Free The Alternative Detective (Hob Draconian) by Robert Sheckley Page A

dark.”
     
     

 
    THE INTRUDER
    17
     
     
    Although the voice hadn’t said so, I assumed that its possessor was carrying a gun. I would have been, if positions had been reversed. So I decided to make no precipitate movement, nothing that would alarm the voice (though he’d sounded cool enough) into firing prematurely, or, shall we say, mistakenly. Nor, given my assumption, was there any efficacious action for me to take at the present moment. I had already closed the door behind me. There was nowhere to go.
    “May I sit down?” I asked.
    “Suit yourself,” said the voice. He was speaking English, but with a French accent, as I might have expected. Moonlight streamed in through the tall, white-curtained windows, throwing a patch of yellow light on the floor and lending a ghostly illumination to the entire room. The armoire crouched in the corner like a fabulous beast. An armchair suggested itself out of the gloom, and I sat down in it.
    After a suitable interval I said, “OK, are you going to tell me what this is all about or do we just sit around in the dark?”
    “I’m acting on behalf of some friends,” the voice said.
    “Just what does that mean?” I enquired.
    “It has come to our attention that you’re looking for Alex Sinclair.”
    “That is correct,” I said.
    “Perhaps my friends could help.”
    “Sure. I pay for information. Tell your friends to give me a call. Early afternoon is a good time. Or leave me their number on your way out and I’ll call them.”
    “I think it would be best if we went to see them now.”
    “I’d love to,” I said, “but actually I’ve got a date in a few minutes. Why don’t we set up a meeting? Lunch tomorrow sound good? I’m buying.”
    “Nice try, M’sieu ’Ob, but no go. My friends insist upon seeing you now. Are you going to come along nice and quiet, or are you going to give me trouble?”
    “That depends,” I said, “entirely upon whether or not you are armed.”
    “Make no mistake,” he said. “I am armed.”
    “That’s easy enough for you to say,” I said. “But am I just supposed to take your word for it?”
    “All right,” the voice said. “Turn on ze light.”
    I complied. The overhead light revealed a man of middle years and sinister mien. His face was sallow and pocked. Blue stubble showed beneath his jaundiced skin like the bristles of a steel brush poking through an olive-drab bedsheet. He was wearing a long black overcoat and a black fedora. He looked like an intellectual dressed up as a thirties gangster; the sort of thing the French do so very well. In his right hand, a blued steel automatic winked wickedly.
    “I’ll assume it’s loaded,” I said. “There is such a thing as carrying credulity too far. Where are we going, and are you going to keep that pointed at me in the street?”
    “It will be in my pocket,” the guy said, pocketing the automatic. “Don’t make me fire, thereby ruining two suits of clothes, to say nothing of your health.”
    And so out we went into the June night.
    Paris is well known to be an exciting city, especially when you walk through it with a gun in your ribs. Thoughts of escape ran through my mind like small gray rabbits. What was to prevent me from suddenly breaking into a sprint, running up an alley, into a theater, or a bar, or a sex shop, or even ducking into the gendarmerie past which our footsteps were now leading us. Reluctantly, I put aside the idea. The black swans of caution brought me back to my senses: any sudden movement on my part could touch off this galoot’s adrenalin-charged reflexes. If there were a hair trigger beneath his tensed trigger finger, a sudden move on my part might cause him to shoot me even before he had time to decide not to. And of course, he could probably get away with it since no one pays attention to noise in Paris unless it is loud enough to be a bomb or repetitive enough to be a machine gun.
    And so I walked on. And as I walked, I thought. One of