Part 10 (1/2)

The train was leaving the station. The custodian had not followed.

TEN.

On Infiltration The hideout, the safe house, the base of operations: you may a.s.sume that your enemy has one, but not that it is to your advantage to find it.

An enormous plaster clown stood bowlegged at the entrance of the Travels-No-More Carnival. The colors of its face and suit were chipped and faded to shades of brown and purple, and the arch of its legs were the gates through which visitors were compelled to pa.s.s. The clown's smile was welcoming, but in a hungry sort of way.

Beyond was the flooded labyrinth of the Travels-No-More. Planks of wood lay over wide pools of muddy water between the remaining attractions-though ”attractions” was hardly the word. Great machines that had once swayed and wheeled and swerved now lay rusting, their broken arms sprawled amid collapsed tents and decrepit booths. The place was full of lost things, and Edwin Moore was one of them now. Looking at it, Unwin felt lost himself. He knew he could not leave the old clerk to this place.

He had gone no more than a few steps beyond the gate when the window of a nearby booth shot open. A man with a cigarette clenched in his teeth peered at him through a cloud of yellow smoke. He had a thick white mustache, stringy shoulder-length hair, and he wore an oilskin duster b.u.t.toned tight at his throat. From out of the collar, angular black tattoos like the roots of an overturned tree spread up his leathery neck to his jawline.

”Tickets,” he said.

Unwin approached the booth, and the man folded his hands in front of him. The same tattoos extended from under his sleeves and down to his knuckles.

”How much?” Unwin asked him.

”Exactly,” he said.

”Exactly what?”

”It'll cost you.”

”Yes, but how much?”

”That's right,” the man said, disclosing a yellow grin.

Unwin felt he had gotten himself into some kind of trouble, but he could not tell what kind.

The man was puffing at his cigarette, saying nothing. Then he squinted and looked past Unwin toward the entrance.

Someone else was walking under the legs of the enormous clown. She held a newspaper over her head as she limped toward them through the rain. It was Miss Greenwood, wrapped in a red raincoat. She insinuated herself beneath Unwin's umbrella and tossed aside the sopping newspaper. She looked more tired than ever-the revelries of the night before had deepened her exhaustion.

The man in the booth unb.u.t.toned the front of his jacket. He had on a shoulder belt of worn leather, lined by a dozen or more gleaming daggers. He removed one and held it lightly by the blade end. Unwin checked its appearance against his memory of the Agency's index of weapons: small, slim, with a pommel weighted for balance. It was a throwing knife.

”Mr. Brock,” Miss Greenwood said, ”surely you're not troubling anyone for tickets on a day like this.”

Unwin recognized the name from Sivart's reports. This was Theodore Brock, who had arrived in the city as Caligari's knife thrower and remained in it as one of Hoffmann's lieutenants. It was his stray throw, all those years ago, that had left Cleo with her limp. He spit his cigarette at their feet and said, ”Well, if it isn't the enchantress Cleopatra Greenwood, come down to visit her old friends.”

”I'm not here for a reunion, just a little outing with my new friend, who seems to have gotten ahead of me somehow.” She shot Unwin a playfully angry look.

”And that's why you need a ticket. It costs money to see the freaks.” He smiled again. ”But you ought to know that, Cleo. How's the leg doing? Still hurt when it rains?”

She drew close to the window. ”My guest is an Agency Eye,” she said. ”It's on business of his that we've come here. I think I can convince him not to see too much while we stroll the grounds, but for that you'll have to be nice.”

”Agency?” Brock said. ”But the hat's all wrong.”

Miss Greenwood raised one hand, cupping it to her lips as though to whisper something in his ear. He leaned forward, then started and brandished his dagger, eyes going wide. She said something Unwin could not make out, and Brock's eyelids fluttered closed. The dagger fell from his hand and embedded itself in the ticket table; his head dropped hard beside it. The knife thrower was asleep.

Miss Greenwood looked around, then pulled the window shut. ”Quickly,” she said.

They went along paths strewn with broken bottles and toys, feathers, illegible playbills. The old fairground pavilions along the midway were constructed to look like the heads of giant animals, their mouths agape to allow access to the exhibits installed in the domes of their skulls. A pig's snout was a tunnel into fetid darkness, the eyes of a fish served as bulging windows, a cat's fangs were stalact.i.tes.

They pa.s.sed them by and came to a causeway of wooden planks set on cinder blocks. Miss Greenwood went first, and Unwin followed.

”What did you do to Brock?”

”I told him to go to sleep,” she said.

In some of his reports, Sivart had hinted that Cleo Greenwood possessed certain strange talents, picked up during her days with the Traveling Carnival. Unwin had a.s.sumed that the detective was being fanciful, or even poetic (truly, he had once written, he had once written, the lady is a knockout the lady is a knockout ), so Unwin cut those details. Perhaps he had been wrong to do so. ), so Unwin cut those details. Perhaps he had been wrong to do so.

They stepped off the plank and walked along a row of junk stalls and shooting galleries. Mechanical ducks were perched on rusted rails, punched through with holes from real bullets. The rain pattering on abandoned popcorn carts and unmoving carousels made for a melancholy kind of music. ”So different from the carnival I arrived with,” Miss Greenwood said.

It was true: sixteen years ago Unwin had seen the sputtering caravan of red, orange, and yellow trucks pa.s.sing through his neighborhood on their way to the fairgrounds. A west-side bridge had been closed that morning, to allow for the safe conduct of the elephants, and the newspapers ran photographs of the animals rearing on their hind legs. Posters were everywhere in the city, promising strange and stirring delights: Nikolai the mind reader, the giantess Hildegard, and Isidoro ”The Man of Memory.” But the show's main attraction was the biloquist Enoch Hoffmann.

Unwin never saw his performance, but he heard plenty about it in those weeks. The Man of a Thousand and One Voices was an unlikely magician, eschewing cape and hat in favor of the baggy, ill-fitting gray suit he wore with sleeves rolled. He gestured indifferently with little fingers while performing his feats and was quickly upstaged by his own illusions, the magic working almost in spite of him. Those who saw the show described the impossible-phantoms onstage, or animals, or inanimate objects, speaking to them in the voices of people they knew: relatives and friends, living and deceased. Those specters were privy to secret knowledge, and some who heard fainted at the revelations.

”The trick I used on Brock just now came in handy while I worked here,” Miss Greenwood said. ”Enoch and I had our own sideshow. Hypnosis, fortunetelling-that kind of thing. Of course, all that's changed. The remnants are no longer in the habit of entertaining.”

The remnants of Caligari's were mentioned in numerous reports that Unwin had filed over the years. They were a crooked cabal, the progeny of a crooked line-plotters, scoundrels, and thieves, each one. Without them Hoffmann could not have seized control of the city's underworld. Unwin had seen them spying since the moment he and Miss Greenwood left the ticket booth. They stood in tattered coats beneath the eaves of game booths or skulked in the shadows of defunct rides, cooking breakfast over open fires: scowling roustabouts, disgruntled clowns, arthritic acrobats. They spoke together in whispers and guffaws or paced alone and spit. Unwin could smell sausage frying, could see the smoke of it threading the rain.

”They hate the Agency,” Miss Greenwood said. ”But you're safe with me, so long as I want you to be.”

She had scarcely bothered to veil the threat-she was Unwin's captor as much as his guide. And here, in the den from which Hoffmann had recruited his every agent and thug, he knew he would need her. How many of the remnants had been apprehended due to the Agency's work? More than he cared to count. He clenched his teeth and tried not to sound bitter as he said, ”That story you told me, about the open windows and the roses. You knew the cause from the beginning.”

”I wasn't the only one playing tricks, Detective Unwin. It was Ed Lamech I'd wanted to see, remember?”

”But you meant for me to be there, at the Cat & Tonic.”

”I needed someone to be my eyes.”

”What did you expect me to see?”

”Strange things,” she said. ”The beginnings of a great and terrible crime. Hoffmann himself, maybe.”

”And a murder.”

Miss Greenwood lost her balance a moment, and Unwin put his hand under her elbow to steady her. She was flexing her bad leg. ”Murder?” she said.

”Samuel Pith. The Rooks shot him.”

She looked away. ”That's horrid. Don't get me wrong. Sam was always a bit of a stuffed s.h.i.+rt. And he knew the risks. But he was an innocent, when it comes down to it. The rules must be changing.”

”There are rules?”