Johannes Cabal the Detective

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 cafes. 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 cafe. 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 cafe, 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, Fraulein 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 cafe, 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.”