Part 19 (1/2)

Arthur was calm as he watched the man opposite him. ”Something you haven't told me yet? Something I need to know that I don't know already? Probably not, Ed. I'm the overseer. I'm the man who sees too much.”

But there was something, Unwin knew. Penelope. Her existence was the thing Miss Greenwood was fighting to keep hidden from Arthur, and the fight had exhausted her. Would Lamech trade what he knew for his life?

”You were supposed to watch him,” Arthur went on. ”That was your job, Ed. But this isn't happening because you failed. It's happening because you've done so well.”

Unwin went to Lamech, tried to feel for the hands that were choking him. His fingers blurred with the watcher's, pa.s.sing through them as though through a mist. Unwin was seized by cold panic. He screamed and grabbed at the air, punched at it.

”I just have to clean your office,” Arthur said. ”Tidy up a little.”

Unwin closed his dreaming eyes, but he could not occlude the vision of the man thras.h.i.+ng where he sat. The dream insisted. In the watcher's office on the thirty-sixth floor, Lamech had died as he died here. His convulsions formed a weird geometry amid the fluttering papers. The pigeons were mesmerized.

Lamech was still trying to speak, but Arthur had begun sorting papers again. Unwin's senses went gray as the watcher's body stilled.

He felt himself lifted from the bed, felt the blanket falling off his body. He tried to catch it, but something s.n.a.t.c.hed him upward and away. The earphones landed on the pillow. He saw below him a great lavender dress and knew he lay in the arms of Miss Palsgrave. She cradled him like a child while she slipped his shoes onto his feet. Her breath was warm on his forehead. She put the record back in his briefcase and gave it to him; his arms were shaking as he took it.

At the far end of the archive, near the place where Unwin had entered, a pair of flashlight beams swept through the dark, casting broad ovals of light over the floor. Miss Palsgrave sighed to herself when she saw them, then tapped Unwin's hat back onto his head. She started walking. Underclerks slept undisturbed all around them.

How cold Unwin was! Through chattering teeth he said, ”You used to work for the carnival. For Hoffmann.”

Miss Palsgrave's voice sounded metallic and thin; it was a voice from a string-and-tin-can telephone. ”For Caligari,” she said. ”Never for Hoffmann. After he staged his coup, I left.”

”And defected to the Agency.”

”The problem is not belonging to one or the other, Mr. Unwin-and there is always an Agency, always a Carnival to belong to. The problem is belonging for too long to either of them.”

Unwin thought of the little square building that represented his own mind in Lamech's final dream. It had stood right at the edge of the carnival; might it be annexed in time? ”Have I-” he said, but he did not know how to finish the question.

Miss Palsgrave looked down at him. In the dark he could see only the dull gleam of her eyes. ”The sleeping king and the madman at the gates,” she said. ”On the one side a kind of order, on the other a kind of disorder. We need them both. That's how it's always been.”

”But your boss-my boss. He's a murderer.”

”The scales have tipped too far,” Miss Palsgrave agreed. ”When Hoffmann made a deal with the overseer, he stopped working for the carnival and started working for himself. Their deal fell apart on November twelfth because Sivart solved that case correctly and Hoffmann imagined he had been betrayed by his conspirator. Now the Agency oversteps its bounds while the carnival rots in the rain. Hoffmann's grown desperate over the years. He'll drown the city in nightmare just to have it for his own again.”

They came to the enormous machine at the other end of the archive. Here the air smelled of wax and electricity. On a wheeled cart nearby was a row of freshly pressed phonograph records. Now that Unwin knew the truth of the Agency's overseer, he saw this place in a new light. A repository of the city's most private thoughts, fancies, and urges, all in the hands of a man who would coerce and torment to learn what he wanted to know, who would murder an old friend to keep his secrets safe. Unwin's own dreams were out there, he thought, along with those of anyone who had ever drawn the attention of the Agency's unblinking eye.

”How could you allow Arthur such . . .” He struggled to find the right word. ”. . . such trespa.s.s?”

”There was a time when I thought it necessary,” Miss Palsgrave said. ”Hoffmann was too dangerous, and we needed every tool to fight him.”

”And now?”

She seemed, for a moment, uncertain. ”Now a lot of things must be changed.”

The two detectives Unwin had seen on the elevator with Detective Screed-Peake and Crabtree-had arrived at the middle of the archive. They cast grim glances at the huge pink chair, the lamp, the rug. Peake smacked his flashlight against his palm and said, ”Forgot my spare batteries.”

”Hush up,” said Crabtree, even louder.

The detectives were limping. Peake had cuts and bruises on his face, and Crabtree's green jacket was torn along one shoulder: Miss Benjamin must have neglected to warn them about the ninth step. They aimed their flashlights deeper into the archive. A few of the underclerks sat up, removed their headphones, and blinked into the light.

”Enoch and Arthur have both grown stupid and hungry,” Miss Palsgrave said to Unwin. ”Someone will have to see them unseated. Someone will have to restore the old balance.”

”Not me,” Unwin said.

Miss Palsgrave sighed. ”No,” she said. ”I suppose not.”

Behind the cart of phonographs was a caged platform-the dumbwaiter. Miss Palsgrave opened the wire mesh door with her free hand and gently set Unwin inside.

”Where do I go now?” Unwin asked.

She leaned close and said, ”You go up.”

She took hold of the rope that hung from the ceiling and began to pull. Unwin fell against the floor of the little car as it shot into the air. He was treated to a brief view of the archive from above, of the pink chair glowing under its lamp, of the underclerks waking and sitting up in their beds, and of Miss Palsgrave, formidable in her lavender dress, drawing him into the air by the force of her great arms as the detectives closed in on her.

Unwin had to remind himself to breathe as the pulley far above creaked under the strain. In that nothing-place between here and there, time slowed, hiccupped, leapt forward. He felt he was still separated from his body, an invisible specter in someone else's dream. Seams of light marking the secret doors into offices throughout the building flitted past. Unwin heard voices on the other sides of the walls, heard typewriters, footsteps. He was seeing the world from the other side now-from the center of mystery, out into the lighted place he had once inhabited.

The ascent ended abruptly, and his arrival was announced by the ringing of a little bell. Unwin tapped the wall in front of him, and a panel flew open. When he clambered out of the dumbwaiter, he found himself once again on the thirty-sixth floor, in the office of Edward Lamech.

The watcher's body was gone now, but Unwin was not alone. Detective Screed stood beside the desk, a few papers in his hands. When he saw Unwin, he stuffed the papers into his jacket pocket and drew his pistol, then shook his head as though to say that now, at last, he had seen it all.

”They always come back to the scene,” he said.

SIXTEEN.

On Apprehension Woe to he who checkmates his opponent at last, only to discover they have been playing cribbage.

Screed looked Unwin up and down, his thin mustache bending with pleasure, or disdain, or both. ”You look terrible,” he said. ”And again that hat on the thirty-sixth floor.”

Screed's suit, navy blue, was identical to the one Unwin first saw him in. It had been cleaned and pressed, or exchanged for a pristine duplicate. If Emily had succeeded in bringing him the memo, Screed did nothing to acknowledge it. He patted Unwin down, keeping the pistol trained on him. He was thorough in his search, but all he came up with was the alarm clock from Unwin's jacket pocket. This he held gently for a moment, as though he thought it might explode. He shook it, put it to his ear, and stuffed it into his own pocket.

”I'm not much of a tough guy,” he said, relaxing his grip on his pistol. ”And we're both gentlemen, as I see it. So I'm going to put this away now, and we'll talk like gentlemen. Agreed?”

Without waiting for a reply, Screed put his pistol back in its shoulder holster. Then he closed his hand and struck Unwin in the jaw with a quick jab. Unwin fell back against the wall.

”That,” Screed said, ”was for getting into the wrong car yesterday.”

Screed grabbed him by the s.h.i.+rt and pulled him out into the hall. The place was silent, the other watchers' doors all closed. They took the elevator to the lobby, and Screed led him around the corner to where his car was parked. With an unlit cigarette in his mouth, the detective drove them uptown, along the east side of City Park.

The somnambulists were all around them, on every block. They went insensibly through the streets, playing the lead roles in their own delirious dramas. A man in a business suit stood at the edge of the park throwing seeds over his head while a flock of pigeons descended upon him to feed. His face was covered with scratches, his suit soiled and torn. A nearby tree was full of young boys, all of them throwing paper airplanes made of newspaper pages. While Unwin watched, one of the boys leaned too far off his branch and fell.

Screed hit the horn and swerved to avoid an old woman crouched in the middle of the street, her hands covered in dirt. She had relocated a pile of soil onto the pavement and was planting flowers in it.

”People these days!” Screed said.

The detective seemed to think that nothing was out of the ordinary-that this was simply the chaos of the everyday. An enemy to messiness in all its forms, An enemy to messiness in all its forms, he had called himself. Maybe Hoffmann's version of the world was how Screed already imagined it to be. When they stopped at a traffic signal, he took the cigarette from his mouth and leaned forward to pick his teeth in the rearview mirror. he had called himself. Maybe Hoffmann's version of the world was how Screed already imagined it to be. When they stopped at a traffic signal, he took the cigarette from his mouth and leaned forward to pick his teeth in the rearview mirror.