Don’t Ask

by Donald Westlake

  ‘No, no,’ Hradec said, delighted at the response, thinking of fellow diplomats over at the UN he could share this anecdote with. ‘We are the United Nations mission, or soon shall be, and the embassy.’ He drew himself to attention. ‘I am Hradec Kralowc, the ambassador.’ Extending a hand, he said, ‘And you—?’

  The man seemed to have to think a minute before remembering his name; he must have really disliked that boat ride. Then he grabbed Hradec’s hand, pumped it, and said, ‘Diddums.’

  Hradec blinked. ‘Diddums?’

  Diddums blanched, then recovered. ‘It’s Welsh,’ he said.

  ‘Ah,’ Hradec said. ‘And the first—’

  ‘John. John Diddums.’

  ‘Well, uh … John. May I call you John?’

  ‘I was just gonna get a cab.’

  ‘I take it, John,’ Hradec went on, ‘you didn’t much care for the motion on that small boat.’

  ‘Don’t remind me,’ John Diddums said, and pressed a hand to his stomach.

  ‘I feel the same way,’ Hradec said. ‘Believe it or not, I came here all the way from Odessa on that thing’ – jabbing his own thumb at the ship – ‘and it was horrendous.’

  ‘Boy, I don’t doubt it,’ John Diddums said.

  ‘Along the way,’ Hradec said, ‘I learned a wonderful cure, just the thing to make that discomfort go away. Have you a few moments?’

  John Diddums seemed surprised. ‘You want me to go on that thing?’

  ‘It doesn’t move,’ Hradec assured him. ‘Not like a small tugboat, at any rate. Frankly, I have nothing to do till the ballet this evening. Come aboard and I’ll fix you the restorative and you can tell me about yourself.’

  ‘Ballet?’

  Never had Hradec heard so much blunt suspicion packed into one small word. To deal with that problem once and for all, ‘I’ll be having supper with one of the featured ballerinas after the performance,’ he explained. And then, just in case that explanations wasn’t enough, he explained further: ‘Ballerinas are girls.’

  ‘Everybody knows that,’ John Diddums said.

  Feeling vaguely irritated, and not entirely sure why, ‘In any case,’ Hradec said, ‘come aboard.’

  9

  It wasn’t supposed to be this easy. Dortmunder walked around the ship, the very sweet drink in his hand that Hradec had given him to settle his stomach, and Hradec showed him everything. Everything. He even saw the bone.

  Has anybody before ever had the householder help case the joint?

  The tour started in the kitchen, where Hradec concocted – Well, no. The tour started in a small, loud, evil-smelling elevator that took them up from the motel lobby-looking entrance to where the kitchen was off to the right down a narrow, long hall. That was where Hradec got out a big glass and a lot of stuff and a Cuisinart and made this magic elixir of his that was supposed to settle Dortmunder’s stomach. Dortmunder carefully looked the other way – all the other ways – while this alchemy was going on, because he had the feeling it would be considered proper manners for the guest to drink the thing, whatever it turned out to be, and so he didn’t want to know what was in it.

  After the kitchen and the glass of medicine – which turned out to be amazingly sweet, with some kind of like Chinese tartness in behind it, but not bad at all, and might even be working to settle his stomach – Hradec led the way up a flight of stairs to his own apartment, of which he seemed to be very proud.

  Well, it was okay. Nice views. Dortmunder didn’t want to say anything, but up top here like this you could feel the Pride of Votskojek moving, just a little, swaying back and forth, constantly adjusting itself to the water and the ropes and the little heave and tow going on between the river and the slip. But Dortmunder didn’t mention this, nor did Hradec, and the glass of restorativeness actually was making a difference, and they didn’t stay up top in the apartment too long, anyway.

  No. Next they called for the elevator again and went down two levels, one lower than where the kitchen was, and this is where you found the embassy offices. And the bone.

  But first, the embassy. There was a big office, which was Hradec’s, full of flags and photos and statues and mementos, and with a few round windows showing the Manhattan shoreline northward, with the UN building itself pretty prominent up there, glinting like Paul Bunyan’s bathroom mirror in the afternoon sun.

  And then there was a smaller office, with no windows at all, but with two people in it, a man and a woman, the ones who actually did all the work around here, and who spoke English with thick accents, like Grijk.

  Hradec introduced him and, ‘Diddums?’ said the man, frowning.

  ‘It’s Welsh.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘If you ever decide to visit our beautiful country, John,’ Hradec said, ‘one of these very efficient clerks will arrange your visa, your hotels, transportation within the country, exit tax, everything.’

  ‘I thought you said you had guards out front,’ Dortmunder said, being clever.

  ‘Oh, you just tell them you’re here for a tourist visa,’ Hradec said. ‘During normal business hours, of course.’

  Dortmunder knew when people talked about normal business hours they meant theirs, not his, so he just nodded and told Hradec’s workers he’d see them around. The man smiled grimly, the woman smiled shyly, and they got back to work.

  Next was the bone.

  ‘Now, here’s the most amazing thing,’ Hradec said as they walked down the long central hall away from the embassy offices. ‘This relic, a saint’s bone, is normally kept at the Rivers of Blood Cathedral in our capital city at Novi Glad – a beautiful city, you must see it some time – but through a fantastic sequence of events it has become crucial to our application for membership in the United Nations; too complex a story to go into.’

  Dortmunder wondered, Should I ask? Should I be interested? On the other hand, could I bear to hear that story again? ‘Uh-huh,’ he said.

  Hradec seemed slightly surprised at this lack of curiosity, but on the other hand he also seemed as pleased not to have to tell the story as Dortmunder was not to have to hear it. Thus companionably, they made their way down the hall, and Hradec opened a door, and they entered the laboratory out of the Frankenstein movies.

  No, wrong. The Frankenstein movies were in a castle, and the laboratory there was huge, with a very high stone ceiling like a church, maybe like the Rivers of Blood Cathedral. But this was a low-ceilinged room, an inside cabin – or three cabins, with their partitions removed – filled with metal tables on which all kinds of jars and retorts and metal boxes and Bunsen burners and stacks of instruction booklets and piles of photographs and general junk were spread and jumbled. In front of the tables were high stools. On the windowless walls were blown-up photos of the bone, X rays of the bone, a lighted-up X-ray viewing box, a calendar that showed two grazing deer in a forest glade – whatever happened to the calendars of smiling girls holding pipe wrenches? – a fire extinguisher, and a pennant from MIT.

  No guards. Door unlocked.

  Inside this room were two men, both wearing white lab coats. (On a portable metal coatrack near the door hung half a dozen more lab coats.) One of the men stared morosely into a microscope while the other gazed intently at a computer screen, but both raised their heads, much like grazing deer, when Hradec and Dortmunder entered.

  Hradec smiled at the microscope one, who was nearer. ‘Hello, John, here’s another John. John McIntire of Johns Hopkins, may I present John Diddums.’

  McIntire, a distracted-looking guy with an orange walrus mustache, two orange walrus eyebrows, and an unchecked growth of orange hair all over his head, offered his hand but then frowned and said, ‘Diddums?’

  ‘It’s Welsh.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Meantime, Hradec had turned to the second man, who had risen from his computer and walked around several metal tables toward them. ‘I don’t think I know you,’ Hradec said, not suspiciously but like the host at a large party. That’s
how tight security was around here.

  ‘Another John, I’m afraid.’ This one had an English accent. Extending his hand to Hradec, he said, ‘John Mickelmuss, Cambridge. John Fairweather asked me to come over and help out for a few days.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ Hradec said, unable to hide the vagueness.

  ‘I take it you are Ambassador Kralowc.’

  ‘Oh, we’re much less formal here. Call me Hradec.’

  You sure are less formal, Dortmunder thought, looking across the room at what had to be it itself, the thing, the very thing. It rested on a piece of black velvet, under blue light for some reason, and it was smaller than Dortmunder had expected, less than a foot long. But a young girl, in the Middle Ages, she probably wouldn’t have been so very tall. The blue light made the bone gleam in an unearthly fashion, as though it were polished ivory, an elephant’s tusk rather than some dead saint’s leg, amazingly white, with a hint of pale blue behind the whiteness, like some very pale skin.

  Dortmunder was recalled from his reverie on the bone by being introduced to John Mickelmuss, who frowned and said, ‘Diddums?’

  ‘It’s Welsh.’

  That usually ended the conversation, but this one said, ‘I knew some Diddums from Cardiff, I believe.’

  ‘Could be,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘Come look at the relic,’ Hradec said.

  10

  It is absolutely the easiest thing I have ever seen in my life,’ Dortmunder said. ‘It’s almost a shame to do it. We could phone for it. We could send a kid to pick it up. It’s so easy, I can’t believe it.’

  They were meeting at Tiny’s place again, this time without J.C., who, Tiny said, had decided she was overdue for a vacation. ‘She got on a plane, and she said, “I’ll be back when I’m back,”’ he told them. ‘No, it was the other way around.’

  ‘We understood that,’ Dortmunder said.

  So the five sat in Tiny’s living room with cans of beer in their hands, and after the discussion about Dortmunder’s unauthorized departure from the Margaret C. Moran was run into the ground, with Dortmunder pointing out how all their predictions when he’d abandoned that alleged tugboat – more like a bouncing rubber ball, if you asked him, and increasingly so in memory – had turned out to be false. He had not been arrested, their plans had not been revealed, his connection with Tsergovia had not been exposed. No, and he hadn’t had the pleasure of the return trip with them, either, including the unexpected squall down around the Battery about which the others were very reluctant to speak.

  No, the only thing that happened was, the Votskojek ambassador, a nice fella, really, had shown Dortmunder the ship, the entire ship. Including the bone.

  ‘He is well known,’ Grijk said grimly, ‘dis Hradec Kralowc, do murder babies and ead dem.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t do any of that while I was there,’ Dortmunder said. ‘All he did was show me the place, and we can walk in there and walk out again playing catch with that bone, and no problem.’

  Kelp, Stan, Tiny, and Grijk all looked interested. ‘Tell us how,’ Kelp said.

  Dortmunder told them.

  11

  The Pen-ta-gon to-day in-formed the Con-gress,’ Linda the newsreader gasped, punning, beads of sweat running down her throat and between her unnaturally firm breasts, ‘that I can’t go on much lon-ger, oh!’

  Supine beneath the sometime-substitute anchor, Hradec Kralowc smiled up in delight at her fevered face as she paused in her recital, but not her aerobics, to pant a bit. ‘I love it when you talk politics,’ he encouraged her. For years, he’d wondered why the female reporters on the television news all spoke in that same rhythmic, pulsing way, regardless of the sense of what they were saying; now he knew. ‘More,’ he urged her, urging as well with his own rhythmic hip pulsations. ‘More. More.’

  ‘The Pre-si-dent has joined the sum-mit at Ge-neeeeeve! Oh! Oh! Oh!’

  Join her? Hradec was just coming to the conclusion that a nice shower à deux at this time would be preferable to further extended activity here on the bed when the phone rang! Damn and blast; throwing him off.

  But not Linda. Her red light was well and truly lighted, and Linda was flying. Forget the phone; insert its own rhythm into the insertion. Fly with me.

  Daredevils of the air, wingtip to wingtip, banking through the clouds, coming in side by side for the smoothest of landings, touching down together; sigh. Engines off.

  Blond hair lank around her anonymously beautiful face, Linda smiled down upon this ambassador – from a minor Eastern European nation, granted, but she was herself only a local feed, so they could both feel pleased with the accomplishment – and murmured, ‘We’ll be back, after this.’

  As she climbed off and went tripping away toward the bathroom, lovely behind gleaming like a beacon of hope in a dark and dangerous world, the ambassador rolled over, grasped the bedside telephone a bit more savagely than necessary, and said, ‘Yes?’ (Being a professional diplomat, he kept all his snarls and savageries inside, beneath a calm, polite exterior.)

  It was Lusk, from the office, of course. ‘Diddums, Ambassador, on one.’

  What? Baby talk? Hradec said, ‘Lusk? What did you say?’

  ‘John Diddums, Ambassador. The man you introduced us to the other day.’

  John Diddums! The unexpected visitor from the sea. Or from the river, actually. ‘Call me anytime,’ Hradec had said to the fellow, in his diplomatic way, and now, be damned if the man hasn’t done it. ‘Right,’ Hradec said, sitting up, listening to the toilet flush – maybe he should ask Harry Hochman if one of his hotel maintenance people could put in a quieter fixture there – and punched the button for line one. ‘Mr Diddums! What a pleasant surprise!’

  ‘You said I oughta call.’

  ‘Yes, I did, and I’m glad you took me at my word.’ Sound of the shower running; vision in mind of Linda soaping herself. Here, let me help with that, but not yet.

  Diddums was saying, ‘The way you talked about, uh, Votskojek, you sure made it sound interesting. I got some vacation time coming up—’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘—and I thought maybe, well, maybe I could come around, talk to you and the other people there, work out a whatchacallit.’

  ‘A whatchacallit?’

  ‘Itinerary,’ Diddums said. ‘That’s what it is, itinerary.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Hradec said, keeping calm, keeping the excitement out of his voice as he had earlier kept out the irritation. A tourist, in Votskojek! An actual tourist, a vacationing traveler, in Novi Glad, in the Schtumveldt Mountains, in the Varja River—

  Well, no, on the Varja River, let us hope, it not being a river for a human body to enter. No need to go into that now, though, with this sudden prospect of an actual deliberate visitor to the ambassador’s native land.

  Deliberate. Not an escaped homicidal lunatic from Transylvania; not a bewildered Ukrainian in a four-door Lada who’d made the mistake of trusting his Soviet maps; not a French balloonist blown off course, nor a Berliner full of berliners who’d fallen asleep on the through train, nor a Zemblan lepidopterist insensibly crossing the border net in hand in pursuit of some rare butterfly, nor a Tsergovian with a bomb to plant in the Chamber of Deputies, but an actual tourist, on purpose, intending to visit Votskojek. And an American at that, with dollars!

  ‘I’d be delighted,’ Hradec said with simple honesty, ‘to see you, Mr Diddums, and work out an itinerary for your visit to Votskojek. At your convenience. When would you like to come by?’

  ‘Uh, this afternoon?’

  ‘Couldn’t be better,’ Hradec assured him. ‘What time?’

  ‘Uh, four o’clock?’

  Hradec was slightly disturbed by Diddums’s apparent inability to answer any simple question without first studying it for snares and pitfalls, but he was so dazzled by the prospect of this first swallow of the Votskojek tourist trade that he was blind to whatever warning signals Diddums might be tossing out ahead of himself. ‘Four o’cl
ock is the perfect hour,’ the ambassador was pleased to tell his country’s guest. ‘I’ll alert my staff to be ready for you, and I look forward to greeting you myself.’

  ‘Me, too,’ Diddums said. ‘That’s what I want, all of us together, working on my trip.’

  ‘And that,’ Hradec said, hearing the shower stop – ah, well, too bad – ‘is what I want, too, Mr Diddums.’

  12

  Three-fifty P.M. In the offices of the Votskojek embassy aboard the Pride of Votskojek, Ambassador Hradec Kralowc and his office staff – Lusk and Terment – searched in vain for more pamphlets, photos, press releases, and other bumpf to fill out the truly anemic travelers’ information packet they were assembling for John Diddums. (Down the hall, in the room with the relic, John Mickelmuss completed inputting into the computer his latest test data and turned to the rather more complicated matter of making a cup of coffee.) If he’d had more time, Hradec would have asked his hotelier friend, Harry Hochman, for help. Oh, well.

  Still 3:50. Andy Kelp and four men wearing eye shadow and carrying canvas purses that were supposed to look like ammunition carriers but looked like purses were standing on the raft moored in the East River at the end of East Twenty-third Street, where the seaplanes ingest and egest their passengers. And here came the plane now, plowing heavily shoreward like an Indian elephant wading through the monsoon. The other four men adjusted their crotches and shoulder pads while Kelp looked away downriver, frowning slightly.

  Still 3:50. Murch’s Mom steered her cab past four perfectly legitimate customers on Third Avenue between Nineteenth and Twentieth streets, all four of them frantically waving – hand, cane, attaché case, dollar bills (that was the hard one to pass) – in order to yank it to a halt in front of Dortmunder, who hadn’t been waving at all. Dortmunder got into the backseat, saying, ‘Hi,’ and Murch’s Mom reached for the meter, explaining, ‘I gotta throw the flag on you, John. Otherwise, some candyass inspector’s gonna write me up.’