The Cabaret des Oiseaux Noirs appears in three press reviews. It has one year of catering records. It does not appear on any map produced after 1977.

Mara goes looking for it. She searches the Paris municipal licensing records, the Bibliothèque nationale theatre archive, street directories from 1970 to 1982. She finds the street. She finds the address. She does not find the venue. A reviewer writing for Rock & Folk in October 1974 described the room as claustral — a monastery word, an architecture of enclosure. The venue holds one catering registration and then stops appearing in any public record.

On Tape 3, Viktor describes the room: low ceiling, wooden chairs, a stage that is a raised section thirty centimetres high, a single overhead lamp that puts a circle of light on the performing area and leaves everything else in dark. At the back of the stage, a large oval mirror, gilt-framed, the gilding worn away in patches. When he stands in the lamp circle, he can see his own reflection clearly. The audience behind him is not in the mirror. The room, as far as the mirror is concerned, contains one person.

He also mentions a man at the best table. Stage left. He watches without moving for the full forty minutes. Viktor names him.

Then he mentions a woman at the bar. He tries to describe her. He stops mid-sentence. Three seconds of tape hiss. He moves on.

Mara plays Nosferatu — Track 3 from Lichtspiel Vol. I: Weimar Shadows. In the bridge, Viktor rewrites the ending: if he were the count, he would never have lingered. He would have taken what he wanted and walked away before the dawn could catch him. The story, in Viktor's version, ends on a fog-covered shore. The monster gets away.

After the song, Mara is not sure the monster sympathy is purely aesthetic.

The Strange Case of Victor Sable is an investigative audio documentary following audio engineer Mara Voss as she reconstructs the life, disappearance, and possible continued existence of cult dark cabaret artist Victor Sable.

There is one page of the contract in the estate box.

Torn cleanly along the top edge — not in anger. Someone removed the pages before it and after it deliberately. What remains is a single clause, typed on paper heavier than standard, on a well-maintained mechanical typewriter, by someone who was being careful.

Mara reads it aloud.

All works of significant emotional origin, present and future, known and unknown to the artist, are held in perpetuity by Pandaemonium Records and its assignees.

In Episode 2, Mara returns to the investigation with something unresolved. She goes back through the press materials she moved past too quickly — the two reviews that give an address for the Cabaret des Oiseaux Noirs that has not appeared on any map since 1977, the 1974 Record Mirror studio address that cannot be verified, the Melody Maker interview in which Viktor described the writing process as inevitable and quoted Cornelius Ash saying the work comes easily to those who've made the right arrangements.

She also called a contact. He has been in the music industry since the late sixties. He knows the cult labels, the vanity pressings, the ones that existed for three years and left nothing behind. She described Pandaemonium Records. He went quiet.

He said: every act that signed with Cornelius Ash peaked and was simply gone. Not one came back.

She asked if he'd ever met Ash. He said he'd been in the same room once. He said Ash was impeccably dressed and very courteous and he had found himself not wanting to stay in the room longer than necessary. He said it was like standing next to a window that faces the wrong direction.

He said: I'd leave it alone if I were you.

Mara plays Tape 2. Viktor describes the recording sessions for what will become Victorian Murder Ballads — the songs arriving faster than they should, every session the session where everything comes complete. He notes Ash's correction during the rough mix playback: this is exactly what I needed, revised in the same breath to this is exactly what you have made it. Viktor says he has been thinking about the space between those two sentences since Thursday.

Then Mara plays Caligari — Track 2 from Lichtspiel Vol. I: Weimar Shadows — in full.

She closes on the contract clause. She is going to find Cornelius Ash.

The clause bothers her.

The Strange Case of Victor Sable is an investigative audio documentary following audio engineer Mara Voss as she reconstructs the life, disappearance, and possible continued existence of cult dark cabaret artist Victor Sable.

Islington. Spring, 1996. An estate sale. A cardboard box with a handwritten label: Victor Sable. Pandaemonium Records. Paris.
In the first episode of her investigation, audio engineer Mara Voss introduces the find: seven LPs, fourteen microcassette tapes, press clippings, and correspondence fragments. Eleven pounds. She outlines what she knows from the press materials — the 1974 Record Mirror photograph, the Cabaret des Oiseaux Noirs, the Pandaemonium Records imprint — and plays The Projectionist, the opening track from Lichtspiel Vol. I: Weimar Shadows, for the first time.
She also plays the first cassette tape. Viktor's voice. Private. Recorded in his apartment on the Rue des Ombres sometime in the early seventies. He describes arriving in Paris, the dinner with Cornelius Ash, the contract he signed, having read twenty-two of its forty-one pages. The wine, which was exactly right. The piano in his apartment, tuned to a pitch he would not have specified himself and could not fault. The first song, which arrived on the third morning, complete — all of it, all at once, already under his hands.
He says: The work began with uncanny ease.
At the close of the episode, Mara notes that she cannot locate Pandaemonium Records in any public registry. She attributes this to label consolidation.
She is professionally satisfied with this explanation.
She should not be.
The Strange Case of Victor Sable is an investigative audio documentary following audio engineer Mara Voss as she reconstructs the life, disappearance, and possible continued existence of cult dark cabaret artist Victor Sable.