done your homework, sir.”
He was happy for a chance to impress her, and perhaps to win her confidence. “In an office as busy as the one on the fourteenth floor,” he explained, “a document occasionally—very occasionally, mind you—goes astray. It is lost under a cabinet, maybe, or accidentally thrown out with someone’s lunch. Or, as you have just reminded me, cleared away by the overzealous custodian.”
Unwin opened the lid of the typewriter and gently prised loose the spools of ribbon. “In cases such as those,” he went on, “where no carbon copy is available, there is only one method for recovering the missing document. Impressed upon the surface of the typewriter ribbon, so faintly that only close examination under a bright light will reveal them, are all the letters it has ever marked on paper. This ribbon here is only slightly used, but Sivart must have done some work with it.”
He put the ribbon into Emily’s hands. She drew a chair closer to the desk and sat down, while Unwin angled the lamp to provide her with the best possible illumination. She held a spool in each hand and stretched the ribbon between them, her big glasses shining in the lamplight.
Unwin removed the paper he had just rolled into the typewriter and took a pen from his briefcase. “Read them to me, Emily.”
She squinted and read, “ ‘M-U-E-S-U-M-L-A-P-I-C-I-N-U-M.’ Muesum Lapicinum? Is that Latin?”
“Of course not. The first letter on the ribbon is the last Sivart typed. We’ll have to read it backward. Please proceed.”
Emily’s nervousness returned (better that, Unwin thought, than her suspicion), and her hands shook as she continued. Twenty minutes later those hands were covered with ink. Unwin typed a final copy, separating the words where he imagined spaces ought to be.
Wednesday. I’m putting aside my designated case in favor of something that’s come out of left field, even though it’s probably a load of bunkum. As for protocol, stuff it. I think I’ve earned the right to break the rules now and then, assuming I know what they are. So, clerk, if you ever see this report, may it please you to know I’ve been contacted by atypical means—over the telephone for cripes sake—by a party previously unbeknownst to me, to whom I am apparently beknownst. I mean, he knew my name. How did he get my number? I don’t even know my number. He said, “Travis T. Sivart?” And I said, “Okay.” And he said, “We have much to discuss,” or something of that bodeful ilk. He wants me to meet him at the cafe of one of our finer civic institutions. Maybe Hoffmann’s behind it. Maybe it’s a trap. One can hope, right? Thus concludes my report for the day. I’m off to the Municipal Museum.
Once he had read the report twice, Unwin handed it to Emily. She read it and asked, “Could the telephone call have had something to do with The Oldest Murdered Man?”
Unwin ought to have guessed that she would be familiar with Sivart’s cases, but to hear his own title spoken aloud by someone he had only just met—someone not even a clerk—caused him to shudder. Emily seemed to take this as discouragement and lowered her eyes.
Still, he had to consider the possibility that Emily was correct, that the telephone call did have something to do with the ancient cadaver in the museum, with the case consigned to the archives thirteen years ago. He thought of the note to Lamech he had found in the dumbwaiter: Let sleeping corpses lie. What if the Miss P. who had offered that advice meant that corpse, that file?
It did not matter. All Unwin had to do was find Detective Sivart, and now he knew where Sivart had gone. He picked up his new badge and rubbed its face with his sleeve. In the burnished Agency eye he could see his own distorted reflection. Charles Unwin, Detective. Who had inscribed those words? He took the clerk’s badge from his jacket pocket (no gleaming frontispiece there, only a worn, typewritten card) and replaced it with the detective’s. That, at least, would help him if he encountered Screed again. And the gun? The gun went with his old badge into the desk drawer. The gun he would not need.
Emily followed him to the outer office. He took his coat, hat, and umbrella from the rack, waving off her assistance.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I’m off to the Municipal Museum,” he said, but the situation seemed to call