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error.”
    Lamech said nothing. Maybe he did not wish to speak with the door open. Unwin closed it and approached. As his eyes adjusted, he began to discern a heavy-featured face, shoulders wide as the wide-backed chair, big unmoving hands folded over the desk.
    “Not your error, of course,” Unwin amended. “Probably a transcriptionist’s typo or a bad connection on one of the older lines. You know how things get when it rains, sir. Fits of static, the occasional disconnect.”
    Lamech regarded him wordlessly.
    “And it has been raining on and off for days now. Fourteen days, in fact. More rain than we’ve had in quite some time.”
    Unwin stood before the desk. “It’s a matter of poor drainage, sir. Bound to interfere with the lines.”
    He saw that Lamech’s telephone was in fact unplugged, the cord left dangling over the edge of the desk. The watcher said nothing. The only sound was the rain against the window—the cause, Unwin supposed, for all his talk about the weather.
    “Unless you protest,” Unwin hazarded, “I’ll just switch on your desk lamp for you. That way I can show you some identification, which I’m sure you want to see before bothering with any of this. Wouldn’t want to waste your time. And you can’t trust anyone these days, isn’t that right?”
    He tugged the cord. The lamp, identical to the one on Unwin’s own desk twenty-two floors below, made a puddle of pale green light over the desktop, over Unwin’s outstretched hand, over the seated man’s gray crisscrossed fingers, and over his heavy gray face, from which a pair of bloated, red-flooded eyes glared out at nothing.
    Corpses were nothing new to Unwin. Hundreds of them populated the reports entrusted to his care over the years, reports in which no detail was spared. People poisoned, shot, gutted, hanged, sliced to ribbons by industrial machinery, crushed between slabs of cement, clobbered with skillets, defenestrated, eviscerated, burned or buried alive, held underwater for lengthy intervals, thrown down stairs, or simply kicked and pummeled out of being—the minutiae surrounding such incidents were daily fare, so to speak, to a clerk of the fourteenth floor. Whole indices, in fact, were organized according to cause of death, and Unwin himself had from time to time contributed new headings and subheadings when an innovative murder necessitated an addition or expansion: “strangulation, unattended boa snake,” was one of his, as was “muffins, poisonous berry.”
    A man so thoroughly versed in the varieties of dispatchment might, then, regard with unusual ease the result of an actual murder, in this case a man whose neck had been bruised by strangulatory measures, tongue emitted as a result of smotheration, eyes bulged almost clear of the skull, result of the same.
    Unwin yanked his hand from the light and took several steps backward, tripped over the edge of the rug, and fell into one of the thickly cushioned chairs, the softness of which did nothing to diminish his revulsion. In each dark corner, Unwin could almost see a killer crouched, waiting for an opportunity to strike. To move from where he sat would have brought him closer to at least one of them.
    So he remained motionless, briefcase clutched in his lap, seated as for a proper meeting with Mr. Lamech. This meeting went on for some time, with only the weather having anything to say, and the weather spoke only of itself.

THREE
    On Corpses
    Many cases begin with one—this can be disconcerting,
but at least you know where you stand. Worse is the corpse
that appears partway into your investigation, complicating
everything. Best to proceed, therefore, with the vigilance
of one who assumes that a corpse is always around the next
corner. That way it is less likely to be your own.
     
     
     
    A knock at the door shook Unwin from his stupor. How long had he been sitting there? Long enough for his eyes to adjust to the light, for him to see that he was quite alone