Don’t Ask

by Donald Westlake

  ‘Whadaya know,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘No one is permitted inside, of course,’ she said, ‘not even when it’s empty, like now—’

  ‘Oh, it’s empty?’

  ‘Yes, but still no one is permitted inside,’ she said, with a sympathetic little smile. ‘But we’re encouraged to encourage the guests to drive over there and take a look at the place, just to admire Mr Hochman’s, uh …’

  ‘Taste,’ guessed Dortmunder. ‘Skill. Money.’

  She was absolutely beaming at him by now. ‘Would you like to see the château?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know where it is?’

  ‘No.’

  So she opened a drawer and whipped out a little map, and drew a circle around the hotel and another circle around the château, and drew a line showing the best route between the two. Then she handed Dortmunder this map, and a big smile, and a wish he should have a nice day.

  ‘Thank you,’ Dortmunder said.

  38

  In the amber glow of the Hyundai’s dashboard lights, Grijk stared pop-eyed at the map. ‘You even god a map,’ he said.

  ‘Sure,’ Dortmunder agreed.

  ‘You pwofessionals,’ Grijk said, his deep voice deeper with admiration. ‘I don’t know how you do such a ting.’

  ‘You learn this stuff, over the years,’ Dortmunder told him, with a modest little shrug. ‘How to find out what you gotta know, if you’re gonna do the job.’

  Grijk just couldn’t get over it. ‘You found oud vhere id is,’ he said, ‘you god da vay ve ged dere, you even goddida place is empty.’

  ‘Tricks of the trade,’ Dortmunder said. ‘So why don’t we head on over there now, okay?’

  ‘Sure, Chon.’

  ‘It’s John.’

  Starting the Hyundai’s washing-machine motor, Grijk said mournfully, ‘I vish I could say yours so good like you could say mine.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’

  Shaking his head, Grijk put the Hyundai into a loud gear and drove shakily out of Kinohaha’s huge parking area – almost as big as the lobby – and out to the empty public highway.

  Empty. Not even eleven o’clock, and all Vermonters and their summertime visitors were well tucked in for the night. This was an early-fading part of the world, all right. In fact, when Dortmunder and May had drifted down to the dining room for dinner at 8:30, it turned out the kitchen was just getting ready to close, and it had been made pretty plain that upright people were done with dinner by 8:30, not starting it. Feeling the pressure all around him to gulp down his chicken and peas and mashed potatoes and clear out of this bright, ugly dining room so the staff could go home, Dortmunder had slowed his intake so much, he ate as though he had the metabolism of a king cobra, and even May began to get nervous at the general chill in the air hovering over all these empty tables, and said, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have dessert.’

  ‘Oh, yes, we should,’ Dortmunder said.

  Dortmunder had the pecan pie with the vanilla ice cream, and it was pretty damn good. It was, in fact, sitting quite comfortably inside Dortmunder right now as he rode beside Grijk through the green darkness of Vermont in the orange embassy Hyundai, a car that, wearing diplomat plates, looked like a little girl in her mother’s high heels.

  Though they would never learn who specifically had been responsible, the truth is, it was a third-generation Dartmouth student who had taken as a design touch for his dormitory room that one crucial road sign that caused Dortmunder and Grijk to wander irrelevant portions of Vermont for an extra twenty minutes before finally getting back on track, but except for this one glancing nod from the Ivy League, molders of America’s leaders, the journey was uneventful, and soon enough they found themselves at the front side of the château.

  Even at night, even from uphill, the château was impressive, a sprawling, turreted, gabled, lofty folly that fit with this mountain scenery without at all blending in; like a black beauty mark on the cheek of a cancan dancer, it augmented the surrounding niceness without ever for a second appearing natural.

  And the other thing about the château, which became immediately apparent, was that when the small, ornate woman had described the place as ‘empty’ she had not meant that as a synonym for alone. The château was not actually one building but three, the central magnificence being flanked by two outrider buildings, both pocket versions of the same architectural style, the one on the left appearing to be a combination garage/storage/utility structure, and the one on the right a fairly modest but nevertheless roomy house, two stories high plus attic, and occupied.

  Very occupied. Scattered out front of this appendage building were a pickup, a station wagon, a dirt bike, three bicycles, a tricycle, and a stroller. Lights were on in two upstairs rooms, and blue television light flickered in a couple of adjoining downstairs windows.

  Of course. Naturally. People like the Hochmans would have a staff in residence, a large family to take care of the place while they’re away and see to it no vandals break in. Or others.

  ‘Well, let’s put it this way,’ Dortmunder said. ‘If they made it too easy, I’d probably get bored and not even want to go on with it.’

  Grijk gave him a funny look. ‘Chon? Is dat true?’

  ‘No,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Let’s find a place to hide the car.’

  The château and its auxiliary buildings stood at the nadir of a wide, winding blacktop driveway down through evergreens from a two-lane country road. The blacktop drive flowed into spreading rivulets of vowel at the bottom, making an O at the château entrance, an I across the second residence, and an E abutting the garage.

  Beyond the château was a steep climb, providing the view. To left and right were tumbled mounds of scenery, tree-covered. With only the Hyundai’s parking lights for illumination, Grijk drove them over to the far end of the utility building, the extreme end of E, which put them as far as possible from the occupied portion of the complex, and there they got out to look things over.

  Grijk’s spy equipment included a flashlight, and by its beam they saw a dirt road meander off into the forest from the top of the E, at the farthest corner of the utility building, heading away from all the structures. They followed it, shining the light this way and that, and soon came upon the Hochmans’s illegal dump. (Why aren’t we surprised?) Stacks of newspapers, cartons of empty bottles, plastic bags of junk, bunches of rags, all the usual detritus drooling down a declivity, a slope full of slops. The dirt road, no more than a pair of tire tracks, meandered past the upper edge of this effluvium, then faded away into a footpath that headed morosely downhill.

  Dortmunder looked it over. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Bring the car in here.’

  ‘Okay, Chon.’

  ‘It’s John.’

  ‘I know id is,’ Grijk said hopelessly, and went away with the flashlight, leaving Dortmunder alone in the dark, to be comforted only by the faint downhill chomping of rats and raccoons and squirrels and other denizens of the natural world as they worked their slow, persistent transmogrification on the Hochmans’s dump.

  Ah, but here came the faint Hyundai lights, followed by the faint Hyundai. With many hand gestures and other encouragements, Dortmunder had Grijk park the beast as close to the edge as possible, over by the far side, where it tilted downward a bit, almost as though about to fall in. Then, as Grijk climbed out of the car, Dortmunder said, ‘Before we do anything else, we take off the license plates.’

  ‘Ve do?’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘I don’t ged id, Chon, but okay.’

  The trunk was nicely equipped with spy stuff, including all the screwdrivers and pliers you could possibly want. Lickety-split, the license plates were removed – rust was no match for Grijk’s upper-body strength – and stowed in the trunk with the tools. Then Dortmunder and Grijk walked back behind the moving pool of flashlight gleam to the buildings, where they found that the blacktop made one consonant as well; a J that sliced
between main house and utility building and curled around to the broad door in the stone wall at the rear, one level below the front.

  This, according to the magazine article, would be the entrance to Harry Hochman’s art gallery. Dortmunder didn’t actually do anything to this door yet, but he studied it a lot, and then he said, ‘Okay. Now let’s see if they left an unlocked window.’

  ‘Chon, they’re gonna have alarms.’

  ‘You know it. Let’s see how good they are, and how good the response is.’

  ‘Is dis a good idea, Chon?’

  ‘It’s the best, Grijk.’

  So they circled the house, moving slowly, using the flashlight sparingly, and at last found a small window to a downstairs powder room that had not been locked. ‘Okay,’ Dortmunder said. ‘What time is it?’

  Grijk’s spy stuff included a glow-in-the-dark watch. ‘Eleven fordy-do,’ he said.

  ‘Good.’ Dortmunder opened the small window, counted slowly to five, and closed it again. ‘Now we go over there,’ he said, pointing toward the utility building, ‘and see the response.’

  ‘Okay, Chon.’

  The response was quite good, really. Dortmunder and Grijk had barely concealed themselves at the far end of the utility building when two guys holding their shotguns up one-handed while they struggled their other arms into their coats came boiling out of the residence on the other side and trotted to the building. Also, a dog started barking; interesting that it hadn’t barked while they were spooking around. But that’s the way it is with dogs, anyway. They don’t bark as a warning or communication; they just bark because something exciting’s happening. Still, it was nice to know about the dog.

  So the unofficial response to the breaking of the alarm’s zone was less than a minute, from the house next door. The official response – three sheriff’s department cars with flashing lights and yowling sirens – took eleven minutes longer. As those three vehicles screamed their way up and over the mountain, Dortmunder said, ‘Time to go hide,’ which he and Grijk then did, trotting down the dirt road, past the dump and the Hyundai, then veering off into the trees, where their erratic flashlight beam was insufficient protection against low branches and high roots. The second time they both fell, they stayed there.

  Five minutes later, they had to hunker down even lower when one of the sheriff’s men, following the dirt road, came along with the flashlight, shone it on the dump, shone it briefly into the abandoned old car, and went back the way he’d come.

  The search of the empty château was long and thorough, and Dortmunder and Grijk watched most of it from the far end of the utility building. They saw the flashlights moving around inside the darkened château, bobbing from window to window. They saw one of the sheriff’s men come out and speak earnestly for a long while into his radio. And at last, thirty-five minutes after Dortmunder had raised and lowered that window, the sheriff’s cars drove away again, more quietly than they’d arrived, the two shotgun-armed guys went back to their TV watching in the other house, and peace and quiet descended once more on the landscape.

  It was now 12:17. ‘Let me know,’ Dortmunder said, ‘when it’s ten minutes to one.’

  ‘Vha’d ve do in the meandime, Chon?’

  ‘I’m gonna nap,’ Dortmunder said, and went back to the Hyundai, and was just settling into some nice soothing sleep when Grijk knocked on his knee and said, ‘Den minudes do one.’

  ‘Okay,’ Dortmunder said, sitting up, yawning. ‘Let’s go do it again.’

  ‘Da same ding?’

  ‘The same thing,’ Dortmunder agreed, and led the way back to that unlocked window – still unlocked, they hadn’t found it – where he did it again.

  Second go-round, response time from the house even shorter, almost down to thirty seconds. Sheriff response also shorter, nine minutes.

  Ah, but the search of the château was also shorter than before, nor was there any eyeballing this time of the Hyundai and the dump.

  ‘Good,’ Dortmunder said when everything was quiet once more. ‘Before we do it again—’

  ‘Ve gonna do id again, Chon?’

  ‘That’s why we’re here, Grijk.’

  ‘Id is?’

  ‘It is. But before we do it again, let’s use some of that spy stuff of yours.’

  So this time, while wandering around the buildings, they used some of the spy stuff. Grijk had brought along, for instance, little microphones with suction cups. You stuck one of these in an inconspicuous spot on a window, and your radio, once you tuned it to the right frequency, would play for you every sound taking place in that room.

  For the art gallery, a windowless room, there was an even more sensitive and powerful microphone that attached with two sharp – ‘Ouch!’ – talons to the wood of the door. Other equipment hooked into the four phone lines emerging from the château and the residence. All of this stuff was twinned to radio equipment stuffed into the trunk of the Hyundai. Everything was old and used and thirdhand, like the Hyundai itself, but everything had just been tested by Grijk, back in New York, and it all still worked.

  It was five minutes after two when they were finished. By now, all the lights were out and the TV switched off over in the occupied residence. This was a very quiet and peaceful mountain when Dortmunder headed for that unlocked window to do it again … and found it locked. ‘They got it this time,’ he said.

  Grijk had been yawning and yawning. ‘So now ve go home?’ he asked.

  ‘Not yet.’

  Dortmunder tromped around to the front of the house, used his own square of flexible metal to open the main door there without leaving any marks, counted slowly to five, then shut the door and strolled away with Grijk as, behind them, lights popped on in the other building.

  Slowing down now. Almost two minutes response time from the two armed guys next door, and sixteen minutes for the sheriff’s three cars. A very brief inspection of the château, this time listened to by Dortmunder and Grijk, moving from frequency to frequency, microphone to microphone, as the searchers moved from room to room.

  The searchers were getting irritated. ‘It’s just gotta be a short,’ they kept telling one another, and the guys from next door kept assuring the sheriff’s men they’d phone the alarm service first thing in the morning.

  Dortmunder was most interested to hear what they had to say when they reached the art gallery. ‘Wait a minute, there, let me turn off the other one,’ said a voice he recognized by now as one of the locals.

  ‘Shit,’ said a deputy’s voice, ‘I can see in there from the doorway; there’s nothing and nobody in there. It’s gotta be a short.’

  ‘Well, do you want me to turn it off or not? I got the picture down already.’

  ‘Nah, the hell with it.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  It was a brisk walk the searchers took through the château this time, scanning most of the rooms merely from the doorway, as they’d done with the art gallery. In hardly any time at all, they were through and outside and saying good night to one another.

  Once the crowd of them were out, and the front door had been slammed shut, Dortmunder and Grijk shut off the radios to the château but kept the telephone intercepts alive. ‘They should be about due to make a phone call now,’ he said, and as he said so the sound began: the beeps and quinks of an outbound long-distance call.

  There were half a dozen rings before a sleepy male voice somewhere else in the world said, ‘Hochman residence.’

  ‘Simmons again,’ said the local voice, and it sounded really annoyed. ‘The damn alarm system just keeps going off and going off. There’s nobody there, there’s nothing—’

  ‘Well, what do you want me to do about it?’ demanded the long-distanced voice, also sounding irritated. ‘I’m certainly not going to wake Mr Hochman at this—’

  ‘Just tell him, in the morning, the system’s—’

  ‘I said I would, the last time you called.’

  ‘He’s gotta get them on it, first thing
.’

  ‘He will, Simmons, all right?’

  ‘It just keeps going off.’

  ‘You need not,’ said the long-distance voice in a very frosty manner, ‘report it to me if it does so again. Not tonight. Good night, Simmons.’ And the phone went bang.

  ‘Good,’ Dortmunder said. ‘We can shut all this stuff down now.’

  They did, and closed the Hyundai trunk, and Grijk said, ‘Vhat now, Chon?’

  ‘Now,’ Dortmunder said, ‘we give them a quick one.’ And he walked briskly up the dirt road and over to the château to open and close the front door, then retired to the usual vantage point.

  The response this time was pathetic; one guy without his shotgun but with his flashlight came clumping across, a full three minutes after Dortmunder had tripped the alarm. One sheriff’s car, no sirens, no flashing lights, showed up five minutes later, but of course he wouldn’t even have been back to headquarters yet when the new call had come in; and his two pals had continued on, not bothering to come back.

  This time, there appeared to be some sort of heated words expelled into the night air in front of the château, between local and deputy, before the sheriff’s car peeled off over the mountain, burning rubber, and the unarmed resident stomped back home and slammed his door.

  ‘What time is it?’ Dortmunder asked.

  ‘Den minudes do dree. In da morning.’

  ‘Wake me,’ Dortmunder said, ‘at five after four.’

  ‘Chon? Vad am I supposed to do vile you’re sleeping?’

  ‘Bring back all your spy stuff. We don’t need it anymore.’ And, ignoring Grijk’s wounded eyes, Dortmunder curled up on the backseat of the Hyundai, snoozed very satisfactorily for over an hour, and got up with hardly any aches or spasms when Grijk awoke him at five after four.

  Dortmunder scratched and stretched in front of the sagging Grijk. ‘This one should do it,’ he predicted, and went cheerily off to open and close the château’s front door.

  That one did it. Not a light went on in the other house. No sheriff’s car showed up. ‘Now,’ Dortmunder said, ‘we can go home and get some sleep.’