Draconian New York (Hob Draconian Book 1)

by Robert Sheckley

  24

  Aurora Sanchez was wearing a simple, beautifully cut black evening dress, off the shoulders. Around her neck, which was long and shapely, though not quite long enough to be described as swanlike, she wore a finely woven gold chain from which depended a little jade figure. Hob caught a glimpse of gold bead earrings. Her dress came to midcalf, a fashionable length that year, no doubt. She had on black patent leather high heels. She carried a little gold mesh purse. She wore no rings. She was prettier in person than her publicity stills. There was an openness and good humor to her features that Hob hadn’t expected. Her complexion was very good if you like that light golden tawny look. She held herself very erect. She was taller than he had expected, five foot ten at least. Her slimness and erect stature made her look even taller.

  “Is this about the job in Paris?” she asked at once. She had a deep voice, faintly flavored with vodka and Spanish.

  Hob told her what Max had told him about the job in Paris and the necessity of being on the morning flight.

  “Model of the year!” Dorrie said. “Oh, Aurora, it’s wonderful!”

  Aurora was beaming. The two girls began to talk about what Aurora should pack for Paris. Hob found it not unpleasant to listen to two pretty women chatter about their wardrobes. Still, time was of the essence. And now a small but disturbing thought crossed Hob’s mind.

  “Will it take you much time to get ready?” he asked Aurora. “We’ve got a flight at seven in the morning.”

  “I can be packed in half an hour,” Aurora said. “But I do have to pick up something first.”

  “Want me to come along?” Hob asked, not wanting to lose sight of this person worth ten thousand dollars delivered live tomorrow in Paris.

  “Sure. I’d appreciate it.”

  Dorrie said, “Okay, I’m going back to the apartment. Meet you both there. Kelly will take us out to Kennedy.”

  Aurora said, “I’ve got to make a quick call. Be right back.”

  Dorrie left. Hob found himself near one of the appetizer tables. He made inroads into the caviar, sampled the Swedish meatballs, munched a few cheese puffs, and washed it all down with a glass of white wine. He was feeling pretty good. The ten grand bonus was practically his. It hadn’t been so difficult after all.

  Aurora came back in a few minutes. “Let’s go!”

  25

  Aurora’s little car was parked around the corner on West Broadway. It was a red Porsche 911, not new but recent, very dusty and very classy. They got in and Aurora turned north on Sixth Avenue.

  “Do you work for Max?” she asked.

  “I’m a private detective,” Hob told her.

  “You don’t really look much like a private detective.”

  “I didn’t have time to put on my makeup.”

  “Have you known Max long?”

  “About ten years. Met him in Ibiza. Ever been there?”

  “With my parents, about twelve years ago. We stayed at a friend’s house in Santa Gertrudis. And once on my own, about four years ago. I stayed in Formentera that time. Does Formentera count?”

  There were four Balearic Islands situated in the western Mediterranean between France and Spain. Majorca was the big one, Ibiza was the crazy one, Minorca was the English one, and Formentera, which lies just a mile or two away from Ibiza, was the sun worshiper’s island, where freaks went to get away from other freaks.

  “Sure it counts,” Hob said. He was about to ask her how she liked the place and whether she was going back again soon— like immediately after Paris, and perhaps in company with a private detective—when she said, “Do you have a gun?”

  “A gun? You mean do I own one?”

  “I don’t care if you own one or not. Do you have one on you right now?”

  “No, I don’t. Is it important?”

  “Probably not,” she said.

  “Do you think we might need a gun?”

  “Might.”

  “What makes you think so.”

  “’Cause we’re being followed.”

  Hob looked back. Just then Aurora saw a break in the traffic and whipped her car out into it. Never assume, as Hob had done, that a pretty girl driving a Porsche doesn’t know anything about handling a car. Pretty girls often have hoodlum boyfriends who show them the basics of high-speed driving. She wound the little car up through its gears. There were quite a few gears, four or five at least. She made a turn and raced downtown, swung around the Fulton Fish Market like it was a pylon and she a racing airplane, and headed back uptown on Church Street. The Porsche howled like a banshee and clung to the road like a leech. Looking back, Hob saw that the car behind them had made that mad turn, too, and was in hot pursuit. As it came under the streetlights Hob saw that it as a white late-model Mercedes. He couldn’t tell how many people were in it, but they were coming on fast.

  “Shit,” Aurora said, “they told me this wouldn’t happen.”

  She dropped down a gear and swung unexpectedly around a corner. She was skillful, but she took up all the road. It was lucky traffic was light. The Mercedes barreled out of Gansevoort Street and followed onto Greenwich Avenue. It was coming up on them fast. As usual when you get into a jam, there was not a cop in sight. Aurora made another turn onto Eighth Street, clipping the curb and rocking up giddily on two wheels. The Mercedes was being driven by someone who knew how. He kept right on behind them.

  “Do you at least know how to use a gun?” she asked.

  “When I have to, I can.”

  “There’s one in the glove compartment. You may have to.”

  Hob got it out. It was a Lugery sort of gun, black and with a long slender snout. Hob felt a little foolish holding it, especially since he wasn’t sure how it worked. He didn’t even know how many safety catches it had. While he was figuring it out, the Mercedes roared up alongside. Hob never heard the shots above the roar of the cars’ engines, but two neat holes appeared in the windshield.

  “Hey,” he said, “what have you gotten us into?”

  “Don’t panic,” she said. “Watch this.”

  She kept the Porsche in a low gear—second, third, who knows about such things?—as they proceeded at speed on Broadway. The Mercedes was trying to come up on them again. “Hang on,” Aurora said, and braked hard and swung the wheel and hit the accelerator. She put the car into as nice a bootlegger’s turn as Hob had ever seen outside of likker-running movies. The Porsche slewed around in a four-wheel drift, its engine ranting and raving like a hysterical orator trying to make a point, and somehow came around 180 degrees and ended up facing downtown. The Mercedes slewed around and was coming toward them again and Aurora neatly evaded it and ran away while the Mercedes banged against a couple of parked cars and had to slow down to regain its composure. And then the Mercedes was out of sight and they cut across town to St. Mark’s Place, then north on First Avenue, past Bellevue. The Mercedes was nowhere around.

  Aurora drove west to Second Avenue and pulled over to the curb at Sixteenth Street. set the emergency brake, and leaned back with a deep sigh.

  “You done good,” Hob said.

  “Yeah.” She smiled seriously. “When you’re good, you’re good. Have you a cigarette?”

  A cigarette is of course de rigueur after a high-speed car chase. In fact, that’s just about the only time Hob smoked after recently giving up tobacco. He fished out a Ducado, one of his few remaining Spanish cigarettes.

  She took it, her hands shaking as she lit it. She blew out smoke and said, “Look, you might as well know it, I’ve got problems.”

  26

  Luke’s Forget-Me-Not Good Eats 24 Hours a Day was located on Sixteenth Street near Second. It was a garish place, all neon and colored lights and mirrors and artificial flowers. There was a huge Wurlitzer pounding out the sentimental 1940s favorites that Moishe, the owner, preferred since they are what he had listened to on the kibbutz at Ein Klein the year before he emigrated to America. The waitresses were your standard industrial models, with blond
ined hair, wet lipstick that glowed in the dark, and pink uniforms that concealed sweaty misshapenness. Aurora ordered coffee and buttered toast.

  “Now look,” Hob said, “just what in hell is going on?”

  “It’s a long story,” Aurora said. “I don’t know where to begin. I don’t even know how to explain Paco.”

  “Begin with Max. Did he set me up for this?”

  “You have a very suspicious nature,” she said. “I assure you, Max knows nothing.”

  “What’s this with Paco you mentioned?”

  She hesitated. Her lower lip protruded slightly in one of the cutest moues of the year. “He’s sort of involved, in a way. But it’s complicated.”

  “And a long story, as you’ve already noted.”

  “Look,” Aurora said, her tone suddenly no-nonsense, “I have to pick up something and deliver it to someone. There’s no way around it, I have to.”

  “Couldn’t it wait until after Paris?”

  “I have to do it tonight.”

  “That sounds reasonable enough,” Hob said. “But it is becoming obvious that someone doesn’t want you to do it.”

  “Yes.”

  “If you keep on trying, you could get killed.”

  “Yes.”

  “So could I.”

  She gave a brave little smile. “I’m not afraid.”

  “Well, I am.”

  The brave little smile faded from her lips, to be replaced by a much less pretty expression of contempt. “You’re really a coward, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, though I fail to see what that has to do with it. The point is, why should I stick my neck out for you? My job was to find you and bring you to Paris. Nobody said anything about having to cope with a Mercedes full of gunmen for the same price.”

  “I guess not,” she said, sighing. “You’ve done what you agreed to do.”

  “Not exactly. I still have to get on a plane with you tomorrow morning.”

  “What happens if you don’t?”

  “Then I don’t get my bonus.”

  “Is it a big bonus?”

  It crossed Hob’s mind to tell her the bonus was insignificant. After all, why tell the truth when a lie will serve better? Having decided this, it surprised Hob to hear himself say, “If ten thousand dollars is big, it’s a big bonus.”

  She thought about that for a while, doodling on a napkin with an eyebrow pencil. Without looking up at him she said, “Hob, I need your help.”

  Hob’s heart leaped at the words, but the wizened dwarf in his head who had to pass on all matters of sentiment kept him under control.

  “Why should I help you? It’s true that you’re lovely and desirable, but even if you were planning on going to bed with me, which I doubt, we’re unlikely to live long enough to accomplish it.”

  “I am not going to bed with you,” she said. “But if you help me, I will pay you.”

  “Handsomely?” Hob asked.

  “Yes, handsomely.”

  “Okay, now let’s forget handsomely and talk real money. How much to help you do your errand?”

  She pondered. “It’s just one night’s work.”

  “In which I could be killed,” Hob reminded her.

  “How does five hundred dollars sound?”

  “A little less than handsome, given the circumstances.”

  “A thousand?”

  “A thousand, and a full explanation of what’s going on.”

  “What about two thousand and no explanation?”

  “Let’s say two thousand and an explanation, but you can lie and I’ll pretend not to notice.”

  “Two thousand dollars! It’s unethical of you to put up the price that way.”

  “It’s not going to come out of your pocket, is it?”

  “That has nothing to do with the ethics of the matter,” she said stiffly.

  “I’m afraid you’ve been watching too many private eye movies. Especially the sort in which the tough old private eye helps out the beautiful young lady just because she needs help. Actually, when the client is in distress, that’s when our product is most in demand, and it’s logical for the price to go up accordingly, according to the capitalistic system we live in which permits this sort of thing.”

  “Do other detectives think like you?”

  “Probably not. But I’m trying to start a trend.”

  She sighed. Women tended to sigh a lot around Hob. “Okay. We have a deal. You were only kidding about not knowing how to use the Luger, weren’t you?”

  “You’ll just have to show me how to load it and work the safeties. I can figure out the rest for myself.”

  “All right. Deal.” She held out her hand.

  Hob took it in both of his. “Before we shake on it, there remains the tiny question of money. What would be nice would be if you could manage the entire fee in advance in case one of us gets killed tonight.”

  Money! She looked at Hob as if he’d said a dirty word. Funny how beautiful women hate to lay out money even if it isn’t their own.

  “Do you take traveler’s checks?” she asked.

  “American Express or Barclay’s,” Hob replied.

  She pulled a slim wallet from her purse and signed over four five-hundred-dollar checks. Hob put them away in his wallet. This was going to help set up the Alternative Detective Agency, assuming he lived to cash them.

  Just then Paco came through the door, recognized Aurora, and came over to the table. It was late in the evening when the meeting finally took place. Probably around 10:00 p.m. Dotty Sayers, a waitress at Luke’s Forget-Me-Not Diner, remembered seeing the three of them:

  “Two guys and a woman. A beautiful woman, really a peach. I used to be quite a peach myself. That was before I had my trouble with the water thing. I guess you heard about that. That’s why you’re interviewing me, isn’t it? No? Well, never mind, these three people, they were in that last booth over there. I distinctly remember the tall man, not really tall but taller than the other guy, the one you tell me now was Hob Draconian. He was flipping the entries of that jukebox thing. He wanted to play something, but he couldn’t find just what he wanted. There were over a hundred selections, so it took him some time to look through them all. At last he found this old Crosby Stills Nash number. ‘Our House’ or some such sentimental shit as that. Two cats in the yard. Wooden ships. That sort of a number. The sort of thing they put in strictly for the old-timers. And this Hob person sort of settled back while the woman, Aurora, you called her, talked with Paco, the Indian-looking fellow. And I guess they talked awhile because they were still there when I looked at them again about fifteen minutes later. I was busy with a double manicotti and there was a funny thing about that. You don’t want to hear about it? All right, you don’t need to shout. No, I didn’t actually see the package change hands. I saw Paco take out something, but he had a scarf wrapped around it. It looked like a cashmere scarf to me, or possibly camel hair, and it was wrapped around something, something rectangular, or do I mean oblong, and then one of them took the package. I think it was the man. Yes, it was the man. No, wait, the woman reached for it.

  “And I heard the man, Hob, heard him say, ‘Are you sure you weren’t followed?’ And Paco said, ‘I think not, why?’ And Hob said, ‘Because that gray Oldsmobile with the broken radio antenna has been around the block three times.’ And Aurora looked at him sort of admiringly and she said, ‘You notice things like that, don’t you?’ And Hob said, ‘It’s my business, lady.’ Which I thought was very butch.”

  Dotty went on: “It was going hell-bent for ten o’clock when Aurora paid the check and they left the diner and stepped out into the murderous cacaphony of a weary whore of a New York night. The streets were full of a tinsel splendor in which hip Jamaicans in porkpie hats with skinny brims played three-card monte with loinweary damsels from the sisterhood of endless night. From neighboring bars and bistros came the sound of Dixieland, hot and dirty, just like they brought it up the river from New Orleans or down the rive
r from Chicago, depending on your orientation. Crack dealers stood in dim satanic doorways selling their vile drug to dwarves with flower faces. A multichanging manycolored stream of people poured by like an endless pride of lions. Paco and Aurora met and exchanged the package. And then the three of them went out the door and that’s when the gunfire started. The dark city streets. The streetlights. Long-legged shadows running down the streets lit by sinister streetlights of a steamy whore of a night with a touch of rain in the air and that smell of mayhem and decay that never leaves this queen whore of all the whore cities in the whoring universe. Sure, I saw the two men, but for me they had no features, they were nothing but shadows monstrously elongated like dream images on a nightmare canvas, or like something out of The Third Man. Hob was running ahead of them, and the woman was running with him. Her high heels clattered on the damp pavement, and lights from the nearby construction site picked out dazzling highlights in her intricate web of hair. Paco was bringing up the rear, but he abruptly dodged off into a side street. The two guys who were in pursuit ignored him. They were after Hob and the girl. And then the girl peeled off and took off on her own. She shouted something to Hob but he didn’t hear it. ‘Bon chance,’ maybe.

  “The two pursuers hesitated, looked at each other, and some sort of a signal must have passed between them. Or maybe one said something to the other. If so, Hob didn’t hear it because just then the mother of all garbage trucks came rumbling past and when the sound environment had cleared up, the girl was gone and you couldn’t even hear her clattering high heels anymore. That left Hob all by his lonesome with two guys coming at him deadly, and he kept on running until he came to a dead-end alley. Then he turned, and the pursuers, seeing they had him trapped, slowed down to an ominous tread and then came forward slowly. Hob could see winks of blued steel in their fists. Guns, what else could it be? And I strained forward trying to hear what they were saying, but I couldn’t make it out.”