“Where are we going?”
“Someplace we can talk in private.”
“I’ll be late for work.”
The man in the herringbone suit flipped open his wallet to reveal an Agency badge identifying him as Samuel Pith, Detective. “You’re on the job,” Pith said, “starting this moment. That makes you a half hour early, Mr. Unwin.”
They came to a second corridor, dimmer than the first, blocked by a row of signs warning of wet floors. Beyond, a man in gray coveralls slid a grimy-looking mop over the marble in slow, indeliberate arcs. The floor was covered with red and orange oak leaves, tracked in, probably, by a passenger who had arrived on one of the earlier trains from the country.
Detective Pith cleared his throat, and the custodian shuffled over to them, pushed one of the signs out of the way, and allowed the two to pass.
The floor was perfectly dry. Unwin glanced into the custodian’s bucket. It was empty.
“Listen carefully, now,” said Detective Pith. He emphasized the words by tapping his hat brim against Unwin’s chest. “You’re an odd little fellow. You’ve got peculiar habits. Every morning this week, same time, there’s Charles Unwin, back at Central Terminal. Not for a train, though. His apartment is just seven blocks from the office.”
“I come for the—”
“Damn it, Unwin, don’t tell me. We like our operatives to keep a few mysteries of their own. Page ninety-six of the
Manual.
”
“I’m no operative, sir. I’m a clerk, fourteenth floor. And I’m sorry you’ve had to waste your time. We’re both behind schedule now.”
“I told you,” Pith growled, “you’re already on the job. Forget the fourteenth floor. Report to Room 2919. You’ve been promoted.” From his coat pocket Pith drew a slim hardcover volume, green with gold lettering:
The Manual of Detection.
“Standard issue,” he said. “It’s saved my life more than once.”
Unwin’s hands were still full, so Pith slipped the book into his briefcase.
“This is a mistake,” Unwin said.
“For better or worse, somebody has noticed you. And there’s no way now to get yourself unnoticed.” He stared at Unwin a long moment. His substantial black eyebrows gathered downward, and his lips went stiff and frowning. But when he spoke, his voice was quieter, even kind. “I’m supposed to keep this simple, but listen. Your first case should be an easy one. Hell, mine was. But you’re in this thing a little deeper, Unwin. Maybe because you’ve been with the Agency so long. Or maybe you’ve got some friends, or some enemies. It’s none of my business, really. The point is—”
“Please,” said Unwin, checking his watch. It was seven thirty-four.
Detective Pith waved one hand, as though to clear smoke from the air. “I’ve already said more than I should have. The point is, Unwin, you’re going to need a new hat.”
The green trilby was Unwin’s only hat. He could not imagine wearing anything else on his head.
Pith donned his own fedora and tipped it forward. “If you ever see me again, you don’t know me. Got it?” He snapped a finger at the custodian and said, “See you later, Artie.” Then the herringbone suit disappeared around the corner.
The custodian had resumed his work, mopping the dry floor with his dry mop, moving piles of oak leaves from one end of the corridor to the other. In the reports Unwin received each week from Detective Sivart, he had often read of those who, without being in the employ of the Agency, were nonetheless aware of one or more aspects of a case—who were, as the detective might write, “in on it.” Could the custodian be one of those?
His name tag was stitched with red, curving letters.
“Mr. Arthur, sir?”
Arthur continued working, and Unwin had to hop backward to escape the wide sweep of his mop. The custodian’s eyes were closed, his mouth slightly open. And he was making a peculiar sound, low and whispery. Unwin leaned closer, trying to understand the words.
But there were no words, there was nothing to understand. The custodian was snoring.
OUTSIDE, UNWIN DROPPED His coffee in a trash can and glanced downtown toward the Agency’s gray, monolithic headquarters, its uppermost stories obscured by the rain. Years ago he had admitted to himself that he did not like the look of the building: its shadow was too long, the stone of its walls cold and somehow like that of a tomb. Better, he thought, to work inside a place like that than to glimpse it throughout the day.
To make up for lost time, he risked a shortcut down an alleyway he knew was barely wide enough to accommodate his open umbrella. The umbrella’s metal nubs scraped against both walls as the bicycle bumped and jangled over old cobblestone.
He had already begun drafting in his mind the report that would best characterize his promotion, and in this draft the word “promotion” appeared always between quotation marks, for to let it stand without qualification would be to honor it with too much validity. Errors were something of a rarity at the Agency. It was a large organization, however, composed of a great many bureaus and departments, most of them beyond Unwin’s purview. In one of those bureaus or departments, it was clear, an error had been committed, overlooked, and worst of all, disseminated.
He slowed his pace to navigate some broken bottles left strewn across the alley, the ribs of his umbrella bending against the walls as he turned. He expected at any moment to hear the fateful hiss of a popped tire, but he and his bicycle passed unscathed.
This error that Pith had brought with him to Central Terminal—it was Unwin’s burden now. He accepted it, if not gladly, then encouraged by the knowledge that he, one of the most experienced clerks of the fourteenth floor, was best prepared to cope with such a calamity. Every page of his report would intimate the fact. The superior who reviewed the final version, upon finishing, would sit back in his chair and say to himself, “Thank goodness it was Mr. Charles Unwin, and not some frailer fellow, to whom this task fell.”
Unwin pedaled hard to keep from swerving and shot from the other end of the alley, a clutch of pigeons bursting with him into the rain.
In all his days of employment with the Agency, he had never encountered a problem without a solution. This morning’s episode, though unusual, would be no exception. He felt certain the entire matter would be settled before lunchtime.
But even with such responsibilities before him, Unwin found himself thinking of the dream he had dreamed before waking, the one that had rattled and distracted him, causing him to scorch his oatmeal and nearly miss the woman in the plaid coat.
He was by nature a meticulous dreamer, capable of sorting his nocturnal reveries with a lucidity he understood to be rare. He was unaccustomed to the shock of such an intrusive vision, one that seemed not at all of his making, and more like an official communiqué.
In this dream he had risen from bed and gone to take a bath, only to find the bathtub occupied by a stranger, naked except for his hat, reclining in a thick heap of soap bubbles. The bubbles were stained gray around his chest by the ashes from his cigar. His flesh was gray, too, like smudged newsprint, and a bulky gray coat was draped over the shower curtain. Only the ember of the stranger’s cigar possessed color, and it burned so hot it made the steam above the tub glow red.
Unwin stood in the doorway, a fresh towel over his arm, his robe cinched tight around his waist. Why, he wondered, would someone go through all the trouble of breaking in to his apartment, just to get caught taking a bath?
The stranger said nothing. He lifted one foot out of the water and scrubbed it with a long-handled brush. When he was done, he soaped the bristles, slowly working the suds into a lather. Then he scrubbed the other foot.
Unwin bent down for a better look at the face under the hat brim and saw the heavy, unshaven jaw he knew only from newspaper photographs. It was the Agency operative whose case files were his particular responsibility.
“Detective Sivart,” Unwin said, “what are you doing in my bathtub?”
Sivart let the brush fall into the water and took the cigar from his teeth. “No names,” he said. “Not mine anyway. Don’t know who might be listening in.” He relaxed deeper into the bubbles. “You have no idea how difficult it was to arrange this meeting, Unwin. Did you know they don’t tell us detectives who our clerks are? All these years I’ve been sending my reports to the fourteenth floor. To you, it turns out. And you forget things.”
Unwin put up his hands to protest, but Sivart waved his cigar at him and said, “When Enoch Hoffmann stole November twelfth, and you looked at the morning paper and saw that Monday had gone straight into Wednesday, you forgot Tuesday like all the rest of them.”
“Even the restaurants skipped their Tuesday specials,” Unwin said.
Sivart’s ember burned hotter, and more steam rose from the tub. “You forgot my birthday, too,” he said. “No card, no nothing.”
“Nobody knows your birthday.”
“You could have figured it out. Anyway, you know my cases better than anyone. You know I was wrong about her, all wrong. So you’re the best chance I’ve got. Try this time, would you? Try to remember something. Remember this: Chapter Eighteen. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“Say it back to me: Chapter Eighteen.”
“Chapter Elephant,” Unwin said, in spite of himself.
“Hopeless,” Sivart muttered.
Normally Unwin never could have said “Elephant” when he meant to say “Eighteen,” not even in his sleep. Hurt by Sivart’s accusations, he had blurted the wrong word because, in some dusty file drawer of his mind, he had long ago deposited the fact that elephants never forget.
“The girl,” Sivart was saying, and Unwin had the impression that the detective was getting ready to explain something important. “I was wrong about her.”
Then, as though summoned to life by Unwin’s own error, there came trumpeting, high and full—the unmistakable decree of an elephant.
“No time!” Sivart said. He drew back the shower curtain behind the tub. Instead of a tiled wall, Unwin saw the whirling lights of carnival rides and striped pavilions beneath which broad shapes hunkered and leapt. There were shooting galleries out there, and a wheel of fortune, and animal cages, and a carousel, all moving, all turning under turning stars. The elephant trumpeted again, only this time the sound was shrill and staccato, and Unwin had to switch off his alarm clock to make it stop.
TWO
On Evidence
Objects have memory, too. The doorknob remembers
who turned it, the telephone who answered it. The gun
remembers when it was last fired, and by whom. It is for
the detective to learn the language of these things, so that
he might hear them when they have something to say.
U
nwin’s damp socks squelched in his shoes as he dismounted in front of the broad granite facade of the Agency’s office building. The tallest structure for blocks around, it stood like a watchtower between the gridded downtown district and the crooked streets of the old port town.
South of the Agency offices Unwin rarely dared to travel. He knew enough from Sivart’s reports of what went on in the cramped taverns and winding back lanes of the old port’s innumerable little neighborhoods to satisfy his curiosity. Occasionally, when the wind was right, he would catch a scent on the air that left him mystified and a little frightened, and tugged at him in a way he could not easily have explained. He felt as though a trapdoor had opened at his feet, revealing a view onto something bottomless and unknowable—a secret that would remain a secret even at the end of the world. A moment would pass before he could place it, before he knew where the scent had come from. Then he would shake his head and chide himself. Seeing it so rarely, he often forgot that it was there: the sea.
He brought his bicycle with him into the Agency lobby, where the doorman allowed him to keep it on rainy days. He could not bear to look at the clock on the wall behind the front desk. His lateness, Unwin knew, would necessitate a second report for the benefit of his supervisor. It was Mr. Duden, after all, who had only recently filed for the presentation of the wristwatch—and did Mr. Duden not expect him to continue to exhibit the virtues that the wristwatch both acknowledged and embodied?
As for this so-called
Manual of Detection,
good sense dictated that he refrain from reading any part of it, including the page ninety-six to which Detective Pith alluded. Whatever secrets the
Manual
contained were not intended for Charles Unwin.
Only one dilemma remained. How to explain his presence at Central Terminal that morning? The coffee story would not do: a blatant falsification, brought to dwell perpetually in the Agency archives, a stain in the shape of words! Yet the truth was hardly appropriate for an official report. Best, perhaps, to write around that hole in the story and hope no one noticed.
The elevator attendant was a white-haired man whose spotted hands shook when he moved the lever. He brought the elevator to a halt without glancing at the needle over the door. “Floor fourteen,” he said.
On the fourteenth floor were three columns of twenty-one desks each, separated by clusters of filing cabinets and shelving. On each desk a telephone, a typewriter, a green-shaded lamp, and a letter tray. The Agency neither prohibited nor encouraged the use of personal decorative flourishes, and some of these desks flaunted a small vase of flowers, a photograph, a child’s drawing. Unwin’s desk, the tenth in the east row, was free of any such clutter.
He was, after all, the clerk responsible for the cases of Detective Travis T. Sivart. Some argued, though never too loudly, that without Detective Sivart there was no Agency. The point was perhaps only somewhat overstated. For in bars and barbershops all over town, in clubs and parlors of every grade, few topics could generate more speculation than Sivart’s latest case.