The Manual of Detection: A Novel - By Jedediah Berry Page 0,93

you solved wrong. The both of you, together. You made a good team. That’s how we needed things. Kept the important stuff hidden that way. Except November Twelfth. He got that one right somehow.”

“That your hand on my shoulder, Artie?”

“Listen to me. You’ve done great work, Ed. The most important work anyone in this outfit has done for me. Just not in the way you think. That night at the carnival, when I realized Hoffmann had me—had us all—I knew I had to make a deal. One hand washes the other.”

“Dirties it, more like.”

“Easy now, Ed.”

“How’s it work?” Lamech asked. “You let him get away with the crimes and you do cover-up? The Agency makes its dollar, your puppet looks like a hero, he gets anything he wants.”

Unwin thought it over and was sickened when he saw how it fit together. The phony mummy, Colonel Baker alive and well—Hoffmann and Arthur must have orchestrated each of those cases in advance. Hoffmann kept the priceless trophy he wanted, kept Colonel Baker’s inheritance as well. And the Agency had its star detective and its front-page stories. Sivart had been tricked every time, and Unwin along with him—the whole city, too.

“I had to come clean with you, Ed. Had to let you know how it was.”

Lamech touched his own throat. He danced his fingers around his collar, grasping for something he could not get hold of. He was fighting the hands of a ghost. Unwin thought he could feel them, too.

“Could be something,” Lamech said, gasping.

Arthur was calm as he watched the man opposite him. “Something you haven’t told me yet? Something I need to know that I don’t know already? Probably not, Ed. I’m the overseer. I’m the man who sees too much.”

But there was something, Unwin knew. Penelope. Her existence was the thing Miss Greenwood was fighting to keep hidden from Arthur, and the fight had exhausted her. Would Lamech trade what he knew for his life?

“You were supposed to watch him,” Arthur went on. “That was your job, Ed. But this isn’t happening because you failed. It’s happening because you’ve done so well.”

Unwin went to Lamech, tried to feel for the hands that were choking him. His fingers blurred with the watcher’s, passing through them as though through a mist. Unwin was seized by cold panic. He screamed and grabbed at the air, punched at it.

“I just have to clean your office,” Arthur said. “Tidy up a little.”

Unwin closed his dreaming eyes, but he could not occlude the vision of the man thrashing where he sat. The dream insisted. In the watcher’s office on the thirty-sixth floor, Lamech had died as he died here. His convulsions formed a weird geometry amid the fluttering papers. The pigeons were mesmerized.

Lamech was still trying to speak, but Arthur had begun sorting papers again. Unwin’s senses went gray as the watcher’s body stilled.

He felt himself lifted from the bed, felt the blanket falling off his body. He tried to catch it, but something snatched him upward and away. The earphones landed on the pillow. He saw below him a great lavender dress and knew he lay in the arms of Miss Palsgrave. She cradled him like a child while she slipped his shoes onto his feet. Her breath was warm on his forehead. She put the record back in his briefcase and gave it to him; his arms were shaking as he took it.

At the far end of the archive, near the place where Unwin had entered, a pair of flashlight beams swept through the dark, casting broad ovals of light over the floor. Miss Palsgrave sighed to herself when she saw them, then tapped Unwin’s hat back onto his head. She started walking. Underclerks slept undisturbed all around them.

How cold Unwin was! Through chattering teeth he said, “You used to work for the carnival. For Hoffmann.”

Miss Palsgrave’s voice sounded metallic and thin; it was a voice from a string-and-tin-can telephone. “For Caligari,” she said. “Never for Hoffmann. After he staged his coup, I left.”

“And defected to the Agency.”

“The problem is not belonging to one or the other, Mr. Unwin—and there is always an Agency, always a Carnival to belong to. The problem is belonging for too long to either of them.”

Unwin thought of the little square building that represented his own mind in Lamech’s final dream. It had stood right at the edge of the carnival; might it be annexed in time? “Have I—” he said, but he did not know how to