The Manual of Detection: A Novel - By Jedediah Berry Page 0,45

her performance. The man in the double-breasted suit was among them, but Emily was not. They went down among the sycamores together, and a bald man in a tuxedo grabbed a handful of fallen samaras and threw them into the air. They spun down around their heads, and he shouted, “Crazy little propellers!”

They returned to the Gilbert Hotel and climbed the fire escape to Miss Greenwood’s room. The man in the tuxedo popped open a bottle of champagne, and they drank. Miss Greenwood laughed and dropped long-stemmed roses everywhere. Then the man in the tuxedo and the man in the double-breasted suit started fighting about which of them had given Miss Greenwood more flowers. After the first sloppy punches were thrown, she kicked them both out.

“I’m going to forget all of this,” she said to Unwin. “He uses me, uses my voice, but keeps me in the dark. So you’ll have to remember for both of us. That’s why I hired you. To remember.”

Unwin left. It was cold outside, and the walk was a long one. He could not tell if he was awake or asleep now—shadows fell at the wrong angles, and the streets curved where they should have been straight. The cold was real enough, however. His hand was a ball of ice around the handle of his umbrella. At last he found the narrow green door of his own apartment building and went upstairs.

A trail of red and orange leaves led from the door all the way into the bathroom.

Detective Sivart was in the tub. The water looked cold and was covered with leaves: a dark little pond. “This channel’s closed to us now, Charlie. That woman, I was wrong about her. She broke my heart. Look.” He pulled a torn leaf out of the water and slapped it onto his chest. It stuck fast.

When Unwin woke, he was on his bed, still wearing his clothes. His head throbbed, his alarm clock was missing, and someone was in the kitchen, making breakfast.

NINE

On Documentation

It is not enough to say that you have had a hunch.

Once written down, most such inklings reveal

themselves for what they are: something to be

tossed into a wishing well, not into a file.

The theft of November twelfth: who can think upon that black patch of the mind, lingering where a memory might be, and not feel cold, lost to it? It seeps like ink along the grooves of the fingertips. Who has not tried to scrub it away?

I was like the rest of you, Sivart wrote in his report. Hoodwinked. Taken in. But then I had a hunch that morning, over breakfast. So what if hunches are against policy? I had one, clerk, and I acted on it. Lucky thing, too—for all of us.

No one hired the Agency to solve the crime, because no one knew that it had been committed. Unwin went to sleep on Monday, November eleventh, and woke up on Wednesday, November thirteenth. He rode his bicycle the seven blocks to the Agency offices. He had been a faithful employee for eleven years, four months, and some-odd days, and it had never occurred to him, at this point in his career, to make unofficial trips for unofficial reasons.

On the fourteenth floor, the messengers brought no new assignment for him, so he passed the morning putting the finishing touches on a case from the previous week. It still needed a title. Unwin liked titles, even though the Agency filing system did not require them. Each case was numbered, and only the numbers were used in the official logs. Still, naming cases was a small and harmless pleasure, and occasionally useful, too. If a fellow clerk had a question about one case or another, using the name could save them both time.

Unwin was still pondering the possibilities over lunch. He had brought a sandwich with him in his briefcase. It was turkey and cheese on rye, his Wednesday sandwich. No better way to pass a Wednesday, he thought, than pondering titles over turkey and cheese on rye.

Nothing about this case had made it into the papers, so the clerks at neighboring desks had their eyes on Unwin’s work whenever they thought he was not paying attention. He was always paying attention, though. Only when the file was completed, and for Unwin that meant titled, would his colleagues become privy to its contents.

As he finished his lunch, he became aware of an unusual number of telephone conversations taking place on the floor. Most of the