Johannes Cabal the Detective Read Online Free PDF Page A

himself on being a sensitive person but, then again, he prided himself on being a great artist, and he was deluding himself there, too. He smiled at the dead man and told him there was a bit of mild flu going around and that was certainly the problem.
    Cabal was getting bored waiting. He had one last syringe to inject just before they presented the imperial carcass to its public which would give the grey, marbled flesh the semblance of humanity. After that—well, he would have to see. The Count Marechal was clearly a career soldier, a political meddler, and an ambitious aristocrat, and any of these occupations in itself would have boded ill. How he managed to be all three simultaneously without tearing down the seams, and the mendacity and ruthlessness with which he was stuffed leaking out, was a small miracle. Cabal briefly wondered what mendacity and ruthlessness looked like as stuffing and imagined something like wet poppy seeds before his personality turned up and quashed such frivolous whimsy. He had to remain focussed if he were to stay alive.
    Lieutenant Karstetz came in and stamped to attention because he liked it. “The Count Marechal requires your presence, Herr Cabal, at the imperial balcony. Oh, and take the corpse with you,” he added as an afterthought.
    “Corpse?” said Prezof, appalled, stepping out from behind Antrobus’s bulk, where he had been brushing nap. Then he looked up at the pale emperor and a penny audibly dropped. He gasped and stepped back.
    “Oh,” said Karstetz, miffed, “I say, the dressmaker. That’s a bind. This is all supposed to be terribly hush-hush. The count will have my guts for garters for letting the cat out of the bag.” He walked over to Cabal. “Be a brick and take his Imperial Deadness to the balcony, will you?” He looked at Prezof without rancour and drew his sabre. “’Fraid I’ve got a bit of cleaning up to do here, don’t y’know?”
    Cabal took the emperor by the elbow and guided him to the door and out into the corridor. As he turned to close the door behind him, he saw Karstetz bearing down on the terrified Prezof. He loathed unnecessary killing but, then again, he loathed Prezof. Still, he felt it was necessary to at least register his disapproval. “You can’t go around killing people to cover up your mistakes,” he said. “You’ll kill off half the country at that rate.”
    Karstetz paused. “You’re right, of course,” he admitted, apparently missing the implication. “I think that’s a very good point. I shall start being more careful—” He turned back towards Prezof and raised his sabre. “Tomorrow.”
    Cabal narrowed his lips and closed the door behind him. Halfway down the corridor, he heard a reedy scream from the room.
    “This is a fine country you’ve got here,” he said to Antrobus II. “ Such a fine place. A nominal leader who should have been in a sepulchre a week ago and a military full of inbred psychopaths.” They walked a little further. “A little bit like Imperial Rome, really.”
    M arechal was crushing a dead cigarette out in an overflowing ashtray when Cabal entered. “Where have you been?” he demanded, thrusting a thumb over his shoulder at an ormolu clock. “Have you seen the time? Is he ready? Gott! Look at the state of him.”
    Cabal produced a syringe and jammed it in Antrobus’s neck. Antrobus seemed wholly unconcerned. Within a few seconds, a spreading perimeter of good skin colour was expanding out from the needle mark. Where it passed, the pallid corpse tones were replaced with a glow of rude health, the dead eyes twinkled, the hair bristled. Lieutenant Karstetz entered as the transformation was well under way. “I say, I could do with a jigger of that stuff after a heavy night.”
    “I’ll give you the formula,” said Cabal in the full knowledge that the stuff was toxic to the living.
    “Does he know the speech?” asked Marechal.
    “He knows every word he’s been taught,” Cabal replied.