Don’t Ask

by Donald Westlake

  ‘Vermont,’ she said, getting to her feet.

  ‘And here.’

  She left the room, and Dortmunder looked at the pages in his hand as though they were an anonymous crank letter. After a while, Tiny got off the phone and said, ‘They’ll be waiting for you tomorrow, eleven o’clock, with all the stuff, whatever they got.’

  ‘Waiting for us,’ Dortmunder corrected.

  But Tiny shook his head, refusing to accept the correction. ‘Waiting for you. Zara already knows, I got this dental appointment tomorrow, just can’t break it.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know that,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘Now you do,’ Tiny said with emphasis. He looked around. ‘Where’d you send May?’

  ‘Vermont.’

  ‘What?’ Tiny said, but then May came in with the results of her search of the bedroom and kitchen: two roadmaps and a fifteen-year-old almanac. One road map was New York City and environs and the other was New England. The almanac contained maps, though mostly of larger groupings like continents. ‘The nice thing about the New England map,’ she said, dumping all this into Dortmunder’s lap, ‘you can see New York City down at the lower left.’

  Yes, he could. And after a long and irritating search, he could also see Middleville, Vermont, the flyspeck that was the mailing address of Mount Kinohaha Happy Hour Inns Ski Resort and Summer Arts Center, which the Harry Hochman château was somewhere near.

  And all of which was quite a ways up this map from New York City. Dortmunder tried to work out the mileages, point A to point B to point C, and so on, and so on, and finally decided Mount Kinohaha was somewhere between 240 and 320 miles from New York. Say five hours by car. Bennington, Vermont, had an airport – an international airport, thank you very much – but, given their travel motivations, maybe they should forget public transportation.

  So, you’d go from here to there, and from there to here …

  So what?

  Dortmunder lifted his head to stare piercingly through Tiny’s forehead at something a block away. ‘Do they have a picture?’

  ‘Sure,’ Tiny said. ‘Who, of what?’

  ‘Them,’ Dortmunder explained. ‘When it’s in the church.’

  ‘Oh, you mean the bone? How it’s displayed? When it’s at home?’

  ‘The Rivers of Blood Cathedral,’ Dortmunder said, remembering Hradec Kralowc’s sales pitch when he’d been Diddums the tourist. ‘In Novi Glad.’

  ‘Grijk’s gonna love this,’ Tiny suggested, and made the call.

  Dortmunder looked around the room, but May wasn’t there. He was trying to figure that out when she came in with fresh beers for all three of them, already opened. She put Tiny’s down next to the phone – he was rumbling at somebody on it, presumably Grijk – hers down next to her chair, and came over to take Dortmunder’s empty out of his other hand and insert the fresh one in its place. Now he had maps in one hand, beer in the other, and almanac and magazine pages on his lap. He looked up at her and said, ‘I forget.’

  ‘Forget what?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Something.’

  Tiny said, ‘Grijk says they got lots of pictures.’

  Dortmunder said, ‘Have him describe it. Where’s the thing kept? Out where people can see it?’

  Tiny relayed the question and the answer: ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How? Is it in anything?’

  Question; answer. ‘It’s in a glass box, like a little glass coffin, on an altar cloth, on an altar, in one of the side places in the cathedral. Wait a minute.’ Tiny listened some more, then said, ‘A glass box vid – with jewels on it.’

  ‘Can he find out where it is now?’

  ‘Dortmunder, why don’t you talk to him yourself?’

  ‘He’s your cousin,’ Dortmunder said. ‘And you’re right there with the phone.’

  Tiny muttered but then asked the question and reported the answer: ‘He’ll call Osigreb in the morning.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘It’s a what, Dortmunder not a who. It’s the capital of Tsergovia.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Tiny listened to the phone, nodded, and said, ‘Grijk says, you got more questions, why not ask in the morning?’

  ‘Dr Zorn,’ Dortmunder said.

  Tiny lowered an eyebrow at Dortmunder, but he repeated the name into the phone, then said to Dortmunder, ‘He’s a very bad man. You want a doctor, Grijk’ll recommend you a great doctor, official doctor to the Tsergovia Olympic team. You don’t want Dr Zorn; he murders babies.’

  Dortmunder said, ‘He doesn’t eat them?’

  ‘I was leaving that part out,’ Tiny explained, ‘on account of May.’

  ‘Thank you, Tiny,’ May said.

  Tiny was still listening to the phone. ‘He’s got no morals, he sells out to the highest bidder.’ Then he interpolated, hand over mouthpiece, ‘We’re still on Dr Zorn here.’

  ‘I got that,’ Dortmunder assured him.

  ‘Okay.’ Into the phone, Tiny said, with surprised interest, ‘Oh, yeah?’ Then he said to Dortmunder, ‘He lives in a big castle in Votskojek that he bought from the Frankenstein family.’

  ‘Sounds like the right guy,’ Dortmunder said. ‘Does Grijk know where he is?’

  Tiny asked, and answer came there, ‘In New York. He’s working for the UN on famine relief. Grijk says it’s a trawisty. What’s a trawisty?’

  ‘Something they have in Eastern Europe,’ Dortmunder told him.

  ‘Oh.’ Tiny listened to the phone, nodded, looked at Dortmunder again. ‘Now he’s got a question for you.’ Listened some more. ‘He wants to know, can he go to sleep now?’

  ‘Why not?’ Dortmunder said.

  Tiny gave him a look, then spoke reassuringly into the phone and hung up, and it rang. So he picked it up again, said a very belligerent ‘Yeah,’ and looked over at Dortmunder to say, ‘It’s Kelp.’

  ‘Good.’

  Tiny extended the receiver. ‘You want to take this call?’

  But Dortmunder shook his head, saying, ‘You’re right there.’

  ‘I may have to move this phone,’ Tiny said. ‘In fact, I may have to move the wall.’ Into the phone, he snarled, ‘So what’s your good news?’ He listened. ‘Oh, yeah?’ Listened some more. ‘Okay.’ Listened some more. ‘Sure.’ Listened some more. ‘Wait, I’ll tell him.’

  ‘About time,’ Dortmunder said.

  Tiny said, ‘He says he’s got a guy. A fence. He talked to the guy, and the guy is maybe interested, but not without a meet.’

  ‘Good,’ Dortmunder said. ‘He’s coming over to pick me up?’

  ‘Dortmunder,’ Tiny said, ‘it’s nighttime.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ Dortmunder said. ‘Late, huh.’

  ‘The guy wants to meet you at one o’clock tomorrow,’ Tiny said. ‘So Kelp’ll come by, twelve-thirty.’

  ‘No,’ Dortmunder said. ‘He can meet me at the store at eleven.’

  ‘It’s an embassy, Dortmunder.’

  ‘He’ll know what I mean.’

  But when Tiny passed the message on, he used the word embassy. Then he hung up and said, ‘He’ll be there. I won’t, he will,’ and the phone rang. Tiny looked at it without love. ‘I’m gettin tired of this,’ he said.

  May said, ‘We don’t usually get this many calls late at night.’

  ‘Nobody does except hospitals,’ Tiny said, and picked up the phone and bit it in half. Well, not quite; but his hello could give you a cauliflower ear. Then he modulated slightly, saying, ‘Hello, Stan. No, nothing’s wrong.’

  ‘I knew it was Stan,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ Tiny said, and did: ‘Fred can do it.’

  ‘Thelma, you mean,’ May said.

  ‘Both of them,’ Tiny told her. ‘They’re on tap.’ He listened to the phone again, nodded, and said, ‘I’ll be sure to pass that on.’ Then he whomped the receiver back onto the hook and said, ‘He says stay off the Henry Hudson, they’re working on the toll-booths.’

/>   ‘I’ll remember that,’ Dortmunder promised.

  ‘Good. And here’s another. If this phone rings again, Dortmunder, you’re gonna need a new one. You may need a proctologist.’ However the phone kept silent as Tiny heaved himself to his feet, saying, ‘We’re done for tonight.’

  ‘I guess so,’ Dortmunder said. He had started to look his normal self again, depressed, but not brain damaged.

  ‘I’ll walk you out,’ May told Tiny, and did, while Dortmunder sat drinking beer. When she returned, he had the almanac open and was squinting at it. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘there really are all these weird countries.’

  ‘Well, at least now you’ve got a plan,’ she said.

  He gaped at her. ‘I do?’

  32

  Dod’s id,’ Grijk said.

  Dortmunder looked at the top picture of the stack of glossy eight-by-tens. It showed, in brilliant but washed-out color, what was apparently a cathedral niche, an ancient gray stone wall across the back, a crumbly stone arch up above in front. A stone step raised the rear half of the niche’s floor, on which stood an altar swathed in cloths of many colors. Centered atop the altar was a glass box edged with gold or brass and surmounted by an elaborately carved golden handle that looked as though it would cut you if you weren’t careful. Gleaming dots of red and green and blue and brilliant white were either gemstones fixed to the metal or unwanted light refractions; the lighting of this picture was really very crappy. Inside the glass box lurked something pale and unidentifiable.

  ‘I was hoping,’ Dortmunder said, ‘for something a little more clear.’

  ‘Looka dee udders.’

  Kelp said, ‘Wait a minute, I’m not done.’

  Kelp and Dortmunder were both standing bent over Grijk’s desk in the Tsergovian storefront, looking at this fourth-rate picture. To their left, Drava Votskonia, on the telephone, extolled the virtues of Tsergovian rock to an unvisionary new world. Now Dortmunder looked at Kelp’s profile and said, ‘Not done? What’s there to look at?’

  ‘Okay,’ Kelp said. ‘I just wanted to get the picture clear, that’s all.’

  ‘Too bad the photographer didn’t have your attitude,’ Dortmunder said, and moved that photo out of the way to see what was next.

  Another, but closer to the subject. The lighting still washed out some details while making others stand out like 3-D. But at least now anybody who’d ever seen the bone before could recognize it, in there inside the panes of glass and the extraneous highlights and reflections. (The camera itself was faintly visible, reflected in the front of the box.)

  Okay, this was at least useful. ‘That’s gold, huh?’ Dortmunder said, drawing his finger over the perimeters of the box.

  ‘Oh, sure,’ Grijk said.

  ‘That’s a ruby?’

  ‘Dod one, doo.’

  ‘Emeralds here? What are these, sapphires?’

  ‘You know your chools, Chon.’

  ‘I’ve seen a few in my time,’ Dortmunder said, and looked at the next picture, which was a long shot of the cathedral interior, severely underlighted. Grijk pointed at a darkish clump and said, ‘In dod abse.’

  ‘It isn’t there now,’ Dortmunder pointed out. ‘I don’t need to see this.’ Lowering an eyebrow at Kelp, he said, ‘And you don’t need to see it, either.’

  ‘I’m not even looking at it,’ Kelp said.

  ‘Good.’

  Dortmunder continued through the photos, and the next three were also useless and irrelevant. Then there came a picture of the bone, all by itself, on black velvet.

  ‘There it is, all right,’ Kelp said.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Dortmunder moved on to the next, which showed the glass box all by itself, open, on top of the same or a similar piece of black velvet, the missing bone’s indentation visible as a shadow on the rich blue velvet lining the bottom. This was a better picture than most; the old, small, delicate but strong hinges and slender leather straps holding the top open were clearly visible.

  ‘At last,’ Dortmunder said, bending closer for a better look. But then he frowned, studying the picture. ‘Where was this taken?’

  ‘In da storage waults a da cathedral. Before da sacred relic come to New York.’

  Dortmunder said, ‘But where’s the box now? Isn’t it here, with the bone?’

  ‘No, no, Chon,’ Grijk said. ‘Glass is, you know …’

  ‘Breakable,’ Kelp suggested.

  ‘Wery.’

  ‘Well, hell and damn,’ Dortmunder said. ‘I can’t do it without the box. Now it’s three jobs. I don’t know, maybe I should just forget the whole thing.’

  Grijk looked unhappy. ‘You can’d,’ he said.

  Dortmunder looked at him. ‘What do you mean, I can’t?’

  ‘Zara Kotor,’ Grijk explained, ‘she faxed whad you’re doing do da government in Osigreb. Only, you know, she made id like id vasn’d our fault da first—’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Dortmunder said. ‘I’m doing this because I feel responsible, is that the idea?’

  ‘Dod’s id. Nod my idea, Chon, you know dod.’

  ‘But if I don’t pull this off …’

  ‘You god a whole country mad ad you,’ Grijk said, with a sympathetic nod. ‘I’m sorry, Chon, but you know Zara Kotor, she’s a bureaucrad, she prodects herself.’

  Kelp said, ‘A whole country mad at Chon, but so what? I mean, Chon, if you don’t ever go there—’

  ‘Nod juss Chon,’ Grijk said. ‘D’all of you.’

  ‘Aw, hey,’ Kelp said, finding it a little more serious, after all.

  ‘And ve god, you know, in da Carpathians, a long history of blood feud.’

  ‘Now, look,’ Dortmunder said. ‘Already we’ve got two jobs to pull at the same time, one in New York and the other in Vermont. Now we got to also pull one in Votskojek?’

  ‘Chon,’ Grijk said, ‘you don’d need dod box.’

  ‘I need dod box,’ Dortmunder corrected him. ‘If I don’t get dod box, you don’t get dod UN seat. You follow me?’

  ‘No,’ Grijk said.

  Dortmunder thought. His cheeks twitched, his eyes went in and out of focus; his knees sagged a little. He said, ‘Okay. You got people over there in Tsergovia, they can get into this vault, get this box, get it here?’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ Grijk said.

  ‘You said that too easy,’ Dortmunder told him.

  ‘No, no, id is easy.’ Grijk promised. ‘Dad old cathedral, hundreds of years, rewolts, peasant uprisings, vars, anticlerical riods, all dese dings. Whad you god under dod cathedral, you god so many dunnels, secred endrances, hiding places, false valls, you could pud a whole subway sysdem in dere and lose id. Ve can ged in any time.’

  ‘Good,’ Dortmunder said. ‘This is Thursday. Can your people get in today, get that box here by Saturday morning?’

  ‘Sure ding, Chon,’ Grijk aid. ‘You van em boad?’

  Dortmunder and Kelp both looked alert. Kelp said, ‘Uh-oh.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Dortmunder told him, and turned back to Grijk. ‘There’s two of these? Two boxes?’

  ‘Hundred and fifty years ago,’ Grijk explained, ‘dey made a fake box, looks just like da real one. For securidy. Bud dey don’t use id for fifdy years.’

  ‘Is it the same place as the other one?’

  ‘Under da cathedral, ya, bud in a different storage place, you know. Nod so much locked up. Nobody cares aboud dod one, id’s all fake chools.’

  ‘Okay,’ Dortmunder said. ‘I hate to delegate authority, Grijk, because most people don’t know how to do anything, but in this case I got to. What I want is, I want your people to sneak in there, put the fake one where the real one is, and bring the real one here, and not get caught, and nobody should know what they did. Okay?’

  ‘Sure,’ Grijk said.

  ‘The real one here,’ Dortmunder said.

  Kelp said, ‘That’s right, Grijk, that’s very important. I don’t know personally what Chon has in mind, but if he says he wants the real one,
he means he can’t use the other one.’

  ‘Without the real one,’ Dortmunder said, ‘we don’t pull the job. Have Zara Kotor fax that.’

  ‘Then it’s her fault,’ Kelp added. ‘And yours. And your whole country.’

  ‘I’m making a node,’ Grijk said. ‘Look.’ And they watched him do so, in ballpoint ink on a white memo pad, and they noticed the Tsergovian alphabet was just close enough to the American alphabet to be maddening. ‘Okay?’ Grijk asked, holding up the memo pad, showing his cipher.

  ‘Good,’ Dortmunder said. ‘Now about the spy stuff.’

  ‘Sure, Chon.’

  ‘It’s for the château, up in Vermont. I need to see inside, and I need to hear inside, before I go inside.’

  ‘Oh, sure, ve god all dad stuff.’

  ‘Fine,’ Dortmunder said. ‘And you’re head of security around here, so you know how to use it all.’

  Grijk looked belatedly alert, as though he’d just been blind-sided. ‘Sure, Chon,’ he said, but a little less forcefully than before.

  Dortmunder was not here to take pity on anybody. He said, ‘Tomorrow, we’re going up to Vermont. You’re bringing all your spy stuff.’

  ‘Okay, Chon,’ Grijk said, and managed a brave smile, saying, ‘Be kind of an adventure, huh? Being spies.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Dortmunder said. He pointed at the phone. ‘Okay if I make a call? Local.’

  ‘Oh, sure.’

  Dortmunder made his call, and soon heard Arnie Albright’s unpleasant voice saying, ‘Now what?’

  ‘John Dortmunder.’

  ‘Whadaya calling me for?’

  ‘I wondered did you have any plastic.’

  ‘Oh, sure, a business deal. Nobody calls Arnie Albright just to chat.’

  Dortmunder rolled his eyes. ‘I would chat, Arnie,’ he lied, ‘only I’m in kind of a rush. Maybe I’ll chat when I come over, if you got any plastic.’

  ‘You’ll be in an even bigger rush when you’re here,’ Arnie said. ‘To listen to me is bad enough. To look at me, you’ll run out the door. Sure, I got what you want. Dash by.’

  ‘Thanks, Arnie.’

  Hanging up, Dortmunder said to Kelp, ‘I know it isn’t nice of me, but I wish I didn’t have to do business with Arnie Albright.’