Unwin did not contradict her, though he doubted that even the
Manual
would contain the few words—whatever they were—to which Miss Benjamin was referring.
“What about the third archive?” he said. “You didn’t tell me about Miss Palsgrave.”
Miss Benjamin stepped back. “I won’t,” she said. “This is Mysteries, after all, and Miss Palsgrave’s work is her own.”
Unwin put on his hat and started down the stairs. Miss Benjamin had seemed tall to him, and now, waist-deep in the floor, he looked up and found her terrible and magnificent, a towering, sulky idol in a brown wool skirt. “Good-bye, Miss Benjamin.”
She capped her silver flask and sighed. “Watch out for the ninth step,” she said, and Unwin had to duck as she kicked the trapdoor closed over his head.
THE STAIRS WERE LIT only by dim lamps that flickered as though to relay a coded message. There was no banister. The wooden steps creaked underfoot, and Unwin felt each with the toe of his shoe before stepping down. Was it a trick of the whiskey, that the walls of the passage seemed to narrow as Unwin descended? Or had he always been a claustrophobe and only needed an experience like this to find out?
The ninth step appeared as sturdy as the others, but he skipped it as Miss Benjamin advised. Unwin found it difficult to stop counting anything once he had begun. Counting sheep, in fact, was his surest route to insomnia—by morning he could fill whole pastures with a vast and clamorous flock. Now he counted steps, and by the twentieth he felt certain the walls really were narrowing, and the ceiling was getting lower, too. How deep did the stairway go? Maybe Miss Benjamin had tricked him into an oubliette. She could have locked the trapdoor and sent a message to Detective Screed by now—but then, perhaps Mr. Duden already had.
The lamps were fewer in number here, and dimmer. He hoped Edwin Moore had known what he was talking about. Could the old man’s memory be trusted at all? Unwin had to bend low to take the last several steps. The fifty-second was the last.
Here was a plain wooden door no more than four feet tall. From beyond it came a sound—a wild, incessant clattering, as of many people typing without pause. Unwin felt for a doorknob but could not find one. When he pushed, the door swung open on silent hinges. He ducked through and had to remain crouched on the other side because the ceiling was so low.
The room was barely larger than the desk in his own office, though finished all in dark wood that gleamed in the light from a chandelier. Where Unwin had expected a legion of underclerks, he saw one tiny woman, her silvery hair pinned in a mound atop her head, seated at a desk at the center of the room. He stooped over her, an uncouth giant in a too-small cave, but she did nothing to acknowledge his presence. Her typing was the quickest Unwin had ever seen—quicker than Emily’s, quicker, even, than the man with the blond beard’s. The sound of one key-clap was indiscernible from the next, and the carrier bell never ceased to reverberate, chiming the end of each line in rapid succession.
“Miss Burgrave?” Unwin said.
The woman stopped typing and peered at him, the wrinkles at the edges of her mouth and eyes fixed in severe concentration. She wore red lipstick, and her cheeks, soft and sagging, were the pink of pink roses. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, then went back to her work.
Her little hands were a hundred-fingered blur. The paper went into her typewriter from a single great roll that had been mounted to the front of her desk, then onto a second roll mounted just above the first. This system freed her of the need to pause and insert fresh sheets.
Unwin bent over to read what she was typing, but Miss Burgrave stopped again and stared at him, causing him to withdraw so quickly that he bumped his head against the ceiling.
“This will not do,” Miss Burgrave said. “You know what it means to be on a schedule, of course, so I will not rebuke you unnecessarily, as that would be tantamount to redundancy, which I already risk by speaking to you at all, and risk again by observing the risk, and so again by observing the observation. In this we could proceed endlessly. Will you not relent? Are you really so stubborn? I ask these questions rhetorically, and thus degrade further the value of my speech.”
“I’m not sure I follow you, Miss Burgrave, but if perhaps you’d allow me into the archives—”
“If perhaps,”
she repeated, her wrinkles deepening. “Mr. Unwin, we shall brook no degree of mysteriousness on this floor. So that weak-kneed naïf allowed you entrance through the trapdoor, and you believe that entitles you to further transgression—and with my assistance, at that.”
Unwin kept quiet now. In spite of himself, he glanced again at the typescript mounted to the desk.
“Facts,” Miss Burgrave explained. “Dead facts, all questions beaten out of them, all lines of inquiry followed to their termini. Answers and answers to answers, the end of the road, of the world, maybe. Yes, that is how I feel sometimes, as though the world has already ended, the shades drawn over every window, the stars burned down to little black beads, the moon waned beyond waning, all life a dollop of ash, and still I remain at work, trying to explain what happened.”
“Explain to whom?”
“Ah, now we come to something.” Miss Burgrave rose from her chair, and Unwin saw that she stood no taller than a child. She waved Unwin out of her way and opened a panel hidden in the wall. From there she drew a book about the size of
The Manual of Detection
but bound in red rather than green. She turned to a certain page and, without having to search, read aloud a single paragraph:
Solutions, as distilled by the clerks so Entrusted, from the Reports of detectives so Assigned, and borne by messengers to the aforementioned Dominions, are there to be studied and Linked each to the other according to common significance, and so prepared for Review by the Overseer. It is solely to the Chief Clerk of Solutions to whom this Task falls, so let him work alone, unhindered by his subordinates in their Courses and his Seniors in their many Doings.
“Where are your underclerks, then?” Unwin asked.
Miss Burgrave sighed. She seemed to have abandoned something: a conviction, maybe, or a hope. She replaced the book and closed the panel, then gestured for Unwin to follow her through a door behind her desk. In the passage beyond, Unwin was able to stand straight again. He heard the quiet commotion of clerkly work: the whisperings, the pen scratchings, the hurried footfalls. But those who made these sounds were nowhere visible in the long hall, nor in the many branches extending from it. Out of the walls protruded two rows of file drawers, one near the floor and the other at waist height, situated so that all their contents were visible. Now and then these drawers would disappear into the walls, only to return a moment later.
As they walked, Miss Burgrave explained, “We are now between the walls of the Archive of Solutions. My underclerks are without, accessing what files they require, according to the instructions I give them by various means, including notes, bellpulls, and color-coded signals. They do not know me, nor would I recognize them, except by the way each clears his throat.”
She took a stepstool from a shadow, climbed it, and switched on a light that extended over one of the drawers. She squinted and adjusted the glasses on her nose. “This is what you are here for, no doubt.”
Unwin perused the titles quickly. There they were, in chronological order—all the work he had done in his twenty years, seven months, and some-odd days at the Agency, every word of every case file, the great works and the lesser-known, the grand capers and the minor mysteries. They barely filled the single drawer.
Miss Burgrave watched attentively as Unwin drew out the file for The Oldest Murdered Man. A long card was fixed to the back of the file, covered with typed references to files elsewhere in the archives. Here was the original mystery, upstairs with Miss Benjamin, here the case files of other detectives overlapping with this one. And below them references to another archive, a third.
He said to Miss Burgrave, “These refer to files kept by Miss Palsgrave. What are they?”
Miss Burgrave winced. “For a Chief Clerk of Mysteries,” she said, “that Miss Benjamin has a great deal to say. How I long for the days of Miss Margrave, who preceded her in the position. Now, there was a woman who knew how to keep a thing to herself. She died just a few days after she retired. Nothing unusual in that. Some people have little in them except the work. But it’s something of a syndrome here at the Agency. Clerks and underclerks are immune, mind you. But anyone who knows anything about anything is granted a very short retirement. I will have my own before long, I suppose. And if laws of proportion apply, then my retirement shall be very short indeed. And your own watcher—which is to say your detective’s watcher—is due to retire soon. A nice man, Ed Lamech. I’ll miss him.”
Unwin understood then that Miss Burgrave knew nothing about his recent promotion. And why would she? His promotion was a mystery even to him, and Miss Burgrave knew only the solutions. So she had not heard of Lamech’s murder either.
“You hesitate to speak,” Miss Burgrave said, “and I warned you once about our tolerance for mysteriousness on this floor.”
He chose his words carefully. “It was the discovery of Lamech’s death, among other mysteries, Miss Burgrave, that brought me here.”
She covered her mouth with one small hand, steadying herself against the file drawer with the other. After a moment she said, “Now, Ed Lamech, he and I used to play cards together. That was before all this, of course. Miss Margrave and I shared a desk, and the archive was just two cardboard boxes at the back of the room: one for mysteries, one for solutions. Edwin Moore kept the files in order. There was a big table at the center of the room where the detectives would lay out mug shots and maps of the city. They smoked and talked big and planned stings; Ed was the loudest of the bunch, but he always had something nice to say. He knew how to make a person feel a little taller. Some nights we’d clear off the table and play a few hands, all of us together. Yes, I always thought Ed Lamech and I might sit down and play cards again, when we found the time.”
She switched off the light and said, “Help me down the stepladder, Mr. Unwin,” and he did, but when she reached the floor, she did not let go of his hand. “This way.”
Unwin’s eyes did not have time to adjust as Miss Burgrave pulled him more and more quickly through the darkness between the walls. When a drawer opened or closed, a band of light from the archive swept momentarily across the floor, but that was all, and Unwin knew he would not find his way back on his own. They came to a corridor that was almost entirely dark, from the walls of which no file drawers extended.
“You go that way,” Miss Burgrave said, “and you tell Miss Palsgrave that I sent you, though I doubt she cares anymore about what I have to say.”
She took her hand back and added, “She works here, but she’s never been like the rest of us; not really. Her curriculum vitae is a curious one, to say the least. Be wary of her. Be polite.”
Unwin said, “I will, Miss Burgrave. But please, tell me one thing. If you know your underclerks only by their coughs, how did you know me?”
“Oh, Mr. Unwin, don’t you know you’re one of my own children? Your work has given me some pleasure through the years. When you leave a thing, you leave it where no doubt can touch it. I will not wish you luck. Of your success or failure I will hear in due course.”
Unwin heard her footsteps receding, glimpsed the silver of her hair as it passed an open file drawer. And then Miss Burgrave was gone.
He went alone into the dark. The passage sloped downward and curved to the left, tracing a spiral through the earth. Sometimes he kept his eyes open and sometimes he shut them; it made little difference. Miss Burgrave had been right about him: he left matters where no doubt could touch them. But that had been his flaw, to bind mystery so tightly, to obscure his detective’s missteps with perfect files. Somehow Unwin had made false things true.
At last his hands found something solid. He felt around the wall, found there the cool roundness of a doorknob and beneath it the gap of a keyhole. He knelt and peered through.
At the center of a vast, dark room were two velvet chairs set on a round blue rug. A blue-shaded floor lamp was set between them, and in its light a phonograph was playing. The music was all drowsy strings and horns, and then a woman began to sing. He knew the melody.
It may be a crime,
But I’m sure that you’re mine
In my dream of your dream of me.
The doorknob turned in his hand, and Unwin entered the third archive of the Agency offices.
THIRTEEN
On Cryptography
The coded message is a lifeless thing, mummified and
entombed. To the would-be cryptologist we must
offer the same advice we would give the grave
robber, the spelunker, and the sorcerer of legend:
beware what you dig up; it is yours.
A
distance of perhaps fifty paces separated him from the chairs, one pink, the other pale green. Unwin felt drawn to the warmth of the electric light, to the languid music playing there, to the voice that could only have been Miss Greenwood’s. It looked to him as though a cozy parlor had been set down in the middle of a cavern. He went toward it, feeling alone and insubstantial. He could not see his arms or his legs, could not see his own shoes. All he could see were the chairs, the lamp, and the phonograph. All he could hear was the music.
The floor was flat and smooth. A floor like that should have set his shoes squeaking, but they were muffled—by the darkness itself, Unwin thought. He kept his mouth shut tight. He did not want to let any of the darkness in.