The Manual of Detection: A Novel - By Jedediah Berry Page 0,73
assigned a replacement yet. The whole archive could fall into ruin.”
She paused and looked up at the shutters, seeming to see through them and into an archive in flames, sheets of burning paper falling out of the sky, columns of file drawers collapsing under their own weight. Unwin wondered if she knew that the world outside the Agency office was already in the process of disintegrating.
“Why was she promoted?” Unwin asked. “Did anyone inform you?”
Miss Benjamin blinked away her vision. “I hardly see the relevance of that,” she said, and poured more whiskey into their cups. “You know perfectly well that detectives are barred from the archives, Mr. Unwin. Only messengers are permitted to move freely from one floor to another. And under no circumstances should a detective be caught drinking whiskey with a chief clerk. So what are you doing down here?”
Answer questions with questions, he reminded himself—he had read that in the Manual. “How many chief clerks are there?”
Miss Benjamin smiled. “I’m not unwilling to help you, Detective. I’m just saying that there’s a price. Now, what were you looking for out there in my archive?”
Unwin found that he liked this chief clerk’s plainspokenness, but he was not yet sure if he could trust her. “I was looking for my old case files,” he said. This was not completely a lie—seeing those files would have been of interest, especially after all he learned since his first meeting with Edwin Moore.
Miss Benjamin laughed, and from outside the booth came the sound of shuffling feet.
“Are you surprised?” Unwin asked. “I’ve done plenty of case files. The Oldest Murdered Man, The Three Deaths of Colonel Baker.”
“Yes, yes,” said Miss Benjamin. “But you’re talking post-detection, Mr. Unwin. Solutions. This”—she gestured to the card catalogs around her and, by extension, the file drawers beyond—“is Mysteries.”
“Only Mysteries?”
“Only Mysteries! What did you expect, everything jammed into one archive? That would be an organizational nightmare. I am Chief Clerk of Mysteries, and the underclerks out there are familiar only with mysteries. It’s why they don’t know what a detective is—they don’t need to. The vicissitudes of detection aren’t part of their work. As far as they know, mysteries come here and stay here. It’s why they’re so nervous. Imagine having all the questions but none of the answers.”
“I don’t have to imagine it,” Unwin said.
“Three.”
“What?”
“You asked me how many chief clerks there are. There are three. Miss Burgrave, Miss Palsgrave, and myself. Miss Burgrave is Chief Clerk of Solutions. It’s her archive you meant to infiltrate, not mine.” She lowered her eyelids and added, “Though it isn’t a terrible thing, having someone to talk to. Your average underclerk doesn’t know a woman from a pile of paper clips.”
Unwin sipped from his whiskey—just as little as he could, because he already felt dizzy from it. “What about Miss Palsgrave’s archive?” he asked. “What is kept there?”
“What I want to know is why a clerk, promoted though he may be, would want to see his own files. Don’t you fellows know your cases back to front?”
“Yes,” Unwin said. “But it’s less a matter of content than of cross-referencing.”
She was silent. He would have to give her at least part of the truth. “The case files are categorized as solutions, and rightly so. They are the finest, most thorough solutions imaginable. But what if an error, a purposeful error conceived for some dark purpose, had been inserted into one of those files? What if an aspect of a solution were thus rendered a mystery? What then, Miss Benjamin?”
“You would not have done such a thing.”
“I have, Miss Benjamin. Many times, perhaps, though without realizing it. I believe that a man was murdered to keep it a secret. Somewhere in these archives are mysteries that have been passed off as solutions, so they belong here, Miss Benjamin, in your archive. And they are deliberately being kept from you.
“Under normal circumstances, I could work through the messengers, calling up one file after another, checking references, piecing the puzzle together. But that would take time. And I don’t know if I can trust the usual channels. Will you help me, Miss Benjamin? Will you tell me the way to the Archive of Solutions?”
He was not sure what he was getting himself into, but Moore had told him that the key to understanding the phonograph record was here in the archives. If not in the first, then maybe in the second.
Miss Benjamin stood, and Unwin saw that she was tall, perhaps a foot