Lamech shook his head at all this.
“Nikolai there,” Arthur went on, nodding at the phone, “was at the Municipal Museum today. He thinks he’s found Edwin Moore. And it looks like our old friend was in touch with Sivart just before he went AWOL.”
“What, you think it’s connected?”
“Listen, Ed, I need help here. If Hoffmann gets too deep into Sivart’s head, it’s trouble for all of us. We need to find him.”
“Hoffmann’s keeping himself checked out. Even if we found him, we wouldn’t be able to wake him. Sivart’s trapped.”
“Who said anything about waking him?” Arthur said.
Lamech shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Then he looked around, as though something had startled him.
“What’s wrong?” Arthur said.
“Thought I heard—”
“Focus, Ed.”
Lamech grumbled. “Hoffmann’s up to something, something big, November twelfth big. But it sounds like Cassidy and Pith know more than I do. I hear Sam’s been working with you directly. With Sivart stuck where he is, we need to throw off the opposition, keep them guessing. So we do something we’ve never done before—and that means breaking some rules, Arthur. We promote someone. Someone completely incapable of solving a mystery. That should buy us the time we need to find Sivart. The harder their agents work to follow our guy, the farther off course they’ll be.”
Arthur looked at him like he thought he was kidding. Then his face went red and his whole body shook with his laughter. It was an angry, wheezing laugh. “I like it,” Arthur said, crying a little.
“Good,” said Lamech. “Because I’ve already sent the memo.”
That got Arthur going again, and Lamech laughed, too. They went on like that until the custodian was wiping tears from his eyes. Then he sighed his whistling sigh and started playing with the papers on his desk.
“Strangest thing, though,” Lamech said.
“Oh, yeah?”
“I saw Hoffmann just now.”
“Just now?”
“Came from his place directly.”
“No kidding. What’d he have to say?”
“A lot of nonsense, mostly. One thing that caught my ear, though.
About our standard procedures. He said the Agency didn’t come up with Chapter Eighteen. That dream detection predated our work. He said he didn’t steal it from us but that we stole it from him.”
Arthur put his spectacles back on.
“Got me thinking,” Lamech said. “Maybe we’re not just worried about Hoffmann getting too far into Sivart’s head. Maybe we’re worried about Sivart getting too far into his.”
Arthur nodded slowly. “Well, Ed, you’re no slouch. See, I met Greenwood in the early days of the carnival, long before the Oldest Murdered Man case, when she and Hoffmann had their own little sideshow. You’d go into their tent expecting your fortune to be told, but then Cleo would put you to sleep and Hoffmann would hop in and see what you had on your mind.”
“Sure, I see,” Lamech said. “A little blackmail operation. You telling me they got you with that scam?”
“It was just after I took over this outfit. That’s why I made all those changes, wrote all those rules—had to keep as much as I could hidden.”
Lamech’s jaw was clenched. “Hoffmann would have learned everything about our operations otherwise.”
“I know I should have told you, Ed. But it’s more personal than business. See, Cleo and I got to know each other after that. We were kids. We fell in love. But the only way we could see each other without Hoffmann catching on was if we met sleepside, in the old Land of Nod. What a courtship that was! I convinced her to teach me how it was done, so I could go over to her place, too, if you follow me.
“Hoffmann told you the truth, Ed. That Caligari fellow taught him dream detection, though he’d have called it something different. Then Hoffmann taught Cleo, and she’s the one who brought it to me. To the Agency. She and I didn’t last, of course. Too complicated, once we found ourselves in opposite trenches.”
Lamech took all this in. “Must be strange for her now,” he said. “Her old boyfriend on full-time surveillance duty.”
“I’m wearing her down, Ed. She’s hiding something from me. I don’t know what it is, but she can’t keep it up much longer. I’ve got the lights turned up bright, and she’s getting tired.”
Lamech looked around the room and said, “There it is again.”
“What?”
“I heard something. Not here. In my office.”
Arthur waved his hand. “That’s just me.”
Lamech gave him a careful look, and after a moment Arthur shrugged.
“Ed, I’m in your office.” He looked put out by having to explain. “All the time I’ve been spending in here these days, I’ve had to work on my sleepwalking. There are a lot of places I have to be, you know.”
“Just stopping in to empty the wastepaper basket, I guess?”
“That’s right,” Arthur said. “Coming by to clean things up a little.”
Lamech put his hat on. “I may as well go, then. I’ll shake your hand topside, on my way out.”
“Door’s locked,” Arthur said. “You don’t wake up until I do.”
Lamech was moving his jaw again, though he looked more thoughtful than angry.
“You’ve been like an uncle to me,” Arthur said. “Showed me the ropes when I first came on staff. Remember me in my messenger’s suspenders? I’d still be wearing them if it wasn’t for you. You pretended like I knew what I was doing before I knew a damn thing. That’s what makes it all so difficult.”
“Makes what difficult?”
“The lying, Ed. I’ve lied to you. So much. But the best way to fool a monkey is to fool his trainer. Sivart’s the monkey, Ed. You’ve always known that. I just want to come clean about the rest of it.”
“Why bother?” Lamech said.
“Ed, listen to me. Sivart’s cases were all bogus.”
“His cases,” Lamech said.
“Your cases. Bunkum. Hooey. Everything you solved, you solved wrong. The both of you, together. You made a good team. That’s how we needed things. Kept the important stuff hidden that way. Except November Twelfth. He got that one right somehow.”
“That your hand on my shoulder, Artie?”
“Listen to me. You’ve done great work, Ed. The most important work anyone in this outfit has done for me. Just not in the way you think. That night at the carnival, when I realized Hoffmann had me—had us all—I knew I had to make a deal. One hand washes the other.”
“Dirties it, more like.”
“Easy now, Ed.”
“How’s it work?” Lamech asked. “You let him get away with the crimes and you do cover-up? The Agency makes its dollar, your puppet looks like a hero, he gets anything he wants.”
Unwin thought it over and was sickened when he saw how it fit together. The phony mummy, Colonel Baker alive and well—Hoffmann and Arthur must have orchestrated each of those cases in advance. Hoffmann kept the priceless trophy he wanted, kept Colonel Baker’s inheritance as well. And the Agency had its star detective and its front-page stories. Sivart had been tricked every time, and Unwin along with him—the whole city, too.
“I had to come clean with you, Ed. Had to let you know how it was.”
Lamech touched his own throat. He danced his fingers around his collar, grasping for something he could not get hold of. He was fighting the hands of a ghost. Unwin thought he could feel them, too.
“Could be something,” Lamech said, gasping.
Arthur was calm as he watched the man opposite him. “Something you haven’t told me yet? Something I need to know that I don’t know already? Probably not, Ed. I’m the overseer. I’m the man who sees too much.”
But there was something, Unwin knew. Penelope. Her existence was the thing Miss Greenwood was fighting to keep hidden from Arthur, and the fight had exhausted her. Would Lamech trade what he knew for his l
ife?
“You were supposed to watch him,” Arthur went on. “That was your job, Ed. But this isn’t happening because you failed. It’s happening because you’ve done so well.”
Unwin went to Lamech, tried to feel for the hands that were choking him. His fingers blurred with the watcher’s, passing through them as though through a mist. Unwin was seized by cold panic. He screamed and grabbed at the air, punched at it.
“I just have to clean your office,” Arthur said. “Tidy up a little.”
Unwin closed his dreaming eyes, but he could not occlude the vision of the man thrashing where he sat. The dream insisted. In the watcher’s office on the thirty-sixth floor, Lamech had died as he died here. His convulsions formed a weird geometry amid the fluttering papers. The pigeons were mesmerized.
Lamech was still trying to speak, but Arthur had begun sorting papers again. Unwin’s senses went gray as the watcher’s body stilled.
He felt himself lifted from the bed, felt the blanket falling off his body. He tried to catch it, but something snatched him upward and away. The earphones landed on the pillow. He saw below him a great lavender dress and knew he lay in the arms of Miss Palsgrave. She cradled him like a child while she slipped his shoes onto his feet. Her breath was warm on his forehead. She put the record back in his briefcase and gave it to him; his arms were shaking as he took it.
At the far end of the archive, near the place where Unwin had entered, a pair of flashlight beams swept through the dark, casting broad ovals of light over the floor. Miss Palsgrave sighed to herself when she saw them, then tapped Unwin’s hat back onto his head. She started walking. Underclerks slept undisturbed all around them.
How cold Unwin was! Through chattering teeth he said, “You used to work for the carnival. For Hoffmann.”
Miss Palsgrave’s voice sounded metallic and thin; it was a voice from a string-and-tin-can telephone. “For Caligari,” she said. “Never for Hoffmann. After he staged his coup, I left.”
“And defected to the Agency.”
“The problem is not belonging to one or the other, Mr. Unwin—and there is always an Agency, always a Carnival to belong to. The problem is belonging for too long to either of them.”
Unwin thought of the little square building that represented his own mind in Lamech’s final dream. It had stood right at the edge of the carnival; might it be annexed in time? “Have I—” he said, but he did not know how to finish the question.
Miss Palsgrave looked down at him. In the dark he could see only the dull gleam of her eyes. “The sleeping king and the madman at the gates,” she said. “On the one side a kind of order, on the other a kind of disorder. We need them both. That’s how it’s always been.”
“But your boss—my boss. He’s a murderer.”
“The scales have tipped too far,” Miss Palsgrave agreed. “When Hoffmann made a deal with the overseer, he stopped working for the carnival and started working for himself. Their deal fell apart on November twelfth because Sivart solved that case correctly and Hoffmann imagined he had been betrayed by his conspirator. Now the Agency oversteps its bounds while the carnival rots in the rain. Hoffmann’s grown desperate over the years. He’ll drown the city in nightmare just to have it for his own again.”
They came to the enormous machine at the other end of the archive. Here the air smelled of wax and electricity. On a wheeled cart nearby was a row of freshly pressed phonograph records. Now that Unwin knew the truth of the Agency’s overseer, he saw this place in a new light. A repository of the city’s most private thoughts, fancies, and urges, all in the hands of a man who would coerce and torment to learn what he wanted to know, who would murder an old friend to keep his secrets safe. Unwin’s own dreams were out there, he thought, along with those of anyone who had ever drawn the attention of the Agency’s unblinking eye.
“How could you allow Arthur such . . .” He struggled to find the right word. “. . . such trespass?”
“There was a time when I thought it necessary,” Miss Palsgrave said. “Hoffmann was too dangerous, and we needed every tool to fight him.”
“And now?”
She seemed, for a moment, uncertain. “Now a lot of things must be changed.”
The two detectives Unwin had seen on the elevator with Detective Screed—Peake and Crabtree—had arrived at the middle of the archive. They cast grim glances at the huge pink chair, the lamp, the rug. Peake smacked his flashlight against his palm and said, “Forgot my spare batteries.”
“Hush up,” said Crabtree, even louder.
The detectives were limping. Peake had cuts and bruises on his face, and Crabtree’s green jacket was torn along one shoulder: Miss Benjamin must have neglected to warn them about the ninth step. They aimed their flashlights deeper into the archive. A few of the underclerks sat up, removed their headphones, and blinked into the light.
“Enoch and Arthur have both grown stupid and hungry,” Miss Palsgrave said to Unwin. “Someone will have to see them unseated. Someone will have to restore the old balance.”
“Not me,” Unwin said.
Miss Palsgrave sighed. “No,” she said. “I suppose not.”
Behind the cart of phonographs was a caged platform—the dumbwaiter. Miss Palsgrave opened the wire mesh door with her free hand and gently set Unwin inside.
“Where do I go now?” Unwin asked.
She leaned close and said, “You go up.”
She took hold of the rope that hung from the ceiling and began to pull. Unwin fell against the floor of the little car as it shot into the air. He was treated to a brief view of the archive from above, of the pink chair glowing under its lamp, of the underclerks waking and sitting up in their beds, and of Miss Palsgrave, formidable in her lavender dress, drawing him into the air by the force of her great arms as the detectives closed in on her.
Unwin had to remind himself to breathe as the pulley far above creaked under the strain. In that nothing-place between here and there, time slowed, hiccupped, leapt forward. He felt he was still separated from his body, an invisible specter in someone else’s dream. Seams of light marking the secret doors into offices throughout the building flitted past. Unwin heard voices on the other sides of the walls, heard typewriters, footsteps. He was seeing the world from the other side now—from the center of mystery, out into the lighted place he had once inhabited.
The ascent ended abruptly, and his arrival was announced by the ringing of a little bell. Unwin tapped the wall in front of him, and a panel flew open. When he clambered out of the dumbwaiter, he found himself once again on the thirty-sixth floor, in the office of Edward Lamech.
The watcher’s body was gone now, but Unwin was not alone. Detective Screed stood beside the desk, a few papers in his hands. When he saw Unwin, he stuffed the papers into his jacket pocket and drew his pistol, then shook his head as though to say that now, at last, he had seen it all.
“They always come back to the scene,” he said.
SIXTEEN
On Apprehension
Woe to he who checkmates his opponent at last,
only to discover they have been playing cribbage.
Screed looked Unwin up and down, his thin mustache bending with pleasure, or disdain, or both. “You look terrible,” he said. “And again that hat on the thirty-sixth floor.”
Screed’s suit, navy blue, was identical to the one Unwin first saw him in. It had been cleaned and pressed, or exchanged for a pristine duplicate. If Emily had succeeded in bringing him the memo, Screed did nothing to acknowledge it. He patted Unwin down, keeping the pistol trained on him. He was thorough in his search, but all he came up with was the alarm clock from Unwin’s jacket pocket. This he held gently for a moment, as though he thought it might explode. He shook it, put it to his ear, and stuffed it into his own pocket.
“I’m not much of a tough guy,” he said, relaxing his grip on his pistol. “And we’re both gentlemen, as I see it. So I’m going to put this away now, and we’ll talk like gentlemen. Agr
eed?”
Without waiting for a reply, Screed put his pistol back in its shoulder holster. Then he closed his hand and struck Unwin in the jaw with a quick jab. Unwin fell back against the wall.
“That,” Screed said, “was for getting into the wrong car yesterday.”
Screed grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him out into the hall. The place was silent, the other watchers’ doors all closed. They took the elevator to the lobby, and Screed led him around the corner to where his car was parked. With an unlit cigarette in his mouth, the detective drove them uptown, along the east side of City Park.
The Manual of Detection Page 24