Of course, an interoffice communication! With such a missive as his guide, Unwin could follow the trail back to its source and settle the matter in person. Though to ask for a memo directed to his superior would be rather unorthodox, Mr. Duden believed that Unwin outranked him now, so he could not refuse the request. But then, to take advantage of his superior’s confusion would be to employ the very misunderstanding he wished to dispel. Imagine the report he would have to write to explain his actions: the addenda and codicils, the footnotes, the footnotes to footnotes. The more Unwin fed that report, the greater would grow its demands, until stacks of paper massed into walls, corridors: a devouring labyrinth with Unwin at its center, spools of exhausted typewriter ribbon piled all around.
Mr. Duden saved him from that fate, however, when he produced the memo for Unwin’s perusal without being asked.
The bottom of the memo was adorned by the Agency’s official seal, a single open eye floating above the words “Never Sleeping.”
To: O. Duden, Overclerk, Floor 14
From: Lamech, Watcher, Floor 36
An employee under your Supervision, Mister Charles Unwin, is hereby promoted to the rank of Detective, with all the Rights, Privileges, and Responsibilities that position entails. Please forward his Personal Effects to Room 2919, and proceed according to Protocol in all regards.
Unwin folded the paper in half and slipped it into his coat pocket. He saw that Mr. Duden wanted it back, to keep it for his records, but the overclerk could not bring himself to ask for it. It was better this way—Unwin would need to incorporate the memo into his report. “I assume that the woman at my desk,” he said, “whose name I have not learned, will carry on with my work, the work I have been doing for the last twenty years, seven months, and some-odd days.”
Mr. Duden smiled and nodded some more. He would not say her name.
Unwin returned the way he had come, avoiding the eyes of his coworkers, especially those of the woman seated in his chair. He could not help glimpsing the plaid coat, however, hanging where his own coat should have been.
IN THE ELEVATOR three men in nice suits (black, green, and navy blue) were speaking quietly among themselves. They regarded Unwin’s arrival with scrupulous indifference. These were bona fide detectives, and Unwin did not have to be a detective himself to recognize the fact. He stood with his back to them, and the elevator attendant hopped off his three-legged stool and closed the door. “Going up,” he announced. “Next stop, floor twenty-nine.”
Unwin mumbled his request for the thirty-sixth floor.
“You’re going to have to speak up,” the attendant said, tapping his own ear. “What floor is it that you want?”
The three detectives were silent now.
Unwin leaned closer and repeated, “Thirty-six, please.”
The attendant shrugged and threw the lever. No one spoke as the needle rose past fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, but Unwin knew the detectives were watching him. Were these three in communication with Detective Pith? He had been watching Unwin for some time, long enough to know that he went every morning to Central Terminal. And if he were watching, others could be watching, too—and not just while he was at the office. Unwin felt as though the Agency’s unblinking eye had turned upon him, and now there was no escaping its gaze.
It might have been watching that morning eight days before, when Unwin first saw the woman in the plaid coat. He had woken early, then dressed and eaten and left for work, failing to realize until he had descended to the street and gone partway to work that most of the city was still sleeping. He could not continue to the office—it would be hours yet before the doorman would arrive with his ring of keys—so Unwin had wandered in the near dark while delivery trucks idled at storefronts, and streetlamps winked out overhead, and a few seasoned carousers shuffled home, arms over one another’s shoulders.
It seemed like a dream now: his passage through the revolving doors of Central Terminal, the cup of coffee from the breakfast cart, the schedule plucked from the racks by the information booth. All those trains, all those routes: he could purchase a ticket for any one of them, he thought, and let himself be borne from the city, let the reports pile up on his desk forever. The mysteries assigned to Sivart now were hollow compared to those of earlier years. The Rook brothers had gone into hiding after November twelfth, and Cleopatra Greenwood had fled the city, and Enoch Hoffmann had performed with quiet precision the cardinal feat of magicianship and caused himself to disappear. The city thought it still needed Sivart, but Unwin knew the truth: Sivart was just a shadow, and he himself a shadow’s shadow.
So it was that he found himself standing at Gate Fourteen with a ticket for the next train into the country, no clear plan to return, checking his wristwatch against the four-faced clock above the information booth. Even to him his behavior seemed suspicious: a clerk rising early, acting on whims, purchasing a ticket for a train out of the city. What kind of motive would anyone from the Agency assign to such behavior? They must have pegged him as a spy or a double agent.
Perhaps this promotion was not an error, then, but a test of some kind. If so, he would prove himself above suspicion by maintaining that it was an error, could only be an error. He would prove that he wanted his job, that he was nothing if not a clerk.
He had not boarded the train that morning after all, had not gone into the country. The sight of the woman in the plaid coat had stopped him. She was a mystery to him, and mystery enough to keep him from leaving. So long as she was there each morning, he would wait with her, and so long as no one appeared to meet her, he would return to work: that was the unspoken bargain he had struck with her.
Still, these detectives in the elevator were watching him—intently, he felt. He tapped his umbrella against the floor while humming a few bars of a tune he knew from the radio, but this must have looked too calculated, since humming and umbrella-tapping were not among his usual habits. So instead of tapping, he used his umbrella as a cane by gently and repeatedly shifting his weight onto it and off it again. This was a habit Unwin could call genuine. But employed as a distraction, it seemed even to him a very suspicious-looking contrivance. He had not read a word of The Manual of Detection, while these detectives probably knew it front to back, knew even the rationale behind Samuel Pith’s assertion that operatives must have secrets of their own.
The attendant brought the elevator to a halt at floor twenty-nine, and the three detectives brushed past, then turned. The one in the black suit scratched a rash above his collar, glaring at Unwin as though he were somehow the cause of it. The one in green hunched bulkily, a dull, mean look in his half-lidded eyes. Navy blue stood in front, his mustache a crooked line over his lip. “That’s no hat to wear to the thirty-sixth floor,” he said.
The other two chuckled and shook their heads.
The attendant closed the door on the detective’s thin scowl, and again the needle climbed upward. From above came the creaking of machinery; steadily the sound grew louder. When the door was opened at last, a chill wind escaped from the elevator shaft to play about Unwin’s ankles. His socks were still damp.
The corridor was lit by yellow light fixtures shaped like upended tulips, and between them were doors without transoms. At the opposite end of the hall, a single window permitted a rectangle of gray, rain-ribboned light.
“Thirty-six,” the attendant said.
In the memo Lamech had identified himself as a watcher. That title was unfamiliar to Unwin, but the intricacies of Agency hierarchy could not be entrusted to just any employee. There were clerks innumerable, with underclerks beneath them and overclerks above, and then the detectives, those knights-errant upon whose work so much depended, while everywhere at once scurried the messengers, lower in status, perhaps, than even the underclerks but entrusted with special privileges of passage, for their words, on any particular day, could originate in the highest halls of the Agency offices. And dwelling in those halls? What shrewd powers, with what titles? On that, Unwin did
not care to speculate, nor do we now, except to this extent: on the thirty-sixth floor, behind doors marked by bronze placards bearing their names, the watchers performed what duties were entrusted to them.
The seventh door on the right (Unwin counted thirteen to a side) bore the name he was looking for. Unlike all the others, this door was ajar. He knocked gently and called through the opening. “Mr. Lamech?”
No response. He knocked harder, and the door swung inward. The room was dark, but in the column of light from the hall Unwin saw a broad maroon rug, shelves of thick books with blue and brown spines, a pair of cushioned chairs angled toward a desk at the back. To one side was a great dark globe, and before the window loomed a bald and massive globelike head. On the desk a telephone, a typewriter, and a lamp, unlit.
“Mr. Lamech,” Unwin said again, crossing the threshold, “I am sorry to have to bother you, sir. It’s Charles Unwin, clerk, floor fourteen. I’ve come about the matter of the promotion. I believe there may have been some kind of error.”
Lamech said nothing. Maybe he did not wish to speak with the door open. Unwin closed it and approached. As his eyes adjusted, he began to discern a heavy-featured face, shoulders wide as the wide-backed chair, big unmoving hands folded over the desk.
“Not your error, of course,” Unwin amended. “Probably a transcriptionist’s typo or a bad connection on one of the older lines. You know how things get when it rains, sir. Fits of static, the occasional disconnect.”
Lamech regarded him wordlessly.
“And it has been raining on and off for days now. Fourteen days, in fact. More rain than we’ve had in quite some time.”
Unwin stood before the desk. “It’s a matter of poor drainage, sir. Bound to interfere with the lines.”
He saw that Lamech’s telephone was in fact unplugged, the cord left dangling over the edge of the desk. The watcher said nothing. The only sound was the rain against the window—the cause, Unwin supposed, for all his talk about the weather.
“Unless you protest,” Unwin hazarded, “I’ll just switch on your desk lamp for you. That way I can show you some identification, which I’m sure you want to see before bothering with any of this. Wouldn’t want to waste your time. And you can’t trust anyone these days, isn’t that right?”
He tugged the cord. The lamp, identical to the one on Unwin’s own desk twenty-two floors below, made a puddle of pale green light over the desktop, over Unwin’s outstretched hand, over the seated man’s gray crisscrossed fingers, and over his heavy gray face, from which a pair of bloated, red-flooded eyes glared out at nothing.
Corpses were nothing new to Unwin. Hundreds of them populated the reports entrusted to his care over the years, reports in which no detail was spared. People poisoned, shot, gutted, hanged, sliced to ribbons by industrial machinery, crushed between slabs of cement, clobbered with skillets, defenestrated, eviscerated, burned or buried alive, held underwater for lengthy intervals, thrown down stairs, or simply kicked and pummeled out of being—the minutiae surrounding such incidents were daily fare, so to speak, to a clerk of the fourteenth floor. Whole indices, in fact, were organized according to cause of death, and Unwin himself had from time to time contributed new headings and subheadings when an innovative murder necessitated an addition or expansion: “strangulation, unattended boa snake,” was one of his, as was “muffins, poisonous berry.”
A man so thoroughly versed in the varieties of dispatchment might, then, regard with unusual ease the result of an actual murder, in this case a man whose neck had been bruised by strangulatory measures, tongue emitted as a result of smotheration, eyes bulged almost clear of the skull, result of the same.
Unwin yanked his hand from the light and took several steps backward, tripped over the edge of the rug, and fell into one of the thickly cushioned chairs, the softness of which did nothing to diminish his revulsion. In each dark corner, Unwin could almost see a killer crouched, waiting for an opportunity to strike. To move from where he sat would have brought him closer to at least one of them.
So he remained motionless, briefcase clutched in his lap, seated as for a proper meeting with Mr. Lamech. This meeting went on for some time, with only the weather having anything to say, and the weather spoke only of itself.
THREE
On Corpses
Many cases begin with one—this can be disconcerting,
but at least you know where you stand. Worse is the corpse
that appears partway into your investigation, complicating
everything. Best to proceed, therefore, with the vigilance
of one who assumes that a corpse is always around the next
corner. That way it is less likely to be your own.
A knock at the door shook Unwin from his stupor. How long had he been sitting there? Long enough for his eyes to adjust to the light, for him to see that he was quite alone with Lamech’s corpse. If someone were going to leap out and kill him, he would have done it by now.
A second knock at the door, louder this time. He should have left as soon as he saw the corpse, should have cried out, or even run into the hall and fainted. That would have made his role in the matter obvious: he was the unlucky discoverer of a horrendous crime. But what would they think when he answered the door and said, “Please, come right in. And look, there’s a dead man at the desk. Strange, isn’t it?”
He could squeeze himself behind the end of the bookshelf, but that would make for a poor hiding place. When he was found cowering there, the suspicion against him would only increase. If he waited a little longer, maybe, the person at the door would give up and go away.
Unwin waited. There was no more knocking, but he heard the sound of a woman’s voice. “Mr. Lamech?”
The body, then. He would have to do something with the body. He went to stand behind Lamech’s chair and gazed down at the broad, blank scalp. From this angle it looked as though there was nothing wrong with the man. He was only very tired, had eased back into his chair for a brief nap. He did not even smell as Unwin imagined a corpse would smell. He smelled like aftershave.
Still, Unwin could not bring himself to touch the dead man. He took hold of the chair and rolled it slowly backward. Lamech’s big hands drifted apart as they slid over the surface of the desk, but his fingers stayed rigid. Then the arms dropped suddenly, and the upper half of the body fell forward. Unwin had to yank the chair back to keep the man’s head from striking the edge of the desk. The chair creaked under the slumped weight of the corpse.
The woman knocked again, so loudly this time that everyone on the floor must have heard.
“One moment!” Unwin shouted, and the woman let out a little oh! as though she had not really expected an answer.
With his foot on one leg of the chair to keep it in place, Unwin heaved against the body with both hands. It bowed deeper and the spine emitted a series of popping sounds that made him recoil. He closed his eyes, held his breath, and pushed again. This time the body slid off the chair and tumbled soundlessly into the dark beneath the desk.
In the most commanding tone he could muster, Unwin called for Lamech’s visitor to enter.
The woman wore a black dress with white lace around the collar and cuffs. The dress was very fine, but of a style Unwin had not seen worn in the city for ten years or more. In her hands she clutched a small purse, also strangely old-fashioned. Her hair was bound up in a black lace cap, still damp from the rain. She was perhaps ten years older than Unwin, and very beautiful—a real stunner, Sivart might have written. She was also the most tired-looking woman Unwin had ever seen. She gazed warily into the room, the shadows beneath her eyes so dark that Unwin mistook them at first for an exotic sort of makeup.
“Please come in,” he said.
She came forward with dreamlike hesitancy, always about to stumble, somehow remaining miraculously on her feet.
“Mr. Lamech,” she said.
He sat down, relieved that she did not know the watcher by sight, but the tip of hi
s left shoe made contact with the body under the desk, and he had to cough to conceal his alarm.
“I know this isn’t how things are done here,” she said.
Unwin’s stomach tightened. Had he given himself away so quickly?
“I know I’m supposed to request an appointment,” the woman went on, “and then someone informs me who will be handling my case. But I couldn’t wait, and I couldn’t see just anyone. I had to see you.”
So it was she who had broken the rules. Unwin cleared his throat and gave her a stern look. Then, to demonstrate his generosity, he gestured for her to sit.
She gazed at the thick cushion, her eyelids drooping. “I mustn’t,” she said. “I would fall asleep in an instant.” Just the thought of sitting down appeared to overwhelm her; she squeezed her purse and closed her eyes for a long moment.
Unwin rose from his seat, thinking he might have to catch her. But she steadied herself, blinked several times, and said, “I’m something of a detective myself, you see. I figured out that you are Sivart’s watcher.”
The Manual of Detection Page 3