water and took the cigar from his teeth. “No names,” he said. “Not mine anyway. Don’t know who might be listening in.” He relaxed deeper into the bubbles. “You have no idea how difficult it was to arrange this meeting, Unwin. Did you know they don’t tell us detectives who our clerks are? All these years I’ve been sending my reports to the fourteenth floor. To you, it turns out. And you forget things.”
Unwin put up his hands to protest, but Sivart waved his cigar at him and said, “When Enoch Hoffmann stole November twelfth, and you looked at the morning paper and saw that Monday had gone straight into Wednesday, you forgot Tuesday like all the rest of them.”
“Even the restaurants skipped their Tuesday specials,” Unwin said.
Sivart’s ember burned hotter, and more steam rose from the tub. “You forgot my birthday, too,” he said. “No card, no nothing.”
“Nobody knows your birthday.”
“You could have figured it out. Anyway, you know my cases better than anyone. You know I was wrong about her, all wrong. So you’re the best chance I’ve got. Try this time, would you? Try to remember something. Remember this: Chapter Eighteen. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“Say it back to me: Chapter Eighteen.”
“Chapter Elephant,” Unwin said, in spite of himself.
“Hopeless,” Sivart muttered.
Normally Unwin never could have said “Elephant” when he meant to say “Eighteen,” not even in his sleep. Hurt by Sivart’s accusations, he had blurted the wrong word because, in some dusty file drawer of his mind, he had long ago deposited the fact that elephants never forget.
“The girl,” Sivart was saying, and Unwin had the impression that the detective was getting ready to explain something important. “I was wrong about her.”
Then, as though summoned to life by Unwin’s own error, there came trumpeting, high and full—the unmistakable decree of an elephant.
“No time!” Sivart said. He drew back the shower curtain behind the tub. Instead of a tiled wall, Unwin saw the whirling lights of carnival rides and striped pavilions beneath which broad shapes hunkered and leapt. There were shooting galleries out there, and a wheel of fortune, and animal cages, and a carousel, all moving, all turning under turning stars. The elephant trumpeted again, only this time the sound was shrill and staccato, and Unwin had to switch off his alarm clock to make it stop.
TWO
On Evidence
Objects have memory, too. The doorknob remembers
who turned it, the telephone who answered it. The gun
remembers when it was last fired, and by whom. It is for
the detective to learn the language of these things, so that
he might hear them when they have something to say.
Unwin’s damp socks squelched in his shoes as he dismounted in front of the broad granite facade of the Agency’s office building. The tallest structure for blocks around, it stood like a watchtower between the gridded downtown district and the crooked streets of the old port town.
South of the Agency offices Unwin rarely dared to travel. He knew enough from Sivart’s reports of what went on in the cramped taverns and winding back lanes of the old port’s innumerable little neighborhoods to satisfy his curiosity. Occasionally, when the wind was right, he would catch a scent on the air that left him mystified and a little frightened, and tugged at him in a way he could not easily have explained. He felt as though a trapdoor had opened at his feet, revealing a view onto something bottomless and unknowable—a secret that would remain a secret even at the end of the world. A moment would pass before he could place it, before he knew where the scent had come from. Then he would shake his head and chide himself. Seeing it so rarely, he often forgot that it was there: the sea.
He brought his bicycle with him into the Agency lobby, where the doorman allowed him to keep it on rainy days. He could not bear to look at the clock on the wall behind the front desk. His lateness, Unwin knew, would necessitate a second report for the benefit of his supervisor. It was Mr. Duden, after all, who had only recently filed for the presentation of the wristwatch—and did Mr. Duden not expect him to continue to exhibit the virtues that the wristwatch both acknowledged and embodied?
As for this so-called Manual of Detection, good sense dictated that he refrain from reading any part of it, including the page ninety-six to which Detective Pith alluded. Whatever secrets the Manual contained were not intended for Charles Unwin.
Only one