The Manual of Detection: A Novel - By Jedediah Berry Page 0,59
his aching arms. He wondered which of the Rooks had afforded him this kindness. There was no sign of the twins here. In every direction he could see nothing but piles of alarm clocks. All the alarm clocks in the city, maybe even his.
“Wake up,” he said to Moore. “Wake up, will you?”
He slid himself forward, bringing his feet close to the other man’s, and tapped the sole of one of his shoes. “Wake up!” he shouted.
“Hush,” said someone behind him. “The Rooks will hear you. You’re lucky they prefer to watch their victims drown.”
Unwin recognized Miss Greenwood’s voice. “How did you get here?” She knelt behind him and tugged at the ropes. “More easily than you did,” she said. She reached into her coat, and Unwin looked over his shoulder to see a dagger appear in her hand. It was identical to those that Brock carried—it must have been the one that pierced her leg during his knife-throwing act, all those years ago.
“I don’t like being left in the rain without an umbrella, Mr. Unwin.”
“Those elephants back there,” he said. “Something ought to be done about them, too.”
She sighed. “Caligari would be furious.”
Unwin waited, listening. He felt the edge of the blade against his spine. Then a sudden pressure, and the fibers of the rope started snapping. He held the umbrella over Miss Greenwood while she cut the cords around his ankles. When they both were standing, she said, “I know you’re not a detective.”
That passage from page ninety-six of the Manual returned to his mind. Without any secrets he was lost forever. But what was he now, if not lost already? “No,” he admitted. “I’m not a detective.”
“Not a watcher either. Something else, some new kind of puppet. I know you’re working for him. I know he sent you to taunt me.”
“Working for whom?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “That phonograph record, those sounds. You have no idea what it’s like, Mr. Unwin. To always find him there waiting for you. To have his eyes in the back of your skull.”
“Whose eyes? What are you talking about?”
She stared at him, still disbelieving. “The Agency’s overseer,” she said. “Your boss.”
It had never occurred to Unwin that the Agency had an overseer, that one person could be in charge. Where, he wondered, was that man’s office?
Miss Greenwood must have seen that his surprise was real. “He and I . . . we know one another,” she said. “Hoffmann is dangerous, Mr. Unwin. But you ought to know that your employer is something worse. Whatever happens, he can’t find out about my daughter.” The barge shifted, and she stumbled on her bad leg. Unwin moved to steady her, but she pushed him away. “There’s a boat tied up on the starboard side,” she said. “Go, take it.”
He gestured at Moore. “Will you cut him free?”
“There’s no time,” she said. “The Rooks aren’t far.”
He held out his hand. “Give me the dagger, then. I’ll do it myself.”
Miss Greenwood hesitated, then turned the handle over to him. “I hope this rescue goes better than your first,” she said.
Unwin knelt and started cutting. These ropes were thicker, and he made slow progress.
“I didn’t want to come back to the city,” Miss Greenwood said.
“I was through with all of this. With the Agency, with Hoffmann; I can hardly tell the difference between them anymore. But I had to come back.”
Unwin cut through the last cord around Moore’s wrists and started working to free his ankles.
“These clocks remind me of a story I used to read to my daughter,” she said. “It was in her favorite book, an old one with a checkered cover. It was the story of a princess who’d been cursed by an old witch—or was it a fairy? In any case, the curse meant she would fall asleep—forever, maybe—if she were pricked by a spinning needle. So the king and queen did what any good parents would do, and piled up all the spindles in the land and burned them, and everyone had to wear worn-out old clothes for a very long time.”
The last of the ropes fell away. He swung Moore’s arms up over his shoulders and with Miss Greenwood’s help lifted him onto his back. She put the umbrella into his hand, and for a moment they stood looking at one another.
“How did the story end?” he asked.
It was not a question she had expected. “They missed one of the spindles, of course.”