Draconian New York (Hob Draconian Book 1)

by Robert Sheckley

  Henry took a second, larger snort and savored it for a moment with his eyes closed and head tilted back beatifically. Then he took out a little more powder and rubbed it into his gums. Then he closed the package and handed it back to Khalil.

  “I just needed to be sure,” Henry said. “But this ain’t party time. Seal it up and put it away. You ain’t been hittin’ on that blow yourself by any chance?”

  “I do not use the devil’s powder,” Khalil said scornfully.

  “Glad to hear that,” Henry said. “You and me put our noses in that dream bag and pretty soon there ain’t enough left to sell. And selling it is the point of the operation.”

  “When are we going to do that?” Khalil asked.

  “My man, I’ve come over to take care of that little detail myself. I’ll tell you about it a little later. Right now, I need to get some shut-eye, then check out the lay of the land.”

  Henry leaned back in his chair, yawned, stretched, and looked around the room. He took in the clothing in piles on the floor, the books with Arabic titles piled in heaps beside them, the suitcase open on the floor beside the pile of books. The suitcase seemed to be crammed with dials and switches.

  “What you got there?” Henry asked. “That some kind of communication device?”

  “No,” Khalil said. “That is my bomb.”

  “You shitting me?”

  “Of course not. I never joke. It is what you call state-of-the-art, made in Germany of best materials. Guaranteed to blow hell out of anything.”

  Henry got up and walked over to the suitcase. He squatted down and peered at it closely, not touching anything.

  “That thing is really a bomb?”

  “It is, I assure you.”

  “Well just tell me this, my man. What in the name of twenty tiny demons in pink djellabas are you doing with a bomb on the floor of your apartment?”

  “My instructions were to blow up M. Dourin, the minister of culture, because of the bad things he has been saying about our group, and his disparaging remarks about Islam in general. But I was told to postpone it to do this job with you.”

  Henry got up and returned to the chair. He shook his head in mock amazement. “Man, you try to blow up everybody what bad-mouths you, you got to put together a lot more suitcases.”

  “We don’t expect to blow up everybody,” Khalil said. “We just make a few examples. But that mission has been postponed.”

  “Then why do you keep the bomb here?”

  “I have no other place for it.”

  Henry shook his head. “I’m going to have to do something about this. What if the police came around to check your identity card? Show me how this thing works.”

  “It is very simple,” Khalil said. He moved to the suitcase, Henry following. “You see this heavy red wire? That’s the locking device. The bomb is inert as long as that is in place. To use the bomb, you pull out that wire. That sets the mechanism. Then you have two choices. You can set a timing device here, by pressing this little button. Each number is a minute. You can set it for anywhere up to twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes. Or, you can press this big blue button here. When you close the lid, the mechanism is armed. When someone opens the suitcase, it goes off.”

  “Okay, I got it,” Henry said. “Very simple, very nice. Don’t even dream of doing anything with that while I’m here. I’ll find a safer place for it. And for the dope, too.”

  Henry yawned and went back to his chair.

  “Didn’t get much sleep on that red-eye. I’ll take the bed, you’ll take the couch. That okay with you?”

  Henry gave him the Big Bad Eye of Coercion, but it was wasted. Khalil was thoroughly cowed. He knew who was number one and who was number two.

  “Yes, of course,” he said, “I have to get ready for my classes.” He started rummaging around for his clothes.

  Henry sat on a chair and waited for him to get dressed and get out of there. The place was a shit heap, there was no doubt about that. But it was only for a while, until he got his hands on some folding money. But right now he wanted some sleep.

  41

  The telephone sounded and Max picked it up. It was the front desk. “A caller for you, Mr. Rosen.”

  “Who is it?”

  “He says his name is Kelly.”

  “Just one minute.” He looked at Aurora, who was seated on the sofa reading Elle. Covering the mouthpiece, he said, “Kelly is here. What do you think?”

  Aurora shrugged. “Now is as good a time as ever.”

  “Send him up.”

  Kelly left his suitcases at the desk and went up in the little elevator, getting out at the third floor. There was no mistaking which way Max’s suite was. Kelly could hear the voices from the elevator, Aurora’s, angry, Max’s, pleading. Kelly considered getting out of there and going around the block and coming back when it was all over, but what the hell, it wasn’t the first time he’d heard Max and Aurora quarrel and he’d already been announced. He went to the door from which their argument came and rang the doorbell.

  After a second or two the door opened. “Hi, Kelly,” Aurora said. She was wearing black leather jeans despite the July weather and she was dragging a suitcase. She stormed past him and went to the elevator.

  Kelly watched the elevator door close and the little openwork elevator disappear into its shaft. He shrugged, and turned to Max’s door.

  Max was standing there, apparently unaffected by the dramatic scene that had just gone down, his expression light, pleasant.

  “Kelly! Damn but this is a very pleasant surprise! Come in, come in! What you doing over here in Gay Paree?”

  Kelly entered and looked around. Max’s suite was large and spacious. White curtains flapped in the mild breeze within opened French doors. The walls were covered with what looked like silk wallpaper and there were old posters of people Kelly had never heard of. The furniture all looked like antiques. The lighting was subdued and artful. It looked like a place a man could feel at home in while he planned his next move.

  “This is nice, Max, very nice.”

  Max shrugged. “Just a place to roost until I get more permanent quarters. How about a drink?” He turned to the sideboard, where a group of glasses made small talk with three bottles. “Scotch all right? What are you doing here, Kelly? It’s great to see you.”

  Kelly accepted a Scotch and water and took it over to a lyre-back chair. He sat down, sipped the drink, and nodded appreciatively. He decided not to ask Max what had just gone down with Aurora. He said, “I told you, Max, I always had a yen to see Gay Paree. I told you that.”

  “Sure you did. But why now? By the way, I was going to telephone you. Some things came up and I had to leave a little hastily, you know how it is.”

  “Sure I do. Hey, I didn’t take no offense, you not telling me you was going. You and I are square. You’ve been more than generous with me. I’m not here to put the bite on you.”

  “Hell, I wasn’t worried about that,” Max said. “You and I, we’ve always been straight with each other. If you need any help, let me know. I’m not in the greatest of financial positions just now, but pretty soon—”

  Kelly raised a hand, palm out. “No, I meant it, Max. I’m not here to dun you for money. When you lit out like that, you left me without anything to do. I’m not blaming you, we always had that understanding, I worked for you as long as it lasted, and when you were gone, that was it. But I got to thinking. I’m serious about always wanting to see Paree. So I thought I’d take a look at the place before something else came up. And there was something else.”

  “Out with it, man,” Max said, smiling.

  “I know you didn’t count on needing me over here,” Kelly said. “But I thought you just maybe might anyway. No matter what line of work you’re into now, it’s good to have someone you can trust backing you up. Or run errands for you, like back in New York. Or whatever. Don’t give me an answer right now. You may need some time to think it over. I’ll be staying here
for a week or two. We’ll see what you think. If not, I’ll go back to New York and no hard feelings.”

  “Well, that’s really decent of you,” Max said. “I will think about it, that’s a promise. Where you going to be staying in Paris?”

  Kelly tapped his raincoat pocket, bulged with a paperback book. “I got a guidebook here, my bags are downstairs, and I’m going out to find a place now.”

  “I’d put you up here, but you can see how it is. …”

  Kelly nodded. “Oh, one thing more. You got a telephone number for that friend of yours, that Hob fella?”

  “Sure I do,” Max said. He scribbled a number on a slip of paper and handed it to Kelly. “What do you want to see Hob for?”

  “Nothing much. He just seemed a nice fellow, and I don’t know anybody over here except you. And I can see you’ve a lot on your mind. I’ll be in touch, Max.”

  42

  Twenty minutes later, Max’s doorbell rang again. Max went to it and opened it. It was Hob, looking creased and disgruntled.

  “Why didn’t they ring me from the desk?” Max asked.

  “I told them you were expecting me.”

  “And so I was. Still. Come on.”

  Just then the telephone rang. Max answered it.

  “Yeah, this is Max. Who’s this?”

  “Max, this is your old buddy Emilio.”

  “In Paris?”

  “That’s right, buddy boy. In Paris.”

  “Well … welcome to the City of Lights.”

  “Thanks a lot. Max, you and me, we’ve got some unfinished business.”

  “No we don’t. This is France, not America.”

  “You ever hear of extradition?”

  “What business are you talking about?”

  “What I’m talking about I’m not going to discuss over the phone. I’ll come by. But first I wanna talk to Aurora.”

  “Join the line. So do I.”

  “Don’t kid around with me, fat man, I know she’s there.”

  “Then you know more, than I do.”

  “If I find out you’re lying …”

  “If you don’t believe me, come over right now, we’ll have some chili and watch French TV. I think there’s a quiz show from Normandy on in about half an hour, ought to be a good one.”

  “All right. If you see her, tell her I got to see her. Is that private cop of yours, that Hob, is he in Paris?”

  “He’s right here.”

  “Put him on.”

  Hob took the phone. “Hob here.”

  “I need to meet with you,” Emilio said. “You know a place?”

  “Make it the Brasserie d’Italie, corner of avenue d’Italie and Massena in half an hour.”

  “Where the hell is that? Never mind, I’ll take a cab. Okay. Give me back to Max.”

  “I’ll be talking with you soon, Maxie. You and I got some unfinished business.” He hung up.

  Putting down the telephone, Max said to Hob, “That was Emilio.”

  “So I gathered.”

  “Do you think I should have told him about the dope being gone?”

  “He’s so smart, let him find out for himself. Max, what does he have on you?”

  “About twenty years in a federal lockup unless I cooperate. That means setting up my contact over here so Emilio can arrest him and make himself look good.”

  “Are you going to do it?”

  Max shrugged. “He’s got me between a rock and a hard place. If I can’t work something out, Mr. Y will have to go.”

  “I thought it’s usually Mr. X.”

  “It is, but I decided to give him a different name. More refreshing that way.”

  “Take care of yourself, Max,” Hob said. “Talk to you later.”

  43

  “Well, that’s about the stupidest thing I ever heard,” Emilio said three-quarters of an hour later, as he and Hob drank beer in the Brasserie d’Italie.

  It had become very warm, Paris finally giving up the unruliness of spring and allowing itself to grow warm and predictable. There were flower scents the air, too, for the dogwood trees were bursting into blossom.

  The beautiful weather was wasted on Hob, who was having some trouble with asthmalike symptoms, and also feeling vaguely out of sorts and in no mood to hear a critique of his hijacking from Emilio.

  The hijacking itself was having a delayed effect on Hob, a shock to his system.

  At first, standing there in that backstreet in Belleville while Khalil pulled the bag of dope out of his baggage, dope that he hadn’t known was there, Hob had felt nothing, or at most a sort of amused chagrin that he, with all his experience in this area, had permitted this hijacking to happen to him, hadn’t anticipated it or at least the possibility of it. It was a numb sort of chagrin: he had felt as if he were wrapped in a protective sort of a grayness. But soon that gave way to a feeling of annoyance and shame that he, Hob, clever, sophisticated Hob, had not foreseen this, had not foreseen or figured out that getting ten thousand dollars for escorting a beautiful woman to Paris was the sort of dream bait with which confidence games are made. His own desire, or need, for a lot of money quickly had brought him to this tangled situation where he not only wasn’t entirely sure of what he was doing, but was equally unsure if he even wanted to do it in the first place. At times like this, times of extreme self-repugnance, all motivations, all reasons for doing anything whatsoever, felt like they were hanging by a string.

  The deeper insight was that there was no reason for doing anything. But this was the edge of the precipice of insight that Hob shrank back from.

  He reminded himself that moods of nihilism soon gave way to moods of enlightened self-interest, thank God. Meanwhile he had this fool Emilio, with his beefy shoulders encased in a Micky Mouse sports shirt from Waikiki, leaning forward across the plastic-topped table and giving Hob the word from on high.

  “Stupid or not, that’s what happened,” Hob said.

  “Sounds like a setup to me,” Emilio said.

  “Clever deduction,” Hob said.

  “You got any ideas who set you up?”

  “Plenty of ideas, no answers.”

  “I suppose you know Kelly is in Paris.”

  “Sure. Spoke to him earlier.”

  “And Henry?”

  “I didn’t know he was here,” Hob said. “How did you find out?”

  “I checked his name in the flight manifests. That Inspector Fauchon knows you, by the way. He helped me check out a few people. Any of them could have set you up.”

  “That’s true.”

  Emilio looked at Hob and raised both eyebrows as if a great insight had just occurred to him. “Hell, you could have set yourself up.”

  “Sure I could have,” Hob said. “I must have figured out by mental osmosis what had been planted in my luggage, and then telephoned from the plane to my gang in Paris instructing them in how to hijack me.”

  “It’s a little unlikely,” Emilio said. “But maybe I can make it fit. You’re smart enough to have figured it out.”

  “That’s the nicest thing that’s been said to me all day,” Hob said. “Too bad it isn’t true.”

  “Spare me your wise guy bullshit,” Emilio said. “I’m responsible for that dope you lost.”

  “Hey, sometimes even innocent guys get hijacked,” Hob said. “It happens.”

  “Maybe. I just want you to know I’ve got my eye on you. You were involved in smuggling a few years ago in Turkey.”

  “Fifteen years ago. And I wasn’t involved, nothing was ever proved.”

  “You just happened to be around when the shit went down?”

  “Something like that.”

  Emilio stood up. “Talking to you is like talking to a bad sixties comedian.” He brooded for a moment, then said, “You wouldn’t happen to have Aurora’s address, would you?” Hob shook his head. “I’ll be in touch,” Emilio said. He got up and walked out, leaving Hob to pay for the beers. It was a small thing, but in Hob’s view it showed
a striking lack of class.

  Hob paid and walked back to his apartment. He didn’t notice the gray Mercedes taxi parked third from the end on the rank at porte d’Italie and boulevard Massena. And since he didn’t notice the taxi, he also didn’t notice Emilio sitting in it, reading a Herald Tribune and watching Hob cross to his flat on the other side of the avenue.

  44

  It was early afternoon and time for a nap. Outside was brilliant summer weather, somewhat hotter than Hob liked. Inside Patrick’s apartment, the stone walls and lack of windows helped keep the place cool.

  Hob sat down, took off his sneakers, peeled off his shirt, which had grown clammy, and stretched out on the cot that Patrick used for a bed and that was kept always open and pushed back against the rear wall. The cot was hard and lumpy. Hob punched the shapeless pillow into a shape he thought the back of his head would like.

  Detectiving was all very well, but even a private eye gets tired. Or if not every private eye, then Hob for sure. Hob was ruled by the energy in his chakras. When it was high, he felt like a world-beater. But all too often his chakras were depleted, his reservoirs hadn’t recharged, his outlook had not freshened. At those times he was tormented by obscure doubts and misgivings that seemed to come from the very core of his being. He didn’t understand what it might all be leading up to, didn’t dare even whisper a possibility to himself, desisted for fear of undermining himself entirely, so subversive was he to himself at times, or, as his therapist used to tell him, “You’re your own worst enemy.”

  At a time like this, a nap was imperative. Even five minutes’ sleep could knit up the raveled sleeve of his frayed self-image. Now, just as he was closing his eyes and wishing he were in Ibiza, and almost getting there in what might have been a dream, the telephone rang.

  Hob stifled a groan and rolled to a sitting position, not a bad accomplishment for a man in his mid-forties with intimations of losing his finca.

  It was Nigel.

  “Dear boy, you know I wouldn’t disturb you during siesta except that we’ve come with something of importance. Potential importance, at any rate.”