The Alternative Detective (Hob Draconian) (6 page)

We entertained each other with lies and ambiguous glances as the plane trudged eastward above the corrugated gray Atlantic. The sun went down and the movie came up, a comedy starring George Bums as Tamerlane. I grew thoughtful after a while, thinking back over the faces in the crowd of people watching the departure, wondering if I hadn’t spotted the large man of the previous day.

After a while, the movie ended and the stewardess brought coffee. Rachel fell asleep with the cup in her hand resting against the plastic passenger tray. I put it away for her and then fell asleep myself. 1 woke up when the “Fasten Seatbelts” announcement came on. We were on our final approach to De Gaulle Airport.

ARRIVAL IN PARIS

11

Rachel was impressed by everything, especially the way everybody talked French and looked foreign. As for me, I felt like I’d come home. I had my own Paris, made up of the Rue Mouffetard, the Rue du Bac, the Rue du Cygne; the cafés along St-Germain-des-Prés, with their starched white linen tablecloths set against rows of amber mirrors in which tuxedoed waiters glided beneath cut-glass chandeliers, the whole bathed in a rosy Belle Époque glow; the weird stone landscapes of Châtelet-les-Halles; the hi-fi section of the FNAC store in Montparnasse; the Tex-Mex restaurant in a cobblestoned courtyard below a dance studio on the Rue du Temple; the American library near the Tour Eiffel; the science-fiction bookstore on the Boulevard St-Jacques.

We went through customs and immigration. The polite French police official stamped our passports with indifferent benevolence: your papers are in order, you’re in Paris, everything is going to be all right.

The taxi into town was expensive, but what the hell, it was Rachel’s money. I gave the taxi an address in the seventh arrondissement. My French was rusty, but I got through ok. The French are intelligent enough to figure out almost any attempt you make in their language. Of course, my driver was an Algerian named Mohammed ben-Amouk, so maybe things
had
changed a little since I was there last.

The ride into Paris from De Gaulle was familiar and comforting. The modern dual concrete highway went across flat fields, farm land, and then an area of light industry as we approached Paris. Then more arterial highways began feeding in and we were at the Porte de la Chapelle, entering the Périphérique that circles Paris.

It was still morning. I had planned that we would check in first with my old buddy Rus. Rus is a light-skinned Negro from the Caribbean, Jamaica or Barbados; his story changes over the years. The way Rus tells it, he had worked his passage to America as a kid, lived in Key West and Miami for a while, managed to join the American army in time for World War II, lived through the Normandy campaign, and had taken his discharge in Paris. He met Rosemary, a pretty blonde Dutch girl studying art history, and they married. Rus never left France again, except for summer holidays on Ibiza. Dutch girls make the best wives of any European nationality, in my humble opinion. Rosemary spoke English better than Rus, in a marked New Jersey accent. But if you listened carefully you could hear the shading of “th” sounds to “d”, a remnant of her native accent.

The taxi came into the Boulevard St-Germain and took a left turn down the Rue de Bellechasse.

“Well, well,” Rosemary said, looking at me when she opened the door, “look what the cat dragged in. Long time between drinks, huh, Hob?”

She led us in through the tiny kitchenette.

Rus’s apartment was dark and tiny and crowded with furniture. There was a bright Mexican blanket on the queen-size bed which they used for a couch by day. Near the bed was an ornamental brass table from Morocco with a tall brass hookah on it. In the corner of the room was the little drawing table with a gooseneck lamp, where Rus did his sketching, the radio close to him. There were a few original sketches on the walls, the work of friends of his. The room had a homey smell of wine, black tobacco, and the Sunday roast.

Rosemary had broadened out some in the years since I’d seen her last, but she still was a very attractive lady—ample, open-faced, her flaxen hair beginning to gray, her smile as cheerful as ever.

“Rosemary,” I said, “I’d like you to meet my client, Miss Rachel Starr.”

“Hi,” Rosemary said, “any client of Hob Draconian is a friend of mine. How’s the Alternative Detective Agency, Hob?”

“I’m here on Agency business,” I said. “And all my friends are going to get a piece of the action.”

“It’s not really very big action,” Rachel explained. “I can’t afford much, though maybe we can figure out a bonus at the end if everything goes all right.”

“Nobody expects to make anything out of the Agency,” Rosemary said. “It just gives us something to talk about.”

Rus and Rosemary lived in a small apartment at 6, Rue de Bellechasse, not far from Invalides and the Chambre de Deputies. It was one of those rent-controlled Paris apartments that still exist, even in the high-rent districts, to reward those who don’t move. It was rumored that Leslie Caron lived in this building, though nobody had actually seen her.

Rus was the same as always, a huge, soft, caramel-colored butterball of a man, hunched over his drawing board in a corner of the living room, drawing cartoons all day to the accompaniment of a whisper of jazz from his radio. He got up to greet me, enfolding me in the big
abrazado
that Ibiza exiles share when they meet.

We sat down over a couple of Stella d’Artois beers and discussed old times and new. Rus was a center for news and information about Ibiza and its far-ranging exiles. Rus and Rosemary held an open house every Sunday. It was what the French call
un bouf
, an eating. He was a quick and inventive cook, Rus was, renowned for his miniature Mexican pizzas and baby spare-ribs.

Rus and I had both known Alex back in the old Ibiza days. At that time, Alex had been a young lawyer who dropped out for a taste of la dolce vita Ibiza-style. After a while he had returned to a practice in Washington, D.C., and that’s the last I’d heard of him.

From Rachel I had learned that Alex had been working for the Selwyn Corporation, professional fundraisers for various causes, some of them legitimate. It was at this time that he had met Rachel. They had been planning to go to Europe together. Alex had gone over first. He had been playing with a combo in Paris, Les Monstres Sacrés, a sort of hobby with him; he loved the raffish Paris music scene. Shortly after his arrival, he had disappeared or dropped out of contact.

Rus hadn’t heard anything; Alex hadn’t gotten in touch with him during this most recent visit.

The place to begin the search was with Alex’s combo. They were playing at a café called El Mango Encantado, on Rue Gregory l’Angevin near the Centre Pompidou. Rosemary, whose French is a lot better than mine, telephoned one of my favorite little hotels, Le Cygne, on the Rue du Cygne near the Beaubourg. We booked Rachel separately into the Crillon, a famous luxury-class hotel in the first arrondissement. For a girl with limited funds, she was doing all right for herself. But what the hell, first time in Paris is the time to go for it. It was close to the Louvre, she explained to me. That was where she was planning to spend her time while I looked for Alex.

EL MANGO ENCANTADO

12

Rachel and I walked east on the Boulevard St-Germain, then north on the Boulevard St-Michel, across the Seine by way of the Pont St-Michel, and across the Îie de la Cité, catching a glimpse of Notre-Dame as we entered the Boulevard Sébastopol on the Right Bank.

El Mango Encantado was on the Rue des Blancs not far from the Centre Pompidou. It was one of the many South American café-restaurants that had opened recently to cater to the increasing numbers of South American students and exiles, who were such a part of the current Paris scene. It was a small dimly lit place where you could hang out all day over a glass of wine. Nearby was the Beaubourg, the great art museum and library founded by Arne Pompidou. This was a very mixed area, a combination of old and new, ancient and modern, and, in Baudrillard’s phrase, the hypermodern.

The combo was just setting up. The leader, Marcello, was pointed out to me, a curly-headed Uruguayan who was also their piano player. I asked him if I could buy him a drink.

Over a Cinzano, Marcello told me that Alex had been staying in a flat on the Boulevard Auguste-Blanqui in the thirteenth arrondissement.

“Do you know the thirteenth?” he asked. “There’s a big shopping mall in the Place d’ltalie. I’d meet Alex at a restaurant there, a place called Roszes. He was always late. I’d walk around the shopping mall, waiting for him, watching the old dames with their dogs and having an occasional apéritif. I didn’t see him when he came down from Amsterdam, however. Juanito was with him, though. Hey, Juanito, what can you tell this fellow about Alex?”

Juanito was the drummer, a small, big-chested fellow with Indian features and heavy horn-rimmed glasses. He had been the son of a diplomat in Chile before Pinochet.

“Sure, I met him at the Gare du Nord when he came down from Amsterdam. We had lunch together at the Café Tranquilité on the Rue Simon-le-Franc. You know the place, near the Place des Innocents where the dope dealers hang out.”

I knew the place. The art students of the Beaubourg use it frequently. And of course the tourists. These streets are closed to traffic, though an occasional car does get through, this being Paris, and pokes its way through the crowds like a hippo tiptoeing through the tulips.

Juanito continued. “I think Alex was waiting for somebody. He put down his newspaper every few minutes and looked right and left. Then some guy I’ve never seen before comes up and whispers something to him and goes away.

“Alex excuses himself and says he has to see someone. I’ve never seen Alex act like this. I haven’t got anything on that afternoon, so I follow him.

“He goes to Goldenberg’s on the Rue Vieille-de-Temple. That’s the kosher place where you can get overboiled beef with horseradish, just like in New York or Warsaw. I didn’t want him to catch me watching him, because Alex is a little funny about that sort of thing. I had a falafel sandwich at one of the Jewish places nearby and waited. And I wondered, because this really wasn’t his sort of place. Alex went in for places like the Crazy Horse Saloon, or the Tex-Mex place on the Boulevard Montpar-nasse. And he loved to go for tea at the Café Deux Magots on St-Germain. The place where Sartre used to have his famous quarrels with Simone de Beauvoir.”

Juanito’s mention of Deux-Magots reminded me of a story an American girl had told me about how she met Jean-Paul Sartre.

She said she had been having a Coke in Le Café Deux Magots because it was so famous, and she had recognized Sartre from a smudged reproduction on the back of one of the American editions of
L’Etre et le néant.
She told me that Sartre looked like a toad dressed in black, but beautiful.

She was a California girl. It was second nature for her to go over to his table and ask for his autograph. Sartre asked her to join him and Miss Simone de Beauvoir. My friend said she didn’t like to cause Miss de Beauvoir pain, as her joining the table was very obviously going to do, to judge by the martyred expression Miss de Beauvoir put on when Sartre made the invitation. But what the hell, this was going to be a world-class anecdote and Mr. Sartre and his lady friend probably had this sort of problem all the time. She sat down and Sartre bought her a Coke, and asked how she was enjoying Paris, and groped her under the table, so she thought he was kind of sweet and considered hanging around long enough to ball him so she’d have a
super
world-class anecdote. But she wasn’t really as tough as all that; sometimes she just liked to scare herself, and besides, she and the other kids were bicycling to Tours in the morning and she needed her sleep.

Her story had great point for me. It’s what I call the human side of philosophy.

Juanito was saying, “Alex came out of Goldenberg’s after a while and caught a taxi. I caught one immediately after. It was a day made for surveillance. ’Follow that taxi!’ I said to the driver.

“ ’There’s a twenty franc surcharge for following people,’ the driver says to me, swinging away from the curb. Like he was reminding me of a local statute.

“ ’Done!’ I said, and away we went.

“We followed him to the Gare Montparnasse. There I lost him. That’s all I can tell you.”

I thanked Juanito, then asked Marcello whether he knew of anyone else I could speak to concerning Alex.

“Sure,” he said. “The obvious person to contact would be Gerard Clovis.”

“Who’s that?”

“The film director. Surely you’ve heard of him?”

“Oh, that Gerard Clovis,” I said.

“It’s true that he’s not too well known outside France, but he’s got a lot of prestige here. Clovis is picking up where Goddard left off, so to speak.”

“What does he have to do with Alex?”

“I thought you knew. Alex was working for him.”

“As what?”

“An actor. He and Clovis met at a party, and Clovis thought he’d be perfect for a part in his new film.”