Johannes Cabal the Detective

the book is understood to be a treatise on certain blasphemous studies pertaining to the resurrection of the dead, represented in the form of fables, obscure metaphors, and Socratic dialogue. The text has proved impenetrable to scholars. This copy of the Whitely edition is believed to be the last surviving example. It was confiscated from the effects of an itinerant found wandering the northern forest, whose identity was never confirmed, and who died shortly thereafter in the asylum at Hamkar. The book is absolutely interdicted without personal permission, by word and in writing, from the Librarian.

CHAPTER 14 in which villainy is revealed and lives are risked

Weighing the pros and cons of his current situation, Johannes Cabal had to admit that he was definitely ahead in the game. The route had proved circuitous, and the clean lines of his original plan to steal the Principia Necromantica had long been trampled under the feet of any number of interested and interfering parties. There had been two very distinct attempts upon his life along the way, although such was the nature of his calling that if nobody had tried to kill him during the project he would have regarded it as, at best, freakish or, at worse, highly suspicious.

Still, here he was with the Principia nestling happily in his Gladstone bag, with the murderous mess of bloody circumstance otherwise known as “the maiden voyage of the aeroship Princess Hortense” due to fly away from him at dawn, taking the last vestiges of menace with it. He might even go down to the aeroport perimeter and wave from behind the wire as it dwindled into the distance and out of his life.

In the meantime, he would find a small, clean, discreet locanda, have a meal that was not subject to Mirkarvian standards of machismo in the kitchen, a long bath, and sleep the untroubled sleep of a man who is tolerably sure that nobody is going to try and cut his throat in the wee small hours — which is to say, he would still lock his door and wedge a chair under the handle.

And so it went. He found a quiet little inn just by the Via Dulcis, whose proprietor was friendly but incurious. He asked Cabal if he was on holiday, Cabal agreed that he was, and that apparently fulfilled the landlord’s entire expectations for gossip. He did not even much care that Cabal had only a single small bag, but blithely showed him up to a small, clean room that had a decent view of a municipal park over the low rooftop of its neighbour. The room shared a bathroom with the three other rooms on the landing, but these were all unoccupied, so Cabal enjoyed his long bath uninterrupted. Clean, shaven, and in his only change of fresh clothing until he would have the opportunity of buying more on the morrow, he sat down to a light meal of pasta and chicken in sauce, accompanied by a glass of dry white wine from, the landlord explained, his family’s own vineyard. Cabal admitted that he was right to be proud of it; while not an extraordinary vintage, Cabal’s spectrograph of a palate found much to admire in it, and so he went to bed tired, very slightly drunk, and — at least briefly — at peace with the world. This last he managed by assiduously avoiding any thought of the past few days and Miss Leonie Barrow’s current circumstances. It was a mental trick that came easily to him, after so many opportunities to practise it in his past.

* * *

He slept through dawn, and therefore any chance to wave goodbye to the Princess Hortense, but this caused him little concern and less dismay. It was hardly his affair if Miss Barrow would insist upon sticking her head in a lion’s mouth. That thought made him consider the coincidence of the leonine Leonie putting her head in any such place, and his thoughts went off in other directions and had to be dragged back into line by the scruff of the neck and spoken harshly to.

He came down to breakfast and enjoyed a light meal in the Continental manner, with strong coffee and tart orange juice in a sparsely occupied dining room in which the other guests kept themselves, much to Cabal’s satisfaction, to themselves. When he had finished, he had another coffee to drink while he skimmed the morning newspaper. This, he was further pleased to note, contained nothing about skies full of murder, or spies turning up cold and dead. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if officials at Senzan Intelligence had already found Cacon, but they would hardly be likely to advertise it. Any suspicions they had would be ranged upon the Mirkarvian aeroship now heading for their border with Katamenia, and there it could remain with his blessings. He, in the meantime, just needed to buy some travelling clothes, and then set off in entirely the other direction. He had suffered his fill of other people for the time being, and he missed his laboratory.

Thinking of his laboratory reminded him of other elements of his life, his real life and real business, away from all the alarums and excursions people seemed hell-bent upon imposing on him. Such nonsense, so distracting. He looked at the empty chair opposite him across the small table and imagined it occupied. He sank into a brown study as he considered the vagaries of fate that had led him to this place and this time and breakfast by himself.

He would probably have been a solicitor. His father had connections with Hinks & Hinks in town, a small firm specialising in the bread-and-butter business of English solicitors — conveyancing, last wills and testaments, and bickering over property lines. His father had so wanted to be English, for his sons to lose their accents and to conform. A whole trajectory for Cabal’s life had been calculated that concluded in his sixty-fifth year, when he was to retire as senior partner at Hinks, Hinks & Cabal to a cottage with roses around the door, Sunday lunch with the grandchildren, and the autumn of his life spent with his wife.

Even at the time, it had been anathema to him. All but that last element. There he had plans himself. Plans that came to an abrupt halt with his brother Horst standing ashen-faced on the doorstep, the mindless run to the river’s edge where a silent crowd stood by, gathered by her where she lay on the grass, her summer dress lank with river water. The doctor had delivered the formula then — that there was nothing that could be done, that all hope had gone, that he was sorry for Johannes Cabal’s loss. He was vague with shock then, hearing without listening, but later, when the priest came and had the damnable temerity to tell him that she was in a better place, Cabal swore and raged and would have struck the man across his stupid sanctimonious face if Horst hadn’t held him back.

That night, he made his decision and, as was in his character, acted upon it immediately. That night, the baleful shade of Hinks, Hinks & Cabal winked out of existence and was replaced by a new arc, that led to here and now, sitting alone at a breakfast table under an assumed name. He noticed the landlord standing close at hand, an expression of concern on his face warring with a professional desire to avoid upsetting the customers. “Mi scusi, signor. But you said something?”

“No,” said Cabal. He got up to leave. “I said nothing. Nothing of import.”

* * *

Teeth brushed, bag packed, and bill paid, Cabal walked out into the clear Parilan morning. The sky was a brilliant blue, the buildings shone in the sun’s reflected glory, and the air was fresh, just a hint of chill still lingering from the clear night. It was a good day to be alive and did much to lift his mood. He would have been a mite happier still if his Webley revolver had been snuggling safely in his bag, but the day was otherwise as good as any day without a large-calibre handgun can reasonably be. Cabal stepped into the street busy with people going to work, and set off toward a gentleman’s tailor he had spotted the previous evening that stocked a lot of black suits and white shirts in unenterprising styles. By his calculations, he would be able to buy some fresh clothes and still reach the railway station towards the end of the morning rush. The crowds would offer him cover while he checked that nondescript men with bulges in their armpits were not monitoring departures. His acute sense of danger told him that he was probably in the clear, but, then again, his acute sense of danger had failed to tell him that somebody was about to throw him out of the belly of the Princess Hortense, so he was not inclined to trust to it, at least not until it could prove to have recovered its edge.

The tailor was most accommodating, and — once he had got over his disappointment that the gentleman was interested only in items off the peg — bustled around fetching them as Cabal reeled off his measurements from memory. “You are in a hurry, signor?” he asked from the top of a stepladder, from which he fetched down white shirts wrapped in tissue paper.

“I have to meet a boat arriving at Santa Keyna, and my train leaves in two hours,” Cabal explained, missing no opportunity to cover his tracks. Santa Keyna lay eastwards of Parila, while he would be travelling to the west. “I shouldn’t have left everything to the last minute, I know,” and he shrugged.

* * *