Johannes Cabal the Detective jc-2

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Miss Barrow bit his palm. He snatched it from her mouth with a muffled curse that hadn’t been sounded since the destruction of a prehuman species, much given to foul utterances that surpassed even man’s aptitude for filthy imagery. Even to this long-vanished race, however, what Cabal said would have been considered a bit naughty.

  He almost backhanded her, but with a tremendous effort of will, reining in a burning desire to create pain, he prevented himself. Instead, he stood glaring at her, hand raised. She flinched a little, but only a little. Finally, shaking with suppressed violence, he lowered his gloved hand and examined the palm.

  “You’ve left teeth marks on the leather,” he said, for lack of anything more civil to say. She started to say something, but he raised a finger to her lips. “Before you utter another syllable, ask yourself two questions. First, what would you have done in my place? And second, what am I doing hiding up an alleyway, anyway? And, no, it wasn’t to get away from you, as should be evident both by my surprise at your liberty and by the fact that you found me so easily.”

  “I wish I’d told the captain about you.”

  “If wishes counted for anything, neither of us would be in our current situations, Miss Barrow. You concede that I had no choice, however?”

  “No.”

  “Close enough. Which brings us to my second question. If you would care to join me behind this barrel, I will explain.”

  “Behind that barrel?” Now she was no longer looking at him as if he were the very epitome of evil but just rather mad.

  “Yes. With some urgency, please. Time is short.”

  “You’re not going to stab me, are you?” she asked, mindful of the knife he’d used to defend himself when he was attacked aboard the Princess Hortense.

  “I was, but it would have been impolite. Believe me, if I was going to kill you, you would already have breathed your last, instead of using said breath to yack tediously at me. Behind the barrel, please. Now!”

  Shaken by Cabal’s admission that murdering her had crossed his mind but had been dispensed with for logical rather than moral or compassionate reasons, she allowed herself to be steered into hiding. From a cautious crouch, they surveyed the Via Vortis in the darkening twilight.

  After a minute of boiling resentment slowly reducing to a simmer, Miss Barrow asked, “What are we waiting for?”

  “Not what,” answered Cabal in a whisper. “Who.”

  Miss Barrow analysed this reply in silence for a moment, found it lacking, and asked, “Very well, then. For whom are we waiting?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s wait and find out, shall we?” If he was aware of the filthy look that Miss Barrow gave him, he did nothing to indicate it.

  “So,” she said with indignant sarcasm, “we are hiding behind a barrel in a town that I believe neither of us has ever visited before, waiting for somebody that you don’t know. From behind a barrel. I think the barrel aspect of this situation bears repeating.”

  Cabal considered saying that if she would prefer to be dead as a doornail, and head down in the barrel, it still wasn’t too late for him to organise that for her, but he did not. Instead, he kept his attention on their view of the road and waited for somebody indefinably suspicious to walk by. Unfortunately, to Cabal’s finely honed sense of paranoia everybody looked suspicious.

  “That one is hanging around,” he whispered, to which Miss Barrow replied, “He’s sweeping the street.”

  “That one is an obvious agent,” he whispered, to which Miss Barrow replied, “He’s a blind man, selling matches, pencils, and shoelaces.”

  “That’s what he wants you to think.”

  “He’s doing a brilliant job, in that case. Look, he’s moving on.” She slapped Cabal’s shoulder. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here. I should be pressing charges against you. Not waiting for God only knows who in some back alley in Parila. Behind a barrel. I’m mad. I must be. After all you’ve done, I must be mad. Not even after all you’ve done in general, but just after all you’ve done to me, today.” She looked at Cabal, bewildered by herself. “Why am I doing this?”

  “Simplicity itself. First, my ruse with the falsified bulletin must have been rapidly seen through.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head wearily. “You’re too good a forger, it seems.”

  “Oh?” A slow smile of wry amusement appeared on his face. “Why, Miss Barrow … are you a fugitive?”

  “No! Nothing so … you. They checked their files and couldn’t find a Johanna Cabal, only a Johannes. So they decided there was no conspiracy, just a bureaucratic cock-up somewhere along the line. They’re a very pragmatic bunch, the Senzans. The lieutenant who arrested me gave me his personal apology. Then he asked me out to dinner.”

  Cabal grunted under his breath. “Most pragmatic.”

  “He was busily kissing my hand when Miss Ambersleigh turned up with half of the British Consulate in tow. Things were explained, and they asked if I wanted to make a formal complaint.”

  “Did you?”

  “Well, no.” She seemed a little embarrassed. “It seemed a bit rude, what with him kissing my hand and everything.”

  “And everything?” he echoed with disdain.

  She shot him a dirty look. “You like to pretend you’re some sort of pure scientist without a human feeling in your body, but you’re just a horrid little man really, aren’t you, Cabal?”

  Cabal had no answer, or at least no answer that he cared to make, so they crouched in silence for a minute longer.

  Cabal checked his watch. “I may have miscalculated,” he said. “We should have seen something by now. In fact” — he looked up at the road as he replaced his pocket watch — “we should have seen Cacon by now.”

  “Cacon? From the aeroship? I thought you said you didn’t know who you were waiting for?”

  “I wasn’t waiting for Cacon. I was waiting for the man Cacon was following.”

  “Who’s that?” Miss Barrow was growing more confused by the second.

  “I don’t know. I thought I’d already explained that.”

  “You haven’t explained anything. This is the first I’ve heard that Cacon is somehow mixed up in all this. Why is Cacon following somebody anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” said Cabal testily. “That’s why I was waiting for him to pass by.”

  “I don’t understand any of this.”

  “Neither do I. Do you think I hide behind barrels in shadowy alleyways for fun? No, I don’t,” he said to head off Miss Barrow, who he felt sure was about to say that it wouldn’t surprise her at all. “There is something going on, and it has to do with the murders.”

  “Probable murder and suicide, you mean?”

  “Oh, please.” Cabal was splendidly dismissive. “DeGarre is murdered for some reason, then when the suicide story falls flat Zoruk is incriminated. The killer makes a hash job of it and eliminates Zoruk before the shortcomings in the charade can be exposed, not realising that it’s too late.”

  “Lady Ninuka’s alibi for him, you mean,” said Miss Barrow.

  “Exactly so. I have an inkling how DeGarre was dealt with, but killing Zoruk is a different matter. The more that I think on the matter, the more solid Schten’s ridiculous concept of a league of assassins becomes.”

  “That makes me think of magicians and their stage illusions, you know. They pull off half their stuff because they’re prepared to do the most incredible feats of engineering, far beyond what the audience thinks is reasonable for a small effect. Just because something seems ridiculous doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

  Cabal considered her words, and said, “You have a very good point, and one that undermines the basis of much of my logic to date. I told Schten that he was a fool — though not in so many words — because this conspiracy of shadows flew in the face of Ockham’s razor. When given the choice between a simple explanation and a complex one, the simpler is usually the truth. That’s why I believed in Zoruk’s suicide for an unconsci
onably long time. I’ve been an idiot, though. ‘Usually’ is a long way indeed from ‘always.’ As with the whole Johanna Cabal nonsense — you may hate me for it now, but you will dine out on it for a year, I assure you — they preferred to believe in incompetence rather than in a forged document. But the document was forged.” He looked at her seriously. “And there are conspiracies out there. I’ve stood too close to several to deny their existence. In a hotbed of intrigue like these little states, so small that you can drop a penny and it will roll over half a dozen international borders before coming to a halt, and where everyone hates their neighbours, plots and conspiracies are endemic.”

  Leonie Barrow looked at him with a strange expression, her pale skin blue and shadowed by the failing light, her eyes dark and bottomless. “Cabal …” she whispered.

  “Yes?” he replied.

  “How — ” She paused, searching for the words. Her gaze fell, and then rose again, and she looked deep into his eyes. “How did you ever become so very fucked up?”

  Cabal sighed. He knew it wasn’t even intended as an insult. It didn’t matter; he had no answer. He looked back out onto the street. “Cacon’s gone,” he said, rising from his crouch. “He didn’t come back around this way again. You can stop hiding down there. Unless you’ve developed a taste for it, of course.”

  She had not, and rose, patting the dust off her skirt. “If anybody sees me coming out of a side street with you, and I’m even a bit dishevelled, I swear I will never live it down.”

  “Nor I,” said Cabal offhandedly. “I wonder where he went? Let’s see if we can find him.” He walked out onto the Via Vortis and looked both ways. There was no sign of Herr Cacon.

  Miss Barrow joined him, albeit in a poor temper. “Why? He’s just an odd little man. Why are you so interested in him?”

  “You didn’t see him. He was like a man with a mission.” He started walking, and Miss Barrow had to scuttle a little to catch up. “Not the sort of man I would normally associate with missions. Would you? He was behaving curiously, and since recent events render that which is curious suspicious, I want to know what he was up to.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said and laughed disbelievingly. “Are you telling me that you suspect a pug in a bad suit like Cacon of crawling around the ship’s vents and trying to throw you to your doom? You’re kidding me.”

  “I am kidding nobody,” he said icily, then reconsidered. “Well, apart from everybody who thinks that I’m a Mirkarvian civil servant named Gerhard Meissner, obviously. Them, I am kidding. In this case, however, I am sincere. I do not believe he attacked me, true, but I suspect he may know who did.”

  “Based on what? Masculine intuition?”

  “Based,” said Cabal, beginning to chafe under all the unwarranted sarcasm, “upon the weight of probabilities.” They had by this point reached the Piazza Bior with no sign of Cacon. Cabal looked up the Viale Ogrilla, and frowned when he remembered the policeman at the café. He turned to Miss Barrow and, with evident reluctance, offered her his arm.

  She regarded it with equally evident suspicion. “What’s this?”

  Cabal forbore to state the obvious and said, “It would help us go unnoticed if we looked like people who can actually bear to be in each other’s company.”

  “I’m not a good enough actress for that, Cabal.”

  “I’m not asking you to look as if you dote upon my every word and glow with happiness in my mere presence — ”

  “That’s lucky.”

  “I just need you to look as if you don’t loathe me.”

  “I’m really not a good enough actress for that. Why the sudden concern?”

  “There’s a café up there, where there is a police officer busily derelicting his duty — ”

  “Hold on. There’s no such verb as to derelict.”

  “There is now. Would you kindly stop interrupting? There is a police officer, and I do not wish to arouse his suspicions. Should he have eyes for anything other than the waitress, which I doubt. Therefore, it would help if we were to avoid an obvious show of animosity. Will you take my arm?”

  Miss Barrow looked up the avenue, thinking. Then she smiled at Cabal and offered her arm. “I should be delighted, Mr. Cabal.”

  Cabal took her arm, and they processed towards the café like old friends, or at least the sort of old friends in which the lady wears a somewhat smug smile while the gentleman scowls darkly. Cabal wasn’t sure why she had suddenly consented to walk arm in arm with him, but he took it to be some sort of arch, feminine insult that he did not understand, nor did he care to try to understand. It was only when they were less than ten metres from the police officer that he realised how remarkably stupid he had been — so focussed on looking for Cacon that he had regarded the policeman as nothing more than a trifling inconvenience that he could guard against by using Miss Barrow. Only now did he remember that using Miss Barrow in any ploy that involved being within calling-for-help range of an officer of the law while he stood right next to her was akin to searching for a gas leak with a flamethrower.

  He thought he understood her well enough to conclude that she would be more interested in Cacon’s activities than in just handing him over to the police. But, that said, he had framed her as a necromancer and set the military on her, and she might still be a tad upset.

  In any event, it was far too late to punch her and run. Instead, he had to touch his hat, smile as convincingly as he could, and say “Guten Abend, Officer,” as the policeman noticed that he had company. The policeman’s attention rested on him so briefly that Cabal didn’t know whether to be relieved or mortally insulted. He could have been wearing one of the more fetching “Wanted” posters published in his wake * on a piece of string around his neck, and the officer would not have noticed. Instead, Cabal watched as the officer’s attention slid effortlessly across him like mercury in a pan to settle on Leonie Barrow.

  “Buona sera, signorina,” he said, failing to acknowledge Cabal altogether. If he had applied the same observational skills to crime scenes and suspects as he did to ascertaining Miss Barrow’s marital status, he would have made capo della polizia before he was thirty. As it was, that seemed unlikely. At this precise moment, for example, he was far less interested in Cabal’s awkward body language and rictus-like smile than in whether women were more interesting when they were dark and passionate, like the waitress, or pale and interesting, like the beautiful lady out walking with the undertaker or clerk or whatever he was.

  Miss Barrow barely looked at him. “Good evening, Constable,” she said, and walked on. Cabal gave her a sideways glance that she pointedly failed to acknowledge. A few paces on, an argument broke out between the policeman and the waitress.

  When they were safely past the café, Cabal said, “I am unsure whether to thank you or to demand an explanation.”

  Miss Barrow walked several paces before replying, “The former, I hope. As I’m not sure why I didn’t just grass you up like the scum you are.”

  “That’s uncanny. Are you channelling your father at the moment?”

  Miss Barrow raised a hand in admonition. “Please, Cabal. Please don’t mention my dad, or I’ll feel guilty that I didn’t just do the right thing and stitch you up like a kipper.” She put her hand to her mouth. “Even my dad doesn’t talk like that. He would have understood not giving you up to the Mirkarvians,” she continued, otherwise unabashed. “He’s not a great fan of capital punishment. But he’d never understand why I didn’t just hand you over to Constable Don Juan back there.”

  “No,” said Cabal, remembering the implacable Frank Barrow, “I don’t think he would.”

  “Don’t get any bright ideas that I didn’t do it because I think you’re anything other than the monster you are, Cabal. Under different circumstances, you’d be under arrest right now. But — ” She stopped, and Cabal stopped, too. She looked up at him, frowning slightly, and serious. “There’s something going on. Something … wrong. Something terribly, terribly wron
g. Something wicked and cruel that ate DeGarre and Zoruk and would have killed you, too, if it had had its way. It’s worse than you, Cabal. I’ve understood you better than I ever wanted to, and part of that is knowing that you don’t go looking for trouble. It just seeks you out, but that’s something else. Whoever or whatever is behind what has happened over the past couple of days makes trouble. The kind of trouble that makes corpses, and I think it’s only just beginning. I want to stop it before it leaves anybody else dead.”

  “And how do I fit into this monster hunt of yours?”

  She smiled, but there was little humour in it. “Set a monster to catch a monster, Cabal.” She took his arm and started walking again. Cabal allowed himself to be drawn along, his mind distracted and distant.

  By the time they reached the end of the avenue, night had truly fallen. A lamplighter was busily hurrying along, lighting the gas lamps as he went, clearly behind schedule. They stepped aside to let him trot past and turned onto the Via Pace. There was almost nobody about, it being the hour of the evening meal.

  “Where from here?” asked Miss Barrow as they passed into the shadow of the San Giovanni Decollato.

  Cabal gestured loosely across the road to the end of the Via Vortis. “We go down there as far as the alleyway where you spotted me, and then we give it up as hopeless. Cacon, or at least whoever he was following, obviously stopped pacing around this triangle of the town, and the pair of them are long gone. After that” — he checked his watch, and swore mildly — “I don’t know. I was intending to leave town, but I’ve missed my train. I assume that if I attempt it in the morning without your permission the police will be watching the stations along all routes from here just as soon as you can warn them?”

  “You assume correctly. I think you’re right about Cacon. We’ll try the Princess Hortense, I think. He’s probably there.” She took a step, but was pulled up short by her arm’s being linked with Cabal’s. He wasn’t moving at all. She looked at him curiously. He was staring off into the middle distance, his nostrils flared, hardly moving. After a moment, he relaxed a little and felt her gaze. He glanced at her, apparently embarrassed. “What is it?” she asked.