Johannes Cabal the Detective

CHAPTER 9 in which Cabal discovers the future of bar snacks and trifles with the nobility

An hour or two later, the false documents completed to his satisfaction, and with an unaccustomed song in his heart and a spring in his step inspired by anticipation of the dirty deed to come, Cabal entered the ship’s salon in something as close to a good mood as he was likely ever to experience. Usually such mischief was not in his character, and it was partially the novelty as much as the sense of relief at having a workable plan that had raised his spirits so.

He sat at the bar and slapped his open palm on the wooden counter to attract the attention of the barman. The barman came over, polishing an already pristine glass, and smiled at Cabal’s evident good humour. “You seem in a very good mood, sir. What can I get for you?”

“I am, thank you. I shall have,” he started, and paused. He belatedly realised that he barely drank. Further, he also realised that the Mirkarvians set a great deal of store by what a man put into his glass. Asking for the wrong thing might well plant suspicions in people’s head. Sparkling water with a slice of lime, for example, would probably see him thrown overboard for crimes against masculinity. What was safe? He plunged for the manliest thing he could think of. “I shall have a beer, please.”

The barman looked at him with poorly concealed astonishment. “A beer, sir? You’d like a beer?”

Cabal’s heart sank. Why was it so damnably difficult to do anything around Mirkarvians without some ridiculous social more or another causing complications? He could try backpedalling, but that would seem even more suspicious. He decided to plough ahead and try for “mildly eccentric” in the barman’s eyes, rather than “highly dubious.”

“Yes. Beer. Why, don’t you have any?”

The barman leaned forward confidentially, reaching under the bar as he did so. If that hand comes up holding a gun, thought Cabal, I’m sunk. If he’s holding half a billiard cue, however, I’m in with a chance.

“I knew you weren’t stuck up, sir,” he said quietly. “Lot of the civils, they look down on beer. Not good enough for them. But you, sir, you’re all right.”

As the barman’s hand rose from beneath the bar, Cabal was filled with a presentiment and a strange foreboding that he hadn’t felt since the last time he’d watched the nightmare corpse city of R’lyeh rise, effulgent with the ineffable and fetid with fish, from the depths of the Pacific.

In the barman’s hand was the largest stein Cabal had ever seen. One could have drowned a sack full of kittens in it, and the drinker wouldn’t even know about it until he reached the dregs. The barman held the stein beneath a beer pump and started to fill it. This took quite a while. When he was finally done, he carefully placed the stein before Cabal, winked conspiratorially, said, “I’ll put it on your chit. Good health to you, sir!” and went back to his duties, whistling jauntily.

Cabal looked cautiously into the top. The beer, when he had excavated down through the dense, tan head of foam, with a pencil, he discovered to be as black as treacle and only slightly less viscous. He sucked experimentally at the droplets on the pencil and discovered the beer to be some form of porter, probably brewed from dark malts, fast-fermenting yeast, and slightly coagulated dragon’s blood. It seemed likely the dragon was very drunk when it died.

He noticed the barman looking at him, so he lifted the stein and took a good gulp, giving himself an undignified if manly foam moustache in the process. He wiped the moustache away with his handkerchief and nodded in a comradely way to the barman, who gave an answering nod and got back to his work. The gulp had barely touched the level of the beer. Cabal realised that he would have to engineer some way to be called away in order to avoid drinking it all. If he had to finish the whole stein, he would probably be drunk for two days, and heaven alone knew what he might say in his cups.

That said, it was actually a pleasant enough drink. It coated his throat all the way down in such an assured and thorough way that it felt as if it might last for some weeks. On the other hand, he had spent enough time in laboratories to know all about organic chemistry and, without resort to a hydrometer, he could still make a fairly accurate guess, from the faint scent of ethyl alcohol, that the beer had an alcoholic content somewhere in the region of ten per cent, possibly a few points more. Given the cavernous dimensions of the stein, this meant there was enough alcohol in it to burn down a mid-size bonded warehouse. Cabal was only an occasional drinker, and knew that he would be singing about goblins before he was even a quarter of his way through it.

He was just thinking of ways that he could abandon it without having his essential Mirkarvianness called into question when a small bag made of greaseproof paper and filled with strange brown shavings appeared under his nose.

Cabal looked sharply to his right to discover that the bag was being held by Bertram Harlmann. He was smiling widely, apparently of the opinion that Cabal should be glad to have a collection of strange brown shavings appear beneath his nose. “I know what you’re thinking,” said Harlmann.

Cabal was confident that, no, he didn’t.

Harlmann continued, “You’re thinking, That’s a lot of beer to drink with no solid sustenance to complement it. What I could really do with is a lovely bar snack. But what? Beer nuts? Beer nuts are a bit tired, aren’t they? Pretzels? You can choke on pretzels. Meat sticks? Bits always end up floating around your beer. No, no, no, no. You don’t want any of that old rubbish.”

Cabal said nothing, but watched him levelly, not even slightly agog to hear what new rubbish Harlmann was peddling.

“You want …” Harlmann nodded at the bag with an encouraging smile, and shook it temptingly.

“I’m not letting one of those anonymous … objects pass my lips without a full description and, ideally, an analytical chemist’s report,” said Cabal.

“Save yourself the trouble, sport,” said Harlmann, a man difficult to put off his stride. In contrast, Cabal had never been called “sport” in his life, and was inwardly reeling at such effrontery. “I can tell you exactly what you’re getting here. Zero carbohydrates, sixty per cent protein, thirty-two per cent fat, all of which is unsaturated, mostly oleic acid, which is good for you, and most of the rest is stearic acid, which is harmless. Bit of salt for flavour, but a little goes a long way. Go on! Try one!”

He still had misgivings, but the breakdown of the snack’s chemical composition sounded reassuring enough. In fact, it sounded vaguely familiar. He took one of the puffy brown shavings and chewed slowly on it. Actually, it wasn’t bad, and he said so.

“Y’see? Y’see?” Harlmann regarded the greaseproof paper bag as if it contained the philosopher’s stone. “The bar snack of the future, these little babies.”

“What, exactly, are they?” asked Cabal, taking another. He’d heard Harlmann use that phrase at the embarkation dinner — “the bar snack of the future” — but Cabal hadn’t been paying much attention on that occasion. What had Harlmann called them? Cabal suddenly remembered, and stopped chewing.

“Pork scratchings,” said Harlmann proudly.

“Pork scratchings,” echoed Cabal, his voice empty of expression. The name suggested that where there were pork scratchings there were pork itchings, and mental images of pigs with terrible skin diseases filled his mind. Had he just been chewing on hog scabs?

“It’s the skin, you see. Basically, cold crackling for the casual peckish market.”

“Pig skin,” said Cabal, starting to chew again. That didn’t sound so bad; after all, pork crackling and rinds were all part and parcel of eating pork. “What process do you use to get rid of the hairs?”

“Just burn them off. What do you think?”

“You may have to do something about the name, but that’s not bad at all, Herr Harlmann.”

“Thank you, Herr Meissner. I respect your opinion. Please, have the bag with my compliments.” He waited until Cabal had taken it from him, before saying in a casual tone, “You’re something in the government, aren’t you?”

So that was it. “A very minor cog in the great Mirkarvian machine, Herr Harlmann. Specifically, a docket clerk, first class in the Department of Administrative Coordination.”

If Harlmann was disappointed with the rank, he didn’t show it. The department, however, seemed grounds for optimism. “Administrative Coordination, eh? Why, that means you have contact with all other departments, including Military Logistics, doesn’t it?”

Cabal had no idea, but it seemed likely. “We have dealings with most other departments, that’s true. Why do you ask?”

“Those little wonders,” he answered, gesturing at the bag in Cabal’s hand. “High-energy food, gives you pep right when you need it! Perfect for troops on the march, eh?”

“It’s an interesting idea, certainly,” said Cabal, for whom war was already such a ludicrous idea that the addition of thousands of soldiers marching off to butcher one another while chewing on slightly salted deep-fried chunks of pig skin added not a jot of absurdity. “I could mention it to my superiors on my return.”

Harlmann smiled patiently and shook his head. “No, no, no, no, my boy. You’re getting this all wrong.” He sat on the next stool and then, to Cabal’s profound discomfort, put his arm around his shoulder. “Your bosses will just take all the credit. That’s not the way to do it at all. You have to present it as a fait accompli, with your name all over it. Look, you can get at the SCF, can’t you?”

Could he? Cabal tried to look noncommittal while working hard to guess what the “SCF” could possibly be. To buy himself some time, he attempted to turn the conversation around. “You seem to know a great deal about it, sir.”

“Well, of course I do. It’s my business. I’ll not lie to you, Herr Meissner. A government contract for my scratchings would be a great boon for my business, and … it could do you a lot of good, too.”

If this was the way Mirkarvia usually operated, thought Cabal, no wonder it was a shambles. As for the SCF, civil services always seemed to be full of committees, and Harlmann was after funding. Therefore, Cabal would guess that it was something along the lines of the Special or even the Secret Committee for Funding. When Harlmann said he wanted Cabal — or, more accurately, Meissner — to “get at” the committee, it seemed evident that he meant for some palms to be greased.

“Well, I can’t get at anyone while I’m aboard the Princess Hortense, sir. We shall have to talk about this in greater detail when we’re both back in Krenz.”

Harlmann frowned. “Why wait? You can wire when we reach Senza.”

Bribery by telegram was a new one for Cabal, especially from a telegraph office in an unfriendly country. “It’s not quite that simple. I’m involved in agricultural remittances. I can’t just telegraph them out of the blue like that.”

“Them?” Harlmann looked at him very closely, and Cabal realised that he may have made a serious error.

He was saved by Miss Ambersleigh, who appeared at his elbow like an English djinni, which is to say suddenly but without a lot of flash and smoke and bother. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” she said. “Herr Meissner? Lady Ninuka wonders if we might have the pleasure of your company.”

The force of Cabal’s desire for any escape from Harlmann might in a different man have manifested itself in bear-hugging and kissing Miss Ambersleigh before conducting her in an impromptu polka around the salon. In Cabal, this impulse was ruthlessly subjugated while he inclined his head in a curt nod. “I should be delighted, Fräulein.” He rose and bowed to Harlmann. “If you would excuse me, mein Herr?”

Harlmann nodded and, somewhat to Cabal’s surprise, smiled in a warm and fraternal manner. “No problem, old man. My best wishes to her ladyship.” He stood, bowed, and turned to go, but, as he turned, he caught Cabal’s eye and very deliberately winked. Then he was gone, taking his pork scratchings with him.

Inwardly perturbed by Harlmann’s behaviour, Cabal took his drink and walked over to go through the pleasantries with Lady Ninuka. As they sat, he noticed Miss Ambersleigh regarding the stein with icy disapproval. Cabal could almost have thanked her for it, because it gave him an excuse to have it taken away and replaced by tea and cakes. Cabal had little time for the English way of life, usually — or, indeed, anybody else’s way of life — but at some point he had developed a weakness for afternoon tea, and the pleasure he expressed when the tray arrived was entirely genuine.

“I’ll be mother,” said Miss Ambersleigh, taking up the teapot. Lady Ninuka caught Cabal’s eye, and smiled slightly at the comment. Cabal took her meaning; this seemed likely to be the only way the censorious Miss Ambersleigh would ever be a mother, unless she unexpectedly entered a convent.

Cabal took his tea with lemon and no sugar, and confined himself to a yellow French Fancy. They chatted politely enough about the weather, the ship, the view, and Cabal was just beginning to think that he was on safe ground when Lady Ninuka said, “I hear you’re involved in the investigation into poor M. DeGarre’s disappearance. Is that so, Herr Meissner?”

Miss Ambersleigh tutted. “Really, Orfilia! I’m sure we don’t want to hear about such a horrid event.” She turned to Cabal. “I’m sure I shan’t sleep a wink tonight! And, as for poor Orfilia, she has trouble sleeping at the best of times. You must not excite her with such talk!”

“You have trouble sleeping?” Cabal asked Lady Ninuka. “You should ask the ship’s doctor for a sleeping draught.”

“She did,” cut in Miss Ambersleigh as Lady Ninuka was drawing breath to reply, “but it’s not good for you to take them too much, my dear. You cannot depend on chemicals.” She turned earnestly to Cabal. “You’re an educated man, Herr Meissner. You tell her. It simply isn’t wise to depend on chemicals.”

Cabal, whose work involved a large quantity of chemicals, resisted the desire to highlight Miss Ambersleigh’s appalling ignorance of scientific matters by telling her that she was entirely constructed from chemicals, and that she ate chemicals, drank chemicals, breathed chemicals, and this was all completely natural. Instead, he said, “Insomnia can be a terrible burden on your well-being, my lady, both physiologically and psychically. Medication is all very well in the short term, but you should try to discover the root of it and deal with it.” That said, he thought she looked remarkably well. It was probably the glamour that women create with paints and powders, but she didn’t look like somebody who went without regular rest. In vulgar terms, she was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He briefly entertained the idea that she might be depending on some much less innocent chemical than a mild sedative, but it didn’t sit well with her behaviour or appearance; she didn’t seem to be exhibiting any of the telltales associated with common stimulants.

“Thank you, Herr Meissner. I truly appreciate your concern. May you talk of your investigation, though? It seems very interesting.”

Speaking quickly, to head off the interruption that Miss Ambersleigh had ready in the slips, Cabal said, “I really cannot speak of the investigation, Lady Ninuka. You understand, of course. It could prove damaging to any findings if they were to be publicised prematurely.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t tell a soul,” she replied, the very picture of innocent propriety, although the way she laid her hand upon her décolletage as she spoke could just as easily have been due to coquettishness as to expressiveness. “I am the very epitome of discretion.”

“Herr Meissner has made it quite clear that he cannot discuss such things, my dear,” persisted Miss Ambersleigh. In her mind, subjects suitable for civilised discussion frolicked happily in a great green pasture of loveliness surrounded by a ha-ha filled with spikes and acid, beyond which lay the Frightful. Violent death and suicide were very much a part of this congregation of the unspeakable, and for every word spoken on such subjects an angel shed a tear, or a fairy died, or a bunny was blinded. Miss Ambersleigh, who was fond of angels, fairies, and bunnies (despite having met only the latter), was therefore very keen to confine her conversation to the lovely pasture.

Lady Ninuka was not. “Well, there must be some aspect you can explain to me,” she said to Cabal. “Your methods, your strategy for getting to the bottom of all this?”

He was flattered that she thought there was any strategy involved in the investigation at all, given that the only solid piece of evidence was an injury sustained during a murder attempt. If real police officers relied on such methods, precious few would ever draw their pensions.

“My lady, you make too much of my humble abilities. I am no detective; I am merely an instrument of the state attempting, in my poor way, to help the captain find the truth.”

“Can’t you see that he doesn’t want to talk about it, Orfilia? Come, now! Let us speak of happier things.”

Cabal was beginning to find that Miss Ambersleigh’s shrill interjections grated on his nerves. If he had been himself, he would have said as much, but Gerhard Meissner — or at least his rendition of Gerhard Meissner — was a more patient man. His true mind flickered on his face for a second, but he brought it under control with a steely flex of his will.

It seemed that Ninuka shared his opinion, though, as the very next moment she said, “Oh, for pity’s sake, Miss Ambersleigh! Can’t you see that every time the poor man tries to say something you tell him that we don’t wish to hear it? Of course he’s keeping quiet. He’s being polite!”

Miss Ambersleigh was momentarily speechless. Only for a moment, though. “Well!” she said. “Well, I never!” Which was probably true.

She rose to her feet and, speaking in short bursts coloured with repressed emotion, said, “I see my company is not appreciated here. I’m very sorry. I shall take myself away. Herr Meissner.” Cabal, who had also risen to his feet, nodded, and muttered in a fair impersonation of an embarrassed man. Miss Ambersleigh turned to Ninuka. “My lady.” And then, like a schooner swept along on winds of decorum, she walked quickly to the other side of the salon and sat alone.

Cabal sat down again. “That’s even more embarrassing,” he said to Lady Ninuka. “I thought she was going to leave, but she’s just sitting there watching us.”

Lady Ninuka didn’t even deign to look, settling back in her chair. “She has no choice. She’s not just my companion; she’s my chaperone. My father hired her to keep an eye on me.” She looked at Cabal over her teacup as she took a sip. “She’s very conscientious.”

Abruptly, and with the sensation of being the last one in the theatre to get the joke, Cabal realised that Lady Ninuka was not so much interested in the progress of the investigation as in the investigator.

The French Fancy turned to ashes in his mouth. The last thing he needed was some new complication in his life, a life that was already built almost entirely of complications. Quite apart from the necromancy, the assumed identity, the mysterious disappearance, the attempted murder, and the Mirkarvian noble after his neck, he now had another Mirkarvian noble after one or more other parts of his anatomy.

Or possibly not. While he knew he was presentable enough, his vanity was not physical, and he had never noticed women swooning in his path before. Perhaps she was just one of those strange souls who derived a sordid, vicarious excitement from crime and death. The sort of young woman he had observed attending public executions, while he himself had been there to spread bribes and so secure the cadaver as fresh experimental material. He found this thought a great relief. The idea that she might derive some perverse pleasure from tales of vile crime and ugly death, rather than something more amatory involving him, was deeply reassuring. It was one less complication to worry about, and for that he was very grateful.

For her part, Lady Ninuka was disappointed when Herr Meissner’s eyes widened with surprise when she finally dropped a hint broad enough for the insensitive nincompoop to detect, but then he seemed to relax and she knew that they had an understanding. She wasn’t sure what she found attractive about him; physically he was good enough, if not extraordinary. She thought it might be those eyes — those blue-grey, intelligent eyes, behind which an earnest if unenterprising mind whirled with whatever it was that civil servants found to dwell upon. Yet he had defied expectations by going around exploring in the middle of the night and, when attacked, had defended himself successfully. There was more to Herr Meissner than met the eye, and Lady Orfilia Ninuka intended to split him open like an oyster and so discover what lay within.

And so with the lines drawn, albeit on entirely different battlefields, the conversation continued.

“Is it true that somebody tried to kill you last night?” she asked, eyes wide and expectant.

Cabal winced inwardly. He knew it had probably been a vain hope that at least some facts of the case would remain confidential, especially after the general fussing over him that morning, but that hadn’t stopped him from hoping.

“Where did you hear that?”

“On a ship, with only a few people aboard? If I hadn’t heard about it, that would have been the marvel. So it is true, then?”

“Yes,” admitted Cabal, sensing that to squirm any further would be pointless as well as undignified, and told her the story excepting the detail of the assailant’s wounded wrist.

Lady Ninuka hung on his every word, and Cabal interpreted this as an unhealthy appetite for the lurid. At least, he did at first, but as the tale wound to its conclusion it occurred to him that the last person who had shown such a close interest in his little adventure — Captain Schten excluded, as it was his job to be interested — was Cacon. On that occasion, Cabal had been quick to suspect the irksome little man of being an agent of some hue. What, he wondered, was rationally preventing him from suspecting the same of Orfilia Ninuka? Nothing. Neither her sex nor her title precluded her in the slightest. Then again, he had only the most vague grounds to suspect Cacon, so was fearing the same of Ninuka merely rational caution or the shallows of paranoia?

Paranoia is an occupational hazard common amongst necromancers. When it is, in fact, true that the whole world is out to get you, one has to set the hurdle of unreasonable fears that much higher. Generally, necromancers discover quite early in their careers — at least, the ones that manage to last past “quite early in their careers” do — that all threats, no matter how nebulous, should be acted upon. In populated areas this is patently impractical, as every single person who comes within a mile of a necromancer may mean him harm. Thus, they move away from cities and towns and even villages, and set up on barren mountaintops, or reclaimed chthonic subterranean redoubts, or, as in Cabal’s case, a nice three-storey townhouse moved, by methods that do not concern us here, from the middle of a respectable suburban terrace and placed, front garden and backyard intact, on a grassy hillside miles from anyone. There he was pleased to conduct experiments that would have made Victor Frankenstein wrinkle his nose, safely away from prying eyes, and there he dearly wished he were now, feet up in front of an open fire, drinking tea and reading the Principia Necromantica. That he was doing none of these things, apart from drinking tea, distressed him. The realisation that his own sense of nurtured and measured paranoia was now so sensitive as to be useless distressed him, too.

He came to the end of his narrative and reached for the teapot. Lady Ninuka was positively aflutter.

“You brave man,” she said, her face full of hero worship. She leaned forward as she spoke, and Cabal was again struck by how very cleverly her wardrobe was cut. In this case, a short jacket offset the modish neckline of the dress to create an overall effect of virginal sensuality. He had no idea where he stood with her; their relative positions were entirely at her whim. It was all very confusing for a man who was much happier at a dissection slab than at a soirée.

“It was nothing, really.” He had meant it as a statement; there is nothing intrinsically brave about fighting for your life. It was only after he had said it that he realised how heroically modest it sounded, and the fact that he had said it without affectation had inadvertently served only to compound the effect.

“Of course it was,” said Ninuka. “In such a situation, I should have been frozen with fear. You are so much more capable than I, Herr Meissner.”

Cabal briefly considered telling her that it would have been the slipstream freezing her, but that snapped a vision of her dangling by one hand in Meissner’s dreadful silk gown — which looked a lot better on her — and then there was the detail of the gown falling open. The surface effect of these thoughts was to make the opening of the sentence he was about to make dribble to an untidy halt and leave him gawping, as if he had just remembered something important.

“Have you remembered something important?” she asked.

He felt vaguely ashamed, as if she’d read his mind. “No. No, I was just … reliving the events of last night. It was — ”

“Exciting?”

“Traumatic, I was going to say, but exciting? Yes, it was that, I suppose.”

Lady Ninuka leaned back in her chair and regarded him. She didn’t quite fling herself around in abandon and pant animalistically, but a sense of flinging and panting still pervaded her far more conservative posture and attitude. In fact, to an uninvolved bystander she would have seemed the very model of decorum and respectability. Cabal wasn’t sure how she was doing it, but he was sure she was doing something. This was an entirely new field of human endeavour for which he had no familiarity and no understanding.

He did, however, have the distinct impression that he was enjoying it. It made him feel warm and important in a way that had never especially occurred or seemed pertinent to him before. He was just going to explain, in the most roundabout and circumspect way, that he had actually been very brave and it had actually been very exciting, when Leonie Barrow appeared at his elbow and said, “Lady Ninuka! How delightful!”

She sat down with them without being invited, and started talking about the theatre in Krenz. Considering that he’d been doing most of the talking until then, Lady Ninuka seemed unaccountably put off her stride. She smiled politely but barely responded to the new subject of conversation at all, and the polite smile quickly became forced, as if masking some other emotion that was trying to rear its head. Finally, she feigned surprise at the time, made her apologies, and left the salon with the wretched Miss Ambersleigh scurrying along in her wake.

As soon as she had gone, Leonie stopped her monologue and smiled, broadly and not without some malevolence.

“What,” said Cabal, somewhat testily, “is going on? What was all that about?”

“Did she ask you about what happened last night?”

“Yes, but she’s hardly the first one to do that.”

“Ah, but did she ask any questions, or just listen very closely?”

“She just listened. What are you getting at?”

“Did she congratulate you on how you handled things?”

Cabal nodded, still confused.

“Did she lean forward a lot? Like this?” She demonstrated, and Cabal had to admit that it was a good impersonation. “Did she touch you lightly on the knee at any point? No? Well, she was certainly working up to it.”

Cabal looked at her, his bafflement lifting. “A witch?” he said, lowering his voice. It wasn’t too surprising, now he stopped to consider it. The upper classes were the embodiment of discretion, and he had certainly heard of members of the nobility who dabbled in practises that would get a commoner drowned in the village pond by her neighbours. “She’s a witch? She needed some sort of direct contact to cast a spell? But why me? What was she after?”

He noticed that Miss Barrow’s shoulders were shuddering with the effort of holding in her laughter. This did nothing to improve his mood.

When she managed to damp down her hilarity a little, she said, “For a clever man, you can be such an idiot. She’s no witch. Not the way you mean it, anyway.” She leaned forwards and gestured him closer. “She was seducing you, you blockhead,” she whispered, and then sat back, unable to contain her laughter anymore.

“She was …” Cabal wasn’t at all sure he’d heard correctly. He had rationally discounted that possibility, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he? “She was what?”

Miss Barrows brought herself rapidly back under control, sobering up with a deep breath. “You heard me. And it’s excellent.”