The Manual of Detection: A Novel - By Jedediah Berry Page 0,96

tobacco smoke. On each table was a vase of withering lilies. They sat themselves in the back of the room.

“Your accomplice,” Screed said, “has been under surveillance since shortly after she returned to the city two weeks ago. We lost track of her for a day here and there, but we know it’s become her habit to take her meals at the Gilbert, where, as you know, she is currently lodged.”

The restaurant was all but empty. A few old, well-dressed men sat at a table near the center of the room, speaking quietly. When Unwin could hear what they were mumbling, he heard only numbers. They were arguing about an account of some kind, or the dream of an account. Seated to Unwin’s left, alone with his napkin tucked into his shirt collar, was the man with the pointy blond beard. He scrutinized an omelette while cutting small bites from it and chewing with measured care. When he saw Unwin look in his direction, he flashed him a glance of smug triumph.

“We will wait here for Miss Greenwood’s arrival,” Screed went on, “and you will greet her without rising from your seat. When she sees you, you will urge her to join us. When you speak of me, you will speak of me—in whatever sly, insinuating terms with which the two of you are accustomed to communicating—as one who has been brought into your plot to infiltrate the Agency.”

Unwin had no choice but to play along. “She’ll suspect something,” he said. “Even if she does sit with us, she won’t tell us anything.”

“That’s in your hands,” Screed said. “I’m giving you a chance to help, Unwin. You should be grateful. Now drink some more, your glass is too full.”

Screed had insisted on whiskey sours for both of them. There was no waiter in the place, but a red-jacketed bellhop—or a boy dreaming he was a bellhop—had filled in, taking the order and returning with the drinks. Unwin sipped from his glass and winced.

“Yes,” Screed said, answering a question he must have silently posed to himself, “my biggest case yet.” He took the maraschino cherry from his drink and plucked it from its stem with his teeth.

Just then the bellhop came back into the restaurant. The boy was oddly alert, and his actions more precise than those of the other sleepwalkers Unwin had seen. He went to the man with the blond beard and gestured with his thumb and pinkie open over his ear: a telephone call. The man with the blond beard looked annoyed but set down his fork, a bit of omelette still stuck to it, and rose from his chair. His napkin was dangling from his collar when he followed the bellhop into the lobby.

Unwin wondered whether it was the overseer on the phone, impatient for an update from his agent.

A minute later the bellhop came back. This time he had on his arm an old man in a tattered frock coat. He directed him to a table nearby, and the old man was about to sit when he saw Screed. He looked at Unwin, then at Screed again, then nodded and closed his eyes in solemn resignation.

It was Colonel Sherbrooke Baker. Like them, he was perfectly awake. “So you have me at last,” he said. “Battered, world-weary, a lowly fugitive, and a threat to no one. But you have me, and now you demand my surrender.”

Screed glowered at Unwin, as though he were somehow responsible and had better not try anything.

The colonel went on, “Once in the poor dregs of his life, the old wretch determines to take his meal in the company of his fellow men, and that is when you nab him. So be it. Better this than to die alone in my cell, wondering how long before I am found by room service, stiff in my chair, eyes gone to jelly.”

Screed’s mustache was twitching as Colonel Baker sat with them at their table.

“My name is Sherbrooke Thucydides Baker,” he said. “I am eighty-nine years old. I am going to tell you the story of my first three deaths and how I was undone at last by the wiles of a madman and his treacherous agents.”

Screed recognized the name—he knew Sivart’s case files as well as anyone, if only out of envy. Slowly grasping the situation, he said, “You’ve made the smart choice, Baker. Why don’t you start from the beginning?” He took the notepad from Lamech’s office out of his pocket and gave it