The Manual of Detection (21 page)

“Who would have given it to him?”

“The same person who showed you the gold tooth in the mouth of the Oldest Murdered Man,” Unwin said. He stopped and took Moore’s shoulder. “I thought you were only being forgetful when you said you dreamed her. But maybe it really did happen in your sleep.”

Moore appeared suddenly dazed. He closed his eyes, and Unwin saw them darting back and forth under the lids. “It was Cleopatra Greenwood, I think.”

“Are you sure?” Unwin said. “Describe her.”

“You’re right,” Moore said, his eyes still closed. “She was younger than Miss Greenwood. Just as pretty, though. And very quiet, as if she thought someone else might be listening. Brown hair under her gray cap. Eyes gray, almost silver, like mirrors. She was dressed for bad weather. She was wearing, I think, a plaid coat.”

The act of remembrance had left Moore in a stupor. Unwin stood with his hand still on his shoulder. The woman in the plaid coat had broken in to the old clerk’s dream and shown him the thing he could not forget. She had unveiled Sivart’s gravest of errors.

Little surprise that Moore had mistaken her for Cleopatra Greenwood. The resemblance, now that Unwin considered it, was obvious. The woman in the plaid coat was Miss Greenwood’s daughter. And she was most certainly “in on it.” But what did she have to gain from revealing the fake in the Municipal Museum? Or from stealing a copy of the
Manual
and giving it to Sivart?

Moore’s eyes popped open. “We have a ride,” he said.

A taxicab was approaching from a narrow side street farther up the block. Moore stepped out from under the umbrella to signal it with both hands. The taxicab lurched to the curb and idled there, its checkered chassis shuddering.

“We’ll go to my place,” Moore said to Unwin, “and plan our next move.”

The driver of the cab was a slouched, thin-faced man. He lowered his window a few inches and watched them cross the street. Unwin drew his coat tighter over his shirt, trying to conceal the stains.

“You’re available?” Moore called.

The driver took this in slowly, refusing to meet Moore’s gaze. At last he muttered, “Available.”

Moore nodded sharply and reached for the handle of the door. He tugged at it a few times, but the door held fast. “It’s locked,” he said.

The driver ran his tongue over his teeth and said, “Locked.”

“Will you take us?” Moore demanded. “Yes or no?”

“No,” the driver said.

Unwin lowered his umbrella over his face and searched for an escape route. Had the cabbie recognized him? He wondered if the newspapers had used the photo on his clerk’s badge.

Moore was insistent, however. “Why did you stop when I waved for you if you did not plan to take on a fare?”

The driver mumbled inaudibly, then reached back, found the lock with his hand, and unfastened it. Moore threw the door open and slid across the seat. Unwin hesitated, but Moore beckoned for him to follow, so he closed up his umbrella and got in.

Moore gave an address just a few blocks from Unwin’s own, then settled back into the seat. “Soon after I completed the
Manual,
” he said, “it was decided that only a few specially trained agents would be privy to the secrets of Chapter Eighteen, and a shorter edition was quickly printed for general use. Enormous changes were under way at the Agency at this time: a new building, the construction of the archives. Controls had to be tightened. Every copy of the original edition was cataloged and accounted for. But what the overseer and I both knew was that one copy of the book could not be so easily repressed.”

Moore tapped his own head and gave Unwin a meaningful look.

“But you would not have betrayed the Agency’s trust.”

“Of course not. I had been with the organization from the beginning, when fourteen of us shared one office heated by a coal stove. But the world had changed since then. The enemy had changed. Caligari’s Traveling Carnival had arrived, and with it the nefarious biloquist Enoch Hoffmann. The old boundaries were already eroding, and to know a thing was to put it in jeopardy. The overseer had dictated to me his profoundest secrets, and he knew that Hoffmann, if he chose, could break the lock on my brain as easily as a child tears the wrapping from a birthday present. I was a danger to the Agency, loyal or not.”

“The overseer threatened you?”

“He didn’t have to.”

“So you left. Made yourself forget everything.”

“It was easier than you might think. I had been the Agency’s first clerk. For years, I was its only clerk. I had developed memory exercises to retain all the information entrusted to me. Imaginary palaces, archives of the mind. They were structural; I could feel their weight in my head. The supports had been bending and groaning for a long time. I had only to loosen a brick or two, and let the rest collapse.” Moore leaned forward and said to the driver, “You there, can’t you go a bit faster?”

Unwin peered through the window. The streets were uncrowded, but despite Moore’s insistence the driver maintained his pace, keeping always to one lane, never hurrying to beat a traffic signal.

Moore fell back into the seat, shaking his head. “I can’t pretend to understand your role in all this, Mr. Unwin. But I think whoever has you on this case put you there because you know so little. How else to explain it? The enemy would not suspect your importance, even were he to search every corner of your mind.”

“That’s changing, though.”

Moore nodded. “You know the dangers, but the dangers know you, too. We will have to act swiftly, now. Our investigation depends upon it.”

“Investigation”: it was just the word Unwin had been trying to avoid. How long now had he been doing the work of a detective, in spite of himself? Ever since he had stolen the phonograph record from Lamech’s office. Or longer: since he first began to shadow the woman in the plaid coat.

“There’s a document,” Unwin said. “A phonograph record. I’ve played it, but I can’t understand the recording—it’s just a lot of garbled noises. I think Lamech intended to give it to me before he was killed.”

Moore’s face darkened. “It must have come from the Agency archives. That’s where the overseer was experimenting with the new methodologies. You’ll have to bring the record down there if you want to learn what it is.”

Moore stopped talking and turned to rub condensation from the window with his sleeve. He gazed out at the street, frowning. Unwin saw the problem, too: their driver was headed the wrong way. Where was the man taking them? Perhaps a reward had been posted for Unwin’s capture, and the cabbie meant to collect.

“I’m not paying you to take the scenic route,” Moore said. “Left, man. Turn left!”

The driver turned right. On the next block, they saw a car that had swerved off the road and struck a fire hydrant. Water shot in torrents into the air, cascading over the vehicle, flooding the gutter and part of the street. A man in a suit sat on the crumpled hood of the car, scratching his head and trying to speak, but his mouth kept filling with water and he could only gurgle and spit. People walking by did not even look at him.

“This is outrageous,” Moore said. “Has someone alerted the authorities? You,” he said to the driver, “use your two-way radio, would you?”

The cabbie ignored him and drove slowly past the scene. Moore’s face went red, and the bruise on his forehead grew a darker shade of purple. He seemed too angry to speak.

A police cruiser was parked at the next corner. Moore rolled down his window, and Unwin sank deeper into his seat as the old man shouted into the rain, “Officer! Officer!”

The driver’s door was open. Seated behind the wheel with her feet on the dashboard was a girl of twelve or thirteen, dressed in her school uniform, twirling a billy club in her left hand. Imprisoned in the back of the car were seven or eight people, packed so tightly that one man—a policeman to judge from his hat, and maybe the rightful owner of the car—was stuck with his face pressed up against the glass.

Moore gasped. “The wicked truant!” he said to Unwin.

At the next block, the cabbie parked in front of a flower shop, where a few people stood beneath a blue-striped awning. He took the car out of gear and let the engine idle.

“I won’t pay you a dime,” Moore said. “Furthermore, I demand your registration number.”

“Quiet,” Unwin said to him.

Moore touched the lump on his head and looked at Unwin as though he had been struck.

“He’s asleep,” Unwin said. “They’re all asleep. The whole city—everyone.”

The people under the awning of the flower shop had noticed the taxicab. Moore peered through the window as they approached, then looked at Unwin. “You’re right,” he whispered.

A woman wearing a yellow housecoat opened the front passenger-side door. She leaned down and said to the driver, “Something to do.”

The driver tapped his palm against the gear stick. “Someplace to be.”

This was apparently the reply the woman was looking for, because she got in beside him and shut the door.

Unwin leaned close to Edwin Moore. “How could Hoffmann have done it?”

Moore was shaking his head and rubbing the white bristles on his chin. Quietly he said, “The alarm clocks.”

Unwin thought again of the nighttime parade he had marched with, of that strange troupe with their thieves’ sacks over their shoulders. Hoffmann had needed the help of only a few to steal the clocks. But then what? The entire city oversleeps and is susceptible to his influence?

“There is still something we’re missing,” Moore said. “But the clocks were implements of order, ones we’ve long taken for granted, and Hoffmann drowned them in the bay. These people outside, they may have dreamed of waking to phantom alarms, when in truth they were waking into a second sleep, one that Hoffmann had prepared for them. The city nearly fell to pieces on November twelfth. Now Hoffmann’s cracked open the madness in its heart and spilled it into the streets.”

“I don’t see what he gains.”

“Anything he wants,” Moore said. “The dissolution of the Agency. The gold he thought was his on November twelfth, with interest. Who knows what he’ll demand? We are beaten—and he has left us awake so that we may witness the manner of our defeat.”

A sleepwalking boy in a green poncho opened the rear door and looked into the cab, his eyes dull behind drooping lids. Startled, Moore scooted across the seat, closer to Unwin. The boy climbed in and said to no one, “Have to get there soon.”

Without turning, the driver of the taxi said, “Have to get it done.”

Others were gathering around the vehicle now. They stood silent in the rain, swaying a little while they waited to take their places inside.

“There’s more than plain madness here,” Unwin said.

Moore pursed his lips. His eyes for a moment were those that Unwin had seen at the museum the morning before—blank in the dark caves of his eye sockets—and Unwin wondered how long the rebuilt frame of the man’s mind would hold. But light quickly returned to them, and Moore said, “Yes, this group of sleepwalkers is different from those others. Special operatives of some kind, perhaps. It’s as though they’ve been recruited for a particular task.”

Unwin opened his door. “I don’t think we want to be in this taxi,” he said.

Moore shook his head. “One of us should stay with them, see what they’re up to. And you already have a burden of your own. Get that record to the archives, Mr. Unwin. Let no one take it from you.”

Unwin climbed out of the car. As soon as he was on his feet, a man in a red union suit slipped by and took his place. Now Moore was sandwiched between two sleepwalkers. For him there was no turning back.

Unwin reached in and handed him his umbrella. “You may need this.”

Moore took it. “We have a good team here,” he said.

Before Unwin could reply, the sleepwalker in the red union suit closed the door, and the taxicab rolled slowly away down the block. Moore turned in his seat to gaze out the rear window, one hand open in grim salute.

“And the truth is our business,” Unwin said quietly.

 

 

 

IT WAS DARK As midnight now, though according to Unwin’s watch it was barely eleven in the morning. The storm had worsened, and inky clouds blotted out every trace of the sun. He pulled his jacket tight over his chest as he walked, though it meant baring one hand to the cold.

Sleepwalkers, dozens of them on every block, ignored him as he passed. Some, like the girl who had stolen the police car, were enacting their strange whims in the streets, transforming the city into a kind of open-air madhouse. One man had dragged his furniture onto the sidewalk and was seated on a soggy couch, tugging anxiously at his beard while listening to the news from a silent, unplugged radio. A woman nearby shouted up at an apartment building, arguing with no one Unwin could see or hear—there was a disagreement, it seemed, about who was to blame for ruining the pot roast.

Other sleepwalkers moved in small groups, stepping around Unwin as he passed. They were silent, their eyes open but unfathomable. They were headed east, the same direction Moore had been taken.

By the time Unwin drew near to his apartment, his clothes were soaked through but his hands were clean. A black Agency car was parked at the end of the block. He cupped his hands against the glass to peer through, expecting to find Screed’s scowling face, but the car was empty. He returned to his building and went inside, climbed the stairs to the fifth floor.

His apartment door was open, his spare key still in the lock. He put that in his pocket and went in, closing the door behind him. In the kitchen he found himself again at the barrel end of a gun—his own this time. Emily Doppel’s eyes were half closed, but her aim seemed true enough. She carried her lunch box in her other hand.

Testing her, Unwin walked toward his bedroom. Emily followed, keeping the pistol trained on her target. He considered going into the bathroom to change, but Emily would probably have followed him there, too. So he undressed in front of her, leaving the damp and bloody clothes in a heap on the floor. Naked, he wondered if there were Agency bylaws regarding detectives and their assistants and whether this violated any of them.