The Manual of Detection (36 page)

The tremors ceased as Hildegard Palsgrave ducked out through the lobby door, her arms and face covered in soot. She dragged her enormous pink chair behind her, and on it was her phonograph. “My first fireworks display in years,” she said.

Penelope shook soot from the dress of the giantess. “You haven’t lost your touch,” she said.

Unwin gazed up the facade of the Agency office building and saw windows opening on every floor. Clerks looked down from the nearest rows, taking turns at the view. Detectives watched from their higher floors, shaking their heads at the scene. Farther up, so far that Unwin could not make out the expressions on their faces, the watchers observed everything from the comfort of their private offices, and above them, fewer in number, were operatives whose titles and functions he did not know.

Emily’s first week on the job, and changes were under way more quickly than she had anticipated. The watchers would be asking their new overseer what to do, now that the chief clerk of the third archive had destroyed what she helped to create.

Edgar Zlatari was driving the Rooks’ truck. He navigated slowly through the crowd and drew up to the curb with the steam engine sputtering. Theodore Brock, the knife thrower, was in the cab beside him, and Jasper was still in the back, still sleeping. Miss Palsgrave set her chair beside Jasper and climbed in.

“What about the Forty Winks?” Unwin asked Zlatari. “What about your work?”

“Show me a place where nobody’s drinking and nobody’s dying, and I’ll show you a man ready to stay put,” he said. “Besides, there’s an old crook in need of burying. Seems his funeral’s been long delayed.”

Unwin looked at Penelope, and she smiled. They must have smuggled Caligari’s remains out of the museum somehow, after the real mummy was returned.

Miss Palsgrave smacked the roof of the cab to signal that she was ready. She had a traveling bag with her, and inside were more recordings of Miss Greenwood’s songs, to make sure Jasper Rook stayed sleeping.

Unwin was tired, too. He had worn himself down—to nothing, nearly—with his cuts and corrections, his erasures and emendations. He was awake now, but was there still time for him? His mind had wearied of its appointed rounds, of the stream of typescript and transcript, and now he wondered what might have been different, what might still be different, if only the day would hold and not abandon him to sleep.

The carnival had disentangled itself from the knot of baffled underclerks and was preparing to move on. The elephants stamped impatiently, the drivers returned to their trucks, and Penny left Unwin’s side to join the front of the line.

Zlatari offered him a ride. He turned down the offer but set his portable typewriter and his briefcase in the cab. He had found the time, that week, to oil the chain of his bicycle.

Maybe Penny was correct, and this was not the kind of thing he could be late for. He glimpsed Caligari’s old motto emblazoned across the side of another truck: EVERYTHING I TELL YOU IS TRUE, AND EVERYTHING YOU SEE IS AS REAL AS YOU ARE.

If that was right, then nothing Unwin saw was real and the ticking of his watch was just another magician’s trick. He had time, so much time. He had all the time he needed.

Some of the underclerks wrapped themselves in the blankets they had brought with them from the archive and stood watching the parade withdraw, dumbfounded. A few of them, confused by all the sights and sounds, or just because they had no place to go, went with it. Other people joined the carnival as it moved west between the office buildings—those who, no doubt, had been among Penelope’s sleepwalkers, the members of her resistance. They had helped rebuild the carnival in their sleep and recalled enough that it mattered. The carnival was twice as large as it had been by the time it left the city.

He allowed himself a last glimpse of the Agency office building, and it appeared to him as it had many times before: a watchtower, a tomb. Not his, now, though someone there—the overseer herself, probably—would be expecting his report. If Unwin dispatched a copy from afar, would its recipient be surprised to find that it originated in the camp of the enemy? He smiled at the thought of it, and the smile surprised him into laughter. He was still laughing when a wind rose up from the river, nearly taking his hat. He held it to his head and steered his bicycle with one hand.

It would be hours at least before they halted long enough for him to set out his typewriter, so he carried on with his work as best he could, drafting in his mind the report that was the last of one series and the first of another.

Acknowledgments

Thanks first to my family: Sean, Caitlin, and Kellin Bliss, Kevin, Debbie, and Michael Berry, Michael Bliss, and Robert Boolukos. Cara Parravani, Dorothy Strachan, and Frank, Ellen, and Kyle Berry, each greatly missed, are everywhere in this novel. I am deeply indebted to Kelly Link, Gavin Grant, Sabina Murray, Mira Bartók, and Holly and Theo Black for their friendship and advice. Thanks also to Chris Bachelder, Brian Baldi, Robert N. Casper, Cecil Castellucci, Ellen Datlow, Miciah Bay Gault, Noy Holland, Shahrul Ladue, Leigh Newman, Jon Sequeira, and Terri Windling for all their help and sound criticism; to Esmond Harmsworth for his guidance and great insight; to Eamon Dolan for his encouragement and general brilliance; to Jason Arthur for his support, and for bringing this book to the UK in style; to Mimi Di-Novo for her generosity; to Deirdre d’Albertis for Chesterton, to William Weaver for Calvino, to Bradford Morrow for Carter and most everyone else; to Christa Parravani for lending me her dream of the sea.

This book is dedicated to my mother, Maureen Berry Bliss, who is always looking for a good mystery.