Johannes Cabal the Detective

“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.”

“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.”