The Manual of Detection: A Novel - By Jedediah Berry Page 0,113
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. The 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,