The Alternative Detective (Hob Draconian) (10 page)

“I’m telling you, I did not turn you and Nigel in. I’m sitting here in front of you telling you that. If you don’t believe me, there’s not much I can do about it. Over to you, Jean-Claude.”

He stared at me for a long time. At last he said, “Damn it, ’Ob, you’re putting me into a terrible situation. Everybody knows you set us up. I’m supposed to take my revenge. You’re trying to play on my sympathy, and it isn’t going to work.”

“That’s what you think?” I asked.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I think.”

“Well, that’s just great,” I said. “So kill me, if that’s what you’re going to do, but please stop boring me to death.”

He smiled faintly. “Same old ’Ob.”

I also smiled faintly. I
was
the same old Hob. Crazier’n a bedbug. But rather more self-aware.

“What’s this about you looking for Alex?” he asked.

“I need to find him for a client. I was trying to find you and Nigel. I want you to work for me on this case.”

“Is that true, ’Ob? You really want us to work for you?”

“You know my way,” I told him. “All my old friends are part of my organization. When you help me on a case, you get a cut of the action. Unless you kill me, of course. That changes everything.”

“Is there really any money in this?” Jean-Claude asked.

I settled down for a nice little chat. Once they start talking money, you’re safe from immediate peril.

CLOVIS

20

“Ah, good morning, Mr. Draconian,” Gerard Clovis said. He was wearing gray twill riding jodhpurs, Frye boots and a yoke-back western shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons. This was his John Huston outfit, I later learned. He also had many other outfits, including a Federico Fellini outfit with floppy black hat.

It was just a quarter past seven. We were outside a large warehouse in the Kremlin-Bicêtre region of the thirteenth arrondissement, not far from where I’d been last night with Etiènne. There were two equipment trucks parked nearby, one crane-mounted camera, and a couple of handheld jobs. More lighting and equipment were inside the warehouse. There were quite a few people standing around, some technicians, some actors.

“Don’t I get a copy of the script?” I asked.

“There is no script,” Clovis said. He tapped his head. “It’s all in here. The general plan. The broad conception.”

“That’s great for you,” I told him. “But what are the actors supposed to do? Read your mind?”

“You will be told all you need to know,” Clovis said. “I want you to have only a general idea. After that, just give me your interpretation, your reactions. I want you—all of you—to ad lib the scene, to be spontaneous. Don’t worry about the dialogue; we’re going to dub it in later, Italian-style.”

He told me I was to enter the warehouse and go to the second floor. I did so. The warehouse was a huge place, a man-made cavern above the ground. It was partially filled with sacks of vegetables, and stacked up along one wall were wooden skids with crates in orderly piles on them. The place smelled faintly of diesel oil and potatoes. There was office space on the second level. I went up there and shook hands with the camera crew. Then I was taken to a costuming booth in the back. Here I was introduced to Yvette, who looked me up and down and conferred with the wardrobe lady. After a brief discussion, they found an outfit for me: a white linen suit and panama hat, Tony Lama lizard-tip cowboy boots, brown checkered westernwear shirt with brown bandanna.

“Yvette,” I said, “I understand that you know my friend Alex Sinclair?”

“Oui, m’sieu,” she said, with that charming intonation that goes with a neat figure, black stockings and peasant skirts. She was a darling little thing, black haired and black eyed, with a natural friendliness that promised more than it was likely to deliver. But of course, you can never tell.

“When did you see Alex last?” I asked.

She looked thoughtful, another expression that she did well. “M’sieu ’Ob,” she said in her delightful accent, “Alex asked me not to talk about his affairs. I must preserve his confidence, you understand.”

“I do understand,” I said, “and I approve. Alex told me the same thing himself. It’s always been his way. Of course, he naturally breaks his rule for me. Especially as I am the bearer of good tidings.”

“Ah, you talk too complicated for me,” Yvette said, with a little laugh that was deliciousness itself. A fantasy formed up in my mind of living in an atelier with this delightful grisette on wine, love and remittance money.

“What I mean,” I said, “is that I have money for Alex. Quite a lot of money. I’d like to give it to him.”

Her expression brightened. “I can contact you, m’sieu, as soon as Alex calls me.”

It was time to go Hollywood. I squinted at her and roughened my tone. “You don’t understand, baby. Alex needs this money and I need some answers fast. Might be something in it for you, too, sweetheart.”

She looked at me wide-eyed. I could see I was getting somewhere. And then a call came from outside, “M’sieu Draconian, we need you immediately!”

“I must think about zis,” Yvette said, wide-eyed, full lips parted slightly to reveal tiny white teeth destined to nibble on my tenderer parts in the near future, or so I hoped.

“’Ob! Where in hell are you!” This time it was Clovis himself calling, and he sounded annoyed.

I marched out to begin my acting career.

DANGER ON THE SET

21

A distant, faint pounding of drums provided a staccato background as I stepped out into the corridor. Someone handed me a prop gun; this seemed to be some sort of
policier
I was acting in, though it was hard to be sure with a director like Clovis. After all, the gun could be a symbol, though I wasn’t sure of what.

There was dry-ice smoke coming out from under the floorboards. Sequenced lighting along the corridor sent out pulses of orange and blue, not my favorite colors. Actually it was pretty neat, all things considered.

Behind me I could hear Clovis shouting, “Keep on walking; don’t stop!” So I kept on. There were open doorways on either side of me, and one guy with a beret and a handheld camera was coming along behind me, panning each of the doorways. I panned them myself, with my eyes, of course, since nobody had given me a camera. Within each doorway was a scene or what they call a
tableau.
I saw people in frozen attitude staring at each other across suits of armor; Asiatics frozen in the attitude of gambling, mouths caught wide in the excitement; scenes of sexual explicitness veiled behind cheesecloth. And I thought of Jim Morrison singing, “Before I fall into the big sleep, I want you here … the scream of the butterfly. …”

And then I saw a face at the far end of the corridor, a woman’s face, her hands beckoning to me. “Dialogue,” Clovis hissed, and so I improvised:

“Hi, baby, you acting in this little number too? You wait right there for me, sweet thing; I’m a-coming down this here corridor as fast as I can, lickety-split.”

Well, I mean it was just words to invent; they were going to dub the dialogue later, but I got caught up in it anyhow, so I didn’t notice when the floor of the corridor came to an end. I couldn’t have noticed it anyhow, since there was this smoke all over the floor up to my ankles.

You figure when professionals are shooting a movie, they have their act together, so I just stepped out and suddenly I wasn’t standing on anything. I was falling.

DR. DADA

22

Paris is filled with places for every mood. I walked to the Avenue de Suffren, past the École Militaire, and then across the Champ de Mars toward the Eiffel Tower. I found a park bench and sat down.

The clarity and order of a French park promote logical thinking. Well-ordered greenery, dust motes in the afternoon sunshine, and little girls in white and gray school uniforms. You come to believe that God speaks French and is inclined toward irony.

Through my haze of abstraction, I slowly became aware of the old gentleman sitting on the bench beside me. It was a surprise, but not really a shock, for me to discover that he wore a black felt hat of antique shape over his powdered peruke. He had on a double-breasted fawn greatcoat with two rows of shiny buttons, silver or pewter. Another peek confirmed that he had green satin breeches that came to the knee, and below those were dove-gray silk stockings terminating in funny black shoes with square white metal buckles.

“Yes, take a good look, Hob,” the old gentleman said. “And then dismiss me with one of your clever rationalizations.”

A shudder passed through me. I knew that this was a time of testing, and it had come upon me before I was really prepared. I let my breath out slowly and turned to address him.

“Always pleased to meet an anomaly,” I said. “I’ve been feeling a bit insubstantial myself of late. Do you have a name?”

“I have many names,” he said in a teasing voice. “But I’ll give you a clue or two. I’m known sometimes as Dr. Dada, and I’m a close friend of Siegfried Surreal. You’ve remarked yourself on the power that the Second Surrealist Manifesto still exercises over the minds of men. You suspect that the true nature of existence is difficult for an Anglo-Saxon to examine with the blunt instrument that is his mind. Common sense condemns you to a prosaic world, but you know it’s the great enemy, and you came to France to find weapons to use in your grand struggle against reality. Confess it, Hob; you came here to talk with me.”

“Yes, but who are you?”

“Among other things, I am that which eludes the web of your ratiocination.”

He smiled at me, a smile of Voltairean subtlety. I felt myself on the verge of some vast breakthrough, some insight that would explain what I was doing here, some knowledge that would help me pull together the disparate strands of my life.

Then his image began to waver. I had a moment of vertigo, and was surprised to find myself, without apparent transition, lying on my back staring up at the sky. My head was resting on something soft: two rounded thighs beneath a long black cotton skirt.

“’Ob! Are you all right?”

I looked up into Yvette’s dark eyes. I was lying on my back on the ground floor of the warehouse. I remembered that I had been on one of the upper floors, walking down a corridor, when something had happened. Then I remembered: the floor had given way beneath me, and I had clutched at an electrical cable. It had broken my fall, but my weight had pulled me free of it and I had come down on the warehouse floor.

“’Ob!” It was Clovis, bending over me. “Are you all right?”

I got to my feet cautiously, more than a little reluctant to leave the warm comfort of Yvette’s lap. I took a few steps, flexed various muscles, discovered that I was bruised here and there but not broken.

“Thank God you are all right!” Clovis said. “I am having this accident investigated. I do not know how it could have happened. There was a hole in the corridor, Hob, and someone had put a piece of cardboard over it. It was inexcusable carelessness.”

I could hear the familiar two-tone wail of a French police car. I wished that Clovis hadn’t called the police. There was sure to be trouble when they learned that I was working on a film without a green card. It was even conceivable that I could be expelled from the country.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. But of course, I couldn’t have known I’d meet Inspector Fauchon.

EMILE FAUCHON

23

Emile Fauchon was a short, dumpy Inspector of Police with a droll Gallic eye and that liveliness of expression that is part of the great Gallic inheritance. He had coarse black hair cut in a short brush, large, lustrous brown eyes, sallow skin and a heavy stubble, recently shaved and powdered. His heavy eyebrows met above his nose, which was strong and slightly hooked. His lips were narrow, downturned. He arrived in a plain Peugeot, looked over the site of the accident, nodded and grunted as Clovis explained what had happened. He said little, made an occasional note in a small black notebook which he kept in a breast pocket of his dark three-piece suit. After he had looked everything over to his satisfaction, he turned to me.

“M’sieu Draconian, you have had a very close call. Are you entirely recovered now?”

“I’m fine,” I told him.

“Then perhaps you would accompany me to the Sélect Café around the corner. We could have a cognac while I take your statement.”

Le Sélect was a workingman’s café, very popular in the
quartier.
White tile floor. Zinc bar. On the small, streaky television, a soccer game in progress, what the Europeans call football because they don’t know any better. Or we don’t.

It was late morning, and we were able to find a table in back without difficulty. I ordered a café au lait and a croissant, Fauchon a cognac and an espresso. The air was heavy with the smell of coffee, chicory, black tobacco, white wine and pernod. Fauchon questioned me, but more as one learning about an acquaintance than as a policeman talking to a suspect. I was a little uncertain about my right to conduct an investigative business in France, so I told him that I was an old friend of Alex Sinclair, which was true, and that I was looking for him, both out of my own interest and on behalf of a friend.