Draconian New York (Hob Draconian Book 1)

by Robert Sheckley

  “You tell me,” Hob said. “Is she due to be going out of town for any reason?”

  “Not that I know of.” Dorrie looked at her watch. “It’s almost two in the afternoon. You’ve got the rest of the day and all night to find her. Your flight to Paris leaves at seven a.m. from the international departure lounge at Kennedy. Kelly will take you. He ought to be here now—”

  She stopped, hearing a key in the door. They waited. The door opened and in walked Kelly.

  “Kelly,” Dorrie said, “I don’t know if you know about the Paris thing—”

  “I know,” Kelly said. “Max phoned me at the gym. I came right over.” He looked at Hob. “You and Aurora gotta take the morning plane from Kennedy, right? Meanwhile, I’ll take you wherever you need to go. I’ve got the limo downstairs. I’m ready to go any time you are. You got much luggage?”

  “Just the one suitcase,” Hob said. “It’s in the bedroom. I just have to throw my stuff back in it.”

  “Don’t bother, I’ll do it for you. I’ll put it in the limo for you.”

  “I still have to find Aurora,” Hob said.

  “You shouldn’t have any trouble. She’s usually home if she’s not on a shoot or out with Max.”

  “I’m about to find out,” Hob said. “So if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a call to make.”

  “I’m leaving,” Dorrie said.

  “I’m going into the kitchen and get a beer,” Kelly said. “Do you know if Henry brought up any? Never mind, I’ll find out for myself.”

  Kelly left the room, and Hob could hear the hard heels of his footsteps as he walked to the kitchen. Dorrie picked up her purse, gave a jaunty little wave, and left the apartment, closing the front door firmly behind her. Hob settled down to the telephone.

  He dialed Aurora’s number. The line was busy.

  15

  “Hello, Aurora? This is Max.”

  “Damn it, Max, you stood me up last night. Where are you?”

  “You’re not going to believe this, baby.”

  “Try me.”

  “I’m in Paris.”

  A pause at the other end. Then, “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

  “Baby, I’m serious. I’m at the Hotel du Cygne just off boulevard Raspail. You remember the place, don’t you?”

  Taking a deep breath. Forcing herself to remain calm. “What are you doing there? I thought the next time in Paris was going to be you and me.”

  “That’s what I’m setting up. Listen, babe, you remember that little matter I was talking to you about? That little matter of Dartois making you model of the year?”

  “Yes, Max, I remember you saying that very well.”

  “Well, something just came up and I think I can swing it now.”

  “Max, how wonderful! When should I come over?”

  “In the morning. I’ve got it all set up. Someone is going with you. But it’s not quite as simple as that.”

  “I should have known there’d be problems.”

  “Well, to swing this thing with Dartois, as you’ll remember, I need money.”

  “Max, you got money.”

  “Not the kind I need to buy into Dartois. I need about two hundred thou more.”

  “This was the way it was yesterday, Max. I don’t see what has changed.”

  “What has changed is, I’ve got a way to get up the money. You remember that other matter I was telling you about? It’s on. And I’ve had a visit from a friend I told you about. Hob Draconian. He’ll be calling you soon.”

  “What about?”

  “I’ve told him to find you and bring you to Paris.”

  “I still don’t get what you’re up to, Max.”

  “He’s a private detective. I’m paying him to do this.”

  “But why?”

  “Listen, babe, do I have to spell it out? Santos called from the airport. He just arrived. He’s got the stuff for me. Paco is going to give it to you.”

  “Max, you live in New York, the world’s prime drug market, and you want to ship the stuff out to Paris?”

  “Yes, I do. It’s a business deal. The New York market is already sewed up. I don’t have the contacts to sell it in a single piece in New York. And I won’t be there to sell it off in eighths like I used to. With this stuff here, I can swing the deal with Dartois, which’ll get you model of the year and give me what I want.”

  “Max, if you think I’m going to carry that stuff over, you’re crazy. I told you I got problems with Emilio.”

  “You’ll just have to duck him.”

  “And bring that stuff through customs? You tryin’ to get me a jail sentence?”

  “Darling, believe me, the fix is in.”

  “So why don’t you carry it yourself?”

  “Because I’m in Paris, not New York.”

  “I won’t do it and that’s that.”

  “I’ve got a way to do it without risk. Like I said, you’ll be accompanied by Hob Draconian.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I’ll tell Kelly to put the stuff in his luggage. It’ll go right through.”

  “And if it doesn’t, what about Hob?”

  “He’ll be all right, too. If they catch him, he’ll convince them he didn’t know anything about it, they’ll hassle him for a while, but they’ll let him go.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “It’s more than likely.”

  “Hell of a way to treat a friend.”

  “Model of the year. And me a part owner of Dartois. Honey, the stakes are plenty big.”

  “Max, I don’t like this.”

  “Aurora, please stop looking on the dark side of things. Nothing will go wrong.”

  “Okay, Max, he’s your friend anyhow, not mine. So what shall I do, wait home for his call?”

  “That’s the idea. You’ll go tomorrow morning. See you soon, babe.”

  16

  Paco suddenly broke into a sprint. The men behind him ran after him. They were now above Rockefeller Center, Fiftieth Street or so, and Paco raced up, dodging pedestrians and bums, his footsteps, in their high-rise Keds, slapping softly against the dull gray pavement.

  It was a beautiful day for a race through midtown Manhattan. Crowds just getting out of Radio City were treated to a flashing glimpse of these three men, running, the neckties of the two pursuers streaming over their shoulders, and Paco ahead, his big barrel chest pumping, dodging, running, turning, and all the time moving uptown, toward some unknown destination.

  “Stop, goniff!” the foremost man behind him shouted. “I want to talk to you!”

  “No speekee Eengleesh,” Paco said, because you could never tell, a little indirection applied at the right moment could loosen up the frozen wheels of industry and render even the most dire of situations into a matter for merry laughing. Or so they had believed in his Swedenborg class at the university. Doggedly he shook his head. What nonsense a man could think while running! And he turned into Fifty-third Street. His legs stretched, pumped, bent, and straightened again, recapitulating all of the movements of a man running. Looking behind him, he saw his pursuers coming behind him, a pair of ugly men, one big, one small. Armed, no doubt. What lousy luck to pick them up just like that. He didn’t dare go to his appointment now. He had to shake his pursuers. But how?

  And then he was at a place with crowds in front, and he saw an opening and darted into the Museum of Modern Art.

  17

  Byron, the ticket seller at the Museum of Modern Art, really didn’t want to let Paco into the museum because Paco looked like the sort of guy whose interest in paintings was limited to either stealing or defacing them. What would a guy like this with his big chest and his little beady black eyes be doing looking at paintings? And in those clothes!

  It occurred to Byron to alert one of the guards, because this guy really looked like a wrong number. He began to reach for the security button but then he paused because Paco reminded him of somebody. He hesitated and tried to think who it is w
as, and then suddenly he had it: Goddamn, but the guy was a dead ringer for Diego Rivera! And Rivera was great, and much misunderstood!

  So, although Byron wasn’t quite sure what point he had made, he still desisted from sounding the alarm, especially since, just then, a tall, dark, handsome man came up, bought a ticket, and said, “It must be great to work here,” and smiled.

  Paco, meanwhile, walking on the first floor of the museum, was unaware of all this. Had they seen him go in here? Had they followed him in? His eyes darted back and forth like frightened black rabbits shrunk to the size of black-eyed peas. He looked outside briefly at the sculpture garden. It looked like a junk heap waiting to get filled in. He went back inside and made his way up the big marble stairs to the second floor. He waited for a while. No sign of the men. It was time for him to go out again and make the phone call.

  The phone call. He had been dreading this part of it. Paco had a phobia about telephones. His father had died of an ear infection after pleading on the phone with a lieutenant from the tax office for a rebate on that year’s tax due to bad luck and suicidal bad judgment. The old man had always had ideas like that. His illness had begun as a kind of fungus growth that formed a perfect circle around his ear. That was how he knew he had caught it from the earpiece of the telephone: the old and infected telephone of Paco’s village, San Mateo de los Montes, in Matelosa Province, in San Isidro.

  Paco had never revealed his telephonophobia to anyone. It had been too important for him to get this job. He wanted to come to the United States so that he could better himself. He knew that at some point he would have to do something important, that there would be something vital that he would have to overcome. The priestess herself, back when he had been an acolyte in the Church of Lesser Spirits, had told him, “There’s no avoiding it, you know, a day of testing will come, a day when you will have to overcome what you’ve never mastered before.”

  “Can you give me a hint?” he had asked.

  “You know that’s not allowed,” she said.

  He had thought many thoughts since then, but it had never occurred to him, not directly, that is, though by unconscious routes, who knows?

  Emerging from the museum, Paco walked down Fifty-third and saw a telephone booth. Yes, it happened as fast as that. In his pocket he found five quarters, which he had been playing with compulsively ever since leaving the embassy.

  Taking a deep breath, he stepped into the phone booth. Being new in these parts, he hadn’t realized that the phone booth had a door and that that door could and perhaps should be closed. He dropped in a quarter.

  After the coin dropped, Paco dialed the number that had been engraved in his memory through constant sessions with Santos, who insisted that he even learn it backward. The phone went through its usual repertoire of sounds. Paco had never before heard the sounds a phone makes, since he had never before talked or listened on a phone, owing to his phobia. But he had been farsighted enough to ask a friend of his, Ramon, a boy from his own village, to record for him on his own cassette player the sounds that a telephone makes, so that when the time came, when the hour of testing was at hand, he would not be helpless.

  And it was miraculous to him that this telephone made the exact same sounds that Ramon’s tape had revealed, though the sounds Paco was hearing were more sonorous, since this was after all the United States.

  And then a tinny voice accompanied by static said, “Hi, this is Aurora Sanchez. I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone just now …”

  18

  Nigel Wheaton, one of Hob’s colleagues in the Alternative Detective Agency, was sitting bare-ass naked in an apartment in Paris reading a month-old Times of London. He was house- sitting Emily Schumacher’s apartment while Emily was away in Provence on a painting holiday that included a special tour of Monet’s garden and a stay at a quaint little local inn. It was a wonderful chance to combine painting with gourmet eating at a cost of only a few thousand dollars for the ten days. The tour guide was M. Grinette, the well-known expert on French impressionism. His wife, Mme Grinette, was the well-known columnist for Haunch and Hoof, the British gourmet magazine.

  Emily could afford this trip because Emily was loaded. The tall gawky old widow had left Nigel in charge of feeding her cats and walking her dog, Quiffy. The dog was a suspicious chow who tolerated cats but didn’t like people except for Nigel. Nigel had a gift with animals, a worthless sort of gift unless he wanted to become a veterinarian or open a pet store.

  Nigel didn’t. He hadn’t been brought up to work at jobs like that. Not that he was lazy. Nigel loved to work on things, as long as they were pretty well guaranteed never to turn a profit. He did all the repair work and most of the rebuilding on his finca in San Jose, in Ibiza, before signing it over to his estranged wife, Nancy, in a fit of quixotic generosity. Nigel couldn’t help acting rich even though he had no money. The Wheaton family had had a lot of money at one time. Enough to give Nigel and his brother Edward first-rate educations at Eton.

  Edward, the sensible one, went into government. He worked in a nondescript government building in Bromley. No one knew just what he did. He was in one of the foreign sections. Something dull to do with trade treaties. Or at least that was the story.

  Actually, Edward was in one of the spy sections, called by various innocuous-sounding initials, anywhere between MI5 and MI16. They changed the initials from time to time just to keep the opposition on their toes. This brother didn’t actually leave his desk and go abroad a-spying. Cutouts, wetwork, field executives, these were all stuff of spy novels, which he never read. He left fieldwork to adventurous types like Nigel. Edward was content to stay in his office and push around papers.

  That is not to imply that Nigel was in the Trade. It would have suited him well, of course, because Nigel was a swashbuckling adventurous sort of bloke who liked nothing better than to go hareing off to some place like Belize or Machu Picchu after hidden treasure. A James Bond type, but with an antipathy to government to which James gave only lip service. Nigel didn’t like any government and therefore didn’t care which party was in power. Despite this, Nigel did help out his brother from time to time when someone like Nigel was needed and no one with his talents but without his effrontery was available. But it didn’t happen often.

  The Wheatons had been rich, but something happened to the family money. Nigel went through his share of it during his gambling period. He had too much nerve to make a good gambler. To be successful at gambling you need to be frightened at the right times. And that house of his in Ibiza had cost a pretty penny, even with Nigel doing most of the work himself. And in the end he lost it all. Gave it away, actually, to his ex-wife, the beautiful Nancy, who, after all, had to raise the children.

  So when all was said and done, there was Nigel, stony as an old boot, working for Hob and the Alternative Detective Agency and waiting for something to turn up.

  All that had turned up recently was this apartment-sitting gig in Paris for Emily Schumacher. It never occured to Emily, an old family friend, that she was hiring Nigel, like you’d hire some tradesperson. You don’t hire friends of the family to sit your apartment and walk your dog. Perish forbid, as Emily was fond of saying, an expression she had picked up from her first husband, Barney, the bald and facetious real estate man from Albany, New York.

  She’d run into Nigel walking past the Crillon one day, and asked him in for tea. “What are you doing in Paris, Nigel?”

  “Just hanging around until the racetrack opens.” Nigel would have died before admitting he didn’t have the money to get anywhere else. You’re really broke when you can’t even leave town.

  “Where are you staying?”

  “I’m just between moves, actually,” Nigel said vaguely. Actually, he was ashamed to admit he’d just been put out of an Arab rooming house in Belleville for lack of the old scratch.

  “But how perfect!” Emily said. “You could stay in my apartment, then, couldn’t you?” Emily explained that she wanted to
go away for her ten days’ painting holiday—she adored Monet but had never been able to copy him well—this was her chance to learn the trick of it—and she didn’t have anyone to care for the animals. And she hadn’t wanted to hire a service.

  “They steal things. And you know how sensitive Quiffy is to strangers.” Quiffy was the chow. “But she adores you.”

  Nigel had agreed. Emily had insisted on giving him money for the animals’ food. Gave him her key, and was off that evening. Chortling. Husband safely dead, only son in Harvard, animals safe, and ten days with Monet and gourmet food. Who could ask for anything more?

  Nigel was stony broke at the time. Any other man—well, most other men—would have taken the generous handful of francs Emily gave him and bought himself a square meal. Nigel went out and bought dog and cat food—tinned—best available—nothing too good for animals left in Nigel’s care—and with what was left over, purchased two baguettes and a block of pâté. Not much of a planner was our Nigel. At the end of his third day in Emily’s apartment, having consumed his provisions in a day and a half, Nigel raided the refrigerator and came up empty. Emily had cleaned it out some time ago. She ate all her meals out and didn’t like to encourage spoilage. A search through the larder revealed nothing but two tins of cassoulet. Nigel consumed them on days three and four and was right back where he started from, only hungrier.

  Nigel hated to think of practicalities, but an empty and growling stomach forced him to it. He looked around the apartment. There was plenty of bric-a-brac he could flog off at the flea market in Culaincourt. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Suppose the hideous cut-glass decanter were missed? After all, this was a friend of his mother’s! Hungry or not, he couldn’t bring himself to steal from her, not even if he called it borrowing. Nigel was more capable of mugging someone on a back street in Montmartre than he was of imposing on the hospitality of a friend of the family.