Don't Ask

by Donald E. Westlake

  No, the best the Tsergovians had been able to come up with was a storefront on Second Avenue, below Twenty-third Street, where commercially the property values are much lower than up in the Forties, nearer the UN and the live theater and the good restaurants.

  They were on the east side of the avenue, and the other side was a whole block of taxpayers,* so the sun beat in through their big plate-glass windows all afternoon of every sunny day, or would if *A temporary structure, commonly one story in height and containing shops of the most ephemeral sort. Constructed by the owners of the land they didn't have the awning. So, with much reluctance but finally with fatalistic acceptance, they'd kept the awning, which still said, in white block letters on the dark green canvas, hakim cleaners & launderers, all but hakim very clean and neat. hakim was clumsily painted over irving, which in turn had been ineptly sewn over zeppi.

  Even though the front door clearly said on its long glass window

  FREE & DEMOCRATIC NATION OF TSERGOVIA

  Embassy

  Consulate

  Commercial Attache

  Tourist Office

  Cultural Exchange Office

  Military Attache

  United Nations Mission (pend.) and even though the two large side windows both featured rather fanciful posters of the purported tourist attractions of Tsergovia, people still brought in their tablecloths after dinner parties.

  The front room, which was all Tiny'd ever seen, no longer looked anything at all like a dry cleaner's. The functional dropped ceiling with the egg-tray fluorescent lights was all that had been retained (changing it would have been very expensive). On the floor now was some nice pale green broadloom, bought cheaply at a carpet sale out on Long Island, which was actually three remnants cunningly placed so that the seams--and the slight differences in color--were barely noticeable unless you were really looking for them.

  On this thick-piled Reinhardt were placed three desks, when a delay is anticipated, sometimes of several decades' duration, between the razing of the previous unwanted edifice and the erection of the new blight on the landscape. Called a "taxpayer" because that's what it does. + + Didn't expect a footnote in a novel, did you? And a real informative one, too. Pays to keep on your toes. each with two chairs and one wastebasket, all bought from a used office furniture store on West Twenty-third Street. One of these desks was near the door, where a young black American woman named Khodeen, their only non-Tsergovian employee, deflected tablecloth bearers. The other two desks, back toward the rear corners of the deep room, formed a long triangle with the first. The left one of these was home base for a stout older woman named Drava Votskonia, who wore a different dark headkerchief ever}' day, who had warts on her face you could use for cup hooks, and whose portfolios were Commercial Attache, Director of the Tourist Office, and Mistress of Cultural Exchange. The other desk belonged to Grijk Krugnk, and his areas of responsibility were Military Attache, Passport Control Officer, and Chief of Security (also the entire security staff) for the embassy, the consulate, and the mission (pend.).

  It was at this desk that Grijk and Tiny now sat, each with one meaty forearm on the scarred surface as they talked. Across the way, Drava Votskonia was on the phone, continuing her perpetual quest for an American interested in reviving the craze of the pet rock. "Imported pet rocks!" (After all, the hula hoop had come back, if briefly, had it not?) And up front, between tablecloths, Khodeen retied her cornrows.

  "We're talking about renting a boat," Tiny now explained. "Not buying one."

  "Dafs for sure," Grijk agreed. "Vad are we gonna do vid a boad? We're a landlocked country."

  "So that's why we'll rent," Tiny explained. Sometimes he had to be very patient with his cousin, a lot more than with somebody whose blood, when spilled, would not be familial.

  "How much you rent for, dis boad?" Grijk demanded.

  "I don't know yet," Tiny said. "This is just I'm dropping by to keep you informed, let you know, there's gonna be an expense."

  "Vad informed? You don't know how much expense."

  "Let's put it like this," Tiny said, reminding himself that this was, after all, a distant cousin, an extremely distant cousin, and maybe he didn't have to be that patient, maybe. "What we'll say is, if the boat rent's less than five hundred dollars, we'll go ahead and do it, and you'll pay us back. And if it's over five hundred dollars, we'll call you and let you make the decision."

  Grijk thought this over. "I donno," he finally decided. "I tink I godda talk to my boss. You wait a minute?"

  "Even a couple minutes," Tiny offered.

  'Tanks." Grijk reassured himself that all the desk drawers were locked, and then he hurried away to the back room, where Tiny'd never been, to confer with his "boss," whom Tiny'd never seen, and who was presumably the ambassador, consul, head of mission (pend.), and chief spokesman for Tsergovia in the United States. And a hard guy to get along with, from Grijk's nervousness every time he thought about the "boss" or actually had to go in and deal with him.

  Tiny stretched in his seat, wondering whether this was a good idea in the first place, to be involved with these clowns, old country or no, and to pair up with Dortmunder and that crowd again, or if maybe what he ought to do was make a clean break with the past and…

  "Pah!" The smack of Drava Votskonia's telephone into its cradle roused Tiny from his reverie. He glanced over and La Votskonia was looking stormy. She noticed Tiny watching her and turned her glower in his direction. "You're an American," she said accusingly. Her accent was similar to Grijk's but less pronounced, more like an irritating buzz around the words than real distortion of the words themselves.

  Tiny thought that over and shrugged. It was an admission he felt he could safely make. "Right."

  "So tell me," she said, "what do Americans do with rocks?"

  Now, here we have an unexpected question. Tiny's brow puckered with thought. Rocks? What do Americans do with rocks? What, Tiny asked himself, do / do with rocks, and the answer was, nothing. "Well," he said, thinking as fast as he could, "they used to make these long low walls out of them, up in the woods, and--"

  "Used to!" Ms. Votskonia cried. She was clearly at, or very close to, the end of her rope. "Don't tell me about used to! They used to make pets out of them! But what do they do with them wow?"

  Tiny thought some more. "Heat them and put them in saunas," he suggested.

  She considered that, then shook her head. "Too limited a market."

  Tiny wracked his brains. "Groins," he said. "I don't mean nothing dirty, I mean like walls out of rocks they put out from the beach, out into the ocean, to keep the sand from going away."

  "Ecological unsound," Ms. Votskonia told him. "Already I have pursued this question with many beachfront communities, and they have all turned against it."

  Tiny felt a sharp little pain growing between his eyes. What do Americans do with rocks? Cairns? No, not anymore.

  The inner door opened and Grijk stuck his head out to say, "Tiny? Could you come in here vun minute?"

  "I could," Tiny told him, and rose to his feet. With his biggest and most insincere smile, he told the fuming Ms. Votskonia, "Sorry I couldn't be more help," and lumbered away through the door Grijk was holding open into a small office where he found himself confronting a woman who made Ms. Votskonia look like Mother Teresa.

  This woman was about the size and shape of a mailbox, with a black-haired white lunch box on top for a head. She wore a uniform much like Grijk's--the dark olive tunic, the black piping, the dark wide trousers, the black boots--and, in fact, she looked much like Grijk, in the same way that Grijk looked much like Tiny. In other words, this was a woman who looked like the paperback version of Tiny, which is not a good way for a woman to look.

  Grijk, as nervous as a kid introducing his father to the school principal, said, "Tchotchkus Bulcher, dis is Zara Kotor, Tsergovian ambassador to the United States."

  When called upon, Tiny could be a social animal. Nodding pleasantly,

  "How
are ya?" he said.

  Zara Kotor said, "Extremely unhappy." She sounded tough as nails, and had no accent at all.

  Ignoring the content of the words, and referring only to their delivery, Tiny beamed and said, "You talk good."

  "I was educated in your country," she said grimly. "Bronx Science."

  "Oh, yeah? I hear that's a good school."

  "We learned our mathematics there, in Bronx Science," Zara Kotor said, beetling an already beetled brow at Tiny. "And five hundred bucks could never be the answer to 'How much does it cost to rent a boat for a little ride on the river?'"

  Tiny felt himself getting just the teeniest bit annoyed. To go through all this crap for no gain, and then to have your judgment questioned? He could roll this dame in that cheap broadloom out there and take her for a little boat ride. He said, "If all we were doing was a nice day on the water, we could go rent a rowboat in Central Park. The idea is, we gotta spend a bunch of time on the river and not have anybody wonder who we are and what we're up to."

  "And for this you need a luxury yacht," Zara Kotor suggested. "Probably with champagne, and girls in bikinis, to make it look more natural."

  "For five hundred bucks?" Tiny grinned at her, not in a friendly way.

  "You got a deal," he said.

  She shook her head. "I don't see why all this expense is needed at all.

  You know where the Votskojek embassy is, you--I've told you before, Grijk, don't do that--have even seen the place. I understand that you and your friends are professionals."

  "That's why we do things right," Tiny said. "Or not at all-- that's another possibility."

  "I don't see," Zara Kotor said, speaking as though used to her word being law, "the necessity for this expenditure. I don't see that it can be approved."

  "Okay by me, lady," Tiny said. "Find yourself another descendant; I'm gone."

  He was turning away, reaching for the doorknob, when she said in tones of outrage, "You've taken our money!"

  "Not me," Tiny told her.

  Grijk hurriedly muttered something in some language that sounded like a can opener being used on a rusty can. Zara Kotor raised a cynical eyebrow. "And I suppose your friends won't share with you?"

  "They never did before," Tiny said. "I got into this because Grijk here talked me into it. And now you talked me out of it again, and that's fine." And once again, he reached for the knob.

  "Now, wait; now, wait," Zara Kotor said, and when Tiny turned back, exasperated, he saw that doubt had somehow penetrated that lunch box she used for a head.

  This time, he kept his hand on the knob. In fact, he considered removing the knob from the door, opening the top of the lunch box, and placing the knob inside it. Instead, "What is it?" he demanded. "I gotta hurry.

  I gotta go tell the guys, don't buy that sunscreen after all."

  "What boat," she wanted to know, "costs five hundred dollars a day to rent?"

  "I don't know," Tiny said. "See ya."

  "Wait!"

  "For what*"

  "All right" she shouted, as though he'd been the one browbeating her all this time. "All right. You say you're doing this pro bono, is that what you're saying?"

  Now Tiny beetled his own beetled brow. Staring hard at this woman, as though she were an assistant DA, he said, "You putting words in my mouth?"

  "Pro bono," she repeated, as though it would make more sense the second time around. "You're, you're… you're not doing it for profit."

  "Damn right I'm not," Tiny said, "and beats the hell out of me why, so I'm just as happy to say--"

  "No, no, wait," she said, patting the air between them. "We started ofFon the wrong foot, that's all."

  "Oh, yeah?"

  "We are a very poor country," she reminded him.

  "That's no excuse."

  Surprisingly, she nodded. "You're right," she said. "I was too suspicious. Could we begin again, as friends this time? As fellow patriots of Tsergovia?"

  Tiny thought it over, and shrugged. They'd started. And the thing had some interesting aspects. "Sure," he said.

  "You'll spend what you have to spend on the boat," she said.

  "Good," he said. "And we'll keep it down as much as we can."

  "I'm sure you will." She stuck out a hand like an order of cold cuts.

  "Friends? Partners?" (Grijk stared openmouthed at this development.) "Sure," Tiny said, and took the hand, which also felt like an order of cold cuts. He shook it.

  Suddenly, she was twinkling at him. "I wouldn't want to be enemies," she said, "with a cute guy like you."

  Tiny fled. that's an awfully small boat," Dortmunder said.

  "It's plenty big," Stan said. As the vehicle specialist in the group, he was the one who'd made the arrangements for the boat and, as he'd assured Dortmunder several times already, he'd kept Dortmunder's qualms about water transport in the forefront of his mind throughout the decision-making process.

  Nor was he even going to drive this boat--"pilot," they liked to say, as though it were an airplane. He would leave that to its owner, the cheerful bearded giant over there in the wheelhouse, looking out all his windows and waiting for them to board, which Tiny and Kelp had already done.

  But not Dortmunder, who stood on the pier and frowned and said, "It just looks small. To me, it looks small."

  "Dortmunder," Stan said, losing his patience, "it's a tugboat. It's the safest thing in New York Harbor. This boat has pushed around oil tankers, passenger liners, big cargo ships from all over the world."

  But not recently. Labor strife, changes in the shipping industry, competition from other Eastern Seaboard ports; what it all comes down to is, the New York City tugboat is an endangered species.

  Most of the sturdy little red and black guys with the hairy noses and the old black automobile tires along the sides are gone now, and the few still struggling along, like the hero of a Disney short, don't have much of a livelihood to keep them going.

  So it hadn't been hard for Stan to find a tugboat owner--a good percentage of the surviving boats are still privately owned-- happy to swing around the Battery an dover to the East River and spend an afternoon dawdling in the offing, no questions asked, no heavy lifting involved, for three hundred bucks. (Tiny had kept his promise to Zara Kotor. He would also keep his distance from her.) Dortmunder stood on the pier, this tugboat--the Margaret C. M.oran, it was called--at his feet, and memories of the Vilburg town Reservoir rose up around an dover his head. "It's moving up and down," he complained, watching the side of the boat do just that in relation to the pier.

  "Sure it's moving up and down," Stan said. "The water's moving up and down. All New York Harbor is moving up and down."

  "I'm sorry you pointed that out," Dortmunder said.

  "Look, John," Stan said gently, his manner calm and patient and sympathetic, "I understand how you feel, I do. But we either gotta do this or don't do it, and one way or the other I gotta pay Captain Bob.

  So you wanna get on the boat, or you wanna go home and get three hundred clams?"

  "Not clams," Dortmunder said. "Smackers; bucks; simoleons; even dollars."

  "Come on, John, which is it?"

  "Forward," Dortmunder said, and stepped onto the top of the tug's rail, which dropped away beneath him, so that he pitched forward into the boat, to be caught like a beach ball by Tiny, who stood him on his feet, brushed him off, and said, "Welcome aboard."

  "Right," Dortmunder said.

  The cheery madman up in the wheelhouse smiled down upon them and roared,

  "All set?"

  "Ready," Stan yelled back, leaping lightly aboard, and half saluted, as one wheel man to another.

  Dortmunder looked about himself and the tugboat was small, dammit. The front half was dominated by the wheelhouse, an oval superstructure built up from the deck, with an octagon of windows around the top, inside which Captain Bob could steer his mighty mite and keep an eye on everything that was happening everywhere all around him.

  The back half
was a small deck area crowded with coils of rope, jerricans of fuel and oil, harpoons, clubs, and general stuff. Under Captain Bob's station at the wheel, a door led into the lower part of the superstructure, and when Dortmunder looked in there he saw a tight spiral staircase coiling downward into a constricted area of loud humming. Tugboats are, after all, merely the smallest possible superstructure surrounding the largest and most powerful possible engine.

  Kelp reclined at his leisure on a coil of rope, back against the side rail that had so betrayed Dortmunder as he fell aboard. Having caught Dortmunder then like a forward pass, Tiny was now seated on the net-covered rail at the stern, seemingly relaxed even though he was just above the churning, foamy wake. Stan had chosen to scramble up to the wheelhouse with Captain Bob, where he stood swaying in the doorway, exchanging shouted pleasantries with the pilot. Dortmunder looked around at all this, wondering where safely to stash himself, and then Kelp patted the coil of rope beside him. "Grab a seat," he said. "Take a look at the view."

  Dortmunder grabbed the seat, grateful to give over the question of balance from his feet to his ass, and took a look at the view, just as Captain Bob vroomed the engine and they went angling and roaring away from the pier and out into the greasy, gray, grimy Hudson.

  Well, it was a view, no argument about that. You don't get to see a sight like this every day, unless you happen to own one of the few remaining tugboats working New York Harbor. On one side, Manhattan, a narrow, crowded aisle of stalagmites that have lost their cavern and been unaccountably exposed to the open air, making for a scene as outlandish as it is spectacular. Look at all those windows! Are there people inside all of those? You see all those buildings, you don't see any people at all, and yet all you're put in mind of is human beings, and just how many of them there must be for the world to contain a view like this.

  So much for Manhattan. On the other side, New Jersey, and so much for New Jersey. Up above, far away, the George Washing ton Bridge, like the hawser holding Manhattan to America (reluctantly, on the part of both), and down below, the jolly green giant's mother, looking for an honest ship.