Draconian New York (Hob Draconian Book 1)

by Robert Sheckley

  Draconian New York

  Robert Sheckley

  To my wife, Gail, with all my love

  1

  This whole thing began with the traspaso, so we might as well begin there, on a fine-looking day in Ibiza in late spring. Ibiza had many fine-looking days and this was one of the best of them: deep blue sky with a couple of puffy white clouds to give it character; brilliant sun filtering through the branches of the almond trees. The big old farmhouse with its solid whitewashed walls. The grape arbor just visible through the little arch that led to the paved courtyard. A day to make you glad you were alive. And Hob Draconian was lying outside in dappled shadow in the Peruvian hammock he had bought at the hippie market in Punta Arabi.

  He was just getting nicely relaxed when he saw something move in the distance. He sat up and saw two men walking among his almond trees. He got out of the hammock and stared at them. They were small figures in the distance, wearing dark suits, walking slowly, and talking to each other. One of them carried an aluminum clipboard that glinted in the sunlight, the other had a large briefcase. They both wore sunglasses.

  Hob got out of the hammock, slipped on his sandals, and went out to see what they wanted. He usually didn’t get trespassers in mid-June, this early in the season. He supposed they were a couple of foreigners, English or French, no doubt, unaware that you didn’t walk across private land in Ibiza without first getting the owner’s permission.

  They saw him coming and waited for him. They were in their mid-thirties, Spanish, by the look of them, peninsulares, not islanders, and not a bit discomfited at being told they were trespassing on private land.

  The one with the clipboard was tall and thin, with dark wavy hair. He said, “It is our information that this land is for sale.”

  “No, you’ve got that wrong,” Hob said pleasantly. “This is my land and I’m not interested in selling.”

  The two Spaniards talked to each other in rapid Spanish. Then the first one said, “You have a deed to this land?”

  “I have a traspaso,” Hob said. “And how is it any business of yours?”

  “I am Lawyer Molinez,” the tall, thin one with the clipboard said. “This is Architect Fernandez.” He gestured at his shorter, thickset companion, who made a little nod of his head in acknowledgment. “We have been hired to look over your land and determine its suitability for our buyer.”

  “But I told you, this land is not for sale.”

  “You are not the owner,” Molinez pointed out. He tapped the clipboard. “You are the renter. We have the permission of the owner.”

  “You mean Don Esteban?”

  “Don Esteban’s family.”

  “You must have made a mistake,” Hob said. “You’ve gotten the wrong piece of land.”

  The architect Fernandez opened his briefcase and took out a survey map of Ibiza. Both men looked at it. Then the lawyer Molinez said, “No, this is the one. The landmarks are unmistakable.”

  “But I tell you, I have a traspaso. No one can sell this land.”

  “We understand that you have a traspaso,” Molinez said. “But we also understand that it expires soon.”

  “I have an understanding with Don Esteban. We have our own arrangement.”

  “That is not my information,” Molinez said. “You have not paid the principal sum on your traspaso. It falls due in less than a month. Our understanding is that the land is available for sale after”—he consulted his papers—“the fifteenth of July.”

  “This is a misunderstanding,” Hob said. “I’ll clear it up myself with Don Esteban. Meanwhile, now is June, not July. Please get off my land immediately.”

  “We are not harming anything,” Molinez said. “We are merely surveying it in accord with the wishes of the people who will be the new owners.”

  “You’re disturbing my tranquillity,” Hob said. “Get out of here or I’ll call the Guardia.”

  The Spaniards looked at each other and shrugged. “You would do better to be more cooperative. The new owners are prepared to offer you compensation for early evacuation.”

  “Get out!” Hob shouted. And the two Spaniards left.

  Hob’s house was called C’an Poeta. He had been living in it for about five years, ever since his arrival on the island, renting it from old Don Esteban, who owned C’an Poeta and several other properties. Hob and the old man had hit it off from the first time they met. Don Esteban dearly loved a game of chess down at the outdoor Kiosko Café in Santa Eulalia, under the big oak tree, over a glass of the rough red wine of the island. Chess was a skill he had picked up working on foreign vessels during his years away from the island.

  He and Hob would often take long walks together, the old man sometimes carrying a bird gun but rarely shooting anything. The walks provided an opportunity for a bit of a ramble and (on Don Esteban’s part) a bit of philosophizing about the never fading pleasures of nature. Nature is especially pretty in Ibiza and easily stands up to rhapsodizing. If your finca were in the chilly wastelands of the Ahaggar Mountains of Morocco you might tend to shy away from likening nature to a good-smelling all-supporting mother. But this figure of speech, a favorite of Don Esteban’s, seemed proper and easy to support in Ibiza.

  Hob always did have a weak side for nature rhapsodizing. It was what led him to hang out with hippies and third worlders in the first place. With them but never of them. And he always eventually tired of the hippies’ air of self-conscious exaltation. It was part of what prevented Hob from ever being a successful flower child, though he tried from time to time. His good sense could always be counted on to return at some point, at which time he would, perhaps regretfully, take the flowers out of his hair and get on with whatever his life had been up to that time.

  Buying and selling property on Ibiza is no small thing. There’s always a drama involved. Don Esteban said he would be delighted to sell to Hob. He had come to think of him as a son, even if Hob’s Spanish was poor and his Catalan nonexistent; more of a son to him than the two big louts who lived in his house and weren’t interested in farming but in chasing foreign women and making deals, and who borrowed money from Don Esteban to spend at the dog track and the bar in the rifle club and the restaurant in the yacht club, places where the sons of well-to-do Ibicencans lived their own version of la dolce vita.

  Traspaso is the arrangement by which a property in Spain is bought and sold. It’s like a mortgage, only with Latin peculiarities. The islanders didn’t think much of the traspaso system and tended to make their own informal arrangements, thus avoiding taxes and other official unpleasantries. When Hob had expressed an interest in buying C’an Poeta, property prices on the island had been low. Don Esteban had agreed to sell for the peseta equivalent of sixty thousand dollars. For that price, Hob got the house and 4.5 hectares of land on the north coast of the island. His small monthly rent had been put toward the purchase price. Hob didn’t even know how much he still owed. But he and Don Esteban had an arrangement. Although legally Hob owed certain sums on certain dates, informally Don Esteban had assured him the place was his as long as he was alive and wanted it. After Hob’s death, if the traspaso had not been exercised, the property would revert back to the Esteban family.

  The old man was as good as his word. He drew up a document and a sum was agreed upon to bind it. Dates were solemnly decided and noted. This over little silver cups of Don Esteban’s prize hierbas, made from twenty-one herbs picked at the correct times of the moon and steeped in white anisette, all this from a recipe that had been in the family for generations. But what they signed in the end after the lawyers got through with it was the standard house-selling lease in Spain as provided by Don Est
eban’s attorney, Hernan Matutes, who ran most of his practice from the back room of the Bar Balear on the promenade in Ibiza City.

  Hob and the old man knew the agreement between them was solely for the purpose of providing legal protection in case of the old man’s sudden death, which he wasn’t expecting but thought he should safeguard against anyhow. Hob and Don Esteban were playing by the vaguely understood rules of a sense of honor which they felt in each other’s presence. Hob would pay what he could when he could, that was the gist of the private agreement; and if he fell into arrears, well, no one cared!

  “What’s the matter?” Harry Hamm asked Hob that evening when they met at El Caballo Negro, the bar in Santa Eulalia where most of the foreign community got its mail.

  “I had a run-in with a couple of Spaniards this afternoon,” Hob said, and told Harry about Lawyer Molinez and Architect Fernandez.

  Harry Hamm was the former policeman from Jersey City, New Jersey, who had come to Ibiza for a vacation and married the beautiful Maria. He had been cozened by Hob into enlivening his retirement by working for the Alternative Detective Agency.

  Hob had started the Alternative Detective Agency because he wanted a job without regular hours that would make enough to keep him in Europe. Private detectiving seemed ideal for a person low on skills but with a good deal of luck and a lot of friends. It gave him a chance to employ his friends, who, like him, were a tribe of homeless exiles without a country they considered their own and without allegiance to any but their own kind. Hob had a lot of friends. He had met most of them from among the uncountable thousands that poured in and out of Ibiza every year, and, like him, were seeking the Great Good Place and the Life That Worked. They were the disinherited and disenfranchised of the world, chaff of the technological revolution, meaningless data of the electronic age, superfluous people, and they didn’t have to be black or Hispanic to fit into that category.

  So Hob founded the Alternative Detective Agency as a sort of a floating commune centered in Ibiza and Paris, with excursions elsewhere as the spirit moved him or the opportunity presented itself. He staffed it with people like himself, wanderers and misfits, artists and would-be artists, visionaries with uncommercial visions, con guys who always got taken, tough guys who were forever getting beaten up. Hob had little expertise, but his rates were low. He wasn’t tough, but he had a dogged quality. His intelligence was only average, but he scored high on whimsy. The Alternative Detective Agency didn’t prosper, but it kept him and several other people alive, and gave him something to do on the long nights when he wondered what he was doing on this alien earth.

  Harry was large and overweight and solid, with close- cropped white hair. “That doesn’t sound good,” he said. “Do you think Don Esteban is up to something?”

  “Not a chance,” Hob said. “That old guy is the soul of honor.”

  “People change after an illness,” Harry said.

  “What illness are you talking about?”

  “Esteban had a stroke while you were away in Paris. Didn’t you know?”

  “Nobody told me,” Hob said. He had been back in Ibiza now for less than a week. He saw he had a lot of catching up to do.

  “I used to see him all the time,” Harry said. “But since the stroke, he doesn’t come out anymore. Have you called on him recently?”

  “No. I’ve just got back.”

  “It might be a good idea.”

  2

  The next day Hob visited Esteban’s farm. Esteban’s wife, Amparo, was as unfriendly as usual. She had never liked Hob. She said that Esteban was not well and was not seeing any visitors. Hob had to be content with that. He went back home, thinking deeply. Although he was still sure nothing was wrong, he was starting to get worried.

  He ran into Don Esteban a day after that, in Luis’s store. Esteban had aged visibly. His hair had turned white. His hands shook. He nodded vaguely at Hob. His sons bundled him into the family SEAT, the Spanish version of the Fiat, and got him away before Hob had a chance to exchange more than a few words with him. The old man’s voice had begun to quaver, and his sparse hair had begun to drop out, balding him and leaving him looking uncomfortably like a newborn babe, or perhaps even more uncomfortably, a freshly skinned rabbit.

  Hob was beginning to worry. He ate that evening at La Duchesa restaurant, presided over by Liana, the small, redheaded French Basque lady who had married Moti Lal, the well-known Parsi Indian painter who spent most of the year in Paris but summered in Ibiza.

  Liana said, “Eh, Hob, good you came in. Harry wanted to see you. He’s eating in the back room.”

  One of the charms of Ibiza in those days was the lack of telephones in private houses. Phone service at this time only extended to commercial establishments and government offices. People had to leave word for their friends in bars and restaurants, or trust in luck, or, in a final extremity, drive out to their houses, if they knew where to find them in the web of dirt roads that connected the tangle of steep hills that formed Ibiza’s backbone.

  Harry was enjoying a plate of pork chops in brown sauce to which Liana had given a fanciful Catalan name. Hob sat down and ordered the roast leg of lamb.

  “I looked into this matter of Don Esteban and your finca,” Harry said. “Asked a few questions. Paco at the San Carlos store filled me in on most of it.”

  Hob already knew that Esteban’s sons needed money and had been driven crazier than they were already by the old man’s conservative ways. Hob also knew that Ibiza, after many years of neglect under the Franco government, had put in a jetport and was experiencing a boom. People on all sides were making land deals and selling formerly worthless property for fortunes. Every year, Ibizan property went up in value. Hob knew all that. But he hadn’t considered how much the brothers feared prices would fall as suddenly as they had risen, leaving them holding half a dozen worthless farms that the old man out of sheer stubbornness had not sold even though he didn’t work them or rent them out. The farms just sat there, a wasted asset, and wasting an asset was unthinkable in a frugal peasant economy like Ibiza’s.

  The rest of the properties would come to them after Don Esteban’s death. But this one place, C’an Poeta, was in the twilight zone, owing to the discrepancies between the written and the oral agreements concerning it. Hob knew this, too.

  What was new to him was the fact that C’an Poeta was of considerable interest right now because a Madrid syndicate wanted to turn the house and its surroundings into a tourist hotel, gambling club, and disco.

  Don Esteban had turned them down. Then he had his stroke. Amparo and his sons browbeat him into showing them a copy of the traspaso. They read the contract and found that there was a large final payment due on July 15 of that year. It was the sort of payment easily promised, easily overlooked. In the old days, Don Esteban would never have enforced it. But it was the sort of clause that Lawyer Matutes had insisted on putting in. Interpreted in strict accordance with the law, it meant that if he missed the payment Hob could lose the property.

  Hob thanked Harry, finished his dinner, and went back to his finca. The next morning he went to the Los Almendros Café in San Carlos, where they had the telephone closest to him. After some difficulty he was connected with the telephone in the back room of the Bar Balear in Ibiza City. Hob’s lawyer, Don Enrique Guasch, along with most of the other lawyers of the island, made this his headquarters, for here one could order wine and coñac and nibble tapas all day and grow as fat as a Catalan lawyer ought to be, and stay in close contact with his friends and enemies, the other lawyers and the judges.

  After suitable greetings were exchanged to the desired degree of elaboration needed to denote the close relationship between the two men, Guasch got down to business and told Hob he had been about to send a messenger to find him. He had bad news.

  “Let me have it,” Hob said. “It’s about the house, isn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Guasch said. He then regretfully told the middle-aged American private detec
tive that he owed a million pesetas on the lease on C’an Poeta and that it was due July 15 and that they, the Esteban family, were notifying him as required in the contract, so that he would have fair warning that upon his inability to pay the required sum, the property under discussion, C’an Poeta, situated in the parish of San Carlos on the north shore of the island, would return to them, the original owners, Don Esteban and the people speaking in his name.

  This hadn’t been Hob’s understanding of the arrangement at all. He drove directly to Don Esteban’s farm in San Lorenzo to get it straight. Amparo, Don Esteban’s unfriendly wife, again wouldn’t let Hob in to see Don Esteban. She put him aside with evasions. “The old man isn’t well today. He’s staying in his room. He doesn’t want to see anybody. If you want to leave a message, I’ll make sure he gets it.”

  Peering in, Hob saw the two sons, Juanito and Xavier, lounging in soft chairs in the entrada, grinning at him.

  Hob drove straight into Ibiza City and found his lawyer, Don Enrique, still in the back room of the Balear, playing dominoes with an old crony. He allowed Hob to take him across the promenade, to the Cellar Catalan, for a second lunch and a private conference.

  An hour and a half later, Hob went back to his finca a sadder and wiser man. The Estebans had him over a barrel. He was going to have to come up with the money. Luckily, a million pesetas at that time was only about ten thousand dollars, and ten thousand dollars, though a very respectable sum, was not by any means the end of the world.

  Unfortunately, Hob didn’t have that relatively insignificant sum. He had just about nothing. And there was an additional complication: Mylar.

  Mylar had been Hob’s wife at the time he signed the traspaso. Hob had put Mylar’s name on the contract in a moment of good feeling. He and Mylar had gone down to Hob’s lawyer, Enrique Guasch, in the port of Ibiza. It seemed that something was not correct in form, and the traspaso had to be made over again. It was just a matter of getting some dates straight. Guasch had shown him where to sign.