The Alternative Detective (Hob Draconian) (2 page)

Nice parents, but they weren’t much help to me when I came back to America after nearly twenty years living abroad. Not their fault. Nobody could have helped. My first company was Alternative Services Corporation. I set it up after returning to the States in 1979 after the Istanbul disaster. I didn’t know what to do with myself back in America.

It hurts to be Johnny Greenhorn in your own country. Almost from a sense of self-protection, I decided to form up the A.S.C.

I’m one of those people who lived in Europe in the sixties and seventies. In Europe, among other things, I had been a clothing and junk jewelry wholesaler, selling to hippies mainly. Now, I used my contacts with hippie organizations and individuals all over Europe to become a supplier of craftsmen’s and farmers’ tools and implements to communes and New Age groups all over western Europe. I was the founder and proprietor of The Alternative Services Corporation.

I was the man to contact if you were really in a rush for a waterless toilet for your campground in the Sierra Nevadas, an Aladdin kerosene lamp for your electricityless finca in Ibiza, a wheel seeder with cultivating attachments for your subsistence garden near Aix-en-Provence, a Shaker furniture kit for the eternal homespun look, or even a small foundry for the primitivists in western Wales. I had the answers to those and quite a few other questions. I charged ten percent over the manufacturer’s list price and you paid postage, but I got the goods for you. I did the calling and harassed the manufacturers until they got off their asses and got the goods out of the warehouse and onto a plane to you. With some frequently used items, like tie-dye chemicals, I maintained a modest stock in a warehouse behind the Flying A station in West New York, next town up from Snuff’s Landing.

I also served as a communication network for many of these people, and I was called upon from time to time to locate someone who might have used my service and had gone missing. People don’t go to the straight police so much in the whole-earth community. They don’t go to private detectives, either, but I was one of the avatars of the new breed.

And I ran all this from Snuff’s Landing, New Jersey. Not a bad life, you say. Yes, but have you considered the size of my support payments? I was in Snuff’s Landing because I had inherited the house on Elm Street from my Uncle Marv. I had moved in there with my most recent wife, Mylar. Now I was waiting for Mylar to complete the last stages of the slow, almost stately dissolution of our marriage and move away; go back to Louisiana, maybe, with her suitcases of Vedantic philosophy books she never got around to reading, and her clippings from her two years’ modelling in Paris, or wherever she pleased, taking her curly auburn hair, sweet smile and long days of sulky silence somewhere else, so I could sell Uncle Marv’s house and go live in some place with a little class.

But Mylar didn’t go, not even when Sheldon declared his love for her. And I didn’t dare leave the house for fear it would somehow be sold out from under me. And anyhow, I wasn’t thinking straight. Back from Europe, I was in limbo, numbed out, culture shocked from returning to an America I didn’t understand or sympathize with after nearly twenty years in Europe. People were talking about things I’d never heard of. I’d missed two decades of television. I felt out of it, a foreigner even though with my speech I could pass as a native.

I didn’t know that was the trouble then, of course. If you had asked me, I might not even have known that I was miserably unhappy. I was too depressed even for ironic contemplation of my own depression. I had descended into the sorry game of repeating to myself bits of sophomoric moral philosophy, in an attempt to head off the utter collapse that had opened beneath my feet when I found that my life made no sense at all.

Grimly I chewed on uplifting aphorisms: Life is beautiful anywhere, I told myself as I walked along the low, marshy, smelly New Jersey foreshore, with its stunted trees and sooty birds and sour little towns. And I steeled myself to face the truth: that life isn’t very good but it’s all you’ve got. And all the time, though I didn’t know it, the changes were stirring.

DAMASCENE

3

The woman known as Damascene came to me the very next day in Snuff’s Landing, New Jersey.

Snuff’s Landing is one of the decaying Hudson River towns that line the shabby foreshore between Hoboken and Fort Lee.

As usual, I was in my dingy office on Sisal Street and I remember that I had just reached page 666 in Motley’s
Rise and Fall of the Dutch Republic
, which is exactly the sort of book to read when you have a business like mine with long gaps between the exciting bits, if any. Then my first customer of the year, aside from Frankie, tapped lightly on the door and came in.

This was very welcome since it was already June.

She was a tall, willowy girl with sunstreaked blonde hair. Her mouth looked sort of trembly and vulnerable. Her eyes were dark and gray, and she had peculiar little lights in the irises. She was wearing a severely tailored dark suit which did not hide her shape; it was that happy simultaneity of ampleness and slenderness that some fortunate women possess.

“Are you Hobart Draconian?” she asked.

“Just like the sign on the door says,” I told her. “Who are you?”

“Men call me Damascene,” she said. “I come from Montclair, New Jersey, where the pomegranates grow.” She smiled at me and a lock of hair fell fetchingly over one eye, giving her that Veronica Lake look that I find so hard to resist.

“Unusual name,” I commented, sizing up her good legs as she sat in the client’s chair facing my desk.

“It’s not my real name,” she said. “I was just kidding about that. It’s something I do when I get nervous. Actually, I’m Rachel Starr with two
r
’s and the first thing I have to ask you is if the name Vedra means anything to you.”

Vedra is an uninhabited island off the coast of Ibiza. Ibiza is one of the four Balearic islands that lie in the western Mediterranean between Spain and France. Vedra was the place we used to go for sunset watching, back a million years ago when I lived on Ibiza with Kate and we did things like that.

“What do you know about Vedra?” I asked.

“I know that you and Alex shared a house near there one summer.”

“Alex? You mean Alex Sinclair?”

She nodded.

I’d lost track of Alex years ago. He and I had been pretty tight for a while.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“Alex said if anything ever happened to him, I should look you up.”

“So what’s happened?”

“He’s missing.”

I nodded. It would have to be something like that. That’s why they come to me.

“Where was he last seen?” I asked her.

“Paris.”

I straightened up in my chair. “What was he doing?”

“He was playing in a rock band. Five-string electric banjo, I believe. He left Amsterdam to rejoin his group.”

“Just a minute.” I swung my feet off the desk and found a pad and a Bic. “What was the name of his group?”

“Les Monstres Sacrés.”

“That sounds like Alex’s sort of group all right. Please continue.”

“I know he arrived in Paris. He sent me a telegram from De Gaulle Airport. He was going to telephone me when he had a hotel room.”

“Obviously he didn’t.”

“No, he did not. I didn’t hear anything from him. That was three weeks ago.”

“I don’t mean to be harsh,” I said, “but is it possible maybe he was ducking you?”

“I don’t think so,” Rachel said. “He’d given me his power of attorney to clear out his bank accounts and sell some property. I’m holding nearly eighty thousand dollars in Alex’s money. That, my friend, is not chicken liver.”

“I agree he probably wasn’t trying to duck you,” I said. “Did you have anyone to call and ask about him? A mutual friend?”

She shook her head. “Alex was very specific about that. If anything happened, I wasn’t to try anyone but you.”

“You’ve come to the right place,” I told her. “The right man, I mean. This is definitely my kind of case.”

Rachel didn’t look convinced. She looked at me, doubt clouding over her large gray eyes.

“What kind of a gun do you carry?” she asked.

“I don’t carry a gun. I believe in an American citizen’s inalienable right to not bear arms. As a matter of fact, I’m a member of the Anti-Rifle Association of America.”

She looked me over, sizing me up. “But you’re tough, right? Karate, stuff like that?”

I shook my head. “Violent movements put my back out. And my doctor has warned me to avoid getting hit on the head.”

“But what do you do in a dangerous situation?”

“I perform the instantaneous intuitive leap that tells me how to handle the situation.”

“You mean that you fake it?”

I nodded. “Faking it. A term used by Paul Simon, one of my favorite philosophers. Yes, that’s what I do.”

“I’m not really convinced,” Rachel said. “Can you give me one reason why anyone would hire you rather than the first name she comes across in the Yellow Pages?”

I shrugged and gave her my half smile. “Because I can cut it, lady.” A line from
Hud
, one of my favorite movies. “But there are several more compelling reasons. You have noticed no doubt that I don’t wear a suit. Private detectives who wear suits charge at least twenty-five percent more than private detectives who wear Levis.”

She still looked doubtful. “Are you at least tough? A bodybuilder, maybe, beneath your apparent scrawniness? A knife thrower?”

I had to smile. She had been taken in by appearances, as so many are. Spiritually I am a tall, lean, cool dude with long hair in a headband. But in physical aspect you might not know that, since I am shorter than average and inclined toward a very slight dumpiness.

“I try to avoid violence,” I told her. “Look, Rachel, I’m the right person to find Alex. Do you think you can hire a man with short hair and a three-piece suit to hang out in the Barrio Chino in Barcelona and come up with leads? Or rap with the Senegalese dope dealers in Les Halles? Or trade hits with the jokers in the Milky Way in Amsterdam?”

“And you can get into those places?”

“Lady, those places are my home,” I told her.

“I don’t have a great deal of money,” she told me.

“It doesn’t take much to get me going. My air fares, meagre expenses, and a hundred dollars a day pin money. That means I don’t earn a thing and have to sleep in youth hostels. But what the hell, it’s for Alex.”

“All right,” she said, “you’re a little weird, but Alex said to trust you. Maybe we can afford a better class of hotel than youth hostels.”

“We?”

“I’m going with you.”

“Why?”

“To make sure you don’t run away with my money. And to find Alex. And because I’ve never been to Europe before.”

Well, what the hell. She was a foxy lady. And I was going back to Europe.

HARRY HAMM

4

I sent Frankie Falcone’s information on to our man in Ibiza, Harry Hamm. Harry is an ex-cop who spent twenty-eight years on the Jersey City force. That was back when Madge was still alive and the twins, Dorrie and Florence, were living at home in the two-story frame house on Kearney Street. Harry’s retired now and living on the island of Ibiza. He owns a small finca, where he raises two varieties of almond trees and can talk in dialect with his Ibicenco neighbors.

Although he’s officially retired and has a small income from his pension, he’s not opposed to taking on a job from time to time. People have a way of bringing him work. Unofficially, of course: the Spanish police don’t license foreign detectives to operate in their territory.

But there are some things the police on Ibiza can’t or don’t want to handle: rip-offs between rival narcotics gangs; the theft by one thief of a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Renaissance paintings belonging to another thief and never registered with the Spanish authorities; the recovery of a million dollar ransom paid in a rescue attempt that failed.

Harry didn’t know any of this until I pointed it out that day in the Peña in Ibiza when the Alternative Detective Agency really came into existence.

Harry had retired last year and moved to Ibiza. The first time he came to Ibiza was to help his son, who’d been put into the Ibiza lockup during the infamous hippie riots of 1969. Harry had gone there to bail him out. It had taken a little longer than usual, because Harry didn’t know which people to give bribes to, and because, in Spain, even the bribes must be laid out with proper form and due gravity. By the time he got it all squared away and got his boy out, Harry had worked up a love for the island. Something about the spine of pine-clad mountains, the warm, tideless sea, the people. That Ibiza magic.

Harry started returning every year. First he came over in summer, during crazy season, but that really wasn’t to his taste; he didn’t like mixing with hot weather weirdos. He’d started taking his vacations in winter, when Ibiza is at its best. He picked up a little finca there, and, after Madge died and the twins moved to Cleveland, Harry took his retirement and moved to Ibiza.