The Manual of Detection: A Novel - By Jedediah Berry Page 0,99
Cat & Tonic?”
The bellhop frowned and shook his head, struggling with the words. “I don’t,” he said. “I’m just the bellhop. But Dad says I might get promoted to desk clerk if I keep my head screwed on straight.”
While the bellhop was talking, Unwin began to circle slowly around him. But Tom grabbed his wrist and held him there. The boy’s grip was strong. “I don’t know anything about the Cat & Tonic,” he said. “But I’m good at getting messages to people.”
“You have a message for me? From whom?”
Unwin could see the boy’s breath as he spoke. “She’s on the fourteenth floor right now, asleep with her head on your old desk. Mr. Duden is trying to wake her, and he might succeed soon. In the meantime she and I are in . . .” Tom trailed off, frowning again. “We’re in direct communication.”
Unwin looked around. He saw no one on the street, no one looking down from the windows above. He moved back under the umbrella and whispered, “Direct communication? With Penelope Greenwood, you mean.”
“No names,” Tom said. “Don’t know who—”
“Don’t know who might be listening in,” Unwin said. “That’s fine, Tom. But what’s the message?”
“She and her dad are in the mist. No, the midst. Of a contest of wills. She’s trying to stop him. She says she’s on your side.”
“But I saw their reunion,” Unwin said. “Her father said they would work together. He said it wasn’t the first time.”
Tom tilted his head, as though his ears were antennae and he was trying to improve reception. “She was eleven years old on November twelfth. He . . . conscripted her.”
“Into what, exactly?”
Tom closed his eyes and breathed slowly, swaying a little. A minute passed, and Unwin thought that he had lost him, that the connection to Penelope—whatever its nature—was broken. Then the bellhop said quietly, “Her father is no puppeteer. But she had another teacher. From him she learned to . . . to let herself in, but also to leave things behind.”
“What sorts of things, Tom?”
“Instructions,” he said.
This was the part of Hoffmann’s scheme that had boggled Edwin Moore that morning. The magician did not know how to plant suggestions into a sleeping mind—but his daughter did. Caligari had taught her how.
“Instructions,” Unwin repeated. “To get up in the night and cross tomorrow off your calendar. Or to steal your neighbors’ alarm clocks. Or worse, to abandon all sense and help turn the world upside down.” Unwin gestured toward a man who had exited the hotel with a suitcase. He was going along the sidewalk, leaving his clothes draped over everything he saw. He had already dressed a letterbox and a fire hydrant. Now he was trying to button a jacket around a lamppost.
“She says that’s not her doing,” Tom replied. “They went together through the sleeping minds of the city last night, and she did what he asked. She opened up their deepest selves and jammed them open. But she made sure you and everyone at the Agency were left alone. And in some people she planted the . . . seeds of resistance. A limin . . . a liminal . . .”
“A liminal directive,” Unwin said, recalling the words of the underclerk in the third archive: something to do, someplace to go. So the sleepwalkers Moore had gone off with were special operatives. But they were working for Penelope Greenwood, not Enoch Hoffmann. “She tricked him, then. But what was the directive? What were her instructions?”
Tom tightened his grip and shook Unwin’s arm. “You have to stop him, Charles. Her father’s onto her, and she doesn’t have much time.”
“What about Sivart?”
“There’s barely anything left of him.” Tom was looking directly at Unwin now, his eyes nearly open. “He’s been broken. None of us can help him.”
“I have a plan—”
“There isn’t time. Get back to the Cat & Tonic, quickly. Finish this.”
The bellhop thrust the umbrella at him, and Unwin took it, but Tom left his arm extended, hand palm up. A moment passed before Unwin realized that the boy was waiting for a tip. He fished a quarter out of his pocket and gave it to him.
They turned at a chugging, rattling sound, just audible over the patter of rain on the umbrella. To Unwin the sound was unmistakable—it was the Rooks’ steam truck. The vehicle was not far off, and running hot, to judge from the high-pitched whine that accompanied the thunderous clamor of its engine. Jasper was coming for him.