Don’t Ask

by Donald Westlake

  ‘Artifact?’ Kelp suggested.

  ‘That’s it,’ Tiny agreed. ‘One side or the other, they got it, they fight over it, that’s one thing, but at least they know it’s still somewhere on display, it exists. But if it disappears—’

  Grijk groaned.

  ‘If it’s destroyed—’

  Grijk groaned louder.

  ‘If it isn’t around anymore,’ Tiny shouted over Grijk’s whale music, ‘if nobody’s got it, there’s gonna be blood in the streets. These people will kill each other to the last baby, believe me they will. There’s things that these people got no sense of humor. I mean, look at Grijk for yourself.’

  They did. They nodded. They saw what Tiny meant.

  Tiny spread big hands. ‘I’m telling you two guys,’ he said, ‘and I’m telling you now. You went out to get that bone. You’re gonna come back with it. Or you’re gonna answer to me.’

  ‘I thought you’d feel that way,’ Kelp said again.

  Tiny glowered. ‘So you thought I’d feel that way, did you? So what are you doing here?’

  ‘Well, these things take time,’ Kelp said.

  Tiny lowered an eyebrow at him. ‘What things take time?’

  ‘Well,’ Kelp explained, ‘the first question is, When the DEA impounds something, what do they do with it? Where do they put it? The guy at the place wouldn’t tell me, so I gotta ask another guy, so I called him, and we’re gonna do lunch.’

  Tiny lowered the other eyebrow. Now he looked like an angry shag rug. ‘You’re gonna do lunch? What is this guy, in the movie business?’

  ‘No,’ Kelp said. ‘As a matter of fact, he’s a cop.’

  17

  When May got back to the apartment early that evening from her cashier job at the Safeway, carrying the bag of groceries that she thought of as a fringe benefit the company just hadn’t happened to think of offering on their own, John wasn’t yet home. She knew he and Andy Kelp and Tiny Bulcher and Stan Murch had gone off to retrieve something or other for a friend of Tiny’s today, and such retrievals sometimes took a little longer than expected, so she didn’t worry overly but merely planned a dinner menu that would make maximum use of the new microwave once John did walk in. A tall, thin woman with slightly graying black hair, who still had many of the twitchy mannerisms of smoking even though she’d given up the filthy habit some time ago, she carried her fringe benefits to the kitchen, put them away, opened a beer for herself, put on her after-work gray cardigan, and went to the living room to relax and watch TV until John got home.

  Also to look at the mail, which was mostly magazines – May subscribed to everything – but which today also included a long, chatty letter from her sister, that she couldn’t stand, in Cleveland. Thank God she was in Cleveland.

  May was just finishing this letter – tonsillectomy, pregnancy, and second-prize essay award were prominently featured – when the phone at her elbow rang and she picked it up. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi, May.’ It was Andy Kelp, sounding as chipper as ever, but with maybe a bit of an unfamiliar edge in his voice. ‘John there?’

  May knew. Don’t ask how she knew, she just knew, that’s all. The literature is full of such instances, anybody can tell you. She knew. She didn’t know exactly what she knew, but she knew. Something in Andy’s voice maybe. ‘No, he isn’t,’ she said. ‘Why? Should he be?’

  ‘Well, May,’ Andy said, ‘maybe I better come over,’ and before May could point out that that was no way to leave the conversation, he’d hung up.

  Twenty minutes later, the doorbell rang. Not the outside bell by the street door, the upstairs bell by the apartment door. Could this be Andy? Usually, Andy just picked the lock and walked on in. If this was Andy, and he was standing on ceremony enough to ring the doorbell, having only picked his way in through the street door downstairs, this was anything but a good sign.

  May left the living room and went down the hall to open the door, and indeed it was Andy, with a worried smile on his face. Even worried, he was smiling, but nevertheless he was worried. ‘Come on in, Andy,’ she said. ‘What are you worried about?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say I was worried,’ Andy said, brow furrowing. ‘You been watching the news at all?’

  May shut the apartment door and they walked together to the living room as she said, ‘Why? What’s on it?’

  ‘Nothing, I think.’ They entered the living room and he gestured at the set, saying, ‘Okay?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Switching it on, looking for the evening news, he said, ‘There was nothing on the radio news, anyway, in the cab, but radio news is all sports, so who knows?’

  Here was the local evening news, well under way. They both studied the newsreader, a blond lady who seemed delighted to report the deaths of four infants in a tenement fire, then switched them over to a blackhaired, stocky, blunt-featured guy who gripped actual paper notes in his fist and told you the news like he’d much rather punch you in the mouth. ‘That’s Tony Costello,’ Andy announced, ‘their police and crime reporter. Let’s see.’

  Tony Costello announced that again today federal and state law-enforcement officers in a joint operation had impounded the largest haul of illegal drugs in history, umpteen zillion dollars’ worth of this and that, all found in an apparently undistinguished house in the middle of Long Island. Some fat people who lived down the block were asked what they thought of this; most thought they didn’t know what they thought, is what it came down to. And back to the blond lady, this time brimming with the happy news of a midair collision.

  Andy said, ‘Is this one of the ones that does the recaps?’

  ‘I think,’ May said uncertainly, ‘this is one of the ones that does coming-next.’

  Andy shook his head. ‘I went by the mission,’ he said, ‘and there wasn’t nothing, no police cars, nothing. In fact, it looked kind of closed up. I phoned their number, and they got their answering machine on, in some foreign language. Can you imagine? A whole country’s mission, and not only they got their answering machine on, it’s a foreign language.’

  ‘Andy,’ May said, switching off the TV right in the middle of ethnic violence, ‘if you don’t settle down and tell me what’s going on, you’re going to drive me back to cigarettes.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry. Sit down, I – Listen, could I have a beer first?’

  ‘Yes,’ May said, long-suffering. ‘And get me another. You know where it is.’

  He knew. He went and came back, and they sat in the living room together and he said, ‘Tiny’s got this foreign cousin, and to help him out we lifted this special thing from another country’s mission, that’s got offices on this boat on the East Side. We got the thing, at least for a while, but John got stuck getting away from the boat. I figured, we’ll find out where the cops have him, maybe bust him out, something, I don’t know. But there’s no cops around, the mission all shut down, nothing on the news; it’s like they didn’t even report the theft. So, I’m sorry, May, I hate to be the one that brings the bad news, but the thing is, we don’t know where John is, right now, this minute.’

  May’s left hand clawed in her cardigan pocket for nonexistent cigarettes. She said, ‘You don’t know if he’s dead or alive?’

  ‘May,’ Andy said, ‘when I last saw him, these private guards had their hands on him. He was alive and standing up, and he wasn’t resisting or being hit or anything like that, and for sure they’d want him to tell where we were going with the special thing. So he’s alive, we know that much. We just don’t know where he’s alive.’

  Where there’s life, in fact, there is hope. May nodded, feeling somewhat reassured. Her hand stopped stretching the cardigan pocket all out of shape. She said, ‘This special thing you took. What is it?’

  Andy drank beer. He sighed. ‘To tell you the truth, May,’ he said, ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that question.’

  18

  Diary of a Prisoner – Day One

  No food, no contact with anyone. Just as darkn
ess was falling, there was suddenly and startlingly switched on a bright fluorescent light inset in the plank ceiling and protected by a heavy iron grating. It shone whitely on the floor in the center of the room, leaving a periphery in the semidarkness, full of shadows, all of which looked like rats.

  Then nothing else happened for a fairly long period of time – the prisoner had no watch – until all at once a great clanking of chains and rattling of giant keys roused him from a groggy half doze and the big old wooden dungeon door creaked open, and four men entered. Two were skinny, unshaven, scared-looking people in dirty white shirts, barefoot; they carried a heavy square wooden table with a bowl and a mug on it. The other two were soldiers in bile-blue uniforms, submachine guns in their hands.

  The soldiers shouted barkinglike orders at the men in white, who put the table down near the door and backed away to the stone wall, keeping their eyes downcast all the time. Then the soldiers shouted a lot of stuff at the prisoner, who’d through all this remained seated on the floor against the wall under the lone window, thinking thoughts as dark as the view outside. The shouting, helped quite a bit by a lot of mean, threatening gestures with the submachine guns, communicated even without a common language the idea that the prisoner was to stand, which he did; was to come over to the table and be quick about it, which he did; and was to eat. ‘No chair?’ asked the prisoner.

  They either didn’t understand or considered the question too effete to be worthy of an answer. In any event, they simply kept pointing their gun barrels at the bowl – better than at the prisoner – and kept shouting the same short, sharp sentences over and over.

  The prisoner looked at his dinner. The bowl contained a thick green sludge, the mug a clear liquid. To the left of the bowl was a torn-off chunk of dark bread, and to its right a large metal spoon. The prisoner considered his options – considered his option. He picked up the spoon, dipped out some of the green sludge, lifted it, lowered it, poured some back in the bowl, lifted it again, scrunched up his face like a little kid taking medicine, and inserted the spoon into mouth.

  And smiled. Smiled around the spoon. Removed spoon from mouth, and went on smiling. ‘Tastes like curry,’ he told the soldiers.

  The soldiers laughed coarsely and jabbed one another in the sides with their elbows and made raucous comments.

  Better to go on thinking of it as curry. The prisoner ate some more, tried the bread and found it fresh and tasty, tried the contents of the mug and found it water; not very cold and also kind of metallic-tasting, like it had been in a pipe somewhere too long, but water.

  The prisoner was really very hungry. He had no idea how long he’d been a prisoner, how long he’d been unconscious – plenty long, to permit a plane trip all the way from New York City to this terrible place – but this was the first food he’d tasted since lunch at home before boarding the Pride of Votskojek, an embarkation he had come to regret, and he was hungry. He ate it all. He even licked the back of the spoon, then put it down and used his finger to scrape the rest of the curry-tasting sludge off the inner sides of the bowl. Then, quite naturally, he said to the soldiers, ‘I have to go to the bathroom.’

  They didn’t understand. They had apparently not one word of English, nor had the men in white – fellow prisoners, they must be – so the prisoner was forced to resort to uncouth gestures, the most universal of universal languages. The soldiers laughed in that heartily nasty way of theirs, then prodded the prisoner back to the center of the room and pointed to a small round hole in the floor there.

  ‘That?’ said the prisoner. ‘You gotta be kidding.’

  These people didn’t kid. These people didn’t know anything about kid. They just did a little more of their hearty obscene laughter, then suddenly turned mean and impatient as they barked a whole lot of fresh orders at the men in white, who scuttled forward, still keeping their eyes down, picked up the table, and lugged it back out of there. The two soldiers swaggered after them, both pausing deliberately to fart into the prisoner’s airspace, then exited, slamming the door and creating another great hubbub with chains and locks.

  Silence. The prisoner gloomily hunched over the little hole in the floor. He thought, How do I get outta here? He looked up at the light and thought, I bet they don’t turn that off. He rolled himself in the thin, rough wool blanket on the floor and thought, I’d tell them everything I know, if there was anybody around who talked English.

  And thus ended day one.

  19

  Andy Kelp was a gregarious fellow. He got along with all kinds, even people in the NYPD. Not all the people in the NYPD, of course. Not even a lot of people in the NYPD. Well, one guy in the NYPD, actually; but that was plenty.

  The first time Kelp called the precinct and asked for Bernard Klematsky, the voice said, ‘Not on duty,’ but the second time the voice said, ‘Hold on,’ and then the voice was Bernard himself, saying very officially, ‘Klematsky.’

  ‘Hi, Bernard,’ Kelp said. ‘It’s me, Andy Kelp.’

  ‘Well, hello, Andy. I was just thinking about you.’

  ‘That wasn’t me,’ Kelp said promptly. ‘I’ve been clean.’

  ‘Want to come on down? I got something you could sign.’

  ‘Maybe not right now,’ Kelp said. ‘I thought, though, maybe I could buy you a drink when you get off.’

  ‘You want something,’ Bernard guessed.

  ‘Of course I want something,’ Kelp said. ‘Everybody wants something.’

  ‘And I want dinner,’ Bernard said. ‘When I get off the job, I always want dinner.’

  ‘Italian, right? Spaghettini with clam sauce.’

  ‘Very tempting,’ Bernard said, ‘but I discovered a new cuisine recently that I like a lot.’

  ‘Expensive cuisine, Bernard?’

  ‘Nah,’ Bernard said. ‘Nothing Asian is expensive, am I right?’

  ‘Oh, you mean Chinese.’

  ‘No,’ Bernard said. ‘Tie.’

  ‘We’re keeping score?’

  ‘Thailand,’ Bernard explained. ‘Food from Thailand. You know what’s great about food from Thailand?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They put peanut butter on everything.’

  ‘That’s what’s great about it?’

  ‘You just wait. Toon’s, on Bleecker Street. Ten-thirty?’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ Kelp said, and was, in a smallish dark restaurant that smelled better than a place that would put peanut butter on everything. Bernard, of course, was late.

  But here he came, at last, at 10:45, grinning and rubbing hands together and saying, ‘Always nice to see you, Andy.’

  ‘You, too, Bernard.’

  Bernard Klematsky was an absolute average guy, mid-thirties, with bushy black hair, a long and fleshy nose, a rumpled gray suit and rumpled blue necktie, and no cop look to him at all. In fact, your first guess would be: math teacher, high school. Easy marker.

  Sitting across the little table from Kelp, not seeming to mind his back to the window, Bernard said, ‘Drinking beer, I see.’

  ‘You want?’

  ‘I’m strictly a white wine man now,’ Bernard said, and whupped his own stomach with his palm, making a hollow gong sound like a temple bell; appropriate to the surroundings. ‘Gotta watch my weight. Too much time on the desk.’

  ‘So you want a glass of white wine,’ Kelp hoped.

  ‘I thought a bottle,’ Bernard said. ‘We could share it. Or you don’t have to drink any if you don’t want.’

  ‘Thank you, Bernard,’ Kelp said.

  The waiter came by then, looking alert. He was so thoroughly Asian that he was as tall standing up as they were sitting down, which made it easy to converse with him. Bernard said, ‘Well, Andy, you had time to look at the menu?’

  ‘Plenty of time,’ Kelp said, which Bernard ignored. ‘Not everything has peanut butter on it,’ he said, ‘that I can see.’

  ‘So you pick the stuff that does,’ Bernard said, and did just that, ordering his dinner without even
glancing at the menu.

  Kelp ordered things that didn’t mention peanut butter, and Bernard said, ‘You don’t know what’s good.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘Oh, and a bottle of the Pinot Grigio,’ Bernard said before the waiter could get away.

  Kelp said, ‘You own a piece of this place?’

  ‘Maybe I should, huh?’

  Kelp sipped beer, gathering his thoughts. Bernard smiled on him and said, ‘Well, Andy, you’re looking pretty good. Clean living, huh?’

  ‘You know it.’

  ‘The last time we talked like this,’ Bernard said, ‘you wanted some information about a guy. Remember that?’

  ‘Leo Zane,’ Kelp said, nodding.

  ‘A very bad customer,’ Bernard said. ‘Not your kind of guy at all. A hit man, wasn’t he? And some cousin of yours got on his wrong side.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Kelp said, and blinked.

  Bernard grinned at him. ‘You still do that thing, Andy,’ he said. ‘You blink when you’re lying.’

  ‘Everybody blinks,’ Kelp said, not blinking.

  ‘Sure. Anyway, you promised me nothing violent would happen to Zane if I could find him for you, and a few months later, you know what?’

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘Zane was arrested,’ Bernard said, ‘in Scotland of all places.’

  ‘Oh, was he?’ Kelp said, blinking.

  ‘You wouldn’t know anything about that.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Blink-blink-blink-blink.

  ‘But the funny part,’ Bernard said, ‘he was arrested for burglary, resisting arrest, leaving the scene of an accident, and a few other things, none of them crimes that fit his MO.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Kelp, holding his eyelids up by an effort of will.

  ‘He’s still doing time over there,’ Bernard said, and grinned again, shaking his head. ‘That cousin of yours must be something.’

  ‘Oh, he is, he is,’ Kelp said, and rubbed his forehead with a band that partially screened his eyes.