The Manual of Detection: A Novel - By Jedediah Berry Page 0,95

in his hands. When he saw Unwin, he stuffed the papers into his jacket pocket and drew his pistol, then shook his head as though to say that now, at last, he had seen it all.

“They always come back to the scene,” he said.

SIXTEEN

On Apprehension

Woe to he who checkmates his opponent at last,

only to discover they have been playing cribbage.

Screed looked Unwin up and down, his thin mustache bending with pleasure, or disdain, or both. “You look terrible,” he said. “And again that hat on the thirty-sixth floor.”

Screed’s suit, navy blue, was identical to the one Unwin first saw him in. It had been cleaned and pressed, or exchanged for a pristine duplicate. If Emily had succeeded in bringing him the memo, Screed did nothing to acknowledge it. He patted Unwin down, keeping the pistol trained on him. He was thorough in his search, but all he came up with was the alarm clock from Unwin’s jacket pocket. This he held gently for a moment, as though he thought it might explode. He shook it, put it to his ear, and stuffed it into his own pocket.

“I’m not much of a tough guy,” he said, relaxing his grip on his pistol. “And we’re both gentlemen, as I see it. So I’m going to put this away now, and we’ll talk like gentlemen. Agreed?”

Without waiting for a reply, Screed put his pistol back in its shoulder holster. Then he closed his hand and struck Unwin in the jaw with a quick jab. Unwin fell back against the wall.

“That,” Screed said, “was for getting into the wrong car yesterday.”

Screed grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him out into the hall. The place was silent, the other watchers’ doors all closed. They took the elevator to the lobby, and Screed led him around the corner to where his car was parked. With an unlit cigarette in his mouth, the detective drove them uptown, along the east side of City Park.

The somnambulists were all around them, on every block. They went insensibly through the streets, playing the lead roles in their own delirious dramas. A man in a business suit stood at the edge of the park throwing seeds over his head while a flock of pigeons descended upon him to feed. His face was covered with scratches, his suit soiled and torn. A nearby tree was full of young boys, all of them throwing paper airplanes made of newspaper pages. While Unwin watched, one of the boys leaned too far off his branch and fell.

Screed hit the horn and swerved to avoid an old woman crouched in the middle of the street, her hands covered in dirt. She had relocated a pile of soil onto the pavement and was planting flowers in it.

“People these days!” Screed said.

The detective seemed to think that nothing was out of the ordinary—that this was simply the chaos of the everyday. An enemy to messiness in all its forms, he had called himself. Maybe Hoffmann’s version of the world was how Screed already imagined it to be. When they stopped at a traffic signal, he took the cigarette from his mouth and leaned forward to pick his teeth in the rearview mirror.

Unwin rubbed his jaw where Screed had struck it. He considered the many accounts he had read of the wild assertions made by suspects after they were apprehended. Protestations of his own would only sound like the pleas of a desperate man, but he had to try to convince Screed of his innocence. “I sent you a memo,” he told him. “Part of it was about Sivart’s cases.”

“Uh-huh,” Screed said.

“I found out he was wrong about a lot of things. That most of his cases have never been solved correctly. You could be the one to fix the record, Detective Screed. We can still help one another.”

“Oh, we are going to help one another,” he said, accelerating through the intersection.

Screed reached into his jacket pocket and removed the pad of paper he had taken from Lamech’s office, holding it so Unwin could see the top sheet. It had been rubbed with the flat of a pencil to reveal the impression left by words written on the previous page. Unwin recognized his own handwriting. The Gilbert, Room 202.

They parked across the street from the hotel. Screed directed him through the lobby to the restaurant, a dim, high-ceilinged room, crystal chandeliers coated in dust. The wallpaper, patterned with curlicues of gold specks, was stained yellow from years of