The Alternative Detective (Hob Draconian) (25 page)

“But the hospital,” Clovis said. “What about the hospital?”

“All in good time, old buddy, all in good time.”

“But for the present, no?”

“That’s right, no Africa just yet. I hear it’s the hot season.”

“You’re going to Paraguay with this woman and live a life of luxurious capitalistic effeteness?”

“That’s it, Clovis. I guess that sums it up. I guess I lied to you. But it was in a good cause.”

“Self-service!” Clovis sneered.

“What better?” Alex asked.

“No,” Clovis said. “I cannot permit it to end like this.”

“How do you want it to end?” Alex said.

“I think you should give me a million of those dollars you stole, and I will endow a charity for African orphans.”

“Actually,” Nigel said, “while you’re handing it out, a million for me and Jean-Claude here wouldn’t go amiss.”

Alex turned to me. “What do you want, Hob?”

“I’d just like to have a few of my dreams back,” I said.

Alex turned to Nieves. “What do you think, darling?”

Nieves was decisive. “Give all of them half of it and let them split it up themselves. That way we all part friends and you and I still have five million left. But whatever you do, be quick about it, darling. That Paraguayan 707 with Cuch and Armadillo piloting it will be landing at any moment now.”

“A 707?” Alex said. “But you knew I wanted a fighter plane.”

“I wanted to accommodate you, love, but they just don’t have the range. We can’t refuel before Tenerife.”

“You did very well,” Alex said. “How did you handle the French airspace question?”

“It was not too difficult,” Nieves said. “This flight is listed as a return home by an official Paraguayan observer of the recent N.A.T.O. air exercises.”

We heard the sound of the plane in the distance.

Then the door burst open and Rachel rushed in.

“Hi, Rachel,” Alex said. “Glad you made your connections all right. You and I have some business to attend to.”

Rachel was looking at Nieves. “Who’s this bimbo?”

“This is Nieves,” Alex said.

“Oh, it is, is it?” She looked Nieves up and down. “Alex, are you trying to tell me what I think you’re trying to tell me?”

“I’m afraid so,” Alex said. “Sorry, but it just wouldn’t have worked. Look, Rachel, I’ve got one million dollars for you.” He reached into his inner jacket pocket.

“And I’ve got something for you, too,” Rachel said, and reached into her purse and shot Alex with what sounded to me like a .38. Then she turned and put a bullet into Wheaton.

THE MEXICANS

54

i managed to knock the gun out of Rachel’s hand and she turned and ran out the door. Clovis, looking shaken, followed her. Alex was standing there holding his shoulder and bleeding genteelly, nicked but not knackered. And Nigel had pulled up his shirt and found a crease along his side. The lady was not too accurate with small arms.

Just then these guys came in. There were two of them, little dark guys with bandit moustaches and big chests and guns, who looked like Mexicans and turned out to be Mexicans. It was sort of funny how they came in, drifting like an inevitable pall of smoke that has picked this place to obfuscate. I remember saying to myself, hell, another country heard from, and I noticed that Alex and Nigel and Jean-Claude were sort of drifting back toward the side door as these guys came in the front, and somehow I was in between, the only one without a gun, and it didn’t look like a good place to be in.

“What I want,” one of the Mexicans said, “is the sailboards. They’re my property and jus’ tell us where they are and there’s no trouble, understood?”

“Hob has them,” Alex answered immediately.

“Hey!” I said.

“Jus’ a minute,” the Mexican said. But Alex and the others, guns at the ready, were backing out the side door.

“Hey, jus’ a minute!” the Mexican said.

“Sorry, we’re late,” Alex said. It was what you’d call a real Mexican showdown, but nobody opened fire and Alex, Nigel and Jean-Claude completed their exit and were gone. That left just me and the Mexicans, who didn’t like the turn of events but couldn’t do much about it.

To break the rather heavy silence that followed, I said, “Who
are
you guys?”

“I’m Paco,” said the one who had done all the talking so far. “This is Eduardo. You mus’ be Hob Draconian.”

I guess I had to be, though I didn’t much like it at that moment.

Paco said, “We’re partners of your frien’ Frankie Falcone.”

“I didn’t know Frankie had partners.”

“Silent partners,” Paco said. “We put up the money for his business. It’s a lot of money, man.”

“So you’re partners,” I said. “What are you doin’ here?”

“Lookin’ after our investment.”

“You flew to France and are now threatening me with guns because of five sailboards?”

Paco looked annoyed. “Who gives a damn about sailboards? It’s what’s inside we’re concerned with.”

“They’re made of polyurethane, aren’t they?” I asked.

“Man, do I have to spell it out? We got our dope inside those boards.”

I gaped at him. “Dope? You mean marijuana?”

Paco looked at Eduardo and laughed. “He thinks we’re talking reefer! Are you for real? We’re discussing black tar heroin, my man. The real Mexican product. The finest heroin in the world.”

Suddenly it all came together for me—the black tar heroin coming into Oregon, pouring across the beaches like petroleum from a sinking ship. The savage desire of the Mexican gangs to expand their product into the lucrative café society of Europe. I later learned that it had become an obsession with them, a matter of status—to sell their heroin under the very noses of the Marseilles drug barons and win out, because French heroin is all right in its old-fashioned way but the Mexican product is new and better and above all, Mexican. It was strange, this thing of national pride. But it seemed right and natural somehow that dope dealers too, not just thieves in military uniforms, could be patriots.

“And so you see, señor,” Paco went on, “it is important to us that this shipment get through. The money is of concern, of course. But we did want to enter our product in the international heroin competition being held this year at San Sebastián.”

From outside I could hear the sound of an aircraft coming in for a landing. That would be Alex’s ride to Paraguay. It was interesting, but it didn’t matter. Right now I was faced with these guys and this was my problem.

I goggled at him. “I haven’t heard about this international competition.”

Paco smiled. “It is not, of course, published in the newspapers. If you didn’t hear of it, señor, perhaps it is because you are not on the circuit.”

As neat a snub as I’ve been handed in a long time. Yet I liked this man with his big automatic pistol and his guayabera shirt. I like a man who stands behind his product.

“But now, señor,” he said, waving his gun with negligent purposefulness so that glints of steel danced across my eyes, and I saw, neither wisely nor too well, that I was in a world of trouble. “Now what we need most urgently from you is the location of the sailboards.”

“My friend,” I said, “if there were one thing I fervently wish, it would be to tell you the location of the sailboards. But alas, someone has stolen them and we are both the poorer for it.”

“You won’t tell?” Paco said, his voice a burlesque of menace more menacing than menace itself.

“Hombre!” I cried, ingratiating to the end, “I can’t tell you because I don’t know!”

Paco shook his head slowly. “Too bad,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s got to be the Mexican pain thing for you.”

“Not the Mexican pain thing!” I cried.

“Jes, the Mexican pain thing. Eduardo! Bring the pinking scissors and the air compressor out of the trunk of the car.”

“You want the edging tool, too?” Eduardo asked.

“Jes, bring the edging tool, too!”

They both smirked. It seemed that the Mexican pain thing was going to be a most comical thing to watch if you weren’t the one undergoing it. So strong was my desire to be a spectator at what I was being forced to be a participant in. … I was in a state of confusion, and so I heard myself say, “All right, you win. We can skip the Mexican pain thing. I’ll take you to the sailboards.”

“You would do that, and betray your own friends?”

“Sure, as long as it’s for a good cause. Like saving my own skin. That’s what I’m doing, I trust?”

“Jes, you take us to the sailboards, we let you leev.” His sneer belied the apparent sincerity of his words, and the twist of his lip presaged the treachery to come if we were lucky enough to even get that far.

“You have five seconds to tell us where to go,” Paco said.

Great. It wasn’t enough they’d given me an insolvable problem, they had to add a time limit, yet.

WHEATON

55

i don’t know how I would have stood up under torture. Luckily I didn’t have to find out. Suddenly the doorway was filled with the impressive tweeded bulk of Nigel Wheaton.

“Oh, let him go,” Nigel said testily. “He doesn’t know anything about the sailboards.”

“How do you know he doesn’t know where the sailboards are?” Paco asked.

“Because I took them myself.”

The Mexicans looked for a chance to do something terrible to Nigel, but he had stepped behind a filing cabinet. Besides, they had noticed that he was armed with a lightweight rapid-fire Cobra Bee Sting, the new Indonesian gun that the Israelis introduced last year at the Beirut atrocities exhibit. In his other hand he was holding a stun grenade designed to capture your attention at no greater loss than your eyesight if you happened to be caught in the wrong blink cycle when it went off.

“Sergeant,” Wheaton said over his shoulder to the uniformed man whose French police cap could be dimly seen, “take these men away.”

In came a sergeant followed by four uniformed French cops carrying Uzis. Another two cops broke a window and entered holding machine pistols. The Mexicans were outgunned. It was time to give up the guns and rely on the lawyers. They allowed themselves to be handcuffed and led away.

Then Fauchon entered the room, shaking raindrops out of his light blue raincoat.

“Hi, boss,” Nigel said.

“Nice work, Nigel,” Fauchon said.

That was my first intimation that my old buddy Nigel Wheaton was working for the police. I gave him a suitably outraged look and said, “Police informer!”

“Yes, old boy,” Nigel said. “I’ve been working at it for some years. Ever since Inspector Fauchon helped get me out of the mess you landed me in Turkey.”

I let that pass. “How did you get the sailboards?”

“Simplicity itself,” Nigel said. “After our meeting in Honfleur, I didn’t return to Paris. I went to the next town, St-Loup, and had a few drinks in the bar there. When Vico’s flight arrived, I put in a call to him from the hotel bar. While he was diverted I hired a taxi to pick up the sailbags. Your five thousand francs came in useful for that. I put the bags into Left Luggage in St-Loup, where they presently await our pleasure.”

“You might have mentioned it to me,” I said.

Nigel shrugged. “And you might have gotten word to me in Turkey. Though I understand it’s only natural to turn in your friends when it’s the only way.”

My mind brought me back, in pain, in torture, to Istanbul. The little soundproofed room in the back of the security area. Jarosik, loosening his tie and rolling up his sleeves. “No more playing around now, Hob. We know the shipment is moving. Where is it? Tell us, or take the fall yourself.”

FAUCHON’S WRAP-UP

56

A gendarme brought Rachel into the room, holding her firmly by an elbow. Fauchon’s voice was not friendly when he addressed her.

“Mademoiselle,” Fauchon said, “by your own admission you committed an assault with intent to kill. Only the fact that you attempted to assassinate a man whom Monsieur Draconian claimed under oath to see die several days ago prevents me from having you charged under French criminal law. I think you are not very well balanced, Miss Starr. I beg you to seek psychiatric advice when you return to your own country.”

“Thanks a lot,” Rachel said. She looked sort of small and pathetic. Her right arm was in a sling. She’d caught a slug back then when the bullets had been flying. “I wish to God I’d finished him, but I only winged him, and his little Latin cupcake got him out to the plane all right. You really shouldn’t let embezzlers fly around in your national airspace like that.”

“We don’t allow it very often,” Fauchon said. “In any event, it has nothing to do with me. That’s the concern of a different department. Ministry of Finance, I suppose.”