Part 21 (1/2)

A sound from outside: the Rooks' steam truck had arrived. It spluttered to a halt, and the door opened and slammed closed.

Miss Greenwood heard it, too. She squeezed the handle of the gun. ”I would have stopped him if I'd known how he intended to use her. It's why I'm here now.”

”And why is Penelope here?” Unwin asked. ”Why would she want to rebuild Caligari's Carnival?”

The ancient pistol shook in her hand. Unwin could not tell if she was surprised by the question or by the fact that Unwin knew her daughter's name. ”To give it back to her father,” she said, ”or to take it from him.” Miss Greenwood swayed slightly, struggling to stay awake even as she stood there. The front door opened, and heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs.

Unwin glanced down at Hoffmann, saw the magician's eyes darting behind their lids. A fever rose up from him, and Unwin thought he detected the sickly burning odor of kettle corn. Sivart was still in there-trapped in that other carnival, the spectral one Hoffmann had built in the dream of the city. What would happen to Sivart if Miss Greenwood pulled the trigger?

”Cleo,” Unwin said. ”Please.”

The door slammed open, and Jasper Rook burst in, his green eyes feverish under the brim of his immense hat. With every step he seemed to grow in size, until they were all gathered up in the great black heat of his shadow. Unwin opened his umbrella to s.h.i.+eld himself, but Jasper flung it aside, and Unwin stumbled backward, landing hard on the floor.

Jasper reached for him with those enormous, suffocating hands. They filled Unwin's vision, and he felt himself drowning in the monster's shadow, which was bottomless and the color of headache.

Then Miss Greenwood was there, her arms around Jasper's shoulders. She had her lips to his ear as she embraced him. Jasper's eyelids fluttered, his body slackened, and he staggered back. Miss Greenwood eased him down, until finally he lay across the rug with his head in her lap. She took off his hat and smoothed his hair with her hand, still whispering sleep into his ear.

”He's tired,” Miss Greenwood said to Unwin. ”He'll sleep for a very long time, I think.”

Unwin stood and found his umbrella, then leaned himself against the back of Hoffmann's chair. The air in the room was cooling again. ”I will too, when this is over.”

Miss Greenwood said nothing, but through her exhaustion Unwin saw something else, something she could not speak of, even now. She had loved those two men, and both had tried to destroy her-Hoffmann when he let her take the fall for November twelfth, Arthur when he began to besiege her dreams. A kind of order and a kind of disorder: A kind of order and a kind of disorder: Miss Greenwood had suffered in the tempest between the two. Miss Greenwood had suffered in the tempest between the two.

In the refuge of her lap, Jasper Rook started to snore.

TOGETHER THEY dragged the sleeping body out of the room and down the stairs. Nothing woke Jasper-not the steps striking the back of his head when Unwin lost his grip for a moment, not the rain falling full on his face outside. With much effort they managed to get him up into the bed of his truck. Miss Greenwood found an oilcloth tarp and laid it over him. It was just after seven o'clock when they left the grounds of the Baker estate.

Miss Greenwood was familiar with the peculiar controls of the steam truck. She kept her eye on a row of gauges over the dashboard while regulating the engine with a row of levers under the wheel, which was enormous and had the spokes of a s.h.i.+p's wheel. The boiler thumped and hissed at their backs.

Unwin gazed silently out the pa.s.senger window. On one corner a young boy was shaking a woman's arm and crying, ”Wake up, Mom! Wake up!” Lights were on in some apartment buildings, and Unwin glimpsed nervous, confused faces in the windows. Some people had woken and gone home. Was Hoffmann's grip beginning to loosen?

”It will come in waves now,” Miss Greenwood said. ”He can't keep them asleep all the time, so some will get a reprieve. But most who do will doubt whether they're really awake.”

It was hot inside the cab, and sometimes the needles on the dials strayed into the red. Miss Greenwood drove south past the Agency office building and into the old port town. They left Jasper and his truck in front of the Forty Winks, where someone from the carnival was sure to find them. At eight twenty-seven, Unwin and Miss Greenwood went together into the cemetery.

Unwin read the names on tombstones they pa.s.sed: Two-Toe Charlie, Theda Verdigris, Father Jack, Ricky Shortchange. Saints' Hill had always been the place where criminals went to bury their own, and these were the outlaws, thieves, and grifters of an earlier era. It ended with the rise of Enoch Hoffmann and was familiar to Unwin only through the oldest of the Agency's files.

”Caligari took Hoffmann in when he was a boy,” Unwin said. ”It couldn't have been easy for him to plot the old man's murder.”

”They always disagreed on how the carnival should be used,” Miss Greenwood said. ”I think Caligari saw it as a tool for stirring up trouble-but only for those he felt deserved it. He would go ahead to each town we visited, get a room somewhere, and 'scout things out,' as he used to say. He was delving into the dreams of the people there.”

”Looking for what?”

”He never really explained, and there wasn't always a logic to it. But most of time he found people who had something to hide. Caligari could be ruthless once he'd chosen his subject. Sometimes, though . . .” She paused and rested with one hand against a tombstone, catching her breath.

Unwin waited, and for the first time since he had met her, Miss Greenwood smiled. ”Sometimes the carnival was just a carnival,” she said.

She led him through the door of one of the mausoleums. Together they strained against the lid and moved it aside, revealing a set of tiled stairs where a cadaver should have been. There were lights on down there. Miss Greenwood climbed in first, and Unwin followed after her, sliding the lid back into place behind them.

At the bottom of the stairs was a dank subway platform. Roots grew through the cracked and dripping ceiling. The eight train was already in the station, its doors open. Unwin and Miss Greenwood were its only pa.s.sengers. Once the train was moving, he said, ”What about Hoffmann? He saw the carnival as a means for profit?”

”That's what he saw when he met Arthur: the potential for profit, for control. What Enoch's doing now resembles a plan he used to talk about sometimes. A way to seize the city entirely if his deal with the Agency ever went sour. The understanding he'd had with Arthur fell apart on November twelfth. Then, when Sivart b.u.mbled into his head, he must have a.s.sumed the worst.”

”Which is what your daughter expected,” Unwin said. ”That's why she gave Sivart the stolen copy of the Manual.” Manual.”

”I understand now what she's doing. She always considered Caligari her true father and wanted to follow in his footsteps. There was a saying of his she liked to repeat, about those who belong to the carnival. 'We're just some people who lost their house keys, and everyone who loses their house keys are neighbors.'

”You see, Mr. Unwin, she intends to give the carnival back to the remnants. To steal it from the man who bent it from its true purpose.”

The train squealed on its tracks and swayed as it rounded a corner, and they both held tightly to the straps.

If Penelope succeeded, Unwin thought, then part of Miss Palsgrave's changing of the guard would be complete.

”Well,” Miss Greenwood said after a while, ”don't you think it's time you told me your plan?”

Unwin was figuring parts of it out as he described it to her, but Miss Greenwood listened patiently. When he was finished, they were both quiet a moment.

”It's not a very good plan,” she said.

THEY GOT OFF at Central Terminal and went up the stairs to the concourse. Some of the trains from Central Terminal were still running on time. The one they boarded moved into the tunnels a few minutes after ten o'clock: less than eight hours, now, before the alarm at Hoffmann's side would ring. When the conductor reached their booth, Miss Greenwood paid for her ticket and Unwin handed him the one he purchased nine days before, on the morning he first saw the woman in the plaid coat. The conductor punched it without looking and moved on.

It was dark, but Unwin did his best to memorize everything he saw outside the windows: the city thinning and then giving way to trees, the bridges spanning the river, the rise and fall of the mountains on the far side. He tried to imagine what it would look like in the daytime.

Miss Greenwood read magazines to stay awake. Whenever Unwin caught her drifting off, he reached under the sleeve of her red raincoat and pinched her. She swore at him, though they both knew that even a momentary slip could cost them everything.

They reached the end of the line with less than five hours left. No one met them at the station. The town was just as Unwin had imagined, and seeing it was like remembering. Maybe he was was remembering. Maybe this was where he had come once, as a boy, to play that game with the other children. Seek-and-find? Call-and-hide? remembering. Maybe this was where he had come once, as a boy, to play that game with the other children. Seek-and-find? Call-and-hide?

They walked north along the town's only street, and Unwin counted his steps, noting everything: the gray cat moving between the slats of a picket fence, the colors of the mailboxes, the breeze coming off the river. They followed a dirt path into the woods. It was cooler here, and Unwin paused to b.u.t.ton his jacket. He smelled the pond before he saw it.

”I cut all mention of this place from Sivart's reports,” he said. ”I'd always a.s.sumed he made it up.”

”You overestimate his imagination,” Miss Greenwood said.

The water, patched with oak leaves, was dark and cold-looking in the moonlight. A tire swing hung from a tree at its edge. Anyone kicking hard enough could swing far over the water. He could let go if he wanted; he could let himself fall right in.

Beyond the swing a slope covered with blackberry briars and, at the top of the slope, the cottage where Miss Greenwood and her daughter had lived for the seven years of her exile. A rubberized electrical cord snaked down from one of the windows. They followed it east into the woods, away from the water. Unwin recalled his dream of footprints in the mud, of the meeting with the boy who had been Enoch Hoffmann, and s.h.i.+vered.

The clearing was just as Sivart had described it. But there at its center a narrow bra.s.s bed instead of a pile of leaves, and on a table beside it a green-shaded lamp and a typewriter. The lamp was plugged in, and the bulb glowed yellow. Sivart was asleep under a yellow cotton blanket, on top of which was spread a second blanket of leaves. He snored with his hat down over his eyes, and his face was stubbled.

A dozen open umbrellas were hung in the tree above the bed, forming a makes.h.i.+ft canopy. He must have used to stepladder to get them arranged that way.

”I told him he could use the place but that I didn't want him sleeping in my room,” Miss Greenwood said. ”I thought he'd understood I meant for him to use the couch, or the spare room in the back. Instead he drags my bed all the way out here.”