Don't Ask

by Donald E. Westlake

  The waiter brought the brandy, set it before Bernard, went away again.

  "--a glass of brandy," Kelp went on, "something like that, just to go get those reading glasses and see for himself they don't have anything to do with drugs or crimes like that at all, and hand them to him. See what I mean?"

  Bernard nodded, thinking things over. "I couldn't help watching your eyes, Andy," he said. "I apologize. I know it's unfair, but I couldn't help it, and that there you just told me was such a crazy mix-up of lies and truth, I don't know where the heck I am."

  "Oh, Bernard. Come on, will ya?"

  "Andy," Bernard said, "there's a fine line we walk, you and me, and you know it."

  "I'do."

  "I will not aid or abet a felony, Andy, and you know better than to ask me. I hope you know better."

  "Okay, Bernard," Kelp said, and his eyes stopped blinking. He said,

  "What my cousin wants to get is property that he feels he's got a claim to, that the DBA doesn't even know it has, that has nothing to do with their case or anything like it, but that could maybe cause complications in my cousin's life if he doesn't get it back quickly. It was a dumb slipup that the reading glasses got in that boat in the first place. Now if it does turn out, and I'm not saying it will or it won't, but if it does turn out that my cousin has to maybe sneak in somewhere and take something on the sly and sneak back out again, he is not going to be taking anything except what he left in the boat, that's his anyway. Is that a crime? I know, I know, technically it is a crime, because technically everything is a crime, but is it a crimel"

  Bernard thought that one over for a long time, and finally he said, "I'll see what I can do to help you on this one, Andy."

  "Thank you."

  "I'll do it because I more or less believe whatever it was you said the last time, but I'll do it only on one provision."

  "If I can, I will," Kelp promised.

  "Someday," Bernard said, "when the statute of limitations runs out, you'll tell me the whole story on this thing."

  "Done," said Kelp.

  "Okay. The DEA impounded this boat in the five boroughs?"

  "Well, on water."

  "But the water's in the five boroughs. It's New York City water."

  "Oh, sure."

  "Okay. I'll make a phone call." Bernard got to his feet.

  "You want anything else?"

  "That's very thoughtful of you, Andy," Bernard said, "but I think maybe not. I don't want to break you, and drive you back off that clean living."

  Bernard went away to make his phone call, and Kelp signaled for and paid the check, which wasn't as bad as he'd feared nor as good as he'd hoped.

  Then Bernard came back and sat down and said, "Governor's Island."

  "That's out in the harbor someplace," Kelp guessed.

  "There's a Coast Guard station out there," Bernard told him. "That's where the federals have their marina, and that's where the impounded boat would go, until it's sold or some federal agency takes it over for their own use."

  "Uh-huh," Kelp said, deadpan.

  Bernard grinned at him, but not without sympathy. "I know what you're thinking, Andy," he said. "The Coast Guard, an armed force of the United States. A fortified island in the middle of New York Bay. You're thinking maybe your cousin oughta go buy another pair of reading glasses."

  When Tiny walked into the storefront Tsergovian embassy the next morning at 10:30, Khodeen, the receptionist, was listening to a Walkman, turning the pages of a comic book about a black woman astronaut saving a rain forest, and sipping through a straw something white, sweet, dead, and wet from a nearby junk food store. All of this activity left her no opportunity to acknowledge Tiny's presence, so he just walked on by, back to where Grijk Krugnk slumped pathetically at his desk, as mournful as an unfed basset hound.

  This air of gloom was pervasive, in fact, except for the infidel Khodeen. Drava Votskonia, the commercial attache at the other desk, sat in a cloud of misery, dabbing at her eyes, not even trying to sell anybody Tsergovian rocks.

  Grijk Krugnk, too, still suffered from the recent unhappy turn taken by events, but at least he was no longer doing foghorn imitations. He roused himself when he saw Tiny approach, and with a hopeless look in his eye he said, "You god id back?"

  "We know where it is," Tiny said. "We think we know where it is. If they didn't toss it and toss it, we know where it is."

  Grijk's despair became mixed with perplexity: "If dey didn'd vad and vad?"

  "Toss it and toss it," Tiny repeated. "Toss the boat, see."

  "Toss da boad?"

  "That means to search it."

  "Id does?"

  "Sure. And if they did, and they found the femur, maybe they didn't know what it is, so they tossed it."

  "Search da femur? How do you search a femur?"

  "No, no," Tiny said. Funny how foreigners couldn't dope out the simplest thing in English. "Toss it like throw it away."

  Grijk groaned. "Id was bedder," he said, "ven I didn'd unner stand."

  With a sigh like a paddle wheeler venting, he rose to his feet. "Zara Kotor vands do dalk do you." "I guess I owe her that," Tiny acknowledged. "But don't leave me alone with her." Then, at Grijk's look of incomprehension--a favorite look of his--Tiny said, "Never mind, just do it."

  "Okay, Diny."

  Grijk led the way through the door at the rear of the shop area to the office in back, which today was empty. He then crossed to a door in the side wall and opened that, saying, "Vad we also god is d'apartmend upstairs."

  "That's handy," Tiny said.

  "And a nize prize, doo."

  This door led to a narrow, steep staircase. They went up it, and at the top was a long, narrow hall. Tiny followed Grijk toward the front of the building, where he knocked on a door, and at a bark from within opened it. He and Tiny went inside.

  This was a Tsergovian living room of the upper-middle class, transported intact to this heathen land. Heavy dark wood predominated, slathered with mohair. A narrow shelf at waist height all around the room displayed commemorative plates, many of them cracked or broken, repaired with glue that had yellowed over time. All lamps had pink or amber shades, dripping with balls and tassels. The windows were covered with dark brocade drapes. On the floor were carpets on carpets. Huge, ornate gilded frames on the walls presented small, dark night scenes behind dirty glass, but at least hid some of the flocked maroon wallpaper. If bears had a designer cave for hibernation, it would look like this.

  Standing in the middle of all this ursine splendor was Zara Kotor, in the same uniform as the first time they'd met, but with some sort of ineffable difference about her, which at first Tiny couldn't figure out.

  Then he got it; a halo of perfume surrounded Zara Kotor, like a sprinkling of rose dust in the air. Uh-oh.

  On the other hand, her facial expression was in the form of a rebuttal to that hint of scent. She was looking as stern as that hibernating bear itself, disturbed in January. "I have a lot of trouble believing, Tchotchkus," she said, "what Grijk tells me."

  "Everybody calls me Tiny," Tiny told her.

  "Not everybody, Tchotchkus. So you've lost the relic, have you?"

  "Not exactly," Tiny said.

  She nodded, emphatic, her darkest suspicions confirmed. "No, I see, not exactly, of course, as I suspected, there was always the possibility, I'd hoped against hope, but you can't change a cat with a cabbage leaf, character will out--"

  She might have gone on talking like a person in a Russian novel indefinitely, except that Tiny cut through the crap, saying, "What's this all about? We dropped it; we'll go back and pick it up."

  "Yes, of course you will," she said, and would have narrowed her eyes if the roundness of her face had permitted. "And how much more will it cost us?"

  "Oh, is that your beef," Tiny said. (Grijk looked around for a steer.) "It is," Zara Kotor said. "I wasn't born yesterday."

  "It was our screw up," Tiny told her. "The guys agree to that. It was our scre
w up, so we'll throw in the repair for free. It's on us."

  The sun abruptly broke through on that stormy face; now Zara looked like a gold-leaf icon in a Russian church. "It is? Tiny? You aren't holding us up for more money?"

  "Nah."

  "Well, that's wonderful news," she said, and then just as abruptly the sun went back behind the clouds. "But that means," she said slowly, "the relic really is lost. If it isn't a ploy, then you really and truly did fuck up."

  "Screw up," Tiny corrected her. "It was just one of those things. We also lost a guy from the crew, we got no idea where he is. At least with the femur, we think we know where we can lay hands on it."

  "Reverent hands, of course," Zara suggested.

  "Oh, sure," Tiny said.

  The sun peeped through drifting clouds, and she said, "You really think you can get it back?"

  "We'll give it a try," Tiny promised. "It's a kind of a tricky place, where we think it is, but the guys are casing it right now, and we'll give it the old try." And he noticed she didn't even ask about the missing member of the crew; sic transit gloria, Dortmunder.

  She smiled; it was damn near girlish. "You'll stay for lunch," she said.

  "You'll tell me all about it."

  I'm sorry, May," Murch's Mom said, "but I'll have to throw the meter on you. Otherwise, I'll get a ticket, for sure I'll get another goddam suspension." "Oh, you can throw the meter if you want," May said, "but that doesn't mean I really pay you any money, does it?" Murch's Mom's hand froze in the act of flipping down the flag. She gazed into the rearview mirror at May. She said, "Why? What else?"

  "It isn't that far," May said. "We could walk it."

  Reluctantly, but acknowledging defeat, Murch's Mom dropped her hand instead of the meter. "Okay," she said, being heroic, "I'll chance it," and she drove May up an dover to the Votskojek embassy, all on the arm.

  There was only one car in the parking area in front of the chain link fence, and it didn't have the red-white-blue diplomat plates, so it probably belonged to the two uniformed private guards standing around behind the gate like Immigration detainees. Murch's Mom parked beside it, and May got out of the cab, while Murch's Mom stayed in it with the engine running, ready to make whatever move the situation might demand.

  May walked over to the gate. The guards looked through it at her like cows. She said, "Is this the Votskojek embassy?"

  They looked at each other. Either they weren't sure or they weren't sure they should admit it, but finally one of them did look back at May and nod and say, "It's closed."

  "I'm here to get a visa," May said.

  "It's closed."

  "Well, where do I get my visa?"

  "It's closed."

  "I have to see somebody to get my visa."

  "It's closed."

  May looked at the other one. She said, "Do you think you should take your friend here to a doctor? He's stuck or something."

  "Lady," said guard number two, whose tape loop was already more complex,

  "he told you the story. The place is closed."

  "How can an embassy be closed?"

  "Like this," the guard said, waving around.

  "Isn't there anybody here?"

  "No," said the guard, the functioning guard, "they all left. Got into their diplomat cars, used to be parked right there, the whole bunch of them, said don't let anybody in, and left."

  "For how long?"

  "Didn't say."

  The first guard reactivated himself: "It's closed."

  "That's okay," May told him. "You already did your part. Just stand there." To the sentient guard, she said, "Did they take anybody with them."

  "Like who?"

  "I don't know. Anybody who wasn't like one of them. Like not a Votskojekareeny, or whatever they call themselves."

  "Votskojeks," said the sentient guard. "That's what they call themselves, and to tell you the truth, lady, they all look alike to me.

  All I know is, they come out here with their uniforms on and their suitcases in their hands and said keep it locked, and they drove away.

  My partner and me just come on duty then, and I guess there was some kind of hassle just before that, only the guys what was on duty then wouldn't say. Maybe they took a couple bucks to keep quiet, the lucky stiffs, I don't know."

  "Unconscious," said the unconscious guard.

  "That's right," said his livelier pal. "So maybe it's a communicable disease or something. They had a doctor with them, too, or anyway he looked like a doctor in old movies, or anyway --"

  "You said unconscious," May broke in. This, she knew, was a John sighting.

  "Yeah. He was in the uniform like the others, with the hat pulled down, but he was out like a light. Two of them carried him out, you know, holding him up on each side like he was walking, but he wasn't walking.

  They carried him right by me, and he wasn't walking. He was snoring."

  Still alive, May thought. "But where did they^o?" she asked.

  "Beats me," said the guard. "All I know is, we stay here until the money they paid for the service runs out. I don't worry about these UN people.

  I mean, that's the problem with the UN, you know, it brings in all these foreigners, all this element, it runs down like the neighborhood. You never know what they're up to. There was one bunch, one embassy I was on guard at, maybe five years ago, they all packed up and left, turns out there was an overthrow at home in their country, they all flew straight to Switzerland, took the country's assets out of the bank there, and disappeared. That's the kind of element you got with your UN here. You ask me, they oughta take this whole UN, and this chickenshit glass building up there and the whole thing and move em down to Washington, D.C. I mean, they're used to these kinds of creeps down there; that's what Washington's all about. Soccer players."

  In the face of such scorn, there was little left to say. May had just learned both much more and much less than she wanted to know. Before this cornucopia of a guard could give her his opinion of UFOs or asbestos or the presidential-primary system or whatever was scheduled to hit the surface next, it was time to get out of here. "Thank you," May said. "Thank you both. I'll try again another time."

  "Like I told you," said the first guard, "it's closed."

  "You did," May said. "I remember that." And she went over to the cab and got into the backseat and said, "They took him away. Alive but unconscious."

  Murch's Mom's hand itched, but she did not scratch it on the meter. She said, "Unconscious?"

  "Snoring," May said. "And where there's snoring, there's hope."

  Diary of a Prisoner--Day Two The prisoner spent a restless night, punctuated by far-off screams. The prisoner tried to convince himself that a church merely happened to be nearby, whose bells sounded like human screams. He had little success making that theory fly.

  The fluorescent light in the ceiling was not turned off. Being a fluorescent, it was also unlikely to burn out, and did not.

  Just before dawn, the prisoner fell at last into a deep, exhausted sleep, from which he was harried almost immediately by a great clattering and clashing of locks and chains, followed by the entrance of the four Beckett characters from the night before. While the two eyes-down prisoners in dirty white placed the table where they'd put it last night, the soldiers strode over to kick the awake prisoner awake.

  He clumsily rolled away from them, entangled in the miserable blanket that had during the night neither warmed him--it had been cold in here--nor protected him from the hardness of the floor. And now, it was tripping him up, on purpose.

  Still, he got to his feet at last, looked around, and said, "I really gotta brush my teeth. I mean, major."

  Linguistic improvement had not occurred with this crowd overnight. The same dumb, hostile, gape-mouthed stares greeted his attempts at communication. Shaking his tousled head, the prisoner stumbled over to the table and found on it the identical same provisions as last night: green slime, clear liquid. He picked up the cup of clear liquid, trust
ing it to be the same as last night's water, and carried it over to that small hole in the middle of the floor. First, he dipped his right forefinger into the liquid, then he rubbed his mossy teeth with that finger as best he could. Of course, fingers don't have bristles, so it wasn't as effective a cleaning method as it might have been, but still.

  Next, the prisoner took a mouthful of water, swirled and swirled and swirled and swirled and swirled and swirled and swirled and swirled-- One of the soldiers came over, glowering, and touched the end of his machine gun to the prisoner's stomach. – -and swirled it around his mouth, then spit it out into the small hole and (deliberately) on the soldier's shiny boot. Then he went back to the table, stood there, and had a hearty meal. The instant he was finished--and it didn't take long--the soldiers began to yell at the other two prisoners, who scurried forward, picked up the table, and trotted out with it like a badly confused pair of ricksha men, the soldiers following.

  The prisoner was left alone then, for a little while, as the prison yard outside his window paled through varying shades of gray. There was no more screaming, which was nice.

  But then here came the clanking and the crashing again. Lunchtime already? It's brainwashing techniques, the prisoner told himself, they're trying to louse up my sense of time. (Why anybody might want to louse up his sense of time was another question.) But, no. When the soldiers came rousting and roistering into the dungeon this time, they were alone, and what they wanted, making it inescapably clear with boot and fist and gun barrel, was for the prisoner to come away with them. Okay, okay.

  The prisoner felt rotten. Unshaved, unwashed, in the same miserable clothing he'd worn on the Pride of Votskojek, his lank hair matted on his head, a feeling of cruddiness caked around his eyes, itches everywhere. This was not at all the first time the prisoner had been a prisoner, but it was certainly the first time he'd been a prisoner of people who took so cavalierly their responsibilities in the situation.

  Outside the dungeon was a low-ceilinged corridor, stone on one side, old planks of wood on the other, that smelled of animals --horses, maybe, or cows. The prisoner was run through this at a lope, constantly prodded from behind, and shoved through a doorway at the end into a windowless, furnitureless room where a short, fat man in a heavy black beard and a tight uniform slapped him across the face and said, "Where did they take the relic?"