Don’t Ask

by Donald Westlake

  As for Hradec, he contented himself with watching the fourth sansculottes from the left. Krystal Kerrin, she klaimed her name to be, and what shapely yet powerful legs she possessed! To think that, in just a few hours, those legs would be wrapped around him. While Nana’s bleak history was baroquely told, Hradec Kralowc sat in the house seat his pony Krystal had obtained for him – fourth row, a bit to the left of center – and watched her trot.

  And then it was over, and like legions of stage-door johnnies before him Hradec trooped around to the stage-door alley, where very quickly Krystal came tripping into view, powerful legs twinkling silver below a short black skirt. Soon, over lobster and pouilly-fuissé at Bernardin, she was bubbling on about her recent activities – tryouts, costumings, classes (sword fighting was going particular well), hairstylists, agent troubles, backbiting backstage at Nana: The Musical – through all of which Hradec sat in shadows across from her, a half-smile of inattention on his face. Her mouth was lovely, and had its uses, but what he mostly thought about was her legs.

  And then the taxi to the embassy, arriving a bit after one in the morning, to find all was well. There was a new team of guards on tonight, confidence-inspiring in their policelike getups. The pair at the gate were Laurel and Hardyish, in that they were fat and thin, but otherwise appeared not to have much of a bent for the comical, unless one counted the length of time it took Hardy to compare Hradec’s self with the photo of himself on the man’s clipboard. But Hradec didn’t mind; total security may take a little longer, but it’s worth it in the long run. Yes indeed.

  When Hardy at last felt he could live with the idea that the man before him and the photograph were both references to the same individual, and Laurel at his instructions unlocked the gate, it was Hardy who offered an oily smile and gestured to some trash on the ground as he said, ‘Appreciate it, sir.’

  Whatever that might mean. Hradec’s thoughts were all of Krystal’s nether pins. ‘Very good,’ he responded, and took his lady of this evening by the elbow and steered her toward the embassy.

  En route, they passed this team’s sergeant, a skinny little geezer who walked with them briefly, started to say, ‘Even—’ then had to stifle a mammoth yawn. Eyes watering, he tried again. ‘Evening, Ambassador. I’m Fenton. Everything’s quiet.’

  ‘Good,’ Hradec said. ‘Carry on.’

  ‘The boys appreciated the thoughtfulness, sir,’ Fenton said, stopping in Hradec’s wake and tossing off a semiofficial kind of salute.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Hradec said, not listening, moving on. Those silver legs whipsawed along beside him in the soft darkness toward the ship.

  The two guards just inside the entrance rose from their folding chairs as Hradec and Krystal boarded. Both smiled and nodded their greetings, and one of them abruptly covered his mouth, segments of a yawn appearing around the perimeter of his hand. Hradec found himself about to yawn in sympathy but forced himself to stop. Can’t have any of that. There’s much to be done before sleep tonight, much, oh, much to be done.

  And was. The clock read well after two when at last Hradec switched off the light and settled down to a much-needed rest in dear Krystal’s arms, and it read not yet three when rough hands switched the lights back on and poked at Hradec’s shoulder and head, and a rough voice said, ‘Rise and shine, you.’

  Hradec’s eyes popped open. Beside him, Krystal’s mouth popped open and a scream began to emerge, but then yet another rough hand clamped down over her face and the scream went back inside. That hand held a white cloth; the tang of chloroform prickled the air, and Krystal’s eyes glazed o’er.

  The room was full of men wearing ski masks. In June? Hradec, still fighting free of a silver-legged dream, stared around and saw only one familiar uncovered face. ‘Karver!’ he cried at the cringing figure of Dr Zorn over by the door.

  Zorn refused to look up. His hands miserably washed one another at his waist. He twitched all over.

  ‘Karver!’ Hradec cried, to his onetime classmate at Osigreb Polytechnic. ‘What’s going on?’

  But it wasn’t his old friend Karver Zorn who answered his plea. No, Zorn was now blinking pathetically at the array of hypodermic syringes in the small carrying case being presented to him by the largest and meanest-looking of the invaders. No, it was another one, the nearest of the interlopers, a slope-shouldered fellow whose features were hidden behind a ghastly purple ski mask blotched with hideous green snowflakes, who said, ‘We’ve taken over the ship.’

  Diddums! Hradec had sense enough not to blurt the name out loud. Instead, staring at the syringe as it approached, ‘This is piracy!’ he cried.

  ‘Good,’ said the phlegmatic Diddums, behind his mask. ‘I never did that before.’

  43

  By Saturday night, when Stan Murch and the burglar team of Harry Matlock and Ralph Demrovsky arrived in Vermont, the château was as ready as a fifteen-year-old boy after two hours of foreplay. The château had had two nights of foreplay, and was just begging to be robbed.

  Grijk Krugnk was having an awful lot of fun here. He’d driven up yesterday, Friday, leading the driver team of Fred Lartz and, at the wheel, his wife, Thelma, plus lockman Ralph Winslow, who even carried a glass with tinkling ice cubes in the car, and heavy-mustached utility man Gus Brock. Fred and Thelma stayed in the Dortmunder room at Kinohaha, Grijk reclaimed his room at the bed-and-breakfast place, and Ralph and Gus made arrangements at a motel down the mountain, using the other one of Arnie Albright’s ticking credit cards. Friday night at the château, while they’d triggered alarms and watched reactions, they’d also installed a lot of Grijk’s spy stuff, both in the château and in the other house, and had done some of the preliminary work on removing alarm systems entirely.

  While this group was thus hard at work up in New England, back in New York Dr Zorn had been strapped to a bench in his church, studying hydrodynamics. Around the time Andy Kelp was testing the doctor and declaring him ready, Grijk and Fred and Thelma and Ralph and Gus were settling into their beds in Vermont for a good day’s sleep.

  With dark on Saturday came more fun at the château. The telephone lines they’d tapped into were blue with the smoke of furious phone calls. The TV monitors they’d installed in both buildings showed the protectors of the estate running in increasingly smaller circles, going out of their minds. The alarm systems that had already been removed now rusted quietly at the bottom of Harry Hochman’s illegal dump. Total and productive quiet would soon arrive.

  Meanwhile, down in New York City, Dr Zorn doctored pizza, and Andy Kelp delivered it. Then Kelp searched several hospital parking lots and parking buildings before he found what he wanted: a large van with fold-down seats and M.D. plates. Firmly believing that doctors understand comfort and discomfort better than anyone else, Kelp always based his automotive choices on medical opinion. And as usual, he was right; the van drove well, its interior was soft and well appointed, and it would very easily transport eight, three of them unconscious.

  Timing is all. The guards were sleepy, but not yet asleep, when Hradec Kralowc and his lady friend returned to the embassy a little after one in the morning, just around the same time that Stan Murch was backing his borrowed truck down the curving driveway beside the château and halting at the wide door that led to the Hochmans’s art gallery. Ralph Winslow, one-handed, sipping from his drink, opened that door just a short time before, down in New York, the other expert lockman in the crew, Wally Whistler, passed his hand over the gate leading to Votskojek territory, and the gate sagged open with a little sigh.

  Wally, Dortmunder, Kelp, Tiny, Jim O’Hara, and the subdued Dr Zorn entered that sovereignty, strolled past the guards all of a heap in their folding chairs, and made their presence known – and felt – to the ambassador and his friend. Zorn put up no resistance when they had him inoculate against consciousness first Kralowc and then the already-chloroformed young lady. Since Zorn was giving no trouble, they permitted him to walk to the van under his own power, where he made absolu
tely no complaint about dosing himself with the same sleepy juice.

  Up in the Green Mountains, certain adjustments of placement and position had been made to the treasures of Harry Hochman’s art collection. Grijk Krugnk, walking as delicately as an elephant in a room full of mice, carried into the gallery the jewel-encrusted glass box that had been flown across the Atlantic from the Rivers of Blood Cathedral and placed it on the pedestal that had been made available for it when a Brancusi torso was relegated to a lesser position.

  Moving quietly but efficiently, Thelma Lartz, still wearing her hat, started taking Polaroid pictures of the collection in situ; so far, the glass box either didn’t appear in the pictures or was merely a small feature of the background. In any case, as Thelma finished exhaustive pictorial documentation of each section of the gallery, Harry Matlock and Ralph Demrovsky and Ralph Winslow and Gus Brock and Grijk Krugnk carried the pieces out and stowed them carefully in the truck. (Drivers don’t do heavy lifting.) At each stage of the operation, Thelma would also take a couple of pictures of the interior of the truck, being careful not to show any human beings or license plates.

  Back on the Pride of Votskojek, Wally Whistler moved like a ghost through several locks, leaving no traces, and making it possible for Andy Kelp once more to lay felonious hands on the femur of St Ferghana.

  Gotcha.

  44

  False dawn haloed the mountains, and still they were driving north. ‘I don’t see why,’ Dortmunder groused, ‘they couldn’t put their ski hotels and their châteaus down by the city.’

  ‘There aren’t any mountains down by the city, John,’ Kelp explained. He was doing all the driving, because he liked to do all the driving, when it was a doctor’s car. ‘It’s all flat down there,’ he explained further. ‘Near the coast.’

  ‘Better,’ Dortmunder said. ‘Safer skiing that way.’

  Kelp nodded. ‘I never thought about it in exactly that light,’ he admitted.

  These two shared the bench-style front seat of the doctor’s car, with the magic bone seat-belted into place between them. Tiny basked in spread-out splendor alone on the seat behind them, with Jim O’Hara and Wally Whistler on the seat back of that, and the three sleeping travelers stretched out on the padded surface at the rear that had been created when the rear seat was folded down. These sleepers bounced sometimes, when there was a rough spot on the road, but mostly the road was a good smooth one, and they lay as quietly back there as the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers – the real one, the first one.

  There’s always traffic in the vicinity of New York City, but once they got about a half hour north that all thinned out and they mostly had the road to themselves. Kelp stayed within a few miles of the speed limit, not wanting to have to explain to any inquiring state trooper that those three passengers in the back were not drunk or stoned, merely sleeping. Sleeping hard. Kelp drove sanely and sensibly.

  South of Rutland, north of Bennington, in the general vicinity of Mount Tabor and Weston and Peru (no, a different Peru), sprawling into the Green Mountain National Forest from a base just outside the forest perimeter, stands the Mount Kinohaha Happy Hour Inns ski resort. The nearest town is Middleville, but what Middleville might be in the middle of nobody any longer knows. Nowhere, basically.

  But it was in Middleville that Dortmunder told Kelp to make the turn; not the well-marked, well-signed come-on-over turn toward Kinohaha, but the other way, up a steep dark asphalt road that quartered and strayed and goofed around but kept more or less tending upward until Dortmunder pointed out the next turn, which was the dead-end road up to the château. ‘From here on,’ Dortmunder said, ‘we gotta be silent, and we gotta be dark.’

  Kelp switched off the headlights and came to a complete stop, and he and Dortmunder peered through the windshield at the world. At first, neither of them could see a thing, until their eyes adjusted to life without headlights, and then Kelp said, ‘There it is.’

  Dortmunder still couldn’t see anything: ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘John, John,’ Kelp said. ‘Have some faith.’

  ‘One time,’ Tiny rumbled from the seat behind them, ‘you drove us into the reservoir.’

  ‘I never did,’ Kelp said as he put the van in gear.

  The outside environment was in shades of black: deep black with some deep green mixed into it on both sides of their vehicle, paler black tinged with blue and pink up above, and flat gray-black in a ribbon out front. The last one was the road, and Kelp steered along it uphill until they came over a rise to some great knobby black mounds, with glints in them; that was the château and its outbuildings.

  Following Dortmunder’s whispered directions, Kelp angled around to the left, away from the second residence and toward the long garage, where he almost, but not quite, ran into Stan and Fred, hunkered over the open trunk of Grijk’s Hyundai, monitoring the video and audio spy stuff. Fortunately, blue TV light glinted off Fred’s high forehead just in time for Kelp to hit the brakes, causing the sleeping logs in back to roll half over and then back.

  Something made Fred lose concentration on the tiny TV screens lined up on the floor of the trunk. He turned his head, he saw the chrome front bumper of the van immediately beside his right elbow, and he jumped a foot – four feet – knocking over Stan in the process.

  Before it was all over, a lot of shrill whispering went over the dam, with a repeated refrain being Fred’s ‘You don’t sneak up on people like that!’ counterpointed by Kelp’s ‘We’re being silent, Fred, that’s the whole point.’ ‘You aren’t being silent now’ was Dortmunder’s contribution.

  Finally everybody calmed down. A glim at the TV screens and a hark at the radios reassured them that no one over at the residence had been disturbed, and they all got back to business. While Kelp picked up the blessed bone and carried it away downslope to the art gallery, Tiny picked up Ambassador Kralowc, Wally Whistler picked up the girl, and Dortmunder and Jim O’Hara picked up Dr Zorn. Dortmunder led the way around to the main front door of the château, he being the one who’d been to this place before.

  Down in the art gallery, the movers, having gone as far as they could without the bone, were taking it easy, sitting around on the floor in the faint illumination from one set of indirect lights at a very low dimmer setting. Harry, the two Ralphs, Gus, Grijk, and Thelma, still wearing her hat, all perked up when Kelp came in through the open doorway, carrying the sacred object. They all rose and stretched and whispered greetings, and Thelma picked up her Polaroid, saying, ‘Let’s get this show on the road.’ Thelma’d become more aggressive since she’d taken over as the active driver in the partnership.

  Kelp nestled the bone into the glass box, fitting it precisely to the indentations already existing in the felt. He and the others stepped out of the way, and Thelma took half a dozen pictures, all clearly showing the bone in the box in the art gallery, amid the rest of the collection.

  Meantime, upstairs, Wally Whistler gently laid the girl onto the small bed in a ground-floor guest bedroom and covered her with the down comforter, while Tiny and Dortmunder and Jim O’Hara carried Kralowc and Zorn up the broad main staircase and into the master bedroom. A few arrangements were completed, and the sleepers were left there as Dortmunder and the others went back downstairs and out the front door and around to the art gallery entrance just in time to watch Thelma’s latest round of pictures of the interior of the now nearly full truck, with the bone in the glass box prominent.

  (Down in New York, in and about the Votskojek embassy, seven guards severally awoke from their naps, feeling rested and content. Fenton, the oldest of them, who’d slept curled up on the carpeted staircase half a flight up from the entrance, was the last to awaken, and the most disconcerted. How long had he been asleep? He wasn’t sure. Had the others noticed his absence? Quickly adjusting his uniform, swallowing the taste of old pizza in his mouth, he hurried down the stairs, to find Garfield and Morrison alertly on duty at the door, the others all bright-eyed and at their po
sts. Fenton, like the other six, believed he was the only one who’d fallen asleep, which he would certainly not verify with self-exposing comments to the rest of the crew. He was just relieved that nothing untoward had happened during his momentary lapse, that everything was still all right aboard the embassy. Whew!)

  Up in Vermont, there was little left to do. A couple of minor torsos and a Dine oil were stowed in the now-full truck, which was then shut up. All spy stuff was removed from both buildings and stashed any which way in Grijk’s Hyundai, which Grijk then drove off, headed for New York. Stan, with Jim O’Hara riding shotgun, steered the truck up and over and out of there. Fred, with Thelma at the wheel, drove Ralph Winslow and Gus Brock away in the same car they’d come up in. And Kelp, back at the wheel of the doctor’s van, had for his passengers Dortmunder, Tiny, Wally Whistler, Harry Matlock, and Ralph Demrovsky.

  Real dawn painted the sky in faint pastels as the four vehicles fled away from the mountain, leaving a temporary peace in their wake.

  Now all that was left was the anonymous phone call.

  45

  Silver legs, silver legs. No, loud noises. Bright lights, crashing around, heavy feet on stairs. What stairs? Headache. Mouth dry, nose clogged. Silver legs?

  Rising reluctantly from blissful sleep, Hradec frowned; he frowned against the noise and the aches and the light pressing insistently on his eyelids; he frowned against consciousness entirely. Straining to dive back down into dear oblivion, he snuggled against Krystal, nose moving against her hairy shoulder, arm around her—

  What?

  As horrified as any Stephen King character, Hradec jolted awake, to stare at Karver Zorn’s unlovely sleeping profile, four inches away. Mouth open, small snores emerging. I’m naked, Hradec thought, I’m in bed with Karver and I’m naked. And so is he!