Draconian New York (Hob Draconian Book 1)

by Robert Sheckley

  She said into the phone, “Look, I’ll get back to you,” and hung up. She turned to Hob and Kelly.

  “Hi, Kelly.” She gave Hob a bright smile. “You’re Hob?”

  “I am.”

  “I’m Dorrie. Max’ll be right out. Can I get you a drink?”

  “Thanks, no.”

  “Max will dispense the other refreshments himself. Take a seat, you’re home.”

  Hob found a leather couch near her desk. The ten-foot wall behind it was bookcases to the ceiling. Each bookcase had eight shelves and each of those shelves was packed, crammed, and jammed with movie cassettes. There were more cassettes on the end tables, and even a few on the floor in the tiny kitchen area.

  Back in Ibiza, Max had mentioned that he liked movies. There was a Sony super beta and a Panasonic AG 6810 VCR, and beside them a Sony thirty-inch television. The other walls were covered with photographs of models, signed and framed. There were several Fashion Institute awards on the walls of the corridor. There was soft snarly rock music playing on a music system. There were smells of marijuana and freshly roasted coffee.

  That was all Hob had time to observe because just then Max came bounding into the room. He was a big man, a little heavier than Hob remembered him. He was wearing a gray Italian silk business suit with a red tweed tie. On his feet were unpolished Scotch-grain brogues. He had a large florid face framed in wavy black hair that was just starting to gray. His handshake was firm, and he put his other hand on Hob’s shoulder and squeezed. His large brown eyes were moist, shiny.

  “Hob! Goddamn but it’s good to see you! You’ve met Dorrie? This office couldn’t run without her. Hob, that summer in Ibiza was the best of my life.”

  “It was a good year for me, too,” Hob said.

  Max grabbed Hob by both shoulders and shook him playfully. “You know, I was always planning to come back to Ibiza.”

  “But you never made it.”

  “I was afraid I might stay for good.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Maybe not. I’m getting rich, Hob, but I don’t have much fun.” He made it sound pathetic.

  “At least you’ve got plenty of movies.”

  Max glanced at the bookcase full of cassettes and grinned. “Yes, and plenty of dope, and plenty of just about everything else except …”

  His eyes slid away. “This is gloomy talk. Let’s lighten up, huh? Have you eaten? We’ve got a place here does the finest spareribs you’ll come across this side of Greenville, North Carolina. And I suppose you wouldn’t mind a toot?” He took a two-gram glass vial out of his pocket and handed it to Hob, along with a gold-plated single-edged Pal razor blade. “You can cut it on the glass tabletop,” he said.

  “Not just now,” Hob said.

  “Don’t be bashful, just tie into it. This stuff is Blue Killer from Bolivia.” Max uncapped the bottle and poured out a pile of crystalline white powder with a bluish glitter. It looked like some of that Mother Crystal the druggies were always talking about when they discussed dream shipments that never came through.

  “And a snorter, of course,” Max said, handing Hob a gold-plated straw flared at one end.

  “Max,” Hob said, “I’m not using it anymore.”

  Max stared. “You’ve got to be kidding. Hob? Old Hob the Demon Drugger? Going religious on us? Come on, babe, loosen up!”

  Hob shrugged, smiled, and accepted the snorter. He’d taken no hard drugs at all for over six months. His doctor in Paris had convinced him they weren’t much good for his atherosclerotic arterial system. His own good sense, what little of it that was left, told him that he paid for every high with a long dark low.

  But it was hard to refuse. Dorrie was watching, eyes bright and cynical. And you know how it is with old dopers. Hob’s fingers took the snorter and set it into the ready position. Max opened a desk drawer and handed him a six-inch slab of onyx with two long fat wavering lines of white powder running from one end to the other. Hob’s nose began watering in anticipation as he bent over and snorted up his first line. That first hit was immaculate. It was like talking to a long-lost old friend. The stuff exploded in his sinuses. His pleasure circuits lit up. A giggle of laughter bubbled up inside him. A voice that he wished weren’t his own said to him, “Just this once, it’s going to be all right.”

  Cocaine is an unusual substance, but the idea of it being a master drug is laughable. For most people it’s a one-time high. After that you habituate fast, and it does nothing for you but increase your already strong susceptibility to self-deception. But it would be too dismal to face up to the fact that after one fine party, all your great highs are in the past, along with your good intentions. This time Hob got a slight flush, about what you’d expect from from the first cigarette of the day. And with it there came the bad taste in the back of his throat, the irritability, the jagged nervousness that always accompanies cocaine. He took a second line to get over the effects of the first, to get into the good part, the high, and then a third line because the second didn’t quite get him off. As usual, the self-deception was kicking in nicely.

  That broke the tension, if there had even been any. Max took a long double snort and then Kelly took a snort, drifted to a couch and picked up a newspaper, high but on duty. Dorrie took a small snort and then answered the telephone. And Hob, once started, kept at it doggedly as Max kept on pouring more high-priced powder onto the onyx.

  Hob’s good intentions went out the window before he had even gotten a chance to form them. Maybe it was because of Mylar, because, although he was glad the marriage was over, the world seemed a less optimistic place without her. And maybe he was taking it because he’d suddenly had the thought that a weekend with Max, whom he’d only known for one summer more than ten years ago, might not have been such a great idea. And he was upset about the traspaso and the whole Ibiza situation. How could Don Esteban have done this to him? He almost dreaded returning to Ibiza, and yet he knew he had to get back as quickly as he could and stave off what looked like the imminent loss of C’an Poeta and perhaps a whole way of life. Despite the coke, or maybe because of it, he was getting nervous, depressed. He wasn’t even going to get time to get over his jet lag. He knew he just had to hold himself together until his sense of purpose returned. Meanwhile balm of Gilead, hair of the dog, he poised the snorter and sucked in long wavy lines of Blue Killer or whatever they were calling the stuff this season.

  Phones rang and Max had to get back to work in his interior office. “Kelly’ll show you your room. Later, babe.” Max went inside. But Hob didn’t leave the living room at once. He was busy doing coke, and Kelly was matching him line for line and talking about some sport, basketball maybe, Hob wasn’t sure.

  Over the next hour Hob took enough Bolivian marching powder to run a locomotive to Albany and back. And didn’t feel a thing. Not at first. And when he did feel something, it was fatigue.

  They call it paradoxical effect. All dopers know it. It is when the drug does the reverse of what the people around you say it’s supposed to do. Like finding yourself unable to sleep because you’re tanked up with sleeping pills. Or unable to stay awake because the coke or the amphetamine has hit you wrong.

  At some point Max came out of the back office. Hob did a few lines with him, and remembered saying, “I need to make some calls. Then I think I’d like to lie down.”

  “Good idea,” Max said. “I should have warned you about this stuff. Bet you never get this quality in Europe. Come on, I’ll show you your room.”

  He led Hob to the back of the apartment. There was a second suite of rooms back there—small living room, adjoining bedroom and bathroom.

  In a corner of the room there was a glass coffee table covered with drugs: little bottles of cocaine, plastic baggies filled with marijuana, bottles of different kinds of pills. There was the inevitable large flat onyx stone with a pile of white powder on it, a gold razor blade, a gold snorter. There was also a crystal decanter on the table filled with a clear liquid,
possibly water, and a couple of wineglasses.

  Max introduced him to the pills. “This here is Ritalin, in case you need to smooth out, and this here’s Percodan. These little green ones with the hole in them are a Mexican variety of Valium, and this one here I can’t remember its name but it’s a Brazilian form of Quaaludin.”

  Dorrie called from the other room, “Long distance, Max.”

  “Enjoy,” said Max, and left.

  Alone in the suite, Hob unpacked his suitcase, humming to himself, suddenly feeling very good. He hung up his clothes in the closet, pausing to take another hit or two of the coke. Then he sat down on a couch. Suddenly he was not feeling so good.

  Nevertheless, he took another line, a big one, and started making calls on the Mickey Mouse telephone beside the day-bed.

  Half an hour later he had called everyone he could think of in the New York area. Most of them had been out. Those who had been in had not been sympathetic. I’d love to help you, Hob, but this is a crazy time. … Five calls, not one cent raised. The traspaso fell due on July 15. Today was June 19.

  Kelly knocked and came into Hob’s room.

  “I gotta take Max over to Shreiber’s, he’s late for an appointment. He’ll be back as soon as he can. He says make yourself at home. You okay?”

  “Oh yeah,” Hob said.

  “You feeling okay?”

  “A slight indisposition,” Hob said.

  “I think you’re not used to this shit,” Kelly said, indicating the coke. “Here, take one of these, fix you right up.”

  He shook a little gold-speckled purple pill out of a bottle, handed it to Hob, and poured him a glass of water from the decanter.

  Old habits die hard. Hob swallowed it without thinking. Then asked, “What did you give me?”

  “Just one of them muscle relaxants. A Korean formula. Catch you later, kid.”

  Kelly left.

  Hob wondered if he should have taken the pill. In a few moments a smile crossed his face. He was feeling no pain. He pulled off his sneakers and lay down on the bed. There was a stereo within easy reach. He turned it on. Peaceful music flooded the room.

  He settled back, closed his eyes, time for a little nap.

  10

  We’re looking at a beautiful old house made of weathered stone, rectangular, with graceful lines based on the golden mean. A classic Mediterranean look. A grape arbor just inside the courtyard. Beyond the house we can see a thin edge of the blue Mediterranean. It is early morning. There is a chill in the air.

  The open double doors, both very high and wide, lead into a gloomy interior. It is a room with a brownish concrete floor and a high-beamed thatched ceiling. It is the living room of Hob’s finca, the one he lived in before C’an Poeta. To one side is a faded but expensive-looking Persian carpet. There is a low stuffed couch against the wall. It is covered in clashing soft paisleys. Two cats are sleeping on the couch. Next to it there is a large low oval table made of hammered brass. A three-foot hookah sits on the table, beside a plastic ashtray stamped Brown’s Hotel, London. There are three gaily colored and uncomfortable-looking beanbag chairs slumped around the table like gut-shot hoodlums in red velvet suits. The room is illuminated by two Aladdin kerosene lamps in simulated brass, with white glass shades with tiny blue cornflowers on them.

  To the left there is a staircase leading up to French doors. Beyond them is Hob’s office. Within, Hob sits at an unpainted plywood desk in front of a big Olympia manual typewriter. There are sheets of paper in unkempt piles on the table’s surface. Hob is typing furiously.

  There is a voice from downstairs. It is Kate, just coming out of the kitchen, twenty-two years old and very pretty, blond hair streaming down her back, looking like the spirit of the flower generation.

  “Dinner’s ready!”

  Hob: “I’ll be right there. Just have to finish my wordage.”

  Kate: “How many pages today?”

  Hob: “Twelve. I’m just finishing.”

  He ducks back inside, returns to his typing. We follow and look over his shoulder. He is writing, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of Hob Draconian.” Over and over. And we see that the other pages contain the same message.

  The scene blurs, fades out, fades back in, changed. It is that wonder of wonders, a snowy morning in Ibiza. The finca gleams white against the lightly powdered ground. The almond and carob trees are stark silhouettes against the pale sky. It is all very unreal. Hob and Kate put the last suitcases in the car, an inexpensive Citroën Dyane 6. The grape arbor is withered now, the cats nowhere to be seen. The car, parked in the lane outside the garden wall, is so loaded with luggage that it sags on its axles.

  Hob goes inside and closes the big front doors, then locks them with a cast-iron key weighing at least a pound. Hob and Kate get into the car and drive off, down the rocky driveway and onto the blacktop road. The hillsides of Ibiza stand on either side, the beautiful biblical scenery, low hills, sheep and goats, orchards, rocky land, low stone walls, stone farmhouses. They drive a mile, then turn off to a dirt road. They go to a farmhouse, get out of the car. A couple, Spanish peasants by the look of their clothes, come out to meet them. Hob returns the key. The farmer goes inside, brings out glasses on a plastic tray, a bottle. The farmer pours two small glasses of hierbas. Everyone drinks to everyone else’s health. Everyone hugs everyone else. Hob and Kate go back to the car. The Spanish couple start crying as they drive off. When Hob and Kate see that, they can’t stop from crying, either. They drive off slowly toward the port of Ibiza.

  Kate says, “That’s that.”

  Hob says, “We can work it out.”

  Kate says, “Oh, Hob. I want to so very much.”

  Hob says, “But what about Nigel?”

  “I’ll just have to tell him that it’s all over between us. But do you mean it this time, Hob? Are you really through running away?”

  “I’ll never leave you again,” Hob tells her.

  Now suddenly we cut back to the earlier scene, the big white finca on the steep hill above the main road to Figueral. The camera lifts and pans the Morna Valley, then continues panning and we see, just below the shimmering blue line of the sea, the white edge of the beach at Aqua Blanca.

  Unaccountably, it’s spring. Kate is wearing a dress made up of light-colored gauzy layers that float in the breeze. She smiles. Her honey-colored hair frames her face. The tiny spring flowers are in bloom—little irises and dwarf orchids, and bright red poppies. The sky is very blue, and there are a few fragile clouds very high up, close to heaven. Hob and Kate stand close together, looking at each other. This is it, the culmination, the realization of the impossible dream.

  Then a man’s voice says, “Excuse me, sir.”

  11

  Paco ducked out of the car, stuffing the canvas bag that Santos had given him under his shirt. It was a guayabera shirt, pleated in front, and the package stretched out the pleats somewhat. Not that Paco cared. Although he was a careful dresser when life gave him the opportunity, he was not fussy. He had been accustomed to good clothes for only a few years, since Don Santos had brought him up from the family hacienda in Matelosa Province on the eastern side of San Isidro, and installed him in the New York embassy.

  He walked uptown on Seventh, crossed over to Eighth, reached Forty-first Street and went into the Port Authority building. His senses were super alert. He was prepared for this moment, had been ready for a long time. His was a small part, but a vital one. And he was aware that he was a vital link in the revitalization of the San Isidrean economy. Yes, he and the people he worked with, Santos and the others back home, were the one last bright hope of the San Isidrean people, their only chance of taking their rightful place under the bright sun of human progress.

  His professor of ecocatastrophes at the University of San Isidro, a man they listened to respectfully, though behind his back they called him Humberto D, had first opened his mind to the peril run by third world countries just by the ineluctable nat
ure of things. “Don’t let America and Russia fool you,” Humberto D had thundered from his lecture stand in the main lecture hall of San Isidro’s university. “Their ideological battle is camouflage. It covers up what the real fighting’s about: namely, who’s got the money and how to keep it from everyone else. It’s a poker game, my friends, and the smaller nations are going to be tapped out. At Harvard this is called the poker table theory of economics. The third world is going to default and United Fruit and its ilk are going to inherit the pot. The best we can hope for is some nice international company to build a convention site here and give our people employment as waiters. The trend is set unless we reverse it ourselves.” Here he held up his crippled hand and smiled bitterly. “It is up to you, young men and women of the nation, to give little San Isidro a chance.”

  There was never enough money. But education was the first priority. The planners at the Financeria had figured that beginning from a base of a few hundred million, they could turn the University of San Isidro into a first-rate education facility, and from that all else would flow. Since San Isidro’s population was small, it would allow every adult San Isidrean to retire from his other pursuits for a period of three years, paid for by the government, in which time he would be taught the fundamentals of modern history, science, literature, art, geopolitics, mathematics, ancient languages, and so on.

  “In the future,” the professor said, “the choices will be simple. Either you will design chips or you will assemble them. If you can’t be the brains, you’ll be the hands.”

  How was San Isidro to become the brains? By training. And how was the training to be paid for?

  As the American folk hero Clint Eastwood says, Any Which Way You Can.

  One avenue of national growth became quickly apparent. San Isidro was conveniently located for the dope trade. It was a small island in the Caribbean 170 miles from Barranquilla. It had a major airport because of its large cut-rate cruise business. Another money-earning outlet would do no harm, and now was the perfect time for it. The heat was tightening up around the Colombian supply. Some important people had flown in from Medellín to consult with Dr. Sachs-Alvarez, the president. The upshot of it was, Dr. Sachs was offered a 10 percent cut on gross shipments and was allowed to introduce his own line, San Isidro Pale Bash, which it was hoped would soon be much in demand among discriminating drug users.