The Manual of Detection (6 page)

All that remained on her desk—aside from the typewriter, telephone, and lamp—was a shiny black lunch box.

Emily came around the desk and reached to take Unwin’s hat, but he held tightly to the brim. She clutched it and tugged until he relented, then she brushed off the trilby and hung it on the coatrack.

She stood very close, and the room felt suddenly small for them both. He could smell her perfume in the air: lavender. She reached for his briefcase, and he drew it against his chest, shielding it with both arms.

“It’s okay,” she said, her smile revealing her crooked teeth. “That’s what I’m here for.”

So his assistant knew what she was here for, even if Unwin did not. But what to do with her? Were he at his desk on the fourteenth floor, he might have been able to think of something. There were always labels to be typed, folders to be sorted: alphabetically, in chronological or reverse-chronological order. But Unwin took pleasure even in those minor tasks and would not soon have parted with them.

He freed one arm from his coat and transferred his briefcase to the other hand while Emily slipped the coat off and away and hung it below the hat. She had also taken possession of his umbrella without his seeing how it was done.

“I have a lot of work to do,” he said.

She folded her hands in front of her. “I’m prepared, of course, to hear all about our case, assuming you’ve already been contacted by your watcher.”

“I have . . . conferred with the gentleman,” Unwin said.

There was a knock at the door, and Emily opened it before Unwin could stop her. In the hall stood a man in a crisp white shirt and yellow suspenders. His age was unapparent: the unkempt blond hair belonged on the head of a boy of thirteen, but he entered the room with the unhesitant calm of someone much older. He was holding a shoe-box-size package wrapped in brown paper.

“Messenger for you, sir,” Emily announced, as though Unwin were not in the room with her.

Unwin accepted the package and unwrapped it while the two watched. Inside was an Agency identification badge for Charles Unwin, Detective. Beside it was a pistol. Unwin snapped the box shut. “Who sent this?”

“That information is not within the bounds of my message,” said the messenger, running his thumbs along the undersides of his suspender straps.

Unwin had parlayed with messengers before. He found them, on the whole, a rascally lot, prone to twist the rules governing their profession to their own advantage. This one was clearly no exception.

“Can you tell me when it was sent?” Unwin tried.

The messenger only looked at the ceiling, as though to acknowledge the question would shame them both.

“Are you free to take a message, then?”

With that, Unwin knew he had snared the man. Messengers were obliged to deliver only what they were given, whether packages or words, but they had to take a message whenever asked. This one let go of his suspenders and sighed. “Spoken or typed?” he asked.

“Typed,” said Unwin. “Emily, you told me you are an excellent typist.”

“Yes, sir.” She returned to her typewriter and loaded a fresh sheet of paper bearing the Agency seal. She held her hands suspended over the keys and tilted her head a little to the left. Her eyes went unfocused, as though she were gazing into some distant, tranquil place.

Unwin began, “To colon Lamech comma Watcher comma floor thirty-six return from colon Charles Unwin comma capital C capital L capital E capital R capital K comma floor fourteen comma temporarily floor twenty-nine return.

“Now for the body of the text. Sir comma with all due respect comma I must request your immediate attention to the matter of my recent promotion comma which I believe has been given in error point.”

Emily’s typing was confident and somewhat brash—she threw the carrier to each new line with a flourish, as one might turn a page of exquisite piano music, and her fingers danced high off the keys at the end of each sentence. Her style lent Unwin even greater resolve.

“As you may know comma I am solely responsible for the case files of Detective Travis Tee point Sivart point. Naturally comma I hope to return to that work as soon as possible point. If you are unable to reply to this message comma I will assume that the matter has been settled comma as I would not wish to trouble you any further than is necessary point. I will of course make sure that you receive a copy of my report point.”

Emily plucked the page from her typewriter, folded it into thirds, and slipped it into an envelope. The messenger put it in his satchel and left.

Unwin wiped his brow with his shirtsleeve. The messenger would go directly to Lamech’s office on the thirty-sixth floor and discover Lamech dead. That relieved Unwin of the responsibility of reporting the fact himself.

“A clerk,” said Emily thoughtfully. “It’s the perfect cover, sir. Criminals will naturally underestimate a common clerk, never suspecting that he could be their undoing. And you already look the part, if you don’t mind my saying. Since your subterfuge must prevail within the Agency, as well as without, I assume this is an internal affair. No wonder you’re the one they got to replace Detective Sivart.”

Emily rose from her chair and gestured toward the back of the room. Her nervousness was gone now—her virtuoso performance at the typewriter had restored her confidence. “Sir,” she said, “allow me to conduct you to your private office.”

There was a door behind the desk, painted the same drab color as the walls—Unwin had failed to notice it before. Emily led the way into a room sunk in greenish gloom. Its dark carpeting and darker wallpaper gave the impression of a small clearing in a dense wood, though it smelled of cigar smoke.

The single window offered a much better view than those on the fourteenth floor. Through it Unwin could see the rooftops of the tightly packed buildings in the old port town and beyond them the great gray splotch of the bay, where smoke from ships mixed with the rain. This was the view Sivart would have turned to gaze upon while writing up his case notes. Down there, near the water, Unwin could just make out the dilapidated remains of Caligari’s Carnival, which had served for years as Enoch Hoffmann’s base of operations. Strange, Unwin thought, that the detective could see the lair of his adversary from the comfort of his own chair.

But then, Hoffmann had not been heard from in a long time—not once in the eight years since The Man Who Stole November Twelfth—and the carnival was in ruin. Could it be that Sivart was gone as well? Unwin remembered discovering, in some of the detective’s reports, inklings of plans for retirement. He had been careful to excise them, of course—not only were they extraneous, they were tendered gloomily, when a lull between cases put Sivart in a dour mood. They appeared with greater frequency after November twelfth, and Unwin supposed he was the only one who knew the toll that case had taken on Sivart.
I was wrong about her,
he had written, meaning Cleopatra Greenwood. And it was true—he had been.

Sivart’s plan involved a home in the country somewhere and the writing of his memoirs. Unwin had been surprised at the detail of Sivart’s description: a little white cottage in the woods, at the north end of a town on a river; a slope covered with blackberry briars; a tire swing; a pond. Also a trail that led to a clearing in the woods.
A nice place to take a nap,
he had written.

Unwin knew that Sivart might never have found his way to that cottage. Something terrible could have happened—why else a corpse on the thirty-sixth floor?

As though sharing in Unwin’s thoughts, Emily said, “There’s no official explanation regarding his disappearance.”

“Is there an unofficial explanation?”

Emily frowned at that. “Sir, there is no such thing as an unofficial explanation.”

Unwin nodded, swallowing against the dryness in his throat. He would have to be careful with his words, even when speaking to his assistant.

Emily switched on the desk lamp, and now he could see a wooden filing cabinet, chairs for visitors, empty bookshelves, and a decrepit electric fan in the corner. He set his briefcase on the floor and sat down. The chair was too big for him, the desk absurdly expansive. He put the box containing his badge and pistol next to the typewriter.

Emily stood before him, her hands clasped behind her back, waiting. What would she do once she perceived that his clerk’s identity was not a cover? The scent of her lavender perfume, mingled with that of Sivart’s cigars, tickled Unwin’s nostrils, made him dizzy. He tried to dismiss her with a polite nod, but Emily only nodded in reply. She had no intention of leaving.

“Well,” he said, “I trust you have undergone standard Agency training, as well as any training requisite to your particular position.”

“Of course.”

“Then you can tell me what I might expect from you at this time?”

She frowned again, only now the look was darker, more wary. Unwin understood that his assistant had been looking forward to this day, her first on the job, for a long time. He risked disappointing her. It would be dangerous, Unwin thought, to disappoint her.

She changed her mind about what was happening, though, and appeared suddenly pleased. “You’re testing me!” she said.

She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, as though to read something imprinted on the backs of her eyelids. She recited, “ ‘On the first day of a new case, the detective shares with his assistant whatever details he feels the assistant ought to know. Typically this includes important contacts and dates, as well as information from related cases called up from the archives.’ ”

Unwin sat back in the enormous chair. He thought again of that corpse upstairs, bloated with mystery. He felt as though the thing had crawled onto his back and would drag him into the grave with it if he did not throw it off. What was the case Lamech had meant for him? Whatever it was, Unwin wanted nothing to do with it.

He said, “I see that you have a subtle mind, Emily, so I can trust you. As you suspected, this is an internal affair. The case before us, number CEU001, concerns the very reason for my presence here. Our task is simple: to find Detective Travis T. Sivart and convince him to return to his job as quickly as possible.” He was forming a plan even as he spoke it. With Emily’s help, perhaps, he could pretend to be a detective just long enough to bring Sivart back to the Agency. Then
he
could make sense of the watcher’s corpse, of Miss Truesdale’s long-stemmed roses, of the phonograph record he had found in Lamech’s office.

Emily was all business now. “Clues, sir?”

“No clues,” Unwin said. “But then, this
was
Sivart’s office.”

Emily checked the filing cabinets while Unwin searched the desk. In the top drawer, he found, forwarded according to Lamech’s demands, his personal effects: magnifying glass for small type, silver letter opener presented to him upon the completion of his tenth year of faithful service to the Agency, spare key to his apartment. The second drawer contained only a stack of typing paper. Unwin could not resist: he withdrew several sheets and rolled one of them into the typewriter. It was a good model, sleek and serious, with a dark green chassis, round black keys, and type bars polished to a silvery gleam. Thus far the typewriter was the only thing Unwin liked about being a detective.

“Empty,” Emily said, “all empty.” She had finished with the filing cabinets and was moving on to the shelves.

Unwin ignored her and checked his margins, adjusted the left and right stops (he liked them set precisely five-eighths of an inch from the edges of the page). He tested the tension of the springs by depressing, only slightly, a few of the more important keys: the E, the S, the space bar. They did not disappoint.

He pretended to type, moving his fingers over the keys without pressing them. How he wanted to begin his report!
This,
he might start, and lead from there on into
morning,
yes,
This morning, after having purchased a cup of coffee,
but no, not the coffee, he could not start with the coffee. How about
I
? From
I
one could really go anywhere at all.
I am sorry to have to report
would be nice, or
I was accosted by one Detective Samuel Pith at Central Terminal,
or
I am a clerk, just a clerk, but I write from the too-big desk of a detective,
no, no,
I
would not do at all, it was too personal, too presumptuous. Unwin would have to leave
I
out of it.

Emily was standing in front of him again, out of breath now. “There’s nothing here, sir. The custodian did a thorough job.”

That gave Unwin an idea. “Here,” he said, “let me show you an old clerk’s trick. It’s something of a trade secret among the denizens of the fourteenth floor.”

“You have done your homework, sir.”

He was happy for a chance to impress her, and perhaps to win her confidence. “In an office as busy as the one on the fourteenth floor,” he explained, “a document occasionally—very occasionally, mind you—goes astray. It is lost under a cabinet, maybe, or accidentally thrown out with someone’s lunch. Or, as you have just reminded me, cleared away by the overzealous custodian.”

Unwin opened the lid of the typewriter and gently prised loose the spools of ribbon. “In cases such as those,” he went on, “where no carbon copy is available, there is only one method for recovering the missing document. Impressed upon the surface of the typewriter ribbon, so faintly that only close examination under a bright light will reveal them, are all the letters it has ever marked on paper. This ribbon here is only slightly used, but Sivart must have done some work with it.”

He put the ribbon into Emily’s hands. She drew a chair closer to the desk and sat down, while Unwin angled the lamp to provide her with the best possible illumination. She held a spool in each hand and stretched the ribbon between them, her big glasses shining in the lamplight.