Draconian New York (Hob Draconian Book 1)

by Robert Sheckley

  “It is just the celebration,” Fauchon said.

  “What celebration?”

  “Bastille Day, of course.”

  “Bastille Day,” Hob repeated. He thought for a moment. “Then this must be July fourteenth.”

  “That is when Bastille Day falls,” Fauchon said.

  Hob stood up as though an electric current had passed through him.

  “What’s the matter?” Max asked.

  “I’m supposed to be in Ibiza tomorrow!” Hob cried.

  “Is that the day of the famous traspaso?” Fauchon asked.

  “Yes, it is! I gotta get out of here! Inspector, if you will excuse me …”

  57

  Just try to get into, out of, or around France on Bastille Day. Hob had Fauchon drop him at a taxi rank and he took a cab to his apartment on the boulevard Massena. He threw a few things into an overnight bag, grabbed his passport, and hurried off to his travel agent on the avenue d’ltalie. His agent, Hassan, told him it was impossible to get to Ibiza today; it was not even possible to get there in a week, everything having been booked up months in advance. Didn’t Hob know that Ibiza was the most popular destination in Europe, and Bastille Day the beginning of the great migration out of Paris?

  Hob tried the ancient solution to all travel difficulties: money. He promised Hassan the four hundred dollars Max had just given him—fanned the bills out in front of him—and begged him to get him to Ibiza, or as close to there as he could, somehow. It was a matter of life or death. Hassan suspected it was more like an irresistible impulse, but set to work on the telephone, talking, arguing, cajoling, lying, threatening, charming, imploring—all the tricks a man will use to get his own way when there’s money involved. Finally, by promising a friend of his at Cook’s two hundred dollars—in addition to the four hundred for him—he got Hob on a chartered flight to Barcelona, with a place on a waiting list for room on the evening flight to Ibiza.

  At Orly Airport they seemed to be playing an occidental version of the fall of Shanghai. Hob fought his way through the dense crowds of holidaymakers, bullied his way to the front of the line, found out the clerk knew nothing of his reservation, and refused to move until the man had discussed the matter with his superior and the reservation had been found. At last he got aboard the airplane.

  On the two-and-a-half-hour flight to Barcelona, Hob had time to go over the state of his money. He had gotten $1,500 walking-around money from Max’s apartment, $2,000 from Aurora, and two payments from Max, one for $250, and the last for $400. It all come to $4,150. He had given Nigel $50, then later given Nigel and Jean-Claude $100 each. He had spent close to $100 in Paris. Then $400 had gone to Hassan the travel agent, and another $200 to Hassan’s friend at Cook’s, and almost $200 for the ticket to Barcelona. That came to $1,150, leaving him with about $3,000. Not enough to pay off the traspaso, but maybe he could talk the lawyers into letting him pay part down, part later, or buying an extension, even a one-month extension. . . . Forlorn hope, but he had to do what he could.

  Barcelona airport, and the usual summer madness. Here his luck ran out. The flight he was short-listed for had been canceled because of engine trouble. The next flight he could get was four days away.

  Hob booked it anyway. The fifteen-minute flight cost less than a hundred dollars. Then he wandered around the airport, weary and unshaven, laying to think of something. And as he walked past a row of airport services, his eye hit upon the writing on a door: Catalan Air Services. Charter Flights Arranged.

  Yes! He walked in the door.

  58

  The high-wing Cessna float plane came dipping out of the sunshine above the city of San Antonio Abad, second largest habitation on the island of Ibiza. It was a brilliant day. A hard northern wind was blowing in from Europe, driving out the famous mistral, scouring the land. It was a chilly wind, expecially for this midmonth weekend in July, just at the height of the tourist season. The people had descended on Ibiza this year in their thousands and their tens of thousands. From France and Germany they had come, and from England and Scandinavia. Nowadays there were even tourists from Russia and the Eastern European countries. Funny how everybody was able to afford a holiday in the sun. Odd that they had all chosen to come here.

  It was middle European mating madness time. When the young of all countries pack up their lusts and journey to the Latin south, to Ibiza, with its sand beaches and its countryside scattered with discotheques and typic restaurants, to Ibiza, where the fashion scene ran nightly in the Old Port of the city, a place so picturesque that it would only be a matter of time before a series of nostalgic films would be made there.

  Ibiza, where the air in July is electric with sex. Where the wine flows and the drugs gurgle. Where the art galleries roam. Ibiza, a place with many points in common with resort places all around the world, but absolutely unique, with its own mix of big money and low hippie style.

  The float plane, droning in the air above San Antonio, began to descend in wide shallow turns. The beautiful bronzed people on the San Antonio beach didn’t pay it much mind. There was a constant buzz of air traffic around the place, most of it big jumbo jets from Frankfurt and Paris and Amsterdam and Milan, bearing the seekers after pleasure. But there were also the little planes, because since millionaires had moved to the island, there had been a growing fleet of small-engine pleasure craft. The little seaplane did not belong to this class of airplane, however. It was obviously a utilitarian model, a worker of the skies, not a player, one of those planes that hire out from Barcelona, ready to take you to the Alps or the Sahara, wherever you wanted to go, with a minimum of fuss, ducking under radar, if necessary, because these sometimes carried the new mercenaries of the world, ready to take on any job, and not too particular on its being legal.

  Yet the question remained: Why was this particular plane coming down over San Antonio Bay? If it was a smuggling run, they had picked the wrong time for it. Smuggling runs were done by night. What was it doing there, then? Well, consider: a float plane has to come down upon water, and the only water calm enough to permit a landing was San Antonio Bay. But that was not today, because that invigorating wind out of northern Europe was blowing up considerable wave action. Despite this, the ship descended to wavetop height, flying parallel with the deep water markers.

  Twelve hundred was not bad, considering. But now he was there, and he found he couldn’t get off.

  “I can’t do it, senor,” the pilot said. “It’s much too rough. I warned you of this possibility, remember?”

  Quickly, before he could lose his nerve, Hob said, “Tell you what. You’ll go down low and drop to stalling speed above the water, just beyond the beach. I’ll walk the last couple of feet. Jump, I mean.”

  The pilot considered that, then nodded. “Yes, I suppose you could do that.”

  “Okay,” Hob said, slightly disappointed that the pilot hadn’t at least tried to talk him out of it.

  Swimmers on the beach were suddenly rewarded with the unwelcome sight of a float plane coming in low and flat over the water, heading straight for the closely packed bathers.

  Behind the beach there were a million dollars’ worth of boardwalk stores and snack bars. If the plane missed the bathers, it seemed a good bet to take out some real estate.

  Between the beach and the open water there were 568 bathers in the water, in imminent peril as the little Cessna came boring in.

  Those nearest the middle of the plane’s line of flight—where the worst swath would be cut should the plane continue landward past a certain limit marked by a line of white buoys—began to panic. They made shooing motions at the airplane. Moans and cries came from five hundred throats in seven different languages and sixteen distinguishable dialects.

  The plane came on. It was a black blob with the sun directly behind it, coming in just above the water. Those watching saw another black dot, a smaller one, detach itself from the larger black dot. It fell to the water’s surface. The plane meanwhile swept upward abo
ve the heads of the bathers.

  After a moment’s sigh of relief, the bathers remembered the second black dot that had fallen from the first one. Was it a bomb? Or had somebody dumped a body?

  “I’ve got it!” a man cried. It was a body. A live, kicking, expostulating and spluttering body. A body trying to explain something to people who weren’t prepared to listen.

  The bathers circled him, shaking their fists, certain that this person had permitted himself to be used as a projectile in some crazy terrorist attack aimed at them.

  Their rage and self-righteousness might have proven difficult for Hob had not a tall, dark, black-haired, black-mustached man with a small tattoo on his left arm and a badge fastened to his trunks put up his hand in an authoritative manner. The crowd fell back, not willing to transgress what might be the law with what might be an inadequate reason.

  “I am a policeman,” the man said. “Senors, please make way. I will take this man into custody.”

  59

  Hob had never before seen the inside of a Spanish jail. That is not as much of an accomplishment as it might seem, because the Spaniards in those bygone golden days were slower than their fellow Europeans at locking up foreigners, perhaps owing to the famous indolence with which Spanish law suffered, combined with the argumentativeness of those whose job it was to administer it. Still, once they had locked someone up, they tended to forget about him.

  Hob’s stone cell probably dated from the Inquisition. A wooden frame bed. A single wooden chair. The stone floor, a dull red, and well swept. To one side, a small table with washbasin. A bidet. A window high overhead, too narrow to permit the egress of anyone but a midget with climbing equipment. This cell was in the old Fortaleza Prison in that section of Ibiza called the Dalt Villa. It was the highest part of town, above the Roman wall, above the Carthaginian and Arab antiquities. A clear hard bar of sunlight lay across one wall. The only sounds you could hear were the far-off cries of vendors in the open-air market far below.

  Hob was doing nothing. He was just sitting. Hob had spent years considering meditation, and sometimes getting very close to attempting it. As a concept it appealed to him very much. He was especially fond of contemplating vipassanna meditation. The idea of studying mindfulness was very precious to him. Hob adored mindfulness. He found it all the more desirable since mindfulness was a quality in which he was singularly lacking. Hob often tried to meditate in the many towns and cities he lived in, but always, the hustle and bustle of everyday life interfered with his efforts.

  There was nothing to do in his cell. The police hadn’t given him as much as a paperback book with which to pass the time, not even a Spanish newspaper. Hob couldn’t quite make out the reason why, but he was to understand that their bringing him to the jail was not a formal arrest but rather a request for him to talk to them. He wasn’t to consider this a literal arrest, at least not yet. The reasons for this strange behavior cannot be fathomed. Who can understand the actions of even one’s own police? If their own motives are so often impenetrable, how much more so those of the Guardia Civil in a country with a divided soul, Spain of our sorrows? Perhaps it had helped that Hob had mentioned the name of his friend, Lieutenant Novarro, a lieutenant in the Guardia Civil, as soon as he was taken into custody.

  Hob had reached the point where he could avoid thinking about any of that. He sat with his legs folded, in a corner, facing the wall. He had been sitting like this for almost three-quarters of an hour. His mind was blessedly blank. He was finally getting into the meditation thing, finally reaching the point where worldly concerns didn’t concern him any longer. And then Novarro had to mess it up by unlocking his cell door and striding in with his black riding boots.

  “Hob! What is this all about? Sergeant Diaz says you were dropped from an airplane onto innocent bathers in San Antonio Abad.”

  “I wasn’t dropped. I jumped from a pontoon. And I wasn’t trying to hit anybody. Quite the contrary. I was trying to avoid them, and I succeeded.”

  “But why? Why did you do it?”

  Hob got up from the floor and stretched his legs. “Ramon, you know why I did it. It was the only way I could get onto the ground. And I had to get onto the ground because of the traspaso.”

  He didn’t have to say any more. On an island as small as Ibiza, not counting the million or so people passing through every year but counting only more or less permanent residents, everyone knew of Hob’s difficulties.

  “But Hob! You are already too late!”

  “I’m not! This is July fifteenth, when the payment is due.”

  “Hob,” Ramon said. “You were sent a notice. Since Saint Francis Xavier’s day falls on the fifteenth this year, the date of your payment was moved to July thirteenth.”

  “They can’t do that!” Hob howled. But his argument, he knew, was pro forma and entirely without merit. He had lost.

  60

  Hob and Ramon were riding together out into Ibiza’s Morna Valley, sitting side by side in Ramon’s gunmetal Deux Chevaux. They were running down the main road toward San Carlos at the northern end of the island. Just past the old silver mine, they turned off the main road and took a dirt track. It led between cornfields and vineyards. The vegetable fields were bare, since it was high summer. Each field had an algorobo tree planted in the middle. Along the sides, there were olive trees, very old, gnarled. Pine, algorobo, olive, almond, the trees of the Balearic Islands. They jounced along and the road becomes rockier and turned up into the central spine of hills that run down Ibiza’s center like a ridge on a hog’s back. Hob was amazed, not for the first time, at how large this little island was in terms of enfolded space. The place seemed endless when you traveled inland along the dirt roads that explore each turn and fold of land and connect every point to every other point and have done so since ancient times. Hob could never forget that Ibiza was one of the ancient places of the earth, where humans had lived continuously for thousands of years. Half the world had ruled this place, and then descended into the past to make way for the next. Various waves of prehistoric people. Then Iberians, Phoenicians, Arabs, Visigoths, Carthaginians, Romans, Catalans, and at last, Spanish. But the people of the island, the ruled, remained more or less the same through the centuries. They were a sturdy offshoot of the Catalan people, secure in their possession of the most beautiful place on earth. A place that Hob thought was now doomed to be trashed in order to stay in step with the rest of the earth.

  They labored up the hills in second gear, and they weren’t talking. What was there to say? And then they came into the curving track where Don Esteban’s land began. They toned into it and ran along a drystone wall, then made a turn into the farmyard.

  There were a number of vehicles there, including one taxi from Santa Eulalia. Someone must have paid plenty, because normally the drivers don’t want to take their Mercedes-Benzes on these narrow difficult roads. Don Esteban’s family was outside, sitting in the sun in little straw-covered chairs. It looked like a party. Old Don Esteban waved as Hob got out of the car. His two sons were there. They looked surly, but so far were acting polite.

  Hob said, “Look, I know, I’m late with the payment, and legally I don’t have a leg to stand on. But I’ve got the money. I’ve got it now.”

  Don Esteban said, “Hob, my old friend. Don’t worry, it has already been paid.”

  “What?”

  “By the beautiful young woman who said she was your friend.”

  “What woman?”

  “She didn’t give her name. But the money—that was there. We all witnessed it. Didn’t we, boys?”

  The two sons nodded, still surly. But Hob thought he could see the beginning of a tendency to accept him anyhow, since what was done was done and you might as well make a legend out of it. He could tell that someday he would become an honorary member of the family. Meanwhile, however …

  “This woman. Where is she?”

  “She might be at your finca, Don Hob. After all, she paid for it.”

/>   “I’ll be back later for a proper celebration,” Hob said.

  And there was nothing for it but that he had to get right back into Ramon’s car and they began sliding and lurching down the hill. They went back to the main road and turned north toward San Carlos and Cape San Vincente. Ramon knew the way as well as Hob. They hit some speeds and took some foolish chances. They went off the main road again and wound up into the hills. The 2CV slipped and slid and grunted and complained, but kept on coming. And they came at last to C’an Poeta.

  61

  Hob raced toward the door. He called inside, “Anybody home?”

  Several people came out. There was Lonesome Larry, and Handsome Harry, and Harry’s girlfriend, and the girl who was always hanging out with Harry’s girlfriend. They flocked around him. But Hob had no time for them. Not yet. He was looking around. And then, there was Aurora, coming down the stairs, wearing a beautiful white dress with many things clinging to it and flying from it.

  Hob said, “You paid my traspaso?”

  “Yes,” Aurora said.

  “But why?”

  “Max and I figured we owed it to you. Max had promised it. That was one thing. And without your help there in Paris, things could have worked out a lot worse then they did.”

  It was no place to hold a conversation, there in the entrada with Hob’s houseguests gaping at them. Hob led Aurora to his own room, upstairs in one of the wings.

  Paris seemed a long way away. But Hob remembered now, and said, “Did you hear about Emilio’s death?”

  Aurora nodded. “There’s an item about it in today’s Herald Trib.” She shuddered. “I won’t pretend I’m sorry. He was a thoroughly despicable man. But I’m sorry he was killed. I wouldn’t want to see anyone killed. I suppose it was that Khalil?”