Draconian New York (Hob Draconian Book 1) Read online

  “Right here. Propietario. And propietaria, if it applies.”

  Hob had hesitated. He’d had no idea before this that he was going to put Mylar’s name on the document. She had nothing to do with the finca, which he’d acquired long before he met her. But she was looking very pretty that morning, and it was a brilliant, sparkling Ibiza day when just being alive makes you feel immortal, and they had been getting along well for several days. Hob was in love that day, had been for several weeks. A record for him.

  After that, of course, the disillusion set in. Mylar had a strangeness about her that was charming, even intriguing, before you got to know her better. After that, it was just maddening. Their good time had been in the off-season, before the summer sun and the carnival atmosphere of the island drove Mylar, who was still called Janie then, a little crazy, or crazier than usual. This was just before her affair with Rebecca, the ersatz baroness from Holland, when Mylar was just starting to discover her lesbian identity and disillusioning poor straight old Hob, who wasn’t with it at all and was still stuck in the old one-man one-woman bag.

  But all that was to come later. For that moment, standing in the lawyer Guasch’s office, it was Ibiza and youth forever, you and me against the world, babe, and hell yes, darlin’, put your signature right there, we’ll be co-owners of a bit of paradise.

  And now it was some years later and Guasch was telling him all this over a second lunch in the Cellar Catalan. Guasch was fat, round, jolly, wised-up, with an ailing wife and an alcoholic Swedish girlfriend who ran a souvenir shop in the port.

  Guasch had confirmed Hob’s suspicions. “No, Don Esteban didn’t fiddle with the traspaso. I doubt he even glanced at it before signing it. That sort of balloon payment at the end came in with the Romans. I wouldn’t say it’s illegal, but it’s awkward for you. You should have let me strike out the balloon payment clause before you signed it. Of course, you didn’t know me very well then and you did know Don Esteban. Or thought you did. See, here, they’ve demanded the million-peseta payment immediately when due, on July fifteenth of this year. Or you forfeit your property.”

  “I’ve lived there for five years,” Hob said. “I’ve made a lot of improvements. Can they really do that?”

  “I’m very much afraid they can. They’re within their rights. You have one month, less a few days. But what’s a million pesetas to an American, eh? Excuse me, I make a poor joke. I know your circumstances. You have exactly twenty-seven days to get your money together, pay it, get your title clear. It comes to just under ten thousand dollars. Have you got it?”

  Hob shook his head.

  “Can you borrow it?”

  “I doubt it,” Hob said. “Unless …”

  “I’m so sorry,” Guasch said cheerfully. “Do you think you can get it?”

  “I’m going to get it,” Hob said, with more confidence than he felt.

  “Try to get it before the next devaluation, no telling if you’ll win or lose by that. And I regret to emphasize that there’s no way of staving this off. Staving, is that the correct word? Unless you could get Don Esteban to change his mind. And I doubt you’ll have much success at that. He’s gone quite senile since his stroke, you know, and has become the creature of his wife, the deadly Amparo, you should have known her mother, and that skinny priest from San Juan, and the two boys. You know they want to sell to the Sport Club, don’t you? They’re offering them one hell of a lot of money. You had the bad luck to choose a finca with the prettiest view on the island. Too bad you can’t sell the view and keep the rest. Get the money, Hob, and be sure to get Mylar’s quitclaim, that’s also essential.”

  Hob went home to his finca. He didn’t speak to anyone, not even the Rafferty twins from Los Angeles who were friends of Hob’s sister and who were clipping the grapevines, not even Amanda, Moti’s fashion model girlfriend from Paris who was making curry in the kitchen. He went straight to his room. His own, private room, as distinct from the rest of the finca, where up to a dozen friends and friends of friends stayed from time to time. His room was a bare, whitewashed cube with a small balcony. The view was spectacular. Opening the French doors you could look out through a cleft in the distant mountains and see a narrow blue window of the sea, framed in almond blossoms provided by the tree that grew just outside his window. Hob looked at the view critically and tried to convince himself that it was too pretty for real beauty, but without success. He liked it just as it was. His eye knew every fold of land, every tree and hummock on his property, every algorobo in his fields, every almond tree in the side orchard. Well, he was going to have to raise that ten thousand and get that quitclaim.

  Unfortunately, this came at a low point in his finances. He’d never had many high points. But this was an especially bad time. The Alternative Detective Agency wasn’t earning much money. In fact, it was losing. Hob had to put out for taxes, bribes, stationery, and folding currency with which to pay his operatives. This all added up to a net loss at the end of this year, and not much better the year before.

  At least he could do something about Mylar. She’d been after him to return to America and give her a Jewish divorce. It seemed that Sheldon, her tax accountant husband-to-be, had Orthodox Jewish parents who insisted upon an Orthodox Jewish divorce before they’d give their approval. And their money, though no one mentioned that part, went hand in pocket with their approval.

  At the time she asked him for it, Hob had resisted. They already had a legal divorce, what did they need with another? Additionally, Hob hadn’t wanted to return to New Jersey and New York. For one thing, it cost money. For another, bad things happened to him in the metropolitan area. He had a sense that it was a bad idea to leave the island at this time. But he was forced.

  Even raising the plane fare was not easy. He managed it, though, calling in petty debts from all his friends and getting a three-hundred-dollar loan from the wealthy English actor who lived nearby and had been none too pleased at being thus tapped, but made the loan anyway.

  And then he booked his trip on Iberia, wiring Mylar to expect him and set up the divorce, and said farewell to the island and his home. He had the curious feeling that Ibiza was leaving him, not the other way around.

  3

  The flight was uneventful. Upon arriving at Kennedy, Hob went to the Iberia Airline counter to check the personal messages, just in case Harry Hamm had come up with any late-breaking news on the traspaso situation. There were no messages for him.

  That done, Hob took a bus to Snuff’s Landing, New Jersey. He had to change in Jersey City to make the connection. It took him almost five hours to get from Kennedy to Main Street, Snuff’s Landing.

  Snuff’s Landing was an unprepossessing little town on the western shore of the Hudson River, sandwiched between dank Hoboken and dreary West New York. Hob had made it with less than ten minutes to spare, and so he went directly to the rabbi’s house on West Main Street, which was about three blocks from where Hob used to have an office and close to the Snuff’s Landing house on Spruce, which he was signing over to Mylar in exchange for clear title to C’an Poeta.

  When he arrived at the rabbi’s house, the rabbi’s wife ushered him into a parlor smelling of shoe polish and potato latkes, where Mylar was waiting. His ex-wife was tall and good-looking, and wearing a dark, severely cut business suit and a necklace of Polynesian shark’s teeth over a cotton Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Mylar’s fashion statements had always tended toward the oxymoronic. Ex-husband and ex-wife shook hands in a formal manner, but with smiles to show that they really didn’t mean anything bad by this. It was time for amused little jokes, banalities such as “I see divorced life agrees with you,” since it had been six months since the actual civil divorce. But Hob couldn’t think of any witticisms, funny how they can fail you just when you need them most, and Mylar was not being forthcoming. She felt in an awkward situation, because this Jewish divorce had been forced on her by Sheldon’s mother, who had insisted on it before she would allow him to marry Mylar. All Hob c
ould think to say was, “Well, two years of marriage down the tubes,” and he decided to suppress the remark. Instead he pulled the transfer-of-ownership document that Guasch had given him, and offered it to Mylar with his pen, remarking, “Might as well get this over with.”

  Mylar gave him a certain look, but she had agreed to this in return for Hob flying back to New Jersey and giving her this divorce. And he was giving her the Spruce Street place, though its value had been reduced considerably since the fire. She uncapped the pen, gritted her teeth, and was about to sign away her share of the Ibiza dream when the rabbi’s wife came into the room and said, “The rabbi is ready for you now.” “I’ll do this later,” Mylar said, and handed the pen and document back to Hob. They followed the rabbi’s wife into the study.

  In the rabbi’s study waiting for them were two small, bearded men with big black hats, and a large man wearing a yarmulke. The large one with the embroidered yarmulke from Israel was the rabbi, the skinnier of the two remaining was the scribe, and the remaining man, who had a mole low on his left cheek, was the witness.

  When Hob came in, the scribe picked up a varnished mahogany case in which, resting on crushed velvet, was a quill pen, a penknife with a mother- or perhaps niece-of-pearl handle, and a hollowed-out cow’s foot filled with ink. He handed the tray and contents to Hob.

  “What’s this for?” Hob asked.

  “He gives it to you as a gift,” the rabbi’s wife said. “You see, you’re supposed to bring your own pen and ink and parchment, like in the old days, but nobody does that anymore. Who knows from quill pens nowadays except a professional scribe? And so he gives them to you so they’ll be yours, so you can loan them to him so he can write the get, the parchment of divorce. And when it’s all over you make him a present of his pens and inks back again.”

  “Suppose I want to keep the pen?” Hob said.

  “Don’t act silly,” the rabbi’s wife said. “Here, put on a yarmulke. Go ahead. They’re waiting.”

  “Draconian,” the rabbi said to Hob. “Is that a Jewish name?”

  “We got it at Ellis Island,” Hob said. “My grandfather got it, I mean.”

  “What was the original family name?”

  “Drakonivitski.”

  “But why did he change it to Draconian?”

  “In our family,” Hob said, “we think Grandfather must have met an Armenian immigration official who couldn’t resist the temptation. That’s only a theory, of course.”

  The rabbi shrugged. The fee was paid, and if these people wanted to act like meshuggeners, that was their business.

  “And you are Rebecca Fishkovitz?” he said to Mylar.

  “I changed it,” Mylar said. “My name is Mylar.”

  “First or last?”

  “Both. Or neither.” She smiled, having succeeded once again in spreading confusion.

  “Mylar is a kind of plastic, is it not?” the rabbi asked.

  “A very pretty plastic,” said Mylar with her bright smile.

  The rabbi had had enough small talk. He got down to business. He asked Hob if he really wanted to divorce this woman. Hob said he did. But, the rabbi said, is there not some chance that, given time, you might change your mind? Impossible, Hob said. The rabbi asked a third time, and a third time Hob declined. Then came the part where Mylar had to walk around him three times. She floated around with her usual grace. Hob noted that she looked more radiant on her divorce than she had on her wedding. Sign of the times, he supposed. Then there was the return of the silver, the ancient bride-price, here represented by five shiny quarters, which Mylar accepted with a smirk. And at last those words that bring happiness to as many as do the words of marriage: I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee, said by Hob and repeated three times. And then the rabbi proclaimed them unmarried people according to Jewish law, and gave them the get, which he ripped almost in half in accordance with the usual practice.

  They left the rabbi’s house together and walked down West Main Street to where Sheldon was waiting for Mylar in his Ford Wrangler. Hob didn’t want to talk to Sheldon just then so he said good-bye to Mylar at the corner. Then he remembered the traspaso.

  “Oh, the traspaso,” Hob said, handing it and his pen back to Mylar. Mylar took it, uncapped the pen, then hesitated.

  She said, “We really don’t need this formality. I know the property is yours. You had it before you met me. You don’t think I’d do anything against you on this, do you?”

  “Of course not,” Hob said. “But you know how Spanish courts are. The formality.”

  “I guess so,” Mylar said. She scribbled her signature and handed the pen and document back to Hob.

  “Take care of yourself, Hob.”

  “You too, Mylar.”

  She turned to go, then stopped. “Oh, by the way. Max Rosen telephoned you.”

  “Max Rosen? Who’s he?”

  “He said you’d remember the sea urchins on Sa Comestilla Beach.”

  “Oh. Okay. What did he want?”

  “He wants you to call him. I’ve got his number here somewhere.”

  Mylar rummaged through her purse and found a Kleenex on which a New York telephone number had been written in blurry lavender lipstick. She handed it to Hob.

  “Good-bye, Hob. Thanks for the divorce.”

  “Good-bye, Mylar. Thanks for the traspaso.”

  She gave him a cheery little smile and walked off to Sheldon’s Ford Wrangler, parked up the street. Hob watched her go, and within him there wasn’t even a sigh.

  Still … two years of marriage down the drain.

  4

  Hob left Mylar at the corner of State and Main and walked to his former office on State and Third. He had occupied one room in a dentist’s suite. It had been a few years since he’d paid any rent, but the place was still unrented to anyone else. The sign over the door read, Draconian, Private Investigator. Everything Our Specialty. Discretion Assured. He climbed a flight of stairs, went down the hall past the dentist’s office on the left—Goldfarb, Orthodontic Surgeon, the Overbite King—to a pebbled glass door at the end. On the outside it said, Draconian. P.I. Hob fitted in his key and opened it.

  Gray autumnal light came in from the windows facing State Street and the Hudson River. At the end of a short corridor, he came to a single smallish room with a battered oak desk and a typing chair. Another chair, an armchair, was positioned just to the left of the desk, and there was a straight-backed chair to the right. On the left wall was a four-drawer filing cabinet. On one wall, which was painted a faded green, hung a copy of somebody’s painting of Minnehaha, Daughter of Laughing Waters. Oddly enough, there was no story attached to this painting. Hob couldn’t remember how he had acquired it. He suspected it was Mylar’s touch, put in when he hadn’t been expecting it. There was also an ancient Smith Corona portable typewriter on a gray felt pad. That also had no significance, in fact even less than the painting.

  Hob sat down behind his desk. He wished he had a felt hat to scale at the coatrack in one corner. The coatrack was another of Mylar’s touches. He felt somewhere on the line between nothing and crappy. Divorcing Mylar for the second time had none of the exhilaration of the first time. It was time he got back to Europe, even though he had just gotten here.

  But there was work to be done. He needed to find some money. That, he reminded himself, was why he had come back to the States. The thing with Mylar was just a sideshow. But where was he to get some money?

  Sea urchins. Yes, he remembered. On the beach at Sa Comestilla.

  Max had been a houseguest of Carlo Lucci, a retired textile man from Milan. Lucci had put Max up in the guest cottage on their estate, Son Lluch, just outside the old lead mine, not far from San Carlos. Hob met him at El Caballo Negro, the “in” bar in Santa Eulalia. All this was before Mylar’s time, of course, when Hob was still living with Kate and the kids. Nigel Wheaton was off the island that summer, off on some harebrained scheme in Belize. With Nigel away, it was a quiet summer. Max Ros
en, then working in New York as a theatrical agent, had come to Ibiza for a holiday, had rented a boat locally from Texas Tom Jordan, and had invited a bunch of people for a day on the waters; Hob had been included. It was a thirty-foot catamaran that Texas Tom had built himself, then gone off to Kathmandu and never returned. Hob had a lot of time on his hands that summer. He ended up spending some of it with Max on the catamaran.

  One time they’d anchored off the beach at Sa Comestilla. Max had brought along a prepared lunch from Juanito’s restaurant, not Juanito Esteban, Juanito Alverez from Barcelona. Cold roast chicken, potato salad, green salad. Max had remarked that what was needed was a nice appetizer.

  “You want an appetizer?” Hob asked him.

  “Sure. But so what?”

  “Hold lunch for ten minutes. I’ll bring you an appetizer.”

  Max stood up, a hefty figure in white jacket and slacks bought at Hombre on boutique row in the port of Ibiza. He looked around. They were anchored fifty feet off the beach.

  “Where are you going to get this appetizer?” one of the girls asked.

  “Don’t worry your pretty head over it,” Hob told her. He was already in swim trunks. He fit a face mask over his head. Didn’t bother with the fins. The water was no more than ten feet deep. He did remember to take along a mesh shopping bag, and a pair of canvas gloves. Then he was over the side and kicking down to the bottom.

  The water was clear, and the sandy bottom was gleaming white. Scattered along the bottom were some black things about the size of saucers. As Hob came down to them he could see their spines. He carefully lifted half a dozen of them and put them into the shopping bag. Then kicked for the surface and swam back to the catamaran.