Johannes Cabal the Detective (24 page)

“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 unconscionably 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 wrong. 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.

“I don’t want you to make any frivolous comments. You obviously enjoy calling me a monster, and I’m not inclined to give you any more ammunition. However—” He flared his nostrils again and inhaled. “However … I can smell blood.”

She looked at him in astonishment for a moment, and then sniffed experimentally. Perhaps it was just his words playing on her imagination, but she thought she could scent something warm and metallic on the warm evening air. “Oh, God. I think you’re right. Where’s it coming from?”

Cabal looked around, questing. “I think it’s coming from—Ah. Actually, you’re standing in it.”

To her credit, Miss Barrow reacted in no more melodramatic a fashion than stepping back to study the dark wet patch that had formed between the cobbles at the end of a small shadowed pathway that led down beside the church before joining the road. It looked black and oily under the yellow glow of the warming gaslight mantles, high atop their lampposts.

“That’s a lot of blood,” she said with more detachment than Cabal would have expected.

“Not necessarily. A little blood goes a long way,” he replied a bit ruefully, the voice of experience.

For her answer, she daintily dipped the toe of her shoe into the patch. It went in quite a way. It seemed that the patch was just the surface of a deep pool that had formed where a cobble was missing. “That’s a lot of blood,” she repeated, and Cabal couldn’t argue with that. It had to be the best part of a litre, and people tend to get very distressed when they find themselves missing such a large portion of their vital bodily fluids. That, or dead.

“There’s a trail,” he said. There was indeed a trail, but not one made up of drops. The pool had formed by blood running down the pathway for a metre or so, but shortly beyond that there was a broad, smeared trail of the stuff. It didn’t take a great forensic talent to realise that whoever was bleeding had collapsed, and dragged himself away further up the path. “Odd. If I were badly wounded right next to a thoroughfare, I would head towards it, try to get help. Admittedly, it’s quiet at the moment, but it’s still the best choice.”

“Would you be thinking that straight if you were so hurt?” Miss Barrow was walking slowly up the path, following the trail.

Cabal didn’t know. He also didn’t know if they should be getting involved. “This has nothing to do with us. We should go.”

“No. There’s somebody terribly injured. They need help.”

“Help? Look how much blood there is, woman. They’re dead. So, I repeat: we should go.”

She stopped and turned to look at him. In the darkness, he couldn’t make out her expression, but her stillness unnerved him strangely. When she spoke, the tone was tired and dismissive, but he thought he heard something else there that he couldn’t quite identify. Perhaps it was disgust. Or disappointment. “Go then, Cabal. Just shoo. I’m done with you.” She turned her back on him and continued to follow the trail of blood.

He watched her, while he failed to do anything: he failed to come up with a witty retort; he failed to say anything very profound regarding their unusual relationship; he failed to walk away with dignity. He succeeded only in opening his mouth and closing it again, undecided, and—as her back was to him—she didn’t even see that. He was still standing there impassively, thirty seconds later, when she became tired at being stared at. In that time she hadn’t progressed very far, the blood becoming increasingly difficult to see in the shadows.