Free The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry Page B

finished for him, but he took Unwin’s arm without comment and guided him from the corridor. They passed through rooms of medieval paintings. Knights, ladies, and princes scowled from their gilded frames. Then a lighted place: shards of pottery on marble pillars, urns of monstrous size, miniatures of long-dead cities. Moore moved faster and faster, dragging Unwin on while the man with the blond beard followed. They caught up with the schoolchildren in a room of statues. These were of men with elephants’ heads, the wise and quiet gods of a strange land sequestered in one dim and narrow gallery. Jewels glinted in the shadows, and the air was heavy and warm.
    “Not my mistake,” Unwin said at last.
    Moore glared at him. “If not yours, whose?”
    “You called Sivart a week ago. You must have met with him and forgotten. You showed him what you showed me. What did he do when you told him? You have to remember. You have to tell me where he went.”
    “But if you’re not Sivart, then who are you?”
    Those weird, elephant-headed gods fixed Unwin with their impassive eyes, and he found he could not speak. I am Sivart’s clerk, he wanted to say. I am the one who set down the details of his false triumph. It is my mistake, mine! But they would trample him when they heard, those elephant people, and gore him with their jeweled tusks, strangle him with their trunks. Remember, they said to him, in a dream he could not entirely wake from. Try this time, would you? Remember something.
    “Chapter Elephant,” Unwin said.
    “What was that?” Moore asked. “What did you say?”
    “Chapter Eighteen!” Unwin corrected himself. He took The Manual of Detection from his briefcase and flipped through the pages, searching for Chapter Eighteen, for the chapter Sivart, in the dream, had told him to remember.
    Moore’s whole body was trembling, and the snowy hair on his head shook with each wheezing breath. He stared at the book in Unwin’s hands. “ The Manual of Detection has no Chapter Eighteen,” he said.
    Some of the schoolchildren were ignoring the exhibits now. They gathered instead around these two men, who were possibly the strangest things they had seen in the museum.
    Unwin flipped to the last pages of the book. It ended with Chapter Seventeen.
    “How did you know?” he asked.
    Moore leaned forward, his face contorted, his eyes terrible. “Because I wrote it!” he said, and collapsed.

SIX
    On Leads
    Follow them lest they follow you.
     
     
     
    I ’ve got just enough to go on, Sivart had written in his first report on the theft of the Oldest Murdered Man. That’s what makes me nervous.
    On the night of the heist, a museum cleaning woman had spotted an antique flatbed steam truck, color red, lurking under the trees behind the Wonders of the Ancient World wing. In her thirty-seven years of employment, she told Sivart during questioning, she had seen many strange things, had seen the portraits of certain dukes and generals turn their eyes to watch her as she mopped, had seen the marble statue of a nymph move its slender right leg two inches in the moonlight, had seen a twelve-year-old boy rise sleepily from the settee of an eighteenth-century boudoir and ask her why it was so dark, and where his parents had gone, and whether she had a sandwich for him. But never had the cleaning woman seen anything so strange as the steam truck, which had the smokestack of a locomotive and the hulking demeanor of a story-book monster.
    A thing like that tends to stick out, so it wasn’t too hard to track it down. Caligari’s Travels-No-More Carnival was closed up for the night: nothing on the midway but the smell of stale popcorn. I found the truck parked beside a pavilion near the boardwalk and pressed my thumb to the smokestack over the engine. Still warm.
    I thought I’d have a peek inside, but somebody was coming from the docks, and I had to scram. The tent flap was hanging open by the entrance, so I wrapped myself in that and