The Alternative Detective (Hob Draconian)

by Robert Sheckley

  El Mango Encantado was on the Rue des Blancs not far from the Centre Pompidou. It was one of the many South American café-restaurants that had opened recently to cater to the increasing numbers of South American students and exiles, who were such a part of the current Paris scene. It was a small dimly lit place where you could hang out all day over a glass of wine. Nearby was the Beaubourg, the great art museum and library founded by Arne Pompidou. This was a very mixed area, a combination of old and new, ancient and modern, and, in Baudrillard’s phrase, the hypermodern.

  The combo was just setting up. The leader, Marcello, was pointed out to me, a curly-headed Uruguayan who was also their piano player. I asked him if I could buy him a drink.

  Over a Cinzano, Marcello told me that Alex had been staying in a flat on the Boulevard Auguste-Blanqui in the thirteenth arrondissement.

  “Do you know the thirteenth?” he asked. “There’s a big shopping mall in the Place d’ltalie. I’d meet Alex at a restaurant there, a place called Roszes. He was always late. I’d walk around the shopping mall, waiting for him, watching the old dames with their dogs and having an occasional apéritif. I didn’t see him when he came down from Amsterdam, however. Juanito was with him, though. Hey, Juanito, what can you tell this fellow about Alex?”

  Juanito was the drummer, a small, big-chested fellow with Indian features and heavy horn-rimmed glasses. He had been the son of a diplomat in Chile before Pinochet.

  “Sure, I met him at the Gare du Nord when he came down from Amsterdam. We had lunch together at the Café Tranquilité on the Rue Simon-le-Franc. You know the place, near the Place des Innocents where the dope dealers hang out.”

  I knew the place. The art students of the Beaubourg use it frequently. And of course the tourists. These streets are closed to traffic, though an occasional car does get through, this being Paris, and pokes its way through the crowds like a hippo tiptoeing through the tulips.

  Juanito continued. “I think Alex was waiting for somebody. He put down his newspaper every few minutes and looked right and left. Then some guy I’ve never seen before comes up and whispers something to him and goes away.

  “Alex excuses himself and says he has to see someone. I’ve never seen Alex act like this. I haven’t got anything on that afternoon, so I follow him.

  “He goes to Goldenberg’s on the Rue Vieille-de-Temple. That’s the kosher place where you can get overboiled beef with horseradish, just like in New York or Warsaw. I didn’t want him to catch me watching him, because Alex is a little funny about that sort of thing. I had a falafel sandwich at one of the Jewish places nearby and waited. And I wondered, because this really wasn’t his sort of place. Alex went in for places like the Crazy Horse Saloon, or the Tex-Mex place on the Boulevard Montpar-nasse. And he loved to go for tea at the Café Deux Magots on St-Germain. The place where Sartre used to have his famous quarrels with Simone de Beauvoir.”

  Juanito’s mention of Deux-Magots reminded me of a story an American girl had told me about how she met Jean-Paul Sartre.

  She said she had been having a Coke in Le Café Deux Magots because it was so famous, and she had recognized Sartre from a smudged reproduction on the back of one of the American editions of L’Etre et le néant. She told me that Sartre looked like a toad dressed in black, but beautiful.

  She was a California girl. It was second nature for her to go over to his table and ask for his autograph. Sartre asked her to join him and Miss Simone de Beauvoir. My friend said she didn’t like to cause Miss de Beauvoir pain, as her joining the table was very obviously going to do, to judge by the martyred expression Miss de Beauvoir put on when Sartre made the invitation. But what the hell, this was going to be a world-class anecdote and Mr. Sartre and his lady friend probably had this sort of problem all the time. She sat down and Sartre bought her a Coke, and asked how she was enjoying Paris, and groped her under the table, so she thought he was kind of sweet and considered hanging around long enough to ball him so she’d have a super world-class anecdote. But she wasn’t really as tough as all that; sometimes she just liked to scare herself, and besides, she and the other kids were bicycling to Tours in the morning and she needed her sleep.

  Her story had great point for me. It’s what I call the human side of philosophy.

  Juanito was saying, “Alex came out of Goldenberg’s after a while and caught a taxi. I caught one immediately after. It was a day made for surveillance. ’Follow that taxi!’ I said to the driver.

  “ ’There’s a twenty franc surcharge for following people,’ the driver says to me, swinging away from the curb. Like he was reminding me of a local statute.

  “ ’Done!’ I said, and away we went.

  “We followed him to the Gare Montparnasse. There I lost him. That’s all I can tell you.”

  I thanked Juanito, then asked Marcello whether he knew of anyone else I could speak to concerning Alex.

  “Sure,” he said. “The obvious person to contact would be Gerard Clovis.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The film director. Surely you’ve heard of him?”

  “Oh, that Gerard Clovis,” I said.

  “It’s true that he’s not too well known outside France, but he’s got a lot of prestige here. Clovis is picking up where Goddard left off, so to speak.”

  “What does he have to do with Alex?”

  “I thought you knew. Alex was working for him.”

  “As what?”

  “An actor. He and Clovis met at a party, and Clovis thought he’d be perfect for a part in his new film.”

  ARNE

  13

  It didn’t take too long for me to find out that Gerard Clovis worked out of the Gaumont movie studios in the north of Paris. I telephoned from a street corner phone booth. No answer. I had forgotten it was lunchtime in Paris, the sacred hour. I decided to ask a few questions around Beaubourg-Les Halles. This was Alex’s turf, a city within a city. I was bound to find someone who knew something.

  I left Rachel in a café near the entrance to the Beaubourg, where she had a good view of the fire- and glass-eaters who perform in the sunken flagstoned courtyard at the front of the museum. She planned to lunch there, then spend a few hours in the Beaubourg to see the Dali exhibit, then go back to the Crillon. I told her I’d call her there.

  It was good to be walking in Paris on a bright June day, the streets filled with tourists and lovers. I had lunch at Le Disque Bleu, a students’ place on the Rue Rambuteau. The onion soup was a meal in itself, and I followed it with a duck pâté sandwich on crusty French bread. A café crème completed it, and I left to continue my stroll.

  I walked around L’Éspace Baltard, where the new sports complex is being built, then once around the Forum des Halles, and so to the Fountain of Innocents, around which Africans with embroidered caps sell leather drums and brass jewelry. This part of Paris always wears a carnival face. Then I spotted a mime working the crowd, watched him for a moment, and remembered that I knew him.

  Arne the mime had the classic white-painted Marcel Marceau face, the black lines from forehead to cheek down the middle of the eye, the painted rosebud mouth. He had a simple but effective routine. When people passed, engrossed in conversation, Arne would fall into step behind them, mimicking their movements, exaggerating them, to humorous effect but without malice. When the people he was mimicking realized he was there, Arne in dumb show, would invite them to follow him. Sometimes he’d get a conga line of five or ten people capering around imitating him. Arne was very good and when he passed the hat, people were generous. He made a good thing out of it. He was a Dane, in his mid-thirties, small and tightly muscled, and he moved with a dancer’s grace.

  He spotted me, came over and sat down at my table on the sidewalk. We exchanged ça va’s. I ordered a Cinzano and he accepted a lemonade.

  “So you have come back,” Arne said. “Is that really smart, Hob?”

  “Come on,” I said. “That stuff went down a long time ago. And it wasn’t my fault.
”

  Arne shrugged, a habit he’d picked up in France. “None of my business, anyway. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m trying to find a guy,” I told him. “You knew him, too, back in the old Ibiza days. Alex Sinclair.”

  “Yeah, he was around here. But I haven’t seen him in a couple weeks, maybe longer.”

  “Do you know a movie director named Gerard Clovis?”

  “Of course. People say he’s the new Fellini.”

  “I hear Alex is working in one of his films.”

  Arne raised one eyebrow. Another French habit he’d picked up. A bead of sweat ran down his white face and rolled down to the blue bandanna knotted around his neck.

  “Yes,” he said, “Alex is participating in one of Clovis’ films. Perhaps ‘acting’ is too strong a term for what Clovis wants. He likes to set up situations, then throw his people into them without preparation. Sometimes he will give certain lines and actions to one or two of his actors, but never to all of them. And he never reveals who has the planned lines and who is supposed to be improvising freely.”

  “I haven’t heard of the guy,” I told him.

  “Here in France he’s known as the Erik Satie of cinematography.”

  “Is that good?”

  “Here in France, it’s very good indeed.”

  “Nice guy?”

  “In a way. Also sarcastic, childlike, and a believer in miracles. Like Fellini, an assembler of cameras and crews on the streets. Cinema Verité stuff. The story is false but the faces are real.”

  “You don’t know what the movie’s about?”

  “No one does, not even Clovis. Clovis likes to work in a free, unplanned, unstructured, unpremeditated way. The impromptu has great charm for Clovis. From the start he’s been against the cult of actors, and against Stanislavskian method, too. In fact, he is opposed to the whole ideal of artistic portrayal. He wants to assemble movies out of a collage of faces, movements and sequences.”

  “When does he start filming?”

  “Probably within the week. Would you like to meet him? Come to the rehearsal tomorrow and I’ll introduce you. Clovis loves foreigners.”

  We arranged a time to meet at the Café des Innocents. I paid for the drinks and went back to my hotel room.

  I have noticed that private detectives in fiction tend to be much more active than their counterparts in real life. I suppose I could have followed up a few more leads that day. But frankly, I was tired. I lay down for a nap.

  TONY ROMAGNA

  14

  That evening, as I was walking from the hotel to meet Rachel, I saw him again. There simply could be no doubt of it. The shape, the dark suit with the bright red gardenia in the buttonhole, the broad, dark, good-natured face. It was the man who had been following me in Snuff’s Landing, and here he was in Paris.

  The guy had paused near the entrance to FNAC. He was lighting a cigar. I walked up to him and said, “Well, well, small world, isn’t it?”

  He finished lighting his cigar deliberately, then gave me a cool look. “Have we met before?” he asked in good New Jersey English.

  “Probably not,” I said. “But I’m sure you know who I am.”

  He looked amused. “Why should I?”

  “Because you were following me in the States, and you’re following me here.”

  “Coincidence,” he said, looking right at me and grinning. He was saying, in body English, Sure, I’ve been following you; what are you going to do about it?

  “Just to make it easy for you,” I said, “my name is Hobart Draconian and I’m staying right near here at the Hôtel Cygne, on the Rue du Cygne. You probably already know that, but I just thought I’d confirm it for you.”

  “Good of you, Mr. Draconian,” he said. “I’m Tony Romagna, since introductions seem to be in order.”

  “What do you do, Tony?” I asked.

  “I’m an investor.”

  “An investor of what, if I may ask?”

  Tony laughed. “Kid, I like you and I guess you’ve made me all right. It doesn’t matter. I have interests in Vegas, Miami and Atlantic City. I’m here in Paris for a little vacation. And also to look after the interests of a friend.”

  “What friend? Why are you following me? Or is it Rachel?”

  “I like the way you just come out with it,” Tony said. “You don’t do any song and dance pretending you’re not scared. Tell you what, I’m going to give you a little tip.”

  “I’m ready,” I said, bracing myself for anything.

  “The best Italian restaurant in this city is La Dolce Vita on the Avenue des Ternes. Tell ’em Tony Romagna sent you. Got it?”

  I nodded, bemused. Tony winked and turned, almost losing his balance as he lurched against a trashcan. He nodded to me again and walked off. I watched him go, then decided it was time for a drink.

  It was funny about Romagna. You get so used to the idea of fat men being light on their feet that you’re a little thrown when you meet one who’s as clumsy as you’d expect a fat man to be if the folk wisdom concerning these things hadn’t led you astray. By clumsy, I don’t mean that Romagna tended to tip over when he leaned too far to one side or anything dramatic like that. No, you could see at once that there was nothing haphazard in Romagna’s clumsiness, nothing clumsy. There was skill in his careful ineptitude, an eerie intentionality. You could see it in his eyes, a dark glowing hazel, the attentive, inhuman eyes of a man who misses nothing, a man who does not possess the unselfconscious grace of the truly clumsy. There was calculation in Romagna’s movements, and in his lurching gait I could sense a dark lucidity, made all the worse because it was a burlesque of itself. All this combined with his small chin and little rosebud mouth, which gave him a sinister rather than a weak look. Romagna had the smooth rosy skin of a fat man, but beneath the show of health you could sense a cadaverous pallor, as though he were feigning health itself.

  I saw now that Romagna was perhaps a better mime than Arne. He was doing an imitation of a New Jersey mafioso trying to hide his affiliation under a cloud of persiflage. Unless that were feigned, too.

  Rachel found me some hours later in Harry’s New York Bar near the Opéra. Harry’s is dark polished woods and American voices and is the sort of place that tolerates quiet drunks, as long as they leave the other customers alone. I was a very quiet drunk. They probably thought I was crazy when I asked for saki, but the stuff works on me like a psychedelic, and I find it hard to worry when I have enough of it in me.

  “You’re drunk,” Rachel said.

  “Nobody’s perfect,” I told her.

  “Did you find out anything about that guy who you say has been following you?”

  “His name’s Tony Romagna.”

  “Why is he following you?”

  “Mr. Romagna didn’t seem fit to enlighten me as to that. Mr. Romagna said that he was in Paris to enjoy a brief vacation and look after a friend’s interests. Any of that mean anything to you?”

  She shook her head. “It can’t have anything to do with me.”

  “What about Alex?”

  “How should I know? Did this Romagna say what he wanted?”

  “Not a clue.”

  Rachel frowned, bit her lower lip gently, and said “What do we do now?”

  “We go for dinner,” I told her, “at La Dolce Vita on the Avenue des Ternes. Romagna said it was the best Italian food in Paris.”

  “Big deal,” Rachel said. “I’m not in Paris to eat spaghetti for chrissakes.”

  “It’s the only lead we’ve got,” I said. “If it is a lead, which it just might be.”

  The food at Dolce Vita was quite good, as a matter of fact, though I’ll spare you the menu this time, except to mention that the cannellonis were exceptional. It was a night for confidences. But no one came over to our red-checkered tablecloth, leaned over the candle guttering in the Chianti bottle and said, “I have a tale to tell.” Not just then, anyhow. Nor did we have much to say to each other. Rachel seemed p
reoccupied, depressed. She seemed to have a hangnail on her left little finger, and she kept on biting at it.

  We left around half past nine in the evening, by different cabs since we were going in different directions, Rachel to the Crillon in the Place de la Concorde, me to an evening in the cafés, and then back to the Cygne and to bed.

  CLOVIS

  15

  It was a bright, beautiful morning when I left the Hôtel du Cygne to go to the casting call at the old Gaumont Studios in upper Montmartre. I decided that I really should conserve some of Rachel’s money, so instead of taking a taxi, I walked to the Châtelet Underground, then rode in a second-class car to Opéra, where I changed, then changed again at St-Lazare and finally got out at Lamarck Caulaincourt.

  I caught glimpses of the beautiful basilica of the Sacré-Coeur as I walked down Caulaincourt to the entrance of the old Gaumont Studios, oldest in Europe, so I’ve heard.

  From the outside the studio building resembled a cross between a fortress and a storage warehouse. The building was at the top of a steep hill. You left the shady plane trees of the boulevard and climbed up a series of steps to a steel mesh pedestrian bridge that crossed over to the Gaumont proper.

  A receptionist took my name and told me where their casting call was being held. I walked down echoing corridors, past busy technicians doing esoteric things with tape reels. At last I came to the place where I was supposed to go.

  Or at least I thought that was where I was supposed to go. I was on a huge sound stage. Low footlights illuminated the scene. The curtains had been pulled back, revealing a scattering of props: a mock-up of a cathedral door; a painted country meadow with river in background; a café set with real chairs and a zinc bar in the foreground.

  As I crossed the stage, a spotlight came on from overhead and picked me up. It followed me as I crossed the stage, where it was joined by a second spotlight.

  Somehow I felt challenged. I walked back to stage center and bowed. With the spotlights in my face I couldn’t tell if anyone was out there. But I figured someone was listening.