Free Johannes Cabal the Detective by Jonathan L. Howard Page A

ACTS AND THE FUTURE REMAINS DARK
    Five minutes later, Cabal was politely shooed away from the windows while the glass was slid back into place and locked. As he watched the procedure with limited interest, a steward appeared at his elbow. “Good evening, sir,” he said, and smilingly handed Cabal a menu.
    “What’s this?” asked Cabal, suspicious.
    “The menu for the departure dinner, sir,” replied the steward. Cabal looked blank. “It’s in the itinerary,” the steward added.
    Cabal pulled Meissner’s little bundle of documents from his inside pocket and quickly sorted through them. Now he thought of it, there had been some sort of ship’s timetable, but he’d assumed it was for general meals, not for anything as specific as a “departure dinner.” But there it was, the captain’s table, dinner dress mandatory. Cabal gritted his teeth very slightly; he couldn’t really worm out of it without drawing attention to himself. He just hoped Meissner had seen fit to pack a dinner jacket.
    C abal let himself into cabin Starboard 6, locked the door behind him, and sat heavily on the bed. He despised acting; the whole conceit of concealing his personality was distasteful in the extreme, and he could hardly wait until these few days were over and behind him. In the meantime, however …
    He opened Meissner’s steamer trunk and had a swift sortie around its contents. Minor Meissner’s rôle in government may have been, but the salary must have been quite impressive. Either that or Meissner’s father was a rich man with plenty of strings to pull for his son. Somehow, the latter seemed more likely. Cabal found no fewer than three dinner jackets, one of which couldn’t possibly be worn except on a bet. He consigned it to the bottom of the trunk and looked at the others; they were both black and acceptable but one was cut less fashionably than the other, and this was the one Cabal hung up in the small wardrobe for wear that evening. Next, he found a pair of trousers and measured them against his leg—yes, he and Gerhard Meissner were of a height. The shirts were also suitable. The underwear, Cabal was profoundly relieved to discover, was brand-new and still in its shop wrappings. With no idea of whether Meissner was still alive, Cabal had few qualms about wearing dead man’s shoes, but he drew the line at dead man’s knickers.
    His ensemble for the evening decided, Cabal sat on the bed, picked up the thin bundle of documents from the bedside, and leafed through them to make sure there were no more unpleasant surprises. It seemed fairly quiet after the first evening; mainly optional events until a mandatory dinner the evening before journey’s end, in Katamenia. There was also a pamphlet about what a wonderful ship the Princess Hortense was, with a short and patronising section on the miracles of modern science, whose very first sentence—a lurching edifice of ill-applied technical babble made still more asinine by the addition of the ignorant hyperbole employed by the worst sort of feature writers—irked him so much that he read no more. Instead, he tore a strip from it to leave him with a square of light card, and this he proceeded to fold into an origami swan.
    When he was finished and the swan was in residence on the cabin’s small writing desk, he turned off the bedside light and sat in near-darkness. Outside his porthole, there was nothing to see but stars. The earth below lay in night without even the light of a cottage to break it. Cabal watched the world—or, at least, he watched what little he could make of the horizon—go by for a few minutes. He felt deeply, profoundly miserable.
    He really, really didn’t want to attend the dinner. On the one hand, he would have to spend the entire evening pretending to be something he wasn’t, and the forfeit for failing to be convincing was death: it simply wasn’t conducive to having a good time. On the other hand, he disliked the company of others at the