Soma Blues (6 page)

“Did you try any yourself?”

Hervé shook his head. “Stanley and I were going to take some together. Tonight, as a matter of fact.” His mouth drooped in sorrow.

“These people he sold it to. Who were they?”

“Hob, you know very well I’m not going to name any names. Not even for you, my dear. Anyhow, none of them could have been involved in Stanley’s murder. Wealthy Parisians don’t kill their dope dealers. You know that as well as I do.”

“Can you at least tell me who he saw last?”

“Oh, Hob, it isn’t going to do you any good. And anyhow, I don’t know.”

“Come on, Hervé. I need a name. I have to start somewhere. Stanley was staying with you just before he got killed, wasn’t he?”

“I’ve already admitted that to Fauchon.”

“So you must know who was the last person he saw.”

Hervé sighed. “Oh, all right. It was Etienne Vargas, if you must know. You know Etienne, don’t you? The tall, delicious Brazilian boy who came to the island a few months ago?”

“I don’t know him. Was he going with Stanley?”

“No way, my dear. Etienne is unfortunately straight. He goes with Annabelle. You know Annabelle, don’t you?”

“Yes. Slightly. Is she here in Paris?”

“Not to my knowledge. Etienne apparently came without her.”

“Where was he staying?”

“Some hotel, I believe. I don’t know which.”

“Was he alone or with someone?”

“I don’t know. He was alone when I saw him. He said he had an appointment with Stanley.”

“How did he act?”

Hervé shrugged. “Brazilian. What else?”

“I mean, was he nervous?”

“Not that I noticed.”

“He came here to your apartment?”

“Yes. Said he was supposed to meet with Stanley. I told him Stanley had gone out. Asked if I could take a message. He said no, he had a date with Stanley later, but since he was in the neighborhood he thought he’d drop by. And then he left. Hob, you mustn’t breathe a word about me telling you this.”

“Don’t worry. Can you tell me anyone else who might have bought this soma from Stanley?”

“I gave him half a dozen names to call. I don’t know if any of them bought from him. Hob, I really don’t know.”

“What about Etienne? Do you think he might have bought some?”

“He’s rich enough to. The Vargas family is very prominent in Rio de Janeiro. His father has a finca on the island, you know, near San Juan. I told you the stuff Stanley had was pricey. But I have no way of knowing who he sold to.”

“I don’t suppose you know where I could reach Etienne now?”

“Not a clue, my dear. I’d imagine he’s gone back to Ibiza.”

TWO

Ibiza

1

Hob looked out the window and saw below, through a thin screen of clouds, the island of Ibiza appear suddenly through a cloud break. He was sitting beside a businessman, fattish and obnoxious, who had begun a conversation by telling Hob that he was from Düsseldorf, had come to Paris on business, and, finishing his appointments early, was taking a long weekend on the Spanish island of Ibiza. Had Hob ever been there? Not waiting for an answer he said that he had a friend who lived in a new condominium near Santa Eulalia—Der Sturmkönig, it was called. Had Hob ever heard of the place? It had been mentioned in
European Architecture
magazine as “a piquant potpourri of styles old and new.” It had three swimming pools, a Corinthian arch, a bandstand in the shape of a seashell, and three restaurants, one of which had been awarded four pigs in
International Gourmand
magazine. It had its own shops and food stores, and, very important, its own German butcher who made the sausages and the
Schweinefleisch
and the other good meats of the homeland. There followed a brief dissertation on sausages, ending with, “I am very particular about my sausages. Only the Germans know how to make proper sausages. The French sausages look amusing but have too much garlic and otherwise lack character. The English sausages are carelessly put together and made with sawdust, like their politics. Only in Germany, and especially in the Düsseldorf area, is it known how to make sausages.”

Hob nodded agreement throughout the speech. It was the sort of old-fashioned chauvinistic talk that was so difficult to come by these days, the sort of talk that Hob, a collector of extreme nationalistic attitudes, usually liked to hear, because in his mind Europe was a big Disneyland in which each country had its own quaint colors and costumes and customs and its own special products and its own typical people in regional costumes who were always willing to make speeches about themselves. He thought it charming that the Italians had strong nationalistic opinions about pasta and the Scandinavians about akvavit, and so on, right down to the Belgians with their mussels and
pommes frites.
But typically, he disliked himself for having this cynical and superficial view, thought little of himself for being charmed by bogus quaintness, or even the real thing, real quaintness, whatever that is. He knew what he sought was out of touch with current realities. Europe was no longer quaint. It was in deadly earnest. But not for Americans, who, to their peril, couldn’t even take the Japanese seriously. Americans didn’t go to Europe to get a dose of reality. There was enough of that at home. They went for the local color. And if they couldn’t find it, they made it up.

The plane dropped a wing and banked. Ibiza came fully into view, a small island that the jet could overfly in much less than a minute. There was the central spine of mountains, with the valleys on the southern side and the sheer cliffs coming down to the sea on the northern side. There was the pall of smoke over to one side, from the huge garbage pit near Santa Catalina that burned day and night and was the island’s leading eyesore. And then the plane was dropping down toward the airfield, and the seat belts sign came on.

At last he was standing on the dusty tarmac, walking to the luggage area. There was a crowd of people behind the barricades, waiting for friends and lovers. Would there be someone waiting for him? Unlikely. It was close to six months since Hob had last been on the island, when he had come for Harry Hamm’s wedding.

And then he was out and into a taxi and smelling the smell of the island: thyme and jasmine, oranges and lemons. He went by the low cubic white houses on the road into Ibiza City. In front of him arose the sight of the D’Alt Villa, the old city, a mass of white cubes rising up out of the ground, all odd angles and shapes, a cubist city of the past, like something out of remote Cycladean Greece.

The driver wanted to chat with him in his rudimentary English. Hob didn’t want to talk, however. The first moments of the return to the island were precious. He searched the roadside for familiar landmarks. The map of Ibiza was covered with monuments to the peculiar personal history of the place. Here is the spot where Little Tony got busted by the Spanish drug cops. That pile of rocks is where Arlene had her old bar, where Elliot Paul used to come by for a drink, before the Fascists demolished it. Just down the road is where you met Alicia that first golden summer. And here is the dangerous crossroads where, one hilarious night, Sicilian Richard went off the road in his big gangster Citröen, and ploughed into an Ibicenco house, killing the brother and sister who lived there, catching them together in bed, so the story went. Richard never lived to tell of it. The Guardia came and took him to the hospital for a broken arm. He died of causes unknown on his way there.

Hob’s first stop was in the village of Santa Eulalia. He had the taxi drop him off at Autos Carlitos where he hired a SEAT 700. He took the little car out on the road to San Carlos, in the hills just beyond the village. He got a lift of the spirits as he passed through San Carlos, noted the half dozen hippies drinking beer and playing a guitar at the wooden tables outside of Anita’s bar, went through the sharp curves with Robin Maugham’s house on the crest on the left, and turned into the rocky drive that led to his finca, Ca’n Poeta. He found room for his car near the big
algarobo
tree in front of the sheds. The house with its beautiful lines made him feel better at once. It was built according to the golden mean, or golden section, Rafe the Architect had told him. Whatever it was, the house looked good with its two wings separated by the second-floor drying shed that had laundry flapping from it now. He went down three steps to the flagstoned entranceway with its big grape arbor. There was no one home but a small dark-haired girl in a pink bathing suit lying in the hammock reading an Alistair MacLean paperback. Hob had never met her before. She said she was Sally, Shaul’s friend—Shaul being one of Hob’s friends from Israel—and that everybody had gone to the beach and who was he? Hob explained that he was the owner, and the girl complimented him on his house and his hospitality.

Hob went inside, put his luggage in his second-floor bedroom, and changed into white cotton shorts, a gray three-button T-shirt, and espadrilles. He left again and drove back out to the San Carlos road, going back toward Santa Eulalia, then turned off at Ses Pines and drove inland between almond fields into the Morna valley. Soon he was climbing toward the Sedos des Sequines, the mountainous ridge that ran down the center of the island. The little car negotiated the steep road without too much difficulty. The narrow rutted road changed to a dirt track and climbed into the steep hills. Several times Hob had to negotiate around rock faces beetling into the road. In Ibiza they tended to build around things rather than blast through them. At last he crawled around a final steep hairpin and saw ahead, where the road flattened across the saddle of the hill, the drystone fence that enclosed Harry Hamm’s finca.

Hob parked the car in the space cut for it in the prickly cactus patch, alongside Harry’s SEAT. He walked around the edge of the stone fence, and then he could see the house, built on the back slope of the hill. It was a small farmhouse, about two hundred years old, with four or five hectares of land surrounding it. The grounds were scrupulously clean, as Ibicenco farms always were, unless they were being farmed by
peninsulares
, as Spaniards from the mainland were called. To one side were the sheds, still half full of
algorobos
, the ever-present carob. Hob could catch its characteristic sickly sweet aroma. It wasn’t a smell he much liked, but he associated it with the island, and so it had become dear to him.

The house itself was typical, built of fitted stones that were encased in mud and brush and then cemented and plastered. As was traditional on the island, the size of the largest room was determined by the length of the trunk of white oak available for the ridgepole. Once the ridgepole was in place, right-angled oak limbs were fitted to either side, then brush was piled on top of that and packed with mud. The roof was flat and slanted toward the center to catch rainwater, which was led to gutters and then down to the underground storage tank from which Harry would pump what was needed up to a holding tank on the roof.

Not even the windows had been modernized, although Harry had decided to do that someday. But he held off, appreciating the fact that in the old days the slit windows kept out the winter’s cold and provided no easy entry for the Saracen pirates from Algeria and Morrocco who used to ravage the island until late in the 1800s. The North African coast was less than a hundred miles away. The Saracens had been raiding these islands for hundreds of years, and the Ibicencos, far from any central government, had learned to take care of themselves. Every village and every outlying structure was a fortress, or at least a strong point, designed to hold up the invaders until men could be assembled to deal with them. There were no Saracen pirates anymore, only English and German tourists—and these tended to give more than they took. Hob sometimes wondered if the change had been advantageous. Dealing with raiders had developed hardiness and self-reliance in the Ibicencos; dealing with tourists had been aesthetically disastrous, bringing fast-food restaurants and entire Scandinavian, German, and French “villages,” newly built self-enclosed tourist centers whose architecture was all the more grotesque since it was a self-conscious attempt to imitate a small village from back home. No American villages so far, but that was sure to come.

There were a few chickens scratching around the front yard at Harry’s place. Maria’s doing, no doubt. Hob had never believed that a guy like Harry Hamm was cut out to keep chickens. But what could you tell about Harry’s Ibicenco wife except that she was beautiful and stately and obviously much too good for Harry, who was an overweight, balding, retired cop from Jersey City, New Jersey, and Hob Draconian’s mostly unpaid partner in the Alternative Detective Agency.

Hob kept to the roadside of the stone fence and hailed the house. “Harry! Are you there?” His voice boomed across the yard, amplified by the freak acoustics of the scalloped cliffside nearby. For a moment there was no answer. Then Harry came running out of the house, in khaki work pants and white shirt, wearing the soft rope-soled espadrilles of the island, a big balding man with a paunch.

“Hob! Come in!” Harry swung open the little gate and led Hob through. Now Hob could see Harry’s car, a Spanish-built Citröen parked just around the side of the sheds.

“About time you showed up,” Harry said. “You talk me into going into this agency with you, and then you split for Paris and leave me here to moulder.”