The Manual of Detection

by Berry, Jedediah

  He sat beside her and, without thinking, drew The Manual of Detection from his briefcase and opened it on his lap. He found the section Detective Pith had recommended to him that morning at Central Terminal, on page ninety-six.

  If the detective does not maintain secrets of his own—if he does not learn firsthand the discipline required to keep a thing hidden from everyone he knows, and pay the personal costs incurred by such an endeavor—then he will never succeed in learning the secrets of others, nor does he deserve to. It is a long road that stretches from what a person says to what a person hides by saying it. He who has not mapped the way for himself will be forever lost upon it.

  Unwin could picture himself on that road: a narrow avenue between tall rows of tenements, just a few lights on in each building, and all the doors locked. In both directions the road went all the way down to the horizon.

  Did Unwin have any secrets of his own? Only that he was not really a detective, that he had been making unofficial trips for unofficial reasons—that he had considered, for a moment long enough to buy the ticket, abandoning everything he knew. But those secrets were liabilities.

  When he glanced from the book, he was startled to find Miss Greenwood sitting up in bed. She carefully smoothed the front of her dress with her hands.

  “You’re awake,” he said.

  She did not reply. Her eyes were open, but she did not seem to see him as she rose from the bed. She went across the room without speaking.

  “Miss Greenwood,” he said, getting up again. He put the Manual back in his briefcase.

  Ignoring him, she went to the window and unlatched it. Before he could reach her, she had thrown the window open. The chill autumn air pervaded the room immediately, and rain blew in from the alley, dampening everything.

  EIGHT

  On Surveillance

  It is the most obvious of mandates, to keep one’s eyes

  open, but the wakefulness required of the detective is not

  of the common sort. He must see without seeming

  to see, and watch even when he is looking away.

  Miss Greenwood climbed out onto the fire escape and balanced on the toes of her high-heeled shoes as she descended the precipitous steps. Unwin was about to call her name again when he remembered something he had heard about the dangers of waking a sleepwalker. He imagined her eyes popping open, a moment of confusion, a foreshortened cry. . . .

  He dreaded the thought of going back into the rain, but he gathered his things and followed her down two flights of steps, past the dark windows of other hotel rooms. At the bottom he found his bicycle chained to the base of the fire escape. He did not have time to unlock it and bring it with him—Miss Greenwood was already on her way out of the alley. He caught up with her on the sidewalk and opened his umbrella over both their heads.

  Was this what she had in mind when she said she wanted to hire him? On the next block he followed her past the sweeping limestone facade of the Municipal Museum as the rain dampened the cuffs of his slacks and the wind wrestled with his umbrella. She turned right at the next corner and led them away from City Park, then headed north. On that block a man came out of an apartment building with a sack over his shoulder. He drew up alongside them, and Unwin saw he was dressed only in his bathrobe. His eyes, like Miss Greenwood’s, were unreadable. From within his sack—nothing more than a pillowcase—came the ticking of clocks, maybe a hundred of them.

  Other sleepers joined them as they walked, women and men of varying ages in varying states of disarray, pajamaed, underdrawered, dripping. All bore sacks of alarm clocks over their shoulders, and all seemed to know where they were going.

  Unwin felt he had stumbled into the mystery he was supposed to be solving, the one to which Lamech had planned to assign him. He suddenly hated that smug, silent corpse on the thirty-sixth floor. He wanted nothing to do with this mystery, but all he could do was allow himself to be dragged along by its current.

  They walked ten, twelve, fifteen blocks. At the north end of town, they came to a part of the city that did not seem to belong to the city at all. Here a broad stone wall girded a wide, hilly expanse. A pair of iron gates, two stories tall, had been left open to allow the sleeping congregation through. The sycamores lining the drive beyond dropped samaras that spun in the rain as they fell.

  At the top of the hill crouched a grand, high-gabled house. Lights shone in every window, illuminating stretches of wild gardens all around. The place seemed familiar to Unwin—had Sivart described it in one of his reports? Above the door was a sign depicting a fat black cat seated with the moon at his back, a cigar in one paw and a cocktail glass in the other. Written in an arc over the moon were the words CAT & TONIC. Unwin was sure he had never heard of it.

  Beneath the portico a line of sleepers awaited admittance into the club. Unwin’s group joined the line, and others gathered behind them.

  A butler ushered them inside, welcoming each guest with a sleepy nod.

  “What is this?” Unwin asked him, collapsing his umbrella. “What’s going on?”

  The butler did not seem to understand the question. He blinked a few times, then squinted at Unwin as though from a great distance.

  The crowd pushed forward, and Unwin was driven into the club. The entry hall was dominated by a wide staircase. Most of the guests proceeded into a room on the right. It was a gambling parlor, and attendants and players alike were sleeping. There were no chips. Instead the players pushed heaps of alarm clocks over the tables. When the house had won enough of the clocks, butlers carted them away in wheelbarrows.

  Emily was here among the players, dressed in yellow pajamas. Her face looked smaller without her glasses, and the rain had turned her hair a dark copper color. She had her own sack of alarm clocks, and for the moment she seemed to be winning. She laughed aloud, revealing her small crooked teeth. Others in the room, after a delay, laughed with her. Unwin felt as though he were looking into an aquarium: everyone in it breathed the same water, but sound and sense moved slowly among them.

  Emily rolled the dice, won again, and a shirtless man with thick eyebrows put his arm around her shoulder. Unwin went toward them, thinking to shake Emily awake if he had to, but Miss Greenwood was suddenly at his side, her arm linked with his. She drew him away, back into the entry hall and through a curtained doorway opposite the gaming room.

  Here dozens of guests were seated at tables, some smoking, some muttering, some laughing, all of them asleep. Sleepwalking waiters went among them, bringing fresh drinks and cigars. On a tasseled stage was a quartet of washboard, jug, rubber-band bass, and accordion. Unwin recognized the accordion player. It was Arthur, the custodian he had seen that morning. He had been sleeping when Unwin and Detective Pith were with him at Central Terminal, and he was still sleeping, still dressed in his gray coveralls.

  Miss Greenwood did not search for an empty seat; instead she went toward a door at the right of the stage. Guarding it were Jasper and Josiah Rook. The twins were not asleep. They stood with their hands in their pockets, scrutinizing the crowd with their trapdoor eyes. Unwin half closed his own eyes to blend in, and let go of Miss Greenwood’s arm.

  Jasper (or was it Josiah?) opened the door for her, and Josiah ( Jasper?) greeted her by name. They went with her through the door and closed it behind them.

  Unwin wandered back to the tables. The guests went on with their dream-party, and he was invisible to them. He looked for an empty seat, thinking he should conceal himself in case the Rooks returned.

  Then he saw her. The woman in the plaid coat was seated alone at a table in the center of the room. Beneath her coat she wore a blue nightgown. She tapped her glass of milk and stared toward the stage with glassy gray eyes.

  What was she doing here? First she had taken his place on the fourteenth floor, and now she was ensnared by whatever madness had claimed Emily and Miss Greenwood. Could it be that the fault was Unwin’s, that his unofficial trips had embroiled her in this dilemma of his? Detective P
ith must have seen him watching her at Central Terminal, must have thought she was a secret contact. Perhaps the Agency had hired her to keep her close, promoted him to keep him closer.

  Unwin went toward her, thinking that he had to explain, had to apologize for all the trouble. Assure her that everything would be set right again, as soon as he found Sivart. He stood to her side and took off his hat. “Are you waiting for someone?” he asked.

  She perked one ear, though she did not look at him. “Someone,” she said.

  “Of course. I can’t imagine you’d be here alone.”

  “Alone,” she echoed.

  Unwin checked his watch. It was nearly two o’clock. On a normal day, in only a matter of hours, he would be at Central Terminal. She would be there, too, and he would watch her and say nothing.

  “I still remember the first day I saw you,” he told her. “I got out of bed and took a bath, ate oatmeal with raisins. I put my shoes on in the hallway because they squeak if I wear them in the house and that bothers the neighbors. I don’t blame them, really.”

  He could not tell if she understood what he was saying, but she did seem to hear. So he sat with her and laid his umbrella on his lap. “I ride my bicycle to work,” he said. “I’ve perfected a technique to keep my umbrella open while riding. The weather . . . well, you know how it is. Sometimes I think it will never stop. The rain will fill up the bay, and one day the city will be gone, just like that. The sea will take it.”

  He looked around; no one was listening. He was the only person awake, but he might as well have been alone and dreaming. He wanted, suddenly, to tell her everything.

  “That morning,” he said, “the morning I first saw you. Something was different. No one was on the streets. At first I couldn’t understand why. Then I realized that I hadn’t turned off my alarm clock. I hadn’t needed to. I’d woken hours before it was set to ring, hours before I should have been awake. The day hadn’t started yet, and there I was, ready for work.

  “I didn’t know what to do with myself. I’d already made it halfway to the office by the time I figured out what had happened. I was standing outside Central Terminal. I’ve never had to take the train anywhere, because I’ve lived in this city my entire life. But suddenly I knew I could never go to work again. I really don’t know why.”

  “Why,” said the woman in the plaid coat.

  “Well, because Enoch Hoffmann was gone,” Unwin said. “The Rook brothers, Cleopatra Greenwood, they’d all left. Sivart’s reports were—only reports. I could tell he didn’t care about the work anymore. What was the point?”

  “The point.”

  “Yes, I’m coming to it. I went into the terminal. I bought a cup of coffee and drank most of it. It was awful. I took a schedule of trains from the information booth, and I even bought a ticket. I was going to go into the country, and I was never coming back. Sivart had imagined his cottage in the woods—why shouldn’t I have mine? By then it was twenty-six minutes after seven in the morning. That’s when I saw you. You came through the revolving doors at the east end of the terminal, and you went to Gate Fourteen and waited. I watched you. I pretended to look at my train schedule, but all I could do was watch you. And when the train arrived, and no one came to meet you, and you turned around and went back into the city, I knew—just as certainly as I had known a moment before that I could never go back to work—that I would go back to work, that I could not leave the city. Not while you were in it, left alone to wait.”

  “Wait,” said the woman in the plaid coat.

  “I will,” Unwin said. “I have a bicycle that I clean and oil every day, and I have a hat that I’ll never part with. My umbrella does everything it’s supposed to do. I have a train ticket, and I keep it in my pocket, just in case that person you’re waiting for ever gets back. But what am I supposed to do in the meantime? I still don’t know your name.”

  The woman in the plaid coat was applauding—all the guests were. Unwin turned to look at the stage. Miss Greenwood had joined the musicians. She went to the microphone, and the music struck up, slow and somber. Arthur leaned into his accordion as he played, and in his hands it breathed like a living thing. The words Miss Greenwood sang were unfamiliar to Unwin, except for the refrain, which he knew from somewhere. Maybe he had heard it on the radio. Yes, it might have been the song that was playing in Zlatari’s kitchen, behind the curtain in the Forty Winks.

  Still I hear that old song

  And I’m sure I belong

  In my dream of your dream of me.

  Applause rose up again, and several guests threw long-stemmed roses onto the stage. She caught a few of the flowers and let the others fall at her feet. Unwin clapped, too.

  “Mr. Charles Unwin?”

  He turned in his seat. Detective Pith, very much awake and still in his herringbone suit, stood at his shoulder. “You,” growled Pith. “Outside. Now.”

  Unwin rose from his chair and followed the detective from the room. They went outside and stood under the portico, where a few sleepwalkers were quietly puffing on cigars and mumbling insensibly to one another. Pith swung his hat as though he were going to hit him. “Damn it, Unwin, are you trying to get us both killed? What are you doing here? You came with Greenwood, didn’t you? This is no good, Unwin, no good at all. Screed’s trying to pin a murder on you, and now you’re hanging around with Greenwood.”

  “I’m trying to find Sivart,” Unwin said. “I thought she might know where he went.”

  “The Agency’s through with the guy. If word gets out that you’re looking for him, it could bother people high up, and I mean very high up. People you don’t want to bother.”

  Unwin fiddled with his umbrella; he could not get the clasp buttoned.

  “Now, I didn’t expect to see you out in the field yet. That takes guts, Unwin, I’ll give you that. But it doesn’t take brains. You should have spent a day or two with your copy of the Manual. Have you read a word of it yet? If you want my advice, you’ll get out of here and forget about the Cat & Tonic, forget about Cleo Greenwood. Talking the way you were in there! Do you know how long it took to set up this sting?”

  The door burst open, and the Rook brothers stepped outside. Unwin immediately closed his eyes, then opened them enough to see what was happening. Pith was doing the same. But Jasper and Josiah went straight to him.

  “My brother,” Jasper said to Detective Pith, “has advised me to advise you to quit the somnambulism act.”

  Pith opened his eyes, and Unwin sidled over to where the others were smoking cigars. A sleepwalker offered him one, and he took it.

  “Good evening, gents,” said Pith. “I thought I was having a bad dream. Looks like I’m having two at once.”

  Jasper pointed toward the sycamores, and Pith started walking. They went two dozen paces from the house, and then Jasper told him to stop. Pith looked directly at Unwin and said loudly enough for him to hear, “You’re done for, you louts. We have our best people working on this. Our very best.”

  Josiah drew a pistol from his coat, and Detective Pith took off his hat and held it over his heart. Josiah put the gun against the hat and fired once. Pith fell face-up in the rain.

  AT THE SOUND OF THE SHOT, the cigar smokers started walking in circles and muttering but did not wake. The Rooks carried Pith’s body to where their steam truck was parked. The bed was loaded with ticking clocks, and the alarm bells clinked sullenly under Pith’s weight.

  The Rooks had Edwin Moore, too. He was still in his gray museum attendant’s uniform and lay beside Pith, bound at the wrists and ankles. The old man was unconscious and shivering. How long had they kept him out in the rain?

  The Rooks were coming back up the drive now. Unwin ran inside. A crowd of sleepwalkers was streaming through the curtained door, troubled and confused by the sound of the gunshot. He pushed through them and climbed the stairs, looking for a place to hide. He opened the first door he saw and went through it.

  The room was wallpapered in a dark re
d pattern. A fire burned in the hearth, crackling and warm. On the back wall was hung an array of antique weapons, swords and sidearms rivaling the collection at the Municipal Museum. Now he understood why he had recognized this place. It was the mansion that had once belonged to Colonel Sherbrooke Baker, and this the very room where he had murdered his brother. Here was the precious hoard, complete and perfectly maintained. Had his son Leopold kept it through the years?

  No: one object did not belong with the Baker estate. In a glass case on its own table, small and shriveled and yellow, lay the Oldest Murdered Man, the real one. Unwin had stumbled upon the trophy room of Enoch Hoffmann.

  Two wingback chairs were angled toward the hearth. In one of them sat a short man in blue pajamas with red trim. He turned his squarish face toward Unwin and with lidded eyes seemed to see. He held a brandy snifter in one hand and gestured for Unwin to sit, then poured a second glass and set it on the pedestal table.