The Manual of Detection: A Novel - By Jedediah Berry Page 0,28

And doubly in the bubbly.

“Root beer,” he said at last.

Zlatari blinked several times, as though maybe he had never heard of the stuff. Then he shrugged and moved away down the bar. On the wall beyond the register was a tattered velvet curtain. In the moment Zlatari drew it aside, Unwin glimpsed a tiny kitchen. A radio was playing back there, and he thought he recognized the song—a slow melody carried by horns, a woman singing just above them, voice rising with the swell of strings. He was sure he had heard the tune somewhere before and had almost placed it when Zlatari pulled the curtain closed behind him.

Unwin shifted on his stool. In the mirror he could see the men at the booth behind him. One tapped his hat excitedly as he said, “Have I got a story!” and the other man leaned forward to listen, though the man with the story told it loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear.

“I saw Bones Kiley the other night,” he said, “and we were just talking business, you know? Then suddenly, out of nowhere, he started talking business. So I said to him, ‘Wait, wait, do you want to talk about business? Because if it’s business you want to talk about, then we shouldn’t be talking about business, because there’s business and there’s business.’ ”

“Ha,” said the other man.

“So then I asked him, ‘Just what sort of business are you in, Bones, that you want to talk about business?’ ”

“Ha ha,” said the other.

“And Bones gets serious-looking, kind of screws up his eyebrows like this . . .”

“Ha.”

“. . . and he looks at me with his eyes squinty, and he says in this really deep voice, ‘I’m in the business of blood.’ ”

The other man said nothing.

“So I said to him,” and the man with the story raised his voice even higher as he finished his story, “ ‘The business of blood? The business of blood? Bones, there is no business but the business of blood!’ ”

Both men laughed and tapped their hats in unison, and the candle flickered and flared, making their shadows twitch on the uneven stone wall.

While the man with the story was telling it, the two at the pool table had set down their cue sticks. Identical faces, lips pale gray, eyes bright green: Unwin wondered if these could be the Rook brothers, Jasper and Josiah, the twin thugs who had aided Enoch Hoffmann in the theft of the Oldest Murdered Man, and in countless other misdeeds during the years of his criminal reign. The worst thing that can happen, Sivart often wrote, and the other worst thing.

Shoulder to shoulder the two approached, leaning toward each other with every step. It was said that the Rooks had once been conjoined, but were separated in an experimental operation that left them with crippled feet—Jasper’s left and Josiah’s right. Each wore two sizes of boots, the smaller on the side of that irrevocable severance. This was the only sure way to tell them apart.

The twins stood over the table with their backs to Unwin, obscuring his view of the men seated there. He felt a great heat coming off the two, drying the back of his neck. It was as though they had just come out of a boiler room.

“My brother,” said one in a measured tone, “has advised me to advise you to leave now. And since I always take my brother’s advice, I am hereby advising you to leave.”

“Yeah, who’s asking?” said the man who had told the story.

“In point of fact,” said the other, in a voice that was deeper but otherwise identical to his brother’s, “my brother is not asking, he is advising.”

“Well, I don’t know your brother,” said the man with the story, “so I don’t think I’ll take his advice.”

In the silence that followed, it seemed to Unwin that even the dead in their graves, just behind the wall where the mirror was hung, were waiting to hear what would happen.

One of the twins licked the tips of his thumb and forefinger and leaned over the table. He pinched the candle flame, and it went out with a hiss. From the dark of the booth came a muffled cry. Then the two men walked to the door with the storyteller between them, his feet kicking wildly a few inches above the ground. They deposited him outside, facedown in the puddle over the slow drain. He lay slumped amid the floating