Don’t Ask

by Donald Westlake

  Well, the first moment was the one that counted. And the first moment had come at 3:22 A.M., when Andy Kelp and Stan Murch had tumbled into Tiny’s apartment waving the bone, big grins on both their faces. Tiny didn’t mind it at all that they interrupted his beauty rest. He held the bone flat on his two big palms and smiled on it like it was a baby and said, ‘So this is the goddam thing, is it?’

  ‘If only John was here,’ Kelp said.

  ‘He isn’t,’ Tiny said, and so much for sentiment.

  Then they called the Tsergovian embassy and, Grijk being head of security over there, it was Grijk they woke up, Tiny telling him, in simple modesty, ‘We got it.’

  The initial Grijk reaction was all anybody could ask: ‘You god id? You god id?’ All three of them in Tiny’s living room could hear Grijk’s voice squawking out of the telephone. Tiny flinched and held the receiver away from his head and said, ‘Yeah. Okay, Grijk? Yeah. Quit hollering like that. We got it. We’ll be right over.’

  And they were, and all of a sudden Grijk wasn’t that enthusiastic anymore. He seemed more fatalistic than anything else when he unlocked the front door and let them in. Maybe he’d just remembered that now he was going to have to fork over the other fifteen large; Dortmunder’s five would go to May, of course, since nobody could be sure he wouldn’t someday come back.

  So anyway, here they were in the Tsergovian storefront on Second Avenue, one small fluorescent lamp on Drava Votskonia’s rock-obsessed desk the only supplement to the pale gleam angling in through the front windows from the streetlights and an occasional taxicab, and Grijk Krugnk somehow just wasn’t with the program. In the pale light, his smile was sickly as Tiny put on Drava’s desk under the fluorescent glare the violin case he’d once taken away from a fella he’d suspected of not being a musician – he was right, too – and opened it to show the sacred ossicle nested in the blue felt within. ‘Is that sumpin?’ Tiny asked.

  ‘Dod’s vunderful,’ Grijk agreed, but somehow he didn’t sound convinced.

  Fortunately, his deputy was there to make up for Grijk’s lack of enthusiasm. ‘Holy bone,’ this guy said in awe, gazing into the violin case.

  The guy’s name was Haknal Vrakek; maybe. Something like that, anyway. Who knew? with Grijk’s accent. ‘Dis is my depudy chief a securidy, Haknal Vrakek,’ Grijk had said when they’d first come in, gloomily pointing to this tall, wolfish, skinny, grinning guy with big teeth, who nodded and nodded, grinning away, until Tiny opened the violin case, and then he said, ‘Holy bone.’ Not like Robin the Boy Wonder being a smart aleck, but like anybody having a religious experience.

  ‘So now you’re set,’ Tiny said.

  ‘We sure are,’ Haknal Vrakek said, rubbing his hands together. He didn’t so much have an accent as an internal echo chamber, as though his voice had been prerecorded, as though he were about to tell you the time and temperature, or suggest if you need assistance, push One now.

  Everybody looked at Grijk, who was not what you would call forthcoming. Not in any sense. Not in the sense of being as up and excited as he ought to be, given that his fondest dream had just come true, and not in the sense, either, of forking over the fifteen grand. In fact, Tiny – who wasn’t even in on the profit this time – had to remind him, ‘You gotta pay the guys now, Grijk.’

  ‘Oh!’ Could he really have forgotten? Maybe so. He stared at his deputy, who gazed mildly back at him, then stared at Tiny, then stared at Kelp and Murch, then finally got himself caught up with events. ‘I’ll get you da money,’ he said.

  Grijk took a step forward, hands out, as though he expected to do something with the violin case or its contents, but Tiny closed the lid and rested his paw on the case and said, ‘We’ll watch the bone for you while you’re gone.’

  ‘Oh,’ Grijk said. He looked again at his deputy, then nodded at Tiny. ‘Dod’s good,’ he said, and went away through the door in back, the deputy following after him, leaving the three to look at each other and say, ‘What’s with him?’ and ‘Beats me.’

  The wait was a little longer than it should have been, but then at last Grijk returned with two white legal-size envelopes, one of which he gave to Kelp and the other to Murch, saying, ‘Da nation of Tsergovia tanks you a tousand dimes. You have saved us.’ Only he said it like it was something he had memorized, like he was just being polite.

  It was the deputy who showed the real spirit of the occasion. ‘It’s wonderful to see the sacred relic,’ he assured them with his echo-chamber voice. ‘Awe-inspiring to touch it with this hand. What magnificent work you have done!’

  ‘Thanks,’ Tiny told him, pleased; but he would have preferred to hear it from Grijk.

  Kelp smiled again at Grijk. He held up his envelope and said, ‘This is five thousand.’

  ‘Dod’s right.’

  Kelp pointed at Murch’s envelope. ‘And that’s five thousand.’

  Before Grijk could answer, Tiny said, ‘Grijk, are you gonna embarrass me again? Come up with the other five. Don’t fool around.’

  Grijk didn’t even look ashamed of himself, just gloomier than before. Talk about cheap. ‘I vasn’t sure,’ he said, pulling a third envelope out from his inside jacket pocket, ‘vad I should do vid—’

  ‘We’re sure,’ Tiny said, plucking the envelope out of his hand. ‘And I’ll tell ya, Grijk, don’t ask for no more favors.’

  ‘You fellas did vunderful,’ Grijk said, sounding tragic but smiling through. ‘I mean id, and I’m gradeful. You vas really vunderful.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Tiny said. ‘And now we’re going home.’

  ‘Okay, Diny.’

  The deputy unlocked the door to let them out. ‘Good-bye, Diny,’ Grijk said.

  ‘Sure,’ Tiny said, and led the way up Second Avenue.

  Very few empty cabs this time of night; maybe up at Thirty-fourth Street. They sloped along, hands in their pockets, feeling dissatisfied, incomplete somehow, and Kelp said, ‘I’m really surprised at that cousin of yours, Tiny.’

  ‘I’m embarrassed by him,’ Tiny said. ‘I don’t even want to talk about it.’

  Stan Murch had been walking along, silent, frowning, and now he said, ‘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.

  27

  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. (H
er research into Western popular culture was unfortunately spotty and incomplete.) Meantime, Tatiana was Hradec’s date here at Harry Hochman’s Vermont château, 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 château, 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 trip-tychs. 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 (Magyar-Croat 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 dungeon, 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.

  28

  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 tabl
e 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 baaaaadddd 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.