Cabal: Johannes Cabal, the Detective Part 8

"What about him?" Leonie had heard the name before: a notorious warlock who had crossed swords with Cabal on at least one occasion to her knowledge. "I thought he was dead?"

"He is. I killed him thoroughly. That was the second time I met him, though. The first time, it wasn't just happenstance. He blamed me for what happened to his father."

"Was he justified in that?"

"Yes. Yes, he was. But, really, his father was a monster. I had no choice."

"With your history, I really don't think you're in any position to call anybody else a monster," she said sharply.

Cabal's expression was unreadable. "No, I am being entirely literal, in the non-metaphorical, purest dictionary sense of the word. His father was a monster. He was trying to kill me, just as he'd killed others. It was self-defence. Surely that's a reasonable justification even in your morally polarised world, Miss Barrow?"

The brief spark of warmth they had struck in the earlier part of their conversation was entirely dead now. The air between them was cold enough to condense dew.

"No," he said finally. "It has to be something to do with DeGarre's death." Leonie noticed that he'd dropped the "disappearance and probable-death formula." "If it was somebody I had ... upset in the past for whatever reason, why would they go to all the trouble of sneaking after me, gloves at the ready, on the small chance that I would find a hatch in the ship's underside, open it, and then obligingly hang halfway out of it?"

"Why weren't they armed, you mean?"

"Not even that. You yourself, Miss Barrow, have already threatened me with exactly the same weapon that anybody with the slightest whiff of intelligence would use." He looked around to confirm that there were no prying eyes or ears before leaning forward and whispering, "You know who I am."

Leonie Barrow hated to admit it, but Cabal's point was solid. Unless he was being stalked by somebody who was absolutely determined to kill him with his or her own hands, the safest and surest way of seeing him die was simply to use the Mirkarvian state as the instrument of death. They would simply denounce Cabal to the captain, and that would be that. The alternative-that this putative revenger wanted to kill Cabal him-or herself-presupposed that somebody who was organised enough to locate and then shadow Cabal onto the Princess Hortense would then absentmindedly forget to pack a pistol, knife, garotte, or other weapon with which to actually do the deed.

The form "him or her" made her think of Cabal's story of his narrow escape. "In the conduit, this person who tried to kill you, was it definitely a man?"

Cabal waited a moment while a steward came over and cleared away their plates. He poured himself another coffee. "I've wondered about that myself. I couldn't see, and the thick leather gloves meant I don't even know what kind of fingers my attacker had. When they cried out, it was high, but I've heard men in great pain sound quite literally like a child, so that proves little."

"I'm not even going to ask how you have heard such sounds, Herr Meissner."

"No? You know so little of the world. You should get out more, Miss Barrow."

Leonie made an offhand gesture that took in the aeroship. "I would say this is fairly 'out.' Your definition probably involves more time spent in graveyards."

Cabal reined in his habitual desire to argue. He had an unpleasant mental image of things getting so heated that Miss Barrow would end up standing on the table, pointing at him, and screaming "Necromancer!" repeatedly. Instead, he raised his hand slightly in a conciliatory gesture. "Pace, Miss Barrow. This is not an ideal venue to air your views on my profession." In the silence that followed, he realised that he had little left to talk about, so to give himself thinking time he said, "I wonder why this table doesn't have a lamp?"

The change of tack caught Leonie by surprise. "A lamp? I thought you'd sat here to avoid having to look at one of the horrible things. It's the only table without one."

"No. There's one over there without one as well." He gestured carelessly over his shoulder without looking, and she saw that he was indeed right; another table on the far side of the room was also lampless. "I sat here because it was less cluttered. I wonder-" He lifted the plate in the middle of the table on which lay the b.u.t.ter dish and some small pots of preserve. Beneath it was a small neat hole in the tablecloth, its edge hemmed to avoid fraying. "It's meant to have a lamp. That's where it would be screwed into place and the electrical cable connected."

Leonie watched his investigation with an impatient frown. "So? What do the table lamps have to do with anything?"

"Not the table lamps themselves. It's the absence of two table lamps. Probably not relevant." He said this with an air of deep distraction.

Leonie Barrow knew enough about real criminal investigations to know full well that cases rarely if ever hinged on an encyclopedic knowledge of tobacco ash or the curious incident of the butler's allergy to spinach. Cabal's musings seemed self-indulgent and immaterial, and she belatedly realised that he wasn't truly talking to her at all. She was merely a sounding board for him to reflect his own ideas back to himself in a slightly different light. Her irritation showed in her voice. "To bring your attention back to the matter at hand, are you going to report the attack on you last night?"

Cabal blinked slightly, startled out of his reverie. "I haven't made up my mind about that yet. I shouldn't draw attention to myself."

"I think the time for that is pa.s.sed. Let's just say that the captain's own enquiries turn up whoever attacked you and, under interrogation, they mention they'd try to throw you out of the ship in your dressing gown and slippers? The captain comes to you and asks the obvious question: 'Why didn't you tell me that somebody tried to kill you, Herr Meissner?' What would you say? You didn't want any fuss?"

Cabal looked sourly at her, but he couldn't refute her argument. His first instinct was always to keep his business to himself, not least because his business frequently carried a death sentence. "That would be an awkward interview, wouldn't it?" He got to his feet.

"What will you tell him?"

"The truth. Mostly."

Captain Schten listened with the expression of a man who goes into a striptease parlour and finds himself attending a lecture on quantum mechanics, expectation giving way to bafflement. He had particular problems with Herr Meissner's motives for wishing to take up a section of the corridor's carpeting.

"You excavated beneath the carpet because you had a dream that told you to?"

"No. The dream was just my subconscious mind's way of drawing attention to something I'd seen without perceiving its significance."

"A square of carpet?"

"A misaligned square of carpet. Yes. Which had not been so misaligned earlier in the evening when I walked by."

The captain pursued his point with the determination of a man after the last pea on his plate. "So you had noticed it was not misaligned earlier?"

"Yes, but not consciously. Captain, I have a problematical relationship with the inner workings of my mind. Why, I could tell you-" He almost said he could tell of times when such submerged ideations had saved his life while dealing with supernatural ent.i.ties that had come from whichever blighted netherworld they called home with the express intention of swallowing his soul, eating his brains, and using his giblets for gravy. Then he decided not to, in much the same way he might decide not to say, "Incidentally, Captain, I'm a necromancer. It would be best to shoot me now."

Instead, he said, "I could tell you of the silliest things that lead to useful concepts, like displacement ... vulcanization ..." He tried to think of a third thing, and failed. "Jam. But this is all digression. The important point is that I knew the carpet had been interfered with, and I investigated."

"And somebody tried to throw you out. Yes, I understood that part. You took a terrible risk, Herr Meissner."

"How was I to know somebody was going to kill me?" protested Cabal. "It was hardly the most obvious course of events."

"I'm not talking about some phantom a.s.sailant, sir. I am talking about how ill-advised it is to go wandering around the bowels of a great machine of which you know nothing. You could have been incinerated, or electrocuted, or crushed. Worse yet, you might have interfered with the operation of this vessel and brought it crashing down! Did you ever pause to consider that?"

Cabal had not, and inwardly rebuked himself. He wasn't about to let the reference to a "phantom a.s.sailant" go unchallenged, though.

"Such catastrophic scenarios aside, Captain, I repeat: somebody tried to kill me. I did not imagine that."

"So you said, and they just vanished. Hardly the actions of a determined attacker."

"Only after I stabbed them!" There was sudden silence. Cabal searched the captain's face. "I did mention that I'd stabbed them, didn't I?"

"You did not." The captain looked suspiciously at Cabal. "How came you to be wandering the corridors in the early hours in your nightwear and carrying a knife, sir?"

"I needed something to lift the corner of the carpet square. I had a pocketknife in my luggage, and went back for it. I do not habitually go to bed armed, if that is what you are implying."

The captain didn't seem mollified by this explanation, but he let it pa.s.s. "So this individual is injured, yes?"

"In the wrist. It was all I could reach."

The captain seemed satisfied for the first time. He was a practical man and-while talk of hallucinatory tesseracts and shadowy a.s.sa.s.sins might irk him-a wound was altogether more concrete an ent.i.ty. "Finally! Some real evidence. Very well, Herr Meissner. I shall start questioning every single person aboard ship, both pa.s.sengers and crew, with the specific aim of finding a wounded wrist. Then we shall see."

Cabal was caught between conflicting emotions. On the one hand, he was pleased that his attacker would soon be identified. On the other, he was being drawn into official scrutiny too close for comfort. He would have to arrange jumping ship in Senza to a nicety when the time came. Previously, he had only had to worry about the tenacious Miss Barrow handing him over to the Senzan authorities. An awkward bit of evasion would have been necessary, but nothing that he felt he couldn't handle. Now he had Schten to worry about, too. This was getting complicated, and complications could get him killed.

In a curious way, it was perhaps fortunate that there had been a probable murder and an attempted murder aboard (Cabal's nocturnal adventure soon became common currency), or the trip would have been stunningly dull. Low cloud choked the valleys below, and the Hortense had climbed to avoid any mountain peaks. As a result, there was very little to see from the salon windows, and the pa.s.sengers were thrown back on reading and conversation to pa.s.s the time. It was easy to imagine that, under normal circ.u.mstances and in the absence of current newspapers, the ship's small library would be heavily patronised. Instead, however, the salon was party to little groups of two or three people sitting together and muttering to one another in conspiratorial tones that died into watchful silence whenever anybody new entered.

Well, not quite anybody. Cabal himself was a topic of conversation already, based on what little was known about the previous night, so when he came in he was fastened upon to add meat to the thin stew of rumour. The Roborovskis were first out of the slips; specifically Frau Roborovski, her reluctant husband pulled along in her wake.

"Herr Meissner! You must tell us everything!" she demanded as soon as they'd finished the dance of courteous rising to one's feet and offering a seat. She then sat in silence, gazing owlishly at him with an air of attentive antic.i.p.ation, like somebody who once came across the word excitement while reading a dictionary and is interested to know what it looks like in the wild.

Cabal wasn't inclined to for a variety of reasons, the least of which was that he felt sure Captain Schten would not appreciate the detail of his attacker's incriminating wound becoming public knowledge. Instead, he limited himself to saying that he had noticed something amiss with the carpet and, investigating, had discovered the conduit, opened the ventral hatch, and then been thrown out by somebody. It bored him to have to retell it, but it was almost worth the effort simply for the way Frau Roborovski went pale and seemed likely to faint when he got to the murder attempt itself.

"Dangling by one hand!" she managed when her attack of the vapours had attenuated slightly.

"Yes," replied Cabal. And then, for sheer devilment, added, "Largely naked."

He had been expecting her to faint outright, or rush off in horror, or do almost anything except what she did do, which was to widen her eyes a little further still and look at him in such a way that he suddenly realised she was imagining it in far too much detail to be seemly.

"Fortunately," he said quickly and a little too loudly, "I was able to climb back aboard."

"If you were just hanging there-" began Herr Roborovski, but the thought mired him down and he said nothing more.

"Yes?" asked Cabal.

"If you were just hanging there," continued Herr Roborovski with renewed inertia, "why didn't this blackguard who attacked you finish the job? You couldn't really defend yourself, could you?"

"He must have thought I had fallen immediately, and was already scurrying away like a rat," said Cabal, steering around the fact that he had, indeed, defended himself.

Herr Roborovski considered this for a moment. "That was lucky," he said finally, but Cabal thought he detected a note of suspicion in his voice.

Cabal inwardly admitted that it certainly sounded that way. Some economy in veracity seemed called for. "Not lucky at all. Only a coward would have attacked me like that in the first place. It seems hardly surprising that he would want to be away from the scene of the crime as quickly as possible."

"Herr Meissner has a point." It was Colonel Konstantin, who had been listening from the next table. "It was a craven a.s.sault. Any man worthy of the name would have struck from the front. Pushing people out of hatches ... It's un-Mirkarvian."

From Cabal's admittedly limited contact with the modern face of Mirkarvia, a sneak attack seemed entirely in character. Then again, he had been dealing only with the ophidian Count Marechal, a bargain-bas.e.m.e.nt Machiavelli if ever there was one. Konstantin, in contrast, struck him as an officer and a gentleman of the old school. He wondered how a man like that would fit into Marechal's vision of a new, resurgent Mirkarvia that embraced deceit and devious doings to achieve its ends.

"You have high standards, Colonel," said Frau Roborovski. "Not everybody else has them. No. Some of the things I read of in the newspaper ... Shocking! Shocking!"

"A criminal is a criminal," agreed her husband with a very Gallic shrug. "If they had any honour they wouldn't be criminals, after all."

Cabal a.s.sumed that they took the Daily Obvious, and perhaps the Sunday Truism of a weekend.

"Do you think your experience has anything to do with DeGarre's death?" Konstantin asked Cabal.

Cabal decided to be noncommittal in the face of no definite evidence. "M. DeGarre is only missing, Colonel."

"Oh, for heaven's sake, man," replied Konstantin dismissively. "You think he's lurking in the hold with the potatoes? Of course he's dead. Somebody did him in, came up with a half-a.r.s.ed attempt at a suicide note, and threw him out of the window." He ruminated for a moment. "Not necessarily exactly in that order, but I'm certain that's the gist of it."

"And then escaped from a locked and barricaded room?"

"Well, I'm not pretending to know all the facts, Herr Meissner. I have to admit, I have no idea how that was done, but I must also admit that it does not concern or worry me. Y'see, in my experience the cleverer somebody tries to be, the more likely they are to come a cropper." Cabal worked hard to maintain his composure, but the colonel had already moved on. "How a killer escapes from a locked room, that's for a detective to work out. It's a little wrinkle that I'm sure will become clear after the captain's investigation is complete."

Cabal wished that he could share the colonel's sangfroid about the affair, but he could not, not after having been unceremoniously dumped out of the aeroship's belly. His hackles were raised, and he wanted-he didn't even pause inwardly to find some euphemistic way to call it "justice"-revenge. Nice, hot, juicy revenge. He and Count Marechal may have been miles apart in most aspects of their personalities, but this thing, at least, they had in common.

Furthermore, after his own interview with the captain earlier, he had received the distinct impression that Schten remained convinced, whatever his protestations about keeping an open mind, that DeGarre had committed suicide. The attack on Herr Meissner was something else again, and he seemed intent on turning all his enquiries in that direction. Cabal, in contrast, was convinced that DeGarre had been murdered, and that the killer had escaped from the room by some means that involved the underfloor ducting. The curious case of the defenestrated DeGarre and the adventure of the ersatz civil servant were inextricably linked, and it seemed that, if he didn't get to the bottom of them, they would in all likelihood remain unsolved. Therefore, he would prosecute his own investigation, and so justice would be served, albeit in pa.s.sing. The important thing was that Cabal would have discovered the perpetrator, and so be ahead of the game when it came to killing him or her.

In all fairness, Cabal's vengefulness was as much a product of his lifestyle as his humours; in his career to date, he had long since discovered that rivals and enemies rarely simply shook their heads and wandered out of his life, older and wiser. Instead, they were inclined to go off to a dark corner and fester away on new plots and schemes that would explode all over his life like acidic pus. Johannes Cabal had far better things to do with his time than spend it dodging acidic pus, so he had realised early on that the best way to avoid a.s.sorted blowhards and rapscallions bursting through the door declaiming "We meet again, Mister Cabal!," or some such nonsense, was simply to kill them the first time around while they were handy and vulnerable. It wasn't a perfect solution, he had to admit; his rivals and enemies tended to have access to the same sorts of forbidden arcane arts and unwholesome sciences that he did, and so having them sometimes come crawling out of their graves, intent on inflicting a messy postmortem revenge, was not unknown.

Still, as a working practise it had a great deal to recommend it. Even the trail of murder it left was of little import, since-first-most of his victims were already under sentence of death for crimes against G.o.d, Nature, and Humanity, and-second-Cabal himself was already under sentence of death for crimes against G.o.d, Nature, and Humanity, so another few corpses on the tally sheet would hardly concern him unduly. They could hang him only once.

He did not even hint that he meant to carry on his own investigation, however. Somewhere on this vessel was somebody who wished him harm, and he had no intention of handing out any bulletins about his plans that might reach unfriendly ears. He would move slowly and methodically, drawing together the facts until he had his attacker's ident.i.ty in hand, and when he did- Cabal was just considering the best way to isolate and kill his prey when Leonie Barrow spoilt it all by approaching the little group at a fast clip and saying to him, but loud enough for everyone to hear, "Herr Meissner! They've caught the man who tried to kill you!"

Chapter 8.

IN WHICH A SUSPECT IS INTERROGATED AND AN INTERROGATOR IS SUSPICIOUS.

It is a nuisance to be preempted. All Cabal's playful little plans to shove his hog-tied a.s.sailant out of the Princess Hortense's ventral hatch to see how he liked it had now come to nothing, and all because the captain had done exactly what he had said he would, and carried out a thorough investigation. He had fastened upon the single most solid and therefore useful fact from the testament of Herr Meissner, and pursued it through every deck of the ship. Now, in a spare cabin in the second-cla.s.s section that had been pressed into service as an impromptu brig and interrogation room, Schten and-after some bullheaded arguing on the basis that he was the only government official aboard and therefore a necessary witness, allied with some creative quotations from imaginary governmental directives-Johannes Cabal sat opposite the freshly arrested attempted-murder suspect.

Gabriel Zoruk did not look best pleased to be there. He was tousled and unshaven, his shirt was without tie or cravat, and his jacket was creased. He actually looked more like a revolutionary now than when he had been spouting ill-considered politicisms the previous evening, yet now, contrariwise, he was silent. He simply sat with his hands in his lap and glowered at Schten and, occasionally, at Cabal, who was sitting off to Schten's right and a little behind him.

For his part, Schten sat in silence, reading some notes from a sheet of foolscap on a clipboard and pointedly ignored Zoruk's glare. Unusually for the captain, his jacket was open, but this may have been to draw attention to the holster and revolver he wore, dark tan leather and acid-blacked steel against the white shirt and trousers. Zoruk could not have failed to notice it when Schten sat down.

When he judged that Zoruk had stewed enough, the captain deigned to look up from his notes. "Your hands, Herr Zoruk. Would you show me your hands, please?"

Zoruk kept his hands in his lap and replied quietly, "Am I under arrest?"

"Yes," replied Schten without hesitation. "You are under arrest."

"I haven't been read my rights."

"I am not obliged to read you your rights, Herr Zoruk. I am not a policeman. You are being held under the provisions of the Aeolatime Act pertaining to the safety of aerial vessels, crew, pa.s.sengers, and cargo. You can have a copy to read later if you doubt it. Now ... Your hands, sir."

Zoruk's gaze flickered from Schten to Cabal and quickly back again. "Why?"

Schten made a deep rumbling sound. To forestall the captain's rising temper, Cabal said, "To be blunt, Herr Zoruk, you are suspected of attempting to murder me. I succeeded in wounding my attacker in the hand or the wrist. Therefore, if you have such an injury we would be very interested in hearing how you came by it. It is a simple thing. If you are uninjured, you may go. If you are injured and can provide a reasonable explanation, ideally with some corroboration, you will in all likelihood also be allowed to go. Truly, sir, if you are an innocent man, you have nothing to lose by helping the captain in his enquiries."

Schten allowed Cabal's words to sink in before repeating, "So ... would you show me your hands, please?"

Zoruk was plainly nervous, and it took him a full five tortuous seconds before he finally placed both hands, fisted, on the tabletop. Cabal saw a bandage across the back of his right hand, about where the switchblade would have struck. Zoruk started talking the instant his hands. .h.i.t the wooden surface.

"I can explain. I know what it looks like, but I can explain." Schten raised his own hand to signal silence, his gaze on the bandage. "Explanations come later, Herr Zoruk. First, I should be obliged if you would remove that dressing."

With obvious reluctance, Zoruk undid the gauze that held the bandage in place. When he had finished, he carefully peeled it off, wincing as the wound beneath was exposed. Cabal leaned forward in his seat to get a better look, and sat back in disappointment. He had been hoping that the injury would clearly be a knife wound, but this was a shallow, if b.l.o.o.d.y, affair. It could easily be the result of a blade wielded with desperation rather than technique causing an ugly scoring instead of a clean cut. He couldn't be sure if his knife had or had not been the cause. It was very frustrating.

"Does that look like a knife wound to you, Herr Meissner?" asked the captain.

Cabal regretfully shook his head. "It may be. I just struck upwards; I don't even know if the blade cut on its sharp edge or was dragged. It's not conclusive."

Schten humphed. He had clearly been hoping for the examination to close the case immediately. He signalled to Zoruk to cover the wound again. "So, mein Herr," he said as Zoruk started wrapping the gauze back around his hand, "we are listening. How came you by that wound?"