Soma Blues

by Robert Sheckley

  Vana pointed to a very sunburned, balding man sitting in a wing chair in the corner and smoking a cigar.

  “Allow me to produce my patron, Senhor Silverio Vargas.”

  The two men shook hands. Vargas indicated a chair. Vana moved a discreet distance away, close enough to be at hand if anything should come up, far enough so that he was not eavesdropping on the conversation.

  Vargas said, “Let’s get right to the point. Tell me, Mr. Draconian, what is your interest in this situation with Arranque?”

  “A man I know, Stanley Bower, was killed in Paris. His brother hired me to find his murderer.

  “And you suspect Senhor Arranque?”

  Hob nodded. “You could say that.”

  Vargas smiled and thought a long time before he spoke. “You are not, by any chance, out to make a name for yourself by breaking a big drug connection?”

  “No, I’m not,” Hob said. “I’ve told you my interest in the case. I have another friend who may be involved. Unwittingly. I want to get him clear, too.”

  “If you could do that much, would you stay clear of the drug connection?”

  “I would.”

  “How can I know that?”

  “Hey, look at me,” Hob said. “My face is my fortune.”

  Vargas studied Hob’s face for a while. Then smiled again. “It is a good face. Very Norte Americano. Ingenuous. Determined. Idealistic. Naive.”

  “You’ve got me down to a T,” Hob said.

  “And facetious. But never mind that. Mr. Draconian, I think our interests may intersect here. I think we might be able to help each other.”

  “I’m not going to join your gang, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “No, no! You really are delightful, Mr. Draconian. But I suppose you get results in your own way. No, let us put some cards on the table. You probably know by now that a very large drug operation is soon to begin.”

  “I’ve been under that impression.”

  “Just between us, I have an interest in it.”

  “I won’t tell a soul.”

  “Thank you. More to the point, my son, Etienne, is also involved in this matter. He got into it entirely without my knowledge. To the point of danger.”

  “Tell me about it,” Hob said. “If you want to, that is.”

  “I think that I do. Vana has told me you are someone to confide in. Vana is never wrong. Well, let’s have a little drink, and a cigar, and I’ll begin.”

  Vargas got up and poured drinks. He opened a cedar-lined box, and Hob accepted a Havana like they used to make Havanas and still do if you’re not an American. They lit up.

  “My son’s involvement in this matter,” Vargas said, “is really my fault. Vana has told me so, and I might as well confess it up front. I kept the boy on too tight a leash. I didn’t give him enough money I thought an unlimited airline ticket good year-round for any place on the earth, and his quite generous allowance, would be sufficient. I wanted him to steady himself, to be something more than a rich man’s son.” Vargas puffed his cigar into life and regarded the glowing tip for a moment. “I wanted him to be a lawyer, to move in the best society, to enjoy all the advantages that I never had. I came up the hard way, Mr. Draconian, and in a hard world where you had to take what you wanted.”

  Hob leaned back. One of the perils of the private detective trade was that wealthy men were forever telling you their life stories. In this case, however, it looked as if it might be an interesting story. And the cigar was very fine.

  “The fact is,” Vargas said, “and this is just between us, I have some financial interest in this operation. But I was shocked to hear that Etienne had involved himself, and through his girlfriend, that Annabelle person, was in trouble with Senhor Arranque and some of the other backers.”

  “That figures.”

  “My first duty is to my family. Etienne is safe now, at my own finca, under the eyes of my guards. I do not like the way this whole thing is going. What seemed to be a safe little operation at first is turning into a decidedly perilous matter. There will be a final vote this evening as to whether to continue or not. I am inclined to vote against. It will be a risky thing to do, but I have my own safeguards. You, however, are in a precarious position, Mr. Draconian.”

  “So I’m starting to think,” Hob said.

  “It’s what comes of trying to play a lone hand. I suggest that you stick with me and Vana for the remainder of the evening. You will be safer that way.”

  “Thanks,” Hob said. “But I’ve got a few other things to do.”

  “Well, try to be careful. We will all be lucky to get of out of this with whole skins.”

  5

  Juanito was just packing up to leave. “Aren’t you leaving with us?” he asked Hob.

  “I can’t. I haven’t found Nigel yet.”

  Juanito hesitated, trying to think how to phrase what he was going to say next. “Might it not be dangerous for you to stay on? ”

  Hob nodded glumly. “But it’ll be just as dangerous for Nigel. Would you mind fixing me a tray with a bottle of champagne and two glasses?”

  “Okay,” Juanito said. He set up a good-looking tray with two chilled champagne glasses on it and a bottle of the hotel’s finest champagne. “I guess you know what you’re doing.”

  Hob didn’t. But he had always suspected that the greater part of being a private detective was a willingness to fake it when you didn’t know what else to do.

  He left the kitchen with his tray, his bottle of champagne, his white napkin, and his two flute glasses. He knew this move wouldn’t be very good for his disguise, of course, but Hob was trying to look at it positively. People who didn’t know him would think he was just a waiter looking for a hotel guest, while people who did know him would think it was just Hob Draconian off on one of his weird numbers. It wasn’t much, but it seemed the best he could do right now with the party closing and Nigel still not in sight. And he really did have to find Nigel.

  The public portion of the party was breaking up, but there were still a lot of guests around. He sorted through them, hoping to find Nigel before Arranque found him. He worked his way quickly through the crowd, trying to catch a glimpse of Nigel’s familiar burly figure. Nigel didn’t seem to be in the main lobby.

  Hob spotted a flight of stairs with people all up and down it, holding drinks and chatting. He went up the stairs. At the top he came to a corridor. One way led to numbered rooms—the guests’ quarters. But the other way had a discreet sign: art gallery.

  He went through a set of swinging doors and entered a corridor with framed paintings hung down either side. This had to be the stuff Nigel had bought on the cheap, because Hob, in all his years as a crypto-art critic, had never seen such a miserable array of paintings whose best feature was their frames. The paintings were not just bad, they were execrable; no, more than execrable. They were beneath contempt. He was looking at art so bad, it could have served as a caricature of what some people think art is all about. It would have been apt as a symbol of why fine European seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art is scoffed at in blue-collar homes all over the Western world. These paintings were to Western art as a satyr to Hyperion, to invert Shakespere’s famous image; or as a hurdy-gurdy is to a Monteverdi requiem, to hazard one of his own.

  Hob came to a set of doors at the far end of the corridor. He didn’t like the look of those doors. Prophetic lines from The Rubaiyat sounded in his head:

  There was a door to which I had no key

  There was a something through which I could not see;

  Some little talk a while of me and thee

  And then no more of thee and me.

  Those doors marked where the art gallery ended, and the real world presumably began again. Hob hesitated a moment and was about to turn back—a modern Eurydice giving up on Orpheus—when the doors swung open, and two men walked through.

  There was rock to the right and rock to the left

  And low lean thorn between


  And thrice you could hear a breech-bolt snick

  Where ne’er a man was seen. …

  Funny how poetry of an ominous sort often echoed in Hob’s mind at times of imminent danger. Although these men were dressed as guests, something about them—the black hair at their wrists perhaps, the livid knife scars on their cheeks, their beetled foreheads and prognathous jaws—told him they were probably hotel security.

  In his best Spanish he asked them, “Excuse me, gentlemen, would you know where I might find Señor Nigel Wheaton?”

  The two glanced at each other; a glance that told Hob nothing whatsoever. The larger and more mendacious looking of the two said, “Yes, señor, we were just helping him with the hanging of the pictures.”

  That didn’t sound just right, but Hob let it pass. “A client has sent him this bottle of champagne. Do you know where I could find him?”

  “Of a surety,” the smaller man said. “Señor Wheaton was just picking up his check before departing. If you come with us, I think we can catch him before he leaves.”

  Hob followed the men through a new set of swinging doors and down the hall. In point of fact, he didn’t exactly follow them. He followed the smaller man, who led, and the other man brought up the rear, thus making Hob what is technically known as the Filling in a Bozo Sandwich. A more suspicious man than Hob might have thought something was amiss. As a matter of fact, Hob thought so, too: But what the hell, in for a penny, in for a pound—and, anyway, it just might all turn out all right. He followed the men through a section of the hotel that seemed strangely deserted. They came to yet another door at the end of the hall.

  “Right in through here,” the smaller man said, an expression on his face that reminded Hob very much of the expression worn by the malignant cripple in Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” when he directed the knight to his peril. Still, it was no time to brood on literary apprehensions. The smaller man opened the door. Hob entered. The larger man hulked in behind him.

  Inside the room, Hob came face to face with Señor Ernesto Arranque, sitting behind a large mahogany desk and looking pleased with himself.

  “Come right in, Mr. Draconian,” Arranque said. “We have been expecting you.”

  Hob glanced around to see who else had been expecting him. As he had somehow suspected, there was Nigel, slumped on the couch in a sitting position with his eyes closed, a nasty bruise high on his forehead, out cold.

  Hob seemed to have missed the opening of this special party within a party. But he suspected he was in plenty of time for the main festivities.

  Nigel suddenly stirred and opened his eyes. “Ah, Hob. There you are. Didn’t happen to bring anyone with you, did you?”

  “Like who?” Hob asked.

  “Like Jean-Claude and a platoon of his tough friends. No, I can see without even asking that you didn’t bring anyone. Came alone, didn’t you?”

  It sounded as if Nigel was chiding him.

  “Well, more’s the pity then,” Nigel said. He looked at Arranque and said, “You fellows didn’t have to crack me quite so hard.” He touched the bruise on his head tenderly.

  “I apologize for that,” Arranque said. “Jaime is a new man. He still hasn’t learned finesse.”

  The two men who had come in with Hob were both grinning. They didn’t seem too discomfited by what Arranque was saying. Indeed, Arranque seemed to be in a high good mood, and his two helpers shared in it with him.

  “I really don’t see what you have against me,” Nigel said. “I’ll admit the paintings are not of the first water. But what do you expect at twenty pounds a throw?”

  “I have no objections to the paintings,” Arranque said. “My difficulty—or rather, your difficulty—lies in your association with Mr. Draconian—something I did not know when Mr. Santos recommended you to me.”

  “Ah,” Nigel said. “Thought it might be something like that. “You have something against Hob?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Arranque said. “He’s been looking into a matter that I’m associated with.”

  “Hob,” Nigel said, “have you been making waves again?”

  “If investigating a murder is making waves,” Hob said, “I stand guilty.”

  “Well, there you have it,” Arranque said. “He calls it ‘investigating a murder.’ I call it prying into my private affairs. I’m afraid I really can’t permit that. I thought I had gotten rid of Mr. Draconian in England. And now he turns up here. And now, of course, I also learn that you are his associate in this so-called detective agency of his.”

  “What do you mean, ‘so-called’?” Hob asked. “If you wouldn’t call it a detective agency, what would you call it?” He was genuinely curious.

  “I know all about your association with MI16,” Arranque said.

  It was news to Hob. “Never heard of them,” he said. “Have you, Nigel?”

  Nigel shrugged, winced, and said, “Isn’t that the name of a double carriageway in England? Or am I thinking of the M16?”

  “This is all very droll,” Arranque said. “And I suppose we could go on like this for some time. But I’m afraid there are pressing matters I must attend to. So, Mr. Wheaton, if you will excuse us, I have private matters to take up with your employer.”

  “Oh, certainly,” Nigel said, standing up a little shakily. “I’ll just slip off. Go down to the village for a beer. How would that be?”

  “I’m afraid that’s not what I had in mind,” Arranque said. “But I appreciate your levity in this matter. The boys will escort you to where I want you to go.”

  The “boys” both had automatics in their hands. Hob hadn’t even seen them draw them. The larger one gestured to Nigel. Nigel looked at him, looked at Hob, raised an eyebrow, and walked across the room.

  “You can use the special entrance,” Arranque said. He went behind his desk and pressed a button. A panel slid open in the far wall, revealing a passageway. “Yes, this way will be better. We don’t want to disturb the guests. Most of them are on their way out now, but a few remain still.”

  As when they had led Hob in, the smaller man took the lead. The larger man gestured at Nigel with his gun. Nigel followed the smaller man into the passageway, then turned and said to Hob, “Well, old boy, I hope you’ve thought of a way out of this.”

  “To reveal it now,” Hob said, “would be premature.”

  The big man behind Nigel gestured with his gun again in a more preemptory manner. Nigel said, “Ta,” and walked through the doorway. The large man walked in behind him. The panel slid shut.

  “Well, now,” Arranque said, “it’s just you and me, for the moment.”

  “That’s true,” Hob said turning his attention back to Arranque. But if Hob had had any thought of leaping on him and overcoming him, he dropped it rapidly because Arranque also had a gun in his hand. It seemed as if everyone had a gun but the good guys. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, Hob thought wistfully.

  6

  “As it turns out,” Arranque said, “I am happy not to have disposed of you in England. Little did I realize at the time that I would need you for an important role here in Ibiza.”

  “Happy to be of service,” Hob said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Die for me.”

  “We already went through that once in England.”

  “Yes, but that was at the wrong time. Now we’re going to do it all over again, and this time we’ll do it right and at the right time. That’s how the Kartel wants it.”

  “Which Cartel is that?” Hob asked.

  “The Kali Kartel. Indian, not South American. K-A-L-I. Not C-A-L-I. And we spell Kartel with a K.”

  “I can see that you’re having a lot of fun with these ominous forebodings,” Hob said.

  Just then there was a discreet rap at the door. It opened, and Silverio Vargas stepped in. He said, “Senhor Arranque, I wanted to tell you …” Then he saw Hob.

  “Hello, friend,” Hob said hopefully.

&nbs
p; “I’m afraid not,” Vargas said. “They have Etienne. Taken him from the finca.” To Arranque he said, “I wanted to tell you that you could rely on my cooperation. Just don’t hurt my son.”

  “I do not intend to,” Arranque said. “As long as you continue to cooperate.”

  “I will do that, of course,” Vargas said. He looked at Hob, hesitated a moment, then shrugged his shoulders and left, closing the door softly behind him.

  Hob said, “So much for the sudden rescue in the nick of time. Could you tell me something? Why did you kill Stanley Bower?”

  “It was self-protection,” Arranque said. “Mr. Bower had no right to be selling soma without an approved franchise from the Kartel. Annabelle understood as soon as I explained it to her. Not only was Bower selling our product illegally, he was also jumping the gun, bringing soma to the market before the official grand opening, before the regular dealers were ready to move. When I pointed this out to him in Paris, Mr. Bower laughed at me.”

  “So you killed him.”

  “He wouldn’t take me seriously. He laughed at me, Mr. Draconian. And nobody laughs at me.”

  Hob fought down an irresistable self-defeating impulse to break out into giggles. Even he could see it was simply not the time.

  “So what now? When do I get out of here?”

  “That will not be up to me. You can take that up with your new hosts.”

  “And they are?”

  “Come with me. You will meet them.”

  Arranque stood up and gestured with the small handgun. His demeanor was pleasant but intent. He didn’t seem to be about to stand for any nonsense. Hob decided to go gracefully.

  They went down through a side door, down a long corridor, and into a large room with a high-domed roof. On the floor were heavy rugs. Incense burned in braziers set into the walls. The lighting was low and indirect, but not so indirect that Hob could not make out a small, white-robed man at the far end of the room. Hob was propelled forward until he stood no more than five feet from him.