Soma Blues Read online

  “A Porsche,” Benet said. “A nine-eleven. They are not difficult to spot. And they corner like the devil, eh? I suppose it adds a certain frisson, to be killed by a car like that.”

  “The Porsche didn’t kill him,” Fabiola said.

  “Not for lack of trying. But you’re right, it didn’t kill him. The man had been leaving the Café Argent in the Square Sainte-Gabrielle when the cars came for him. He dived for the gutter. He must have hurt his shoulder, landing like that on the cobble-stones, but at least he saved his life. For the moment, anyway. I don’t suppose he’d had time to think about the other car.”

  “It came from the other direction,” Fabiola said. “It was a big car”.

  “A Mercedes three-fifty, I believe,” Benet said. The driver must have seen him go under the car. So he put the Mercedes right into the parked car. He must have been going forty kilometers an hour and he went into it head on. I don’t remember what make the parked car was—perhaps an Opel. The collision rocked it right up onto the curb. It uncovered the man in the straw hat like taking off a turtle’s carapace. Only he didn’t have on his straw hat any longer. It had come off when he dived under the car.”

  “He had blond hair,” Fabiola said. “He wore a leather jacket. It looked expensive.”

  “And he lay there for a moment, blinking. Then he must have seen the first car, the Porsche, come around, because he scrambled to his feet and began to run, like the other people. I suppose there were a dozen out there. Some had come out of the café to see what the trouble was. They found themselves being chased by these two cars. Then, I don’t remember how, the cars were in the Square Sainte-Gabrielle.”

  “They had mounted the curb following the blond man,” Fabiola said.

  “You know the square, Inspector? The café in the middle with the newspaper kiosk beside it? Cars circle around it, and in the square itself there are a few plane trees and some benches. There’s also a bus shelter. The man had run there. And there were other people in the square, too, but the cars ignored them, if not deliberately hitting them can be said to be ignoring them, because they were determined to get the blond man. They were like cowboys, Inspector, trying to cut one longhorn out of the herd. One has seen the movies, one knows. And so they chased him, and he ran from them, dodging around benches. They smashed right through, damaging their cars most horribly. The blond man had not lost his courage. He dodged around, and, when the time seemed right, tried to cut back across the boulevard. And that is when they got him.”

  Just then a gendarme came over, saluted the inspector and said, “I found this, sir. It was in the man’s jacket pocket.”

  He handed Fauchon a small address book with a sealskin cover.

  “That should help,” Fauchon said, putting it in his pocket.

  “And there’s also this,” the gendarme said. “The deceased was holding it in his hand.”

  He handed Fauchon a small green bottle made of what looked like jade.

  4

  “Ah, Hob, good to see you.” Fauchon was conservatively dressed as always. His round face expressed gravity. The high eyebrows indicated irony. The narrow upper lip showed reserve; the full lower one, passion, or perhaps gluttony. The small brown eyes were shrewd, and they seemed to glow with a light of their own. He said, “I wonder if you can identify a person for me?”

  “Why me?”

  “Because he is a foreigner, and we believe he lives in Ibiza.”

  “What made you think that?”

  “That he is a foreigner? Because we have his passport. He is English. As for the Ibiza connection, he was carrying a straw basket with ibiza embroidered on it. And I believe he is wearing a Spanish kerchief knotted around his neck. Also a Spanish shirt.”

  “Only about a million people pass through Ibiza a year,” Hob said.

  “Perhaps he is a resident, like you.”

  “There must be thousands of year-round residents, most of whom I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting. Still, I’ll take a look if you want me to.”

  “I would be much obliged.”

  “What is it, a traffic accident?” Hob had just caught sight of the hastily erected police barricade. “Unless you have some important reason, I don’t think I want to see this. I’m supposed to cook chili tonight, and if I’m right about what’s in that car, it’s going to kill my appetite.”

  “Really, Hob,” Fauchon said in his precise, idiomatic, and utterly foreign English, “for a private detective you have little taste for blood.”

  “It may seem strange to you,” Hob said, “but even an American private detective doesn’t go out of his way to wade in gore.”

  “Gore,” Fauchon said. “Good word. Dickensian? Never mind. Come with me, Hob. This is necessary.”

  The body had been carried to the sidewalk and a big piece of green canvas thrown over it. Two policemen were standing nearby, their truncheons tucked into side pouches. It had just begun to rain. Drops of moisture beaded the canvas. There was a smell of diesel and gasoline in the air. The mist and light rain were growing heavier. Fauchon rocked back on his heels. He bent down over the tarp and with an economical gesture pulled the tarp halfway down.

  The body was that of a blond-haired man in his late thirties or early forties. He wore a white shirt, tieless, the front heavily coated in blood and grime. His slacks were fawn, and he had on white moccasins. He wore a heavy gold chain around his neck. Hob bent to look at the chain. It terminated in a gold coin, its top pierced to allow the chain to pass through. On the coin was a bas relief of two crouched leopards. At last he looked at the face. It had been battered but was still recognizable.

  5

  Fauchon’s small cramped office was in a stone-fronted building that looked like a bank, occupying most of the block between rue d’Anfer and avenue Kléber. Within its tall bronze-fitted glass doors, protected from the rain, a few policemen were standing around smoking. Most of the Paris night patrols worked out of the old station near the Chambre des Députés. Fauchon’s section wasn’t interested in the nightly toll of street crimes—the muggings, beatings, wife and husband slayings; all these they left to the gendarmes. Their section was after bigger game. Anything that might have international implications found its way to the Sûreté. A lot of the cases were then reassigned to the appropriate departments. Fauchon and his people did not ordinarily respond to traffic accidents, especially traffic accidents in a far-out sector like Sainte-Gabrielle.

  Hob slouched along beside and slightly behind the inspector, a head taller—or half a head because he stooped. They went down the wide central corridor, past offices on either side, only a few of which were lighted. An occasional shirtsleeved figure in an office looked up and waved. Fauchon didn’t wave back; his acknowledgment was a grunt. They reached the elevator, a small affair like a closet, to one side of the splendid marble double stairway. Fauchon had long complained about that elevator, which was much too small and much too slow. The Works Ministry claimed they could not install a larger elevator without removing two, perhaps three of the marble pillars that adorned the ground floor. Since the building had been declared a National Treasure, the pillars had to stay exactly where they were.

  Fauchon didn’t say anything on the ride to the third floor. He was humming and rocking on his heels, his gaze fixed on an upper corner of the elevator as if he expected to see a malefactor appear there—ectoplasmically, as it were. They got out of the elevator on the third floor and turned left, Hob leading now because he had been here before and knew the way. Only a single light glowed at the end of the hall. Fauchon’s office was at the end of the hall on the left. He hadn’t bothered to lock it. A green-shaded lamp shone over his desk. Fauchon dropped his hat on a hatrack beside his umbrella, sat down behind his desk, and motioned Hob to take a seat.

  “Haven’t seen you for a while, Hob,” Fauchon said. “How is the detective agency going?”

  Hob knew, and Fauchon knew that he knew, more about the workings or lack of them of the Alte
rnative Detective Agency than any of its employees, including its owner and chief operative, Hob Draconian.

  “The agency is fine, I’m fine, everyone is fine,” Hob said. “Now, can we get to it?”

  “Get to what?” Fauchon asked, his face all innocence.

  “Damn it,” Hob said, “stop playing with me, Emile. You brought me out to Sainte-Gabrielle, and you asked me to return here with you. Now, please tell me what in hell you want and let me get home.”

  “Belligerent, aren’t we?” Fauchon said. “Are you that eager to return to Marielle?”

  “Not really,” Hob said. “Tonight I was supposed to cook my famous chili for an assortment of publishing people.”

  “Then Marielle is expecting you? Tell her you were detained on police business. That should save you from a row.”

  “You show little insight into Marielle’s character,” Hob said, “if you think a legitimate excuse will suffice.”

  “I could have warned you about that woman,” Fauchon said.

  “Well, why in hell didn’t you?”

  “Stop being childish,” Fauchon said. “What I dislike about you, Hob, is that you have no small talk. Don’t you ever read detective novels? The cop and the private detective talk about all sorts of things. Insinuations are always made by the policeman before he gets down to cases.”

  “I have no time to read detective novels,” Hob said. “I’m too busy detecting.”

  “And in your spare time?”

  “I read Proust.”

  “Who was that fellow under the tarpaulin?”

  “Stanley Bower.”

  Fauchon looked annoyed. “You really are poor at this, Hob. You are supposed to say that you never saw him before, and I point out that your eyes widened when you looked at him, and then you admit that you might possibly have seen him once or twice, but couldn’t claim to actually know him, and so on and so on until I get you to admit that he was in fact your long-missing brother.”

  “Inspector Fauchon, please be serious. Or if you can’t, at least take me out and buy me a decent dinner.”

  “Marielle does not provide?”

  “Our arrangement is that we split all costs. Unfortunately, I have no money.”

  “What about the famous check from America?”

  “It still has not arrived.”

  Fauchon clucked in mock sympathy. “So Marielle pays for you both?”

  “That would be against her principles. It would mean that she was keeping a younger man. No, Marielle buys food for one and assumes that I eat out on my own.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I wait until she’s gone to sleep. Then I eat what’s left over. Fourth-day lamb or veal roast with the fat nicely congealed around it is always a treat. Stale cheese with green mold for dessert.”

  “My dear fellow, you have my sympathy. Women’s ability to deal out humiliation is only succeeded by man’s ability to take it.”

  “Who said that, La Rochefoucauld?”

  “My father, as a matter of fact. He had some great stories about the Ouled-Naïl dancing girls who used to come to his command post at Sidi bel Abbès.”

  “I’d love to hear it,” Hob said. “Preferably over a glass of white wine at Au Pied du Cochon.”

  “Stanley Bower, I believe you said?”

  “Yes, his name popped into my head as soon as I saw him. Pity I can’t remember anything else about him.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “Blank,” Hob said, tapping his head. “They say that hunger makes a man forgetful.”

  “Hob,” Fauchon said, his voice making the transition nicely from jesting to menacing, “do not toy with me.”

  “Is that a line from one of your detective novels?” Hob asked. “Of course I’m going to toy with you. I’m hungry, and I don’t want to go back to Montparnasse and make chili. How the hell can you French think chili is a gourmet dish?”

  “It is our special gift,” Fauchon said, “to equate the exotic with the desirable.”

  “Oh, God,” Hob said, lowering his head into his hands.

  “You’re so pathetic,” Fauchon said, “I find it difficult to be cross with you. Come along then. Perhaps a plate of pâté will refresh your memory.”

  “Follow it up with maigret of duck,” Hob said, “and I’ll tell you what they did with Judge Crater.”

  “Comment?” Fauchon said, choosing that moment to become French again.

  They didn’t go to Au Pied du Cochon. Instead they went to the Brasserie Lipp, because Fauchon was in a mood for choucroute garnie. The Lipp was one of the famous old restaurants on the boulevard Saint-Germain, across the street from Deux Magots. It was a palace of tinted mirrors and amber lights, chandeliers, tuxedoed waiters, and stylish people, who were becoming more and more difficult to tell from the people merely trying to be stylish. There were the inevitable German tourists, of course, and the inevitable British tourists, and the many other tourists who were also becoming inevitable, notably the Japanese. Hob also ordered the choucroute. It was large, spicy and filling, and the best the Lipp had to offer. Where the French ever got their passion for sauerkraut and knockwurst was beyond him. These were things the guide books never told you.

  Fauchon ordered a white Bordeaux. Hob thanked God for France, where even police interrogations are conducted over a glass of wine.

  “Now,” Fauchon said, “about this fellow Stanley Bower.”

  “Who?” asked Hob.

  “The person you identified.”

  “Did I? You know, Emile, I just might have made all that up. In order to get to the Lipp, you know.”

  “Hob, that is not funny.”

  “I thought you wanted me to be more evasive and conversational, like your private detectives in books. Aside from those circus people, did anyone else see what went on?”

  “We have no eyewitnesses. Of course we interrogated the people at the Café Argent, where this Stanley Bower was just before his murder. We talked to the proprieter, who served them.”

  “Them?”

  “Bower was talking with some fellow shortly before his murder.”

  “What fellow? What did he look like?”

  “He was sitting in the shadow. The proprietor did not get a good look at him. Just a man. He left. Bower left shortly after him, and that’s when the cars arrived.”

  “Nothing else about the other man? Color of hair? Height?”

  “He was sitting. He wore a hat. The proprietor couldn’t even give us a description of the hat.”

  “That’s great,” Hob said. “And for this I’m missing my party.”

  “What time are your guests due?” Fauchon said.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “The guests of Marielle for whom you are to cook the chili.”

  “They’re probably arriving just now,” Hob said, expertly wrapping a soggy mass of wine-flavored sauerkraut around a bit of rosy knockwurst and popping it into his mouth, following it up with a piece of crusty baguette and a sip of wine.

  “Start telling me something,” Fauchon said, “or I will summon a gendarme to escort you home. There is still time for you to play host.”

  “You’d actually do that, wouldn’t you?”

  “The cruelties of the French police are beyond the comprehension of the Anglo Saxons,” Fauchon said with a little smile of satisfaction. He put his napkin on the table and started to get up.

  Hob reached out and touched his arm. Fauchon sat down again.

  “You’re pretty good at making jokes, but you don’t take one worth a damn.”

  “Tell me about Bower.”

  “English. About forty years old. A nodding acquaintance. Met him in Ibiza a couple of years ago. He knew somebody. House guest. Let me think a moment. Yes, he was staying with Elliot Turner, the actor.”

  “You know Turner?” Fauchon said.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I recently attended an Elliot Turner film retrospective at the Ciné Montparnasse Study Cen
ter. Is he as nasty as the parts he portrayed?”

  “Oh, much worse.”

  “They say he is quite a ladies’ man.”

  “They lie. He is a flaming homosexual.”

  “Indeed? In his movies he is always lusting after somebody else’s woman.”

  “In real life, he was always lusting after somebody else’s boy.”

  “And Stanley Bower was a friend of his?”

  “I suppose so. As I said, Bower was staying at Turner’s finca in San Jose. His house guest. I never saw them together much, but I imagine either they were friends or Bower was blackmailing Turner.”

  “Did you learn what Bower did for a living?”

  “He didn’t seem to do much of anything. I believe there was family money. That’s what Bower hinted at, anyhow.”

  “Hinted?”

  “I call it that. Bower liked to buy a round a drinks at El Caballo Negro and brag about his family connections and how his grandfather had been the best friend of Edward the Seventh. Or maybe it was another Edward. That’s how he talked to the Americans. But when any English were present, he didn’t have much to say about all that. It was impossible to tell whether he was trying to put one over on us or indulging in that British sense of humor that becomes so sly that even it’s possessor can’t tell who he’s sending up.”

  “Did you know Stanley Bower was a drug dealer?” Fauchon asked.

  Hob shook his head. “Explains why you’re so interested in this case, though. Are you sure of your information?”

  “A small bottle of the drug he was selling was found on his body. It’s a new drug. It turned up in New York recently. Have you ever heard of soma?”

  “That’s a new one on me,” Hob said.

  “On a lot of people. It’s something we might start seeing around, however. Which is why I’d like to get on it before it gets started. Did you see Bower again after his stay in Ibiza?”

  “Nope.”