The Manual of Detection (15 page)

“I don’t remember inviting you,” said the woman in the plaid coat.

“Isn’t this Hoffmann’s party?”

She sipped her milk. “Is that what he told you?”

The woman in the plaid coat seemed to know more than he knew. The revelation left him feeling helpless and strangely betrayed. “I thought I’d dragged you into something dangerous,” he said, steadying himself with his umbrella. “But it’s the other way around, isn’t it? Who are you?”

She was starting to look annoyed with him. “It’s too soon for us to speak,” she said. “You haven’t finished your report.”

“My report?”

She sighed and looked at one of her slippered feet. “I am your clerk, you know.”

The music had climbed to a new pitch, and the dancers swerved wildly over the floor. Arthur, the accordionist, bellowed while he played. Unwin turned to see the bassist’s rubber band snap and fly across the room—with that, the set was over.

When he looked back, the woman in the plaid coat was gone. The party was ending, everyone was saying goodbye. What had happened to Emily? He had been rude to leave her on the dance floor alone.

Miss Greenwood found him and took his arm. “A few of us are headed back to my place,” she said.

The butler nodded to them as they went out the door, and a dozen people congratulated Miss Greenwood on her performance. The man in the double-breasted suit was among them, but Emily was not. They went down among the sycamores together, and a bald man in a tuxedo grabbed a handful of fallen samaras and threw them into the air. They spun down around their heads, and he shouted, “Crazy little propellers!”

They returned to the Gilbert Hotel and climbed the fire escape to Miss Greenwood’s room. The man in the tuxedo popped open a bottle of champagne, and they drank. Miss Greenwood laughed and dropped long-stemmed roses everywhere. Then the man in the tuxedo and the man in the double-breasted suit started fighting about which of them had given Miss Greenwood more flowers. After the first sloppy punches were thrown, she kicked them both out.

“I’m going to forget all of this,” she said to Unwin. “He uses me, uses my voice, but keeps me in the dark. So you’ll have to remember for both of us. That’s why I hired you. To remember.”

Unwin left. It was cold outside, and the walk was a long one. He could not tell if he was awake or asleep now—shadows fell at the wrong angles, and the streets curved where they should have been straight. The cold was real enough, however. His hand was a ball of ice around the handle of his umbrella. At last he found the narrow green door of his own apartment building and went upstairs.

A trail of red and orange leaves led from the door all the way into the bathroom.

Detective Sivart was in the tub. The water looked cold and was covered with leaves: a dark little pond. “This channel’s closed to us now, Charlie. That woman, I was wrong about her. She broke my heart. Look.” He pulled a torn leaf out of the water and slapped it onto his chest. It stuck fast.

When Unwin woke, he was on his bed, still wearing his clothes. His head throbbed, his alarm clock was missing, and someone was in the kitchen, making breakfast.

NINE

On Documentation

 

 

 

T
he theft of November twelfth: who can think upon that black patch of the mind, lingering where a memory might be, and not feel cold, lost to it? It seeps like ink along the grooves of the fingertips. Who has not tried to scrub it away?

I was like the rest of you,
Sivart wrote in his report.
Hoodwinked. Taken in. But then I had a hunch that morning, over breakfast. So what if hunches are against policy? I had one, clerk, and I acted on it. Lucky thing, too—for all of us.

No one hired the Agency to solve the crime, because no one knew that it had been committed. Unwin went to sleep on Monday, November eleventh, and woke up on Wednesday, November thirteenth. He rode his bicycle the seven blocks to the Agency offices. He had been a faithful employee for eleven years, four months, and some-odd days, and it had never occurred to him, at this point in his career, to make unofficial trips for unofficial reasons.

On the fourteenth floor, the messengers brought no new assignment for him, so he passed the morning putting the finishing touches on a case from the previous week. It still needed a title. Unwin liked titles, even though the Agency filing system did not require them. Each case was numbered, and only the numbers were used in the official logs. Still, naming cases was a small and harmless pleasure, and occasionally useful, too. If a fellow clerk had a question about one case or another, using the name could save them both time.

Unwin was still pondering the possibilities over lunch. He had brought a sandwich with him in his briefcase. It was turkey and cheese on rye, his Wednesday sandwich. No better way to pass a Wednesday, he thought, than pondering titles over turkey and cheese on rye.

Nothing about this case had made it into the papers, so the clerks at neighboring desks had their eyes on Unwin’s work whenever they thought he was not paying attention. He was always paying attention, though. Only when the file was completed, and for Unwin that meant titled, would his colleagues become privy to its contents.

As he finished his lunch, he became aware of an unusual number of telephone conversations taking place on the floor. Most of the other clerks were hunched over mouthpieces, mumbling. He sensed in their voices a mixture of fear and incredulity.

Were the families and friends of his colleagues calling to find out about his case? This was unprecedented. Unwin crushed his lunch bag and dropped it into the wastepaper basket. He knew by then what he was going to call the file—The Episode of the Facing Mirrors, after the case’s most significant clue—but this show of discourtesy convinced him to delay the final processing for at least another hour.

More telephone calls came in while Unwin sorted papers and vetted old notes. Those who received the calls began to confer with one another, leaning over the aisles to whisper. If he had been deep in a case, Unwin would have found this immensely distracting.

The noise reached a crescendo when Lorraine, one of the most recent hires on the floor, slammed her receiver onto its cradle, flung back her head, and emitted a long, thin wail. As though in response, other clerks knocked stacks of pages off their own desks, rattled drawers, slammed typewriter keys, or went to the windows for air. Unwin, appalled and bewildered, threw himself over his files to protect them.

What had happened?

The overclerk’s door opened, and Mr. Duden materialized for the first time that week. He jogged between the desks toward the center of the room, clutching his hair. “Stop!” he cried.

Unwin could see in the overclerk’s eyes the same panic that had seized the others. Mr. Duden had not come to calm them; he had come to join them. “Stop everything you’re doing!” he cried. “Everything is wrong! It isn’t Wednesday, it’s Tuesday!”

Unwin clutched his files more tightly. Mr. Duden was right—it
was
Tuesday, only two days since Unwin had woken to the ringing of the city’s church bells. Yesterday’s lunch had been cucumber and horseradish: his Monday sandwich.

He counted the number of times he had written the date since arriving that morning.
November thirteenth:
it was everywhere, in his notes, in memoranda, entries of at least four indices, the master log, the ancillary log, in the final sections of The Episode of the Facing Mirrors. He tried to multiply in his mind the number of errors he alone had committed by the number of people on the floor, and that by the number of floors in the Agency office building, but his calculative powers failed him. It would take weeks to undo the damage, and traces of the calamity were sure to abide indefinitely.

The story trickled in over the course of the afternoon, and the clerks gathered in circles at one desk or another, sharing new tidbits of information. Calls came in from people out of town who had noticed the discrepancy—Wednesday in the city and Tuesday everywhere else. There was chaos in the harbor: ships held in port or turned away by bewildered customs officials, goods piled on the wharf with no one to accept them, longshoremen brawling with sailors, radio officers trading insults on every frequency. Traffic on the major bridges halted as delivery trucks choked both lanes and drivers left their vehicles to huddle confused and indignant amid the mayhem. Appointment desks at beauty salons, employment bureaus, doctors’ offices, and the courts were overwhelmed. At the schools children wept over examinations for which they had not studied.

Unwin remained in his own seat, trying not to listen to this news, working instead to list the corrections he would have to make. (He lost the list by the end of the day and would have to start over the next morning.)

That Hoffmann was responsible came as no surprise to anyone on the fourteenth floor, though it added to Unwin’s dread the weight of impending responsibility. Evidently, the magician’s criminal network extended well beyond the rickety sprawl of the Travels-No-More Carnival. His agents had somehow infiltrated all the major newspaper offices, radio stations, and civic departments, just to set the calendars ahead one day. But that did not explain how an additional
X
appeared on wall calendars in homes throughout the city. The biloquist might imitate any one of us, Unwin thought, but surely we are not all working for him.

Though the effects of the disruption were pervasive, it was at the Central Bank that the true purpose of Hoffmann’s gambit was discovered. There a convoy of armored cars with a cargo of gold was slated to arrive midmorning. But because it was expected on Tuesday, and not Wednesday, no members of the bank staff were there to greet them. Hoffmann’s own agents, dressed for the part, were ready to fill in. The gold went from one set of cars to another and would have left in them had Sivart not intervened.

It was all in the early edition the next day, the second issue of the city paper to bear the date of Wednesday, November thirteenth. Unwin skimmed the article in the elevator and went quickly to his desk. He had come to the office early and was the first to arrive on the fourteenth floor, except for Mr. Duden, who peeked through his office door and nodded gratefully. From the circles beneath the overclerk’s eyes, Unwin guessed he had stayed through the night.

Sivart’s report was already on Unwin’s desk. It was improbably thin and, according to the cover page, the first and last in the series.

I don’t think I really have to file a report on this one,
Sivart began,
because I wasn’t working on the Agency’s dime. Call it a sick day if you like. Still, I’ll give you a few of the details, and you can do what you want with them.

There was little in the report that had not already appeared in the papers. Sivart said he had no idea how Hoffmann managed the trick; furthermore, he did not intend to find out. Unwin was dizzied by the implication—to file a case with no true solution!—but he read on.

Sivart, acting on that hunch of his, had alerted several other detectives from his floor and called them all down to the parking lot behind Central Bank. They staked out the place and waited for an hour. Hoffmann’s agents arrived, not in their usual carnival remainders but driving a column of black trucks and dressed as bank staff. Sivart paid attention to one of them in particular.

The limp,
he wrote,
was familiar.