Don’t Ask

by Donald Westlake

  Kelp said, ‘So you’ll go see Arnie by yourself, right? And I’ll meet you at one o’clock at the other guy’s place.’

  ‘Not a chance,’ Dortmunder said.

  * * *

  In the subway heading uptown, Kelp said, ‘What do you think the odds are they’ll steal the wrong box?’

  Dortmunder thought it over. ‘Fifty-fifty,’ he said.

  Kelp beamed. ‘There, see? You’re not such a pessimist, after all.’

  33

  Two of you,’ Arnie Albright said when he opened the door and saw Dortmunder and Kelp both standing there, unnatural smiles on both their faces. ‘So, Dortmunder, you brought somebody along to talk to so you don’t have to talk to me.’

  ‘Nah,’ Dortmunder said, and Kelp said, ‘I asked to come along, Arnie, I hadn’t seen you for such a long time.’

  ‘You’re lucky you got a nose doesn’t grow,’ Arnie told Kelp, and stepped back to usher them into his smelly apartment.

  Arnie’s apartment was much like the grizzled, gnarly Arnie himself. Its small rooms had big windows looking out past a black metal fire escape at the stained brown brick back of a parking garage no more than four feet away. For decoration, the walls were covered with part of Arnie’s calendar collection. Pretty pictures, sexy pictures, dumb pictures, all over an infinity of Januaries, Januaries starting on every possible day of the week, under pictures of automobiles from every automotive era, pinups from every era of permissiveness, plus enough cuddly puppies, kittens, foals, and ducklings to induce diabetes. Just to keep interest alive, the occasional calendar began with October or March.

  In front of the parking garage-view windows was an old library table, on the surface of which Arnie had laminated several of his less valuable half-year calendars – duplicates and drugstore displays and those on which pencil additions graced the girls. On this table now was also a small brown paper bag, toward which Arnie gestured, saying, ‘That’s what you came here for. Not to see me. People don’t ever want to see me, you can take my word on that.’

  ‘You’re too hard on yourself, Arnie,’ Dortmunder assured him as he moved toward the table and the paper bag.

  Seating himself at the table, Arnie said, ‘Save your breath, Dortmunder, I know what a scumbag I am. People in this town, they call a restaurant, before they make the reservation they say, “Is Arnie Albright gonna be there?” I know these things, Dortmunder.’

  It was so hard to talk with Arnie. How could you agree with him, but on the other hand how could you not agree with him? Avoiding the issue entirely, Dortmunder said, ‘So you’ve got plastic, huh?’

  ‘Sit down, Dortmunder,’ Arnie offered. ‘If you can bear to be that close to me, with the smell.’

  Dortmunder and Kelp took the other two chairs at the table, Dortmunder trying to look nothing but businesslike, Kelp with a manic bright expression of camaraderie and fellow-feeling. ‘Okay,’ Dortmunder said, ‘here we are.’

  ‘It’s my stomach,’ Arnie said. ‘My own stomach hates me; it’s so aggravated it gives me this breath. Well, you can smell it for yourself; I smell like a toilet.’

  ‘It’s not that bad, Arnie,’ Dortmunder said. It was, in fact, worse.

  Kelp, talking through that Kabuki mask of palship, said, ‘You got some cards for us, huh, Arnie?’

  ‘That’s why you’re here,’ Arnie said, and dumped out of the paper bag half a dozen batches of credit cards, each held by a rubber band, each with its own scrawled note on a scrap of paper on top. ‘There you are,’ he said.

  Dortmunder said, ‘How much?’

  ‘Depends how long you need it, and for what,’ Arnie said. ‘You need a card you can go on using for six months, rock-solid, take it overseas, that gets expensive.’

  ‘Don’t need anything that good.’

  ‘Three months is—’

  ‘Not that long, either.’

  Arnie nodded. ‘The big deals don’t come to me,’ he said. ‘All I get’s the penny-ante stuff. People know I gotta carry junk, because otherwise who’d come to a shithole like this to see a shithole like me? Anything decent, they go right to Stoon. To buy, to sell, Stoon’s their man.’

  Dortmunder said, ‘Oh? Is he out of jail?’ And he couldn’t keep the interest out of his voice.

  ‘You, too, Dortmunder,’ Arnie said. ‘Don’t tell me different. You, too, would rather deal with Stoon than put up with the piece of crap I am.’

  ‘Arnie,’ Dortmunder said, ‘you know I always come straight to you first. What have you got for me here, Arnie?’

  ‘So what are you talking? Just a dirty weekend?’

  ‘This weekend.’

  ‘Well, sure, what other weekend?’ Arnie scooped all but one of the stacks of credit cards back into the bag, then pointed at the remaining stack. ‘These are good until Tuesday.’

  ‘Fine. That’s all we need.’

  ‘But I mean Tuesday,’ Arnie said. ‘Up till then, they’re fine, give you no trouble. Tuesday, you try to pass one of these, sparks are gonna come from it, smoke, a stink worse than this joint here.’

  ‘By Tuesday, I’m done with them,’ Dortmunder said. ‘How much?’

  ‘How many you need?’

  ‘Two.’

  Arnie nodded. ‘Fifty apiece,’ he said.

  ‘Arnie,’ Dortmunder said, ‘you yourself just said these things die on Tuesday. How many customers you gonna get between now and then?’

  Arnie considered that. Then he said, ‘Dortmunder, let me put it to you this way. Would you rather spend half an hour here, arguing with me, being around me, being around this septic tank of an apartment, all to save twenty bucks, or would you rather pay the hundred dollars?’

  34

  A hundred bucks isn’t bad for a weekend in the mountains,’ Kelp said as they walked through Central Park, watching each other’s back. ‘Everything considered.’

  ‘Arnie Albright considered,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘Well, that.’

  ‘Tell me about this guy we’re going to see,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘Well, I heard about him from a guy that knew a guy,’ Kelp began.

  ‘I figured it was something like that.’

  ‘This guy,’ Kelp said, ‘will not touch anything that Interpol isn’t looking for. This guy deals only with what you call your major commissions.’

  ‘That’s what I need, all right,’ Dortmunder agreed. ‘Will he deal with us?’

  ‘That’s what the meeting’s about. Eyeball each other, see do we call the preacher or forget it.’

  ‘What about the guy personally?’

  ‘That I don’t know,’ Kelp said. ‘On the phone, he sounded like an actor.’

  ‘An actor.’

  ‘You know, those English actors, come on the talk shows late at night cause they got a movie out you never heard of.’

  ‘I don’t know them,’ Dortmunder said. It wasn’t that he didn’t watch television; it was that television didn’t stick in his brain; it washed through like sterile water through a chrome pipe, leaving nothing and taking nothing away. It kept his eyes open till bedtime.

  ‘Anyway,’ Kelp went on, ‘the arrangement is, we’re pretending to be the carpenters.’

  ‘With the guy?’ This made no sense that Dortmunder could see. ‘He thinks we’re carpenters? How we gonna talk to him about a robbery if he thinks we’re carpenters?’

  ‘No, no, his office thinks we’re carpenters. You know, on account of how we look, there’s got to be an explanation why we’re there.’

  ‘I don’t even know this guy,’ Dortmunder said, ‘already he’s insulting me.’

  ‘John, you want a careful guy, am I right? So this guy is a careful guy. So for the moment we can be carpenters.’

  Dortmunder held up his right hand as they walked through the dogs off leashes, the infants off leashes, the maniacs off leashes, all rollicking together in the park in the bright spring sun. He studied his palm. It had a pleasing softness and smoothness to it. The tools a burg
lar holds are delicate tools, gentlemanly tools; they leave the operator’s hands pleasant to be around. Nothing like carpenters and their tools. ‘Well,’ he decided, ‘I’ll do my best. But I won’t do any demonstrations.’

  ‘No, no, this is just the cover story for the staff.’

  Dortmunder said, ‘This is a fence with a staff?’ The kind of fence he was used to was more of a fella like Arnie Albright, or a guy named Morris Morrison who scratched himself all the time and had a big warehouse building full of dubious goods over in Long Island City before he retired to jail in Florida.

  ‘John,’ Kelp said, ‘this is a fence with an eight hundred number. This is a fence with offices in London and Paris. This is a fence with the Getty Museum’s unlisted number.’

  ‘I dunno, then,’ Dortmunder said. ‘Maybe he won’t deal with us.’

  ‘All we can do is present ourselves, honestly and straightforward.’

  ‘Oh, we don’t have to go that far,’ Dortmunder said. ‘What’s the guy’s name?’

  ‘Guy.’

  ‘Yeah. What’s his name?’

  ‘Guy Claverack,’ Kelp expanded.

  Dortmunder said, ‘The guy’s name is Guy?’

  ‘It happens,’ Kelp said. ‘There’s also guys named Hugh.’

  ‘Like me, for instance,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘No, I – Never mind. Don’t get hit by that bus,’ Kelp suggested and, having left the park, they now successfully crossed Fifth Avenue.

  ‘Funny to be in this neighborhood in the daytime,’ Dortmunder commented.

  35

  I am afraid I will have to interrupt lunch at one point,’ Guy Claverack apologized to his guests as they placed themselves at table. ‘Carpenters are coming to discuss some renovations back in the storage area.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Quite understand.’

  ‘Poor Guy.’

  This was, of course, not just any lunch. This was lunch with Guy Claverack, premier art dealer to what is left of the aristocracy in this plebeian world. Guy Claverack was the man to see if the exigencies of fate required you to sell off that fourteen-foot-by-forty-three-foot arras portraying the Battle of Tronfahrt that had been in your family since 1486 and in which your own forebear Murphyn the Unrepentant is clearly visible in the center right, just beyond those massed bowmen.

  Conversely, Guy Claverack was also the man to see if the tables at Monte Carlo had been good to one – well, Lord, it does happen from time to time – and one was prepared to purchase a fourteen-foot-by-forty-three-foot arras of somebody else’s ancestors in noble battle for that drafty blank spot on one’s own castle wall. In short, to have Guy Claverack answer one’s phone call was as important in the world of pretenders to long-gone thrones, as emblematic of acceptance, as, in a crasser world, it would be to have your phone call returned by your senator, your banker, your agent.

  It also didn’t hurt Guy Claverack that he was, in addition to being rich and powerful and important, also handsome and mysterious. Handsome in a large and bearish way, six feet six inches in height, with a high, broad forehead, clear brown eyes, thick, wavy brown hair, and a full, rich brown beard neatly topiaried into an oval cupping his well-fed face. And mysterious in a rather thrilling way; known to have associates in the louche world of thieves and forgers and confidence men, confidantes among the police, connections with smugglers, to be in fact a sort of Raffles, for those who’ve never read Raffles, which by now is almost everybody. Stolen artworks could very often be reacquisitioned, at of course a fee, through the efforts and contacts of Guy Claverack. He was known, to put it another way, to be a fence, though only in the nicest and most acceptable way, and no one would ever have associated his name with such a beggarly word.

  Guy was also known to be an arbiter of social acceptance in his narrow world. Whenever those who thought of themselves as insiders – big-ticket art world insiders, or bearers of the blood when ’tis blue – found themselves in New York, they invariably phoned Guy, and if he invited them to lunch their bona fides were accepted, they could believe they were believed to be, in the outer world, who they believed themselves to be at home. (If – shocking thought – they were not invited to lunch, they skulked from the city at the earliest opportunity, hoping no one would ever learn they’d been there.)

  In addition to its status-side meaning, the Guy Claverack lunch was also a culinary experience not to be missed. It took place in the small dining room at the rear of his office suite on East Sixty-eighth Street near Madison, and it was catered by the four-star French restaurant down the block (in which Guy held a small interest). The food was invariably delicious, the gossip frequently so, and the experience generally as satisfying and ego-fulfilling as a good facial.

  Today’s guests, three in number, were something of a mixed bag. Commercially, the most interesting was Mavis, Princess Orfizzi, fresh from her divorce from the repellent Prince Elector Otto of Tuscan-Bavaria, flush with marriage loot to dispose of. Most useful in the long haul was no doubt young Alex Leamery of the London home office of Parkeby-South, the world’s most prestigious auction house. Parkeby-South maintained offices and auction galleries in New York and Paris and Zurich, but the twits of its London office were the only ones who actually mattered, and of them the willowy Leamery was perhaps the most promising.

  The third guest, Leopold Grindle, came closest to that mysterious other side of Guy’s life. An expert art appraiser, a bent, chunky man with unruly gray hair and thick eyeglasses, Grindle was on retainer to any number of museums, sheikhdoms, banks, and private purchasers the world around, to authenticate or dismiss their purchases. Very rarely were his attributions reversed. And yet, if the circumstances or the money was right, as Guy well knew, Leopold could rise above accuracy. A fine quality, at times.

  Lunch was delivered by deft, dwarfish Hispanics – there are fewer and fewer fine French waiters in New York every day, alas – whose chief quality, apart from the silent skill of their serving, was that they spoke no known language other than, among themselves, some mongoloid cousin of Spanish, which meant that gossip at Guy’s table – and what other reason was there to get together? – would stay at his table, and not find its way either to the burning ears of the subjects or the open maw of the public prints.

  Gossip at table today centered mostly on the goatish, mulish, and piggish qualities of Prince Elector Otto, Mavis’s recent ex, the pretender to a throne so obscure that not even Otto himself claimed to know precisely where it was or who his subjects would be were they ever unwise enough to accept his credentials. Beyond his amusement at the missing Otto, Guy had yet another reason to indulge Mavis’s evident desire to dish her obnoxious former spouse. Among the art treasures she had made off with from the wrecked sloop of their marriage were two pieces in which he had a particular interest, both having kicked around the art world from buyer to buyer the last few years, both the work of major figures, and both with pedigrees just clouded enough to make negotiations interesting. One was a Veenbes, that early Flemish master, a contemporary of Brueghel, if somewhat darker in his view and in his work; his Folly Leads Man to Ruin was now in Mavis’s possession. As was also a Rodin bronze, four feet tall, a young ballerina seated on a tree stump. Neither item would be so much as mentioned during lunch, of course, but a discreet form of preliminary negotiation was nevertheless under way.

  Today’s simple sole had just been completed, and the Hispanics were wafting around a heavenly salad of seven kinds of immature lettuce leaf when the small phone on the delicate Chippendale candlestick table behind Guy made its merry little tinkle. Reaching back for the receiver, placing it to his head, Guy said, ‘Guy,’ and listened to his secretary say, ‘The carpenters are here.’

  ‘Oh, good, have them go down to delivery.’ Hanging up, ‘Duty calls, it’s the carpenters,’ he told his guests, dabbed his lips with white linen, took just a sip of the Sancerre, and left the room.

  Guy Claverack & Co. occupied a town house on the north side
of the street, with well-tended flower boxes at the streetward windows and only the discreet gold-lettered name on the leaded glass of the front door to suggest this house was a center of trade. One reached that door by climbing a broad but steep flight of scenically crumbling brownstone steps, flanked by intricate wrought-iron railings. Guy’s offices and dining room were at this level, display rooms one flight up, his private quarters on the top two floors above.

  There was, however, another street entrance to the building, marked by a white-enamel-lettered iron sign affixed to the right-hand staircase railing. DELIVERIES, it read, with an arrow angling steeply down. On this side, next to the main broad brownstone steps climbing up, more plebeian slate steps clomped down, made a sharp turn, and finished beneath the main steps at a windowless gray metal door. Beyond this door lay a beehive basement of stone and concrete, composing many small cells filled with unsold arts and crafts, all bisected by a front-to-back central low-ceilinged corridor.

  Along this corridor Guy now made his way, his black shadow in the fluorescent overhead lights sweeping around him like a cape. He undid the several locks that would release the gray metal door – gray metal within, as well, niceties of decoration being unknown at this level – and opened it, to reveal two men waiting out there who, if in fact they had really been carpenters, Guy wouldn’t have let work on a bird cage.

  But they weren’t carpenters, were they? Sloping, suspicious, dubious, ramshackle people, dressed as though for a long bus ride somewhere in the Third World, they were about as far from the general idea of Raffles, the gentleman thief, as one could get without actually entering prison. ‘Come in, gentlemen,’ Guy said, which was his idea of a joke. He stepped back, with a sweeping gesture, like Errol Flynn taking off Robin Hood’s hat. ‘Come in.’

  One was taller and gloomier, the other sharper-featured and brighter-eyed. It was the bright-eyed one who said, as he crossed the threshold, ‘We were sent by—’

  ‘I know who sent you,’ Guy cut in, smoothly but firmly slicing off the naming of any names. ‘The construction work is back this way,’ he went on, and shut the door, and retraced his steps down the bare, bright corridor, trusting them to follow (but not trusting them much farther than that).