Don’t Ask

by Donald Westlake

  The second regular, building strongly on his original base, said, ‘How about portables?’

  The third regular banged his beer glass on the table. ‘I can’t stand them,’ he announced. ‘Boom boxes. The only stations you can get on those things is brain damage.’

  ‘They cause brain damage,’ said the fourth regular, being positive on a whole new subject.

  ‘How?’ asked the second regular, returning to the basics.

  ‘Vibrations,’ said the first regular, also returning to basics.

  But the third regular rounded on the fourth and said, ‘How can you be sure it isn’t the other way around?’

  ‘What isn’t the other way around?’

  ‘They were already brain-damaged to begin with; that’s why they bought the boom boxes.’

  ‘No no no,’ said the positive fourth regular. ‘They used to have enough brains to walk into a store, hand over the money, walk out with the radio.’

  ‘Can’t stand those things.’

  ‘But you look at them now,’ the fourth regular persisted, ‘walking around with those boxes, you can see they don’t have enough brain left to close their mouths.’

  The others, establishing a certain level of brainpower, closed their mouths to mull that one over, while Dortmunder approached Rollo the bartender, snoozing against the cash register, and said, ‘Anybody back there?’

  Rollo’s eyes focused. ‘I would say,’ he answered, ‘everybody’s back there. The other bourbon’s got your glass.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Dortmunder nodded to Rollo, who’d drifted off again, then he walked past the regulars, who were all blinking and frowning, trying to remember what they’d been talking about, and headed for the back room.

  Which, as Rollo had suggested, was full. With Dortmunder, all eleven from the caper were here: Kelp, Tiny, Stan Murch, Gus Brock, Fred Lartz, Harry Matlock, Ralph Demrovsky, Ralph Winslow, Jim O’Hara, and Wally Whistler. All of the chairs were occupied except the one with its back to the door, and a few of the guys were sitting around on upended wooden liquor cases.

  Dortmunder upended a liquor case, sat on it, and Gus Brock said, ‘Dortmunder, we got three cents left over.’

  Dortmunder wasn’t ready for this. ‘How come?’

  Gus said, ‘We got eleven guys, we got thirty grand. That comes out twenty-seven hundred bucks a man, but with three hundred bucks left over. So we split that, and it’s twenty-seven bucks a man, but with three bucks left over. So we split that, and it’s twenty-seven cents a man, but with three cents left over, for eleven guys.’

  Dortmunder nodded. Somehow, he felt as though he were still out front with the regulars. He said, ‘We’ll give it to Tiny; he didn’t get anything the first time around.’

  Everybody agreed that was fair, especially Tiny, and then everybody wanted to know what was going to happen next.

  ‘Nothing,’ Dortmunder said. ‘We’ll give this guy Guy Claverack, this guy Clav – Guy – Him. We’ll give him two days to meet some people, talk it over, start the negotiation. Thursday we’ll give him a call. Meanwhile,’ turning to Stan, ‘how’s the truck doing?’

  ‘Fine,’ Stan said. ‘I went out there today and moved it to a different town. Every six blocks out there, it’s a different town with different cops, so all I have to do is keep it moving; no police force is gonna notice they got this same truck all the time.’

  Gus Brock said, ‘How long is this two thousand seven hundred twenty-seven dollars and twenty-seven cents supposed to last us? In other words, when can we expect something from your guy?’

  ‘You mean Guy?’ But then Dortmunder waved a hand in the air, saying, ‘No, forget that, I know who you mean. And the way I figure, it’s going to have to be at least a week, so they can all negotiate, and maybe a month, but it can’t be any longer than that.’

  Stan said, ‘I’m gonna take the train out to Long Island and bop that truck around every other day for a month?’

  ‘I hope not that long,’ Dortmunder said.

  Harry Matlock said, ‘Me and Ralph got a suggestion.’ Meaning his partner, Ralph Demrovsky.

  Dortmunder wasn’t sure he was in the market for suggestions – they were already moving forward on the agreed-upon plan here, after all – but he said, ‘Sure. What is it?’

  ‘Just in case there’s a problem with your guy,’ Harry said, ‘in case it looks like there’s a problem, or there could be a problem, or whatever, Ralph and me a few years ago made contact with a couple people that move art to Europe. First to Canada, and then to Europe. We could slip that truck into Canada, get some people in Europe that buy that kind of stuff. Dealers, you know.’

  ‘That’s a possibility,’ Dortmunder agreed. ‘It’s less money, because they pay less, and you got more people along the route with their hand out that they got to have a little piece, but if the first plan falls through, that’s good you’ve got those contacts.’

  ‘When?’ Harry said.

  ‘You mean, when do you call your contact? When do we figure things aren’t working out? Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry said.

  Stan said, ‘I don’t feature taking that train every other day for a month, I’ll tell you that.’

  Dortmunder considered. The essence of leadership is compromise. That, and sensing the needs of your people. That, and remaining confident on the surface. And some other stuff. ‘Two weeks,’ he said. ‘How’s that?’

  Everybody agreed two weeks was fine. It was long enough to know if the negotiation with the insurance company was going to come to anything, but not so long as to drive everybody, and especially Stan, crazy.

  ‘Fine,’ Dortmunder said. ‘When I call this guy Guy on Thursday, I’ll tell him the deadline. In the meantime, we already got a little taste, almost three grand apiece.’

  ‘And me,’ Tiny said, deadpan, ‘I got three cents for the first caper. Things are lookin up.’

  54

  Harry Hochman was not a detail man. The kind of man Harry was, he hired detail men, and they took care of the details, while Harry kept his mind and eye on the big picture. What Harry Hochman was was a big-picture man.

  Which was what made it so goddam irritating to be in this hotel room with these people, listening to details. The room itself was all right, but it damn well better be, it was his. But really his. This was the living room of the Imperial Dragon Suite on the top floor of the Dragon Host Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City, just north of Grand Central Station and south of the Crispinite monastery, and this was the flagship of a chain of seventeen Dragon Host hotels Harry owned in partnership with the Japs, because the only way to get into the Japs’ pants was to let them get into yours. So Dragon Host ran hotels in New York and Washington and Chicago and San Francisco and Los Angeles, plus a few in Canada and South America, but it also ran hotels in Tokyo and Osaka and Kyoto and Otaru and Yokohama and Nagoya and Kobe, and that’s what Harry Hochman meant by the big picture. Not these goddam details about insurance and art thieves and private eyes. Why couldn’t he just hire somebody to handle all these details and give him a call when everything was straightened out and the art was back where it belonged and Harry could go visit the Vermont château once more?

  But, no. Outside, if a person had the leisure to stand up and look out a window, was all of Manhattan Island, or at least all of Manhattan Island that a big-picture man like Harry Hochman needed to look at, but could he go look at it? No. He had to sit here in the living room of the Imperial Dragon Suite with a lot of detail men and converse with them about details.

  Like these Polaroid pictures of his art collection. Pictures showing it where it belonged, and then pictures of it in some goddam truck. ‘Do you recognize these, Mr Hochman?’ asked one of the detail men. Perly, his name was, Jacques Perly. He was the private eye, though in his blue suit and round plumpness he looked to Harry more like an untrustworthy doctor. Didn’t look like any private eye Harry had ever seen.

  ‘Of course I r
ecognize them,’ he snapped, leafing rapidly through the pictures, barely concentrating at all, for so many reasons. Details, for one. And the fact all this stuff was gone, stolen, for another. And that the thieves took the photos, for a third.

  If that pissant little faggot Hradec had only torn himself out of the embraces of his smarmy little lover – talk about your untrust-worthy doctors! – long enough to hear an entire moving van being filled with paintings and statuary, none of this would be happening, and Harry would be comfortably concerning himself with some big picture somewhere, instead of looking at these little pictures in his hands here. (Since Harry wasn’t taking any of Hradec’s constant phone calls, he was unaware of Hradec’s theory that the whole thing was the work of Diddums, nor was he aware of Hradec’s contention that he and the ungood doctor had been drugged and were not sexually involved with one another, but, even if he’d heard all that, he wouldn’t have believed it, mostly because he was too irritated.)

  The private eye, Perly, said, ‘The reason we need your positive identification, Mr Hochman, is because your insurance companies are uninterested in paying for works that you don’t own.’

  ‘Well, they damn well better pay for the works I do own,’ Harry snarled, and glared around generally at the four men and two women here representing the insurance companies. More detail people, as were the two lawyers, the accountant, and the two men in wrinkled neckties from the New York Police Department. (How do people wrinkle neckties?) The NYPD men were here because, even though the theft had taken place in Vermont, and everybody’s best guess was that it was a Boston gang that had pulled the job and they were hiding the loot somewhere in Boston, the extortion attempt was taking place in New York. The reason the Vermont police and the Boston police weren’t here was because they were searching Boston for Harry Hochman’s stolen art, and fat chance they had of finding it, is what Harry thought. Fat chance. He thought it was all in Canada.

  This detail man, this private eye, Perly, wasn’t finished with him yet. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘could you take a look at the photographs? Just identify one or two items for me, sir, if you would.’

  Details; you could drown in details. ‘Very well,’ Harry said with bad grace, and peered at one of the photographs. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Leaning against the side of the truck there, that’s a Botticelli, two angels with one ribbon around their necks, bought that eleven, no, twelve, no eleven, I think maybe twelve, years ago in Geneva. Then here—’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Something from one of the other photos would be good.’

  Harry sighed long and loud to let them know what he thought of this pecksniffery. Lotta crap. ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘That’s a de Chirico. You see the little white Doric column, the blue sky?’

  ‘Yes, sir, Mr Hochman, thank you.’

  Harry, with the feeling of an adult dragooned into a child’s game, put that photo at the bottom of the stack in his hands and looked at the next one. He blinked. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘what the hell is that?’

  Nobody in the room had expected such a reaction. This was a simple cut-and-dried procedure, legally necessary but not normally full of surprises; the victim identifies the stolen insured items. The whole crowd in the room tensed up, detail people realizing that a detail was wrong.

  Jacques Perly, already leaning solicitously over Harry to guide him through the identification process, said, ‘What’s that you say, Mr Hochman?’

  ‘This damn thing,’ Harry said, pointing at the damn thing, prominent in the photograph. ‘What the hell is this supposed to be?’

  ‘Don’t you know, sir?’

  ‘How the hell am I supposed to know? What is this?’

  ‘You mean, sir,’ Perly asked, bending down even closer to Harry and the photo, ‘that glass chest or coffer there? That small casket? No, let me see … reliquary, I would say.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Harry said. ‘I don’t own any reliquary.’

  ‘Are you sure, sir?’

  Harry did not believe his ears. In his own suite, in his own hotel, in his own nation, on his own planet, he was being insulted to his face. ‘Am I sure?’

  Perly withdrew his objectionable head somewhat from Harry’s lap but held out his hand instead, saying, ‘May I see that photo, sir? If I may?’

  ‘You can keep it,’ Harry said, and slapped the damn thing into the damn man’s damn hand.

  Perly, unruffled, studied the photo. ‘These other objects visible here,’ he said. ‘You do recognize these, don’t you? Isn’t this the de Chirico you mentioned before, in the background here?’

  ‘Don’t show me that damn thing,’ Harry said, waving it away. ‘I didn’t say the rest of it isn’t mine, the rest of it is mine. I’m saying, what the hell is that glass box doing there?’

  ‘With something in it,’ Perly said, peering closely at the photograph.

  ‘And that isn’t mine, either,’ Harry said. ‘Whatever the hell it is.’

  One of the insurance munchkins said, ‘Mr Hochman, isn’t it possible, with everything you own, I mean, with all your possessions, isn’t it, that you might have, uh, have, uh …’

  It was Harry’s fierce eye that ground the fellow to a stop, and Harry’s pointing finger that pinned him in his place. ‘Say the next word,’ Harry said, ‘and you’re looking for a job.’

  There was a long silence in the suite. Everyone but Harry was too uncomfortable to move; Harry was too irritated to move. When he’d established that the insurance company clown was not going to say the dread word, Harry answered it, anyway: ‘I know every piece of art I own. And I do not own that glass box. And I do not own whatever is inside it.’

  Perly cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me, Mr Hochman,’ he said.

  Harry bent his fierce eye on Perly, who, being an independent subcontractor, was less intimidated by it. ‘What,’ Harry said.

  ‘I believe, Mr Hochman,’ Perly said, pointing at the photos in Harry’s hands, ‘if you’ll look through those, you’ll see some showing the box in your gallery, on a pedestal.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Harry said.

  ‘If you would look, sir …’

  Harry looked. Harry’s eyes widened. There it was. There the damn thing was, by God. And there it was again. And, tucked away in the background, there it was yet again. ‘Well, what the hell is this?’ Harry demanded.

  ‘It’s a pity, Mr Hochman,’ Perly said, ‘that your collection was never catalogued.’

  ‘What’s the point in that? I’m always buying or selling; it changes all the time. We just did some painting down there, moved things around. But this glass box is not mine.’

  ‘It appears to be, sir,’ Perly dared to say. ‘It very strongly appears to be.’

  Harry had had enough of this. This goddam glass box was one detail too many, the detail that right this minute was breaking the camel’s back. Glowering once more at Perly, Harry said, ‘You’re the private eye, aren’t you?’

  ‘We prefer private investigator, Mr Hochman,’ Perly said.

  ‘Oh, do you. Well, I prefer to know what’s going on, and it seems to me it’s your job to tell me what’s going on. Here’s a picture of this glass box for you, Mr Private Investigator. Investigate. When you’ve got it figured out, let me know.’ He strafed the room with his glare. ‘When you’ve all got it figured out, let me know,’ he said. ‘This meeting is over. Good-bye.’

  55

  Perly turned the Lamborghini onto Gansevoort Street, thumbing the beeper on his visor as he did so, and down the block, amid the warehouses and the few remaining elements of the meatpacking industry, his battered old green garage door lifted out of the way. Perly steered into the building, beeped the door shut behind him, and drove up the concrete ramp.

  The conversion didn’t start until the second floor, where the high stone block walls were painted a creamy off-white and spotlights mounted high in the metal ceiling beams pinpointed the potted evergreens in front of his office door. Perly parked in his spot – the other was for the occ
asional client – crossed to the faux Tudor interior wall, handprinted the door open, and stepped into his reception room, where Della looked up from her typing to say, ‘Hi, Chief. How’d it go?’

  ‘Weird one this time, Della,’ Perly said, skimming his hat across the room to a perfect ringer on the hat rack.

  ‘They’re all weird, Chief,’ Della reminded him. ‘What’s the story this time?’

  Sitting with one heavy hip cocked on the corner of Della’s desk, Perly said, ‘Rich guy, Harry Hochman, hotels. Art collection stolen up in Vermont. Thieves took pictures of the loot, prove they’ve got it.’ He took several photos from his inner jacket pocket, hefted them. ‘Did the standard ID with Hochman, showed him the pictures.’ He put a photo on the desk in front of Della, pointed. ‘See that reliquary?’

  ‘It’s a beauty, Chief.’

  ‘Hochman says it isn’t his.’

  ‘He does?’

  Perly spread the rest of the photos in front of Della. She looked at them, photo after photo of Harry Hochman’s art collection, with the glass box. She did her soundless whistle. ‘Wow, Chief,’ she said. ‘Why would he say a thing like that?’

  ‘That’s the question all right, Della.’ Perly stood from her desk, brushed the seat of his trousers, shot his cuffs, and said, ‘I told you, Della, it’s a weird one this time. Call Fritz, tell him I need blowups of the best pix of the box, soonest. Then call Margo, Jerry, and Herkimer. Meeting here at four o’clock.’

  ‘High gear, eh, Chief?’ said Della.

  ‘You’ve got it, Della,’ Perly said. ‘I want to know what that box is, and I want to know what that thing inside it is, and I want to know what it’s all worth, and I want to know why Harry Hochman’s so shy all of a sudden. And I want it all yesterday.’

  ‘Consider it done, Chief,’ Della said, and reached for the phone.

  56

  Archbishop Minkokus rarely if ever read the lay press. It was so full of discomforting information. ‘In order to hold your faith intact/Be sure it’s kept unsullied by fact.’ Therefore, he had not known, when he’d phoned Hradec Kralowc on Monday about Tsergovia’s wondrous abdication by fax, about the Votskojek ambassador’s other problems, the robbery in Vermont and the sudden public doubts about his sleeping patterns and sleeping partners. It wasn’t until Wednesday morning, when one of his clerks brought him the anonymous letter and the photograph that had just been hand-delivered to the guard desk by the UN building’s main entrance down below, that the archbishop began to learn what had been going on in the mundane world while he’d been concentrating on the eternal.