Don’t Ask

by Donald Westlake

  He made faces while he ate, the Mace apparently having altered the taste of things he ordinarily liked, but he made no comment beyond one mumbled, ‘What a homecoming,’ and he listened quietly while May gave him a report of events here in town while he’d been away up in Vermont on the slippery slopes. How the guys had lost the bone to the DEA but were pretty sure they were off to get it, and probably the Tsergovians even had it by this hour, and Andy Kelp would call tomorrow, probably – no, certainly – with good news, and would be delighted to learn that John was safe, and would bring over his five thousand dollars.

  ‘So. All’s well that ends well, then,’ John said inaccurately, but it was a nice thought to take along to bed, where it helped him sleep right through until Kelp showed up around ten the next morning.

  29

  Dortmunder looked at the money he’d dumped out of the envelope onto the coffee table. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said.

  Kelp shrugged. ‘Tiny says it’s ours,’ he said, ‘and you know how seldom people argue with Tiny. As far as he’s concerned, we got the bone and we delivered it. Gave it straight into his cousin’s hands, got paid, and that was that. We did what they paid us to do.’

  ‘But,’ Dortmunder objected, ‘they don’t have the bone.’

  ‘That’s the way it looked to me, too,’ Kelp agreed, ‘but Tiny explained it this other way, and Grijk just sat there looking like one of those beached whales you see in the Post and said, “Okay, Diny, okay, Diny,” in that way he has. Tiny told him to go borrow some more from Citibank, he wants us to do it again.’

  ‘And what’d Grijk say to that?’

  ‘I think he’s discouraged,’ Kelp said. ‘That whole crowd over there, I think they got the wind kind of knocked out of their sails.’

  Dortmunder looked into the coffee cup he’d brought in with him from the kitchen, but it was empty. Shaking his head, he said, ‘I don’t follow the sequence there. Where’d those other people come from?’

  ‘What it looks like,’ Kelp told him, ‘it looks like the Votskojeks put a tap on the Tsergovians’ phone, so when Tiny called to say we had the bone and we’re coming over, they went there real quick ahead of us, three of them. Two went upstairs and tied up the people there, and the third one stayed with Grijk to make sure he didn’t slip us the high sign, and made Grijk say he was his deputy security guy. So we left the bone and split, and they copped it for themselves.’

  ‘That’s really irritating,’ Dortmunder said. He looked in his coffee cup, and it was still empty.

  ‘Water over the bridge,’ Kelp said. ‘We did the job, and we got paid.’

  Dortmunder looked at the money on the coffee table. He looked around the room, but May was off at her cashier job at the Safeway, and there was no one else to consult. ‘I don’t know about this,’ he said.

  Kelp said, ‘What’s not to know? John, this is the most successful job we pulled in recent memory. In even not so recent memory. There was something to get, we went out and got it, we got paid for it. Okay, we lost it for a little while—’

  ‘You lost me, too,’ Dortmunder pointed out.

  ‘John,’ Kelp said, more in sorrow than in anger, looking at him as though Dortmunder were guilty of some sort of low blow, ‘John, we said, “Jump.” You remember that; Stan and me, we both said, “Jump.”’

  ‘Just pointing out,’ Dortmunder said. ‘You said you lost the bone; I’m just pointing out, you also lost me.’

  ‘Whatever you want,’ Kelp said. ‘We found the bone, and you found yourself—’

  ‘In Vermont.’ (That still griped.)

  ‘—and we got paid. Success. Victory. Accomplishment. End of story.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Dortmunder said.

  Kelp shook his head. He was getting exasperated. He said, ‘What don’t you know?’

  For answer, Dortmunder reached for the phone and dialed a number. The phone rang six times, and then there was a click, and then a sound like a bear roused too early from hibernation – part roar, part cough, part gnashing of teeth. ‘Tiny, it’s John,’ Dortmunder said.

  The growl formed itself into words: ‘I taught you wuh lost.’

  ‘I found myself,’ Dortmunder said. ‘Tiny, I want to go over to—’

  ‘Don’t you know what time it is?’

  ‘What? No, I don’t think so, I— Hold on.’ Dortmunder turned to Kelp, ‘He wants to know what time it is.’

  While Kelp vainly searched himself for a watch, Tiny roared in Dortmunder’s ear, ‘I don’t wanna know what time it is!’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘I’ll find out,’ Kelp said, getting to his feet and going away to the kitchen.

  ‘And I don’t care where you been, neither,’ Tiny said. ‘If that’s what you’re calling me about, forget it.’

  ‘I been in Vermont,’ Dortmunder said, ‘but that isn’t the point.’

  ‘You been in Vermont?’

  ‘But that isn’t the point. The point is—’

  ‘Vermont?’

  ‘You don’t care, Tiny, remember? The reason I’m calling is, I want to go see the Tsergovians, and I thought maybe you could bring me over there.’

  Tiny muttered a bit, like a subway going by far below ground level, and then he said, ‘Whadaya wanna go over there for? You got your money, right?’

  ‘I got jerked around, Tiny,’ Dortmunder said. ‘I wanna know the story.’

  ‘What story? There is no story. You got hired, you did it, you went to Vermont, you got paid. The money’s good, right? It isn’t draffs, right?’

  Kelp came back from the kitchen and said, ‘It’s quarter after ten.’

  ‘It’s quarter after ten,’ Dortmunder said into the phone.

  There was silence. It stretched on and on. Had Tiny gone back to sleep? Dortmunder said, ‘Tiny?’

  A long sigh came snaking down the phone line. Tiny said, ‘You wanna go see these people, Dortmunder, whyntcha just go see these people? You need the address?’

  ‘Grijk’s the only one I met,’ Dortmunder reminded him. ‘You’re their cousin; you can like vouch for me.’

  ‘I don’t do family reunions,’ Tiny said. ‘I did what I could for that crowd, and now that’s it.’

  ‘I don’t ask you a lot, Tiny,’ Dortmunder said, and just let that lie there, and waited.

  Long silence, even longer than before. But Tiny hadn’t gone back to sleep, Dortmunder knew he hadn’t. He waited.

  Another long sigh. Tiny said, ‘All right, Dortmunder, this once.’

  ‘Thank you, Tiny.’

  ‘I’ll call them; I’ll call you back.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You know, Dortmunder,’ Tiny said, ‘you could go too far, you know.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to do that, Tiny,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘You’re right about that,’ Tiny said.

  30

  Zara Kotor,’ Tiny said, ‘and Drava Votskonia, this is John Dortmunder and An-drew Kelp.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Call me Andy.’

  ‘Sit down, sit down.’

  They were in the upstairs parlor at the Tsergovian embassy, amid the tasseled shades and the commemorative plates. All the chairs and sofas up here were deeply stuffed mohair; you sank way down into them, and they itched. Zara Kotor, settling into the big maroon sofa under the ornately framed painting of a corner of a cul-de-sac at midnight during a power failure, patted the mohair seat cushion beside her – puff, puff, the dust lazily rose – for Tiny to come sit beside her, but somehow he managed not to notice and took the settee on the other side of the room. All the settee.

  It was Kelp who wound up next to Zara on the sofa, but she paid him no attention. Her eyes were on Tiny as she said, ‘I’m glad you fellows came around. I was afraid we wouldn’t be seeing any more of you, lose touch with one another.’

  Tiny shifted on the settee, which groaned piteously, and said, ‘It’s Dortmunder wants to talk to you. That
one there.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Zara said, eying Dortmunder with wary interest. ‘You’re the one who was captured.’

  ‘And given the runaround.’

  ‘But you escaped.’

  ‘They treated me like a rube,’ Dortmunder said. He was feeling sullen and embarrassed, having to explain himself this way. Treated like a rube; if he didn’t do something about that, then they were right, right?

  She looked at his face and nodded, with a little smile of understanding. ‘You want revenge.’

  ‘I want my own back,’ Dortmunder agreed. ‘But first I got to know, if you and Votskojek are all so poor, how come they could pull such a major scam?’

  ‘That’s an easy one,’ she said, her smile turning grim. ‘The answer is Harry Hochman.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘He owns hotels,’ Zara told him. ‘Happy Hour Inns.’

  ‘Oh, them,’ Kelp said happily. ‘I’ve got some of their towels.’

  ‘And they’ve got some of my goat,’ Dortmunder said. (Grijk looked briefly puzzled.) ‘But Harry Hochman,’ Dortmunder went on, ‘doesn’t sound like a Votskojek name.’

  ‘He’s an American,’ Zara said. ‘He came to Novi Glad years ago, with money in both fists, trying to buy people and governments, and when our country split up he decided to put his bets on Votskojek. If they win, he gets richer.’

  ‘So he financed it, huh? Running me around in Vermont.’

  ‘I think he has a place there.’ Turning to Grijk, she said, ‘Get the Hochman file. It’s in the black drawer.’

  As Grijk obediently lumbered away – thud thud thud, down the stairs – Dortmunder said, ‘You got a whole file on this guy?’

  ‘We keep tabs on our enemies,’ she said, with a glint in her eye. ‘When the day comes, we’ll get our own revenge.’

  ‘If the day comes, you mean.’

  ‘When.’

  Dortmunder nodded, thinking about that. He said, ‘What are you gonna do next, about the bone?’

  ‘We can’t steal it anymore,’ she said. ‘They’re alerted to that now.’

  ‘What else is there?’

  Looking very serious and ambassadorial, she said, ‘We are presenting a formal objection to the General Assembly concerning the makeup of the advisory committee.’

  ‘The archbishop, you mean.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re saying he’s prejudiced or whatever, you want him off your case.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Isn’t it kinda late to make that beef?’

  ‘I’m sorry we didn’t do it earlier, yes,’ she admitted.

  Dortmunder nodded again. ‘And it won’t work now, will it? On account of being so late. So then, besides the archbishop’s already got a religious thing against you, because of the bone, now he’s gonna have a personal thing, because you said he couldn’t be fair.’

  ‘He can’t be fair!’

  ‘Less now than before,’ Dortmunder pointed out.

  Zara sighed. She was looking less like an ambassador and more like a Bronx Science student. ‘We know that,’ she said. ‘But we tried the other way, and we failed. Now they’re on guard against us, and we don’t have any more money …’

  ‘You have a little more,’ Dortmunder said.

  Instantly, she was all suspicion again, gimlet-eyed and stern-jawed, but before she could say anything the thud-thud of Grijk’s return sounded, and they all turned to look at the doorway. Grijk stomped in carrying two maroon expansion files with cloth ties in neat bows. He carried these to Zara and she handed one to Kelp, beside her, for safekeeping while untying the other one and fingering through its contents. Meanwhile, Grijk went back to his own mohair seat, passing Dortmunder on the way, pausing to say, with quiet sympathy, ‘I lost a goat once. It was werry sad.’

  Dortmunder contemplated that piece of personal history. Grijk resumed his seat, and Zara grunted as she leaned forward to put some papers from the file on the massive dark-wood coffee table, saying, ‘Mr Hochman owns a ski resort in Vermont.’

  ‘Does he.’ Dortmunder picked up from the coffee table a full-color brochure of the Mount Kinohaha ski resort. Leafing through it, he saw a bright wintertime photo of the shopping area. ‘The village,’ he muttered. ‘That’s it right there, the village they ran me through.’

  Kelp got up to come over and peer past Dortmunder’s shoulder at the picture. ‘Gee, John,’ he said. ‘With all those skis and things in the windows? And you didn’t catch on?’

  ‘They didn’t have skis in the windows,’ Dortmunder said, with what only looked like patience. ‘They had food and stuff. And people all dressed in – Ah hah!’

  Kelp looked alert. ‘Ah hah?’

  ‘Summer-stock theater,’ Dortmunder read from the brochure, and pointed to the phrase. ‘That’s where they got all those goddam villagers and their goddam native goddam garb.’

  ‘Boy,’ Kelp said. ‘They really put on a whole production for you.’

  ‘Sure,’ Dortmunder said. ‘So I’d give up and tell them where the bone is, if they’d promise to bring me back to the States. From Vermont.’ Then he frowned over at Zara, who was still frowningly going through the files. ‘But what about that Dracula’s castle place? Where they were taking me when I got away.’

  ‘Hochman owns a house near there,’ she said, ‘They call it a château. I’m looking for a – Here it is.’

  This time, what she’d produced out of the file was a bunch of pages cut from a magazine and stapled together in one corner. She held them out, and Kelp came over to take them and deliver them to Dortmunder; except he moved very slowly coming back, leafing through the pages, becoming absorbed in what he saw.

  Dortmunder said, ‘Andy? Do you mind?’

  ‘What? Oh, no, no. Here.’ And Kelp handed over the pages.

  Which were from an architecture magazine; a whole article about Harry Hochman’s brand-new château up in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Interior and exterior photos, and gobbledygook copy, leaning heavily on the word volume, as in ‘volume of air,’ ‘volume of space,’ ‘contrasting volumes of light and darkness.’ The ‘volumes flanking the fireplace’ turned out to be books, which confused matters.

  ‘Doesn’t look like Dracula’s castle to me,’ Kelp said. ‘Looks kinda pretty good, actually.’

  Dortmunder pointed to a view of the building from downhill, looking up, the volumes of the design darkly silhouetted against the pale blue volume of the sky. ‘That’s where I saw it from,’ he said. ‘Okay?’

  Kelp squinted, the better to see, and gazed judiciously at the picture for so long that Dortmunder finally, to make a point, turned the page and looked at the rest of the article. He studied it briefly, turned back and forth through the pages, then looked over at Zara Kotor. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘we could help each other out here.’

  When in doubt, Zara Kotor invariably fell back on paranoia: ‘I don’t see how,’ she said, with a frosty look that somehow exempted Tiny, who was keeping as low a profile as possible, given that he was about the size of a minor Alp. ‘I don’t see it at all.’

  ‘Well,’ Dortmunder said, and patted the magazine article open on his knee, ‘we both want something, seems to me. You want your UN seat, which means you want that bone, and I want to even the score with some smartass room-renters.’

  ‘I told you,’ she said, ‘we’ve given up that approach. Security will be much tighter there now. Besides, it’s almost too late anyway. They already have photos of the relic, X rays, some test results.’

  ‘Not enough to prove it’s the right one,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘Not yet,’ she agreed. ‘But very soon. Then, if we take it, they’ll be able to demonstrate they once had it.’

  ‘But not yet.’

  ‘But soon.’

  ‘But not yet. Also, we could lift the test results while we’re in the neighborhood.’

  Zara expelled an exasperated sigh. ‘All right. Fine. But it isn’t going t
o happen.’

  ‘Why not?’ Dortmunder asked her. ‘If we move fast, we can do the whole thing. You can join that club you’re so hot for, and I can poke this guy Hochman in the eye. If we move fast, and if we help each other.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t have the details worked out yet,’ he admitted, ‘but I will, as long as I know I can count on you people.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Well, you know,’ Dortmunder said, ‘behind you, you got a whole country. You got …’ he searched for the word ‘… assets we don’t have, being a country.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Armies, air forces—’

  She recoiled, shocked, bouncing off the sofa-back. ‘My God, we’re not going to war with Votskojek! Not here in New York!’

  ‘They’d hardly notice, in this town,’ Dortmunder told her. ‘But that isn’t what I meant. What I meant was, you could give us like backup support, whatever we decide to do.’

  ‘Not necessarily whatever,’ she said, with a very guarded look. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you’re beginning to remind me of those guys in high school, kind of nerdy guys that you didn’t notice very much – Bronx Science was full of them – and one day they’d say, “I have this idea,” and they’d go off, talking to themselves, and the next thing anybody knew, the lab was on fire.’

  ‘Not this time,’ Dortmunder said. ‘If anything catches fire, it won’t be your stuff.’ Turning to Tiny, he said, ‘You busy, the next couple of days?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Tiny said.

  Dortmunder was interested. ‘Yeah? Doing what?’

  ‘Staying away from you,’ Tiny said.

  Dortmunder nodded. ‘I understand your feelings,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ Tiny said, ‘let me express them, anyway. I’m surprised at you, Dortmunder. Maybe you can make a nice meal outta revenge, but I’m a meat-and-potatoes man.’