Don't Ask

by Donald E. Westlake

  Funny thing. Last night, the prisoner would have told anybody anything about anything. But somewhere in the course of the recent several hours, as his clothing had stiffened with old perspiration and his flesh had tightened up from new bruises and the stubble had started to get really itchy under his chin, a transformation had occurred inside the prisoner, and now he knew, he knew, he wouldn't tell these operetta assholes diddley. Fuck cm. And the horse they rode in on. Therefore, "No speak English," the prisoner said.

  The fat man reared back as though it was the prisoner who'd slapped him; not a bad idea, come to think of it. "What are you playing at?" the fat man cried. "Of course you speak English! You're an American!"

  "Frangipani accalac," the prisoner said.

  The fat man looked stern. "We have ways to make you talk," he said.

  "Afghanistan bananastand," the prisoner told him.

  The fat man looked at the soldiers and pointed at the prisoner. "Club him!" he snarled.

  The soldiers raised their machine guns, butt-first. The prisoner looked at the fat man and smiled a small and wintry smile. "They don't speak English," he said.

  The fat man looked flustered. The soldiers paused uncertainly, looking at the fat man, their guns still raised to club. Nothing at all happened for a long moment, and then the door behind the prisoner opened and Hradec Kralowc entered, in a snazzy suit and white shirt and old school tie (black, purple, and dark blue: Osigreb Polytech). Smiling in a self-deprecatory way, he said, "Well, Diddums, so you've seen through our little charade. Yes, of course we've assigned English-speaking guards to your case, in hopes you would let something slip, thinking you weren't understood.

  Ah, well, such little tricks rarely work, in truth."

  The small room was already overcrowded, but now Dr. Zorn entered, too, his spirally eyeglasses spinning reflections of the light, his nasty mouth smiling. The prisoner immediately crossed his arms over his chest, covering his upper arms with his hands.

  Kralowc chuckled, "No, no, Mr. Diddums, you won't be getting any more injections. At least not at this moment."

  "A fine subject," Dr. Zorn said covetously, "for aversion training."

  "Not now, Doctor," Kralowc said, and turned to the fat man. He spoke pleasantly enough to the fat man, or as pleasantly as that language of theirs permitted, but the fat man blinked and looked abashed and fidgeted his feet and answered in frightened monosyllables. The prisoner, having seen good cop/bad cop done a lot better than this, spent that interval looking at the doorway and deciding it wouldn't accomplish anything to suddenly run through it.

  Finishing with his apparent chastisement of the fat man, Kralowc then spoke pleasantly enough to one of the soldiers, who obediently leaned his machine gun against the wall and reached into his jacket for a none-too-clean handkerchief as Kralowc said to the prisoner, pleasantly enough, "I'm afraid we must blindfold you now as we take you to a new location. There are certain military installations you must not see, particularly as you are known to be a Tsergovian sympathizer. If you did see these things, I'm afraid our military command would insist that you be disposed of. You understand."

  "Oh, sure," the prisoner said, and the handkerchief was tied around his head, blocking his eyes except for a teeny little strip at the bottom, which made it possible for him to see the front of his own body but nothing else.

  Hands took his arms and propelled him forward. The front of his body, and presumably the rest of him as well, went back through that doorway, turned left (away from the dungeon! hurrah!), and walked along a concrete floor, then stumbled over some kind of sill, then walked on crunchy gravel for a while.

  "We'll be getting into our car now," Kralowc's voice said from nearby.

  Hands bent the prisoner this way and that, poked at him, adjusted him, and pretty soon he was, as advertised, in a car. The backseat, from the feel of the flat, soft surface his knees were now pressed against. Other people got into the car, too, on both sides of the prisoner, pressing him pretty tight. He folded his arms, because there wasn't any room for them at his sides, and sat there peeking down at his arms and his lap for a while.

  The car's trunk slammed. Pause. Car doors slammed, four of them. A car engine started; sounded like it needed a tune-up. The vehicle lurched forward, and there was the sound of tires on gravel: crunch-crunch-crunch. Then they reached pavement, a smoother surface, and gained speed, and the car sounded less like an out-of-whack washing machine.

  Somebody in the car smelled bad. This offended the prisoner, until he realized he was the one stinking up the place, and then he was pleased.

  The foulest revenges are the most sweet.

  After five or ten minutes of driving on a surprisingly smooth road, Kralowc began to speak, apparently from the front seat, saying,

  "Frankly, Diddums, I'm sorry to see you in this situation. In our two meetings, I'd come to think of you as a sympathetic person, one I enjoyed discussing things with. And now to find you've thrown in your lot with the Tsergovians, it's really too bad. I can only assume you don't know them well, that you took the job for pay or believed some massive pattern of disinformation."

  The silence following that statement encouraged a reply, but the prisoner could think of nothing in particular he wanted to say, so the silence stretched and stretched and then broke, and Kralowc said, "Let me try to put the situation in perspective, Mr. Diddums. As caretakers of the femur of Saint Ferghana, as, if I may say so, reverent and awe-inspired caretakers of the sacred relic, we not only deserve whatever rewards such selfless concern might bring but our continued hegemony itself hangs in the balance. And not only ours. I'll tell you, Mr. Diddums, without hyperbole, that the health and well-being of every man, woman, and child in this entire trans-Carpathian region depends on the continued independence and internal security of Votskojek."

  A mutter of "hear hears" surrounded the prisoner at the end of this speech, none of which had done more than graze his mind on its way out the windows that had been opened for some reason.

  Another little silence. An audible sigh from Kralowc, and then his voice again. "I'm sorry you won't meet me halfway, Did dums," he said. (Be interesting to know by what thought processes he chose when to say "Diddums" and when to say "Mr. Diddums." Or maybe not.) When this sally also produced no response, Kralowc made some sort of guttural remark, apparently to the driver, because at once they speeded up and shortly made a sharp right, and then began to climb.

  And Kralowc spoke again, "I want to show you something, Diddums," he said. "So we're taking a little detour. I can't believe you're a man who won't be reached by honesty and sincerity. You must want, as we all do, what5s best for all mankind. We've met, you and I, we've talked; I can't be that wrong about human nature."

  Well, maybe.

  They climbed for quite a while. Votskojek was supposed to be a mountainous country, so here was the proof. Then at last, the car slowed, more gravel was crunched, and the car came to a stop. Doors opened. "Here we are," Kralowc said, as though there'd been some doubt.

  Many hands worked to get the prisoner out of the car and then to get him back on his feet and brush him off. Then, at last, the blindfold was removed, and what a view! Boy, if only he had a camera!

  They stood on a parking area beside a curve in a two-lane road high up on a mountainside, with the land dropping sharply down just past the end of the gravel. But this was not the craggy, rocky mountainside he'd expected; this mountain was as green as a bankroll, pine trees and grasses, wildflowers along the verge of the road, and not a human structure in sight.

  Except, far away to the south--no, east--no, uh…

  It's still morning, and the warm spring sun is there, so that's east, so that's kind of southwest. Okay. Except, far away to the southwest, there were two huge gray salt and pepper shakers, round concrete towers, fat at the bottom then tapering in near the top, then curving out again at the upper lip. White smoke or steam came from the one on the left, so that would be the salt. The pepper wasn't in
use.

  But other than those things, the automobile they'd come here in was the only visible manufactured artifact. This automobile was medium-size, as the prisoner had already known, and black and foreign--Lada, it said on the side, in small, discreet chrome letters --and its license plate was black, with a silver V 27 on it.

  Also, the group around this car were the only visible human beings. The group consisted of the prisoner and Hradec Kralowc and the two soldiers from the dungeon, plus Terment from the Pride of Votskojek office, who was being the driver, and who was, in fact, staying in the car while the others got out and stretched their legs.

  Never mind the people; look at the view. The mountain fell away steeply in front of them, all fir trees and underbrush and flowers. Across the way were other mountains, and the prisoner noticed that two of those mountains out there had green bands down their sides where the trees had been cut away to make meadows. Long strips of meadow stretching down the mountains.

  Hradec Kralowc took the prisoner's arm and pointed out toward the salt and pepper shakers. "Do you see that? That's Tsergovia."

  The prisoner perked up. That's Tsergovia? Not that far away, really. If he could get over there, if he could get to Tsergovia, he could bounce some names off the people he met--good thing he was so accomplished at pronouncing Grijk Krugnk, gonna come in handier than he'd expected--and eventually find the authorities, and then find rescue. If he could get there.

  Well, at least he now knew where it was. Southwest of here.

  "And this," Kralowc was saying, as though the prisoner might care about anything except the location of Tsergovia, "is Votskojek." And he waved his hand at the mountains, the greenery all around them. "Do you understand now, Diddums?" he asked.

  No. The prisoner said it aloud: "No."

  "You don't know what those towers are? I'm sorry, I thought everyone did. Those are cooling towers for a nuclear plant. All of Tsergovia has been given over to the military-industrial complex."

  They do pay well, the prisoner thought.

  "Disease is rampant in Tsergovia," Kralowc went on. "Cancers, leukemia, birth defects, all the terrible legacy of nuclear plants run by lax, uncaring, unskilled bureaucrats. Air pollution, dead lakes and streams, stunted crops, disappearing wildlife. That's what Tsergovia has chosen, and it's what they want for us. Make no mistake, Diddums, if their underhanded methods in this UN matter are allowed to win, we will be helpless. Poverty-stricken, friendless, at the mercy of our historic enemies. Everything you see here, everything we of Votskojek hold dear, will be trampled beneath the Tsergovians' hobnailed boot. That's what we're fighting for, Diddums. Truth, justice, and the Votskojek way!"

  "Huh," said the prisoner, impressed not by the argument but by its impassioned delivery.

  Kralowc studied him. "You're an honorable man," he said, getting it wrong again. "I know you won't change your allegiance easily. But I want to break through Tsergovian lies and propaganda, I want you to see what you will destroy if you refuse to help us in our hour of need. I'm going to show you a Votskojek village. I'm going to show you the life the Tsergovians mean to crush."

  Good. The longer the tour went on, the better the prisoner liked it, since he suspected that, at the end of the road, lay Dr. Zorn. "Sure," he said. "Like to see it."

  "We discussed," Kralowc said, "when we innocently believed you were a true tourist, we discussed the charming village of Schtum, in the Schtumveldt Mountains."

  "Yeah, I remember that."

  "Well, these," Kralowc said, waving his arm, "are the Schtumveldt Mountains, and you are going to see Schtum!"

  "Sounds good," the prisoner said.

  Kralowc rested a commiserating hand on the prisoner's forearm.

  Sympathetically, he said, "I'm sorry, but we'll have to blindfold you again for part of the way. Our military defenses, you know."

  "Oh, sure."

  So they did, and stuffed him back into the car like an overripe pimento into an olive, and crowded in on both sides of him, and soon they all drove on.

  Uphill, downhill, twisty roads; fast driving, slow driving, imprecations at the driver--they sounded like imprecations-- from Kralowc, and then an order barked by Kralowc at the back130 seat, and the blindfold was removed once again, and the prisoner blinked and looked out the car windows.

  This time, they didn't stop, but just drove slowly through the town.

  Pretty little place, kind of an alpine village effect with the steep roofs and the gingerbread eaves and the cute shutters flanking the windows. It was the shopping street of the village, lined with small stores showing meat or bread or flowers in their front windows, with the tall green mountain as a backdrop.

  The narrow street was crowded with pedestrians. They were all in their native costume, wide skirts and full blouses with scoop necks for the women, bright, full shirts and dark pants with elastic bottoms below the knee for the men. Almost all wore buckled shoes, and many of the women had on old-fashioned sunbonnets. Many of these women were young and damn good-looking. Most of the people smiled sunny smiles and waved at the car as it went by.

  "Only official vehicles are permitted in the town center," Kralowc explained. "Residents and visitors must leave their automobiles at the parking lots outside town and come in by pony cart."

  And, as he said it, a pony cart went by, half full of cheerful people, all of whom waved at the car as they went past. The pony, too diligent to wave, nodded at the car.

  "That's our policy throughout the country," Kralowc went on. "Livable spaces for human beings. We refuse to be slaves to the machine. Not like your friends the Tsergovians. Oh, I wish I could show you one of their cities. The bloodred sky, the greenish sewage running in the gutters, the grit and grime on every face that has been outdoors for more than five minutes, the public statues eaten away by acid rain to mere lumps, the hopeless look on the faces, the hunched bodies of the children…"

  Kralowc paused, overcome by his own eloquence. "To think," he managed to say, "that they plan such a future for these people."

  Terment, at the wheel, said something fast and low, and Kralowc reacted, saying, "Yes, yes, you're absolutely right." To the prisoner, he said,

  "Now we must blindfold you again. I apologize --"

  Everything became dark for the prisoner.

  "--for the necessity." j

  "That's okay."

  "Thank you, Diddums."

  Soon the car sped up, and now it ran along for a good half-hour or so.

  From time to time, Kralowc had more bushwah he wished to impart, but the prisoner paid no attention. (It's easy to ignore people when you're blindfolded, without them knowing you're doing it.) While Kralowc pointed with pride and viewed with alarm, the prisoner devoted his thoughts to the question of which direction they were now traveling.

  Southwest? When they got wherever they were going, when he got his opportunity to escape--would he be able to see those salt and pepper shakers? Those were his beacons to steer by; they would lead him out of Votskojek and into Tsergovia and safety.

  After a while, it grew silent inside the speeding car; apparently, even Kralowc was tired of all that political Muzak. The big lumpy soldier bodies to both sides of the prisoner were warm, supporting; the hum of the tires on the road was sedative; he hadn't had much sleep last night…

  The prisoner was jolted awake by the sudden jolting of the car, like a bucking bronco, followed by a whole series of imprecations-- these were definite imprecations--from Kralowc, interspersed with querulous whines from Terment. The car kept bucking, then it coughed, then became silent.

  Still rolling, but silent.

  They ran out of gas! The prisoner couldn't believe it. How did they do that? And what was in it for him?

  A long walk, blindfolded, probably.

  The car rolled along. The prisoner could feel it slowing, could feel the ba-dump when it left the pavement, could hear the squnchy-creenk as the tires crushed weeds, could feel the little stutter in their progress as
Terment tentatively tapped the brakes, and finally he felt them roll to a stop. The sound of Terment applying the hand brake was like a joke in bad taste.

  But, then, all jokes are in bad taste, aren't they? Isn't that what they're for?

  "Unfortunately, Diddums," Kralowc said into the new silence, "this idiot seems to have permitted us to run out of fuel."

  Whining from Terment. Ignoring it, Kralowc said, "Fortunately, we are very near our destination. We'll be able to walk from here."

  Oh, will we? "You're the boss," the prisoner said.

  "Yes, I am. I think, therefore," Kralowc added, with barely suppressed rage, "we should begin by getting out of the car"

  This last wasn't directed at the prisoner. Kralowc spoke to the prisoner only in honeyed tones. The sound of car doors snapping open was followed by the removal of those warm, comforting, supportive bodies from the prisoner's flanks, followed by the removal of the prisoner himself from the car, in the usual fashion; hands clutched various parts of him and yanked. This time, the process was a little worse, since the soldiers were taking out their sense of injustice on the prisoner, as soldiers do.

  At last, he was set on his feet. And briefly left alone. Lifting his head to peer down past his own front, he saw grass around his feet, grass and weeds. Putting out his hand, he touched the side of the car and took one step in that direction to lean against it.

  Meantime, his captors were hurriedly plotting together in their native tongue; at the end of which Kralowc reverted to English, saying, "You won't be needing that blindfold anymore, Diddums. There's a path we can take that goes near no secret installations. And we wouldn't want you to fall and hurt yourself."

  "Good thinking," the prisoner said, and the blindfold came off yet again, was converted back to a dirty handkerchief, and was replaced in its owner-soldier's jacket.