Miss Greenwood stepped into the clearing, limping badly on her bad leg. She went to stand next to Sivart. Her exhaustion had developed into something else, something hard and cracked. The look in her shadowed eyes, when she saw Arthur, was full of a strange fire.
Unwin leaned over the edge of the bed and started putting on his shoes.
“Idiots,” Arthur said. “You know what that madman’s doing to my city. To our city. You need me.”
“Like hell,” Sivart said.
“Mr. Unwin, you saw the third archive. What the Agency always needed was an honest-to-goodness record, not just of our work but of the city’s work. Its secrets, its thoughts, its dreams—good and bad. They’re down there in our basement, the whole shebang. It’s only because of Hoffmann that any of it’s necessary. He’ll twist the world out of whack if we don’t keep a watch on things.”
For a moment Unwin found himself wanting to be convinced. It would be safer for everyone, he thought, to keep those records, to make more of them, to document everything they could see, to possess forever the solutions to those mysteries for which each person was treasury, keeper, and key.
But if everything is knowable, then nothing is safe, and the sentinels are unwelcome guests, mere trespassers. Not an antidote to the enemy—only his mirror.
“Hoffmann’s taken care of,” Unwin said. “Screed has him by now.”
Sivart looked furious when he heard that. He came over to Unwin and said, “Ben Screed? That jokester? It isn’t his case, Charlie, never was. You shouldn’t have done that.”
Arthur seemed to have given up on them and was watching Miss Greenwood attentively. He righted his accordion and held it with both hands. “How’s that one go, darling?” he said, running his fingers over the keys. “The one we used to play when it was almost time to go?”
She drew a gun from the pocket of her red raincoat. It was the antique pistol she had taken from Hoffmann’s trophy room. “Almost time to go,” she said.
Arthur filled the bellows and played a few chords. “Wait, wait,” he said. “I’ve almost got it.”
He and the others turned at the sound of another person coming up the path. Something glinted in the shade—a pair of eyeglasses, Emily Doppel’s. She must have followed the sleepwalking overseer, maybe even sat next to him on the train. She had Unwin’s pistol in one hand and her lunch box in the other.
She took a long look at everyone in the clearing. Unwin wondered whether she could have created the same scenario with those figurines in her lunch box. Investigator, suspect, informant, criminal: there were only so many ways to arrange them.
Unwin stood and went to her. “We did it, Emily. We found Sivart.”
“Did we?” she said, her voice flat. “And what now?”
“Now—well, I was thinking about it. I was thinking we should keep working together. I don’t know what the rules are, exactly, but what’s to stop us from solving more mysteries together? I think I’m getting the hang of this. And I think I can’t do it without you.”
She met his gaze, but only for a moment. “You know, Detective Unwin, I applied three times to work at the Agency. I was twelve the first time. I wanted to be a messenger, but I fell asleep in the middle of the interview. A year later I tried again, but they remembered who I was and they didn’t even ask me to come in. The last time was about a year ago. I thought maybe I’d ask for a spot at a clerk’s desk. But I changed my mind at the last minute and told them I wanted to be a detective, that I wouldn’t be happy with anything less. They still remembered me. And they knew, somehow, what I had in my lunch box. ‘Little girl,’ they said, ‘why don’t you just go home and play with your toys.’
“I was so mad I almost went down to the carnival, to see if the remnants would take me in. But before I could, Arthur visited me in my sleep.” She was looking at the overseer now. “He gave me a chance when nobody else would. He said, ‘Come and be my assistant. I’ll teach you everything.’ I thought maybe it was just a delusion, something I’d invented to make myself feel better. But it wasn’t. Every time I drifted off, I was back in his office. And cases I heard about there would show up in the papers a few days later. It was real. And the head of the Agency was teaching me everything.”
Emily’s gaze had settled on Cleo. “Miss Greenwood,” she said, “you have to drop that gun now.”
Arthur wheezed until his wheezing became laughter. “Attagirl,” he said, still teasing a tune from the bellows. “I knew I could count on you.”
Miss Greenwood showed no indication that she had heard any of this, and Emily took a step closer to her.
“Lady,” Sivart said to Emily, “put the gun down.”
Emily pointed the gun at Miss Greenwood as Sivart took aim at Emily. Did the Manual contain a name for this, for what was happening? These three could stand that way forever, no one making a move, because there was no good move to make. Miss Greenwood shook her head—barely conscious, it seemed, of what was going on around her. She knew the gun, knew the man at whom she aimed. That was all, maybe.
The overseer was still wheezing. He looked at Emily and said, “What are you waiting for?”
She ignored him and said to Unwin, “I convinced Arthur to assign me to you, after your promotion. The plan was to keep an eye on you. Make sure you stayed on track. Make sure you found Sivart for us.”
Unwin felt cold as he recalled one of the first assignments he had given his assistant—to contact the Agency’s custodian and ask him to clean the paint spilled in the hall. But they had discussed more than spilled paint—as they must have every time she fell asleep.
“You did a good job of it, then,” Unwin said.
“Not good enough,” she said. She was shaking her lunch box as she spoke, rattling the tin figurines inside. “It shouldn’t be like this. . . .”
Arthur had stopped laughing. “That’s right, Emily,” he said. “There are protocols.”
Emily did not seem to hear him. “I stole Lamech’s copy of The Manual of Detection,” she said.
The accordion sagged in Arthur’s hands, emitting a dissonant sigh. “Emily,” he said quietly.
“At first I just wanted it for myself,” she said. “But once I’d read the whole thing, I saw what it could do, what it could . . . incite a person to do. So I left it in Sivart’s office, where he was sure to find it. I couldn’t stand the waiting anymore. I wanted someone to make a move, a real one. I wanted Hoffmann back, and the Agency ready to fight him.”
Unwin took a step away from her, closing his eyes as he considered his mistake. Penelope Greenwood was not the thief of the unexpurgated copy of The Manual of Detection. Though in revealing the gold tooth of the Oldest Murdered Man, she had worked in concert with Emily, and toward the same end. The two of them, without apparent knowledge of one another, had together rekindled the old war between the Agency and the carnival.
The leaves, when the breeze took them, rustled like paper. Emily looked at the ground, shaking her head. “What a mess I’ve made. I could have done a better job.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Sivart said.
She half closed her eyes, then recited, “ ‘To the modern detective, truth is rarely its own reward; usually it is its own punishment. And if you cannot track mystery to the back of its ugly cave, then be content to stand at the edge of the dark and call it by name.’ ”
She looked at Arthur as she lowered her gun.
The overseer, as though a spring in him were suddenly loosed, leaned into his accordion and began to play. The bellows strained and crumpled between his hands, and his big fingernails danced over the keys. “That’s how it goes, isn’t it, darling?” he said.
Miss Greenwood went closer to him. “Stop calling me that,” she said.
Arthur’s song was the opposite of a lullaby, thunderous and brash. “Sure,” he said, stamping the time with his foot. “That’s it. What are the words? ‘Between you and me, All the way to the sea, In my dream of your dream—’ ”
Miss Greenwood’s shot sent him tumbling backward. He tripped over the roots of the old oak and fell cradled against its trunk. His arms were still moving as he lay there, but the air went in and out through the two holes the bullet had made in the bellows, and the notes were just ragged whispers now.
Detective Sivart took his hat off and sat on the edge of the bed. He looked at the ground and waited until it was quiet again. Then he switched off the light.
THE DINING TABLE was big for the cottage, and Unwin had to walk with his back against the wall to reach his seat. He looked around while Sivart fussed in the kitchen. There were shelves of old books and photographs on the walls. The pictures were hung with their frames nearly touching, so that the wallpaper—a faded pattern of carts and hay-stacks—was all but obscured. In one yellowing image, the giantess Hildegard sat on a tree stump, boxes of fireworks open all around her. Aloof and queenly on her bower throne, she regarded the camera with her chin raised and her eyes downturned.
In another picture a young Miss Greenwood was seated at a dime-store counter, straw in her soda glass. Her smile was careful. A little girl sat on the stool beside her, legs dangling with her ankles crossed. Penelope, her hair tied back in a braid, gazed mistrustfully at the camera.
“Be there in a minute,” Sivart called from the kitchen.
Unwin realized he had been drumming his fingers against the table and stopped himself. Through the window he had a view of the pond at the bottom of the hill. Emily and Miss Greenwood were walking around the water together, talking.
Sivart came into the room with a blue dish towel draped over his shoulder. He had taken off his jacket and shirt, leaving his black suspenders strapped over his undershirt. “Hope you’re hungry,” he said. He set down a tray covered with strips of bacon and fried eggs, most of the yolks broken. He went away and came back with plates and forks, a pile of toast, pancakes, a bowl of blackberries, butter.
The detective looked at everything, frowning. He left again and came back with a pot of coffee and a creamer. “Haven’t eaten in days,” he said, tucking a napkin into his collar.
Unwin was hungry, too. He helped himself to pancakes and a handful of blackberries. Sivart forked a stack of bacon onto his plate and said, “It took you long enough to figure out where I was.”
“You could have told me right from the start.”
“Nah, you would have screwed it up if I’d done that. Like today, except our friend out there would’ve been awake, and he would’ve remembered to bring his gun.”
Outside, Emily and Miss Greenwood had arrived at the tire swing. They were still speaking, and they seemed to have come to an agreement of some kind. Miss Greenwood was nodding, her arms crossed over her belly, while Emily stood with one foot up on the tire.
“That Emily’s a firecracker,” Sivart said as he ate. “Reminds me a little of Cleo’s girl. Now, Penny, she was an odd kid. Barely ever talked, listened to everything like she was taking notes. I used to see her down there on the swing. It never seemed like she was playing, really. More like she was just—I don’t know—waiting.”
Unwin spread butter over his pancakes. “Hoffmann looked almost afraid of her when I saw them together in Lamech’s dream.”
Sivart grinned and stabbed another piece of bacon. “He should’ve been. I wish you’d seen him when he realized what she was doing with his sleepwalkers. I thought his skull would break open and we’d both fall out.
“You know, Penny caught me at Central Terminal the day I was headed out here. We talked it all through in advance, about you being our agent in the field. We needed radio silence through the whole thing after that. Between Arthur and Enoch, there were no safe channels.”
“That’s why she’s at Central Terminal every morning,” Unwin said. “She’s waiting for you to come back and let her know it’s over.”
Sivart chewed thoughtfully, washed it down with coffee. “I’m not going back, Charlie,” he said.
The two women came inside, and Miss Greenwood went straight for the coffee. Emily stood in the doorway until Sivart gestured at her and said, “Sit. Eat.” Then she reluctantly found a chair and put her lunch box on the table.
Sivart looked at it and said, “Do you have one of an old detective, ready to retire, a respectable gut under his coat?”
“No,” Emily said. “They’re all active-duty.”
“Well, those days are over for me,” he agreed. Then he turned to Miss Greenwood. “How about you, honey?”
“I’m going to get some sleep,” she said.
“Here? Or in the slammer?”
“Here,” Emily said. “But that depends on Detective Unwin, really. He’ll be the one writing the report.”
Miss Greenwood looked at Unwin over the rim of her cup.
“I’ll have to include everything I know,” he said. “But I’m a clerk again, so it’s my job to determine what’s relevant and what isn’t.”
Sivart shook his head and snickered. “Spoken like a true-blue spook,” he said.
For a while the only sounds were the clatter of forks on plates and spoons in coffee cups and the ticking of a clock in another room. Sivart, sated, leaned back in his chair and raised his arms over his head. “Still,” he said, “I wish we all could have sat down and talked about it. The three of you, me, Hoffmann. Even Arthur down there.”
Miss Greenwood had begun to doze in her chair, but now she was listening again. Her voice was cold when she spoke. “It would have been helpful for your memoirs,” she said.
Sivart shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Unwin knew they were all thinking the same thing—that those memoirs, if Sivart ever wrote them, would have to tell the story as it was in the files, not as they knew it now. The detective was looking to Unwin for help, but it was Emily who spoke first.
“Maybe we can open the archive to you,” she said. “For your research.”
Sivart took the napkin out of his collar and said, “Fine. That would be fine.” He got up and started gathering the dirty dishes.
Later Sivart and Miss Greenwood walked Unwin back to the station while Emily returned to the clearing. (“Someone has to start cleaning up,” she said.) A cool breeze was blowing off the river, and Unwin noticed details he had failed to include in his dream of the place: the second church steeple at the south end of town, bits of trash floating along the shore, some old railroad ties in the weeds beside the tracks. If Arthur had not been asleep for so long, he might have sensed that something was wrong when he followed Unwin here. But waking and dreaming must have been a blur to him by the end.
One part of Unwin’s dream had carried over to the real world somehow. The rain was gone, and the sun was rising into a clear sky. It was as though no one trusted it yet—all the people climbing into the train still wore raincoats and carried umbrellas.
The conductor called for them to board. Sivart, suddenly sheepish, rubbed the bristles on his chin and said, “I think I promised you a drink once, Charlie.”
“Another time,” Unwin said. “Maybe next month, for your birthday.”
“What, you figured it out?”
What Unwin had figured out was that Sivart did not have a hunch on the morning of November twelfth, as he wrote in his report. It was just that Arthur and Hoffmann chose the one day of the year that the detective would notice had gone missing.
Sivart handed Unwin the typewriter that had been at his bedside, closed up in its case now. “It’s just my old portable,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll need it anymore. And there’s no telling how the chips are going to fall, back at the home office. Might be good to keep a little nimble, you know?”
Unwin hefted the case to test its weight. It was lighter than he expected, but he noticed a keyhole by the latch. Sivart saw what he was looking at.
“Let’s see,” the detective said. Then, with a swift, graceful movement, he reached behind Unwin’s ear. The key was in his hand when he brought it back.
Sivart’s grin fell away, and
his face went pale. “I didn’t even mean to do that,” he said. “A week ago I didn’t know how. More Hoffmann’s style, really. You don’t think there are side effects, from all that time we spent cooped up together? Like maybe there’s a bit of old twiddle-fingers still left in here?”
Unwin recalled what young Penny Greenwood, all those years ago, had said to Sivart when she read his palm. That he would live a long life but part of it would not be his own. Unwin took the key. “Thank you,” he said. “The typewriter is perfect.”
The detective, something like fear on his face, stared at his own shaking hand. Miss Greenwood took it in her own and held it. “Don’t worry,” she said to Unwin. “I’ll take care of him.”
Unwin boarded and chose a seat on the side facing the shore. As the train pulled away, he glimpsed Sivart trudging back up the road, toward the cottage. He and Miss Greenwood were walking arm in arm.
The Manual of Detection Page 28