Don’t Ask

by Donald Westlake

  Dortmunder clutched the manila folder of Votskojek information to his chest with his left hand while shaking hands generally with his right. ‘I appreciate this,’ he assured them all. ‘Appreciate the time, hope I didn’t take you from, from, from …’

  ‘Not at all, not at all.’

  ‘Our pleasure.’

  ‘Do enjoy Votskojek.’

  ‘I’m sure I will,’ Dortmunder said. And I’m sure Kelp’s out of there by now, he thought. He has to be.

  ‘I’ll see you down,’ Hradec said with more obvious relief than diplomats usually show.

  Has to be out of there by now; has to be.

  But, no. ‘Hm hm hm hm hm,’ said Mickelmuss, bending over the equipment, while Kelp’s hand reached out to a knobby fist-sized machine on a nearby table. Enough, one way and another, was enough. Kelp lifted the machine.

  ‘Got it! At last,’ Mickelmuss announced, and turned his smiling face to observe the machine in Kelp’s hand. ‘Ah!’ he said in delight. ‘Spectropolaric analysis! That ought to clear up a few matters.’

  ‘Yeah, it ought to,’ Kelp said.

  ‘Well, she’s all yours,’ Mickelmuss told him, with a careless wave at the bone, while with his other hand he patted his tummy and said, ‘Frankly, that coffee seems to go right through one. Perhaps I should have alerted you. Pardon.’ And he left.

  Dortmunder and Hradec zoomed down the ship’s innards. Hradec wouldn’t even leave the elevator. ‘You’ll know your way,’ he said, smiling blankly, and waited for Dortmunder to exit. Which Dortmunder did, and the elevator door slid shut. Dortmunder crossed to the open door leading outside the ship, looking all around as he went, hoping to see Kelp lurking, but not.

  From beneath his lab coat, Kelp took the shoe box containing the fake femur, provided by Grijk Krugnk. ‘It’s a real bone, from a real zevendeen-year-old girl,’ Krugnk had assured him. ‘Dat’s all I know.’

  ‘Dat’s all I want to know,’ Kelp had assured him right back.

  The shoe box, with a rubber band around it to keep the top on and the bone in, had been suspended all this time from a hook stuck through one end of the box and then attached to a preexisting loop in the middle of the lab coat’s back, at waist level. Wearing the loose garment with the shoe box in position had made Kelp look rather lard-assed for such an otherwise-slender guy, but science is a pretty sedentary occupation, so it was okay.

  Kelp put the shoe box on the table near the real bone. He slid off the rubber band, opened it, and removed the copy. The two bones looked remarkably similar to the naked eye, except that the real one was slightly less shiny and had somewhat deeper shadows at its knuckly ends. Being very careful to keep it clear in his mind which bone was which, Kelp made the switch, closed the shoe box, put the rubber band on it, and had a hell of a time trying to hook it back onto that goddam loop. (Murch had done it for him in the motorboat.) Finally, he decided the hell with it, he’d just carry the goddam thing, so he tucked the shoe box under his arm and crossed to the hall door.

  Two doors in that hall simultaneously opened; that to the lab and that to the elevator. Kelp and Hradec stepped out; Kelp stepped smartly back. Hradec turned the other way, and a third door opened, beyond the elevator; that to the office. Lusk and Terment hurried out, complaining in Magyar-Croat, a language in which even a declaration of love sounds like a declaration of war; complaints can really bend the molecules of the surrounding air.

  Kelp waited. The three in the hall stood jawing. Would they still be at it when Mickelmuss returned? What would Kelp do with the shoe box? What if he was to take the lab coat off, hang the shoe box, and then somehow put the coat back on again without dislodging the –

  No. Slam; the complainers had gone. Kelp left the lab and hightailed for the stairs, hoping against hope that Dortmunder hadn’t started the diversion yet.

  Ah, but he had. While Kelp was still failing to rehook the shoe box inside his coat, Dortmunder had already reached the gate, where he took from his jacket pocket the small black collapsible umbrella that was his prop for the occasion. One guard opened the gate, and Dortmunder looked up into an almost perfectly blue sky to say, ‘Well, it looks like rain.’

  The guards frowned at him. They frowned at the sky. One of them said, ‘It does not.’

  Dortmunder kept looking up. His free hand pointed up and he said, ‘What about that cloud there? That dark one.’ Meanwhile, his other hand was pushing the still-closed umbrella, ten inches long in its collapsed state, through one of the diamond-shaped spaces in the fence right next to the opening for the gate.

  ‘What dark cloud?’ demanded a guard.

  ‘That one, by the tall building,’ Dortmunder said, pointing generally upward.

  ‘Well, I don’t see it,’ said the guard.

  ‘Neither do I,’ said the other one.

  ‘I don’t care what anybody says,’ Dortmunder announced, still looking up, ‘I’m opening my umbrella.’ And he pushed the button in the handle that did so.

  Pop. Dortmunder looked down. ‘Whoops,’ he said.

  The guards also looked down. ‘Now what?’ one of them demanded.

  The answer was, the umbrella was in the fence. That is, the open black fabric foliage of the umbrella was on one side of the fence and the handle was on the other side of the fence, with the shaft that connected the two now passing through that diamond-shaped hole. The business end of the umbrella was far too wide to fit back through the diamond, and the J-shaped handle was just a little bit too wide to go through it.

  And not only that, but with the umbrella in this position it would not be possible to close the chain-link gate. ‘Well, for Christ’s sake,’ said the second guard. ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Dortmunder said, looking chagrined.

  In fact, he knew exactly how he’d done it, having practiced with half a dozen other umbrellas on a different chain-link fence for a couple of hours earlier today. Having practiced so many times, and having had to retrieve the umbrella after each successful trial, Dortmunder knew also the fairly tricky but rather simple way to reclose the umbrella and slide it back through the hole in the fence to free it, but before becoming proficient at such umbrella retrieval he had wrecked several of the harmless little things and had come close once or twice to losing his temper. He had also on one occasion jabbed an umbrella rib rather painfully into the palm of his hand. All in all, he expected this situation to keep the guards distracted for some little time to come.

  Plenty of time for Kelp to make his escape. Surreptitiously peering backward under his own armpit, Dortmunder scanned the ferry slip and was disheartened to see no Andy Kelp at all back there, dogging it for the river. Where the hell was he?

  On the stairs, at that instant, having gone through the stairway door just an instant before Hradec Kralowc hurried back out of the office, an extremely important color photograph of the Rivers of Blood Cathedral in Novi Glad, which John Diddums had inadvertently left behind, clutched in his hand. Hradec zoomed downward in the elevator and reached the entrance level long before Kelp.

  ‘I think we need a hacksaw,’ said one of the guards.

  ‘No, I can do it,’ said the other guard. ‘I’ll just close the damn thing again and pull it back through.’

  ‘I feel really stupid about this,’ Dortmunder admitted, bending down to peer very closely at the trouble he’d caused, hoping by his bumbled eagerness to appear to try to help but actually to make things even more difficult than they already were.

  But not as difficult as they got. The guard who felt he knew how to handle the problem reached out and compressed the umbrella, Dortmunder crowding too close in his palpable desire to make up for his clumsiness. A rib jabbed the guard in the palm; the guard’s hand jerked back; his elbow caught Dortmunder square in the eye; Dortmunder fell all of a heap, unconscious.

  Hradec stepped from the Pride of Votskojek, to find his nation’s first volunteer tourist being beaten up by the hired guards. ‘Here!’ he c
ried. ‘Stop that!’

  The guards, not particularly having wanted a victim, now found themselves standing over their victim, looking and feeling both sullen and sheepish, as Hradec ran forward.

  Kelp thudded down the stairs.

  Murch sneaked one more peek over the edge of the ferry slip and could not figure out what he was looking at. Some sort of procession?

  The sheepish, sullen guards, under Hradec’s incensed instructions, carried the unconscious Dortmunder back toward the entrance to the Pride of Votskojek. The bumpiness of the journey revived Dortmunder, who opened his remaining good eye just in time to see Kelp hurtle out of the broad doorway in the side of the ship and crash head-on into Hradec. Both went flying, and so did the shoe box, which opened, spilling its femur onto the rough planks of the slip.

  Kelp rolled around on the planks, found his footing, found the bone and grabbed it, struggled to his feet, and saw Dortmunder in the grip of the two gate guards. They’d caught him! ‘Run, John!’ Kelp yelled, and belted one of the guards across the head with the bone.

  ‘Not with the relic!’ screamed Hradec, still all asprawl on the entrance ramp.

  The guards, bewildered about most things but quickly understanding violence, dropped Dortmunder (thud!) and turned to confront this new and less ambiguous threat. Dortmunder, one-eyed John, scrambled up the back of one of the guards to his feet as Kelp slashed and parried with the bone, using it as a saber as he yelled again, ‘John! Run!’

  Oh, it was hopeless, and Dortmunder knew it, but he couldn’t help trying just one last dodge: Squinting his good eye at Kelp, he said, ‘I don’t know you?’ Except it came out a question, rather than the ringing declaration he’d been hoping to hear.

  Everybody stopped. Everybody looked at Dortmunder. Stricken, Kelp whispered, ‘You weren’t blown?’

  ‘Not till now.’

  ‘Grab him!’ Hradec cried, and pointed at Dortmunder.

  ‘Run, John!’ Kelp yelled, and showed how by showing his heels to the group, scampering hell-for-leather toward the end of the slip.

  Dortmunder, with no time to think and with guards already reaching for him, also ran. But as he ran, arms pumping, legs quaking, face muscles distorted in a grimace as though he were in a rocket ship undergoing pressure of three gravities or more, he squinted like Popeye at the world out ahead of himself, saw what he was running toward, and couldn’t believe it. That’s the river out there!

  Murch, seeing his passenger in view at last, eased the motor-boat forward, and Kelp leaped from the end of the slip, landing in the boat on his feet, then knees, then elbow, then bone, then face.

  Dortmunder gasped like a cappuccino machine as he reached the end of the slip and juddered to a stop. He looked down at that teeny target, miles below him on top of the deep river.

  Kelp and Murch stared up at him, both making many urgent gestures. ‘Jump, John!’ Kelp cried.

  ‘Come on, come on!’ Murch shouted.

  Dortmunder panted. He stared downward, managing to see double with only one working eye. He tried to jump; he tried to come on, come on; he really did; but he just couldn’t do it. And then hands closed on his elbows, shoulder, and head.

  Kelp knelt up in the bottom of the boat, bone in one hand, gunwale clutched in the other, and Murch steered them briskly away from there, aimed at Long Island City. Kelp stared back at the receding Dortmunder, in the firm grip of the private law. ‘He’s going to blame me for this,’ Kelp said, ‘I just know he is.’

  Dortmunder closed his remaining eye.

  13

  Hradec sat at his desk and considered the situation. John Diddums, or whoever he really was, sat in a slatback chair facing him, handcuffed behind his back, with the cuffs looped through a slat. The guards had returned to their useless post at the gate, carrying a hacksaw for the umbrella, and with orders to let in no one, including the scientists previously authorized to be aboard the embassy. John Mickelmuss of Cambridge had been requested, gently but firmly, to abandon ship; some political problem at home in Novi Glad was hinted at. Lusk and Terment stood around looking worried but willing. And some anonymous bone lay shamelessly upon Hradec’s desk.

  He prodded the pale thing with the business end of a ballpoint pen. It did nothing. He frowned at Diddums: ‘Where did they go with the real relic?’

  Diddums’s open eye looked introspective, almost meditative. The other was blackening up pretty well; he was going to have some shiner there. Good.

  But he wasn’t answering the question. Hradec said, ‘Don’t make me call the police.’

  Diddums sighed, but that was all. He didn’t answer, didn’t even focus his one good eye on his interrogator. He was as forthcoming as this phony femur.

  Of course Hradec couldn’t call the police, which Diddums must understand as completely as Hradec. The Tsergovians’ strategy from the beginning was now clear; to claim the real relic was false, to force a period of scientific testing of the sacred object, to await their opportunity, and then to steal the honest leg bone of the saint and replace it with this shoddy imitation. Not imitation bone, real bone, but imitation saint.

  And what would the Tsergovians do at this point, now that their fell plan had come to fruition? Would they announce they’d had the relic all along? Present it, say, at a press conference, so Archbishop Minkokus, that senile dodderer who held all their futures in the palm of his palsied hand, would turn his toothless, drooling smile on their application for the disputed United Nations seat?

  No. Hradec Kralowc knew something of political strategy, and so he knew the best thing for the Tsergovians to do at this point was nothing, particularly since they’d already been claiming to have the true relic in their possession but would not produce it until the pretender had been exposed.

  So the bone was with Tsergovia, but the ball was in Hradec’s court. If he were to suddenly claim the actual relic had been stolen by unknown raiders, with no unbiased outside eyewitnesses, the Tsergovians would plausibly suggest that the report of the theft was itself false, to cover the falsity of their imitation. If, on the other hand, the Votskojeks – meaning Hradec, at this moment – did nothing, it wouldn’t take long for the scientists to see through the pathetic claims of this gnawed chicken leg.

  Their only hope was to find out where the raiders were taking the relic, where the Tsergovians planned to keep it hidden until the Votskojek humiliation was complete. Which meant their only hope was Diddums.

  Hradec gazed on the man and saw that he was a brick wall, a mystery clothed in an enigma surrounded by a conundrum. There was something about Diddums’s very fatalism that would make him a hard nut to crack.

  But cracked Diddums must be, and soon. Watching, thinking, considering his options, Hradec began to hatch a plan. It was a crazy idea, but it just might work. Turning to Lusk, he said, ‘I’m afraid it’s time to telephone—’

  ‘The police?’

  Lusk would never make a diplomat. ‘No, not the police,’ Hradek said. ‘This is the time for desperate measures. I’m afraid it’s time to telephone … Dr Zorn.’

  Under his furrowed brow, Diddums’s good eye widened.

  14

  It didn’t seem to take any time at all. Stan Murch stood at the wheel, steering straight and true across the choppy river, and the last thing Andy Kelp saw was his comrade and partner John Dortmunder being led away down the ferry slip like a blind man by people whose body language suggested they were not his friends. And the next thing he saw was a shiny badge being held out by a guy whose fashion statement was thick black shoes and sharp-creased navy blue trousers and a nerdy dark blue plastic zip-up jacket, and whose verbal statement was, ‘Okay, hold it right there. That’s good. Now get outta the boat.’

  The Queens-Brooklyn side of the East River is very different from the Manhattan side, Manhattan being almost completely residential along that shore, tumbled blocks of apartment buildings that advertise river views but actually offer industrial views of Brooklyn and Queens: factories
, warehouses, storage yards, junkyards, piers for barges and tugs and small cargo vessels, all the vast nethers of a busy metropolis laid out like a picture in a pop-up book for the aesthetic viewing pleasure of rich Manhattanites. Of course, these days rich Manhattanites tend to be people for whom such a view is a step up from the oil refineries and sand of home, so it’s okay. And it was into this Dickensian warren of riverside grunge that Stan Murch steered their trusty little motorboat, near to where he’d stashed the getaway car, just north of Newtown Creek, that industrially useful channel of near-water that forms the Brooklyn-Queens line. Here they could be alone and unnoticed, as quietly they and the bone slipped away.

  So why was their landing spot – thick, splintery planks and rusty old iron mooring posts that used to front a rural mailbox factory until its owners gave up on the city and moved to pleasant, safe, cheap, boring quarters in deepest Pennsylvania – full up with prissy guys in blue with shiny badges? Guys who wanted Kelp and Murch outta the boat now.

  Could the Votskojeks be that fast? Impossible; it was a bare five minutes since they’d zoomed away from the ferry slip. Nevertheless, feeling he’d rather not work out an answer to the question ‘What are you doing with that bone?’ Kelp kicked the sacred object under a corner of tarpaulin in the puddly bottom of the motorboat while climbing out. ‘Here I come, here I come.’

  And here came another surprise; like the first, not a happy one. A couple of the many guys – many guys – in blue hanging around on this pier happened to turn their backs while moving briskly about their brisk business, and in big block white letters on the back of their dark blue zip-up jackets – they were all making essentially the same fashion statement – were the letters D and E and A.

  Oh, boy. The feds. The Drug Enforcement Administration. Murch and Kelp looked at one another knowing they were in deep shit but not whose, and one of the boys in blue came over to say, ‘Which of you is Walter “Pepper” LaFontaine?’