Draconian New York (Hob Draconian Book 1)

by Robert Sheckley

“What’s this?” Max asked.

  “Sea urchin. Delicacy of the Med. What we need now is knives, forks, and some lemon.”

  “What’s it like?” one of the girls, the one with the long brown hair, asked.

  “Raw sea urchin is not to everyone’s taste. Don’t ask me to describe it. It tastes a little like crab and a little like caviar.”

  Max liked it, and the girls raised no objections. Ibiza girls eat anything.

  Afterward, Max relaxed on the deck under a brandy-soaked Mediterranean sun. “Hob,” he said, “this is wonderful. All of it. Ibiza. The sea. The sky. The land.”

  Ahead of them, the island of Ibiza rose out of the flat, shining sea. It was a perfect day in July.

  Max said, “This is the best summer of my life. If you’re ever in New York …”

  Hob made the call to the New York number Mylar had given him.

  5

  The woman’s voice over the telephone was clear, low pitched, well modulated.

  “Max Rosen Associates.”

  “I’d like to speak to Mr. Rosen.”

  “Who shall I say is calling?”

  “Tell Max it’s the guy who taught him how to eat raw sea urchins near the beach at Sa Comestilla.”

  “How do you spell that?”

  “Which part?”

  “That last word. Com something.”

  Hob spelled it for her. She still didn’t like it. But she was a good sport. “Just one minute.” She switched him over to the Muzak. It was playing something with a lot of violins while outside his office window, a couple of kids were playing stickball.

  Suddenly there was a man on the line. Deep booming voice filled with vitality.

  “Is this who I think it is?”

  “Yes, it’s Hob Draconian.”

  “Hob! What a pleasure! You got my message. What are you doing in the States, anyhow?”

  “I came back to take care of some business.”

  “How’s the detective business?”

  “Going great, Max.”

  “No, seriously.”

  “A little slow.”

  “Can I help?”

  “Only if you’re fool enough to invest in an unlicensed American detective who has an unpaid traspaso on a beautiful finca in Ibiza.”

  “I might be able to help. What’s the deal?”

  “Max, it’s a straightforward proposition. Invest with me and I go spend it on my traspaso. I’ve got a problem there. You get your return off the top if I ever show a profit.”

  Max thought it over for a moment or two, turned it over in his mind, tasted it and found it good. “Listen, maybe I can help. What the hell, you’re practically family. Where you calling from?”

  “Snuff’s Landing, New Jersey.”

  “Well, come on into Manhattan. I’ve got plenty of room here. You’ll stay with me. We’ll get shit-faced and talk about the old days. You’re here for the weekend? I’ll show you a time you’ll never forget. What was that girl’s name in Formentera? Never mind, we’ll talk about it when you get here. How are you coming?”

  “Trailways bus.”

  “You don’t have to do that, Hob. Take a taxi. I’ll leave money at the desk.”

  “I’m not too proud to ride the bus.”

  “I am. But suit yourself. I’ll have Kelly meet you at the Trailways in Port Authority.”

  “Hey, that’s not necessary. Just give me the address.” But Max had rung off. Hob wondered who the hell was Kelly.

  6

  While Hob was walking to the bus stop, Lieutenant George Glatz was rubbing his forefingers together. It was the sort of meaningless gesture that had begun to plague him more and more of late. He leaned back in the seat of the paint-sick Pontiac that the Third District police headquarters on Dulcimer between Tenth and Jade had assigned him. “Perfect for surveillance,” Captain Kirkpatrick had told him when Glatz had asked for the Corvette. “A car like this, one look and you can’t remember what it looks like.”

  Glatz was parked in the special zone that the airport people assign to police officers who have to shadow someone leaving Kennedy. In this instance, Glatz was supposed to follow a man named Santos, a diplomat from the newly independent Caribbean state of San Isidro. Since Santos was accredited to the UN, Glatz couldn’t arrest him even if he did something. So why was Glatz there? Why was the NYPD interested in Santos in the first place? Because certain persons from Treasury, so it was rumored around the big water cooler that stood next to the bulletin board just down the hall from the sergeant’s office in New York’s Third District police headquarters, had had a short but intense talk with Commissioner Flynn at Flynn’s castle in Rhinebeck, New York, and the result, after clanking its way down the chain of causes and effects for a few days, was to put Glatz in a paint-sick Pontiac in the special police no parking zone at the international arrivals building of Kennedy International Airport.

  Glatz was not alone. Sitting in the passenger seat beside him was a DEA agent named Emilio Vasari. He was presently working undercover on a case that involved Santos, at least marginally.

  Glatz sucked on a Chesterfield filter. He was tall and cadaverous, with close-cropped brown hair beginning to thin and gray, and a long nose with a bump in it from the time he had played center-field tackle for the Gaelic Striders and had briefly contemplated going on the professional hurling circuit until a batsman’s boggle not only broke his nose but also damaged his optic nerve so that it was almost a year before he could see the same old crap with his previous acuity.

  His car telephone rang.

  “Lieutenant Glatz? This is Angelo at customs.”

  “Yeah, okay, what’s up?”

  “That guy you were asking about—Santos—he’s just coming through now. Want us to give him a toss?”

  “Certainly not,” Glatz said. “He’s got diplomatic immunity. Just pass him through. Thanks, Angelo.”

  Glatz put down the phone. Turning to Emilio, he said, “He’s here. Maybe we’ll get lucky this time.”

  “Huh,” said Emilio. He had some problems of his own to think about.

  The Varig jet had begun its flight in Rio de Janeiro and made various stops in the Caribbean and at Miami before it landed at Kennedy Airport. The passengers came forth, first class first—money has its privileges. There were only five passengers in first class. Four of them had that anonymous gray-suited be-briefcased and gold-watched look that could enable them to pose anywhere as a frieze for Wealth and Its Privileges. The fifth man, Santos, was something else again, though not too much of a something else. He was a tiny man who wore a little pointed beard and looked like a miniature Robert De Niro. Santos’s face was a matte brown, his eyes were clear with the tiny wrinkles in the corners that you get from dodging palace revolutions. He wore diplomat’s blue pinstripe. In his lapel there was a tiny rainbow-colored pin: the Order of Simón Bolívar, awarded to him by the government of Venezuela in recognition of his service there as ambassador from the island of San Isidro. His shoes, perhaps not surprisingly, were patent leather pumps with elastic sides. He carried himself erectly. There was an air of alertness to his face. An ironic smile shaded his lips; the expression seemed habitual.

  Santos strolled through the resounding corridors of Kennedy with the other passengers, toward immigration and customs. He had a little mustache as well as the beard, an imperial, it was called, and he looked like one of those third world diplomats who are more at home in Manhattan than in Misraki, San Isidro’s capital city and main port. At the immigration desk he took out a diplomatic passport and showed it to the official. The slight pursing of the official’s lips would have presaged no good for one who was not, as Santos was, a diplomat fully accredited to go where he wished and do what he wished in the United States without let or hindrance. His baggage and person were not to be searched under any circumstances, even suspicious ones. The customs man, seeing that this man was untouchable, and in any event pursuant to previous orders from Glatz outside in the paint-sick Pontiac, u
npursed his lips, stamped Santos’s passport, and watched him go through the green doorway of nothing to declare, from which place, unchallenged to open his sturdy attaché case, he continued to the baggage claim and ground transportation.

  The official picked up the phone on his desk and punched in a three-digit number. He heard a terse, “Yeah?” and said, “Your guy’s just left.”

  Down in the short-term parking lot Glatz put down his car telephone and snubbed out the cigarette that Alice had said only that morning was going to kill him, the only question was when, and the sooner the better as far as she was concerned. Alice had been in a bad mood ever since they cut back on her methadone, telling her that eight years of maintenance was enough already. Glatz sighed. He supposed he’d gotten what he deserved. His dad had always told him, never marry a junkie, not even a Catholic junkie.

  “He’s coming through now,” Emilio said, and Glatz cranked up the paint-sick old Pontiac and a moment of expectation hung in the warm summer air.

  7

  When Santos came through the automatic doors onto the passenger pickup area, Jose, the embassy driver, was just gliding to the curb in the big old stretch Cadillac. Jose was the best driver San Isidro had ever produced. The stretch limousine pulled in just as the ambassador came out the swinging doors. Santos always considered that trick of Jose’s more difficult than balancing the island’s budget. Not that anyone tried very hard to do that. Santos got in, taking care not to step on Paco, who was lying on the floor of the car under a throw rug.

  “Good trip, sir?” Jose asked from the front seat.

  “Yes, tolerable,” Santos said. “Always good to go back home, as long as it is not for too long. How are things here?”

  “The usual soap opera,” Jose said. “Undersecretary Juarez is making a fool of himself again with the daughter of the ambassador from the Dominican Republic—do you know, there’s no short way of saying that?—and as usual his wife is the last to know. Secretary Shirley Tschombola is pregnant, we believe by Gardener Felius. And there have been a few other incidents.”

  “Pretty much business as usual,” Santos said. “Good, good.” Then he remembered the man lying under the throw rug at his feet. “Paco, how are you?”

  “Welcome back, sir,” Paco said in a muffled but respectful voice.

  “Don’t get up yet,” Santos said. “Not until we’re out of the airport area. Nobody saw you get in the car, did they?”

  “No sir. They smuggled me in at the embassy garage and I’ve been under this rug ever since.”

  “Good, good. We’ll talk later.”

  They went around the ramps and onto the Belt Parkway that led to Manhattan. Jose had already determined that an old Pontiac was following them. Soon the cemeteries of Queens came up on their left, and beyond them, the highly taxed skyline of New York City.

  “Okay, Paco,” Santos said. “We can talk now. But don’t sit up.”

  Paco pushed aside the throw rug revealing himself as a short, chesty, weight-lifting sort of vaguely Indo-Latino sort of a guy, with sideburns that came to scimitar points just above the muscled and knotty line of his jaw.

  “Did you bring it?” Paco asked.

  “Of course“ Santos said. “The plan must go forward.”

  Paco nodded. He was five and a half feet tall by three and a half feet across the shoulders. He came from Matelosa Province, San Isidro’s poorest district. Paco’s family had worked for two hundred years on the Santos family estate. There existed between them a master-slave relationship that both men cherished.

  “I think you ought to know,” Jose said from the front seat. “We’re being followed.”

  “That’s all right,” Santos said. “I counted on the possibility. Paco, let’s get to work.”

  Santos opened his diplomatic pouch. Pushing aside a small sheaf of state secrets that was there only as window dressing, he took out a small canvas bag that looked like it weighed about two kilos and might have a street value of perhaps two hundred thousand dollars, assuming the bag contained two kilos of 99.9 percent pure cocaine from the family estates of Santos’s cousin Octaviano Marrani from Cochibamba Province in Bolivia.

  “You know what to do?” Santos asked.

  “I know,” Paco said. “Don’t worry, boss.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Santos said. “The outcome of a multimillion-dollar dope operation isn’t your responsibility, is it?”

  “I know it’s not easy for you,” Paco said.

  “And why do I bother doing it? After all, I am independently wealthy.”

  “You do it for San Isidro,” said Paco. “For your patria, and mine.”

  “Yes,” Santos said. “La Patria.” He smiled bitterly. “Is it not strange to what extremities the emotion of patriotism can lead us? To think that we would be doing this!”

  Jose the driver leaned around from the front seat. His mustache quivered as he said, “Those people are still following us.”

  “I hadn’t expected them to go away,” Santos said. “Can you lose them?”

  “Here in the Midtown Tunnel?”

  “Sorry, I forgot. When possible.”

  They came out the tunnel into Manhattan. The Pontiac was about four cars back. All of them watched the pursuing car in the rearview mirror and pretended to an unconcern they could not have felt. When they came across town to Seventh Avenue, Jose picked his moment and made a quick right turn that took them momentarily out of sight of the pursuing vehicle; then Paco opened the door and slipped out into the street. He had the satchel clutched tight.

  “Now take me to Godfrey’s,” Santos said, after Paco was gone.

  The limo turned and would have sped away if this story had been taking place in California. Since it was New York, the limo crawled crosstown and then uptown again, and, eight cars behind it, Lieutenant Glatz struggled along. Unnoticed by either car, Paco had picked up a new pursuer. Another car, a brown Ford Fairlane with a crumpled right front fender, had been following the Pontiac all the way from Kennedy. The two men in it had a better angle and saw Paco leave Santos’s car. They spoke to their driver and he stopped. They got out and followed Paco on foot.

  8

  The ride on the Trailways bus to the New York Port Authority building was interesting in a dreary sort of way. Hob sat beside an elderly man in a greasy green parka who told him all about a car he had only had for seven hours before his ex—son-in-law totaled it. Hob tuned out the old guy’s babble, mentally reviewed the list of people he was going to call for a loan as soon as he was in Max’s apartment, and watched through the window as the bus negotiated the spirals down to the Lincoln Tunnel. He started thinking about Mylar. She’d looked really pretty this morning at the lawyer’s office. He remembered the sweet look on her face the morning just a little more than two and a half years ago when he’d married her at the British consulate in Gibraltar.

  The Trailways bus came through the Lincoln Tunnel and parked in the bay under the Port Authority bus station. As Hob got off he saw a short, heavyset, middle-aged man with a tough, expressionless face watching the passengers get off. He was holding up a sign that read Hob Draconian.

  Hob went up to him and said, “I’m Hob Draconian.”

  The man reversed the sign. On the other side it read Welcome to New York.

  “I’m Kelly,” the man said. “Max sent me out to get ya.”

  Kelly was solid and compact. He was wearing a starched short-sleeved cotton sport shirt with small horses printed on a white background, olive drab slacks, plain brown shoes well shined. He had a pale, closely shaven face with a strong five o’clock shadow. A smell of lilac toilet water emanated from him. Hob remembered that you could still find lilac water in the old barbershops of the financial district and Little Italy. Kelly had a diamond pinkie ring and small brown bloodshot eyes. His voice was husky New York, friendly but impersonal. He looked like a man you don’t fool around with. Not that Hob was planning to.

  Kelly led him to the escalator. They wen
t up to street level and went out on the Ninth Avenue side. There was a shiny new Chrysler stretch limo parked in a No Parking zone. A cop was standing beside it, rocking back and forth on his heels and twirling his nightstick. Kelly said, “Thanks, Dugan. I appreciate it.”

  “Any time, Kelly,” the cop said.

  Kelly opened the limo’s back door for Hob, remarking, “I used to be a cop myself. Sergeant. Homicide.”

  They drove uptown to one of those big new apartment buildings near Lincoln Center. There was a man in uniform to open the door, another man at the front desk.

  “Who did you wish to visit, sir?” the deskman asked Hob.

  Kelly said, “This is Hob Draconian, Max Rosen’s friend. He’ll be staying for a while.”

  The deskman said, “Mr. Rosen didn’t say nothin’ ta me about it.”

  “So call him up and ask him yaself.”

  The deskman considered, shrugged. “If you say it’s okay, Kelly.”

  Kelly lead Hob to the elevators, muttering, “Them fuckin’ Greeks.”

  Hob didn’t make much of that. He watched as the floor numbers flashed by. They blurred into one another and he lost count after about fifty. It seemed a long time until they reached the penthouse.

  He followed Kelly down a carpeted corridor to a door marked Penthouse. As if you couldn’t tell. Kelly took out a key and let them in.

  9

  Hob found himself in a big bright white-walled room with shiny parquet flooring. At the far end, a picture window looked out over Manhattan to the south. There was a spindly antique-looking desk near the door, and a woman with brown hair in a pageboy sitting at it was talking on the telephone. She was about twenty-six years old, with a broad, attractive face. She was wearing a brown tweed sports jacket, and a straight black skirt that showed off her crossed legs to advantage. Beneath the jacket she had on a pale peach blouse. Metal loop earrings. A string of small pearls.