Unwin’s nose tingled with the scent of matchsticks as he read what Jasper had written: The Gilbert, Room 202.
Without having to look, he knew it was the same address written on the piece of notepaper in his pocket. Unwin had already met Cleo Greenwood, then. She had called herself Vera Truesdale and told him a story about roses in her hotel room.
He put the card in his pocket and stood up. He had asked only one question, and the Rooks had answered it—was he not entitled to a second, since there were two of them at the table? There were plenty of questions on his mind: about the identity of the corpse in the Municipal Museum, the meaning of Cleopatra Greenwood’s visit to the Agency that morning, whether any of it meant that Enoch Hoffmann had come out of hiding. But the Rooks were looking at him in a way that suggested their business was concluded, so he stood and gathered his things.
At the door Zlatari grabbed his arm and said, “The price of some questions is the answer, Detective.” He glanced back at the Rooks, and Unwin followed his gaze. They might as well have been a pair of statues, the original and a copy, though no one could have said which was which.
“I suppose you saw Cleo Greenwood since she got back to town,” Zlatari said. “Heard her singing at some joint a little classier than this one. Maybe she looked at you from across the room. Time stopped when you heard her voice. You’d do anything for her, anything she asked, if only she asked. Am I right? Or maybe you imagined all that. Try to convince yourself that you imagined all that, Detective. Try to forget.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll always be wrong about her.”
Unwin put on his hat. He would have liked to forget, forget everything that had happened since he woke up this morning, forget even the dream of Sivart. Maybe someday Edwin Moore could teach him how it was done. In the meantime he had to keep moving.
He went to the door and hopped over the puddle on his way up the stairs. The Rooks’ red steam truck was parked down the street—he was surprised he had failed to notice it before. It was just as the cleaning lady at the Municipal Museum had described it all those years ago: red and hunched and brutal-looking. Had he fallen into his files, or had his files spilled into his life?
He hurried to his bicycle, wanting to be as far from the Forty Winks as possible by the time the Rooks understood the extent of his poker-facedness. When they flipped over his last hand, they would see various numbered cards there, none of them concurrent, and of four different suits.
SEVEN
On Suspects
They will present themselves to you first as victims, as
allies, as eyewitnesses. Nothing should be more suspicious
to the detective than the cry for help, the helping
hand, or the helpless onlooker. Only if someone
has behaved suspiciously should you allow
for the possibility of his innocence.
An empty hat and raincoat floated at the center of the diagram in Unwin’s mind. Beside them was a dress filled with smoke. A pair of black birds with black hats fluttered above, while below lay two corpses, one in an office chair, one encased in glass. The diagram was a fairy tale, written by a forgetful old man with wild white hair, and it whirled like a record on a phonograph.
The rain fell heavily again, and Unwin pedaled against the wind. These were unfamiliar streets, where unfamiliar faces glared with seeming menace from beneath dripping hats. A small dog, white with apricot patches, emerged from an alley and followed him, barking at his rear tire. No amount of bell ringing could drive it away. When it rained like this, these city dogs were always lost, always wandering—the smells they used to navigate were washed into the gutters. Unwin felt he was a bit like one of those dogs now. This one finally left him to investigate a sodden pile of trash at the corner, but once it was gone, he found that he missed it.
His umbrella technique worked best over short distances and at reasonably high speeds. Now he was soaked. His sleeves drooped from his wrists, and his tie stuck to him through his shirt. If she saw him like this, Cleopatra Greenwood would laugh and send him on his way. That she knew something was a certainty—she always knew something, was always “in on it.” But what was she in on? Why had she come back to the city now?
Even after all his work at maintaining consistency, Unwin knew that a careful examination of the Agency’s files would reveal perhaps a dozen versions of Cleopatra Greenwood, each a little different from the others. One of them, at the age of seventeen, renounced her claim on her family’s textile fortune and ran off to join Caligari’s Traveling Carnival. The carnival, in the autumn of its misfit life and haunted by odd beauties and ill-used splendors, made of the girl a sort of queen. She read futures in a deck of old cards and suffered a man with a handlebar mustache to throw daggers at her.
During one performance a blade pierced her left leg, just above the knee. She removed the dagger herself and kept it. The wound left her with a permanent limp, and the blade would appear again in many of Sivart’s reports. When she found him in the cargo hold of The Wonderly, that night out on the bay, it was already in her hand.
I’d been trying to remember something I’d read about escaping from bonds, Sivart wrote. It’s easier if you’re able to dislocate certain bones at will, but that’s not in my job description. I was about as useful as a jack-in-the-box with his lid glued shut. So I was happy to see her, even though I didn’t know what she was doing there.
“I’m going to help you get what you came for,” she said. “And you’re going to get me out of here.”
So she was in trouble, too. She was always in trouble. I wanted to tell her she could do better than old twiddle-fingers back there, but I still needed her to cut those ropes, so I played nice and kept it to myself.
We found the crate with Mr. Grim inside and carried it to a lifeboat. It was tough going, she with her limp and me with sore feet, but with a pair of ropes to lower them we managed to get corpse and crate down onto the dinghy. She sat at the prow and rubbed her bad knee while I rowed. It was dark out there on the water, no moon, no stars, and I could barely see the seven feet to her face. She wouldn’t tell me where she would go after this. She wouldn’t tell me where I could find her. Truth is, I still don’t know where she stands. With Hoffmann? With us? She seems like a good kid, clerk, and I want to trust her. But maybe I’m getting her wrong.
For years, over the course of dozens of cases, Sivart was never sure whose side she was on, and neither was Unwin, until the theft of November twelfth, when Sivart caught her red-handed and did what he had to do.
If what Edwin Moore had said was correct, then it might have been Greenwood who made the switch that night and tricked Sivart into returning the wrong corpse to the museum. And if Sivart had failed to get the truth out of her, what hope did Unwin have? He was no threat to her; he was nothing at all: DETECTIVE CHARLES UN, as it said on his office door.
Ahead of him a black car rolled from an alleyway, blocking his route. Unwin braked and waited. No traffic prevented the car from taking to the street, but it stayed where it was. He tried to look in at the driver; all he could see was his own reflection in the window. The engine let out a low growl.
What would the Manual have to say about this? Clearly, Unwin was meant to be intimidated. Should he pretend that he was not? Act as though this were all a misunderstanding, that he was only a little embarrassed by so awkward an encounter? No such cordiality was forthcoming from the driver of the vehicle, so he dismounted and walked his bicycle to the opposite side of the street.
The vehicle sprang from the alley and came straight at him. Unwin leapt back as it rolled onto the curb. Two steps farther and he would have been pinned against the brick wall. In the driver’s window, distorted by streaks of rain, his own reflection again.
Unwin mounted his bicycle and pedaled back across the street. He tried to keep calm, but his feet slipped from the pedals, and he wobbled. He heard the screech of the car’s tires as it turned in the street, its e
ngine roaring as though it sensed its prey’s weakness. Unwin regained control and slipped into the alley from which the car had come. Then the beast was behind him, filling the narrow passage with its noise. He pedaled faster. The car’s headlights glared, turning the rain into a solid-seeming curtain. He thought he could reach the far end, but on the street beyond, the car was sure to overtake him.
He held his umbrella behind him as he emerged, and the wind tore it open. With his free hand, he yanked the handlebar to the left. The umbrella gripped the air, and the bicycle veered sharply onto the sidewalk, teetering at the gutter’s edge.
The car dashed directly into the street, nearly colliding with a taxicab. Unwin did not stop to look. He was off and pedaling again, head ducked low over the handlebars, rainwater sloshing in his shoes. Then a second car, identical to the first, emerged from the cross street and halted in the intersection, blocking his escape. Unwin did not stop—he had forgotten how. He collapsed his umbrella and hefted it on his forearm, cradling it like a lance.
The driver’s door opened, and Emily Doppel poked her head over the roof. “Sir!” she said.
“The trunk!” Unwin cried.
Emily got out and raised the trunk lid, then stood with arms open. Unwin hopped off, and the bicycle soared straight to his assistant, who lifted it into the air with surprising strength and dropped it into the trunk. She tossed him the keys, but he tossed them back.
“I don’t know how to drive!” he said.
She got back into the driver’s seat just as the other car halted beside them. Detective Screed stepped out. He spit his unlit cigarette into the street and said, “Unwin, get in the car.”
“Get in the car!” Emily screamed at him.
Unwin got in beside Emily and closed the door. She threw the vehicle into gear, and his head snapped against the seat back. In the rear window, he saw Screed run a few steps after them. Then the detective stopped, bent over, and put his hands on his knees. The man with the blond beard was standing beside him, his portable typewriter in his hand.
“Where did you get this?” Unwin asked.
“From the Agency garage,” she said.
“The Agency gave you a vehicle?”
“No, sir. It’s yours. But under the circumstances I didn’t think you’d mind.”
Emily drove with the same gusto she put into her typing, her small hand moving quickly between the wheel and the gearshift. She rounded a corner so fast that Unwin nearly fell into her. Her shiny black lunch box tipped over between their seats, and its contents rattled.
How had his assistant found him? She knew he had gone to the Municipal Museum, but she could not have learned of his trip to the Forty Winks unless she spoke to Edwin Moore—or to other contacts of her own.
“I shadowed Detective Screed,” she said, as though guessing his thoughts. “I knew he was up to no good when I saw him slink out of the office.”
She took a winding route through the city, using tunnels and side streets Unwin had never seen. He felt the cold now, felt the dampness of his clothes against the seat. He took off his hat and squeezed the water out of it, took off his jacket and tie, squeezed those, too. The address on the card was still legible; he gave it to Emily, and she nodded.
“Did you find a phonograph?” he asked.
Emily’s cheeks turned red. “I fell asleep,” she said, keeping her eyes on the road.
Unwin opened the heating vents and settled back into the seat. They were headed uptown now, and through the gray drifts of rain to the north, beyond the farthest reaches of the city, he could see green hills, distant woods. Had he been there once, as a child? He seemed to remember those hills, those woods, and a game he played there with other children. It involved hiding from one another; hiding and then waiting. Hide and wait—is that what the game was called? No, it involved seeking, too. Watch and seek?
“Screed thinks you’re guilty of murder,” said Emily.
Unwin remembered his conversation with the detective on the twenty-ninth floor, how he had given Lamech’s memo to him. Screed must have gone upstairs soon after. He probably found the corpse before the messenger did.
“What do you think?” Unwin asked.
“I think you’re going to clear your name,” she said. Her cheeks were still red, and there was something very much like passion in her voice. “I think you’re going to solve the biggest mystery yet.”
Unwin closed his eyes as the air from the vents slowly warmed him. He listened to the sound of the windshield wipers sweeping over the glass. Watch and follow? Hide and watch? Follow and seek?
Maybe he was confused. Maybe he had never played a game like that at all.
IT WAS DARK WHEN UNWIN WOKE, and his clothes were dry. Through the passenger window, he saw a low stone wall. Behind it a copse of red-leafed maple trees dripped in the light of a streetlamp. He was alone. He reached down and found his briefcase by his feet, but his umbrella was gone.
He opened the door and clambered out onto the sidewalk, jacket and tie over his arm. The air from City Park was cool and smelled of soil, of moldering things. A row of tall buildings stood opposite, the light from their windows illuminating shafts of rain over the street. Emily was gone. Had she finally seen through his facade and abandoned him?
A man in a gray overcoat emerged from the park with two small dogs on leashes. He paused when he saw Unwin, and both the dogs growled. The man seemed to approve and let them go on growling. A minute passed before he pulled them away down the block.
Unwin put on his tie, slipped into his jacket and buttoned it. He considered hailing a taxicab—not to take him to the Gilbert Hotel but to take him home. No cars moved on the block, however, and now he saw Emily, coming toward him from across the street. Her black raincoat was cinched around her waist, and she walked with one hand in her pocket. She did not look like a detective’s assistant. She looked like a detective.
Without a word she handed him his umbrella, took the keys from her pocket, and opened the trunk. Together they lifted the bicycle out, and Unwin set it against the lamppost.
“Everything’s set,” Emily said. “There’s a little restaurant in the back, but Miss Greenwood isn’t in there. You’ll have to go straight to her room. I’ve already spoken to the desk clerk. No one will stop you from going up.”
Unwin looked across the street and noticed the sign over the door from which she had come. The cursive script was lit by an overhanging lamp: The Gilbert.
“You’ve done great work, Emily. I think you should take some time off now. Lie low, as they say.”
Emily stood with him under his umbrella. She moved in very close and reached a hand up to his chest. He felt as he had that morning, in the office on the twenty-ninth floor—that the two were shut in together, without enough space between them. He could smell her lavender perfume. She was unbuttoning his jacket.
Unwin stepped away, but Emily held to his jacket. Then he saw why. He had put the buttons in the wrong holes, and she was fixing his mistake. She undid the rest of the buttons, then straightened the sides and refastened them.
When she was finished, she closed her eyes and tilted her head back, lifting her face toward his. “Those closest to you,” she said, “those to whom you trust your innermost thoughts and musings, are also the most dangerous. If you fail to treat them as enemies, they are certain to become the worst you have. Lie if you have to, withhold what you can, and brook no intimacy which fails to advance the cause of your case.”
Unwin swallowed. “That sounds familiar.”
“It ought to,” she said. She opened her eyes and patted his briefcase. “Don’t worry, I put your book back where I found it. And I only took a peek. I think that page is especially interesting. Don’t you?”
Emily closed the trunk and went around the car. He followed her with the umbrella, holding it over her head until she was inside. She rolled down her window and said, “There’s something I’ve been wondering about, Detective Unwin. Say we do find Sivart. W
hat will happen to you?”
“I’m not sure. This may be my only case.”
“What about me, then?”
Unwin looked at his feet. He could think of nothing to say.
“That’s what I thought,” Emily said. She rolled up the window, and Unwin stepped aside as she pulled away from the curb. He watched the car veer down a street into the park and vanish among the trees, heard its gears shifting. When it was gone, he walked his bicycle across the street to the hotel, found an alleyway beside it, and left it chained to a fire escape.
Not until he had entered the hotel lobby and exchanged nods with the desk clerk did he realize that Emily had admitted to knowing his reason for coming here, even though he had never mentioned Miss Greenwood’s name.
THE WOMAN WHO HAD introduced herself as Vera Truesdale answered her door on the second knock. She wore the same old-fashioned dress, black with lace collar and cuffs, but it was wrinkled now. Her hair was down, wavy and tousled. There were streaks of white in it that Unwin had failed to notice that morning. In the room beyond, the little lace cap lay folded on the pillow, and a black telephone was sunk in the folds of the untidy bed.
The Manual of Detection Page 9