Authors: Robert Sheckley
The place appeared to be quite old, dug for the finca that had been here before the hotel. A string of bare electric bulbs was strung along the walls. Hob found a pull switch and turned them on. By their dim light he could see that the walls were rough-hewn out of limestone, unfinished. The place was cool and dry inside. Nice after the heat of the day outside.
Working his way along, Hob saw that the cellar extended into a natural rock cavern. The cases of wine and champagne were stacked up along the walls. Hob walked past the last case and shone his flashlight into the darkness beyond. The passageway slanted down, and he could see no end to it.
“You guys get started,” Hob called to the waiters. “Find the Château Yquem and take some of it up. I’ll be right with you.”
He continued deeper and deeper into the rock that lay beneath the hotel. After fifty or so feet the cavern began to narrow. It was here that Hob found a pile of boxes covered with a green tarpaulin. It blended so well with the walls that he almost walked past it.
The tarp had been tied into place around the boxes. Hob untied one of the corners and pulled it back. He found a stack of wooden crates. He got out his Swiss Army knife and, with considerable difficulty, levered up one of the boards, almost cutting his finger in the process. At last he got it and saw that inside, packed in excelsior, were a number of small green objects. Lifting one of them, he shone the flashlight beam on it. Yes, it was one of his green bottles all right. It was filled with a heavy, liquid substance. He shook it. The liquid moved slowly, with a sleepy, luxurious motion that Hob could almost describe as evil. He didn’t think it was a sample size of Lavoris. This was soma.
Hob replaced the bottle in the excelsior and put the top strip back on. He retied the tarp, leaving it more or less as he had found it. Then he hurried back to the kitchen, bringing the last half-dozen bottles of Château Yquem with him.
After depositing the bottles in the kitchen for Juanito to open, Hob picked up another tray of appetizers and went out again.
He could see that some of the guests were already leaving. It was late afternoon. The real festivities, which were only for the hotel’s backers and special guests, would begin in an hour or so. He still hadn’t found Nigel. But at last he did spot Bertha.
“Going now?” he asked her.
“In a few minutes. Do you need a ride?”
“I can’t leave yet. But I want you to get hold of Ramón at the Guardia Civil barracks in Ibiza. Tell him this is an illegal gathering, and we need the services of him and his men in the patent-leather three-cornered hats.”
“Hob, have you been drinking? Doping?”
“No, I’m just high on role-playing. Will you do what I ask? You are working for the agency, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am. And frankly, this party is a stone bore anyway. Can I put this canapé back on your tray?”
“Yes, but don’t let anyone see you. That’s it. Off you go now.”
4
Hob, still keeping an eye open for Nigel, wandered around the hotel. He strolled into the Lilac Room and saw Vana, his rescuer from Arranque’s hoods of several nights ago.
Vana said, “It is good to see you, senhor. There is someone over here who would like to meet you.”
Vana pointed to a very sunburned, balding man sitting in a wing chair in the corner and smoking a cigar.
“Allow me to produce my patron, Senhor Silverio Vargas.”
The two men shook hands. Vargas indicated a chair. Vana moved a discreet distance away, close enough to be at hand if anything should come up, far enough so that he was not eavesdropping on the conversation.
Vargas said, “Let’s get right to the point. Tell me, Mr. Draconian, what is your interest in this situation with Arranque?”
“A man I know, Stanley Bower, was killed in Paris. His brother hired me to find his murderer.
“And you suspect Senhor Arranque?”
Hob nodded. “You could say that.”
Vargas smiled and thought a long time before he spoke. “You are not, by any chance, out to make a name for yourself by breaking a big drug connection?”
“No, I’m not,” Hob said. “I’ve told you my interest in the case. I have another friend who may be involved. Unwittingly. I want to get him clear, too.”
“If you could do that much, would you stay clear of the drug connection?”
“I would.”
“How can I know that?”
“Hey, look at me,” Hob said. “My face is my fortune.”
Vargas studied Hob’s face for a while. Then smiled again. “It is a good face. Very Norte Americano. Ingenuous. Determined. Idealistic. Naive.”
“You’ve got me down to a T,” Hob said.
“And facetious. But never mind that. Mr. Draconian, I think our interests may intersect here. I think we might be able to help each other.”
“I’m not going to join your gang, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“No, no! You really are delightful, Mr. Draconian. But I suppose you get results in your own way. No, let us put some cards on the table. You probably know by now that a very large drug operation is soon to begin.”
“I’ve been under that impression.”
“Just between us, I have an interest in it.”
“I won’t tell a soul.”
“Thank you. More to the point, my son, Etienne, is also involved in this matter. He got into it entirely without my knowledge. To the point of danger.”
“Tell me about it,” Hob said. “If you want to, that is.”
“I think that I do. Vana has told me you are someone to confide in. Vana is never wrong. Well, let’s have a little drink, and a cigar, and I’ll begin.”
Vargas got up and poured drinks. He opened a cedar-lined box, and Hob accepted a Havana like they used to make Havanas and still do if you’re not an American. They lit up.
“My son’s involvement in this matter,” Vargas said, “is really my fault. Vana has told me so, and I might as well confess it up front. I kept the boy on too tight a leash. I didn’t give him enough money I thought an unlimited airline ticket good year-round for any place on the earth, and his quite generous allowance, would be sufficient. I wanted him to steady himself, to be something more than a rich man’s son.” Vargas puffed his cigar into life and regarded the glowing tip for a moment. “I wanted him to be a lawyer, to move in the best society, to enjoy all the advantages that I never had. I came up the hard way, Mr. Draconian, and in a hard world where you had to take what you wanted.”
Hob leaned back. One of the perils of the private detective trade was that wealthy men were forever telling you their life stories. In this case, however, it looked as if it might be an interesting story. And the cigar was very fine.
“The fact is,” Vargas said, “and this is just between us, I have some financial interest in this operation. But I was shocked to hear that Etienne had involved himself, and through his girlfriend, that Annabelle person, was in trouble with Senhor Arranque and some of the other backers.”
“That figures.”
“My first duty is to my family. Etienne is safe now, at my own finca, under the eyes of my guards. I do not like the way this whole thing is going. What seemed to be a safe little operation at first is turning into a decidedly perilous matter. There will be a final vote this evening as to whether to continue or not. I am inclined to vote against. It will be a risky thing to do, but I have my own safeguards. You, however, are in a precarious position, Mr. Draconian.”
“So I’m starting to think,” Hob said.
“It’s what comes of trying to play a lone hand. I suggest that you stick with me and Vana for the remainder of the evening. You will be safer that way.”
“Thanks,” Hob said. “But I’ve got a few other things to do.”
“Well, try to be careful. We will all be lucky to get of out of this with whole skins.”
5
Juanito was just packing up to leave. “Aren’t you leaving with us?” he asked Hob.
“I can’t. I haven’t found Nigel yet.”
Juanito hesitated, trying to think how to phrase what he was going to say next. “Might it not be dangerous for you to stay on? ”
Hob nodded glumly. “But it’ll be just as dangerous for Nigel. Would you mind fixing me a tray with a bottle of champagne and two glasses?”
“Okay,” Juanito said. He set up a good-looking tray with two chilled champagne glasses on it and a bottle of the hotel’s finest champagne. “I guess you know what you’re doing.”
Hob didn’t. But he had always suspected that the greater part of being a private detective was a willingness to fake it when you didn’t know what else to do.
He left the kitchen with his tray, his bottle of champagne, his white napkin, and his two flute glasses. He knew this move wouldn’t be very good for his disguise, of course, but Hob was trying to look at it positively. People who didn’t know him would think he was just a waiter looking for a hotel guest, while people who did know him would think it was just Hob Draconian off on one of his weird numbers. It wasn’t much, but it seemed the best he could do right now with the party closing and Nigel still not in sight. And he really did have to find Nigel.
The public portion of the party was breaking up, but there were still a lot of guests around. He sorted through them, hoping to find Nigel before Arranque found him. He worked his way quickly through the crowd, trying to catch a glimpse of Nigel’s familiar burly figure. Nigel didn’t seem to be in the main lobby.
Hob spotted a flight of stairs with people all up and down it, holding drinks and chatting. He went up the stairs. At the top he came to a corridor. One way led to numbered rooms—the guests’ quarters. But the other way had a discreet sign: art gallery.
He went through a set of swinging doors and entered a corridor with framed paintings hung down either side. This had to be the stuff Nigel had bought on the cheap, because Hob, in all his years as a crypto-art critic, had never seen such a miserable array of paintings whose best feature was their frames. The paintings were not just bad, they were execrable; no, more than execrable. They were beneath contempt. He was looking at art so bad, it could have served as a caricature of what some people think art is all about. It would have been apt as a symbol of why fine European seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art is scoffed at in blue-collar homes all over the Western world. These paintings were to Western art as a satyr to Hyperion, to invert Shakespere’s famous image; or as a hurdy-gurdy is to a Monteverdi requiem, to hazard one of his own.
Hob came to a set of doors at the far end of the corridor. He didn’t like the look of those doors. Prophetic lines from
The Rubaiyat
sounded in his head:
There was a door to which I had no key
There was a something through which I could not see;
Some little talk a while of me and thee
And then no more of thee and me.
Those doors marked where the art gallery ended, and the real world presumably began again. Hob hesitated a moment and was about to turn back—a modern Eurydice giving up on Orpheus—when the doors swung open, and two men walked through.
There was rock to the right and rock to the left
And low lean thorn between
And thrice you could hear a breech-bolt snick
Where ne’er a man was seen. …
Funny how poetry of an ominous sort often echoed in Hob’s mind at times of imminent danger. Although these men were dressed as guests, something about them—the black hair at their wrists perhaps, the livid knife scars on their cheeks, their beetled foreheads and prognathous jaws—told him they were probably hotel security.
In his best Spanish he asked them, “Excuse me, gentlemen, would you know where I might find Señor Nigel Wheaton?”
The two glanced at each other; a glance that told Hob nothing whatsoever. The larger and more mendacious looking of the two said, “Yes, señor, we were just helping him with the hanging of the pictures.”
That didn’t sound just right, but Hob let it pass. “A client has sent him this bottle of champagne. Do you know where I could find him?”
“Of a surety,” the smaller man said. “Señor Wheaton was just picking up his check before departing. If you come with us, I think we can catch him before he leaves.”
Hob followed the men through a new set of swinging doors and down the hall. In point of fact, he didn’t exactly follow them. He followed the smaller man, who led, and the other man brought up the rear, thus making Hob what is technically known as the Filling in a Bozo Sandwich. A more suspicious man than Hob might have thought something was amiss. As a matter of fact, Hob thought so, too: But what the hell, in for a penny, in for a pound—and, anyway, it just might all turn out all right. He followed the men through a section of the hotel that seemed strangely deserted. They came to yet another door at the end of the hall.
“Right in through here,” the smaller man said, an expression on his face that reminded Hob very much of the expression worn by the malignant cripple in Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” when he directed the knight to his peril. Still, it was no time to brood on literary apprehensions. The smaller man opened the door. Hob entered. The larger man hulked in behind him.