The Manual of Detection (17 page)

“Tickets,” he said.

Unwin approached the booth, and the man folded his hands in front of him. The same tattoos extended from under his sleeves and down to his knuckles.

“How much?” Unwin asked him.

“Exactly,” he said.

“Exactly what?”

“It’ll cost you.”

“Yes, but how much?”

“That’s right,” the man said, disclosing a yellow grin.

Unwin felt he had gotten himself into some kind of trouble, but he could not tell what kind.

The man was puffing at his cigarette, saying nothing. Then he squinted and looked past Unwin toward the entrance.

Someone else was walking under the legs of the enormous clown. She held a newspaper over her head as she limped toward them through the rain. It was Miss Greenwood, wrapped in a red raincoat. She insinuated herself beneath Unwin’s umbrella and tossed aside the sopping newspaper. She looked more tired than ever—the revelries of the night before had deepened her exhaustion.

The man in the booth unbuttoned the front of his jacket. He had on a shoulder belt of worn leather, lined by a dozen or more gleaming daggers. He removed one and held it lightly by the blade end. Unwin checked its appearance against his memory of the Agency’s index of weapons: small, slim, with a pommel weighted for balance. It was a throwing knife.

“Mr. Brock,” Miss Greenwood said, “surely you’re not troubling anyone for tickets on a day like this.”

Unwin recognized the name from Sivart’s reports. This was Theodore Brock, who had arrived in the city as Caligari’s knife thrower and remained in it as one of Hoffmann’s lieutenants. It was his stray throw, all those years ago, that had left Cleo with her limp. He spit his cigarette at their feet and said, “Well, if it isn’t the enchantress Cleopatra Greenwood, come down to visit her old friends.”

“I’m not here for a reunion, just a little outing with my new friend, who seems to have gotten ahead of me somehow.” She shot Unwin a playfully angry look.

“And that’s why you need a ticket. It costs money to see the freaks.” He smiled again. “But you ought to know that, Cleo. How’s the leg doing? Still hurt when it rains?”

She drew close to the window. “My guest is an Agency Eye,” she said. “It’s on business of his that we’ve come here. I think I can convince him not to see too much while we stroll the grounds, but for that you’ll have to be nice.”

“Agency?” Brock said. “But the hat’s all wrong.”

Miss Greenwood raised one hand, cupping it to her lips as though to whisper something in his ear. He leaned forward, then started and brandished his dagger, eyes going wide. She said something Unwin could not make out, and Brock’s eyelids fluttered closed. The dagger fell from his hand and embedded itself in the ticket table; his head dropped hard beside it. The knife thrower was asleep.

Miss Greenwood looked around, then pulled the window shut. “Quickly,” she said.

They went along paths strewn with broken bottles and toys, feathers, illegible playbills. The old fairground pavilions along the midway were constructed to look like the heads of giant animals, their mouths agape to allow access to the exhibits installed in the domes of their skulls. A pig’s snout was a tunnel into fetid darkness, the eyes of a fish served as bulging windows, a cat’s fangs were stalactites.

They passed them by and came to a causeway of wooden planks set on cinder blocks. Miss Greenwood went first, and Unwin followed.

“What did you do to Brock?”

“I told him to go to sleep,” she said.

In some of his reports, Sivart had hinted that Cleo Greenwood possessed certain strange talents, picked up during her days with the Traveling Carnival. Unwin had assumed that the detective was being fanciful, or even poetic (
truly,
he had once written,
the lady is a knockout
), so Unwin cut those details. Perhaps he had been wrong to do so.

They stepped off the plank and walked along a row of junk stalls and shooting galleries. Mechanical ducks were perched on rusted rails, punched through with holes from real bullets. The rain pattering on abandoned popcorn carts and unmoving carousels made for a melancholy kind of music. “So different from the carnival I arrived with,” Miss Greenwood said.

It was true: sixteen years ago Unwin had seen the sputtering caravan of red, orange, and yellow trucks passing through his neighborhood on their way to the fairgrounds. A west-side bridge had been closed that morning, to allow for the safe conduct of the elephants, and the newspapers ran photographs of the animals rearing on their hind legs. Posters were everywhere in the city, promising strange and stirring delights: Nikolai the mind reader, the giantess Hildegard, and Isidoro “The Man of Memory.” But the show’s main attraction was the biloquist Enoch Hoffmann.

Unwin never saw his performance, but he heard plenty about it in those weeks. The Man of a Thousand and One Voices was an unlikely magician, eschewing cape and hat in favor of the baggy, ill-fitting gray suit he wore with sleeves rolled. He gestured indifferently with little fingers while performing his feats and was quickly upstaged by his own illusions, the magic working almost in spite of him. Those who saw the show described the impossible—phantoms onstage, or animals, or inanimate objects, speaking to them in the voices of people they knew: relatives and friends, living and deceased. Those specters were privy to secret knowledge, and some who heard fainted at the revelations.

“The trick I used on Brock just now came in handy while I worked here,” Miss Greenwood said. “Enoch and I had our own sideshow. Hypnosis, fortunetelling—that kind of thing. Of course, all that’s changed. The remnants are no longer in the habit of entertaining.”

The remnants of Caligari’s were mentioned in numerous reports that Unwin had filed over the years. They were a crooked cabal, the progeny of a crooked line—plotters, scoundrels, and thieves, each one. Without them Hoffmann could not have seized control of the city’s underworld. Unwin had seen them spying since the moment he and Miss Greenwood left the ticket booth. They stood in tattered coats beneath the eaves of game booths or skulked in the shadows of defunct rides, cooking breakfast over open fires: scowling roustabouts, disgruntled clowns, arthritic acrobats. They spoke together in whispers and guffaws or paced alone and spit. Unwin could smell sausage frying, could see the smoke of it threading the rain.

“They hate the Agency,” Miss Greenwood said. “But you’re safe with me, so long as I want you to be.”

She had scarcely bothered to veil the threat—she was Unwin’s captor as much as his guide. And here, in the den from which Hoffmann had recruited his every agent and thug, he knew he would need her. How many of the remnants had been apprehended due to the Agency’s work? More than he cared to count. He clenched his teeth and tried not to sound bitter as he said, “That story you told me, about the open windows and the roses. You knew the cause from the beginning.”

“I wasn’t the only one playing tricks, Detective Unwin. It was Ed Lamech I’d wanted to see, remember?”

“But you meant for me to be there, at the Cat & Tonic.”

“I needed someone to be my eyes.”

“What did you expect me to see?”

“Strange things,” she said. “The beginnings of a great and terrible crime. Hoffmann himself, maybe.”

“And a murder.”

Miss Greenwood lost her balance a moment, and Unwin put his hand under her elbow to steady her. She was flexing her bad leg. “Murder?” she said.

“Samuel Pith. The Rooks shot him.”

She looked away. “That’s horrid. Don’t get me wrong. Sam was always a bit of a stuffed shirt. And he knew the risks. But he was an innocent, when it comes down to it. The rules must be changing.”

“There are rules?”

“The Agency isn’t the only organization requiring discipline, Detective Unwin. Now, tell me what else happened last night.”

“You sang a song or two,” Unwin said.

She stopped and turned, her face close to his under the umbrella. “You’re sounding like a detective,” she said. “Just when I was beginning to like you.”

Some of the remnants had followed and were lurking now at the edge of the hall of mirrors. There were a dozen of them, maybe, or just a few, accompanied by their distorted reflections. They stood with their arms crossed in front of them, watching.

“What do you want to know?” Unwin asked her.

“What you’re doing here, to begin with.”

“I want to see the Rooks.”

“No one
wants
to see the Rooks, Detective Unwin. They were sweet little boys when they came here with the carnival. But they were still attached then. After Enoch paid for the operation, they got to walk on their own, but it changed them in other ways, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“They lost something,” Miss Greenwood said. “I don’t know what to call it. ‘Conscience’ isn’t quite the word. Some people do cruel things, but the Rooks are cruelty itself, monsters under any moon. And they never sleep.”

“Never?”

“Not in seventeen years.”

Unwin thought that explained something, but he was not sure what. “You haven’t slept in a long time either,” he said.

“That’s a very different story. The Rooks are no more than their master’s hands. Now, I want you to tell me what happened last night.”

When he hesitated, she turned to signal to the men by the fun house. They took a few steps forward, their reflections multiplying. Sivart might have seen a way out of this, but Unwin did not.

“I’ll tell you what I saw,” he said, and she signaled again for the remnants to wait.

Unwin described the gambling tables, the alarm clocks, her own performance, which seemed somehow to draw the sleepwalkers to the party. He told her how the Rooks were overseeing the operation and how the custodian had played accordion while she sang.

All of it interested her, but he could tell she was after something else. “I want us to be honest with each other,” she said. “I must seem like a bully to you. The truth is, I only came back to the city because I’m trying to help someone. You were wrong when you accused me of showing your friend the truth about the Oldest Murdered Man. That must have been my daughter.”

Unwin did not have to think long about the Agency’s files on Cleopatra Greenwood to assure himself that there was nothing in them about a daughter. Either Miss Greenwood was lying to him or she was revealing something Sivart had failed to discover.

“I’m afraid she’s gotten herself into some kind of trouble,” Miss Greenwood went on. “She’s turned out too much like her mother, that’s the problem.”

“You think she’s wrapped up in Hoffmann’s plans.”

She glanced over her shoulder to make sure the remnants could not hear, then said quietly, “I’ll help you stop him.”

“Miss Greenwood, I don’t want to stop Enoch Hoffmann.”

Her exhaustion was showing again. A strong, sea-smelling wind hurled rain from the direction of the bay, and she squinted against it. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that Travis might be dead by now?” she asked, her voice rising as the wind picked up. “Your only way out of this thing is to do what he failed to do.”

A sound like thunder caused them both to turn. It was the clattering rumble of a heavy vehicle on a pitted road. Unwin looked for it, but a row of ragged sideshow tents blocked his view. The remnants were coming toward them now. Even with their reflections left behind, there were still a lot of them.

“Sivart was too stupid to see he’d been beaten,” Miss Greenwood said. “Don’t make the same mistake.”

Unwin collapsed his umbrella and ran. In a moment the remnants were only a few strides behind him; they whooped into the rain, thrilling to the pursuit. Unwin headed for the nearest tent and slipped inside. The air smelled thickly of mold, and rainwater poured in through tears in the canvas. He ran to the back and swung his umbrella, rending the fabric, then split it to the ground with one downward stroke.

The Rooks’ steam truck was approaching on the road beyond. It bounced over potholes and tossed black clouds from its smokestack, its headlights throwing twin yellow beams into the rain. He ran along behind until the truck slowed to round a corner. Then he hopped onto the rear bumper, opening his umbrella and swinging it over his head. He kept hold of the tailgate with his free hand.

Behind him Miss Greenwood stood in the middle of the road with the remnants, her raincoat bright amid those drab, disheveled men. She watched him go until the truck turned again, passing a row of old theaters on its way into the heart of the Travels-No-More.

DETECTIVE SIVART’S FIRST BRUSH with Caligari’s occurred soon after the carnival arrived, months before the events surrounding the Oldest Murdered Man case. Reports coming into the Agency at the time indicated that the ringmaster might have represented a threat to the city. He was wanted in over a dozen states for crimes ranging from robbery to smuggling, blackmail to fraud. It was said that even his name was stolen—from a forebear in the trade, one who retired in infamy.

Sivart was one of several information gatherers assigned to investigate. He had taken a leisurely stroll along the midway, then slipped into a small pavilion in a remote corner of the fairgrounds. There an eight-foot-tall woman was bent over a worktable, measuring and mixing foul-smelling powders from barrels and bowls.

They need to get this gal a bigger room,
Sivart wrote in his report. Hildegard, he discovered, oversaw the troupe’s pyrotechnic displays and also served as the resident giantess.
We got along like old pals, and after a while we were sharing a drink. Well, “sharing” isn’t the right word, since she emptied my flask with one swig. I went to find something more and brought back a cask of fancy stuff, paid for with Agency funds, thank you. If I have to drink on the job, I’m not going to pay for it.

The two sat together for hours. She seemed to know what he was doing there but did not mind telling him about her time with the carnival, where they had traveled, the sights she had seen. While they talked, she poured her black-powder mixtures into the tubes of rockets and fixed fuses to them. When Sivart got too close to her work, she just pushed him back with one huge hand.