The Manual of Detection (8 page)

“He still does not know where to begin,” said the man on the telephone.

Unwin turned. Had he heard correctly? The man with the blond beard stood with his back to the room, one arm resting on top of the telephone, his head bent low. He spoke quietly, then listened and nodded.

Unwin took a deep breath. This was his first hour in the field, and already his nerves were getting to him. He turned back to his book and tried to focus.

“He is trying to focus,” said the man at the telephone.

Unwin set down the
Manual
and rose from his seat. He had not misheard: somehow the man with the blond beard was speaking Unwin’s thoughts aloud. His hands shook at the thought; he had begun to sweat. The three men at the lunch counter swiveled again to watch Unwin walk to the back of the room and tap the man on the shoulder.

The man with the blond beard looked up, his eyes bulging with violence. “Find another phone,” he hissed. “I was here first.”

“Were you speaking about me just then?” Unwin asked.

The man said into the receiver, “He wants to know if I was speaking about him just then.” He listened and nodded some more, then said to Unwin, “No, I wasn’t speaking about you.”

Unwin was seized by a terrible panic. He wanted to run back to his seat or, better yet, back to his apartment, forget everything he had read in the
Manual,
everything that had happened that day. Instead, without thinking, he snatched the telephone out of the man’s hand and put it to his own face. He was still shaking, but his voice was steady as he said, “Now, listen here. I don’t know who you are, but I’d appreciate it if you’d keep to your own affairs. What business is it of yours what I’m doing?”

No response came. Unwin held the receiver to his ear, and he heard something, a sound so quiet he could barely tell it from the prickle of static on the line. It was the rustling of dry leaves, or sheets of paper, maybe, blown by a mild wind. And there was something else, too—a sad warbling that came and went as he listened. The cooing, he thought, of many pigeons.

He set the telephone back in its cradle. The man with the blond beard stared at him. His jaw was moving up and down, but he made no sound. Unwin met his eyes for a moment, then returned to his table, sat, and hurriedly began to eat his sandwich.

One of the men at the lunch counter got off his stool. He wore the plain gray uniform of a museum attendant. His white hair was thin and uncombed, and his dark eyes were set deep in his pale face. He shambled toward Unwin, breathing through his whiskers while crumpling a paper napkin in his right hand. He stood in front of the table and dropped the napkin into Unwin’s hat. “Sorry,” he said. “I mistook your hat for a wastepaper basket.”

The man with the blond beard was on the telephone again. “He mistook his hat for a wastepaper basket,” he said. But as the museum attendant left the café, he knocked into the table where the man with the blond beard had been sitting. A glass tipped and spilled water on the papers stacked beside the typewriter. The man with the blond beard dropped the receiver and came running over, cursing under his breath.

Unwin took the napkin out of his hat; something was written on it in blue ink. He uncrumpled the paper and read the hastily scrawled message.
Not safe here. Follow while he’s distracted.
He stuffed the napkin into his pocket, gathered up his things, and left. The man with the blond beard was too busy shaking wet pages to notice him go.

 

 

THE MUSEUM ATTENDANT GRABBED Unwin by the arm and directed him north into the first of the museum galleries. The name on his pin was Edwin Moore. He leaned close and spoke into Unwin’s ear. “We must choose our words carefully. You especially. Everything you say to me I must spend precious minutes unremembering before I sleep. I apologize for waiting as long as I did to intercede. Until I heard you speak, I thought you were one of them.”

“One of whom?”

Moore breathed worry through his whiskers. “I cannot say. Either I never knew or I have purposefully forgotten.”

Their route took them through the halls of warfare, where empty suits of mail straddled horse’s armor empty of horses. Gold and silver weapons gleamed in their cases, and Unwin knew them each, knew the slim-bladed misericord, the graceful rapier, the double-barreled wheel lock pistol. They were all in the Agency’s index of weapons, though the pages dedicated to such antiquated devices were less useful than those covering the more popular implements of the day: the pistol, the garrote, the cast-iron skillet.

Moore looked in Unwin’s direction as he spoke but would not meet his eyes. “I have been an employee of the Municipal Museum for thirteen years, eleven months, and some-odd days,” he said. “I always follow the same path through these corridors, altering my course only when necessary, as when a lost child begs my assistance. I like to keep moving. Not to see the paintings, of course. After all this time, I no longer see the paintings. They may as well be blank canvases or windows onto white sky.”

A dull but potentially dangerous personality,
the man with the blond beard had typed,
empty or clouded over.
Was it Moore he had been describing? What sort of man worked to forget everything he knew? Doubtless he was a little mad. Unwin, mindful of the commandment to choose his words carefully, chose none for now.

Soon they came to a broad, circular chamber. Unwin knew the place. Light entered through a small window at the top of the domed ceiling, entombing in gray light the coffin of glass on a pedestal below. The Oldest Murdered Man was surrounded by schoolchildren, out on a field trip. The more brave and curious among them stood close, and some even pressed their faces to the glass. Unwin and Moore waited until their chaperone, a stooped young man in a tweed coat, counted the children and shepherded them away. Once the patter of their feet had receded, the only sound was that of the rain on the window high above.

They went closer, the squeaking of Unwin’s shoes echoing in the vast room. A plaque set in the floor at the base of the pedestal declared, TO DETECTIVE TRAVIS T. SIVART, WHO RETURNED THIS TREASURE TO ITS RIGHTFUL PLACE OF REST, THE TRUSTEES OF THE MUNICIPAL MUSEUM EXPRESS THEIR UNDYING GRATITUDE.

The Oldest Murdered Man lay curled on his side, his arms folded over his chest. His flesh was yellow and sunken but intact, preserved by the bog into which he had been thrown, all those thousands of years ago. Had he been a hunter, a farmer, a warrior, a chieftain? His eyes were not quite closed, his black lips drawn back over his teeth in an expression that suggested merriment rather than terror. The hempen cord with which he had been strangled was still twisted around his neck.

“I always found the name imprecise,” Unwin said. “He may be the first victim of murder we’ve discovered, but surely he wasn’t the first man to be killed by another. He may even have been a murderer himself. Still, he is our oldest mystery, and an unsolved one at that. We have the weapon, but not the motive.”

Edwin Moore was not listening. He looked at the ceiling while Unwin spoke. “I hope there is enough light,” Moore said.

“For what?”

The sun, though partly obscured by clouds, crested the window at the top of the dome, and the room suddenly brightened.

“There we are,” Moore said. “Did I tell you that I always keep to the same route when making my rounds? That is why I reach this room at the same time every afternoon. There was a woman, I think. She wanted to draw my attention to something, to this. Who was she? Did I only dream of her? I try not to notice things, Detective. I know a story or two. I know the days of the week. That is enough to help eclipse the rest. But look, look there. Can you fault me for noticing that?”

Moore pointed at the glass coffin, at the dead man’s parted lips. Unwin saw nothing at first, just the grim visage that Sivart had described, in his reports, as
a sad sorry face, laughing because it has to—a face you’d like to buy a drink.
Then he noticed a glinting at the back of the man’s mouth, like that of the gold lettering on
The Manual of Detection.
He knelt, using his umbrella for balance, and drew as close to the corpse as he could bear. He and the mummy peered at one another through the glass. Then the light shifted, and the dead man gave up his secret.

In one of his teeth, a gold filling.

Unwin dropped his umbrella and jerked upright, tripping over his own feet as he backed away from the mummy. He had the odd impression that his breath had escaped with his umbrella and gone skittering over the floor with it, out of reach. He needed them both, but he could not go and fetch them. He was still standing only because Edwin Moore was propping him up.

Let sleeping corpses lie,
the note in the dumbwaiter had read. The gold filling twinkled in the mouth of the Oldest Murdered Man, and to Unwin it was as though the corpse were silently laughing at him. The implications extended deep into the Agency archives, all the way down to Unwin’s own files. He said it aloud as he realized it: “The Oldest Murdered Man is a fake.”

“No,” Moore said. “The Oldest Murdered Man is real. But he is not in this museum.”

Footsteps at the edge of the room caused Unwin and Moore to turn. The man with the blond beard stood in the doorway, his portable typewriter in his hand.

“We must continue,” Moore whispered. “I’ve never seen that man before, but I don’t like the looks of him.”

Unwin was standing on his own now. “He was in the café not ten minutes ago,” he said.

“No time to argue,” said Moore. He picked up Unwin’s umbrella and pressed it into his hands. They left the way the schoolchildren had gone, through an arched doorway and into a dim hall between galleries.

“Please understand,” Moore said. “I tried hard to forget the whole thing. Succeeded, perhaps, many times. But every day there is the tooth again, the filling. And that woman, who keeps insisting that I see it. It itches at my brain. The filling may as well be set in my own head. I need to forget about it. Knowing much of anything is a danger to me. I need you to fix your mistake.”

“My mistake?”

“Yes. I did not want to be the one to break it to you, Detective Sivart. But the corpse you retrieved from
The Wonderly
the night you first confronted Enoch Hoffmann—it was the wrong corpse. A decoy.” Moore looked sad as he spoke, his breath whistling through bunched whiskers. “He tricked you, Detective. He tricked you into helping him hide a dead body in plain sight.”

“Whose dead body?”

“Either I never knew—”

“Or you’ve purposefully forgotten,” Unwin said.

Moore seemed surprised to have his sentence finished for him, but he took Unwin’s arm without comment and guided him from the corridor. They passed through rooms of medieval paintings. Knights, ladies, and princes scowled from their gilded frames. Then a lighted place: shards of pottery on marble pillars, urns of monstrous size, miniatures of long-dead cities. Moore moved faster and faster, dragging Unwin on while the man with the blond beard followed. They caught up with the schoolchildren in a room of statues. These were of men with elephants’ heads, the wise and quiet gods of a strange land sequestered in one dim and narrow gallery. Jewels glinted in the shadows, and the air was heavy and warm.

“Not my mistake,” Unwin said at last.

Moore glared at him. “If not yours, whose?”

“You called Sivart a week ago. You must have met with him and forgotten. You showed him what you showed me. What did he do when you told him? You have to remember. You have to tell me where he went.”

“But if you’re not Sivart, then who are you?”

Those weird, elephant-headed gods fixed Unwin with their impassive eyes, and he found he could not speak.
I am Sivart’s clerk,
he wanted to say.
I am the one who set down the details of his false triumph. It is my mistake, mine!
But they would trample him when they heard, those elephant people, and gore him with their jeweled tusks, strangle him with their trunks.
Remember,
they said to him, in a dream he could not entirely wake from.
Try this time, would you? Remember something.

“Chapter Elephant,” Unwin said.

“What was that?” Moore asked. “What did you say?”

“Chapter Eighteen!” Unwin corrected himself. He took
The Manual of Detection
from his briefcase and flipped through the pages, searching for Chapter Eighteen, for the chapter Sivart, in the dream, had told him to remember.

Moore’s whole body was trembling, and the snowy hair on his head shook with each wheezing breath. He stared at the book in Unwin’s hands. “
The Manual of Detection
has no Chapter Eighteen,” he said.

Some of the schoolchildren were ignoring the exhibits now. They gathered instead around these two men, who were possibly the strangest things they had seen in the museum.

Unwin flipped to the last pages of the book. It ended with Chapter Seventeen.

“How did you know?” he asked.

Moore leaned forward, his face contorted, his eyes terrible. “Because I wrote it!” he said, and collapsed.

SIX

On Leads

 

 

 

I
’ve got just enough to go on,
Sivart had written in his first report on the theft of the Oldest Murdered Man.
That’s what makes me nervous.

On the night of the heist, a museum cleaning woman had spotted an antique flatbed steam truck, color red, lurking under the trees behind the Wonders of the Ancient World wing. In her thirty-seven years of employment, she told Sivart during questioning, she had seen many strange things, had seen the portraits of certain dukes and generals turn their eyes to watch her as she mopped, had seen the marble statue of a nymph move its slender right leg two inches in the moonlight, had seen a twelve-year-old boy rise sleepily from the settee of an eighteenth-century boudoir and ask her why it was so dark, and where his parents had gone, and whether she had a sandwich for him. But never had the cleaning woman seen anything so strange as the steam truck, which had the smokestack of a locomotive and the hulking demeanor of a story-book monster.