The Manual of Detection: A Novel - By Jedediah Berry Page 0,103

Rook started to snore.

TOGETHER THEY dragged the sleeping body out of the room and down the stairs. Nothing woke Jasper—not the steps striking the back of his head when Unwin lost his grip for a moment, not the rain falling full on his face outside. With much effort they managed to get him up into the bed of his truck. Miss Greenwood found an oilcloth tarp and laid it over him. It was just after seven o’clock when they left the grounds of the Baker estate.

Miss Greenwood was familiar with the peculiar controls of the steam truck. She kept her eye on a row of gauges over the dashboard while regulating the engine with a row of levers under the wheel, which was enormous and had the spokes of a ship’s wheel. The boiler thumped and hissed at their backs.

Unwin gazed silently out the passenger window. On one corner a young boy was shaking a woman’s arm and crying, “Wake up, Mom! Wake up!” Lights were on in some apartment buildings, and Unwin glimpsed nervous, confused faces in the windows. Some people had woken and gone home. Was Hoffmann’s grip beginning to loosen?

“It will come in waves now,” Miss Greenwood said. “He can’t keep them asleep all the time, so some will get a reprieve. But most who do will doubt whether they’re really awake.”

It was hot inside the cab, and sometimes the needles on the dials strayed into the red. Miss Greenwood drove south past the Agency office building and into the old port town. They left Jasper and his truck in front of the Forty Winks, where someone from the carnival was sure to find them. At eight twenty-seven, Unwin and Miss Greenwood went together into the cemetery.

Unwin read the names on tombstones they passed: Two-Toe Charlie, Theda Verdigris, Father Jack, Ricky Shortchange. Saints’ Hill had always been the place where criminals went to bury their own, and these were the outlaws, thieves, and grifters of an earlier era. It ended with the rise of Enoch Hoffmann and was familiar to Unwin only through the oldest of the Agency’s files.

“Caligari took Hoffmann in when he was a boy,” Unwin said. “It couldn’t have been easy for him to plot the old man’s murder.”

“They always disagreed on how the carnival should be used,” Miss Greenwood said. “I think Caligari saw it as a tool for stirring up trouble—but only for those he felt deserved it. He would go ahead to each town we visited, get a room somewhere, and ‘scout things out,’ as he used to say. He was delving into the dreams of the people there.”

“Looking for what?”

“He never really explained, and there wasn’t always a logic to it. But most of time he found people who had something to hide. Caligari could be ruthless once he’d chosen his subject. Sometimes, though . . .” She paused and rested with one hand against a tombstone, catching her breath.

Unwin waited, and for the first time since he had met her, Miss Greenwood smiled. “Sometimes the carnival was just a carnival,” she said.

She led him through the door of one of the mausoleums. Together they strained against the lid and moved it aside, revealing a set of tiled stairs where a cadaver should have been. There were lights on down there. Miss Greenwood climbed in first, and Unwin followed after her, sliding the lid back into place behind them.

At the bottom of the stairs was a dank subway platform. Roots grew through the cracked and dripping ceiling. The eight train was already in the station, its doors open. Unwin and Miss Greenwood were its only passengers. Once the train was moving, he said, “What about Hoffmann? He saw the carnival as a means for profit?”

“That’s what he saw when he met Arthur: the potential for profit, for control. What Enoch’s doing now resembles a plan he used to talk about sometimes. A way to seize the city entirely if his deal with the Agency ever went sour. The understanding he’d had with Arthur fell apart on November twelfth. Then, when Sivart bumbled into his head, he must have assumed the worst.”

“Which is what your daughter expected,” Unwin said. “That’s why she gave Sivart the stolen copy of the Manual.”

“I understand now what she’s doing. She always considered Caligari her true father and wanted to follow in his footsteps. There was a saying of his she liked to repeat, about those who belong to the carnival. ‘We’re just some people who