Cabal: Johannes Cabal, the Detective Part 14

"Dear G.o.d, Cabal!" Miss Barrow was past him and kneeling by Cacon's supine body. "Don't just stand there! He's still alive!"

Cabal was going to say, "But not for long," when he thought ahead and just knew that this would result in Miss Barrow's doing a lot of shouting in his face that he could well do without. So instead, noting that the windows were already closed and shuttered, he set the gas going in the two mantles in the room and lit them cautiously with his candle. Now, at least, Cacon could die in decent visibility.

Miss Barrow had meanwhile, with an admirable disdain for ladylike decorum, undone Cacon's jacket and torn open his shirt. The knife wound was instantly apparent despite the ma.s.s of venous blood around it. A narrow slit forced open by the twist of the blade, it lay in his skin like a single gill cover of a pale cave fish, his life pulsing weakly from it in time to his slowing heart. She tore a strip from his shirt, folded it into a thick wad, and held it over the wound, pressing down hard, trying to hold his soul to his body by the strength of her arms.

"Do something, Cabal! Do something! Get help!" She looked up at him and, suddenly, Cabal understood that she had never seen death at first hand. The realisation sent a cool shiver of remembrance through him, back to when this had been him, kneeling over somebody and willing them back to life. And failing. Now he could only stand, and watch, and see the signs of imminent, inevitable death, and he felt nothing. Miss Barrow looked up at him, and she didn't even like Cacon, but there were tears in her eyes. "Do something, Cabal. Please!"

He knelt on the other side of Cacon, unconsciously avoiding the blood, and leaned in close. "Alexei. Alexei! Can you hear me?"

Cacon's eyelids flickered, but beneath them his eyes rolled drunkenly in their sockets. Cabal gripped the side of Cacon's head and drew up one eyelid high using the pad of his thumb. It was rough treatment and Miss Barrow started to speak, but Cabal quenched her with a glance. She fell silent, finally understanding that the man was going to die, and that there was nothing either of them could do about it.

"Alexei Cacon! Listen!" Cabal spoke loudly and clearly into Cacon's face, demanding a response. "Who did this to you? Who stabbed you? Cacon? Tell me!"

He tried. Cacon truly tried. He drew together what was left of his consciousness and tried to force words out through his mouth, that garrulous mouth that had always seemed so eager to gabble on about nothing in particular. Now it wouldn't respond properly, and his jaw flapped and his tongue lay stubbornly still. He felt thirsty, terribly thirsty, but he couldn't ask for water; he couldn't ask for anything at all. The dark shapes above him that might have been people grew darker still. Cacon felt so thirsty and so tired. He would have a little sleep, and ask for water when he awoke, because we always wake up from sleep. And so Cacon died.

They stayed in tableau for some moments afterwards, Cabal deep in thought and Miss Barrow uncertain what to do. She rose awkwardly and sat on an upright chair near the window.

Cabal didn't seem to notice. He stayed silent for a little longer, then closed Cacon's eyes and laid his head down. "Typical, Cacon. Not just of you but of our whole unhappy race. Prattling importunately over nothing, but when you have a chance to say something important, silence. Typical."

He stood up, brushing off his knees as he rose.

"Well, it won't do. We need to know who killed him."

"We?" said Miss Barrow, too tired and sick at heart to speak with pa.s.sion. "Need?"

"Very well. I need. It seems unlikely that this isn't all a.s.sociated with events on the aeroship, which means whoever stabbed Herr Cacon may well be whoever tried to kill me. I don't like leaving unknown enemies in the shadows. They have a habit of jumping out again. This business needs attending to before I can move on."

"Good. Good." Miss Barrow seemed terribly weary all of a sudden. Cabal recognised a shock reaction when he saw one. He could have helped her, but it seemed too distracting when he had a murderer to find. "We have to find the murderer. Good. How are we going to do it?"

"Your criminology degree doesn't suggest anything?" he said.

She didn't rise to the baiting. Indeed, it seemed unlikely she even noticed it. "I'm still an undergraduate. I don't know what to do. I don't know." She looked lethargically around the room as if noticing it for the first time. "Dust for fingerprints? I don't know."

"Fingerprints. Feh. Very useful in most circ.u.mstances but not when we know that he was stabbed outside and made his way here. I doubt his attacker even set foot inside the door." He looked around the room. It was an odd house, spa.r.s.ely furnished and with little sign of occupation. He frowned.

Miss Barrow was wondering the same thing. "What is this place, anyway? Who lives here? I'm not sure anybody does. The air's stale, and there's a thin layer of dust."

Cabal made no reply. Instead, he took up the candleholder, relit the candle, and left the room. Miss Barrow found herself alone with the corpse. She felt that she should be scared, or at least awed by the presence of death, the last great mystery. But the body was Cacon's, and he was as unimpressive in death as when he was alive. She sat staring at him and thinking how unlike a person a human body is once the breath of life, with all its pulses and beats and tics and movement, is gone. His corpse was pathetic, in that it inspired pathos, and pitiful, in that it aroused pity. She found herself feeling more sorry for Cacon than she had ever felt for anyone before. All hopes and dreams extinguished, all potential gone. If only she could wave a wand and make him breathe again, it would be the greatest gift that could be bestowed.

Cabal returned, shattering her reverie. "I found this," he said, and held up a key on a ring. "It fits the lock. The one next to it is of the same pattern as the cabin keys aboard the Princess Hortense. It would be no surprise to discover that it unlocks Cacon's stateroom."

"So this is Cacon's place," said Miss Barrow, with an apparent lack of interest. Cabal pursed his lips and was about to speak, when a spark of animation ran through her as her intellect stopped freewheeling in shock and started to reengage her mind. "But Cacon's Mirkarvian. Why would he have the keys to a house in Senza?"

Cabal wagged his finger at her tellingly. "Exactly."

"And the answer is ... ?"

Cabal shrugged. "I have no idea. But I know a man who does."

She looked at him with eager interest. "Who?" Infuriatingly, Cabal just raised his eyebrows and looked meaningfully at her. "What? You? But you just said-" It took a second for her to understand him, but then her gaze fell to Cacon, and her mouth fell open in astonishment. Astonishment and horror. Definitely some horror. "Oh, you have to be joking."

"I never joke about my work," he said, and was unable to suppress a malevolent smile at the end as the ramifications settled upon Miss Barrow.

"No! You can't. You absolutely must not, Cabal! It's ... a monstrous crime. A terrible, terrible thing!"

"Is it? What is our alternative? Do you have a criminological department about your person to aid in the application of your towering forensic skills? You do not?" He simulated amazement, and did not trouble himself to simulate it well. "Then we shall do things my way." He made for the door.

"Where are you going?"

"For reagents. Not the ideal circ.u.mstances under which to gather them, but I think I can throw something together in a hurry that should give the hapless Herr Cacon one last shudder of animation." Miss Barrow did not seem convinced. Impatient, for the first few minutes of a person's death are the most vitally important minutes of opportunity for a necromancer, Cabal added, "Look, I have to go. Without the necessary chemicals, we'll lose whatever wits are still floating around his cooling brain. The only more immediate alternative that I can think of is a Tantric ritual involving necrophiliac sodomy and, frankly, I don't think my back is up to it. So, if you will excuse me?"

And he left, inwardly treasuring Miss Barrow's expression.

The dispensing chemist and the general grocery stood next door to each other, and both contained homes above the shops in which the chemist and the grocer, respectively, lived with their families, which was very convenient if you wanted to throw small pebbles at both sets of windows at much the same time.

The chemist was the first to respond. He swung open a window and looked down into the street through half-moon gla.s.ses. He was jacketless, his white hair slightly awry, and he had a napkin in his collar. "Eh! What is it? Who are you? What do you want?"

Cabal finished writing a list in his notebook, tore out the page, and held it up for the man to see. "I need these supplies urgently."

"What? What is that? Supplies?" Somebody said something behind him, and he turned away to reply, which involved a lot of arm-waving and extravagant shrugging. He returned his attention to Cabal. "I'm having my dinner!"

"A man's life is at stake," said Cabal, not entirely untruthfully.

"Eh?" The chemist looked him up and down. "You're a doctor?"

Cabal's expression twisted in a way that seemed to suggest If my gun hadn't been confiscated in Mirkarvia, I would currently be in the process of shooting you. "No," he said with crystalline iciness, "I am not a doctor, but these supplies are vitally important."

As he spoke, the door of the general grocery swung open and the grocer, a man of middle years but bearing a surprisingly full, raven-black head of hair, appeared. He stood, straightening a collar that was thoroughly askew, as he looked around and saw Cabal. "Signor? Did you cast stones upon my cas.e.m.e.nt?"

"I did," said Cabal. "I have an urgent requirement from your shop."

"Eh?" said the chemist. "What is this? You are on an errand to collect vital medicine and yet you have time to bother Signor Bonacci? Eh? For what? Some nails, perhaps? A mop? I was having my dinner, signor! Not so urgent, eh? Not so urgent!"

Cabal ignored him. To Signor Bonacci the grocer, he said, "Dolly Blue. Do you stock it?"

"Eh?" said the chemist. Cabal continued to ignore him.

"Dolly Blue, you say?" said Signor Bonacci, clearly taken aback. "What, the stuff housewives put in the last white rinse?"

"Specifically, a mixture of indigo blue and starch. I need those chemicals."

"Pah!" said the chemist. "You're mad!" He started to close his window.

"I will pay double the price for a little alacrity, gentlemen," Cabal said, loudly enough to be heard through the rapidly closing shutters. The shutters paused, and then reopened.

"Double?" said the chemist. "Eh?"

Miss Barrow was sitting on the stairs in the house when Cabal returned. She had found and lit the gaslight in the hall and, judging by the muted glows, those towards the back of the house and upstairs. Cabal said nothing as he placed the paper bag containing his purchases on the dresser, and hung up his jacket and hat. Miss Barrow finally said, "I've looked over the whole house. It's strange. Everything you could want to be comfortable is here-bedding, books, the larder is full of tinned and dried food. A lot of preserves in jars, too. But there isn't a single personal touch about the place. I can't see the personality of the owner. I don't understand why Cacon had a key to it. I would say it was rented, but I've never heard of food being supplied like that."

Cabal kept his counsel. He had a theory about the house, but would wait to hear what Cacon had to say on the subject. Provided, of course, that the ad-hoc resurrection worked. He took up the paper bag and went into the room where Cacon lay, pausing at the doorway to ask Miss Barrow, "Do you want to see this?" She looked at him, her eyes tired and haunted. Cabal tried again. "You might find it ... educational." She didn't respond, just stared at him through the bannisters.

Cabal went into the room alone. Miss Barrow sat silent and motionless on the stair. She heard the crackle of the paper bag being opened, and its contents removed and checked. Shortly thereafter, she heard the fizz of powders being tipped onto flames and smelled pungent chemical fumes drifting through the crack of the ajar door. Cabal started chanting under his breath-a strange singsong in a language she didn't recognise, and doubted more than a handful of people in the world would recognise. Then, defying a reluctance that would joyfully have driven her from that house, that town, that very country, she climbed to her feet and walked slowly down the couple of steps to the boards of the hallway and into the front room. Cabal's chanting paused, and then continued.

Twelve minutes later, Alexei Cacon returned from the dead.

The room stank like a laboratory fire, and the thick chemical fug made Miss Barrow's eyes sting. Cabal ignored it all, his own eyes screwed shut as he chanted and chanted a seemingly endless litany of inhuman words from an inhuman religion. They were awful words, incomprehensible to her, but jagged, ugly things that he spat out like stones and razors. That he knew them by heart did not escape her, and she feared him for that, for it showed depths in him that opened into the abyss. Nor did he hesitate when Cacon's heels began to rattle on the floor, his legs spasming like the galvanised corpse of a frog on a school science bench. It was death, but in reverse, and the most obscene abrogation of the laws of nature she could ever imagine. Life did not return easily to the carca.s.s but was bullied and coerced, and what little dignity there is in death was torn and tattered by this sordid reversal. Cacon seemed to swell with something that was just close enough to life to serve, but, equally, she sensed in her every fibre that it was a poor sort of stopgap and would leak away again soon enough. When Cacon started to shake and suck in ragged, dry breaths, she shuddered with revulsion, but she could not stop watching.

Cabal did not notice her reaction. He checked the second hand on his pocket watch and started a new, more urgent chant. The ritual as a whole would give him only a few seconds in which to interrogate Cacon, provided this last stage succeeded in nailing his soul back into his body, a relationship that would perforce prove to be a delicate one.

Cacon's eyes fluttered open. "Oooh! Right in me guts, that was! Ruined me vest and that was fresh on this morning. Still, mustn't grumble." His eyes managed to stop on Cabal's face and went most of the way towards focussing. "Hullo, Herr Meissner! You found me, then? Very good, very good. I thought, Cacon, me old fruit bat, I would say you're just about stuffed. You've been left for dead, and that's what you'll be, oh, any minute now, I'd say, yes. Not dead, though, am I? Result! Alexei Cacon, one! Grim Reaper, nil!"

"Cacon, you're dying," said Cabal bluntly, painfully aware of the vital seconds already wasted.

"Cabal!" said Miss Barrow, snapped from profound horror to mannered indignity at such rudeness. She already had her hand to her mouth when he shot her a furious look.

"What? How's that?" Cacon tried to look around, but his reanimation was barely enough to get him talking again, and his head was too heavy for his enervated neck to move. "Who's there?" What Cabal had just said filtered through at about that moment, and Cacon looked back at him with an expression of offended rect.i.tude. "Dying? What d'you mean, dying? I feel as right as rain, me ol' mucker. Just let me have a bit of a rest and I'll be back up on me hind legs, hopping around like a kangaroo, full of rude health!"

"Of course you will," said Cabal tersely, in what he believed was an acceptable bedside manner. He was mistaken in this. "Now quickly, Cacon, tell me. This is urgent. Who stabbed you?"

"Stabbed me? Pshaw! A mere flesh wound. I've had worse shaving."

"I doubt it-"

"It just bled a bit." He considered, while Cabal-impatience rising-checked his watch again. "It bled quite a bit, true. It-" The complacent expression turned to one of realisation, and then fear. It seemed Cacon had sped from denial to understanding with a rapidity that might have dismayed his circ.u.mlocutory mores had he been generally less gutted and exsanguinated. "Oh, b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l! I remember now! I'm dying!"

"Quite so. Your time is short, Herr Cacon. Make these seconds count for something, I beg you. So, again ... who stabbed you?"

Cacon's face bore a rictus of terror. "Help me!"

"Then help me! Who stabbed you?"

Cacon's eyes swept from side to side, and their light was beginning to fade. Cacon's brief curtain call to the world's stage was already coming to an end.

Cabal took him by the lapels and shook him furiously. "Cacon, you verdammt fool! If you don't tell me who did this to you, they will escape! Is that what you want? Is it?"

Cacon said something, but the words were lost as his head rolled back. "What?" barked Cabal. "What was that you said?" He held Cacon still and listened closely, his ear an inch from Cacon's mouth.

In the sudden stillness, Cacon's next words were perfectly audible even to Miss Barrow where she sat some feet away.

"I saw her ... I saw her following you, Meissner."

Cabal's astonishment could have been greater only if Cacon had told him he'd been stalked by an allosaurus in twin set and pearls. "Her? A woman?"

Cacon rallied enough to say, "Yes, a woman. Flamin' Nora, Meissner! It's a bad time to need lessons on the blinkin' objective form of the singular feminine nominative, isn't it?"

Cabal had been insulted by enough dead men not to concern himself. "This woman, who was she?"

"Following you. I thought, Oho, what's this, Rovetta? Young love? Not with that viperess! So I cut up the alley, went round. Get b'hind, see?"

Cacon had started slurring. Cabal knew his synapses were firing their last, but there was so much he needed to know.

"Rovetta?" said Miss Barrow. "Who's Rovetta?" Cabal shot her a furious look, but Cacon answered all the same.

"Rovetta's me. 'S my name. Arturo Rovetta. 'Smee." He frowned. "Your voice has gone all high, Meissner, mate."

Cabal could see that Cacon-or Rovetta, so it seemed-had reached the stage where his brain was no longer capable of doing the complex work necessary to lie. In morte veritas.

"Went roun' an' roun' an' roun' till I los' 'er. Thought, Ah, sod it. Wen' to safe 'ouse and there she wa.s.ss ... 'Ullo!' says I. 'Bam!' she goes. Stiletto righ' in me gizzards. Don' hurt so much now. Don' hurt a' all. Goin' all dark. Goin' allllll dark ..." His eyes lost focus, and Cabal knew it was too late to ask him any more questions. There was a silence broken only by the rasp of Cacon's shallow breaths. "Eh, Meissner, me ol' ... me ol' ... thingy. Guess wha'. You'll never ... guess wha' ..."

"What is it, Rovetta?" The bark had completely gone from Cabal's voice. Miss Barrow watched him, surprised and a little perturbed by how gentle he had become, how quietly he spoke.

"I 'ave ... the oddest feelin' I've done this before ... Deja vu, isn't it, ol' son? Deja vu ..."

Then Alexei Cacon-Arturo Rovetta-died for the second and final time.

Ten minutes later, Cabal was sitting in the upright chair that Miss Barrow had been using. He could hear her pacing back and forth upstairs. When Cacon died, she made a sound in her throat somewhere between a gasp and a sob, and fled the room. Cacon lay still and cold on the floor, covered with a sheet from the bedding cupboard. Cabal sat with his hands in his lap, fingers interlaced, and stared at the body, thinking. False names, safe houses, shadows, and murder; it seemed he had been right all along about Cacon's being an agent, but with a true name like Rovetta Cabal had evidently put him in the wrong camp.

All of which raised the question: why was Cacon-Cabal found it impossible to think of him as Rovetta-aboard the Princess Hortense in the first place? It was possible he was just leaving Mirkarvia at the completion of a mission, or a placement, or whatever it is that the less dynamic spies do. That idea didn't appeal to Cabal, though; with a potential revolution fermenting in Mirkarvia, it would certainly be in Senza's best interests to keep as many intelligence agents and agents provocateurs on the ground as possible, all the better to pour fuel on its enemy's troubles. So the weight of probability was that he was aboard the Princess Hortense for a particular reason, that might or might not have something to do with DeGarre's and Zoruk's deaths.

Cabal cupped his hands over his mouth and nose and sighed heavily. As a scientist, he was used to evolving his knowledge by developing a hypothesis and then building a bridge of experimental and evidential proof that got him from where he was to where his hypothesis suggested he could go. Sometimes the hypothesis was flawed and the bridge could not be completed, but even that failure was potentially useful in itself. Here, however, he lacked the most basic things; he had no hypothesis that linked everything together. He had a retired engineer, a f.e.c.kless and naive student of politics, a Senzan secret agent-all dead-and himself, the victim of an attempted murder. He could not escape the likelihood that politics was behind all these, and that each killing or attempted killing might have different motives, but that took him no further.

He was still sitting in a dismal brown study when Miss Barrow came quietly down the stairs and reentered the room. She couldn't help but glance at the sheet-covered body on the floor before saying to Cabal, "Sorry."

"Sorry?" Cabal lifted his head. "Sorry for what, precisely?"

"For-" She tried to find words, failed, and gestured vaguely in the direction of upstairs. "I was a little upset. I can't say why. I was upset the first time poor Mr. Cacon ... died. But the second time, that was so much worse. I don't know why." She looked sideways at him, unhappy at confiding in the foul Herr Cabal, and unhappier still to ask him, "Why would that be so?"

"Because you saw hope." He got to his feet. "We should go. His colleagues are bound to wonder where he is, and they will surely come here first. I do not think I care to explain all these interesting piles of burnt chemicals and chalk markings on the floor to them. They will doubtless show a lack of imagination for my aims and a lack of sympathy for my methods. And then torture and kill me." He walked past her into the hall. She heard him putting on his jacket and hat as he added, "It's only to be expected. Occupational hazard." He reappeared in the doorway, straightening his cravat. "I think we shall go out by the other exit. It's always nice not to have to traipse through a crime scene. Coming?"

To anybody who hadn't seen a man die twice in a room stinking of blood and burning Dolly Blue, it was a lovely evening. The sky was clear, the pavement cafes were doing a quickening trade as people came out to follow their evening meals with more evening meals, and lovers walked arm in arm, whispering secrets.

Miss Barrow, who had taken Cabal's arm for the purpose of blending in with the evening crowd, was whispering secrets in his ear, but of a nature that would have disappointed Cupid. They were murmurs of murder and murderers, daggers and death, necromancy and necessity.

"But you see the efficacy of my methods," replied Cabal. "Imagine if every murder victim had a chance to name his or her murderer. Think what a boon it would be."

"No," she said, quietly. "It's monstrous. Dragging souls back into their bodies for the convenience of the living, for a few muddled moments before sliding off into the shadows. Isn't dying once cruel enough?"

"Oh, you mustn't judge from that little display. That was just a party trick thrown together from easily available components and a few rarer items from my bag. If Cacon had died more quickly, or been poisoned, or a dozen other variables, it would not have worked at all. Even with a near-perfect subject to work with, there is only perhaps a one in three chance of the Asyrinth ritual you witnessed taking effect. We were lucky we got as much from him as we did."

"Listen to yourself, Cabal. He wasn't a subject. He was a human being."

Cabal's jaw tightened. "I would ask you not to lecture me on morality. I don't take it kindly. Besides, you say 'human being' as if it's something special. There are a lot of them about, you know, and few are worth the price of the calcium in their bones."

"Most of us don't measure a person's worth in calcium!" she said, a little too hotly, as she drew some confused glances from other walkers.

Cabal smiled quietly at suchlike-a smile he had spent painstaking minutes in front of the mirror bringing to a high finish, a smile that said, I will indulge your attention for a few seconds, but then you should really look away, with a pitch-perfect subtext, barely discernible at a conscious level, that went, Or I shall run an open razor across your eyeball. Everybody looked away.

Unperturbed, he murmured to Miss Barrow, "And perhaps that's why there's so much wrong in the world. Calcium's quite my favourite alkaline earth metal. It should be more highly regarded."