Draconian New York (Hob Draconian Book 1)

by Robert Sheckley

  He never got the hang of it. Any of it.

  He asked his instructor, after one particularly exasperating session on the mat when he saw that he’d never get beyond the beginner’s white belt, “Isn’t there some fighting art that does not require training?”

  Hob’s guru smiled. “The finest art of all, beyond karate and aikido, beyond ninjitsu, is sun li, the art of the unpremeditated attack. It requires no training. In fact, training destroys its efficacy.”

  “That sounds like the one for me,” Hob said.

  “In order to employ it, a man’s heart must be pure, and his mind empty.”

  “My mind is often empty,” Hob said. “But pure heart? I think that leaves me out. Unless naïveté will do instead.”

  “You don’t understand what I mean by pure. It is not a judgment on your life. It refers only to your state in the moment of action. Purity is the absence of a gaining idea.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as, ‘I did this, I did that,’” his guru said. “As soon as you think a thought like that, your spontaneity vanishes, taking with it your skill. You are left only with the ineffective gesture of ego. When you face a fight, your opponent can be defeated, but not by you.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Hob said.

  As Fric advanced, Hob narrowed his eyes to slits, the better not to see trouble with. His body froze into the apparently awkward posture that presages the onset of sun li, the ultimate offensive. Fric came at him from the left, Frac straight on. Frac’s bulk, backlit by the swinging overhead bulb spinning at the end of its white plastic cord, cast its shadow over Hob a split second before his opponent himself arrived. Fric meanwhile, shoulders hunched and knees bent to minimize his already inconsiderable height, his shadow, side-lit, looming taller than the man himself, scuttled toward Hob like a giant spider in an attack all the more deadly for its appearance of ineffectuality.

  At this crucial moment, Hob’s body disconnected from his mind. His head moved of its own accord, with a mincing delicacy, allowing Frac’s swinging sausage arm to move harmlessly a fraction of an inch from Hob’s head. At the same moment Hob’s feet performed an economical little shuffle and Fric hurtled past him and banged hard into a wall and slid to the ground with a dazed expression on his face of a malevolent dwarf sired by a banshee.

  Hob saw this only out of the corner of his eye, of course, since his attention was taken up with the larger and more formidable Frac. His little shuffle, while evading Fric nicely, had done nothing for him anent the trajectory of Frac’s murderous onrush. There was time only, in a maneuver that will be sanctioned by the dojos of future, but is unheard of in this day and age, for him to thrust out his elbow, allowing Frac to ram his nose against it, and bringing him to so quick a halt that he was thrown back upon himself.

  At that point, recovering his balance nicely, Hob pushed himself hard into the ponderous but momentarily becalmed Frac, the point of his shoulder impacting against the man’s larynx. Frac blinked twice, his eyes bulged like peeled blue eggshells, and he collapsed in a heap in a manner reminiscent of reconstructions of how a brontosaurus would fall if it were to be shot in its tiny brain by a hunter from the future equipped with an express rifle and an insatiable desire for the great hunt.

  Hob stepped back, a chortle rising to his lips. His enemies were down and out. “I did it!” he cried aloud.

  At that moment, of course, the sun li technique failed him. His appreciation for his own cleverness, the inevitable gaining idea, blunted his senses. He did not hear the footsteps behind him, but knew later, in a moment of dry retrospection, that they were sounds that must have been logically present, since they were concomitant with the progress of whoever it was who got close enough to hit him across the back of the head.

  It would not be incorrect to say that stars exploded in his eyes. Hob found himself on the floor of the warehouse inching his free hand toward a shiny black object which lay conveniently close but could have played no part in his salvation even had he been able to reach it, since it was nothing but a galosh, and a worn one at that. Easy enough for Aurora to point that out later, when they were out of the mess. But how was Hob to know at the time that the black object was a galosh, and not a cosh? For that matter, how was he to know what was apparent to her from the moment of her return, gun in hand: that the screeching sound from above meant trouble for someone. For what should come plummeting down from the ceiling joists but a wheelbarrow full of pig iron in the form of large ingots, one of which missed Hob by no more than a foot, and another, rebounding off a rotting building member, ricocheted into Frac with sufficient force to remind the pasty-faced hit man that you gets no bread with one meatball.

  Hob did realize that it put the hit man out of action, whores de combat, as they used to say in the Rainbow Division, and forced Fric, now solo, into an instant change of plan. The skinny hit man in the long black overcoat, looking like a truncated William Burroughs filled with venemous green Jell-O, slapped his partner back to consciousness, and they both looked surprised at Aurora holding the Luger on them.

  “Take a gun, Hob,” Aurora said.

  Hob picked up one, noting carefully that the safeties seemed to have been released and the weapon was apparently in full firing position.

  And then the two hit men had scrambled to their feet and were running, Frac huge and quivering, moving fast for a fat man on small dancer’s feet, and Fric scuttling along beside him, a venemous small spider of a man, darting back into the shadows of the warehouse.

  And then they were alone, and the city was silent except for the sound of a motorcycle coming down the street.

  It was driven by a small man in a big leather jacket. The man was bald and had big ears. He dismounted, put the bike on its stand, killed the motor, and said, “Hob Draconian?”

  “That’s me,” Hob said.

  “Good. Harry Hamm phoned me. Said it was an emergency. I came here from Queens on my BSA. What seems to be the trouble?”

  “It’s all over now,” Hob said. “You’re late. But thanks for trying.”

  31

  In Fauchon’s office at the Quai des Ouvreves in Paris, Fauchon’s telephone rang. It was Radon, the chief supervisor. “Fauchon, I’ve got a long distance from New York. A Mr. Emilio Vasari, special agent of the Drug Squad. Inspector, I have already spoken to Bureau Chief Pasquinod, who has urged full cooperation. He assigned you to work with M. Vasari because you speak English.”

  “Yes, I speak her a little,” Fauchon said.

  “I’ll put him through now.”

  He waited. There was a clicking on the line. Then an American voice. “This is Emilio Vasari.”

  “What seems to be the trouble, Special Agent?” Fauchon asked.

  “I’ll get directly to it,” Emilio said. “A woman is traveling by Air France to Paris tomorrow morning. We have reason to believe that either she, or, more likely, her traveling companion, an American, will be carrying a large amount of cocaine in their luggage.”

  “Unwise of them,” Fauchon said. “Though the customs inspection at De Gaulle is frequently lax. Still, we can see to that. If you wish, I will call my colleague, Superintendent Grapneau, at the De Gaulle customs, and he will have his men search the luggage with especial care and arrest the criminals if your information turns out to be true.”

  “No, no, that’s not what I want at all,” Emilio said.

  “You do not?” Fauchon asked.

  “Certainly not. I’m not interested in arresting some mule, a carrier, I mean, which I’m sure is what this operation is. I want whoever they’re delivering it to.”

  “And do you know who that is?”

  “Strictly between us?”

  “Oh yes,” Fauchon said. “I am aware that I have seen no evidence yet.”

  “We believe they’re delivering it to a Mr. Max Rosen. He’s a model agent, and he’s presently in Paris on business. We already have a few things on Mr. Rosen. He’s flying over the two people in question at
his own expense. They’re leaving from his apartment. Although we have no direct evidence, I believe Mr. Rosen is going to make a dope sale out of this.”

  “You could be right,” Fauchon said. “It’s certainly worth looking into.”

  “Yes, but tell me this, Chief Inspector. Can you let these people through customs and then put a tail on them so we’ll know where they go after they leave De Gaulle airport?”

  “And when we reach the source, when they turn the alleged cocaine over to Mr. Rosen, or someone else, is it then that you want the arrest?”

  “No, I just want you to follow them, learn who they’re delivering to. I want to be in on the arrest. I’ve been working on this case for almost two years.”

  “I can understand your feelings,” Fauchon said. “I will be pleased to greet you when you arrive. Will it be your first time in Paris? Do you have the police headquarters address? Good. Tell me the flight number and the names of the people.”

  “It’s Air France three forty-two arriving day after tomorrow at ten-thirty p.m.”

  Fauchon scribbled. “And their names.”

  “Aurora Sanchez. And the man is Hob Draconian.”

  Fauchon cocked an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Draconian. Shall I spell it for you?”

  “No need,” Fauchon said. “I know perfectly well how to spell it.”

  Later, sitting alone in his office, Fauchon wondered why Hob was doing this. From their previous encounter on the case of the missing sailboards, Fauchon had formed what he considered an accurate idea of Hob’s character. The man might be inept, but he was not criminal.

  The more Fauchon thought about it, the more disturbed he became. He had a liking for the feckless American. There was a sweetness about Hob that no attempt at being tough could conceal. So what was up?

  After thinking about it for a few minutes, Fauchon decided to see what he could learn. He called Hob’s friend and business associate, Nigel Wheaton, and asked him if he could drop into police headquarters for a chat. Nigel, all aplomb, said he’d be delighted.

  32

  Nigel came in half an hour later wearing an old but very well made tweed suit from one of the famous British men’s tailors. Wheaton’s beard was freshly brushed, his wild reddish blond hair was somewhat kempt. Nigel sat down in the straight-backed wooden chair facing Fauchon’s desk.

  “Coffee?” Fauchon asked. He pressed a buzzer without waiting for a reply. When Saucierre, the new man, poked his head in the door, Fauchon sent him down to the brasserie for coffee and croissants.

  “That will be nice,” Nigel said. “You’re looking well, Inspector.”

  “Appearances are deceiving,” Fauchon said. “I have recently had—what do you call it?”—he gestured at his stomach. “Un crise de foie.”

  “Liver trouble,” Nigel supplied. “The famous French liver.”

  “Yes. Precisely.”

  “Sorry to hear it. Is there anything I can do for you, Inspector?”

  “Oh, no, no. I just like to chat with my friends from time to time. Tell me, Nigel, have you been in touch recently with Hob?”

  “Talked with him just a few hours ago. He’s returning to Paris today, as I’m sure you know.”

  Fauchon nodded. “Is all well with Hob? Has he any special concern on his mind these days?”

  Nigel looked at him, considered several lies, finally decided to tell the truth this time, since Fauchon probably knew it anyhow.

  “Hob has a property in Ibiza, what they call a finca. It is a farmhouse and several hectares of land. Recently the mortgage on it fell due. Hob has been trying to raise money to pay it off.”

  “Is there a deadline?”

  “Rather a severe one, I fear. July fifteenth.”

  “And if Hob does not raise the money?”

  “Then he stands to lose the finca.”

  “Does it mean so much to him, this finca?”

  “I’m afraid it does.”

  “But why?” Fauchon asked. “My understanding is that Ibiza is nothing but a cheap vacation spot. A cut-rate Miami Beach of Europe, n’cest pas?”

  “That’s very apt, Inspector,” Nigel said. “But to some people, expecially those who came there in the sixties, Ibiza is something rather different.”

  “Different? How?”

  “For many it makes a rite of passage.”

  “Please explain what a rite of passage is.”

  Nigel thought for a moment, then said, “In Anglo-Saxon countries everybody knows what it means when a group of men meet and spend an evening together pounding drums. That is intended to be a rite of passage. They want to belong to something.”

  Like many Anglo-Saxon things, Fauchon found this almost incomprehensible, but nodded anyway.

  “We can assume that they haven’t found anything to belong to, because if they had they’d be belonging to it already. Since they haven’t found it, they’re expressing their faith that it does exist, somewhere. That there’s something worth doing. Something worth fighting for. Worth living for. Owning your own little farm in Ibiza is part of that dream for them. It is a way of saying, I am not a footloose wanderer with no home and no family. I belong somewhere.”

  “Interesting,” Fauchon said. “And you think this analysis pertains to Hob?”

  Nigel said that people like Hob had a lot of trouble trying to figure out what was worth living for. Home. Mother. Country. Those were the standard short list. For many people, including Hob, they didn’t ring the bell. What Hob loved was Ibiza. But not the real thing. Hob loved his dream of Ibiza.

  Nigel went on to explain that the Ibiza of dreams didn’t really exist except as a sort of Platonic form, but that was what Hob loved. For him, Ibiza was the golden dream of eternal youth, of a better life, a piece of utopia for oneself. Not perfect, no; but its very faults gave it verisimilitude.

  That was the best Nigel could do in the way of an explanation, and Fauchon knew he would have to be content with it. After the coffee arrived, the two men drank and chatted about the deterioration of Paris. That was always a safe topic.

  Emile-Marie Baptiste Fauchon was born in Cagnes-sur-Mer. His father was a colonel of spahis in the French Foreign Legion. The family saw little of Jean-Phillipe-Auguste Fauchon during Emile’s formative years. The colonel was stationed mostly in Sidi-bel-Abbès in Algeria during those years, where he was in charge of the quartermaster’s depot. Fauchon’s mother, Corinne, was youngest of the Labat sisters of the great perfume-making city Grasse. Fauchon lived his first ten years in Cagnes-sur-Mer. After his father’s retirement the family moved to Lille, where Colonel Fauchon took on a job as principal of the Ecole Superieur. There, barring occasional holidays at a house the family owned in Normandy, Fauchon remained until he enrolled in the Polytechnique in Paris. After graduation he did his military service, which involved first a tour as a guard at the French mission in Tonkin, and then service in the French Police Militaire. By now Fauchon’s preference for police and military life was well established. He joined the Paris gendarmerie soon after retirement from the service, and rose through the ranks to chief inspector.

  He lived in a large apartment on the rue de Tocqueville in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, just down the block from the Ecole des Affaires de Paris. His wife, Marielle, was a plump, comfortable woman with lively black eyes who usually wore light-colored organdy dresses. Sterile due to an obscure birth defect, Marielle lavished her maternal attention on a one-eyed orange cat named Touissant and had a small but flourishing vegetable garden growing in pots on the roof of their building. She had inherited two small vineyards near Villeneuve-sur-Lot in Guienne and let them out to local growers. The income, though small, provided a useful addition to the salary of a French inspector of police.

  Emile Fauchon awakened at 7:00 a.m. every day including Sundays, though he would have liked sometimes to lie in. Typically, when he opens his eyes, a cold clear white light fills the room: the logical, clear-sighted, slightly cold French dawn. He
took care not to awaken Marielle, who rises soon after he leaves to take up her own daily round. This included shopping for dinner in half a dozen little shops on the narrow streets of her neighborhood; giving three hours a week to the Croix Rouge; and so on.

  Fauchon’s day took him entirely out of the quartier, by metro to the Fifth Arrondissement police headquarters in the place Malsherbes. The police building occupies the entire block and was an uninspired granite box with slightly incongruous marble columns designed and built by Herce in 1872. Within it was a warren of offices and corridors, with many different levels connected by staircases set in unexpected places. During the Nazi occupation this building’s interior was hastily remodeled to serve as headquarters for the new Ministry of Mines and Harbors for the Seine and the Loire. Dozens of large offices were converted into hundreds of tiny ones. And when the police were given the place in 1947 for their new headquarters, it was found that the vast number of offices and cubicles was no more than what was needed to fill the needs of the bureaucracy, the infrastructure, the permanent cadre, the records division, and so on.

  The duties of a special branch detective, as Fauchon actually is, could take him all over Paris, and even all of metropolitan France. The French allowed their officials considerable latitude in this regard, though any unusual actions and certainly any unusual expenses had to be justified later. It was the duty of special officers like Fauchon to be generalists whose study was not so much the individual crime as the ever-changing maladies in the body social. They did not necessarily go out on cases: they studied where and under what circumstances a case might have taken place. Their job was to be sensitive to the changing trends of crime. These special branch inspectors turned up at the snob bar of Closerie des Lilas and at the vulgar entertainments of La Cannebiere. You could find a special branch inspector sitting on a bollard beside the Saint-Martin canal, puffing on a pipe, perhaps, or cracking peanuts and tossing their shells into the oil-rainbowed water. Or he might be ordering a Tunisian sandwich at one of those little places off the boulevard Saint Michel, or strolling in deep contemplation in the Strangers’ Wing of Pere Lachaise Cemetery, taking communion perhaps with Dupin, his spiritual forefather, not, of course, buried here, since he never lived, except in the only true sense, figuratively.