Draconian New York (Hob Draconian Book 1)

by Robert Sheckley

  27

  Trapped. No place to go. One guy on one side of him, the other on the other side of him. All three of them breathing hard. Around them, the dark New York night. Aurora gone. Trouble.

  “Stand and deliver,” Hob said.

  “What?” said the taller of the two men with guns.

  “That’s what highwaymen used to say to the people they waylaid. ‘Stand and deliver.’ It meant, give us your money and valuables.”

  “Ain’t that fascinating?” Tall Gunman remarked to his sidekick, a shorter man who wore, among other things, a red bow tie.

  “Interesting what you can learn on this job,” Bow Tie said.

  “If you don’t want me to stand and deliver,” Hob said, “then we’ve no business together, so if you’ll excuse me …”

  Bow Tie smiled and said, “I’m Fric and he’s Frac. We’re traveling hit men. We’re different from other people.”

  “Oh, really?” Hob replied. It wasn’t much. He was hoping to stall long enough for his repartee to return.

  “Oh yes,” Fric said. “Did you think that professional hit men lived in houses with lawns and wives and children like ordinary citizens? Frac and I live in rented rooms above unkempt bars with neon signs that flash on and off in the lonely darkness of the misery of great cities. Sleaze is our milieu, squalor our future, filth our dreams. Aesthetically, it’s not really a living. But it is fair enough to say that we hit men are the jackals of the underworld. We drag down the bucks marked for destruction.”

  Frac, towering bulbous beside his hateful little sidekick, peered down at Hob and said, “I hate guys like you. You think you’re so good just because you don’t gouge and injure people like we do. As if that meant anything sub species aeteritatis! What about the do-badders? Don’t you think badness has an equally crucial part to play in the cosmic harmony that rules all things?”

  “I never thought about it that way,” Hob said. In fact he had, often, but he wasn’t going to tell him that.

  “Well, think about it,” Frac went on. “There’s no on without an off. No up without a down. No good without an equal admixture of bad.”

  Hob listened patiently to what he considered no more than rudimentary Manichaeism. By moving his neck from side to side, as though it were as stiff as it in fact was, but never taking his hopefully hypnotic gaze off Frac’s perspiring doughnut face, Hob could take in with his peripheral vision an impression of the warehouse space they had pushed him into, seeing it dimly like a cathedral ornamented with fallen seagulls and old condoms.

  “The media portrayal of the philosophical position of a lawbreaker is truly deplorable,” Fric put in.

  “Unsympathetic portraits?” Hob asked.

  “Worse than that.” Fric stuck out his lower lip. “They insinuate that our position is morally indefensible.”

  “Well … no offense meant, but isn’t it?”

  “No, dummy, the existence of the bad is necessary for the existence of the good. Therefore bad is a condition of the good and can’t be bad in its own right. Get it?”

  “Oh, yes! Yes!”

  “You’re lying. But what does it matter? Cowardice always accompanies you representatives of the good.”

  “Be reasonable. I never claimed to be good. And anyhow, what kind of discussion is it when you have the gun?”

  “Yeah, I have the gun.” Fric regarded the gun for a moment. “To be philosophically rigorous I ought to turn the gun over to you to show you that your cowardice is innate, not a matter of who’s got the weapons.”

  “That would be an interesting demonstration.”

  “But I’m not really a philosopher. I’m just a professional hit man who likes to keep intellectually alert. But I suppose we should get on with it. Are final prayers part of your cultural heritage or can we skip the anthropomorphizing?” He raised the gun.

  “Hey, come on!” Hob cried, as he struggled with the incompatible emotions of outrage and alarm. “Aren’t you going to give me a chance to pray?”

  “To an extent,” Frac said. “We, too, are creatures of convention. You have thirty seconds.” He looked at his watch. Fric drew his gun. Then looked sheepish.

  “Actually we weren’t going to kill you yet. Don’t jump the gun, fella. Just come with us.”

  28

  Hob looked around. This dilapidated warehouse must have put up its For Rent or Sale sign shortly after Cheops put up Big Number One. Antiquity clung to the place like a bat clings to ivy. Depending from the ceiling were ancient joists and battered old trusses and other construction members, and many other things that were lying around the endless expanse of filthy floor like a perverted child’s massive toys. The ceiling had been partially destroyed, and now oily-winged seagulls flew in and out like larks of death flocking to a hanging. Even given all this, it would be hard to indicate the intensity of the feelings of dread that this place aroused in Hob except to note that his emotions on first reading “The Pit and the Pendulum” were piddling in comparison.

  They went through to an inner room, recently constructed by the look of the wood shavings on the floor and the smell of fresh paint. Fric closed the door and locked it.

  Now he could get a better look at his captors. One was a gross fat man with a lardy white face punctured by sparse black bristles, wearing a brown derelict’s suit with a necktie pulled tightly around a frayed and dirty collar of forlorn pretensions. His partner (this inference was justifiable, given the stage setting and the postures of the participants), was a skinny little wretch with a hateful face and a twist in his back, reminiscent of that hateful beggar in Browning’s Childe Roland, whose crutch traces the letters of doom.

  “Where am I?” Hob asked.

  “That would be telling,” said Fric. He was the skinny malevolent one, and it was strange to see him without his sidekick, the large, gross, thick-necked, bull-biceped triceratops of a man who went by the innocuous name of Frac. Hob was in need of good signs. What he had at present wasn’t so great. Hob’s feelings were made no better by the room he was in. It was a low-ceilinged, dismal granddaddy of a death-and-anxiety room. It was a cellar of some sort, with a poured concrete floor, or possibly it was a faked poured concrete floor but had actually been built by tiny mollusks rather than the more macroscopic process of laying concrete.

  Hob must have said some of that aloud because Fric reacted with a grimace and Frac said, “Acting crazy isn’t going to get you out of here.”

  “Was I acting crazy?” Hob said, leering madly. “I wasn’t aware of it. Beg your pardon, I’m sure, hee, hee.”

  “Stop doing that,” Fric said. “Otherwise I’m going to have to mete out some dolorous punishment.”

  “How well you said that!” Hob said. “Anyone could see at a glance that you are well beyond the gangster class. Would you mind getting me a drink of water? It’s hard for me to swap gags with you while my throat is parched.”

  Fric brought him a glass of water. Frac pulled up a chair and sat down. Fric wore a small derby. It was tilted belligerently over his eyes. His thin white face was bisected by a thin mustache. Something seemed to be bothering him. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and hurried out the door.

  Frac said, “Enough fun. Where’s the package?”

  “What package?” asked Hob.

  Frac said, “Oh, it’s going to be that way, is it? Listen, there’s no time for fooling around. We want the package that Paco gave to Aurora.”

  “Why don’t you talk to them about it?” Hob said.

  “We intend to,” Frac said. “Where can we find Aurora?”

  “I have no idea. You didn’t give us time to set up a rendezvous.”

  “That’s unbelievable. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” Hob said, hoping to get conviction into what was only a simple statement of the truth.

  “You know what’s going to happen when Aziz gets here, don’t you?”

  Just then the door opened. Fric came in, frowning, small and worried, loo
king like a Toulouse-Lautrec out of a nightmare. He was carrying a cellular telephone.

  “Come with me,” he said to Frac. “We’ve got something to straighten out.”

  “What about him?” Frac said, indicating Hob with a jerk of his thumb.

  “He’ll keep. This is important.”

  “We’ll take care of you later, wise guy,” Frac said. He left the room with Fric. The door closed and Hob heard the padlock snick into place.

  29

  It was a bare room, aside from a broken shovel in one corner and a pile of white ashes in a bucket in another. The only door was made of boilerplate. No keyhole. No hinges in sight, either. Hob decided to save his breakout skills for a more auspicious occasion. He looked around. Desk, calendar on the wall, chairs, overhead fluorescent, flickering nastily. He opened the desk.

  In the bottom right-hand drawer there was a cellular phone.

  He lifted the receiver. Dial tone! Yeah. He gently put it down again.

  Now he had a telephone. But who to call? Jerry Raintree? Jerry was almost adequate as a divorce lawyer. But to get him out of a hole like this? Forget it.

  Mylar was impossible, even if she was still in town.

  He could call 911. Report a combined fire, break-in, civil emergency, and murder. The murder would come later, when the cops found he had put them to all this trouble just because, as far as they could see, he had gotten himself locked into a basement room. If he told them the whole story, he didn’t need a lawyer to tell him he’d be charged as an accessory to whatever crimes these goniffs were in the act of perpetrating. His hands weren’t exactly clean, either.

  If he did call the cops, the best probable outcome would be months of delay while they kept him in New York. Examining the case, they might charge him with a crime. Hell, he was probably guilty of one crime or another. He needed to watch his step or he could end up in jail. And then what about his trip to Paris, his fee, his traspaso?

  Then he got an idea and on impulse lunged at the telephone and punched in a series of numbers. If there was one thing he knew, it was the direct dialing code for Ibiza. At last a voice came on the other end.

  “El Caballo Negro, Sandy speaking.”

  “This is Hob Draconian,” he said.

  “Hob, I say! How very nice! Did you know it’s five in the morning?”

  “So why are you still there?”

  “The Mosleys hired the bar for a private party and half the town’s here.”

  Hob could picture Sandy standing there, a tall, very skinny Irishman with a long nose and the finest collection of sweaters in the Balearics.

  “I’m in a kind of a hurry,” Hob said. “Is Harry Hamm there by any chance?”

  “Let me just take a look,” Sandy said. Through the receiver Hob could hear the blare of Sandy’s cassette player, and the multilingual susurrus of conversation from around the bar. He could picture the place. A two-story whitewashed building. On the outside, the sign, El Caballo Negro, on the black double doors. You went in and two steps down. There was a big pillar in the middle of the room separating the bar into two unequal parts. To the right, a staircase led up to Sandy’s quarters—two tiled rooms and a bathroom. Downstairs to the right was the bar, with the bottles behind it. There were rattan and wicker chairs scattered here and there, and low varnished tables. On the walls were photographs of friends, most of them now departed. Hob wanted to be there then, sitting on one of the rickety barstools, a Coke with plenty of ice in his hand, chatting up some English bird who thought our little island quaint beyond words.

  “Hob?” Sandy came back on the line. “He’s not here. Take a message?”

  Hob tried to phrase it in his head. “I am being held prisoner in the basement of some terrible place in New York.” Sandy would think he was kidding if he said something like that.

  “Tell Harry I have some big-sized money for him,” Hob said. “Only there’s something he has to do like super-quick to get it.”

  “Okay, Hob, I got it.” Sandy was unruffled by the big news.

  “Is there anyone around who could find Harry for me?”

  “Let me just check. … Tailend Charlie is here.”

  “Is he sober?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Who else is there?”

  “Eddie Buns is here and reasonably sober. And Moira just came in. And wait a minute, speak of the devil …”

  The next voice was a gruff Jersey City voice. “Hob? You there?”

  “Harry, I got something to tell you.”

  “You got something to tell me? I got something to tell you. I quit.”

  “Harry, what’s the matter?”

  “This is no way to run a detective agency. It isn’t even a good way to run a funny farm, which is what your operation is starting to look like. What in hell are you doing, hanging around in New York? There’s work to be done. When you talked me into this scheme of yours—”

  “Harry,” Hob said, breaking in. “I’d love to hear the entire bit, but at some other time. Right now I got two things to tell you. Listening?”

  “Hob, get back here. I’ve got something important for us. When can you get here?”

  “Harry,” Hob said, “it’s just possible I’ll never make it. In that case, the Alternative Detective Agency is yours. You’ll find the papers in the candy box on my desk in the finca. I’ll expect you to take care of Nigel and Jean-Claude.”

  “Stop talking crazy. What kind of trouble you in?”

  “It’s a little difficult to explain. I started out trying to find someone, tell her about a job, and put her on a plane.”

  “Straightforward enough so far,” Harry said.

  “I’m bringing back some money to Ibiza to start our agency with.”

  “Fine. So why aren’t you here already?”

  “I was coming to that,” Hob said. “I am being held prisoner in a warehouse in New York City at 232A Reade Street. Got that?”

  “You’re not kidding, are you, Hob? From anyone else I would expect this to be a joke, but from you …”

  “I’m not kidding, this is the straight goods. I gotta talk fast, Harry. They left me in this room with a live phone but I don’t know how long I have before they come back.”

  “Come back and do what?”

  “With luck, just beat me up so badly that I’m a cripple for life. Of course, I might not get off that easy.”

  “What have you done to them?”

  “They say that I’ve ripped them off of about a million dollars’ worth of product.”

  “So give it back.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that. Believe me when I tell you that if there were any way of replacing it, I’d be all for that. But it’s not in my hands.”

  “So what is in your hands?”

  “This telephone. That’s all I’ve got.”

  “Hob, this isn’t really happening, is it?”

  “Goddamn it, Harry, this is not a gag or a stunt.”

  “All right. Just a second. All right. Give me the info again. Where’s that warehouse?”

  Hob gave him the whole thing again.

  “Okay,” Harry said. “I guess there’s no time to hear the whole story now. You’d just lie about it anyhow.”

  “What are you going to do?” Hob asked.

  “That’s what I’m thinking about,” Harry said. “It’s a little difficult to be decisive with us three thousand miles apart. All right, I think I got an idea. You’re a prisoner in this warehouse, right?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to say.”

  “Okay, I got an idea.”

  “Okay,” Hob said. And heard the rattling sound as someone started opening the outside door.

  “Gotta go,” he said into the phone. “Harry, save me!” He hung up, replaced the phone in the drawer, and stood up to meet his destiny as he’d lived all of his life, erect and proudly whining.

  30

  The outside door opened. Fric and Frac returned.
<
br />   Frac said to Fric, “Relax, I’ll take care of this.”

  And suddenly there was Frac. Grinning. Flexing his muscles. Anticipating the pleasure he was going to have grinding Hob’s bones into a thin grayish paste. Pausing to savor the various mental bits that went to make up a dream dismembering of a sadistic nature so gross that one could do no more than allude to it. Nor could Hob blame him. Nietzsche once remarked that he hated the weaklings who thought they were good because they had soft paws. In relation to Frac, Hob had soft paws. Naturally he was on the side of the underdog; that was because he was one himself. Judged impersonally, there was no reason to prefer his interpretation over Frac’s. But of course, even weaklings with soft paws occasionally have their day.

  Hob thought at that dire moment of his guru. His guru was a small Belgian fellow with a big head and preposterous mustaches who taught karate and other skills. This was at the Big Dojo in Ibiza, on the seaward side of the hill. It was a white-washed building of one story, set into the side of the hill. The place was neither heated nor air-conditioned. There were about ten regulars who attended, breaking bricks with their foreheads and talking esoterically. There were a couple of kids from town who wanted to learn karate so they could compete in karate matches. And there was Hob, trying to learn a skill to keep him from getting killed or beaten up in his chosen work of detectiving.