Don’t Ask

by Donald Westlake

  The photograph, a Polaroid shot, placed neatly on the desk in front of him, was clearly a picture of the sacred relic of St Ferghana – he recognized the reliquary – supposedly in the care and safekeeping of the Votskojek authorities in Novi Glad, but apparently in some sort of underlit art gallery somewhere. Naked statues and paintings of naked women were discomfitably visible in the photo, causing the archbishop to look hastily away and to stare at his clerk instead, saying, ‘Father? Why are you showing me this?’

  ‘The letter explains, Your Grace.’

  The letter. The first draft of this letter had been written personally by John Dortmunder, by hand, on Sunday night. It had been read, on Monday and Tuesday, by Dortmunder’s faithful companion, May, by Andy Kelp, by Tiny Bulcher, and by Grijk Krugnk, all of whom pronounced it wonderful, and all of whom knew how to fix it. Statements were altered by this editorial staff, emphasis was shifted, entire sentences were moved from place to place, additional thoughts were inserted (some of them later to be removed again), and eventually a letter was produced that everybody but Dortmunder found satisfactory. He still preferred his first draft.

  But the letter the archbishop now held was far from that first draft. Handwritten by May on typewriter paper from the Safeway, it read:

  Dear Archbishop Minkokus.

  I am a disgruntled employee of Mr and Mrs Hochman, the hotel people. They think their better than anybody. So I helped steal all their art. But I am a devout person, I pray to Saint Dismas all the time, and I was shocked when I saw this sacred relic in among all the profane and filthy art that people like those people like. Naked pictures, and pictures that hold the Church up to scorn. Mr and Mrs Hochman are doing many dirty deals with Ambassador Hradec Kralowc of Votskojek, like him helping them get around the tax laws in this country and Europe. They paid to fix up a love nest apartment in that Votskojek ship for the Ambassador. And now he gives them this sacred relic, for them to pretend it is ‘art’ like all that corrupt filth they have their, I say their going too far. Archbishop, the people that stole all that ‘art’ may be thieves, but they have got more respect than that. They will treat the sacred relic like it should be treated, and when the insurance company pays and the art goes back I hope you will see to it that the sacred relic is treated decent and like it ought to be from now on.

  Sincerely,

  A Sinner but not a Total Loss

  ‘Absurd,’ the archbishop said when he’d finished this group effort. ‘Ridiculous. I don’t even understand most of it.’

  ‘Your Grace,’ said the clerk diffidently, ‘I took the liberty of bringing along these recent articles from the New York Times. If you’d look at these two reports, Your Grace, you’ll see what the letter writer is talking about.’

  The archbishop viewed the papers in the clerk’s hands with deep mistrust. ‘It isn’t about world population growth, is it?’

  ‘No, Your Grace. It’s about the art theft referred to in that letter.’

  ‘I hate all that anticlerical stuff about world population growth.’

  ‘This is something else entirely, Your Grace,’ the clerk assured him.

  Still dubious, prepared to clamp his eyelids shut at the first sign of an uncomfortable reality, the archbishop took the papers and began to read. When, four minutes later, he raised his head, he was a changed man, though not on the subject of world population growth. ‘Get me,’ he said coldly, ‘that man. On the telephone.’

  ‘Yes, Your Grace.’

  The clerk started to leave, but the archbishop said, ‘Take these things with you,’ waggling bony fingers over the newspaper articles and the letter.

  ‘Yes, Your Grace.’ The clerk picked up the papers, saying, ‘Should I turn the letter over to the police?’

  The archbishop stared. ‘Whatever for? To have this shameful revelation in the newspapers?’

  ‘I only thought, Your Grace, the police might think it was evidence or some such thing. Concerning the crime.’

  ‘Temporal laws are not our concern,’ the archbishop instructed. ‘We have the Church to consider. File that letter under miscellaneous correspondence.’

  ‘Yes, Your Grace.’

  ‘I’ll keep this photo a while.’

  ‘Yes, Your Grace.’

  The clerk bowed himself out, and the archbishop brooded at the photograph, observing this treatment of the relic of St Ferghana, until the clerk buzzed him that he had the ambassador on the phone. The archbishop pressed the button. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, Archbishop, how are you today?’ There was a nasty homosexual nasal quality to the ambassador’s voice that the archbishop had never noticed before. If there was one thing the archbishop hated more than normal sex, it was abnormal sex. His own voice, usually thin and gravelly and harsh, became colder and more forbidding than ever as he said, ‘It doesn’t matter how I am today, Ambassador. When do you intend to bring the relic of St Ferghana over here to the UN and present it to the General Assembly?’

  There was a brief startled silence at the other end of the line, punctuated by little coughs and grunts. Then the ambassador said, ‘Well, Archbishop, I was on the phone yesterday with President Ka—’

  ‘I want to know,’ the archbishop said, ‘when we’ll be seeing the relic over here at the UN.’

  ‘Well, there should be, you know, Archbishop, a certain ceremony in connection with—’

  ‘When.’

  ‘I had thought, well, uh, you know, a few weeks—’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ the archbishop said.

  The silence this time was stunned, and profound. ‘Tomorrow, Archbishop?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘But my president wants a ceremonial occa—’

  ‘You may have your ceremony whenever you want it,’ the archbishop said. ‘Whatever sort of ceremony a fellow like you might devise. But the relic is to be in this building, in my office, for safekeeping, tomorrow.’

  ‘Archbishop,’ the miserable invert stammered, ‘I don’t see how I can, uh, uh, uh …’

  The archbishop hung up.

  57

  It turned out, Guy could host a lunch on Thursday, after all. There happened to be a few people in town who could be useful or amusing when put together at his table, at least two of whom immediately broke other appointments when they received his invitation, which was highly gratifying. The lunch went as well as Guy had expected, and after it, after seeing his guests out at the front door to their limousines waiting on East Sixty-eighth Street – Guy did prefer guests who departed by limo rather than by cab – he returned to his office, to learn that two calls had come in while he’d been lounging upstairs: Jacques Perly and the carpenters.

  ‘Ah,’ Guy said, standing over his secretary’s desk, holding the two ‘While you were out’ slips. ‘No number for the carpenters?’

  ‘They said they were on a job site without a phone,’ she explained, ‘and would call back after three. It sounded as though they were at a pay phone.’

  The pay phone is to the telephone as the taxicab is to the limousine. ‘Get Jacques for me, then,’ Guy said, ‘and put the carpenters through when they call back.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Guy moved on into his own office, and beyond, to his bathroom, where he dropped two Alka-Seltzer into a glass of cold water. Carrying it back, listening to the fizz, feeling the faint shower of bursting bubbles on the hand holding the glass, anticipating the relief just ahead, he sat at his desk as the intercom said, ‘Mr Perly on one.’

  ‘Hello, Jacques.’ Guy sipped Alka-Seltzer. ‘How are we coming along?’

  ‘Slow and steady,’ Perly answered. ‘This situation, Guy, I’m afraid it isn’t quite as simple as you and I, in our own simplicity, assumed.’

  ‘Were we assuming that?’

  ‘Well, I was assuming it,’ Perly said, ‘and I suppose I was assuming you were assuming it, as well. But you already knew this affair was complicated?’

  ‘Well, no,’ Guy said. He felt his feet weren’t q
uite touching bottom in this conversation. ‘I wouldn’t say I thought it was complicated.’

  ‘Because if there’s anything I should know …’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Guy said. ‘I merely meant, I never assume any situation is simple.’

  ‘Ah. A wise philosophy. This situation is quite other than simple. I’m having to run down a few leads here and there.’

  ‘Leads?’ Guy drained the Alka-Seltzer, suddenly needing it more. ‘You mean to find the collection, rather than buy it?’ Thirty thousand down instead of a million up; a hell of a thought.

  But Perly said, ‘Not precisely. In a way, I think what we’re dealing with here is an inside job.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Guy said. ‘Anyone I know?’

  ‘I’ll be happy to chat about it once I’ve cracked it,’ Perly said. ‘But what I need now is time.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’ Guy was sorry the Alka-Seltzer was all gone. ‘You don’t want me to stall these people, do you? Desperate criminals like these?’

  ‘Frankly, yes.’

  ‘We discussed at lunch, Jacques, you know we did, the alternatives they do have. Europe, South America. To be just as frank as you are, I’m already out-of-pocket in this situation, to keep them contented—’

  ‘That’s up to you, of course.’

  ‘I know it is; I’m not complaining. But to stall? They already phoned once today, while I was out; they’ll be calling back after three.’

  ‘All I want,’ Perly said, ‘is two weeks.’

  ‘What? Impossible. How can I ask these people to wait two weeks, when they know any second they could be exposed, arrested?’

  ‘What can you do for me, Guy? I need time. Ten days, can you do that much?’

  ‘One week,’ Guy said firmly. ‘In good conscience, that’s all I could even try for.’

  Perly sighed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘then it’s up to me, that’s all. Work faster, that’s all.’

  Which was when Guy realized one week was how long Perly had hoped for from the beginning. To be negotiated with, and not notice; the Alka-Seltzer turned to gall and wormwood in Guy’s stomach. ‘I’m sure,’ he said acidly, and burped, ‘you’ll find the way. You’re very resourceful, after all.’ And he hung up on Perly’s suave good-bye.

  By one minute past three, when the carpenter called, Guy was feeling better about life, mostly because of other business dealings that had occupied his time. Now, hearing the gloomy tones of the chief carpenter in his ear, he was positively cheerful when he said, ‘No news yet, I’m sorry to say.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ the carpenter said. ‘For now, it’s okay. Pretty soon, though, it’s not gonna be okay.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘We’re hanging out here in the wind, you know.’

  ‘I perfectly sympathize.’

  ‘The longer it takes, the more chance something goes wrong, one of us gets nabbed, the whole deal goes south.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more.’

  ‘We got other things we could do with this stuff.’

  ‘Everyone is aware of that, I assure you.’

  ‘So we gotta have a deadline here, and then after that we’re gonna have to go and do other things. Some one other thing.’

  Here was the sticking point. Gripping the phone, speaking carefully, Guy said, ‘I don’t know how much I can rush the process here. We’re dealing, after all, with insurance companies and so on.’

  ‘That’s okay. You just tell them the deadline, if they ever want to see this stuff again. Or, if they’d like to pay a hundred cents on the dollar to the guy in Vermont, they could do that, too.’

  ‘I’m sure they’d rather not.’

  ‘So they’ll meet the deadline.’

  ‘I don’t know how rapidly we could all—’

  ‘Two weeks.’

  …

  ‘You there?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Guy said.

  ‘You heard me?’

  ‘I heard you. Two weeks, you said.’

  ‘And not a minute more.’

  Guy smiled all over his face. ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘I think I can assure you, it might even be a few minutes less.’

  58

  The storm came out of nowhere, whipping northward up the Atlantic Coast, swamping small boats, eroding beaches, exposing the frenzied ocean waves to the lurid glare of its lightning bolts. Wind rammed the rain before it, sweeping across the bare decks of the Staten Island ferries as they wallowed in the heaving harbor and waddled slowly toward shore. Sheets of rain flung themselves up Broadway, drumming on taxi roofs, theater marquees, closed newspaper kiosks. Skyscrapers ran with fat tears of water; the gutters boiled; trees in the parks bent and trembled before the fury of the elements. Far up in the Bronx, the storm raged and shrieked around the black bell tower of St Crispinian, where pale arching currents of electricity feebly echoed the jolts of lightning from above, and where Hradec Kralowc’s faint voice, torn by the wind, was heard to cry, ‘We can’t give up! Not now!’

  Electric power had not failed, at least there was that. Round light globes beneath circular tin reflectors hung on long black wires from the shadowy stone ceiling high above Dr Zorn’s laboratory. The globes swayed in the air as crooked fingers of wind reached in through cracks in the church walls, making shadows twist and writhe in all the corners, but at least the lights stayed on. The experiment could continue.

  There was to be no defeatism. They were winning, they were! Hadn’t Hradec succeeded in quitting the Pride of Votskojek unobserved, eluding the press by wearing the uniform of a Continental Detective Agency guard and exiting with the eight-to-four shift? Hadn’t he brought his cellular phone with him, and hadn’t he used it, right here in this former church yesterday afternoon, to convince Archbishop Minkokus, that fiend from Hell, that he needed twenty-four more hours before he could bring the sacred relic to the archbishop’s office in the United Nations building? Hadn’t he done so by claiming he couldn’t move the relic without permission from his president back in Novi Glad, which permission had not as yet come through but would surely come through at any moment, once the situation had been sufficiently explained to the president? And hadn’t that persuaded the archbishop to say, ‘Very well. Friday. By noon’?

  Friday, by noon. That was hours from now. Hradec had been here for more than twenty-four wakeful hours so far, spurring Dr Zorn to greater heights of experimentation, demanding success, and they still had until noon tomorrow, nearly eleven hours. Surely, surely, surely by then they could fake a bone!

  ‘We won’t fool anyone!’ Zorn insisted, that defeatist, that miserable mewling swine. ‘This doesn’t even look like a femur!’ he cried, pointing at the bone they were working with, brought here by Hradec from a butcher shop in Chinatown, the closest thing he could find to his memory of the stolen relic.

  ‘We don’t have to fool anyone,’ Hradec argued. ‘The only person who is going to see this bone is Archbishop Minkokus, that senile, old, doddering fool. This is only to buy time, Karver, only to buy a little time.’

  ‘Defrauding an archbishop,’ Zorn wailed. ‘They’ll lock us up forever!’

  ‘No one will know! The archbishop’s half-blind!’

  ‘The other half will see this bone doesn’t even come from a human being!’

  ‘How do you know? Maybe it does! No one knows what goes on in Chinatown!’

  Dr Zorn picked up the bone in question and banged it on the autopsy table. ‘This is not a human bone.’

  ‘How would the archbishop know such a thing? What does he know of the inside of the human body?’

  The argument raged on within as the storm raged on without. They shaved the bone; they painted it; they surged powerful beams of electric energy through it; they lowered it into various solutions; they exposed it to the storm; they radiated it; they boiled it but didn’t keep the soup; they froze it. On and on the work continued, without pause or rest.

  Around the church, the storm keened and crashed, but the two within remaine
d bent over their experiments. The storm abated, its cruel teeth withdrew, the storm fled away northward to exhaust itself on the upland slopes, and still Hradec and Zorn labored on. Morning came, and with it the sun, and still they did not rest.

  And then the phone rang.

  Hradec looked up from the container of dry ice. Smoke and steam enveloped his head. He listened to the tone of the ring. ‘That’s my phone,’ he said. ‘It must be Lusk or Terment, from the embassy; no one else has my cellular phone number.’

  ‘You’d better answer it,’ Dr Zorn suggested. He was haggard from lack of sleep, his reddened eyes behind the thick lenses looking this morning like targets.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Hradec moaned, turning unwillingly toward his briefcase, where the ominous phone shrilled once more. ‘What now?’ And he fished it out.

  It was, as Hradec had supposed, Lusk or Terment; he himself didn’t care which. ‘I am not to be disturbed,’ he barked, his voice hoarse and ragged.

  ‘A Mr Perly called. He’s investigating Mr Hochman’s theft.’

  ‘I don’t care about that.’

  ‘He says he wants you at Mr Hochman’s suite in the Dragon Host Hotel at ten o’clock this morning.’

  ‘What? For God’s sake, why?’

  ‘He didn’t say. He just said Mr Hochman will be there, and everyone else concerned will be there, and it would be better for you if you were there.’

  Outraged through his exhaustion, fitting the tattered cloak of diplomatic immunity about himself, Hradec said, ‘Are you implying he threatened me?’