Johannes Cabal the Detective (23 page)

After a visit to the bank to change some of the British notes he had concealed in the lining of his case for Senzan liras (“I’m touring,” he told the cashier, almost truthfully), he found a dispensing chemist’s and a very well-stocked hardware shop that between them provided everything he needed for his hair dye. He had no intention of actually making it while in Parila; the plan was to mix it in the train’s lavatory en route to Genin, so that he would step down to the platform a different man. For the moment, he stored his purchases away in his bag and wondered if it would be advisable to buy a change of clothes, too, before travelling. No, the chance of police enquiries revealing the purchases, and so updating his description, was too great. On the other hand, he could always buy something gaudy and memorable and then dump it at the first opportunity. Should the police discover the purchase, they would certainly regard it as an attempt to radically alter his appearance and therefore report it in their police bulletins, rendering them even more inaccurate. This seemed to Cabal a desirable state of affairs. He was just wandering the streets, looking for somewhere that might sell orange ruffled shirts, when he paused to look in a shop window. In the reflection, he saw a familiar figure across the avenue behind him, but only a flash and then it disappeared up an alleyway. Cabal’s heart sank.

All that paranoia aboard ship had just been mellowing into an acceptance that there weren’t armies of agents and masses of interlocking conspiracies at all, and he had been enjoying being able to forget all that in order to concentrate on simply avoiding the police. As a necromancer, this was very much part of the job requirements, and he flattered himself that he was quite practised and professional at it. Now, however, all those fears that something terribly complex that killed people in passing was going on, and he had no idea what it was, came back to him with sobering intensity. The man he had seen reflected in the glass was Alexei Aloysius Cacon, and he was positive that Cacon had been watching him.

Cabal turned, but caught just a glimpse of Cacon’s coat as he scurried up the alley and out of sight. This complicated things; Cabal needed at least another half hour to complete his arrangements before catching the train. If Cacon ran off to find a police officer, flight would become dramatically more difficult. The railway station would immediately become off limits, and he could be sure that the main thoroughfares out of Parila would be watched. There was nothing for it. Cabal would have to take what mealier-mouthed governmental types might call “executive action.” His term was much shorter, and involved sticking his switchblade between Cacon’s ribs. Sighing heavily, for he disliked violence generally and murder in particular, Cabal set off to commit violent murder.

Cabal’s earlier walk around this district of Parila had already formed a reliable map in his well-ordered memory, and he knew that Cacon’s alley would bring him out onto the Viale Ogrilla, a leafy avenue bounded by clothes shops and cafés. He set off at a fast trot down the road he was on—a long, narrow street with an uncommonly high frequency of bookshops upon it called the Via Vortis—to intercept Cacon as he emerged from the end of the dog-legged alleyway.

At the corner, however, he had reason to come to an abrupt slowing and a grand show of mannered nonchalance. Directly opposite the end of the alleyway, an officer of the Polizia di Quartiere was chatting up a waitress at a roadside café. Cabal could only observe and inwardly plan a rapid retreat as he watched Cacon emerge from the alley and head directly for the policeman. After he crossed the road and was a mere couple of metres from the café, however, he turned to his left and started walking away from Cabal and, indeed, the policeman. Cabal immediately dropped his plans for flight and watched, perplexed, as Cacon wandered off. No, that wasn’t accurate. Cacon was emphatically not wandering. Rather, he was walking with definite intent up the Viale Ogrilla, in the direction of its junction with the Via Pace. This was all very mysterious.

Cabal checked his watch to see how long he had before he had to be at the railway station, but his interest in running was being chipped away by pure curiosity. What on earth did Cacon think he was up to? Cabal checked his watch again, but this time it was just to give him a moment to think. He had time to follow Cacon for perhaps five minutes before completing his purchases and getting to the station became overriding. It probably wouldn’t be very difficult to follow him undetected; the sun was almost down, and the pale stone of the buildings was already glowing a darkening blue. Very well, then, he decided. Five minutes, and no more. Walking like a man enjoying a stroll on the way home from work, Cabal set off after Cacon.

Chapter 12

IN WHICH THE GLOVES COME OFF

Cacon was evidently not in the mood for window-shopping. He walked up the Viale Ogrilla like a man with a mission, moving from the right-hand side of the avenue back over to the left as he reached the junction with the Via Pace. Cabal had no trouble shadowing him; he had no interest at all in watching his own back, his attention being focussed entirely on his forward quarter. Cabal watched him vanish around the corner, then dog-trotted in pursuit, in a semicasual “If I’m late home for dinner again, my wife will kill me” sort of way. He still took the corner cautiously himself. He had half an idea that Cacon really was a Mirkarvian agent, after all, and might be waiting in ambush, but this proved fallacious. Cacon was already fifty metres away, on the kerbside of the pavement, walking at a fast pace and sometimes craning his head to the right as if looking for something or somebody who was just obscured by the line of buildings. Curioser and curioser.

Opposite the Church of San Giovanni Decollato was the western end of the Via Vortis, where Cabal had first espied Cacon, and it was onto this road that Cacon turned. Cabal followed to the corner and looked around it more than a little suspiciously. The only reason he could imagine anybody walking so fixatedly around the same buildings was to see if he was being pursued. That would depend on Cacon’s actually checking his back, but he never did. An alternative occurred to Cabal: perhaps Cacon was shadowing somebody else. But, in that case, whoever this third member of the chain was, why was he circling the buildings, too? Perhaps Cabal was doing the wrong thing; perhaps instead of following Cacon widdershins around the triangle of buildings until boredom set in or shoe leather gave out, he should reverse his path and discover of whom it was that Cacon was in such single-minded pursuit.

No, he realised after a brief second, that was a bad idea, as it would mean walking straight into the unknown prey, if prey he was and not hunted predator. Instead, he would wait in ambush. Cacon had already passed the end of the alleyway he had originally used between the Via Vortis and the Viale Ogrilla, apparently intending to go at least as far as the junction where the two met on the edge of the Piazza Bior. That was good enough for Cabal; he would wait in the alleyway, working on the hypothesis that the third man would circle the route at least once more. Dusk was gathering rapidly, for which he was grateful, as it allowed him to lurk with an excellent chance of going unseen.

He found a dark corner between a drainpipe and a barrel half full of food wrappers, and was just turning to see how good a view of the Via Vortis it afforded when he received a resounding slap across the face that snapped his head to one side and sent his dark spectacles flying. In the moment between impact and turning his head back to glare at his attacker, he realised two things. First, the dusk wasn’t quite as gloomy as it had seemed from behind smoked glass, and second, Leonie Barrow had got out of custody with remarkable alacrity.

“
Guten Abend, Fräulein Barrow
,” he said, watching her guardedly as he recovered his spectacles. It was obviously becoming too dark to wear them, so he slid them into his breast pocket instead. “How pleasant to see you.”

Miss Leonie Barrow, for her part, called him something utterly frightful that she had never ever called anybody in her life before, and that even her father—career policeman that he had been—had only ever heard a handful of times, and then kicked Cabal hard on the shin.

Cabal was a great fan of dignity in general and of his own in particular, and managed to keep the hopping down to two low springs before overcoming the sharp and penetrating pain.

“How bloody dare you? How could you? I gave you a chance, and this is how you repay me?” she shouted at him. “I could have handed you over right there! Right on the first night, as soon as I saw your pasty, smug face in the salon! I must have been demented not to! I need my bloody head examined!”

Cabal wasn’t giving her his full consideration. He was mindful that the mysterious third man might be walking past on the Via Vortis in front of him, and that at the end of the alley behind him, on the Viale Ogrilla, there was a police constable who, if he could tear his attention away from the waitress at the café, might wonder what all the commotion down the alley was about. Cabal had an ugly intimation that Miss Barrow would tell him, too. She needed to be quiet … 
he
needed her to be quiet, and to be so quickly. To his small credit, he considered stabbing her and dumping her body in the barrel for no more than a very few seconds, although he did get as far as targeting her solar plexus for the fatal incision (followed by angling the blade upwards to penetrate the diaphragm and the aorta), and gripping the knife in his pocket before dissuading himself.

Instead, he put his left hand over her mouth and forced her against the wall. The suddenness of the move shocked her into compliance, her only reaction being an alarmed widening of her eyes. He locked his gaze to hers, raised his right index finger to his lips, and whispered with harsh impressiveness, “Shush …”

Miss Barrow bit his palm. He snatched it from her mouth with a muffled curse that hadn’t been sounded since the destruction of a prehuman species, much given to foul utterances that surpassed even man’s aptitude for filthy imagery. Even to this long-vanished race, however, what Cabal said would have been considered a bit naughty.

He almost backhanded her, but with a tremendous effort of will, reining in a burning desire to create pain, he prevented himself. Instead, he stood glaring at her, hand raised. She flinched a little, but only a little. Finally, shaking with suppressed violence, he lowered his gloved hand and examined the palm.

“You’ve left teeth marks on the leather,” he said, for lack of anything more civil to say. She started to say something, but he raised a finger to her lips. “Before you utter another syllable, ask yourself two questions. First, what would you have done in my place? And second, what am I doing hiding up an alleyway, anyway? And, no, it wasn’t to get away from you, as should be evident both by my surprise at your liberty and by the fact that you found me so easily.”

“I wish I’d told the captain about you.”

“If wishes counted for anything, neither of us would be in our current situations, Miss Barrow. You concede that I had no choice, however?”

“No.”

“Close enough. Which brings us to my second question. If you would care to join me behind this barrel, I will explain.”

“Behind that barrel?” Now she was no longer looking at him as if he were the very epitome of evil but just rather mad.

“Yes. With some urgency, please. Time is short.”

“You’re not going to stab me, are you?” she asked, mindful of the knife he’d used to defend himself when he was attacked aboard the
Princess Hortense
.

“I was, but it would have been impolite. Believe me, if I was going to kill you, you would already have breathed your last, instead of using said breath to yack tediously at me. Behind the barrel, please.
Now!
”

Shaken by Cabal’s admission that murdering her had crossed his mind but had been dispensed with for logical rather than moral or compassionate reasons, she allowed herself to be steered into hiding. From a cautious crouch, they surveyed the Via Vortis in the darkening twilight.

After a minute of boiling resentment slowly reducing to a simmer, Miss Barrow asked, “What are we waiting for?”

“Not what,” answered Cabal in a whisper. “Who.”

Miss Barrow analysed this reply in silence for a moment, found it lacking, and asked, “Very well, then.
For whom
are we waiting?”

“I don’t know. Let’s wait and find out, shall we?” If he was aware of the filthy look that Miss Barrow gave him, he did nothing to indicate it.

“So,” she said with indignant sarcasm, “we are hiding behind a barrel in a town that I believe neither of us has ever visited before, waiting for somebody that you don’t know. From behind a barrel. I think the barrel aspect of this situation bears repeating.”

Cabal considered saying that if she would prefer to be dead as a doornail, and head down in the barrel, it still wasn’t too late for him to organise that for her, but he did not. Instead, he kept his attention on their view of the road and waited for somebody indefinably suspicious to walk by. Unfortunately, to Cabal’s finely honed sense of paranoia everybody looked suspicious.

“That one is hanging around,” he whispered, to which Miss Barrow replied, “He’s sweeping the street.”

“That one is an obvious agent,” he whispered, to which Miss Barrow replied, “He’s a blind man, selling matches, pencils, and shoelaces.”

“That’s what he wants you to think.”

“He’s doing a brilliant job, in that case. Look, he’s moving on.” She slapped Cabal’s shoulder. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here. I should be pressing charges against you. Not waiting for God only knows who in some back alley in Parila. Behind a barrel. I’m mad. I must be. After all you’ve done, I must be mad. Not even after all you’ve done in general, but just after all you’ve done to me, today.” She looked at Cabal, bewildered by herself. “Why am I doing this?”

“Simplicity itself. First, my ruse with the falsified bulletin must have been rapidly seen through.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head wearily. “You’re too good a forger, it seems.”

“Oh?” A slow smile of wry amusement appeared on his face. “Why, Miss Barrow … are you a
fugitive
?”

“No! Nothing so … you. They checked their files and couldn’t find a Johanna Cabal, only a Johannes. So they decided there was no conspiracy, just a bureaucratic cock-up somewhere along the line. They’re a very pragmatic bunch, the Senzans. The lieutenant who arrested me gave me his personal apology. Then he asked me out to dinner.”

Cabal grunted under his breath. “Most pragmatic.”

“He was busily kissing my hand when Miss Ambersleigh turned up with half of the British Consulate in tow. Things were explained, and they asked if I wanted to make a formal complaint.”

“Did you?”

“Well, no.” She seemed a little embarrassed. “It seemed a bit rude, what with him kissing my hand and everything.”

“And everything?” he echoed with disdain.

She shot him a dirty look. “You like to pretend you’re some sort of pure scientist without a human feeling in your body, but you’re just a horrid little man really, aren’t you, Cabal?”

Cabal had no answer, or at least no answer that he cared to make, so they crouched in silence for a minute longer.

Cabal checked his watch. “I may have miscalculated,” he said. “We should have seen something by now. In fact”—he looked up at the road as he replaced his pocket watch—“we should have seen Cacon by now.”

“Cacon? From the aeroship? I thought you said you didn’t know who you were waiting for?”

“I wasn’t waiting for Cacon. I was waiting for the man Cacon was following.”

“Who’s that?” Miss Barrow was growing more confused by the second.

“I don’t know. I thought I’d already explained that.”

“You haven’t explained anything. This is the first I’ve heard that Cacon is somehow mixed up in all this. Why is Cacon following somebody anyway?”

“I don’t know,” said Cabal testily. “That’s why I was waiting for him to pass by.”

“I don’t understand any of this.”

“Neither do I. Do you think I hide behind barrels in shadowy alleyways for fun? No, I don’t,” he said to head off Miss Barrow, who he felt sure was about to say that it wouldn’t surprise her at all. “There is something going on, and it has to do with the murders.”

“Probable murder and suicide, you mean?”

“Oh, please.” Cabal was splendidly dismissive. “DeGarre is murdered for some reason, then when the suicide story falls flat Zoruk is incriminated. The killer makes a hash job of it and eliminates Zoruk before the shortcomings in the charade can be exposed, not realising that it’s too late.”

“Lady Ninuka’s alibi for him, you mean,” said Miss Barrow.

“Exactly so. I have an inkling how DeGarre was dealt with, but killing Zoruk is a different matter. The more that I think on the matter, the more solid Schten’s ridiculous concept of a league of assassins becomes.”