Johannes Cabal the Detective

she continued more sedately. “In an asylum for the criminally insane, as it happens. Sad, lonely men, they took up necromancy in the same way madmen might take up knives to revenge themselves on a society that they don’t understand and that makes no effort to understand them. You, though. You can fit in. It’s no mean feat to pass yourself off as one of this bunch.” She indicated the gathered Mirkarvians with a nod of her head. “I don’t see you leading an army of zombies into the fray.”

“Zombies are so passe.”

“Don’t be flippant with me, Cabal. Your life’s mine. I want to do the right thing but, my God, it wouldn’t take much provocation — not much at all.”

Cabal scowled. “What’s this? Psychoanalysis by coercion? ‘Tell me about your childhood, or else?’ I didn’t realise psychiatry had become so two-fisted.” He smiled at her for appearance’s sake, but his eyes were sharp and dangerous. “Don’t think you can quantify me and put me in a thesis. A census taker once tried to test me. I let my front garden eat him.”

“Your front garden?”

He wrinkled his nose. “You didn’t expect me to do it, did you?”

Miss Barrow’s eyes flickered to one side, and suddenly she smiled broadly and became the very spirit of vivacity. “You told your gardener he could eat it! Oh! That’s simply too precious!” She laughed full-throatedly.

Cabal was caught off guard, but only for a moment. He looked to his side and pretended to realise that they had company. “Well,” he said with ersatz joviality, “you just can’t get the staff these days, can you?”

The couple to whom he spoke allowed a moment’s bewilderment before laughing politely. “No, no, you can’t,” said the man, plainly wondering with what he was agreeing.

There was a short embarrassed pause during which Cabal wondered why they wouldn’t go away, and the couple desperately tried to formulate a polite plan for getting away.

“I’m Roborovski,” said the man, having run out of ideas. “Linus Roborovski. And this is my wife, Lisabet.”

They did not seem to be especially well suited to each other. He was in his late thirties to mid-forties, careworn and starting to bald, and he exuded an air of being in a state of permanent harassment. He wore a good, but not very good, bespoke suit in brown-green twill which he looked forced into despite its having been made to measure. Cabal decided that he was a small businessman who had unexpectedly become successful and wasn’t quite sure how to deal with the trimmings that came with it.

His wife had a good six inches on him and was younger, no more than thirty. She was wan rather than simply pale, and she wore her loosely coiled strawberry-blond hair like an affliction. She had an unlovely dress in mustard yellow hanging about her that in no way complimented her complexion. She stood beside and a little behind her husband, and they looked like the makings of a poultice. They served to remind Cabal — should a reminder ever be necessary — why his social skills were so poor: people were loathsome and not worth the practise.

“Meissner,” he said, shaking hands with Roborovski. “Gerhard Meissner.” He hadn’t even let Roborovski’s hand go before his wife was offering hers, palm down. Hoping he successfully suppressed the weary note that would surely colour his voice should he let it, he clicked his heels and kissed her hand. “Enchante,” he added, for want of anything sensible to say. In his experience, it was possible to talk any sort of rubbish in a foreign language and so sound sophisticated.

As he looked up in straightening, he noticed a glimmer in her eye that he didn’t altogether like. There was something calculating there, and the fact that he had no idea what she was calculating caused him a twinge to his sense of self-preservation. In an instant, the glimmer was gone and she was looking at him with the glassy expression of a bourgeois hausfrau, or a head of livestock.

Herr Roborovski was looking enquiringly at Miss Barrow. “And your friend is …?” he asked Cabal.

Miss Barrow, however, was not going to be spoken for, no matter what passed for etiquette in Mirkarvia. “Leonie Barrow,” she said, and held out her hand. That she held it out thumb upwards, for shaking, may have been lost on the Roborovskis, for they both shook her hand with polite smiles and the ghost of a curtsey from Frau Roborovski.

“You’re English, aren’t you?” she asked Miss Barrow. “I’ve always wanted to visit England, but Linus is so busy, we never seem to get the chance to have a holiday.”

“Oh? Why, what do you do?”

She addressed the question directly to Herr Roborovski, but he just looked blankly at her like a rep actor who was considering what to have for supper instead of watching for his cue. After a moment, Frau Roborovski said, “He’s a cabinetmaker.” Her husband jumped slightly, like a rep actor who has finally decided to have Welsh rabbit for supper and returns to the here and now to discover a stage full of his fellow actors glaring daggers at him.

“Oh, yes,” he said, as if the statement was so astounding that it required confirmation. “I’m a cabinetmaker.”

“And that keeps you busy, does it?” asked Cabal, seeking to reconcile cabinetmaking, extreme busyness, and journeys on luxury aeroships to his satisfaction.

“Ah, um. Yes?”

“Linus,” interjected his wife with the mildly acidic tone of someone who suspects that they’re being made sport of but isn’t quite sure, “is very successful. He runs one of the most respected workshops in the country!” The end of the sentence was punctuated with a sharp nod of the And don’t you forget it, buster variety.

“Running a cabinet manufactory.” Cabal activated the muscles that careful research had revealed would create a supercilious smile. It was one of his more convincing ones. “How fascinating.”

Herr Roborovski beamed, a happy hamster. His wife did not. “What do you do, Herr Meissner?”

“Me? Oh, I’m just a cog in the Mirkarvian civil service, I’m afraid. I neither sow nor do I reap, in all but the most figurative way. Making things with your hands, though, that’s something to be proud of.” To illustrate the point, he held out his own hands, palms upwards. They hadn’t seen any serious manual work in the past four months, at which time they had been calloused from unofficial nocturnal exhumations — the necessity of bludgeoning several recalcitrant revenants back into an inanimate state, and then the resulting unofficial nocturnal cremations. Now they looked like the hands of a pencil-pushing administrator who might occasionally do a little gardening in a window box.

Herr Roborovski unconsciously mimicked Cabal’s action, holding up his hands. Cabal noted that they showed some signs of labour but, like his own, not recently. While coming to the conclusion that, boringly enough, the little man and his irritating wife were just what they appeared to be, Cabal distractedly added, “I mean, all that arcane business with G-clamps, shellac, dovecote joins, lathes, and suchlike. Always nice to actually make things with your hands.”

“It is nice,” he agreed, a little mournfully.

“In your own time, of course.” The wan Frau Roborovski seemed to take exception to building anything that was not for profit. “You have your company to think of.” Deciding that her husband was clinically incapable of self- promotion, she said to Cabal and Miss Barrow, “We are hoping to expand into Katamenia. Linus’s designs are popular there, but having to transport things through Senza when those brutes insist on dismantling everything — as if one is likely to hide a cannon in a credenza — is costing us money. The intention is to open a workshop in Katamenia and cut out all that Senzan nonsense entirely.”

“Why would you … why would one want to hide a cannon in a credenza?” asked Miss Barrow.

“Military aid. The Katamenians are barbarians, of course, but they are our historical allies. The Senzans fear a war on two fronts and use some silly treaty or another to prevent Katamenia rearming.”

“Rearming? How did they lose their last lot of weapons?”

The Roborovskis looked uncomfortable. “I’m sure Herr Meissner can — ”

“No, no,” Cabal assured Frau Roborovski. “You’re doing a good job.”

Cornered, she admitted, “There was a war. More of a border dispute, really” — Cabal, listening, thought of the many invasions that had started with a trifling “border dispute” to provide a casus belli — “that the Senzans blew out of all proportion. The next thing you know, the Katamenians are expected to demobilise all their armed forces and melt down their weapons. Just enough for police actions, that’s all they were allowed. A disgraceful affront to a nation’s sovereignty! A calculated insult to a proud martial tradition!”

Or a wise victor drawing the teeth of a mad dog, thought Cabal, accurately if uncharitably.

“Those Senzans think so much of themselves, going around behaving like they own