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
Follow them lest they follow you.
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.
A thing like that tends to stick out, so it wasn’t too hard to track it down. Caligari’s Travels-No-More Carnival was closed up for the night: nothing on the midway but the smell of stale popcorn. I found the truck parked beside a pavilion near the boardwalk and pressed my thumb to the smokestack over the engine. Still warm.
I thought I’d have a peek inside, but somebody was coming from the docks, and I had to scram. The tent flap was hanging open by the entrance, so I wrapped myself in that and hoped nobody would spot my hat. In the end, though, I couldn’t help but risk a look.
What I saw was a tall fellow with one very odd mug. It looked like it was made out of clay, all pocked and pale, but his eyes were bright green. He peered into the cab, his breath fogging up the glass. Then he sighed and walked on.
I came out in a hurry, meaning to get out of there, and nearly walked straight into a second man. The weird thing, clerk? It was the same guy I’d just seen go in the opposite direction. Turns out this model of goon comes in sets of two.
He called to his brother, and they got hold of me quick, then gave me a very professional roughing over. Our walk down to the pier was less than romantic. A rusting smuggler’s ship, The Wonderly, was docked down there. The whole thing reeked, like maybe they’d just raised it off the filthy bottom of the harbor.
The man in charge was a squat little fellow in a rumpled gray suit. The Man of a Thousand and One Voices is more impressive in the carnival posters, with his face lit green by hocus-pocus. In the flesh he looks more like an accountant who’s had a bad day and stumbled into the wrong part of town. He was shaking his head, looking sad about the whole thing. I was sad about it, too, and I let him know, in so many words.
We talked for a while. His real voice (if that’s what it was) sounded soft and high-pitched, like a kid’s. He explained how the Oldest Murdered Man had been the carnival’s main attraction for years, that they had been searching for the mummy for a long time. “I’m only bringing him back home,” he said.
“Why the boat, then?” I asked.
Enoch Hoffmann grinned. “The boat is for you,” he said, and that’s when his two buddies threw me into the cargo hold.
The story of the detective’s escape—how he found the corp
se on board, commandeered a lifeboat, and rowed it ashore through the night—was in the newspapers the next morning. Agency representatives returned the Oldest Murdered Man to the museum that day, amid shouted questions and the popping of flashbulbs.
But if the mummy was not in the museum now, where was he? And whose corpse was here in his place?
WITH HELP FROM SOME of the schoolchildren, Unwin carried Moore into a back room. The place served as a holding area for pieces of exhibits on their way into or out of the museum. Objects that might have seemed momentous in the galleries languished here like junk-sale leftovers. Paintings leaned in piles against the walls, sarcophagi gathered dust in the corners, marble statues lay half buried in packing material. The children put Edwin Moore on a worn blue chaise longue, and he lay with his arms over his face, shivering and mumbling.
“Is he a knight?” one of the children asked.
“He’s an artist,” another one said.
“He’s a mummy,” insisted a third.
Unwin corralled them back into the museum and set them in line behind their chaperone, who had failed to notice them leave. The children waved good-bye, and Unwin waved back. When they were gone, he walked partway down the hall and peered around the corner. He did not see the man with the blond beard.
From his sickbed Moore called out for water. Unwin searched though the crates and found a bowl, dark clay with a black crisscross pattern around the exterior. It was, he supposed, ancient, priceless, and difficult to drink from, but it would have to do. He filled it from the drinking fountain in the hall and carried it to the chaise longue with both hands.
Moore sipped the water, spilling some onto his jacket. Then he lay down and sighed, but immediately began to shiver again. “There is no keeping it back,” he said. “I had bound it so tightly, it came undone all at once.”
“You did meet with Sivart,” Unwin said.
“Yes, oh, yes.” He took his arms from his face; it was as white as his hair. “But I never should have spoken to him. He left here in a passion. I thought he would chew his cigar in two. And you! Who are you?”
Unwin considered showing the man his badge, then thought better of it. “I’m Charles Unwin, Agency clerk. My detective’s gone missing, and I’m trying to find him. Mr. Moore, you have to tell me where he went.”
“Do I? I have already remembered too much, and they are sure to come for me now.” He gestured for the bowl of water, and Unwin raised it to his lips. He drank, coughed some, and said, “Not even the Agency wants every mystery solved, Mr. Unwin.”
Unwin set the bowl aside. “I’m not trying to solve anything,” he said.
Moore’s gaze appeared focused now, and the color was returning to his face. He looked at Unwin as though seeing him for the first time. “If you are Sivart’s clerk, then you ought to know where he went. The sight of the gold tooth left him baffled. He needed information, the most reliable he could find.” He added quietly, “Whatever the price.”
Some of the places mentioned in Sivart’s reports were as foreign lands to Unwin—he came upon their names often enough to be convinced of their existence, but it was preposterous to think he could reach them by bicycle. For him there were two cities. One consisted of the seven blocks between his apartment and the Agency office building. The other was larger, vaguer, and more dangerous, and it intruded upon his imagination only by way of case reports and the occasional uneasy dream. In a shadowy corner of that other city was a certain taproom, an unofficial gathering place frequented by the enterprising, the scheming, and the desperate. Sivart went there only when every supposition had proved false, when every lead had dead-ended. And because the place rarely had any direct bearing on a case, Unwin usually excised its name from the files.
“The Forty Winks,” he said.
Moore nodded. “If you insist on tracking him down, Mr. Unwin, then I suggest you work quickly. I fear I’ve started the timer on an explosive, but I do not know when it will go off.” He rose suddenly from the chaise longue. He was light on his feet and seemed a little giddy.
“What about the woman you mentioned?” Unwin asked. “The one you said showed you the tooth?”
Moore grimaced and said, “I took you at your word when you said you aren’t trying to solve anything.”
Unwin clenched his jaw. Without thinking, he had started asking questions he did not want to ask. After this, he thought, he would have to put down The Manual of Detection for good.
“This way, then,” Moore said. “There is a back door—that will be the safest route.”
The exit was no taller than Unwin’s waist. It was blocked by empty crates, so they worked together to move them aside. The door opened onto the park. Here the trees grew thickly about the back of the museum, and the path was matted with oak leaves, orange and red. Unwin crouched to go through and opened his umbrella on the other side.
Moore bent down to look at him.
“Tell me one thing,” Unwin said. “Is it true, what you said? That you wrote The Manual of Detection?”
“Yes,” said Moore. “So take it from me—it is a bunch of rubbish. They should have asked a detective to write it. Instead they asked me, and what did I know?”
“You weren’t a detective?”
“I was a clerk,” Moore said, and he closed the door before Unwin could ask him anything else.
HE RODE SOUTH THROUGH the city, his umbrella open in front of him. He ignored the blare of horns and the shouts of drivers as he wove through the midday traffic, keeping his head tucked low.
He passed the narrow green door of his own apartment building, then the grime-blackened exterior of Central Terminal. There he caught sight of Neville, the boy from the breakfast cart, standing just out of the rain, smoking a cigarette.
At the next block, Unwin veered east to avoid the Agency offices. He did not want to risk seeing Detective Screed again, or even his own assistant, not yet. The noise of the traffic receded as the cast-iron facades of warehouses and mill buildings rose up around him, rain pouring in torrents from their corniced rooftops. Unwin’s arms and legs were shaking now, but not from the exertion or from the cold. It was that dead face he had seen behind the glass in the museum. He felt as though it were still mocking him with its awful gold-toothed grin. The thread, the one that connected mystery to solution, that shone like silver in the dark—Sivart had picked the wrong one, and Unwin had strung it up as truth. What did the false thread connect?
In the old port town, Unwin slowed to navigate the winding, crowded streets. Business carried on in spite of the rain, with deals being made under awnings and through the windows of food stalls. He felt he was being watched, not by one but by many. Was there something that marked him as an employee of the Agency? An invisible sign that the people here could read?
He pedaled on, easing his grip on his umbrella. The rain fell softly now. In the maze of old streets that predated the gridding of the city, he passed timbered warehouses and old market squares cluttered with the refuse of industry. Machines—the purpose of which he could not guess—rusted in red streaks over the cobblestone.
The crowds thinned. From chimneys, crooked fingers of smoke pointed at the clouds. Barren clotheslines sagged dripping over the street, and a few windows glowed yellow against the day’s persistent gloom. Unwin quickened his pace, his memory of Sivart’s descriptions serving as map, and came at last to the cemetery of Saints’ Hill, a six-acre tangle of weeds, dubious pathways, vine-grappled ridges, and tumble-down mausoleums.
The Forty Winks was beneath the mortuary, a low-slung building of crumbling gray stone at the southeast corner of the block. He had half hoped that the place did not really exist, but the chipped steps leading from the sidewalk down to the basement level were real enough. He chained his bicycle to the cemetery fence, under the eaves of the building.
From the top of the stairs, he could hear the smacking of pool balls, the clinking of glasses. He could still go home, if he wanted. Sleep off the day and wait for th
e next one, hope that everything would right itself somehow. But a window level with the sidewalk creaked open, and someone looked up at him, wrinkling his nose as though trying to catch Unwin’s scent. A pair of wide, reddish brown eyes blinked behind the glass.
“In or out?” the man called from below.
It was too late to go back. Unwin descended the stairwell, collapsing his umbrella just enough to make it fit. At the bottom of the steps was a slow drain, cigarette butts floating in the puddle that had formed. Unwin pushed the door open with the tip of his umbrella, then stepped over the water and into the Forty Winks.
The tables were lit only by candles, while the bar, on the cemetery side, had the benefit of several windows near the ceiling, through which a greenish light dribbled over bottles of liquor. Most of the bottles were arranged on shelves in a tall, oblong cabinet, its door gaping.
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