Johannes Cabal the Detective (26 page)

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 carcass 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 rectitude. “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 circumlocutory mores had he been generally less gutted and exsanguinated. “Oh, bloody hell! 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 wasss … ‘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 … Déjà vu, isn’t it, ol’ son? Déjà vu …”

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

T
en 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 feckless and naïve 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?”

T
o 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 cafés 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.”

They walked in silence for a little while then, while Cabal wondered who Cacon’s murderous “viperess” might be, and Miss Barrow wondered if Cabal was serious about the ethical qualities of calcium. With anybody else it would have been a joke, but with Cabal she couldn’t be so sure.

“It’s a small pool of suspects,” said Cabal, changing the subject from preferred elements. “In the case of Cacon, at any rate. A woman, and I think, given his comments, one from aboard the ship. Just four possibilities.”

“Lady Ninuka, Miss Ambersleigh, and—I suppose—Frau Roborovski. That’s three. Who’s the fourth?”

Cabal did not answer, but continued to promenade down the road, looking straight ahead. She finally understood, and it did not please her.

“Me? You suspect me? Oh, you’re a piece of work, all right, Cabal.”

“There you go, thinking like a civilian, Miss Barrow,” Cabal chided her. “Your father would be most upset to hear you talk like that.”