The Alternative Detective (Hob Draconian) by Robert Sheckley Read Free Book Online

brothers are not in any trouble, are they?” Maria asked.
    “Not that I know of,” Harry said. “But if they’re smuggling stolen goods out of Spain they could get into some trouble.”
    “You think that Vico has stolen these boards and is using my brothers to transport them somewhere?”
    “It looks that way,” Harry said.
    “Wait a minute,” she said. “My brothers may smuggle a little whiskey or cigarettes, just like all the fishermen. There have been contrabandistas in these islands for centuries. But my brothers would never transport stolen goods.”
    “Maybe they don’t know those boards are stolen,” Harry said. “Maybe they’re just taking them somewhere for Vico like general cargo.”
    Maria thought about it, then went inside the finca. She came out almost at once with a black kerchief around her hair and a shawl around her shoulders.
    “I will come with you and speak to the men on the docks. You’ll get nowhere otherwise. Somebody may know where my brothers went.”
     
     

 
    FLIGHT TO PARIS
    10
     
     
    Rachel told me a little about herself during the flight to Paris. She claimed to be the only daughter of short parents, but had herself grown to the height of five feet nine, the tallest occurrence in her family in almost a hundred years. She had gone to high school in Waukegan, Illinois, and movingly described to me the cold winters they used to have, and how in February the neighborhood dogs, turning wild, began to run in packs and bring down the occasional delivery man. She told me how her father, a Church of England minister, had turned to repairing McCormick reapers when his entire congregation, a family of twenty-three from Little Dorking in Hampshire, moved to Hawaii.
    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