Johannes Cabal the Detective

CHAPTER 8 in which a suspect is interrogated and an interrogator is suspicious

It is a nuisance to be preempted. All Cabal’s playful little plans to shove his hog-tied assailant out of the Princess Hortense’s ventral hatch to see how he liked it had now come to nothing, and all because the captain had done exactly what he had said he would, and carried out a thorough investigation. He had fastened upon the single most solid and therefore useful fact from the testament of Herr Meissner, and pursued it through every deck of the ship. Now, in a spare cabin in the second-class section that had been pressed into service as an impromptu brig and interrogation room, Schten and — after some bullheaded arguing on the basis that he was the only government official aboard and therefore a necessary witness, allied with some creative quotations from imaginary governmental directives — Johannes Cabal sat opposite the freshly arrested attempted-murder suspect.

Gabriel Zoruk did not look best pleased to be there. He was tousled and unshaven, his shirt was without tie or cravat, and his jacket was creased. He actually looked more like a revolutionary now than when he had been spouting ill-considered politicisms the previous evening, yet now, contrariwise, he was silent. He simply sat with his hands in his lap and glowered at Schten and, occasionally, at Cabal, who was sitting off to Schten’s right and a little behind him.

For his part, Schten sat in silence, reading some notes from a sheet of foolscap on a clipboard and pointedly ignored Zoruk’s glare. Unusually for the captain, his jacket was open, but this may have been to draw attention to the holster and revolver he wore, dark tan leather and acid-blacked steel against the white shirt and trousers. Zoruk could not have failed to notice it when Schten sat down.

When he judged that Zoruk had stewed enough, the captain deigned to look up from his notes. “Your hands, Herr Zoruk. Would you show me your hands, please?”

Zoruk kept his hands in his lap and replied quietly, “Am I under arrest?”

“Yes,” replied Schten without hesitation. “You are under arrest.”

“I haven’t been read my rights.”

“I am not obliged to read you your rights, Herr Zoruk. I am not a policeman. You are being held under the provisions of the Aeolatime Act pertaining to the safety of aerial vessels, crew, passengers, and cargo. You can have a copy to read later if you doubt it. Now … Your hands, sir.”

Zoruk’s gaze flickered from Schten to Cabal and quickly back again. “Why?”

Schten made a deep rumbling sound. To forestall the captain’s rising temper, Cabal said, “To be blunt, Herr Zoruk, you are suspected of attempting to murder me. I succeeded in wounding my attacker in the hand or the wrist. Therefore, if you have such an injury we would be very interested in hearing how you came by it. It is a simple thing. If you are uninjured, you may go. If you are injured and can provide a reasonable explanation, ideally with some corroboration, you will in all likelihood also be allowed to go. Truly, sir, if you are an innocent man, you have nothing to lose by helping the captain in his enquiries.”

Schten allowed Cabal’s words to sink in before repeating, “So … would you show me your hands, please?”

Zoruk was plainly nervous, and it took him a full five tortuous seconds before he finally placed both hands, fisted, on the tabletop. Cabal saw a bandage across the back of his right hand, about where the switchblade would have struck. Zoruk started talking the instant his hands hit the wooden surface.

“I can explain. I know what it looks like, but I can explain.” Schten raised his own hand to signal silence, his gaze on the bandage. “Explanations come later, Herr Zoruk. First, I should be obliged if you would remove that dressing.”

With obvious reluctance, Zoruk undid the gauze that held the bandage in place. When he had finished, he carefully peeled it off, wincing as the wound beneath was exposed. Cabal leaned forward in his seat to get a better look, and sat back in disappointment. He had been hoping that the injury would clearly be a knife wound, but this was a shallow, if bloody, affair. It could easily be the result of a blade wielded with desperation rather than technique causing an ugly scoring instead of a clean cut. He couldn’t be sure if his knife had or had not been the cause. It was very frustrating.

“Does that look like a knife wound to you, Herr Meissner?” asked the captain.

Cabal regretfully shook his head. “It may be. I just struck upwards; I don’t even know if the blade cut on its sharp edge or was dragged. It’s not conclusive.”

Schten humphed. He had clearly been hoping for the examination to close the case immediately. He signalled to Zoruk to cover the wound again. “So, mein Herr,” he said as Zoruk started wrapping the gauze back around his hand, “we are listening. How came you by that wound?”

“It was an accident, just a stupid accident. And I have a witness! I was in the corridor this morning and one of the stewards was just ahead of me. He reached the double doors leading into the dining room first and held it open for me. As I was reaching for the handle, so he could move on, he lost his grip or thought I was already holding the door or something. In any event, the door closed on my hand. They’re pretty heavy, you know. Powerful springs on them. It made quite a mess of my hand. The steward was full of apologies and got me off to the doctor’s … what do you call it? The clinic? The sick bay, that’s it. It was cleaned up and bandaged and that was that. Well, I thought that was that, but now everybody’s very interested in it.”

The captain had made a few notes and nodded. “Very well, Herr Zoruk. I shall make some enquiries. In the meantime, you will have to remain in custody.” Zoruk started to protest, but Schten talked over him. “Please remember, you are suspected of a serious crime. I would be failing in my duty if I did not complete my investigation before acting on its findings. If the steward and the ship’s medic confirm your story, you will be released shortly. All I ask is a little patience.”

Schten climbed to his feet and stood by the door, ushering Cabal out ahead of him. A burly engineer was keeping guard outside, and he locked the door once Zoruk was alone. Schten took the keys. “Thank you, Kleine. You may return to your section.” The engineer saluted crisply and left them. Schten looked pensively at the locked door before walking slowly away, Cabal by his side.

“Do you believe him?” asked Cabal.

“It’s irrelevant what I believe,” said Schten. “Facts are all that matter.”

“You have a scientist’s mind,” said Cabal approvingly. “Yes, facts are paramount, clearly. But you must have an opinion? Even scientists use a degree of educated intuition to guide their research.”

“An opinion … I do not wish to prejudge, Herr Meissner. But I will admit to some disbelief that you can injure a man in the hand in the early hours of the morning and, a few hours later, a suspect manages to injure himself in the same place in an innocent accident.”

“Your meaning being …?”

“My meaning being, is it an innocent accident, or is it an apparently innocent accident?”

“My thoughts exactly. It is a long coincidence if the former, but an engineered alibi if the latter.”

Schten stopped at the head of the circular staircase that led down to the first-class deck. “Just promise me that you made no mistake about injuring your attacker, mein Herr. I don’t want to take a man’s liberty because of a mistake made in the excitement of a struggle.”

Cabal drew his switchblade from his jacket pocket and snapped the blade out. Schten raised an eyebrow. “Hardly a penknife, Herr Meissner. You carry that with you?”

“From last night, yes, Captain. You can hardly blame me. Look, I haven’t cleaned the blade since then. You can see blood has worked its way down to the pivot.”

Schten watched with evident disapproval as Cabal closed the knife and put it away. “That knife is material evidence. It should be held in the ship’s safe until official investigators have seen it.”

Cabal looked him in the eye and said, “You may have it with my blessings the very moment you supply me with a replacement of equal or greater lethality. A pistol would be nice.”

“Impossible.”

“Then I shall keep my knife.” The captain frowned, and then shrugged. It was un-Mirkarvian to disarm a law-abiding citizen, Cabal guessed. “Now, Captain, who is next for questioning?”

The ship’s sick bay was surprisingly large, a fact Cabal commented upon when they first entered. It was a long room with four beds out, but room for more. The rows of lockers at head height and the large glass-fronted pharmacy cabinet indicated that the bay was as well equipped as it was spacious. Dr. Huber looked just as capable as his environment, despite being only in his mid-twenties and having a mop of wavy black hair whose exuberance no pomade could hope to quell. He blinked at them over ill-advised half-moon glasses, and seemed so friendly and competent that Cabal’s usual dislike of doctors was hardly provoked at all.

Dr. Huber smiled. “You would be surprised at how quickly an infection can travel through a ship, mein Herr. Days from medical assistance, and people have to be isolated from the rest of the crew and passengers.”

“Can’t they be confined to their cabins instead?”

“If the problem is mild, yes, but even something mild is debilitating, and the crew does not have individual cabins. Would you feel safe aboard a ship where some otherwise mild gastrointestinal illness had laid the crew low?”

Cabal had a momentary mental image of the crew fighting to use the heads while the bridge stood abandoned, the ship’s wheel rolling gently this way and that as the Princess Hortense drifted whimsically into the nearest hillside. No, he had to admit. He would not feel safe.

“Besides which,” continued Huber, “serious illnesses and even, God forbid, serious accidents happen, despite our best efforts. The patients would require constant supervision. I cannot organise that if they are in their cabins.” He appeared not to have noticed the captain wince when he spoke of accidents. Some maritime superstitions had clearly made their way from the seas to the skies, and tempting fate was one of them. With hindsight, it also seemed likely this was why the doctor had not attended the meal that first evening; thirteen at table would be considered inauspicious. As things had turned out, twelve was not such a lucky number, either. Cabal watched with quiet amusement from the corner of his eye as Schten surreptitiously looked around for some wood to touch.

“To business, Doctor,” said Schten, after tapping the edge of the doctor’s desk with palpable relief. “Earlier today, Gabriel Zoruk came to you with an injury.”

The doctor thought for a moment and nodded. “The young man who came in this morning with a cut to his hand? Yes, a straightforward case. I just cleaned the wound and bandaged it. Asked him to come back tomorrow to make sure there were no signs of infection. What about him?”

Cabal recalled that there was some directive somewhere, probably a part of the Hippocratic oath, about patient confidentiality. It seemed from Huber’s blithe ignorance of such niceties that Hippocrates was regarded as some sort of dangerous liberal in Mirkarvia.

“In your considered opinion, Doctor, what do you think caused the injury?”

“He caught it in a door.” Huber looked at the other men’s faces and frowned at their silence. Grudgingly, he added, “Well, he said he caught it in a door. I had no reason to think he was lying. What’s this all about, Captain?”

“Was the cut consistent with being caught in a door, would you say?”

Huber bridled. “I’m no criminologist, Captain. The forensic sciences are not my field. I would regard it as a courtesy if I were not forced to make a judgement in a discipline of which I have only a passing knowledge.”

Schten nodded unhappily. He had wanted a nice black-and-white piece of information, but he knew enough of life to realise that such things are a rarity. There was no point in trying to wring a certainty from the doctor; it seemed Zoruk would benefit from the assumption of innocence that even Mirkarvian justice used, provided the defendant wasn’t a necromancer.

Muttering a thanks to Dr. Huber, he and Cabal made to leave. As they reached the door, however, Huber spoke up, his tone grudging. “I will say this much, gentlemen. When I was cleaning the wound, I remember thinking how remarkably sharp the door that cut him must have been.”

Muttering with dissatisfaction, Schten next sought out the other witness to Zoruk’s accident. Cross-referencing the time against the location of the door (when a Swiss watchmaker wishes to say things are going precisely to schedule, he will say they are running like a Mirkarvian duty rota), he was able to locate the right man with ease. Steward Dorffman had none of Dr. Huber’s tiresome caveats about objectivity and evenhandedness.

“I was closing the door, and he sticks his hand right in it. I thought I’d hardly touched him, but next thing I know he’s dancing around, saying I’ve broken his bones and there’s loads of blood, and so on.” Dorffman then underlined his views on Gabriel Zoruk with a short and insulting impersonation that involved a downturned mouth that would not have looked out of place on a tragedian’s mask, his lower lip wobbling, as he held up up a dangling hand like a puppy with a sore paw. He kept this up for almost thirty seconds, despite his captain and Cabal staring stonily at him.

“So,” said Schten, in an effort to stop Dorffman before he decided to base a comic monologue on this showstopping piece of mimicry, “you felt that Herr Zoruk was exaggerating?”

“Yes, sir. I hate to speak badly of the passengers,” he said with the supercilious air of a man who very much enjoyed speaking badly of the passengers, “but that door barely touched him. It was like this,” he said, tapping himself very lightly on the back of his right hand and instantly returning to his Zoruk impersonation, now with added whimpering.

Schten finally boiled over, leaving Cabal to lean against the corridor wall and examine his nails, while Dorffman was left in no doubt about the necessary level of respect to show both passengers and senior crew.

Afterwards, as they descended to the first-class deck, the captain managed to choke down his anger far enough to ask Cabal what he thought of the two witness statements.

“Unhelpful,” said Cabal. “The doctor doesn’t wish to commit beyond a vague belief that Zoruk’s explanation for his cut may be a little unlikely. As for Steward Dorffman, I wouldn’t trust him to tell me if it was day or night. He certainly thinks the accident with the door was a very petty one, and from our perspective we may infer that Zoruk may have engineered it to explain his damaged hand. As far as building a case against him goes, it is all circumstantial.”

“So this morning has been a waste of time.”

“No, not entirely. At the very least, we are left with the basis of a deductive argument for Zoruk’s guilt.” Cabal looked at his own hand. “I know that I injured my attacker’s right hand. I have no idea how badly, but I certainly drew blood. Therefore, my attacker has a recent cut to his or — just possibly — her hand.”

“So we go back to checking everybody,” said Schten, and sighed.

“Both passengers and crew, as per your original orders. Absolutely everybody must be checked if the investigation is to have validity. No exceptions. We are lucky that this is a relatively small pool of potential suspects, and that the pool is sealed. Nobody comes in and nobody goes out, except via the windows or the maintenance ducts, and such people are unlikely to be guilty, in any event.”

“True,” said Schten, letting the latter barb go unremarked. He clearly wasn’t happy with the image of his ship dropping bodies the way an oak drops leaves in October, but it was not an entirely unfair charge, especially coming from a near-victim. “The only survivable way on or off over this terrain is via entomopter.”

“Entomopter?” said Cabal. He would sooner trust his life to a cotton loom pushed off a cliff as fly in an entomopter. Though a scientist himself, and a great proponent of progress, there was something about the whirling wings of the flying machines that brought the phrase “new-fangled” unbidden to his lips. The sheer complexity of the clutch assembly that controlled the two pairs of closely mounted wings, as they beat in figures of eight so rapidly that they were barely visible, was a sticking point for him. Anything that finicky, moving that quickly, was simply asking for trouble.

“Yes.” Schten nodded upwards. “There’s an entomopter deck up top. I think the idea is that patrons can join and leave the journey en route, rather than having to go to an aeroport.” He shrugged. “Extra weight for nothing, in my opinion. If they’re mad enough to have their own machine, then they’re mad enough to fly the whole way by themselves.”

“But not in comfort,” added Cabal. Schten grudgingly nodded, but Cabal was already thinking of something else. “Are there any machines up there at the moment?”

“No. They tested the deck during the commissioning trials. The arrestor lines work well, and the deck is more than strong enough to stand a heavy landing. I’ve seen six machines parked and lashed down for heavy weather on that deck, which was the benchmark for signing off that particular trial; an impressive sight. It’s typical, though. They go to all that trouble to add a feature to the ship yet, once she’s commissioned and taking paying passengers, not a single enquiry about using it. Not one! Utter waste of time, money, and effort.”

“Perhaps that will change. How prominently was it advertised?”

“Not very. It’s all been very hurried, because of the food-supply mission. Yes, between that and the civil trouble at departure, this hasn’t been the most glorious of maiden voyages, has it?” He sighed heavily, and Cabal guessed that he was thinking about DeGarre and the Zoruk problem. “Not very glorious at all.”

Cabal felt tired and depressed all afternoon. He had eaten — sausage and some form of pickled vegetable, washed down with white wine served in another ludicrously capacious glass — by himself, glad that at least he didn’t have to pretend to play at detectives with Miss Barrow. He had been slightly surprised that the captain’s initial investigation leading to the arrest of Gabriel Zoruk had not been the detailed and thorough procedure he had at first believed. It had, in fact, consisted of little more than the captain telling his senior staff that they were looking for somebody with an injured hand and one of his officers saying he’d seen somebody with a new bandage on his hand that very morning. So much for methodical police work.

In the face of the flimsy case against Zoruk, the captain had finally got around to following Cabal’s suggestion and doing what he should have done in the first place. His officers were making the rounds of every cabin, every workstation, and every bunk and, in a flurry of unctuous apologies, checking every hand aboard. It was the logical and correct thing to do, which would make it all the more painful when it was all for nothing.

Even if they did demonstrate beyond a doubt that Zoruk was the only person on the Princess Hortense who carried the damning injury, it would founder in court because the prosecution’s star witness, the redoubtable Herr Meissner, would be nowhere to be found. As soon as they arrived in Senza, he would be away like a particularly skittish and chemically enhanced rabbit, dumping the persona of the hapless Meissner in the nearest dustbin and heading for freedom. All, of course, assuming that he managed to dodge the police reception that Miss Barrow would be quick to arrange at the aeroport.

He felt the heft of the switchblade in his pocket and considered the quickest and surest way to make sure that didn’t happen. But it was a hollow thought. He was just weighing options, and he knew it. Things would have to be a great deal more desperate before he would be obliged to kill her. There were certainly more elegant if less quick and less sure ways of dealing with Miss Barrow’s moralistic intransigence. That he was having trouble thinking of any that were also practical was one source of his depression.

Abruptly, a new source presented himself. Without so much as a by-your-leave, Herr Cacon appeared in the dining room, looked around, ignored any number of empty tables, and sat down at Cabal’s. Some imperious finger-snapping later, he had gained the attention of the waiter, placed his order for lunch, and was settling down to the serious business of being boorish.

“So!” He began with ghoulish glee. “What’s all this about somebody tryin’ to do you in, Meissner, me ol’ mate?”

Cabal tried to think of an excuse to leave immediately, but apart from a convincing but undignified lie about having an urgent appointment in a water closet, nothing occurred to him. With a heavy heart, he began to tell Cacon about the attack.

It was only when he was almost finished that it struck him as mildly surprising that Cacon had interrupted him only twice, and on both occasions with intelligent questions. As he completed the story, Cacon’s intent expression smoothly relaxed and once more he became the oafish poseur he had previously seemed to be.

Astaroth’s tears, thought Cabal. Why is nothing plain and simple in my life?

An unsympathetic observer might have said that when one embarks on a career as a necromancer — consorting with demons, digging up the dead and bringing them back to life, or at least something fairly similar to life — one can hardly complain when things become complicated. Even by those standards, however, it seemed a little unfair that the perfectly simple theft of a book had turned into a great tumbling chaos of politics, murder, deceit, and mystery.

He wouldn’t have minded so much if he just had the faintest idea what was going on. No, that was untrue. He would have minded just as much even if he were in possession of a concise document entitled “What Is Going On.” He would probably have minded it even more, because then the motives for what was going on would have been clearly listed as bullet points, and their weak, pettifogging, infantile nature would be revealed. Cabal, famously not a gambling man, would have put money on there being politics involved. Politics frequently was involved in so much that was weak, pettifogging, and infantile, and Mirkarvia seemed to sweat the filthy stuff.

And where there is politics there is lying and deception. Cabal felt strangely let down that Cacon might not be Cacon, and that the transcendentally irritating man might not have been formed, as other men, by pressures of life and peers but as an exercise in creative writing for some clerk in an intelligence or security bureau. If he had to make a guess, he would say that “Cacon” was actually a member of Mirkarvian Intelligence. Marechal handled security, and Cabal could not believe that such a polished performer would find much satisfaction in working for a kick-the-door-down-and-shoot-them-in-their-beds merchant like the count.

Cabal reined in his hypothesising with difficulty. From a momentary change in Cacon’s expression, he had transformed the aggravating little man from an exasperant at the dinner table to a super-spy at large. The weight of probability remained firmly on the side of Cacon’s being exactly what he appeared to be, albeit with an unexpected and intelligent interest in true crime. This latter thought amused Cabal slightly; if Miss Barrow caused him any trouble, he need only tell Cacon that she was a criminologist in training, and she would never be free of him for the rest of the voyage.

No, that wasn’t quite true. The rest of the voyage was all the way to Katamenia. He was planning to jump ship in Senza, which was also Leonie Barrow’s destination. From what little he knew, Katamenia was not much of a holiday destination. He wondered how many of the other passengers were also going all the way there.

Mirkarvia, Senza, Katamenia. These little countries always seemed to have such long histories, usually full of extraordinary characters with horrible personalities. One would expect small places to breed small people, yet so many world changers had walked out of their minor nations, unblinking, onto the great global stage, where — as often as not — they messed it all up for everybody. These people … these great people, building empires out of blood, which collapse into cinders as soon as the inevitable reversals of fortune begin. Cabal loathed their every atom. If he had his way, a single scientific meritocracy would govern the world. Politics and economics were plainly too complex for the fuddled minds of politicians to take in.

He had been thinking all this as an alternative preferable to listening to whatever Cacon had to say. In this, at least, it really didn’t matter if Cacon was a phenomenally boring man or some variety of secret agent pretending to be a phenomenally boring man. The overall effect was still that of being talked at by a phenomenally boring man. Cabal found that he was phenomenally bored by him. Currently, he was detailing the dénouement of a long list.

“I’m sorry, Herr Cacon, but I have work to attend to,” said Cabal, rising from the table. “I have some agricultural land-remittance discussion papers to work up to a fourth draft, and all this business with M. DeGarre and suchlike has put me behind schedule. If you will excuse me …?”

He walked off immediately before Cacon had any chance to excuse him or not.

Back in his cabin, he sat down to plan how he was going to escape from the aeroport tomorrow in Senza. His understanding was that the vessel would be laid up for some time while the Senzans went through her with a fine-tooth comb, looking for anything that might be construed as military aid for Katamenia. Miss Barrow would be sure to inform the Senzan authorities as soon as she could, and he would be arrested immediately.

Cabal played the likely sequence of events out in his mind. Miss Barrow leaves the ship as soon as she possibly can and denounces him to the Senzan authorities. The customs men or a police squad boards and arrests him. He is taken into custody, put on trial, and sent to prison for a period of, allowing for good behaviour, forever. This was a poor prospect.

Alternatively, she denounces him, the Senzan authorities attempt to arrest him but are confronted by Captain Schten, arguing that Herr Meissner is a Mirkarvian citizen and they can keep their stinking Senzan paws off him. Cabal liked this version. His liking for it deteriorated when he took the train of events a little further, however. The Senzans demand proof. Schten then wires to Krenz for corroborating evidence. Krenz wires back to say that Civil Servant Meissner has been discovered in a vegetative state at the aeroport — oh and, incidentally, has Schten got an infamous necromancer called Cabal aboard who happens to look a little like Meissner and is wanted for crimes against the state?

Cabal spent the next hour running through further alternatives and variants on the alternatives; each and every one of them resulted in life imprisonment or death. The only way out of this ring of fire was to move back a step and simply ensure that “Miss Barrow leaves the ship as soon as she possibly can and denounces him to the Senzan authorities.”

He took out his switchblade and opened it. The pivot still smelled of blood, and he doubted that the moisture was doing the steel any favours. He took a handkerchief from Meissner’s luggage and started to clean the blade carefully.

He could try and be off the ship and through customs before Miss Barrow had a chance to warn the officials, but this was fraught with difficulties, given that she would be intent on beating him to it. Or he could stop her being a problem now. She wouldn’t have to die; he was reasonably confident that he could injure her badly enough that she would be in no state to tell anybody anything about him until he was free and clear.

But … she had hinted at leaving a letter with the captain to be opened in case anything happened to her. No, then — too risky. It was not even worth considering if he could somehow steal the letter from the captain’s safe. For all his other accomplishments, Cabal had never attempted safecracking.

So, he had only one real option, which was to delay Miss Barrow in some non-lethal way at the very moment of disembarkation, and then scurry through Senzan customs with sufficient dignity to avoid suspicion. Simplicity itself.

But Cabal had problems with simple things. His was a complex life, and when something simple was called for he generally had to sidle up to it in a long series of lateral steps, circling it like a crab of the intellect. After some minutes of mental scuttling, his face was transformed by a smile. It was not a nice smile. It was the smile of a criminal mastermind who, on capturing his nemesis, decides to forgo the circular saws and piranhas and just shoots the man.

It was a good, elegant plan. He would spend a few hours using the official stationery Meissner had brought along to rustle up some convincing documentation to support the gross deception he would spin for the Senzan officials. It wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny, but it didn’t need to. All he needed was a few minutes of confusion. Chortling darkly, he unpacked Meissner’s travel typewriter and began drafting a governmental-agencies bulletin concerning a wanted criminal.

A necromancer called Cabal.