The Manual of Detection (29 page)

The custodian sat upright and tossed his spectacles onto the desk. He stared straight at Lamech, his face reddening. “These are the basics, Ed. You keep track of your copy of the
Manual.
You know that.”

Lamech hung his head.

“Who took it?”

“I don’t know.”

“The whole thing makes me tired,” Arthur said. “Imagine that: tired in your sleep.”

Lamech said nothing for a moment. Then he asked, “What are you, three days in?”

“Three, four, maybe,” Arthur said, shaking off a laugh. “Shows, does it? I’m trying to keep up on Cleo, that’s all.”

Unwin recalled what Miss Greenwood had told him, out on the barge, about the eyes in the back of her skull. Not just a watcher’s eyes, but this man’s. Who was the Agency custodian, that he should be conducting dream surveillance?

“Most I ever went was six hours,” Lamech admitted, “and that was by accident. Strangest thing, too. My subject dreamed she woke up, and I thought she really was awake. Went about my day for a while, but it turned out I was still in her head.”

“Hah,” said Arthur.

“But listen, Greenwood’s back in town, isn’t she? Maybe she’s the one who nabbed my book. I’ll get after her myself. I’ll—”

Arthur stopped him by slapping a sheaf of papers against the desk. He stacked the pages even, his big fingers moving with an accordionist’s quickness. “You don’t ever quit, do you, Ed? You could have retired—what, seven years ago? It’s a dangerous job. I don’t have to tell you that. You have a wife, children.”

“A grandchild, too,” Lamech added. “Little girl, four years old. Wants to be like her grandpa when she grows up.”

Arthur clicked his tongue against his teeth, signaling approval. He set his hands down on the square of desk he had cleared. “But something has to go wrong, eventually.”

“Eventually,” Lamech agreed.

Just then a pigeon came in through a window, and Lamech ducked as it landed on the desk in an uproar of scattered feathers and paper. Arthur steadied the bird with one hand and got hold of its leg with the other. A tiny canister was fixed to the pigeon’s leg; Arthur opened it and withdrew a rolled slip of paper.

Carrier pigeons, Unwin thought. The dreamed equivalent of the Agency’s messengers.

Relieved of its charge, the pigeon flapped off and found its nest among the file drawers.

“It’s from your pal down the hall, Alice Cassidy,” Arthur said, reading the note. “Her agent’s been busy lately.”

Lamech leaned closer. “Sam Pith? What’s he up to?”

“Got him staking out the old Baker place. We think it might be where Hoffmann’s holed up these days. Time we got to the bottom of whatever all the chatter’s about.” He set the note down, and it curled again. “How’s the weather out there?”

Lamech sat back in his chair. “Clear skies and a balmy breeze,” he lied. “Sunshine, warm on the face. Piles of red leaves. Children run, laugh at themselves. Laugh at the whole damn thing.”

Arthur frowned and scratched the side of his face with one big fingernail. “What about your case, Ed?”

“Sivart,” Lamech began.

“Taken a powder, has he?”

The watcher got to his feet. He moved his jaw from side to side, as though he wanted to spit. “Well, you already know. You always already know. Why do you bother with these appointments? I’ll send a bird next time. I’ve got work to do.”

“Sit down.”

Lamech cursed under his breath and sat with his arms crossed.

Arthur smiled peaceably. “I wanted to hear about it, straight from the source. Was he angry? Was he furious? How furious was he? Tell me about it.”

“Whoever took my copy of the
Manual
turned around and gave it to him. Unexpurgated edition.”

A phone rang. Arthur dug through the papers on his desk while Lamech looked on, incredulous. The telephone was identical in appearance to every other telephone Unwin had seen in the Agency offices, but there was something different about the sound of this one’s bell. It echoed as though from the far end of a tunnel.

Arthur snatched up the receiver. “Yes. . . . What? . . . No, listen. Listen to me. . . . Hey, listen! I don’t care if he eats the same thing all next week, too. Keep on him, he’s your man. Check your frequencies. . . . Recheck them, then. I’ll do it myself next time.” He hung up.

“Funny,” Lamech said.

Arthur sucked his teeth and said, “That Miss Palsgrave is a wizard with the gadgetry. This is our latest development. Turns out the recording thingum can be plugged into the transmission gizmo, then spliced to a telephone’s domajig. Means instant communication between the oneiric mind and a mundane pay phone. Connection’s a little spotty, still.”

Lamech shook his head at all this.

“Nikolai there,” Arthur went on, nodding at the phone, “was at the Municipal Museum today. He thinks he’s found Edwin Moore. And it looks like our old friend was in touch with Sivart just before he went AWOL.”

“What, you think it’s connected?”

“Listen, Ed, I need help here. If Hoffmann gets too deep into Sivart’s head, it’s trouble for all of us. We need to find him.”

“Hoffmann’s keeping himself checked out. Even if we found him, we wouldn’t be able to wake him. Sivart’s trapped.”

“Who said anything about waking him?” Arthur said.

Lamech shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Then he looked around, as though something had startled him.

“What’s wrong?” Arthur said.

“Thought I heard—”

“Focus, Ed.”

Lamech grumbled. “Hoffmann’s up to something, something big, November twelfth big. But it sounds like Cassidy and Pith know more than I do. I hear Sam’s been working with you directly. With Sivart stuck where he is, we need to throw off the opposition, keep them guessing. So we do something we’ve never done before—and that means breaking some rules, Arthur. We promote someone. Someone completely incapable of solving a mystery. That should buy us the time we need to find Sivart. The harder their agents work to follow our guy, the farther off course they’ll be.”

Arthur looked at him like he thought he was kidding. Then his face went red and his whole body shook with his laughter. It was an angry, wheezing laugh. “I like it,” Arthur said, crying a little.

“Good,” said Lamech. “Because I’ve already sent the memo.”

That got Arthur going again, and Lamech laughed, too. They went on like that until the custodian was wiping tears from his eyes. Then he sighed his whistling sigh and started playing with the papers on his desk.

“Strangest thing, though,” Lamech said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“I saw Hoffmann just now.”

“Just now?”

“Came from his place directly.”

“No kidding. What’d he have to say?”

“A lot of nonsense, mostly. One thing that caught my ear, though.

About our standard procedures. He said the Agency didn’t come up with Chapter Eighteen. That dream detection predated our work. He said he didn’t steal it from us but that we stole it from him.”

Arthur put his spectacles back on.

“Got me thinking,” Lamech said. “Maybe we’re not just worried about Hoffmann getting too far into Sivart’s head. Maybe we’re worried about Sivart getting too far into his.”

Arthur nodded slowly. “Well, Ed, you’re no slouch. See, I met Greenwood in the early days of the carnival, long before the Oldest Murdered Man case, when she and Hoffmann had their own little sideshow. You’d go into their tent expecting your fortune to be told, but then Cleo would put you to sleep and Hoffmann would hop in and see what you had on your mind.”

“Sure, I see,” Lamech said. “A little blackmail operation. You telling me they got you with that scam?”

“It was just after I took over this outfit. That’s why I made all those changes, wrote all those rules—had to keep as much as I could hidden.”

Lamech’s jaw was clenched. “Hoffmann would have learned everything about our operations otherwise.”

“I know I should have told you, Ed. But it’s more personal than business. See, Cleo and I got to know each other after that. We were kids. We fell in love. But the only way we could see each other without Hoffmann catching on was if we met sleepside, in the old Land of Nod. What a courtship that was! I convinced her to teach me how it was done, so I could go over to her place, too, if you follow me.

“Hoffmann told you the truth, Ed. That Caligari fellow taught him dream detection, though he’d have called it something different. Then Hoffmann taught Cleo, and she’s the one who brought it to me. To the Agency. She and I didn’t last, of course. Too complicated, once we found ourselves in opposite trenches.”

Lamech took all this in. “Must be strange for her now,” he said. “Her old boyfriend on full-time surveillance duty.”

“I’m wearing her down, Ed. She’s hiding something from me. I don’t know what it is, but she can’t keep it up much longer. I’ve got the lights turned up bright, and she’s getting tired.”

Lamech looked around the room and said, “There it is again.”

“What?”

“I heard something. Not here. In my office.”

Arthur waved his hand. “That’s just me.”

Lamech gave him a careful look, and after a moment Arthur shrugged.

“Ed, I’m in your office.” He looked put out by having to explain. “All the time I’ve been spending in here these days, I’ve had to work on my sleepwalking. There are a lot of places I have to be, you know.”

“Just stopping in to empty the wastepaper basket, I guess?”

“That’s right,” Arthur said. “Coming by to clean things up a little.”

Lamech put his hat on. “I may as well go, then. I’ll shake your hand topside, on my way out.”

“Door’s locked,” Arthur said. “You don’t wake up until I do.”

Lamech was moving his jaw again, though he looked more thoughtful than angry.

“You’ve been like an uncle to me,” Arthur said. “Showed me the ropes when I first came on staff. Remember me in my messenger’s suspenders? I’d still be wearing them if it wasn’t for you. You pretended like I knew what I was doing before I knew a damn thing. That’s what makes it all so difficult.”

“Makes what difficult?”

“The lying, Ed. I’ve lied to you. So much. But the best way to fool a monkey is to fool his trainer. Sivart’s the monkey, Ed. You’ve always known that. I just want to come clean about the rest of it.”

“Why bother?” Lamech said.

“Ed, listen to me. Sivart’s cases were all bogus.”

“His cases,” Lamech said.

“Your cases. Bunkum. Hooey. Everything you solved, you solved wrong. The both of you, together. You made a good team. That’s how we needed things. Kept the important stuff hidden that way. Except November Twelfth. He got that one right somehow.”

“That your hand on my shoulder, Artie?”

“Listen to me. You’ve done great work, Ed. The most important work anyone in this outfit has done for me. Just not in the way you think. That night at the carnival, when I realized Hoffmann had me—had us all—I knew I had to make a deal. One hand washes the other.”

“Dirties it, more like.”

“Easy now, Ed.”

“How’s it work?” Lamech asked. “You let him get away with the crimes and you do cover-up? The Agency makes its dollar, your puppet looks like a hero, he gets anything he wants.”

Unwin thought it over and was sickened when he saw how it fit together. The phony mummy, Colonel Baker alive and well—Hoffmann and Arthur must have orchestrated each of those cases in advance. Hoffmann kept the priceless trophy he wanted, kept Colonel Baker’s inheritance as well. And the Agency had its star detective and its front-page stories. Sivart had been tricked every time, and Unwin along with him—the whole city, too.

“I had to come clean with you, Ed. Had to let you know how it was.”

Lamech touched his own throat. He danced his fingers around his collar, grasping for something he could not get hold of. He was fighting the hands of a ghost. Unwin thought he could feel them, too.

“Could be something,” Lamech said, gasping.

Arthur was calm as he watched the man opposite him. “Something you haven’t told me yet? Something I need to know that I don’t know already? Probably not, Ed. I’m the overseer. I’m the man who sees too much.”

But there was something, Unwin knew. Penelope. Her existence was the thing Miss Greenwood was fighting to keep hidden from Arthur, and the fight had exhausted her. Would Lamech trade what he knew for his life?

“You were supposed to watch him,” Arthur went on. “That was your job, Ed. But this isn’t happening because you failed. It’s happening because you’ve done so well.”

Unwin went to Lamech, tried to feel for the hands that were choking him. His fingers blurred with the watcher’s, passing through them as though through a mist. Unwin was seized by cold panic. He screamed and grabbed at the air, punched at it.

“I just have to clean your office,” Arthur said. “Tidy up a little.”

Unwin closed his dreaming eyes, but he could not occlude the vision of the man thrashing where he sat. The dream insisted. In the watcher’s office on the thirty-sixth floor, Lamech had died as he died here. His convulsions formed a weird geometry amid the fluttering papers. The pigeons were mesmerized.

Lamech was still trying to speak, but Arthur had begun sorting papers again. Unwin’s senses went gray as the watcher’s body stilled.

He felt himself lifted from the bed, felt the blanket falling off his body. He tried to catch it, but something snatched him upward and away. The earphones landed on the pillow. He saw below him a great lavender dress and knew he lay in the arms of Miss Palsgrave. She cradled him like a child while she slipped his shoes onto his feet. Her breath was warm on his forehead. She put the record back in his briefcase and gave it to him; his arms were shaking as he took it.

At the far end of the archive, near the place where Unwin had entered, a pair of flashlight beams swept through the dark, casting broad ovals of light over the floor. Miss Palsgrave sighed to herself when she saw them, then tapped Unwin’s hat back onto his head. She started walking. Underclerks slept undisturbed all around them.