The Manual of Detection: A Novel - By Jedediah Berry Page 0,51

The custodian had not followed.

TEN

On Infiltration

The hideout, the safe house, the base of operations:

you may assume that your enemy has one, but not

that it is to your advantage to find it.

An enormous plaster clown stood bowlegged at the entrance of the Travels-No-More Carnival. The colors of its face and suit were chipped and faded to shades of brown and purple, and the arch of its legs were the gates through which visitors were compelled to pass. The clown’s smile was welcoming, but in a hungry sort of way.

Beyond was the flooded labyrinth of the Travels-No-More. Planks of wood lay over wide pools of muddy water between the remaining attractions—though “attractions” was hardly the word. Great machines that had once swayed and wheeled and swerved now lay rusting, their broken arms sprawled amid collapsed tents and decrepit booths. The place was full of lost things, and Edwin Moore was one of them now. Looking at it, Unwin felt lost himself. He knew he could not leave the old clerk to this place.

He had gone no more than a few steps beyond the gate when the window of a nearby booth shot open. A man with a cigarette clenched in his teeth peered at him through a cloud of yellow smoke. He had a thick white mustache, stringy shoulder-length hair, and he wore an oilskin duster buttoned tight at his throat. From out of the collar, angular black tattoos like the roots of an overturned tree spread up his leathery neck to his jawline.

“Tickets,” he said.

Unwin approached the booth, and the man folded his hands in front of him. The same tattoos extended from under his sleeves and down to his knuckles.

“How much?” Unwin asked him.

“Exactly,” he said.

“Exactly what?”

“It’ll cost you.”

“Yes, but how much?”

“That’s right,” the man said, disclosing a yellow grin.

Unwin felt he had gotten himself into some kind of trouble, but he could not tell what kind.

The man was puffing at his cigarette, saying nothing. Then he squinted and looked past Unwin toward the entrance.

Someone else was walking under the legs of the enormous clown. She held a newspaper over her head as she limped toward them through the rain. It was Miss Greenwood, wrapped in a red raincoat. She insinuated herself beneath Unwin’s umbrella and tossed aside the sopping newspaper. She looked more tired than ever—the revelries of the night before had deepened her exhaustion.

The man in the booth unbuttoned the front of his jacket. He had on a shoulder belt of worn leather, lined by a dozen or more gleaming daggers. He removed one and held it lightly by the blade end. Unwin checked its appearance against his memory of the Agency’s index of weapons: small, slim, with a pommel weighted for balance. It was a throwing knife.

“Mr. Brock,” Miss Greenwood said, “surely you’re not troubling anyone for tickets on a day like this.”

Unwin recognized the name from Sivart’s reports. This was Theodore Brock, who had arrived in the city as Caligari’s knife thrower and remained in it as one of Hoffmann’s lieutenants. It was his stray throw, all those years ago, that had left Cleo with her limp. He spit his cigarette at their feet and said, “Well, if it isn’t the enchantress Cleopatra Greenwood, come down to visit her old friends.”

“I’m not here for a reunion, just a little outing with my new friend, who seems to have gotten ahead of me somehow.” She shot Unwin a playfully angry look.

“And that’s why you need a ticket. It costs money to see the freaks.” He smiled again. “But you ought to know that, Cleo. How’s the leg doing? Still hurt when it rains?”

She drew close to the window. “My guest is an Agency Eye,” she said. “It’s on business of his that we’ve come here. I think I can convince him not to see too much while we stroll the grounds, but for that you’ll have to be nice.”

“Agency?” Brock said. “But the hat’s all wrong.”

Miss Greenwood raised one hand, cupping it to her lips as though to whisper something in his ear. He leaned forward, then started and brandished his dagger, eyes going wide. She said something Unwin could not make out, and Brock’s eyelids fluttered closed. The dagger fell from his hand and embedded itself in the ticket table; his head dropped hard beside it. The knife thrower was asleep.

Miss Greenwood looked around, then pulled the window shut. “Quickly,” she said.

They went along paths strewn with broken bottles and toys, feathers, illegible playbills. The old