Diaries / Detective Calloway’s Case File
Five exhibits, a great deal of red string and one detective who is almost, nearly, very close to finding floor seven and a half.
Fiction. The characters, diaries, legends and reports are invented. The lift and the lair are real.
Exhibit A
Obtained the building plans from the city archive. Eighteen floors, one lift, one stairwell. I counted the windows from the street: nineteen rows. I counted again. Nineteen.
Asked the archive clerk about the extra row. She said windows are not her department and offered me a brochure about the heritage facade.
Pinned to board. Red string to: the lift.
Exhibit B
Recovered from a bin in the lobby: a Lucky Noodle receipt, forty-two serves, no chilli, delivered to “Floor 7½, ask for the Chair”.
Interviewed Frankie Lo. Frankie gave me a fortune cookie and suggested I take the stairs. I did not take the stairs. I should have. I spent forty minutes in the lift and it stopped nowhere interesting.
Fortune: “The thing you seek is between.” Pinned to board.
Exhibit C
Spoke to a group who said their lift stopped in a storm and they spent an hour in an office “run by assassins, with a plaque”. They were cheerful about it. They had escaped with four minutes to spare and wanted to know if I could recommend a good dessert place nearby.
Every group I speak to says the same thing: the lift, the office, the plaque, sixty minutes. Not one of them has seen the man whose office it is.
Red string to: the plaque. Who is Employee of the Month?
Exhibit D
Interviewed Gus Pagano, night doorman, thirty years on the desk. He was very helpful. He told me everything about the building except anything I asked.
He doesn’t see anything. He told me so four times. On the fifth time, he looked at the lift.
Gus knows. Gus will never say. Respect.
Exhibit E
A postcard pinned to the precinct noticeboard, sender unknown: a lift panel with the 7 and the 8 lit up together, postmarked Hay Street, Perth.
There is a second office. Or the same office, somewhere else. Or the lift is very, very long. I have put in for leave and bought a guidebook to Western Australia.
Red string to: Perth. Ran out of string.
— Det. R. Calloway, Midtown Precinct (case still open)
