The Manual of Detection

by Berry, Jedediah

  Unwin opened the typewriter on his lap. One of the oak leaves was stuck between the type bars. He put that in his pocket, loaded a fresh sheet of paper, and began to work on his report. “I,” he decided, would have to be part of it after all.

  Lest details be mistaken for clues, note that I ride my bicycle to work every day, even when it is raining. That’s how I came to be at Central Terminal last Wednesday morning with my hands full and my umbrella under my arm. So encumbered, I found it impossible to recover the umbrella dropped to the floor by a certain party, whose role in all this I will, over the course of this report, attempt to explain. She was, as they say, “in on it” from the beginning, whereas I was merely “it,” and I use the word as children do when playing games that involve running and hiding, and seeking those who are hidden.

  We have been playing a game like that, a great many of us for a great many years. Some of us did not know we were playing, and some of us were not told all the rules.

  Now that I have the opportunity to begin this report, I do not know how best to categorize it. I am both clerk and detective, but due to the circumstances of the case at hand I am also neither of those things. A train will bring you back to the place you came from, but it will not return you home.

  Dozens more black raincoats boarded the train at each stop on its descent through the valley. The clattering of the wheels kept time with the rhythm of Unwin’s typing, and newspapers rustled all around. He caught sight of one of the headlines: RETURN OF THE CARNIVAL THAT NEVER LEFT.

  He wrote, At least I know who I am writing this report for. Miss Greenwood’s daughter is my clerk, after all, and she will want every detail, every clue, from top to bottom.

  The seven twenty-seven train arrived at Central Terminal one minute late as usual. Unwin put the typewriter away and slipped the pages of his first report into an empty folder from his briefcase. He waited for the last of the black raincoats to pour out the doors, then followed them through Gate Fourteen. The woman in the plaid coat stood on her toes. She stopped searching when she saw him, and he went to her. She had been waiting a long time.

  HE did NOT see Emily again for several days. When he did, it was on the Agency elevator. She was wearing the same blue woolen dress she had worn the day they started working together. At first it seemed as though she were going to ignore him. “I’m sorry,” she finally said. “It’s just that it’s against policy for us to speak.”

  “You’ve been promoted.”

  “Yes.”

  “High up in the ranks, I hope.”

  “Very,” she said, and touched the pencil in her hair. “Some of the watchers, I guess, have had their eyes on me. And then, you know, there was a vacancy.”

  Unwin recalled Miss Palsgrave’s words about the changing of the guard and knew that it was not Edward Lamech’s place Emily had taken. She had been the overseer’s only assistant—no one knew the job better than she did. He wondered whether she kept those figurines on her desk while she worked: totems of the agents whose efforts she now directed. Better that, he supposed, than those blank-eyed pigeons.

  “There must be a lot of changes under way,” Unwin said.

  Her gaze grew suddenly hard. “Well, change takes time. And there are only a few people who know as much about this place as you do, Mr. Unwin, so I’m trusting you to keep it that way. Do you follow me?”

  “I’m not sure that I do.”

  “Please try, Mr. Unwin. You’re very valuable to us.” Her voice softened. “To me, I mean. It would be terrible, you know, if you put me in a difficult position.”

  “A difficult position,” Unwin said.

  She took his hand and pressed something into it. He recognized its shape against his palm: it was the figurine from her collection that he thought looked like him. The one with his hands on his knees and a look of astonishment on his face. She kept her hand in his until they reached the twenty-ninth floor. Then Unwin pocketed the figurine and stepped off the elevator, turning to say good-bye. Emily’s smile was sad, and Unwin thought for a moment that the sight of her crooked teeth would break his heart—and then it did, a little. He could not even tell her why, not now, though she might understand once she received his report.

  Emily looked away as the attendant closed the door.

  He packed his things quickly: silver letter opener, magnifying glass, spare spools of typewriter ribbon. He took some typing paper, too. It could be a long time before he had fresh supplies at hand again.

  He closed the office door behind him and found Screed waiting in the hall.

  “I need your help getting this thing lit,” Screed said. His right arm was in a cast, and he was fumbling with the lighter in his left hand. Unwin took it from him, struck the flint, and raised the flame to the cigarette dangling from the detective’s lips. It was the first time Unwin had actually seen him smoking.

  “Everything was just as you said it was,” Screed said. “The Cat & Tonic was empty, and there was Hoffmann, asleep in his chair. Wasn’t he surprised to see me, after your alarm went off! I had him, Unwin.”

  “You had him,” Unwin repeated.

  “I wanted to take my time, you know. Get in touch with the right people at the newspaper. I figured that everyone should know about the historic occasion. I left him locked in my closet while I made the arrangements.”

  “But you forgot about his voice,” Unwin said.

  Screed looked at the floor and coughed smoke through his nose. “I was only gone a minute. When I got back to my office, Peake and Crabtree were waiting in the dark. They jumped me. Hoffmann had called them over using my voice and convinced them that Hoffmann had stuck me in the closet and was coming back to kill me. By the time we’d figured out what happened, he was gone.”

  Screed would not look Unwin in the eyes. They both knew that Hoffmann might never be caught again, that he could already be anywhere, anyone. But if Sivart really did have a bit of Hoffmann still in his brain, might the opposite also be true? It pleased Unwin to imagine a fragment of the detective in the magician’s mind, shadowing his every move.

  After a while Unwin said, “At least you got the Oldest Murdered Man.”

  Screed sighed. “There’s one old museum attendant down there who was pretty pleased about it. Not sure anyone else cared. I think they’re even going to keep the plaque with Sivart’s name on it.”

  Screed was still smoking when Unwin left, flinching each time he had to move his arm.

  The fourteenth floor was Unwin’s next stop. The clerks pretended not to see him, which made the walk to his old desk a little easier. Even now the sounds of the place tugged at him. He would have liked to sit for a while with his eyes closed, just listening to those typewriters and file drawers.

  Penelope Greenwood had packed her things into a cardboard box. When she saw Unwin, she tucked it under her arm and put on her gray cap. Mr. Duden was watching as they returned to the elevator together. Unwin glanced behind him and caught the overclerk wringing his hands.

  Out on the sidewalk, Unwin stood with Penny in the sunlight and waited. After the third time he checked his watch, she took his wrist gently and said, “Charles, this isn’t the kind of thing it’s possible to be late for.”

  She had returned to the city to revenge the murder of Caligari—but revenge, Unwin had come to understand, was not her only motive. She felt it was her duty to reclaim the thing that was lost when the carnival passed to her father. “The unknown will always be boundless,” Caligari had said, and Unwin believed that Penelope Greenwood meant to keep it that way.

  Some at the Agency, he thought, would be pleased to hear that the organization had a proper adversary again.

  Caligari’s Carnival rounded the corner. It was restored in full and traveling again, the mud of the old fairgrounds washed away, its every part repainted red or green or yellow, flinging streamers and music in all directions. The remnants had taken to their trucks; they waved and honked horns at the children who shouted from the sidewalks. Th
e parade heaved itself in starts and stutters up the avenue, and at the front were the elephants, walking trunk to tail. Penelope had cleaned and fed them and scrubbed them behind their ears. Even the oldest of the three looked lively again.

  As the parade drew close, a series of deep thudding sounds shook the sidewalk. Unwin and Penny held each other’s arms as cracks appeared in the cement at their feet and a gust of hot, acrid air erupted from the Agency lobby. They turned to see black smoke streaming out the door, and with it a crowd of bewildered, red-faced men clutching bowler hats to their heads. Whistling sounds and the cracks of explosives followed.

  Unwin and Penny drew closer as the underclerks tumbled past them, shouting and coughing, some still pulling jackets over their pajamas. The crowd merged with the parade in the street, bringing the procession to a halt. Clowns and underclerks toppled over one another as drivers shouted from their seats and hats, pillows, and balloons flew into the air. Up and down the avenue, people huddled at open windows to watch the spectacle. The youngest elephant, out of delight or indignation, reared on its hind legs and trumpeted.

  The tremors ceased as Hildegard Palsgrave ducked out through the lobby door, her arms and face covered in soot. She dragged her enormous pink chair behind her, and on it was her phonograph. “My first fireworks display in years,” she said.

  Penelope shook soot from the dress of the giantess. “You haven’t lost your touch,” she said.

  Unwin gazed up the facade of the Agency office building and saw windows opening on every floor. Clerks looked down from the nearest rows, taking turns at the view. Detectives watched from their higher floors, shaking their heads at the scene. Farther up, so far that Unwin could not make out the expressions on their faces, the watchers observed everything from the comfort of their private offices, and above them, fewer in number, were operatives whose titles and functions he did not know.

  Emily’s first week on the job, and changes were under way more quickly than she had anticipated. The watchers would be asking their new overseer what to do, now that the chief clerk of the third archive had destroyed what she helped to create.

  Edgar Zlatari was driving the Rooks’ truck. He navigated slowly through the crowd and drew up to the curb with the steam engine sputtering. Theodore Brock, the knife thrower, was in the cab beside him, and Jasper was still in the back, still sleeping. Miss Palsgrave set her chair beside Jasper and climbed in.

  “What about the Forty Winks?” Unwin asked Zlatari. “What about your work?”

  “Show me a place where nobody’s drinking and nobody’s dying, and I’ll show you a man ready to stay put,” he said. “Besides, there’s an old crook in need of burying. Seems his funeral’s been long delayed.”

  Unwin looked at Penelope, and she smiled. They must have smuggled Caligari’s remains out of the museum somehow, after the real mummy was returned.

  Miss Palsgrave smacked the roof of the cab to signal that she was ready. She had a traveling bag with her, and inside were more recordings of Miss Greenwood’s songs, to make sure Jasper Rook stayed sleeping.

  Unwin was tired, too. He had worn himself down—to nothing, nearly—with his cuts and corrections, his erasures and emendations. He was awake now, but was there still time for him? His mind had wearied of its appointed rounds, of the stream of typescript and transcript, and now he wondered what might have been different, what might still be different, if only the day would hold and not abandon him to sleep.

  The carnival had disentangled itself from the knot of baffled underclerks and was preparing to move on. The elephants stamped impatiently, the drivers returned to their trucks, and Penny left Unwin’s side to join the front of the line.

  Zlatari offered him a ride. He turned down the offer but set his portable typewriter and his briefcase in the cab. He had found the time, that week, to oil the chain of his bicycle.

  Maybe Penny was correct, and this was not the kind of thing he could be late for. He glimpsed Caligari’s old motto emblazoned across the side of another truck: EVERYTHING I TELL YOU IS TRUE, AND EVERYTHING YOU SEE IS AS REAL AS YOU ARE.

  If that was right, then nothing Unwin saw was real and the ticking of his watch was just another magician’s trick. He had time, so much time. He had all the time he needed.

  Some of the underclerks wrapped themselves in the blankets they had brought with them from the archive and stood watching the parade withdraw, dumbfounded. A few of them, confused by all the sights and sounds, or just because they had no place to go, went with it. Other people joined the carnival as it moved west between the office buildings—those who, no doubt, had been among Penelope’s sleepwalkers, the members of her resistance. They had helped rebuild the carnival in their sleep and recalled enough that it mattered. The carnival was twice as large as it had been by the time it left the city.

  He allowed himself a last glimpse of the Agency office building, and it appeared to him as it had many times before: a watchtower, a tomb. Not his, now, though someone there—the overseer herself, probably—would be expecting his report. If Unwin dispatched a copy from afar, would its recipient be surprised to find that it originated in the camp of the enemy? He smiled at the thought of it, and the smile surprised him into laughter. He was still laughing when a wind rose up from the river, nearly taking his hat. He held it to his head and steered his bicycle with one hand.

  It would be hours at least before they halted long enough for him to set out his typewriter, so he carried on with his work as best he could, drafting in his mind the report that was the last of one series and the first of another.

  I rode alongside the steam truck for a while, then overtook it and wove my way to the front of the column. Penelope Greenwood walked with the reins of the lead elephant in her hand, and the big beast flapped its ears in the wind. What frightens us about the carnival, I think, is not that it will come to town. Or that it will leave town, which it always does. What frightens us is the possibility that it will leave forever, and never come back, and take us with it when it goes.

  It is taking me now, and I am frightened and alive and very much awake.

  Where are we going next? With what purpose? Penny says she will carry on with Caligari’s work, and whatever happens, someone is going to have to write it all down. So I have my job back, in a way, but the words mean nothing, all is mystery, and always there’s room enough for more.

  I’ll try to record it as we go, but that’s for another report. This one ends here, on a bridge over the river with the elephants leading us toward what routes they remember, and Hoffmann still out there with his thousand and one voices, and Agency operatives already on our tail, and the city waking, and the river waking, and the road waking under our feet, and every alarm clock ringing at the bottom of the sea.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks first to my family: Sean, Caitlin, and Kellin Bliss, Kevin, Debbie, and Michael Berry, Michael Bliss, and Robert Boolukos. Cara Parravani, Dorothy Strachan, and Frank, Ellen, and Kyle Berry, each greatly missed, are everywhere in this novel. I am deeply indebted to Kelly Link, Gavin Grant, Sabina Murray, Mira Bartók, and Holly and Theo Black for their friendship and advice. Thanks also to Chris Bachelder, Brian Baldi, Robert N. Casper, Cecil Castellucci, Ellen Datlow, Miciah Bay Gault, Noy Holland, Shahrul Ladue, Leigh Newman, Jon Sequeira, and Terri Windling for all their help and sound criticism; to Esmond Harmsworth for his guidance and great insight; to Eamon Dolan for his encouragement and general brilliance; to Jason Arthur for his support, and for bringing this book to the UK in style; to Mimi Di-Novo for her generosity; to Deirdre d’Albertis for Chesterton, to William Weaver for Calvino, to Bradford Morrow for Carter and most everyone else; to Christa Parravani for lending me her dream of the sea.

  This book is dedicated to my mother, Maureen Berry Bliss, who is always looking for a good mystery.

 

 

 
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