Cabal: Johannes Cabal, the Detective Part 7

"How," said Cabal, wondering how far he could let the uncomfortable persona of Herr Meissner slip in safety. Every degree was a relief. "How did he open the window? If it's like mine, it's fixed with a screw."

The thought hadn't occurred to Schten. He looked at the window again and seemed nonplussed. He cast his gaze around the room. "I don't know, Herr Meissner. The windows can be opened when we are at anchor and in low-level flight, but my crew would have made the rounds of all the cabins and secured the windows when we began to climb."

On the bed, he found the answer to this small mystery. A tool wallet lay open, its elasticated straps holding in place the sort of small spanners, screwdrivers, and other devices that a man with an interest in the mechancal might well carry in his luggage. One screwdriver was out of place, lying across its fellows. Beside it was the missing window screw. Schten picked it up and showed it to Cabal. "It was never foreseen that a pa.s.senger would have both the desire to open a cabin window at high alt.i.tude and the means by which to do it." He sighed as he looked at the window. "A tragedy."

"Why did he do it?" Konstantin had walked past Cabal to stand in the rapidly cluttering cabin. "He seemed in perfect equilibrium at dinner. Why would he return here with every appearance of good humour and then coldly and methodically put an end to himself?"

Schten shrugged. "Dinner was several hours ago. Perhaps he spent that time brooding over something. The man who undid that window may have been of very different composure to the man to whom we bid good night."

Konstantin was unimpressed. "Brooding over what?"

"The boy was right. I have dedicated my life to science, and all it has brought is death. The victims of my machines cry out for justice. I shall give it to them."

Konstantin and Schten turned to Cabal in astonishment. They found him leaning over a portable typewriter on the small writing desk. He was reading from a sheet still in place between platen and paper bail.

Cabal turned and looked at the two men. "He typed his suicide note. How very modern of him."

Schten glared at him. "For G.o.d's sake, Meissner! A man's dead." He made to remove the sheet from the typewriter. Before he could reach it, however, Cabal tapped a lever on the typewriter's carriage twice smartly and then tapped a key. He pulled the sheet from the machine himself and regarded it sharply for a moment before handing it over.

"The inevitable investigation into M. DeGarre's death will no doubt wish you to preserve this as evidence, Captain," he said.

Schten was coming to the conclusion that he really didn't like the meddlesome Herr Meissner. "What was the point of that, sir?"

"To give the police a comparison. I have repeated the last m of the message, as you can see. We are all witnesses that I typed it on this machine and, even to the naked eye, the two letters seem identical. Believe me, Captain, a thorough investigation would leave no stone unturned and no hypothesis unconsidered, including the possibility that this note was typed on another machine and left here to divert suspicion."

"What? What? Are you serious, man? The door was locked and barred from the inside. Are you suggesting that the poor man was murdered and the murderer threw the body out of the window and then himself to follow?"

"I am suggesting it, yes, but not as a serious theory, only as a possibility. There are such things as parachutes, after all."

"Parachutes? This is a civil vessel, sir; it has no need of parachutes. And before you suggest that this remarkable murderer of yours brought his own aboard, you should understand that we are travelling in near-total darkness over wooded mountains. No one but a lunatic would attempt such a jump."

"There are such things as lunatics, Captain." Cabal held up his hands to forestall Schten's increasing wrath. "Peace, sir. I do not believe for a second that this is the case. While there are certain religious and political groups that encourage a degree of fanaticism in some of their members, that they may be used as expendable a.s.sa.s.sins, they are rarely subtle. I see no reason that any such organisation should want to kill M. DeGarre and then disguise it as suicide. Miss Barrow-" He turned to Leonie, as did Schten and Konstantin, both in some surprise that a woman would want to hang around the scene of a death. She, in her turn, demonstrated some discomfort that her silence had not rendered her entirely invisible. "I understand from our conversation earlier that you have some interest in psychology. What do you make of all this? The apparent equanimity of M. DeGarre this evening? The abrupt nature of this note?"

That Cabal did not mention that her "interest" in such matters was formal and criminological was not lost on her, and so she spoke as an unthreatening dilettante.

"Well," she started uncertainly, "from what I've read on cases like"-she gestured vaguely at the cabin and its window-"this, there is no standard form. Sometimes there are notes, but ... well, there's no rule that says there has to be. And when there is a note it can be anything from pages and pages long to less than you'd leave in a note for the milkman. I understand Herr Meissner's wishing to be thorough, but there is nothing here to say this is anything but what it appears to be. And that is very regretful. I liked M. DeGarre."

"As did I, my dear," said Konstantin. "I think we all did. This isn't the place for a young lady. Please, may I accompany you-?"

"That won't be necessary, Colonel," interrupted Cabal. "I have said my piece and perhaps demonstrated my incompetence for such an investigation. I shall leave this in the hands of the captain, who will surely do a better job of it than I. Good night, gentlemen. I am, of course, at your service if you should need me for a statement or suchlike." He nodded curtly, to which the colonel clicked his heels, while the captain distractedly bid them farewell.

On the way to Leonie Barrow's cabin, Cabal stared at the carpet the whole way, his hands behind his back, thinking. She looked at him, mildly amused. "If anybody saw you like that, they'd forget all about us being the ship's lovebirds. You're taking me, unchaperoned, to my cabin, but you look like a man with acute dyspepsia."

Cabal was not in the mood for verbal fencing. "DeGarre, missing and, in all reasonable probability, dead."

"Yes?"

"A suicide note. Typed."

"Yes."

"Brooding over a few featherlight jibes from some boy who's barely started shaving, he types a note, removes a securing bolt from his window, and throws himself into the void."

"Yes."

Cabal walked in silence for another few paces. "Do you believe a word of it?"

"No. No, I don't. That business with the typewriter-what were you up to?"

"I told the captain. A letter from that typewriter for comparison."

"That's something else I didn't believe a word of. You should be careful; I don't think the captain believed you, either."

Cabal stopped and looked at her. "What's this?" he said, a bitter mockery evident in his tone. "Concerned for my safety?"

"I've explained that once." She kept walking, and after a moment Cabal admitted defeat in this small conflict and followed. "All I'm saying is that you should keep your head down. If you want to keep it at all. So, the typewriter."

"The typewriter. I backs.p.a.ced twice and typed the last letter in DeGarre's note, the m in them."

"What use is that for comparison? It would have come down in the same place as the original."

"No. It should have come down in the same place as the original."

"But it didn't?"

"No. About half a millimetre to the right and a little more upward."

"Which means what, exactly? That the note was typed, removed, and then replaced? Why would DeGarre do that?"

"If DeGarre did it at all. And, even if he did not, why would this hypothetical expendable a.s.sa.s.sin do it?"

They had reached Leonie's cabin and paused by the door, speaking in hushed tones. "We believe he was murdered, then?" she whispered. "I don't believe in hypothetical expendable a.s.sa.s.sins, with or without parachutes. Unless we can come up with a reasonable explanation of how a murderer got out of a locked and barricaded room, we're just going to have to accept that it was suicide, no matter how wrong that seems."

There was something of the caged animal about Cabal, she thought, as she waited for a reply. He was angry and frustrated that he had been presented with a problem that intrigued him, but that engaging that problem might lead to his exposure, arrest, and execution. She could almost feel sorry for him. But this was Johannes Cabal, a man she knew from bitter experience was more than capable of monstrous acts of violence and cruelty when necessary. Then again, he was also the man who had sent her a letter and doc.u.ment of such astonishing and liberating power that it had made her father-a man of great imperturbability-sit down and repeat, "Well, I'll be b.u.g.g.e.red" for the better part of a minute.

Whatever was going on inside Cabal's mind currently, he did not seem in the mood to share. "Good night, Miss Barrow," he said finally, and walked away, drawing his ridiculous Oriental dressing gown tight. Leonie watched him through narrowed eyes, shook her head, and retired for what was left of the night.

Cabal got back to his cabin, closed the door heavily, dumped the horrendous dressing gown on the floor, and threw himself into his bed with a muttered expression of irritation with the world. He just wanted to go back to sleep. He did not want to become any more involved in the curious case of the defenestrated DeGarre than he already was. Indeed, if he could avoid any further entanglements he would be a happy man. A happier man, at least. He was determined to roll over, make himself comfortable, forget all about the night's events, and go to sleep.

He managed exactly half of this list. After rolling over and making himself comfortable, he discovered that he was just comfortable enough to consider the night's events in detail, and in so doing drove away any hope of sleep. He was in that awkward place where rationality and logic don't quite match up, and the horrible squealing of misaligned mental cogs was driving him to distraction. Pure brute logic said the door was locked and barricaded, the window was open, and the cabin offered no hiding places, therefore the occupant of the cabin had gone out of the window. Pure brute logic overruled any silly murder shenanigans by pointing out the suicide note and the locked room, and then proceeded to wave Ockham's razor around in a threatening manner.

Rationality, however, is a slightly different beast, or, at least, Cabal's was. It considered the curious facts of DeGarre's good humour at dinner, the curiosity of the misaligned suicide note, and ... d.a.m.n it! The chair! Cabal sat up in bed, thinking hard. Why had DeGarre barricaded his door at all? The door was already locked. Even if opening the window turned out to be a noisy operation, by the time a member of the crew bearing a master key arrived to open the door he would long since have completed his unsuccessful impersonation of Peter Pan and become an untidy mess in the Mirkarvian wilderness. To protect against or at least slow any attempt to kick the door down. Schten had dislodged the chair with a single well-placed kick, but the captain was a big man. Anybody else would have taken longer to get through, and that was what DeGarre had planned upon. There, it was satisfactorily explained. No, it wasn't. It was overplanned. Once the window was open, it was the work of a moment to climb out into eternity. Unless he ended up dithering before the jump? No, that wouldn't do, either. That meant he had planned for time spent dithering, which meant he expected to be unsure or at least antic.i.p.ated the possibility of being unsure, in which case he was unsure of committing suicide, in which case-Cabal growled with irritation. In which case, why had he committed suicide? People don't set out to kill themselves and then make contingency plans lest they change their minds. It was a stupid, stupid circular argument. So he returned to the point of departure. Why had DeGarre barricaded his door? Cabal looked around for a new path to follow, one that didn't curve so alarmingly, but was to be disappointed.

He slumped back down and tried to sleep. At first, his slowing conscious mind was naive enough to believe that his subconscious was helping him to drift off. It presented him with a vision of a limitless plane of tiles beneath a sterile white sky. The tiles were marked on each edge with a letter-a, b, c, d-to indicate orientation, and some mathematical symbols were scrawled across the centre. He halfheartedly attempted to read one, but the notations squirmed beneath his gaze and it seemed too much work to force them to stay still. He was fairly sure they were something to do with topology, and that was enough for him. Topology was not one of his favourite branches of mathematics. Instead, he went for a walk, feeling the rea.s.suring touch of pure, warm s.h.a.g pile scientific logic beneath his bare feet. There was little to look at except for the tiles, so he watched them pa.s.s beneath and by him as he strolled, enjoying the swirling patterns of notation on their surfaces, enjoying the regularity, and the- Something stabbed his foot. He hopped sideways, swearing with surprise. One of the tiles was not flush with the others, and had gashed his foot. The tiles didn't feel warm and woolly anymore but cold and hostile. His blood was scattered in scarlet drops across the offending tile, shining like rubies. As he watched, the notation joined with his blood and formed new shapes. Belatedly, he realised that the writing was not entirely topographical. It was too late now, though. All around him tiles were rising to reveal that they were in fact the top faces of cubes. All but the one that had cut him; that one grew and expanded, and he could see extra dimensionality within it, a tesseract. He tried to name its four dimensions-he felt he had to-but they came out wrong. This cube had the dimensions of height, length, width, and significance. It grew and grew until he was in its skeletal shadow, the white sky warped in its core.

Cabal awoke suddenly from a light slumber, sweating, angry, and with a phantom pain in his foot. He was angry at himself for looking and not seeing, angry at his unconscious mind's infuriating habit of telling him things in the most obscure way possible, and angry at circ.u.mstances for putting him in this wretched situation. He could investigate the potential clue he had just perceived, but he knew that he shouldn't.

He managed to resist his curiosity for the best part of four minutes.

It was now over two hours since the discovery of DeGarre's disappearance and probable death. The corridors were quiet again, and the muttered conferences from his fellow pa.s.sengers speculating about the night's events had long since died away. Cabal wrapped the dressing gown around himself again and, his phantasmically injured foot still fresh in his memory, put on Meissner's slippers.

He looked up and down the corridor, but it was silent and empty. Satisfied that he was alone for the moment, he turned his attention downwards, and started walking towards DeGarre's cabin.

The dark red carpet marked with a black pattern was not made up of a single roll at all. Instead, the ingenious Mirkarvians had used individual squares of carpet. The practicality of being able to easily replace damaged or stained sections without the necessity of recarpeting great lengths of corridor was not lost on Cabal. Nor, now, was the significance of his dream. Tesseract sounds a great deal like tessellate, at least to an overactive unconscious mind. There are seventeen groups of tessellation with translational symmetry in two dimensions; the pattern woven into the identical carpet squares used group pmg, which reflects in only one direction. Therefore, if a tile is placed incorrectly it breaks the pattern. The pattern was a complex one, wrought in one dark colour upon another, if one regards black as a colour. In the normal run of things, it might have been months before an error was noticed, if it ever was.

Between Cabal's eye for order and the a.n.a.lytical qualities of his unusual mind, it had been discovered within a few hours. A few hours, because Cabal was positive the carpeting had been perfect before. Yet now-he stopped and knelt just around the corner from DeGarre's cabin-one square had been lifted and replaced incorrectly. Why was that? It was obvious that the pattern had been disrupted, if only one took a few moments to examine it properly. The unmistakeable conclusion was that it had been replaced in a hurry, and there had been no time to check.

The square was well tamped down, and Cabal was frustrated to find that he couldn't lift it. A brief trip back to his cabin and he returned with his switchblade. It was the work of seconds to insert the tip of the knife beneath the square's edge and lift it out.

Beneath was a bed of underlay. Unlike the carpet, this seemed to be continuous. Yet he could make out a neat cut running through it close to the edge of the exposed area. Cabal lifted more carpet squares and revealed that a square section of underlay, perhaps seventy centimetres along an edge, had been cut. It didn't look to be a hurried job and, when he lifted the loose square of underlay, he saw that it had probably been done when the flooring was originally laid. A maintenance hatch lay in the area he had cleared, a ring in its surface ingeniously flush, with only a small s.p.a.ce to insert a fingertip and flip the ring up so the hatch could be lifted. Without a second thought, Cabal did so.

He disliked extemporised activities, not least because going without preparation usually meant being unprepared. As he lowered himself into the darkness of the ducting that lay beneath the open hatch, he reflected that there were better ways to explore a mysterious dark place than without a torch and naked but for a Chinese dressing gown and a pair of slippers. Giving himself the a.s.surance that he would not go far, he shuffled along on all fours.

The duct almost immediately reached a T-junction. He gauged that turning left would take him beneath the corridor on which DeGarre's cabin lay, so that was the way he went. The light filtering down through the open hatch behind him dimmed sharply as he took the corner, and for the next two or three metres he crawled forwards in deep gloom. Thus, he felt, rather than saw, something unusual in the duct. The slightly flexible sheet metal became suddenly rigid and, feeling around, he realised that he had discovered yet another hatch, locked shut at its four corners by rotating catches connected to small handles. He gripped one of the handles, gave it an experimental turn, and felt a catch disengage. He did the same to one of its neighbours, and felt that side of the hatch drop slightly until it came to rest on something. He guessed that the hatch would have a lip running around its edge to prevent it simply falling through once all four catches were opened, because-unless he was very much mistaken-he had a very good idea what was on the other side of it, and dropping the hatch would be inconvenient at the very least.

He released the last catch, lifted the far edge of the hatch, and pushed it away from him so that it lay on the duct floor on the far side of the opening. Then he crawled back a little and gingerly pushed the near edge of the hatch away from him to reveal what lay beneath.

It was Mirkarvia, some four thousand feet below him, and barely visible in the early-morning darkness. A cold wind blew up through the hatch and made him shiver, suddenly very aware of how ridiculously unprepared he was. Extemporisation! Pah! He spat, mentally, on the concept. Here he was, woefully underequipped to carry out any sort of detailed investigation, without light or notebook. And cold. Very, very cold. Still, he was here now, so he should make the most of it, although he had little idea what he hoped to find. The duct didn't run beneath DeGarre's cabin, with a convenient hatch to give the hypothetical a.s.sa.s.sin an escape route. He felt around for anything suspicious, but there was nothing; the duct's main function seemed to be to carry a.s.sorted cables and pipes around the ship, with ventilation possibly a secondary task. There were a couple of st.u.r.dy metal handles mounted on either side of the opening, although they struck him as more likely to be used as mounting for ladders during maintenance than as rungs to hold when engineers climbed through here.

He reached down and felt around on the outer skin of the Princess Hortense but found very little to excite his attention. Well, it had seemed an interesting avenue of enquiry when it was all dreamscapes and hypercubes, but now that it had been reduced to freezing in a tin tunnel Cabal felt it had lost some of its allure. He pulled his arm back inside and backed up a little to allow himself room to pull the hatch into position. Except that he couldn't back up a little; something was in the way, and by the time he realised that "something" was actually "somebody" it was much too late.

His knees squealing against the steel floor of the duct, he was bodily shoved forward. He tried to scramble across to the other side of the open hatchway, but a hand came down in the small of his back and pushed him forcefully down. As he fumbled, looking for some way to pull himself clear, one knee dropped over the edge of the gap, and Johannes Cabal fell out of the hatch.

Chapter 7.

IN WHICH CABAL IS IN TERRIBLE DANGER AND THEN HAS BREAKFAST.

Johannes Cabal disliked many things, despised fewer, loathed fewer still, and reserved true hatred for only a handful. Understanding how intense his personal definition of "dislike" was, however, gives some impression of how hot his hatreds ran. This is a man who had, after all, shot men dead for making him faintly peeved.

Johannes Cabal hated people trying to kill him. He hated it, and he hated them. Certainly, most people aren't keen on it, but few have actually experienced it, and fewer still on the regular basis with which Cabal was familiar. Already, within this single narrative, we have seen how the Mirkarvian judicial system had salted him away for execution and then, more personally, how the Count Marechal had intended to skewer him upon a cavalry sabre. Cabal by degrees had grown more inured to the actual event of an attempt upon his life, but he never could gird himself effectively against the intent. He didn't so much find it hurtful as ignorant. To kill him would either be the work of a Luddite, fearful of his necromantic studies, or a vandal who tried to destroy him simply because that's what vandals do. Thus, for Johannes Cabal, was the world arranged: Luddites, vandals, and a vast chorus of the undecided.

His first thought, as his legs preceded him towards a likely doom, was that at least this settled the question of DeGarre's death. Unless there was some sort of recluse who lived in the ducting and took very unkindly to strangers, the person who had just thrown him out was DeGarre's killer. Not suicide, then. Good. The numerous anomalies would have bothered him forever if it had been suicide. "Forever," however, currently seemed to equate to the time it would take him to hit the ground.

Fortunately for him, the animal part of his brain that so irritated him with such base desires as eating and sleeping had different priorities. To expedite these, the uppermost of which was "Don't die," it had dumped a large quant.i.ty of adrenaline into Cabal's bloodstream, and had-after locating one of the rungs by the hatch edge during a panicked fumble-affixed his right hand to it with a grip of stone. Thus, Cabal did not tumble to a lonely death on an unseen mountainside. At least, not immediately.

Instead, he hung by one hand like an apple from the bough, and wondered, with a degree of objectivity that surprised him even at the time, whether panicking might help. Despite the received wisdom in such events being "Don't look down," he looked down, and regretted it terribly. Not because of the great height-he could barely see anything in the darkness; he might have been a few metres above a mound of mattresses for all he knew-but because his dressing gown had come undone and he had neglected to put on anything beneath it, such had been the alacrity with which he left his cabin. No, this view was not especially what he wanted for his last memory.

The slipper fell from one foot and whirled into the void and out of sight. That settled it. The thought of his corpse being found largely naked but for one slipper (should it stay on during the fall) and a dressing gown that was a definite crime against aesthetics spurred him into action. He looked up and started to swing his free hand to grab on to the handle. As the edge of the hatch was almost within range, a gloved hand reached down and slapped his away. Oh yes, thought Cabal. Somebody's trying to kill me. I'd almost forgotten. His a.s.sailant, hidden in the shadows of the conduit, gripped the little finger of Cabal's right hand and very deliberately started to bend it back.

This was really too much. There was nothing for it-his attacker had to die.

Currently, however, Cabal was at a great disadvantage: several, in fact. Yet, even as his shadowy attacker worked on loosening Cabal's grip, on the rung in particular and on life in general, Cabal was quickly cataloguing his situation and his a.s.sets. He had one hand free, he had one slipper, he had one dressing gown, and-he remembered with a pleasurable frisson-he had a switchblade knife in one of the pockets of that dressing gown. Yes, between the free hand and the switchblade he felt sure he would be able to formulate a robust response.

Preparation is everything. Cabal was very much aware that to lose the knife was to lose his life, so he was careful to grip the knife firmly when he finally got his left hand into his right-hand pocket, the dressing gown having grown frolicsome in the aeroship's slipstream. He found the release, and the blade snicked out between the gap he had left between his fingertips and his thumb. Closing his fingers and thumb to reestablish a good grip, he concluded the preparatory step of his plan. It had taken perhaps three seconds.

What the plan itself lacked in subtlety, it more than made up for in brutality. As his attacker, who seemed to be wearing coa.r.s.e leather gloves, finally got a good grip on Cabal's little finger, Cabal reached up and stabbed, aiming at the attacker's wrist. Anatomically, you can really spoil somebody's day with even a shallow cut there, and Cabal was very much in the mood to cause as much misery as possible. There was a cry, and Cabal's finger was released.

He knew he had a moment's grace. If the attacker was only scratched, he would resume with a great deal more violence in a moment. Looking to his reserves, Cabal put the knife in his mouth and grabbed the other side of the hatch with his free hand. In his teens, he would have been able to pull himself up with little difficulty, but he was now in his late twenties and exercised but little. He steeled himself and pulled. He didn't care how many muscles he tore or how much agony he put himself through. Falling was not an option. Dying was not an option. There was too much to be done.

No muscles tore, but he knew they would be complaining bitterly in a few hours, as he clambered gracelessly into the secure darkness of the conduit. His attacker was nowhere to be seen. He waited in silence for almost three minutes before he was convinced that he was alone. Then he allowed himself the luxury of flopping forward, exhausted and half frozen, to lie on his front. Under his breath he mumbled, "Too much to be done. Too much to be done. Too much to be done ..."

Leonie Barrow found Cabal at breakfast. The long dining table of the evening before had been separated into individual tables and bolted down in their customary positions. Each also had the addition of a four-headed lamp: four iron swans' necks that rose from a central mounting curved down and then up to conclude with the swans' heads, beaks agape, with lightbulbs stuck in their gullets. It was a typical Mirkarvian conceit: exquisite engineering merged with a barbaric aesthetic. She noticed that Cabal was sitting, probably deliberately, at one of the few tables that had no lamp. The rest of the room was almost empty, but for Herr Harlmann, who, it seemed, had struck up a relationship with Lady Ninuka's companion, Miss Ambersleigh. He was presumably boring her with business anecdotes, though she was maintaining an air of interest that might even have been real. Whatever they were talking about, it was in low tones that would have seemed conspiratorial but for the change in atmosphere brought on by the events of the previous night. The disappearance and presumed suicide of M. DeGarre had cast a pall over the ship, and the jollity of the previous evening had entirely evaporated. Even the crew seemed subdued beyond professional impa.s.siveness.

Leonie ordered poached eggs and toast from a steward, who seemed perplexed that anybody would want such a combination for a meal when she wasn't ill, and sat uninvited at Cabal's table. He paused for a moment while cutting his steak-a far more Mirkarvian choice for breakfast-to eye her suspiciously. "Good morning, Miss Barrow," he said in a perfunctory tone, immediately forking a neat square of meat into his mouth to forestall any more speech.

"Good morning, Herr Meissner," she replied. She had momentarily considered teasing him by almost using his real name, but she was not in the mood and she was positive that he wasn't, either. He looked tired and somewhat distracted. "Any further thoughts about last night?" she asked when there was n.o.body near.

Cabal slowed his chewing for a moment. Then he took a sip of black coffee, swallowed, and said, as if it were a common subject for conversation, "Last night, somebody tried to kill me."

The steward's arrival with her food and a pot of tea covered her surprise. When they could speak again, she whispered, "Tried to kill you? Who did?"

Cabal regarded her with mild amus.e.m.e.nt. "Smile when you whisper," he advised her. "You're supposed to be flirting with me, if you recall?"

She stared at him icily. Then suddenly her expression thawed and she smiled winsomely, her eyes dewy with romantic love. "Oh, sweetheart ... somebody tried to kill you? Whosoever would do such a thing to my nimpty-bimpty snook.u.ms?"

Cabal could not have been more horrified if she'd pulled off her face to reveal a gaping chasm of eternal night from which glistening tentacles coiled and groped. That had already happened to him once in his life, and he wasn't keen to repeat the experience.

"What?" he managed in a dry whisper.

"Smile when you whisper," she said, her expression fixed and bloodcurdlingly coquettish. "You're supposed to be flirting with me, remember?"

"Please don't do that." He wasn't sure that he wouldn't prefer to be dangling from the underside of the Princess Hortense again rather than endure another second of Miss Barrow's unnerving countenance. He certainly found it a great relief when she allowed the expression to slip and be replaced by one of wry amus.e.m.e.nt.

"So, I've discovered what it takes to frighten a man who deals with devils."

"Not frightened, Fraulein. More ... discomforted." He took a moment to compose himself. "Now, are you really all that blase about somebody trying to kill me?"

She looked at him seriously. "Of course not. Tell me what happened." She ate her breakfast as Cabal concisely related the events of the previous night. When he had finished, and was taking the opportunity to dispatch the remainder of his steak, Leonie drank her tea and considered. "There are two possibilities, I suppose. The misarranged carpet really does have something to do with DeGarre's death. Or-" She studied him carefully before proceeding. "Or an enemy of yours has followed you onto the ship or has recognised you."

Cabal stopped sawing up his last bit of meat. "You're not serious?"

"You must have dozens of enemies-" She almost said his name, but restrained herself in time. "Herr Meissner. Importantly, you probably don't even know a few of them on sight."

"Explain."

"You leave a trail of destruction through people's lives." Cabal started to argue, but she talked through him. "Even if the ones you affect directly either will not or cannot come after you, that still leaves family and friends. You provoke hatred and revenge. You know it."

Cabal hadn't really thought about it in those terms, but he could see the truth in her words. He never went out of his way to damage people's lives-not except in some very deliberate cases, anyway-but people would insist on getting in the way. Now he considered it more carefully, he began to appreciate just why quite so many bullets, knives, and the occasional crossbow quarrel had whistled past his frantically dodging head down the years.

"Rufus Maleficarus," he said in quiet contemplation.