The Manual of Detection: A Novel - By Jedediah Berry Page 0,88

Penelope Greenwood have conspired in advance to allow him this reprieve? Unwin did not know how far he could follow. He was already pushing at the boundaries of what Miss Palsgrave’s machine had recorded, and he felt a tug at the back of his skull. This dream was nested like one of those dolls that contain themselves a dozen times over. But if the chief clerk of the third archive had been observing the dream, might she have shifted the focus from one mind to another, changing frequencies as Lamech said she could? Yes: the closer Unwin kept to Sivart, now, the better the recording maintained its coherence.

Sivart had reached the edge of the carnival. There at its border was a small, almost perfectly square building, its windows reflecting the fairground’s glow. The detective went up to the steps and put his hand on the doorknob, then shut his eyes and wrinkled his brow. “Okay,” he said to himself, “easy as spinning a radio dial.” He turned the knob and threw the door open with a flourish.

On the other side was Unwin’s bathroom.

Sivart went in and looked around. He yawned, stretched, then took his coat off and flung it over the shower curtain. “This is more like it,” he said. He turned on the hot-water faucet and undressed, then reached up into his coat pocket and pulled out a small bottle of smoked glass. This he unstoppered, sniffed, and emptied into the water. The tub filled with bubbles. When the bath was ready, he tested the water with one toe and got in. With his hat down over his face, he began puffing on his cigar, dropping ashes into the tub. The only spot of color in the room was the ember of the cigar, and it burned so hot it made the steam over the tub glow red.

Unwin stretched his legs beneath the covers of an underclerk’s bed in the third archive of the Agency offices. In his dream of Lamech’s dream of Hoffmann’s dream of Sivart’s dream, a dreaming Unwin opened his bathroom door, a fresh towel over his arm, his robe cinched tight around his waist. Sivart scrubbed his feet with a long-handled brush, and the other Unwin said, “Sir, what are you doing in my bathtub?”

Sivart told the other Unwin not to use his name. Somebody could be listening in. He accused him of being forgetful. He said, “I’m going to tell you something that you’re going to forget. Ready?”

“Ready,” the other Unwin said.

“Okay, here it is. You’re awfully worried about getting everything right. I’ve seen what you’ve done to my reports. I’ve read the files. You edit out the good parts. All you care about are details, and clues, and who did what and why. But I’m telling you, Unwin, there’s more to it than that. There’s a . . . I don’t know”—he waved his cigar in the air—“there’s a spirit to the whole enterprise. There’s mystery. The worse it gets, the better it is. It’s like falling in love. Or falling out of love, I forget which. Facts are nothing in comparison. So try, would you? Try to leave the good parts alone?”

“Sorry,” Unwin said, “what were you just saying? I was thinking of something else.”

“Never mind. Just remember this: Chapter Eighteen. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Say it back to me: Chapter Eighteen.”

“Chapter Elephant,” Unwin said.

FIFTEEN

On Skulduggery

If you are not setting a trap, then you

are probably walking into one. It is the

mark of the master to do both at once.

Somewhere an elephant trumpeted. Somewhere else an alarm clock rang. And back in Lamech’s city, someone was screaming.

The cord that had tugged at the back of Unwin’s brain grew taut and wrenched him from the nested dreams, out of his bathroom, out of the carnival, back into the hissing static of the rain. A dark shape rolled on the ground at his feet. It was Lamech, still pulling at his hat, which was shrunk tight over his face now, so that his nose and brow were visible through the felt. Unwin crouched over him, wanting to help somehow, trying to get hold of the hat, though he knew it was impossible.

Lamech kicked his shoes against the cobblestones and bellowed. He twisted and rolled, his shirt coming untucked. Finally the hat popped off. His face was red and sweaty, his mouth a perfect O as he gulped the air.

The hat had lost its shape and lay on the ground, a dead little animal. Lamech slapped it into the