Don’t Ask

by Donald Westlake

  Still alive, May thought. ‘But where did they go?’ she asked.

  ‘Beats me,’ said the guard. ‘All I know is, we stay here until the money they paid for the service runs out. I don’t worry about these UN people. I mean, that’s the problem with the UN, you know, it brings in all these foreigners, all this element, it runs down like the neighborhood. You never know what they’re up to. There was one bunch, one embassy I was on guard at, maybe five years ago, they all packed up and left, turns out there was an overthrow at home in their country, they all flew straight to Switzerland, took the country’s assets out of the bank there, and disappeared. That’s the kind of element you got with your UN here. You ask me, they oughta take this whole UN, and this chickenshit glass building up there and the whole thing and move em down to Washington, D.C. I mean, they’re used to these kinds of creeps down there; that’s what Washington’s all about. Soccer players.’

  In the face of such scorn, there was little left to say. May had just learned both much more and much less than she wanted to know. Before this cornucopia of a guard could give her his opinion of UFOs or asbestos or the presidential-primary system or whatever was scheduled to hit the surface next, it was time to get out of here. ‘Thank you,’ May said. ‘Thank you both. I’ll try again another time.’

  ‘Like I told you,’ said the first guard, ‘it’s closed.’

  ‘You did,’ May said. ‘I remember that.’ And she went over to the cab and got into the backseat and said, ‘They took him away. Alive but unconscious.’

  Murch’s Mom’s hand itched, but she did not scratch it on the meter. She said, ‘Unconscious?’

  ‘Snoring,’ May said. ‘And where there’s snoring, there’s hope.’

  22

  Diary of a Prisoner – Day Two

  The prisoner spent a restless night, punctuated by far-off screams. The prisoner tried to convince himself that a church merely happened to be nearby, whose bells sounded like human screams. He had little success making that theory fly.

  The fluorescent light in the ceiling was not turned off. Being a fluorescent, it was also unlikely to burn out, and did not.

  Just before dawn, the prisoner fell at last into a deep, exhausted sleep, from which he was harried almost immediately by a great clattering and clashing of locks and chains, followed by the entrance of the four Beckett characters from the night before. While the two eyes-down prisoners in dirty white placed the table where they’d put it last night, the soldiers strode over to kick the awake prisoner awake. He clumsily rolled away from them, entangled in the miserable blanket that had during the night neither warmed him – it had been cold in here – nor protected him from the hardness of the floor. And now, it was tripping him up, on purpose.

  Still, he got to his feet at last, looked around, and said, ‘I really gotta brush my teeth. I mean, major.’

  Linguistic improvement had not occurred with this crowd overnight. The same dumb, hostile, gape-mouthed stares greeted his attempts at communication. Shaking his tousled head, the prisoner stumbled over to the table and found on it the identical same provisions as last night: green slime, clear liquid. He picked up the cup of clear liquid, trusting it to be the same as last night’s water, and carried it over to that small hole in the middle of the floor. First, he dipped his right forefinger into the liquid, then he rubbed his mossy teeth with that finger as best he could. Of course, fingers don’t have bristles, so it wasn’t as effective a cleaning method as it might have been, but still.

  Next, the prisoner took a mouthful of water, swirled and swirled and swirled and swirled and swirled and swirled and swirled and swirled—

  One of the soldiers came over, glowering, and touched the end of his machine gun to the prisoner’s stomach.

  —and swirled it around his mouth, then spit it out into the small hole and (deliberately) on the soldier’s shiny boot. Then he went back to the table, stood there, and had a hearty meal. The instant he was finished – and it didn’t take long – the soldiers began to yell at the other two prisoners, who scurried forward, picked up the table, and trotted out with it like a badly confused pair of ricksha men, the soldiers following.

  The prisoner was left alone then, for a little while, as the prison yard outside his window paled through varying shades of gray. There was no more screaming, which was nice.

  But then here came the clanking and the crashing again. Lunchtime already? It’s brainwashing techniques, the prisoner told himself, they’re trying to louse up my sense of time. (Why anybody might want to louse up his sense of time was another question.)

  But, no. When the soldiers came rousting and roistering into the dungeon this time, they were alone, and what they wanted, making it inescapably clear with boot and fist and gun barrel, was for the prisoner to come away with them. Okay, okay.

  The prisoner felt rotten. Unshaved, unwashed, in the same miserable clothing he’d worn on the Pride of Votskojek, his lank hair matted on his head, a feeling of cruddiness caked around his eyes, itches everywhere. This was not at all the first time the prisoner had been a prisoner, but it was certainly the first time he’d been a prisoner of people who took so cavalierly their responsibilities in the situation.

  Outside the dungeon was a low-ceilinged corridor, stone on one side, old planks of wood on the other, that smelled of animals – horses, maybe, or cows. The prisoner was run through this at a lope, constantly prodded from behind, and shoved through a doorway at the end into a windowless, furnitureless room where a short, fat man in a heavy black beard and a tight uniform slapped him across the face and said, ‘Where did they take the relic?’

  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 em. 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 m
an 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, Diddums,’ 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, what’s 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 po
llution, 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 over-ripe 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 backseat, and the blindfold was removed once again, and the prisoner blinked and looked out the car windows.