Part 15 (1/2)
He was not sure what he was getting himself into, but Moore had told him that the key to understanding the phonograph record was here in the archives. If not in the first, then maybe in the second.
Miss Benjamin stood, and Unwin saw that she was tall, perhaps a foot taller than he was. She crossed her arms and looked worried. ”There are several paths to the Archive of Solutions,” she said, ”but most will be too dangerous.” She pushed her chair aside and lifted an edge of the frayed blue rug. A trapdoor was beneath. ”This pa.s.sage is reserved for the use of the chief clerks. I don't think anyone but the three of us remembers it's here.”
She lifted a bra.s.s ring and pulled the trapdoor open. A stairwell spiraled downward into the gloom.
”Thank you,” he said.
Miss Benjamin took a step closer to him. With the shutters over the window, the air in the booth had grown warmer, and now Unwin found it difficult to breathe, especially when each breath carried with it the sweet aroma of the whiskey on Miss Benjamin's lips.
She said, ”I do know a thing or two about detectives, Mr. Unwin. I know that with a few words you could have won my heart. But you're one of the n.o.ble ones, aren't you?”
Unwin did not contradict her, though he doubted that even the Manual Manual would contain the few words-whatever they were-to which Miss Benjamin was referring. would contain the few words-whatever they were-to which Miss Benjamin was referring.
”What about the third archive?” he said. ”You didn't tell me about Miss Palsgrave.”
Miss Benjamin stepped back. ”I won't,” she said. ”This is Mysteries, after all, and Miss Palsgrave's work is her own.”
Unwin put on his hat and started down the stairs. Miss Benjamin had seemed tall to him, and now, waist-deep in the floor, he looked up and found her terrible and magnificent, a towering, sulky idol in a brown wool skirt. ”Good-bye, Miss Benjamin.”
She capped her silver flask and sighed. ”Watch out for the ninth step,” she said, and Unwin had to duck as she kicked the trapdoor closed over his head.
THE STAIRS WERE LIT only by dim lamps that flickered as though to relay a coded message. There was no banister. The wooden steps creaked underfoot, and Unwin felt each with the toe of his shoe before stepping down. Was it a trick of the whiskey, that the walls of the pa.s.sage seemed to narrow as Unwin descended? Or had he always been a claustrophobe and only needed an experience like this to find out?
The ninth step appeared as st.u.r.dy as the others, but he skipped it as Miss Benjamin advised. Unwin found it difficult to stop counting anything once he had begun. Counting sheep, in fact, was his surest route to insomnia-by morning he could fill whole pastures with a vast and clamorous flock. Now he counted steps, and by the twentieth he felt certain the walls really were narrowing, and the ceiling was getting lower, too. How deep did the stairway go? Maybe Miss Benjamin had tricked him into an oubliette. She could have locked the trapdoor and sent a message to Detective Screed by now-but then, perhaps Mr. Duden already had.
The lamps were fewer in number here, and dimmer. He hoped Edwin Moore had known what he was talking about. Could the old man's memory be trusted at all? Unwin had to bend low to take the last several steps. The fifty-second was the last.
Here was a plain wooden door no more than four feet tall. From beyond it came a sound-a wild, incessant clattering, as of many people typing without pause. Unwin felt for a doork.n.o.b but could not find one. When he pushed, the door swung open on silent hinges. He ducked through and had to remain crouched on the other side because the ceiling was so low.
The room was barely larger than the desk in his own office, though finished all in dark wood that gleamed in the light from a chandelier. Where Unwin had expected a legion of underclerks, he saw one tiny woman, her silvery hair pinned in a mound atop her head, seated at a desk at the center of the room. He stooped over her, an uncouth giant in a too-small cave, but she did nothing to acknowledge his presence. Her typing was the quickest Unwin had ever seen-quicker than Emily's, quicker, even, than the man with the blond beard's. The sound of one key-clap was indiscernible from the next, and the carrier bell never ceased to reverberate, chiming the end of each line in rapid succession.
”Miss Burgrave?” Unwin said.
The woman stopped typing and peered at him, the wrinkles at the edges of her mouth and eyes fixed in severe concentration. She wore red lipstick, and her cheeks, soft and sagging, were the pink of pink roses. ”Oh, it's you,” she said, then went back to her work.
Her little hands were a hundred-fingered blur. The paper went into her typewriter from a single great roll that had been mounted to the front of her desk, then onto a second roll mounted just above the first. This system freed her of the need to pause and insert fresh sheets.
Unwin bent over to read what she was typing, but Miss Burgrave stopped again and stared at him, causing him to withdraw so quickly that he b.u.mped his head against the ceiling.
”This will not do,” Miss Burgrave said. ”You know what it means to be on a schedule, of course, so I will not rebuke you unnecessarily, as that would be tantamount to redundancy, which I already risk by speaking to you at all, and risk again by observing the risk, and so again by observing the observation. In this we could proceed endlessly. Will you not relent? Are you really so stubborn? I ask these questions rhetorically, and thus degrade further the value of my speech.”
”I'm not sure I follow you, Miss Burgrave, but if perhaps you'd allow me into the archives-”
”If perhaps,” she repeated, her wrinkles deepening. ”Mr. Unwin, we shall brook no degree of mysteriousness on this floor. So that weak-kneed naif allowed you entrance through the trapdoor, and you believe that ent.i.tles you to further transgression-and with my a.s.sistance, at that.” she repeated, her wrinkles deepening. ”Mr. Unwin, we shall brook no degree of mysteriousness on this floor. So that weak-kneed naif allowed you entrance through the trapdoor, and you believe that ent.i.tles you to further transgression-and with my a.s.sistance, at that.”
Unwin kept quiet now. In spite of himself, he glanced again at the typescript mounted to the desk.
”Facts,” Miss Burgrave explained. ”Dead facts, all questions beaten out of them, all lines of inquiry followed to their termini. Answers and answers to answers, the end of the road, of the world, maybe. Yes, that is how I feel sometimes, as though the world has already ended, the shades drawn over every window, the stars burned down to little black beads, the moon waned beyond waning, all life a dollop of ash, and still I remain at work, trying to explain what happened.”
”Explain to whom?”
”Ah, now we come to something.” Miss Burgrave rose from her chair, and Unwin saw that she stood no taller than a child. She waved Unwin out of her way and opened a panel hidden in the wall. From there she drew a book about the size of The Manual of Detection The Manual of Detection but bound in red rather than green. She turned to a certain page and, without having to search, read aloud a single paragraph: but bound in red rather than green. She turned to a certain page and, without having to search, read aloud a single paragraph:
Solutions, as distilled by the clerks so Entrusted, from the Reports of detectives so a.s.signed, and borne by messengers to the aforementioned Dominions, are there to be studied and Linked each to the other according to common significance, and so prepared for Review by the Overseer. It is solely to the Chief Clerk of Solutions to whom this Task falls, so let him work alone, unhindered by his subordinates in their Courses and his Seniors in their many Doings.
”Where are your underclerks, then?” Unwin asked.
Miss Burgrave sighed. She seemed to have abandoned something: a conviction, maybe, or a hope. She replaced the book and closed the panel, then gestured for Unwin to follow her through a door behind her desk. In the pa.s.sage beyond, Unwin was able to stand straight again. He heard the quiet commotion of clerkly work: the whisperings, the pen scratchings, the hurried footfalls. But those who made these sounds were nowhere visible in the long hall, nor in the many branches extending from it. Out of the walls protruded two rows of file drawers, one near the floor and the other at waist height, situated so that all their contents were visible. Now and then these drawers would disappear into the walls, only to return a moment later.
As they walked, Miss Burgrave explained, ”We are now between the walls of the Archive of Solutions. My underclerks are without, accessing what files they require, according to the instructions I give them by various means, including notes, bellpulls, and color-coded signals. They do not know me, nor would I recognize them, except by the way each clears his throat.”
She took a stepstool from a shadow, climbed it, and switched on a light that extended over one of the drawers. She squinted and adjusted the gla.s.ses on her nose. ”This is what you are here for, no doubt.”
Unwin perused the t.i.tles quickly. There they were, in chronological order-all the work he had done in his twenty years, seven months, and some-odd days at the Agency, every word of every case file, the great works and the lesser-known, the grand capers and the minor mysteries. They barely filled the single drawer.
Miss Burgrave watched attentively as Unwin drew out the file for The Oldest Murdered Man. A long card was fixed to the back of the file, covered with typed references to files elsewhere in the archives. Here was the original mystery, upstairs with Miss Benjamin, here the case files of other detectives overlapping with this one. And below them references to another archive, a third.
He said to Miss Burgrave, ”These refer to files kept by Miss Palsgrave. What are they?”
Miss Burgrave winced. ”For a Chief Clerk of Mysteries,” she said, ”that Miss Benjamin has a great deal to say. How I long for the days of Miss Margrave, who preceded her in the position. Now, there was a woman who knew how to keep a thing to herself. She died just a few days after she retired. Nothing unusual in that. Some people have little in them except the work. But it's something of a syndrome here at the Agency. Clerks and underclerks are immune, mind you. But anyone who knows anything about anything is granted a very short retirement. I will have my own before long, I suppose. And if laws of proportion apply, then my retirement shall be very short indeed. And your own watcher-which is to say your detective's watcher-is due to retire soon. A nice man, Ed Lamech. I'll miss him.”
Unwin understood then that Miss Burgrave knew nothing about his recent promotion. And why would she? His promotion was a mystery even to him, and Miss Burgrave knew only the solutions. So she had not heard of Lamech's murder either.
”You hesitate to speak,” Miss Burgrave said, ”and I warned you once about our tolerance for mysteriousness on this floor.”
He chose his words carefully. ”It was the discovery of Lamech's death, among other mysteries, Miss Burgrave, that brought me here.”
She covered her mouth with one small hand, steadying herself against the file drawer with the other. After a moment she said, ”Now, Ed Lamech, he and I used to play cards together. That was before all this, of course. Miss Margrave and I shared a desk, and the archive was just two cardboard boxes at the back of the room: one for mysteries, one for solutions. Edwin Moore kept the files in order. There was a big table at the center of the room where the detectives would lay out mug shots and maps of the city. They smoked and talked big and planned stings; Ed was the loudest of the bunch, but he always had something nice to say. He knew how to make a person feel a little taller. Some nights we'd clear off the table and play a few hands, all of us together. Yes, I always thought Ed Lamech and I might sit down and play cards again, when we found the time.”
She switched off the light and said, ”Help me down the stepladder, Mr. Unwin,” and he did, but when she reached the floor, she did not let go of his hand. ”This way.”
Unwin's eyes did not have time to adjust as Miss Burgrave pulled him more and more quickly through the darkness between the walls. When a drawer opened or closed, a band of light from the archive swept momentarily across the floor, but that was all, and Unwin knew he would not find his way back on his own. They came to a corridor that was almost entirely dark, from the walls of which no file drawers extended.
”You go that way,” Miss Burgrave said, ”and you tell Miss Palsgrave that I sent you, though I doubt she cares anymore about what I have to say.”
She took her hand back and added, ”She works here, but she's never been like the rest of us; not really. Her curriculum vitae is a curious one, to say the least. Be wary of her. Be polite.”
Unwin said, ”I will, Miss Burgrave. But please, tell me one thing. If you know your underclerks only by their coughs, how did you know me?”