"Tiny, how come you never met that deputy before?"
"I dunno," Tiny said, exasperated, really wanting a change of subject.
"Maybe he brought him in for extra security, on accounta the bone."
"Brought him in from where?"
"How do I know? Tsergovia, maybe."
"Since we called him?"
Tiny stopped. He frowned at Murch, and Kelp said, "Grijk was a lot happier in that phone call, wasn't he?"
"Well, God damn it.," Tiny said.
They had walked two blocks north on Second Avenue; the return trip was a lot faster. It then took Kelp all of forty seconds to get through the front door. They went down the long, empty front room, the light on Drava's desk still gleaming. They went through the dark and empty office.
Upstairs. Up in the parlor, they found Grijk and Drava and Zara Kotor, all tied and gagged, and lying on the carpets. The bone and the violin case were gone. they were having champagne in the dungeon, admiring the instruments of torture neatly aligned on the refectory table and the realistic chains and shackles fastened to the fake wall, when a servant came in with a cellular phone on a silver salver, bowed with the same obsequiousness that had added such verisimilitude to his downtrodden role in the prisoner game, and said to his employer, millionaire hotelier Harry Hochman, "Excuse me, sir. Telephone for Ambassador Kralowc."
"Thank you," Hradec said, switching his champagne glass to his other hand, and then he spoke Magyar-Croat into the receiver for some time as the others listened without comprehension, these others being Harry Hochman himself, his beloved wife, Adele, and Tatiana Kuzmekistova, a onetime star of Soviet cinema, a tall, slender, sultry brunette now madly studying English with the intention of becoming the next Greta Garbo, unaware there will be no more Greta Garbos. (Her research into Western popular culture was unfortunately spotty and incomplete.) Meantime, Tatiana was Hradec's date here at Harry Hochman's Vermont chateau, for the interrupted charade.
Finishing his conversation, returning the phone to the silver salver (the servant bowed himself out as lugubriously as he'd ever trotted the prisoner's dining table from the prisoner's cell), Hradec smiled at the others and said, 'The relic is safely back aboard the embassy."
"Congratulations, Hradec," Harry said, raising his champagne glass.
"I'm so happy for you," said Harry's beloved wife, Adele.
"Of excellence," said Tatiana, whose pronunciation was just about perfect.
They drank to Hradec's good fortune, but then Harry shook his big red head and looked briefly rueful. "It's just a damn shame we didn't get to use this place," he said, waving at their stage set with his half-full glass. (Harry's glasses were always half-full, never half-empty.) Well, it was too bad, really. This space was usually the ground floor art gallery at the chateau, with its own wide, wood delivery entrance into the stone foundation of the building, around at the rear, on the downhill side. With the help of the summer theater's set designer and backstage crew, it had been turned into quite a credible torturer's paradise, one that would surely have struck dread into the heart of the unforthcoming Diddums, had he ever seen it.
Here is what they'd done to this windowless and climate-controlled room.
The Braque bronzes and third-century Greek torsos had been pushed back out of sight behind drably painted flats placed in front of the walls of Matisses and medieval triptychs. Old barn siding had been laid as an ancient rough floor atop the smooth gray composition modern floor, then lightly sprinkled with stage blood. The nubbly sound-deadening ceiling, overdue for a paint job anyway, had been smeared a dull black, to be restored to its own color after the main event.
But there was to be no main event. First, not daring to stop for gas, and miscalculating how much they'd need, they'd run out, whereon Diddums astonished everybody by rather brutally escaping --he'd been so lethargic up till then--and then Hradec had recovered his relic, after all. So all was well that ended well, but it still would have been fun to use this set.
Particularly because of Harry's uniform. Over Hradec's muted doubts, Harry had caused to be flown in from Novi Glad in one of his own planes a Votskojek army general's uniform in 52 short, gaily bedecked with every known Votskojek medal, including those combat medals that, Votskojek's army never having been in actual contention against another army, had never been awarded to anybody.
But they looked swell on Harry Hochman's broad chest, flowing like lava over his broad belly, as well. It had been Harry's intent to be the mutely scowling General Kliebkrecht (MagyarCroat was not among his accomplishments) in the background of the scene, snarling from time to time as the playlet and his inner sense of drama dictated. Too bad.
Still, he could wear the uniform at the celebratory party, and did. In it, this short, barrely guy in the medal-bedecked dark olive uniform looked like a time-lapse night photograph of traffic going up and down a broad highway on a vast mountain. Fun!
At sixty-six, Harry Hochman was ready for fun. He'd always been a short, barrely guy with a big, fat red face and a lot of silken red hair (then gray hair, then red hair again), who considered himself a self-made man, since, after all, he'd taken his father's minor hotel, motel, and bus-line holdings, worth no more than three or four mil, and had expanded them into this current multi everything--multinational, multimillion, multidirectional. A one-man conglomerate, Harry Hochman looked as though he'd swallowed the world and had found it good. His florid face coursed with emotions, all of them operatic--rage, greed, triumph, glee. He was right to wear the uniform; he looked good in it, to the extent that he looked good in anything. (Secretly, he wished he could wear it all the time. But even for a titan such as himself, there still must be unfulfillable desires. Humbling.) For a man like Harry Hochman, Eastern Europe in its current post-Soviet disarray was a kind of wonderful Christmas present, a model-train set all for him; some assembly required. And Votskojek was the centerpiece.
Once it was securely ensconced in its proper traditional United Nations seat, once its economic treaties with its neighbors were in place, that little landlocked barren boulder in the Carpathians would become Harry Hochman's stepping stone to Europe. All of Europe.
Soon, Votskojek would join with the other former Comecon nations in a new economic alliance. This refurbished and renamed Comecon would join the European Community whether France and England liked it or not. And at the end of the day, from the Rockies to the Urals, Harry Hochman would be the hotel man. (He'd even suggested that already as a slogan to his advertising agency: "From the Rockies to the Urals, a Hochman pillow will rest your head." The ad guys were thinking about it.) And of course the hotels were just the beginning. Once established, they would be the base for horizontal expansion into all sorts of industries.
Insurance in Holland, television production in France, agriculture in Italy, mortuaries in England; the possibilities were infinite.
That this rosy future for this rosy man had become dependent on a bone was so ridiculous as to be infuriating. For the first time in many years, Harry had had to start putting the plastic protector in his mouth at night, to keep from grinding his teeth in his sleep. A bone It's a good thing I'm not a ruthless man, Harry had told himself more than once, I'd just have that senile clot of an archbishop assassinated.
Except, of course, stupid though it might be that the relic of St.
Ferghana had become this important in twentieth-century international politics, the fact was that Votskojek did have possession of the little beauty, which gave it a leg up (pardon the pun) on the competition. So.
The femur of St. Ferghana fronted the future hopes of Votskojek;
Ambassador Hradec Kralowc was responsible for the femur; and Kralowc was in Harry Hochman's pocket. Which was why he'd been so openhanded in setting up his flummery to "gaslight the fella to a fare-thee-well."
That, and it was fun.
Harry looked around his converted art gallery, the six-plus millions worth of art now completely out of sight behind the faux dungeo
n, and he almost wished he could keep the place this way. Come down here in this uniform from time to time, strut around, listen to the hollow thud of these boots on the barn-siding floor. "Damn shame," he said again.
"Harry, you're just a big boy," said his beloved wife, Adele, smiling indulgently upon him. Taller than her husband, and a little younger than he every year, stately as a frigate's figurehead; where he was red, she was black and white all over; hair as black as Ronald Reagan's, skin as white as any golem's. She almost always wore black, under the mistaken assumption that it made her look thinner. What it made her look like, in fact, was Dracula's aunt, but nobody was likely to tell her so.
Harry grinned back at his rather scary but beloved wife. "Admit it, Adele," he said. "You'd have liked to see that fella's face yourself when he walked in here."
"Poor Diddums," Hradec said, and laughed.
Harry's red face turned quizzical, "Poor Diddums? How come?"
"Such a minor cog in the wheel," Hradec explained. "A foot soldier, a nobody. And here he was, at the very center of all this machination.
What I would like to see is his face when he found out he was in Vermont!"
They all laughed at that idea, Tatiana saying, "Such amusement!" Then they all finished their champagne, and Harry reached into the ice bucket, grabbed the Dom Perignon by the throat, and refilled. "To John Diddums," he said, raising his glass. "The poor schnook."
"Hear hear," said Hradec.
"Of positive!" said Tatiana, and they all drank.
When the prowler fell over a chair in the kitchen, May woke up and knew exactly what to do. A woman alone had to be ready to defend herself, and May was ready. The drawer in the bedside table slid noiselessly open.
Her hand closed first on the flashlight, which she didn't want, but then she found what she was looking for and slid silently out of bed, holding it out in front of her. In the dark room, she crossed toward the greater darkness of the doorway, hesitated there, and heard the prowler shuffling cautiously in this direction down the hall. She took a breath, held it, turned the corner, and Maced the guy full in the face.
"Holy shit!" "John?"
"Ow! Ow! Ow!" Crash bang thud bang crash.
Horrified, May backed into the bedroom, frantically feeling along the wall there, finding the light switch, flicking it on, and there was John, all curled up on the hall floor near his spilled beer can, thrashing around like a bug that has just been sprayed with Raid. Which, in a way, he was.
Every time he came up for air, John told her a little more of the story, and May apologized all over again for everything, including having left that chair pulled out too far from the kitchen table. Then, kneeling on the bathroom floor, John would bend forward again like one of those novelty drinking birds and stick his flaming head back into the water-filled bathtub.
And so, piece by piece, May learned of John's capture and imprisonment, his jailer's deception, his own escape, his discovery of the truth, and his long journey home from Vermont in a scattered series of short hops in trucks, truck drivers being the only people in America who aren't afraid to pick up a hitchhiker who looks like John Dortmunder, since most of them look like John Dortmunder themselves.
When at last the stinging abated on John's face and neck and ears, and when he could keep his eyes open without shedding tears all over the place, and when the really bcwuuiaMdd taste in his mouth had to some extent gone away, May left him and went to the kitchen to get them both a fresh beer, plus for him a sliced American cheese sandwich with butter and mayo and mustard and ketchup on white bread nicely quartered into triangles, which she brought to the living room, where John now sat, the white towel around his neck setting off his red skin and red eyeballs, making him look like something that has just been shorn.
He made faces while he ate, the Mace apparently having altered the taste of things he ordinarily liked, but he made no comment beyond one mumbled, "What a homecoming," and he listened quietly while May gave him a report of events here in town while he'd been away up in Vermont on the slippery slopes. How the guys had lost the bone to the DBA but were pretty sure they were off to get it, and probably the Tsergovians even had it by this hour, and Andy Kelp would call tomorrow, probably--no, certainly --with good news, and would be delighted to learn that John was safe, and would bring over his five thousand dollars.
"So. All's well that ends well, then," John said inaccurately, but it was a nice thought to take along to bed, where it helped him sleep right through until Kelp showed up around ten the next morning.
"Dortmunder looked at the money he'd dumped out of the envelope onto the coffee table. "I don't get it," he said.
Kelp shrugged. 'Tiny says it's ours," he said, "and you know how seldom people argue with Tiny. As far as he's concerned, we got the bone and we delivered it. Gave it straight into his cousin's hands, got paid, and that was that. We did what they paid us to do."
"But," Dortmunder objected, "they don't have the bone." 'That's the way it looked to me, too," Kelp agreed, "but Tiny explained it this other way, and Grijk just sat there looking like one of those beached whales you see in the Post and said, 'Okay, Diny, okay, Diny,' in that way he has. Tiny told him to go borrow some more from Citibank, he wants us to do it again."
"And what'd Grijk say to that?"
"I think he's discouraged," Kelp said. "That whole crowd over there, I think they got the wind kind of knocked out of their sails."
Dortmunder looked into the coffee cup he'd brought in with him from the kitchen, but it was empty. Shaking his head, he said, "I don't follow the sequence there. Where'd those other people come from?"
"What it looks like," Kelp told him, "it looks like the Votskojeks put a tap on the Tsergovians' phone, so when Tiny called to say we had the bone and we're coming over, they went there real quick ahead of us, three of them. Two went upstairs and tied up the people there, and the third one stayed with Grijk to make sure he didn't slip us the high sign, and made Grijk say he was his deputy security guy. So we left the bone and split, and they copped it for themselves.''
'That's really irritating," Dortmunder said. He looked in his coffee cup, and it was still empty.
"Water over the bridge," Kelp said. "We did the job, and we got paid."
Dortmunder looked at the money on the coffee table. He looked around the room, but May was off at her cashier job at the Safeway, and there was no one else to consult. "I don't know about this," he said.
Kelp said, "What's not to know? John, this is the most successful job we pulled in recent memory. In even not so recent memory. There was something to get, we went out and got it, we got paid for it. Okay, we lost it for a little while--"
"You lost me, too," Dortmunder pointed out.
"John," Kelp said, more in sorrow than in anger, looking at him as though Dortmunder were guilty of some sort of low blow, "John, we said, 'Jump-' You remember that; Stan and me, we both said, 'Jump.'"
"Just pointing out," Dortmunder said. "You said you lost the bone; I'm just pointing out, you also lost me."
"Whatever you want," Kelp said. "We found the bone, and you found yourself--"
"In Vermont." (That still griped.) "--and we got paid. Success. Victory. Accomplishment. End of story."
"I don't know," Dortmunder said.
Kelp shook his head. He was getting exasperated. He said,
"JF/wtfdon'tyouknow?"
For answer, Dortmunder reached for the phone and dialed a number. The phone rang six times, and then there was a click, and then a sound like a bear roused too early from hibernation--part roar, part cough, part gnashing of teeth. "Tiny, it's John," Dortmunder said.
The growl formed itself into words: "I taught you wuh lost."
"I found myself," Dortmunder said. "Tiny, I want to go over to--"
"Don't you know what time it is?"
"What? No, I don't think so, I--Hold on." Dortmunder turned to Kelp, "He wants to know what time it is."
While Kelp vainly searched himself f
or a watch, Tiny roared in Dortmunder's ear, "I don't wanna know what time it is!"
"You don't?"
"I'll find out," Kelp said, getting to his feet and going away to the kitchen.
"And I don't care where you been, neither," Tiny said. "If that's what you're calling me about, forget it."
"I been in Vermont," Dortmunder said, "but that isn't the point."
"You been in Vermont?"
"But that isn't the point. The point is--"
"Vermont?"
"You don't care, Tiny, remember? The reason I'm calling is, I want to go see the Tsergovians, and I thought maybe you could bring me over there."
Tiny muttered a bit, like a subway going by far below ground level, and then he said, "Whadaya wanna go over there for? You got your money, right?"
"I got jerked around, Tiny," Dortmunder said. "I wanna know the story."
"What story? There is no story. You got hired, you did it, you went to Vermont, you got paid. The money's good, right? It isn't draffs, right?"
Kelp came back from the kitchen and said, "If s quarter after ten."
"It's quarter after ten," Dortmunder said into the phone.
There was silence. It stretched on and on. Had Tiny gone back to sleep?
Dortmunder said, "Tiny?"
A long sigh came snaking down the phone line. Tiny said, "You wanna go see these people, Dortmunder, whyntcha just go see these people? You need the address?"
"Grijk's the only one I met," Dortmunder reminded him. "You're their cousin; you can like vouch for me."
"I don't do family reunions," Tiny said. "I did what I could for that crowd, and now that's it."
"I don't ask you a lot, Tiny," Dortmunder said, and just let that lie there, and waited.
Long silence, even longer than before. But Tiny hadn't gone back to sleep, Dortmunder knew he hadn't. He waited.
Another long sigh. Tiny said, "All right, Dortmunder, this once." 'Thank you, Tiny."
"I'll call them; I'll call you back." 'Thank you."
"You know, Dortmunder," Tiny said, "you could go too far, you know."
"I wouldn't want to do that, Tiny," Dortmunder said.
Don't Ask Page 16