Draconian New York (Hob Draconian Book 1)

by Robert Sheckley

  Inspector Fauchon would be less than human if he did not use his freedom of the city to take his coffee at a favorite café, and to show up for lunch at places that had found favor with him before. One of the serious amusements of Paris was choosing one’s habitual restaurant. That was different from finding a good restaurant. One’s habitual restaurant should serve pretty fair grub, of course, since someday you might have to bring your boss or your mistress. But you didn’t look for gourmet food five lunches a week. Not if you want to get anything else done. Fauchon had simplified his intake. He tried to eat an omelette every lunch of his life. This was easy to do in Paris, where omelette making was one of the last great impromptu culinary achievements. Crisp and yellow, perhaps slightly singed around the edges, slid into a shoulder of the skillet and dotted with melted butter, with perhaps a little melted Gruyère in it, or some fried potatoes and a bit of bacon … Well, you could see the possibilities. Fauchon saw them almost every day in Les Omelettes d’Sybaris, a ten-stool omelette joint on rue de Racine just north of rue de Rivoli and boulevard Sebastapol. It was his favorite eating place. How convenient when it also offered some opening into crime, because then he would be justified in eating there every day.

  In one respect at least Fauchon did not resemble your typical French police inspector. Others of his caste did not hurry, nearly every day, on feet made furtive by the irony of the situation, to a certain passageway off the rue Saint-Germain (fittingly named after that great mystic, the count de Saint-Germain, who, in the mid-1700s, fought and won several duels before it was discovered he was a woman and a mystic of exceptional abilities). Fauchon would go down this cul-de-sac until, halfway down, he came to a door painted a patchy fading blue, with a metal doorknob. This was always unlocked. Fauchon would open the door and go up two short flights of stairs. Ringing the bell that depended from a lanyard on the far end, he would wait, his expression saturnine and unfathomable, often smoking a Gauloise, sometimes tapping his foot impatiently.

  After leaving the place of the blue-washed door, Inspector Fauchon would go back to work, and his daily round became more predictable. To La Petite Crevice in the rue Royale for tea in the English fashion and to wait out the first waves of the evening rush hour in which people milled around for several hours, going simultaneously to and from the center and the suburbs. Then he took the metro home to Le Grenouille, stopping, on his way, at the kiosk on the corner of his street to buy one of those small twisted cigars steeped in rum that the convicts used to roll in Martinique in the mid-1800s and which Regie Francaise, the national tobacco cartel, brought out in 1953 as Le Petit Curlienne. He would put the cigar in his breast pocket to smoke after dinner. And he would ascend to his apartment, where Mme Fauchon would have dinner already on the table, typically something high on veal and low on veggies. It would be going on evening, and both Fauchons watched an hour or so of television in the evenings. We have lost the notations of which shows they watched, but since France has only two channels and their shows are as like each other as pois in a poid it hardly matters. Whatever they watched was erudite, imbued with clarity, tinged with elegant irony, and utterly boring in a nineteenth-century sort of way.

  And then to bed. Bed is indeed the inevitable conclusion of all our days, since most of us, those who sleep in the open under bridges no less than those who doss down in the mansions of the rich, are bound by the same circadian necessity to embark nightly on what Baudelaire called the sinister adventure.

  The Fauchons’ bedroom smelled pleasingly of lavender and patchouli. Sleep rounds out the day, wraps us in a cloak of forgetfulness so that we may forget what we did with the day, the innocent day that changed so utterly into the guilt-streaked night. And sometimes in the dark we roll over a little further than usual, encounter a familiar thigh or rump, and whisper, “Are you awake?” And hear the hoped-for reply, “Yes.”

  33

  Time at last to leave New York. Hob and Aurora were sitting in the back of the limo. Kelly was in front, driving. It was 5:45 a.m. by the little dashboard clock. Traffic was light. A slight ground mist was blowing in from the Atlantic Ocean.

  Hob’s thoughts at this time were far away, in Ibiza. His mind was full of random images of Ibizan people and places: the view of the sea from the cliff at Sa Comestilla, Harry Hamm’s scowling-cheerful face, Maria’s sad beauty, and cut through these were images of the brightly clad hippies at the weekly bazaar at Punta Arabi, all of this interlaced with occasional real-life images of Aurora, silent on the seat beside him, her pure profile outlined from time to time by the tiny twinkling lights of the city as seen from the Van Wyck Expressway.

  And cutting through all this was Kelly’s voice, telling a story as he drove, the story of how good it had been to live in Manhattan before the days of the Knapp Commission, in whose prejudiced eyes long-accepted police practices suddenly turned into acts of deepest villainy, and an entire police force had to recharacterize itself by denying what it had done for so long. Someone had to swing for it, of course, and the man picked for that was Kelly, straight and true, who never ratted on his associates, not even to save his own job; Kelly, whose years on the force went down the drain when the Knapp hanging judges forced him out of his job and into the cruel world to find a new sinecure to replace the old one. Kelly’s story was punctuated by any number of ad hominem devices like, “You know what I mean?” “You hear what I’m sayin’?” “I mean, what else was I to do?” And the like.

  Aurora was wearing a nicely cut dark blue traveling suit by Givenchy, a big patent leather shoulder bag, medium heels. Hob had on his usual jeans, tennis shoes, yellow T-shirt with black letters across the front spelling out Bhuddaghosa High, and on top of it a dark brown tweed jacket with leather elbow patches of the sort writers are assigned to wear in the parade of similitudes called Earth where they demonstrate such things for the rest of the universe.

  At Kennedy’s international departures, Kelly double-parked the limo and carried the suitcases into the airport. A sleepy clerk at the Air France counter stamped their tickets, glanced at their passports, and gave them boarding passes, a ticket to ride.

  “See ya around,” Kelly said, and left them at the X-ray machines. They passed these without incident, and proceeded through the rest of airport security to the embarkation lounge. Here Hob just had time to read the front-page stories in the New York Times, while Aurora pondered chapter 7 of Gibran’s The Prophet, and then the announcement came and it was time to board. They strapped in and soon the flight was under way.

  In the enforced intimacy of the plane, with its dimly glowing little lights, its soft-voiced flight attendants bringing you drinks, its vibrating hum that went right through you and became a part of you and helped enforce the belief that you were in a time apart from all other times, a timeless time, in this timeless atmosphere of intimacy, Hob and Aurora fell inevitably into conversation, made all the easier because of a certain sympathy between them, all the more strong because unacknowledged.

  Aurora spoke first of her life, how she had been born and raised on the island of San Isidro off the Atlantic coast of South America, not far from Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles. “It’s a small tropical island, quite pretty, quite friendly, and—how shall I say it?—quite hopeless.”

  Her mother, Faience, was a primary-school teacher and she had ambitions for her children, pretty little Aurora and careful Caleb, four years older. Aurora grew up on the island, in a style of rural poverty known around the world, her father either run off or secretly dead, no one was sure, but secure among her many aunts and uncles. She soon became a tall, slim, pretty, light-skinned girl, at fourteen modeling for the island newspaper, winning a Lesser Antilles beauty contest at sixteen and getting an all-expenses-paid trip to Miami.

  She found modeling work there without much difficulty. But she didn’t like the scene. She had absorbed the American ideal of picking her own friends, and deselecting those who didn’t please her. She wanted culture, which she had read about in s
chool. In Miami, culture consisted of Latin dance bands and Central American poets. The music was great, but the poets turned out to be disappointing. At the end of a love affair she went to New York.

  “I found work. I met some people. I met Max. That was about two years ago. And here I am.”

  Hob’s life came up next, and Hob touched on the highlights briefly. Raised in a small New Jersey town. His father a life insurance salesman, his mother a librarian. Graduated high school, served in the army in Korea, after discharge enrolled in NYU. Not long after graduation, with the indifferent grades of a boy-man who doesn’t know what he wants to do, he went to Europe. The picture cleared when he stumbled across Ibiza. His dream home. He spent the next fifteen years there and elsewhere in Europe.

  And of course his finca. He spoke at some length about that, his problems paying for it, its various excellencies.

  “It must be nice,” Aurora said, “to love something as much as that.”

  “Oh, it isn’t exactly love,” Hob said, and was hard-pressed to explain what he meant. “I mean, yes, I do love the place, but that’s not because it’s so lovable, it’s because it’s home.”

  “We’re alike in some ways,” Aurora said. “You’ve elected your own home. I haven’t found mine yet.”

  On that high note they exchanged addresses and telephone numbers in Paris. And then there was a movie, and then there was breakfast, and then there was another movie, and then a doze, and after that, the announcement came: “Please fasten your seat belts. We land at De Gaulle in ten minutes.”

  34

  They stumbled sleepily through De Gaulle, 10:34 in the evening Paris time, passed through immigration and were waved through customs. Outside, in the big outer room, there was a crowd of people awaiting arrivals, and men in that crowd holding hand-lettered signs with people’s names. One of those signs read, Hob Draconian—Aurora Sanchez. They walked up to the man. He wore a chauffeur’s cap, but had on a tan suit rather than the usual navy blue of the professional driver. He was in his early twenties, with dark curly hair, stubbly face, prominent mustache. He had a large mole on his face, and there appeared to be something wrong with his upper lip, perhaps a poorly fixed harelip. He appeared to be an Arab, or perhaps a street apache from somewhere in southern Europe.

  “Where is Mr. Rosen?” Aurora asked him, glancing around.

  “At his hotel.”

  “Why didn’t he come to meet us?” Aurora asked.

  “I know nothing about that,” the chauffeur replied in the Arab-accented tones of the Maghreb. “They simply told me at the agency to pick you up.”

  “And take us where?”

  “To Mr. Rosen’s hotel,” the man said. “Or wherever else you wish to go.”

  “It’s like Max not to show up himself,” Aurora said. “At least he always sends a car.”

  They followed the man out through the airport’s main doors. His vehicle, a rather battered Mercedes of some years, was parked at the curb. Hob thought about Kelly meeting him at Port Authority. Professional drivers seemed able to park where they pleased.

  There was a man sitting in the front seat passenger’s side. He was younger than the chauffeur, dark skinned, mustached, dressed in a dark shapeless suit. The driver said, “That is my cousin, Ali. I am Khalil.”

  Ali nodded to them vigorously. He scrambled out of the limo and took their suitcases, putting them in the trunk. He spoke to them rapidly, in ingratiating Arabic.

  Khalil said, “He’s saying he hopes you don’t mind him being here. He likes to listen to the radio. He’s just arrived here from Tamanrasset.” Khalil rolled his eyes to indicate that Ali was either unsophisticated or feeble-minded, or, as is sometimes the case, a bit of both. They all got in the Mercedes and soon were speeding down the autoroute toward Paris.

  35

  It was just past eleven at night. Hob watched the familiar highway signs come up indicating various destinations, most prominent of which was Paris. Traffic was heavy but moving right along, with a lot of heavy trucks from Belgium and Holland. In the front seat, Khalil and Ali were quiet, watching the road. The radio whispered Arab music. Aurora had her head back and her eyes closed. The car glided along hypnotically in a cocoon of swift-moving traffic. It was all very soothing, lulling, and Hob wasn’t prepared for it when the Mercedes suddenly and dramatically accelerated.

  Hob was thrust back into the seat. He struggled to sit straight and asked, “What’s going on?”

  Aurora gasped. Ali, turning from the front passenger seat, was showing a small blue-black automatic. It was not exactly pointed at them, but it was not exactly pointed away, either. It was ambiguous, like the scene they were in, but indications were on the sinister side.

  “Be tranquil,” Ali said, in accented English. “We have some company.”

  Hob caught color out of the corner of his eye and turned around and saw the flashing red and blue lights of a police car some thirty or so yards behind them. For a moment he didn’t want to take in the implications. “Slow down,” he said pettishly.

  Khalil continued accelerating, then cut the wheel sharply to the right. The car plunged down the exit ramp leading to the boulevard Aubervilliers. Behind them the police car braked sharply and, slamming against the curb, managed to get into the exit behind them. Its siren was screaming.

  They came out of the exit onto the boulevard at speed, causing traffic to pull sharply away from them as the Mercedes’ horn screamed for track. A traffic tie-up ahead posed an obstacle that Khalil managed by pulling into the oncoming traffic lane, dodging oncoming cars like fixed obstacles and gaining a block on the pursuing police car. Then he made a wheel-screeching right turn, and then another. The siren was fading away. Khalil brought the speed down to an unnoticeable city level as they went on.

  Aurora said to Hob, “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” Hob said, “but at the moment it doesn’t look too favorable.”

  “Pliz,” Ali said from the front seat, gesturing with the automatic, “no talking.”

  They sat in silence as Khalil negotiated backstreets, coming out at last on the boulevard de Belleville, going past the North African restaurants with their couscous and their delectable tajines, past the flashing neon signs of the restaurants of a burgeoning Chinatown, and then into a backstreet and then into another, narrow, with houses flashing by on either side, and then a quick left and a right again into even narrower streets, deserted, streets without sidewalks or pedestrians to walk on them.

  Khalil pulled to a stop in one such block.

  “We will not detain you much longer,” Khalil said. He had produced an automatic of his own. He spoke to Ali in swift Arabic. Ali got out and opened the passenger side door. He went around to the trunk, unlocked it, took out the pieces of luggage, and piled them on the sidewalk.

  “Open them,” Khalil said to Hob.

  “They’re not locked,” Hob said.

  Khalil snapped the latches and opened Hob’s suitcase. Rummaging around for a moment, he pulled out a brown paper bag. Opening it, he withdrew a round burlap bag the size of a loaf of bread. Stenciled on its side was the legend Basmati Rice, Product of India.

  “You always travel with rice?” Khalil asked him.

  “It makes the perfect gift,” Hob said.

  Khalil gave a short snort of an unamused laugh and tucked the automatic into his coat pocket. He found a pocketknife in an inside pocket, opened it, and slit the burlap bag across the top stitching. When he had a slit an inch wide he pushed in a forefinger and withdrew it covered with a white powder. He licked his finger and smiled broadly.

  “Yes, this is it,” he said to Ali. “Give me the tape.”

  Ali took a roll of black plastic tape and handed it to Khalil. Khalil tore off a piece and sealed up the burlap bag again and handed the roll back to Ali.

  “Okay,” Khalil said to Hob and Aurora. “You can go.”

  They started to move down the street.

  “Wait!” Khalil
said. “Don’t you want your suitcases?”

  Hob and Aurora came back and picked up their suitcases. Khalil said, “End of the block turn right and walk two blocks. That will bring you back to the boulevard de Belleville. You should have no trouble finding a taxi.”

  “Thanks,” Hob said.

  “Don’t mention it,” Khalil said. He engaged the clutch and the Mercedes sped off.

  36

  Max was standing in the doorway of his hotel suite, dressed in a flowered dressing gown, smiling broadly. “Hob! Aurora baby! You okay?”

  Tight-lipped, Aurora swept in. Hob entered behind her dragging both suitcases. He was arm-weary and disgruntled. He let solicitous Max guide him to an overstuffed chair. Hob collapsed into it.

  Aurora looked around, unimpressed, and said, “Where’s my room?”

  “Just down the hall,” Max said. “But let me get you a drink first. Rough flight?”

  “Hob will tell you all about it,” Aurora said, picking up her, suitcase and vanishing down the hall.

  “What’s with her?” Max asked Hob.

  Max was staying in a hotel suite at the venerable Hotel du Cygne on the boulevard Montparnasse. Although he had only been there a few days, already he was surrounded by the visual reminders of the great theatrical past of Paris: old billboards of Jean-Pierre Aumont in The Blonde Sailor, posters of Piaf, etc. Other names, other posters.

  “Aurora’s in a bit of a pet,” Hob said. “She hates being hijacked.”