finish the question.
Miss Palsgrave looked down at him. In the dark he could see only the dull gleam of her eyes. “The sleeping king and the madman at the gates,” she said. “On the one side a kind of order, on the other a kind of disorder. We need them both. That’s how it’s always been.”
“But your boss—my boss. He’s a murderer.”
“The scales have tipped too far,” Miss Palsgrave agreed. “When Hoffmann made a deal with the overseer, he stopped working for the carnival and started working for himself. Their deal fell apart on November twelfth because Sivart solved that case correctly and Hoffmann imagined he had been betrayed by his conspirator. Now the Agency oversteps its bounds while the carnival rots in the rain. Hoffmann’s grown desperate over the years. He’ll drown the city in nightmare just to have it for his own again.”
They came to the enormous machine at the other end of the archive. Here the air smelled of wax and electricity. On a wheeled cart nearby was a row of freshly pressed phonograph records. Now that Unwin knew the truth of the Agency’s overseer, he saw this place in a new light. A repository of the city’s most private thoughts, fancies, and urges, all in the hands of a man who would coerce and torment to learn what he wanted to know, who would murder an old friend to keep his secrets safe. Unwin’s own dreams were out there, he thought, along with those of anyone who had ever drawn the attention of the Agency’s unblinking eye.
“How could you allow Arthur such . . .” He struggled to find the right word. “. . . such trespass?”
“There was a time when I thought it necessary,” Miss Palsgrave said. “Hoffmann was too dangerous, and we needed every tool to fight him.”
“And now?”
She seemed, for a moment, uncertain. “Now a lot of things must be changed.”
The two detectives Unwin had seen on the elevator with Detective Screed—Peake and Crabtree—had arrived at the middle of the archive. They cast grim glances at the huge pink chair, the lamp, the rug. Peake smacked his flashlight against his palm and said, “Forgot my spare batteries.”
“Hush up,” said Crabtree, even louder.
The detectives were limping. Peake had cuts and bruises on his face, and Crabtree’s green jacket was torn along one shoulder: Miss Benjamin must have neglected to warn them about the ninth step. They aimed their flashlights deeper into the archive. A few of the underclerks sat up, removed their headphones, and blinked into the light.
“Enoch and Arthur have both grown stupid and hungry,” Miss Palsgrave said to Unwin. “Someone will have to see them unseated. Someone will have to restore the old balance.”
“Not me,” Unwin said.
Miss Palsgrave sighed. “No,” she said. “I suppose not.”
Behind the cart of phonographs was a caged platform—the dumbwaiter. Miss Palsgrave opened the wire mesh door with her free hand and gently set Unwin inside.
“Where do I go now?” Unwin asked.
She leaned close and said, “You go up.”
She took hold of the rope that hung from the ceiling and began to pull. Unwin fell against the floor of the little car as it shot into the air. He was treated to a brief view of the archive from above, of the pink chair glowing under its lamp, of the underclerks waking and sitting up in their beds, and of Miss Palsgrave, formidable in her lavender dress, drawing him into the air by the force of her great arms as the detectives closed in on her.
Unwin had to remind himself to breathe as the pulley far above creaked under the strain. In that nothing-place between here and there, time slowed, hiccupped, leapt forward. He felt he was still separated from his body, an invisible specter in someone else’s dream. Seams of light marking the secret doors into offices throughout the building flitted past. Unwin heard voices on the other sides of the walls, heard typewriters, footsteps. He was seeing the world from the other side now—from the center of mystery, out into the lighted place he had once inhabited.
The ascent ended abruptly, and his arrival was announced by the ringing of a little bell. Unwin tapped the wall in front of him, and a panel flew open. When he clambered out of the dumbwaiter, he found himself once again on the thirty-sixth floor, in the office of Edward Lamech.
The watcher’s body was gone now, but Unwin was not alone. Detective Screed stood beside the desk, a few papers