Unwin shifted on his stool. In the mirror he could see the men at the booth behind him. One tapped his hat excitedly as he said, “Have I got a story!” and the other man leaned forward to listen, though the man with the story told it loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear.
“I saw Bones Kiley the other night,” he said, “and we were just talking business, you know? Then suddenly, out of nowhere, he started talking
business.
So I said to him, ‘Wait, wait, do you want to talk about
business?
Because if it’s
business
you want to talk about, then we shouldn’t be talking about business, because there’s business and there’s
business.
’ ”
“Ha,” said the other man.
“So then I asked him, ‘Just what sort of business are you in, Bones, that you want to talk about
business
?’ ”
“Ha ha,” said the other.
“And Bones gets serious-looking, kind of screws up his eyebrows like this . . .”
“Ha.”
“. . . and he looks at me with his eyes squinty, and he says in this really deep voice, ‘I’m in the business of blood.’ ”
The other man said nothing.
“So I said to him,” and the man with the story raised his voice even higher as he finished his story, “ ‘The business of blood? The business of blood? Bones, there is no business but the business of blood!’ ”
Both men laughed and tapped their hats in unison, and the candle flickered and flared, making their shadows twitch on the uneven stone wall.
While the man with the story was telling it, the two at the pool table had set down their cue sticks. Identical faces, lips pale gray, eyes bright green: Unwin wondered if these could be the Rook brothers, Jasper and Josiah, the twin thugs who had aided Enoch Hoffmann in the theft of the Oldest Murdered Man, and in countless other misdeeds during the years of his criminal reign.
The worst thing that can happen,
Sivart often wrote,
and the other worst thing.
Shoulder to shoulder the two approached, leaning toward each other with every step. It was said that the Rooks had once been conjoined, but were separated in an experimental operation that left them with crippled feet—Jasper’s left and Josiah’s right. Each wore two sizes of boots, the smaller on the side of that irrevocable severance. This was the only sure way to tell them apart.
The twins stood over the table with their backs to Unwin, obscuring his view of the men seated there. He felt a great heat coming off the two, drying the back of his neck. It was as though they had just come out of a boiler room.
“My brother,” said one in a measured tone, “has advised me to advise you to leave now. And since I always take my brother’s advice, I am hereby advising you to leave.”
“Yeah, who’s asking?” said the man who had told the story.
“In point of fact,” said the other, in a voice that was deeper but otherwise identical to his brother’s, “my brother is not asking, he is advising.”
“Well, I don’t know your brother,” said the man with the story, “so I don’t think I’ll take his advice.”
In the silence that followed, it seemed to Unwin that even the dead in their graves, just behind the wall where the mirror was hung, were waiting to hear what would happen.
One of the twins licked the tips of his thumb and forefinger and leaned over the table. He pinched the candle flame, and it went out with a hiss. From the dark of the booth came a muffled cry. Then the two men walked to the door with the storyteller between them, his feet kicking wildly a few inches above the ground. They deposited him outside, facedown in the puddle over the slow drain. He lay slumped amid the floating cigarette butts and did not try to pick his face up out of the puddle.
The brothers returned to the back of the room. One chalked his cue stick while the other considered the table. He took his next shot, sinking one ball, then another.
The man still in the booth blinked, his eyes not yet adjusted to the change in light. He put his hat on and went outside. After a moment’s hesitation and a glance back into the bar, he lifted his friend out of the puddle and dragged him up the stairs.
Zlatari came out from behind the curtain, muttering as he went to close the door. Once he was back behind the bar, he uncorked the bottle in his hand and slid it across to Unwin.
The two men at the back of the room had finished their game, and were seating themselves side by side at the booth nearest the pool table. One of them nodded at Zlatari, and Zlatari raised his hand and said, “Yes, Jasper, just a moment.”
Eight years had passed since the names Jasper and Josiah Rook had appeared in Sivart’s reports—like Hoffmann, the twins had gone into hiding following the events of The Man Who Stole November Twelfth. There were times when Unwin had hoped to see them come back—but only on paper, not in the flesh.
“Well,” Zlatari said to him, “it’s your lucky day. We’re about to play some poker, and we need a fourth.”
Unwin raised one hand and said, “Thank you, no. I’m not very good at cards.”
Josiah whispered something into Jasper’s ear—it was Josiah, according to Sivart’s reports, who served as counsel, while Jasper was generally spokesman. The latter called to Unwin, “My brother has advised me to advise you to join us.”
Unwin knew enough to know he had no choice. He took his bottle and followed Zlatari to the table, seating himself at the gravedigger’s right. The Rooks regarded him unblinkingly. Their long faces, molded as though from the same mottled clay, could have been lifeless masks if not for the small green eyes set in them. Those eyes were very much alive, and greedy—they caught the light and did not let it go.
Zlatari dealt the cards, and Unwin said, “I’m afraid I don’t have much money.”
“Your money is no good here,” said Josiah, and Jasper said, “To clarify, my brother does not mean that you play for free, as the expression may commonly be interpreted. Only that we do not play for money, and thus yours is literally of no value at this table.”
Zlatari whistled and shook his head. “Don’t let Humpty and Dumpty here spook you, tight-lips. That’s just their version of gentlemanly charm. Mine is traditional generosity. The bank will forward you something to start with. And like he said, we don’t play for money at this table. We play for questions.”
“Or rather,” said Jasper, “for the right to ask them. But only one question per hand, and only the winner of that hand may ask.”
Unwin did know a thing or two about poker. He knew that certain combinations of cards were better than others, though he could not say for sure which beat which. He would have to rely on poker-facedness, then, which he knew to be a virtue in the context of the game.
“Ante is one interrogative,” said Zlatari.
Unwin placed a white chip beside the others on the table and examined his cards. Four of the five were face cards. When his turn came, he raised the bet by one query, though under the guise of hesitancy. Then he traded in his single non-face card and received another face card, a king, in its place. A handful of royalty, then. What could be better? Minding his poker face, however, he made sure to frown at his hand.
There ensued a whirl of bets, calls, and folds, until finally only Unwin and Josiah were still in the game. Josiah set his cards on the table, and Jasper said for him, “Two pair.”
Unwin revealed his own cards, hoping that someone would interpret.
“Three kings,” Zlatari said. “Tight-lips takes the pot and keeps his nickname for now.”
Unwin tried not to look pleased as he claimed the pile of chips. “I may ask my question now?”
“Sure,” said Zlatari. He seemed cheerful at the Rook brothers’ loss.
“But you just asked it,” said Josiah, “and now you are down one query.” As he said this, he blinked for the first time since they had started playing, though it was less a blink than a deliberate closing and reopening of the eyes.
“Shouldn’t you have told me the rules before we started?” Unwin said.
“The laws of the land are not read to us in the crib,” was Josiah’s reply. “And you just expended another query, though you are allowed only one.”
“It was rhetorical,” said Unwin, but he tossed aside the two chips anyway.
Zlatari said, “Hell, we should be fair to the new guy,” and he told Unwin how to trade up: two queries for a single inquiry, two inquiries for a perscrutation, two perscrutations for a catechism, two catechisms for an interrogation, and so on.
Unwin’s next hand did not look to him as strong as the first, and he folded early, assuring himself there were better cards to come. Worse hands followed, however, and the other players directed their questions at one another, ignoring him. He listened carefully to their answers, but they were of little use because he hardly understood the questions. He heard names he did not recognize, references to “jobs” that were “pulled” rather than worked, and a lot of talk that sounded more like code than speech.
Zlatari asked, “Would putting the hat on the uptown bromides win dirt or be a fishing expedition?”
“A few rounds of muck could show ghost,” was Josiah’s reply.
At the end of the next hand, it was Jasper who threw in enough chips for a perscrutation and said to Zlatari, “Tell me about the last time you saw Sivart.”
Zlatari shifted in his seat and scratched the back of his neck with grimy fingernails. “Well, let’s see, that would have been a week ago. It was dark when he got here, and he did a lot of things he doesn’t usually do. He was nervous, fidgety. He didn’t ask me any questions, just took a seat in the corner and read a book. I didn’t know the man could read. He stayed until his candle burned down, then left.”
The Rooks appeared dissatisfied with the account. Apparently a perscrutation was a rather weightier kind of question and required a more thorough disclosure. Zlatari drew a breath and went on. “He said I might not see him again for a while. He said that Cleo was back in town, that he had to go and find her.” Zlatari glanced at Unwin when he said this, as though to see if it meant anything to him. Unwin looked down at his chips.
Cleo could only be Cleopatra Greenwood, and Unwin had long ago come to fear—even loathe—the appearance of her name in a report. She had first come to the city with Caligari’s Traveling Carnival and for years was one of Sivart’s chief informants. But to file anything regarding her motives or aims was to risk the grueling work of retraction a month later. Mysteries, in her wake, doubled back on themselves and became something else, something a person could drown in.
I had her all wrong, clerk:
how many times had Unwin come upon that awful admission and scurried to fix what had come before?
The others were waiting for Unwin’s next bet. His winnings were largely depleted, so he traded an inquiry for two queries but quickly lost both. The Rooks, as though sensing that Unwin would soon leave the table, turned their attention on him. Jasper used a query to learn his name, and Josiah spent an inquiry to ask what kind of work he did.
Unwin showed them his badge, and the Rook brothers blinked in tandem.
Zlatari’s brow wrinkled behind his question-mark curl. “Well,” he said, “it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had an Eye at my table. Detective Unwin, is it? Fine. Everyone’s welcome here.” But on this last point he seemed uncertain.
Unwin lost and lost again. All the questions came to him now, and he gave up answers one after another. His opponents were disappointed at the spottiness of his knowledge, though Zlatari licked his lips when Unwin told what he knew about Lamech’s murder, about the bulky corpse at the desk on the thirty-sixth floor, its bulging eyes, its crisscrossed fingers.
Zlatari dealt new hands, and Unwin’s was unremarkable: no face cards, no two or three of any kind. His beginner’s luck had run out. This would be his last hand, and he had learned so little.
Zlatari folded almost immediately, but the Rook brothers showed no sign of relenting. They eagerly took up their new cards and just as eagerly counted out their bets. Unwin was going to lose. So he said to Zlatari, “A two, three, four, five, and six of spades: is that a good hand?”
Again that slow, sleepy blink from the twins.
“Yes,” said Zlatari. “That is a good hand.”
The brothers tossed their cards onto the table.
Unwin set his own cards facedown and collected his winnings, quickly, so they would not notice how his hands were shaking. He traded in all his chips, which was enough, Zlatari told him, for the most severe sort of question the game allowed. The inquisition would be answered by everyone at the table.
Unwin looked at each of them carefully. The Rooks were silent, imperious. But their questions had revealed that they, like him, were looking for Sivart. And Sivart was looking for Greenwood. So Unwin cleared his throat and asked, “Where is Cleopatra Greenwood?”
Zlatari looked over his shoulders, as though to make sure no one else had heard, even though the bar was otherwise empty. “Hell!” he said. “Hot stinking hell! You want to bury me, Detective? You want us in the dirt today? What’s your game, Charles?”
Josiah whispered something in Jasper’s ear, and Jasper said, “Those questions are out of turn, Zlatari. You’re breaking your own rules.”
“I’ll break more,” Zlatari said. He flicked his hands at Unwin. “Up, let me up!”
Unwin got to his feet, and Zlatari shoved past, knocking chips off the table and onto the floor. “You get your answers from them,” he said, “but I don’t want to know what they are. I’ve got enough graves to dig without having to dig my own.” He went muttering to the farthest table and sat facing the door, twisting his mustache between thumb and forefinger.
The Rooks were still in their seats. Unwin sat back down and tried not to look directly at those green, unblinking eyes. He felt again the strange heat of the two men, dry and suffocating. It came over the table in waves; his face felt like paper about to catch.