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repeating aloud, “The Gilbert, Room 202. Now, you try to get some rest, Miss Truesdale.” He rose and showed her to the door. She went willingly, though she seemed to have more to say. He avoided her eyes and closed the door before she could speak again, then waited, listening. He heard her sigh, heard her irregular footsteps retreat down the hall, then the rush of air as the elevator door opened and closed.
    The bell rang again.
    He went to the wall and felt it with the palm of his hand. The surface was cool to the touch. He put an ear against it and held his breath. From the building’s unseen recesses came a low keening sound, as of wind trapped in a tunnel or air shaft. What could be hidden there? Unwin recalled something Sivart had written about the manor of Colonel Baker, in the case reports chronicling that wretched man’s three deaths: It’s more secret passageways than real passageways, and every looking glass is a two-way mirror. I had to shake the hand of a suit of armor, if you can believe it, to open the door to the library. The old guys are suckers for the classic stuff.
    Could the same be said of Mr. Lamech? Unwin went to the bookshelf and began to search. The books were identified only by roman numerals and alphabetical ranges; reference works, perhaps, for some vast and intricate discipline. He did not need to comprehend the subject to find what he was looking for: one volume, the spine worn at the top from frequent handling. He pulled it forward, and immediately a panel in the wall flew open, revealing something like a miniature elevator car. Inside was an envelope of brown paper, about a foot square, with a note attached.
    Taking it, Unwin felt he was crossing a boundary that had long separated him from the world that was the subject of his work. But here was a note, so brief that he read it in the instant he saw it.
     
    Edward,
     
    Here is your special order. I didn’t peek. But if you want my advice, you’ll let sleeping corpses lie.
     
    Kisses
Miss P.
     
    That the Agency should employ a dumbwaiter came as a surprise. It was his understanding that every communication, no matter how trivial, was to be conveyed by messenger. The operator of the switchboard could not even connect one employee to another—Agency bylaws dictated that the telephones were for external calls only. So what manner of special order could this be, to have arrived in the office of a dead man by such extraordinary means?
    The envelope was heavy, unbending, and unsealed. Might Lamech have been planning to present this to him when they met? Unwin slid one finger under the flap of the envelope and tilted it open.
    Inside was a phonograph record. Unlike those he had seen for sale in music shops, it was pale white, almost translucent, and at its center was the Agency’s open-eyed insignia, the spindle hole serving as pupil. Looking closer, he saw a series of letters and numbers imprinted between the groove of the lead-out. The three-letter prefix, TTS, was one he had seen on every report to cross his desk in twenty years, seven months, and some-odd days. It stood for Travis T. Sivart.
    The bell rang again, and the dumbwaiter sank toward the place from which it had come. Unwin closed the panel. He felt he was a clerk again: composed, prepared to carry on, engrossed by the facts of the thing and not the thing itself. He returned to Lamech’s desk, tore off the page of notes from his meeting with Miss Truesdale, and put that in his pocket.
    He glanced at the telephone. Why had the cord been left unplugged? Unwin reinserted it into the base of the phone, then switched off the green-shaded lamp.
    The phonograph record, he knew, was evidence from the scene of a crime, and to take it would be to commit another. But a moment later Lamech’s door was closed, the elevator on its way back to the thirty-sixth floor, and the record inside Unwin’s briefcase, snug beside his copy of The Manual of Detection.
    How to account for this