Don’t Ask

by Donald Westlake

  ‘Agh!’ Hradec recoiled to a sitting position, arms protectively about himself, just as the room filled with uniformed men pointing guns. At him.

  Horror on horror! Which horror to be appalled by first?

  ‘Hold it right there!’ said a lot of the uniformed men.

  Hold it! Right here? In this bed, with this, this person?

  Memory swooped back, like a giant hawk with poisoned talons. Diddums! What is this place? What has he done to me?

  Somewhere, a girl screamed.

  46

  Guy Claverack usually started his day with the New York Times, but this Monday morning was different. Having seen the early reports of the Hochman art collection robbery on the television news last night, and having understood immediately that this was the job his carpenters had been planning, he wanted to know more about what had actually happened. Much more. He wanted to know everything there was to know, in fact, and somehow it seemed to him that with this particular kind of story the tabloids would be far likelier to squeeze out of it all the juice it might contain. Lack of journalistic restraint, that’s what he craved this morning, and so he sent his secretary out first thing for the Daily News, the Post, and Newsday, and they did not disappoint.

  The Post:

  GAY LOVE NEST STRIPPED OF 6 MIL ART

  Newsday:

  THEY SLEPT

  THROUGH IT

  Hotelier’s Guests

  Unaware of Robbery

  The Daily News:

  TWO MEN, SNEERING WOMAN

  SLEEP THROUGH ART HEIST

  She Slept Alone

  The stories below these headlines read something like this:

  Following an anonymous phone tip, Vermont State Police and Windham County Sheriff’s Department deputies yesterday morning searched the supposedly empty mountain retreat of multimillionaire hotelier Harry Hochman, to find a scene described by Deputy Buell Rondike as ‘like nothing I ever seen before in my life.’

  Downstairs in the plush châteaulike building, police found that the Hochmans’s world-renowned art collection, valued at more than $6 million, had been cleaned out, down to the bare walls. Upstairs, police and deputies discovered an Eastern European diplomat, Hradec Kralowc, ambassador to the United States from the recently formed nation of Votskojek, asleep in bed with another Votskojek national, a United Nations Famine Relief researcher, Dr Karver Zorn. The two men claimed to have no knowledge of the robbery, and to have slept through it.

  In another part of the building, police found Broadway actress Krystal Kerrin (see accompanying photo), currently featured in Nana: The Musical at the Mark Time Theater. Miss Kerrin’s claim to have been forcibly abducted and drugged by a large group of homosexual men has been hotly denied by the two Eastern Europeans.

  As to their own version of events, Ambassador Kralowc is said by police sources to be claiming diplomatic privilege, although, ‘I don’t believe there is any such thing as diplomatic privilege in a situation like this,’ said State Department spokesman Rondike Buell in Washington last night.

  Guy was still wallowing through this stuff – the Post gave greatest emphasis to the homosexual angle and Newsday to the value of the stolen art, while the Daily News went with Hochman’s wealth, Krystal’s show biz link, and Kralowc’s upper-crust social standing (posh, posh, and posh) – when his secretary buzzed him to say, ‘The carpenter’s calling.’

  ‘I thought he might.’ Guy switched over to the outside line and said. ‘That’s some letter of recommendation.’

  ‘We stand behind our work,’ said the phlegmatic voice on the phone, though with an understandable hint of pride. ‘We thought we’d come by today, show you some pictures of stuff we’ve done.’

  ‘Come ahead,’ Guy urged him. ‘I’m looking forward to seeing them.’

  47

  Dortmunder and Kelp let Claverack drool over the pictures as long as he wanted. They were back in the basement storage cubicle with all the imprisoned Victorian sofas, and they spent the time looking the place over for a possible future visit.

  At last, Claverack sighed, and the eye he turned on his guests was shiny with emotion. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘Beautiful objects. Beautiful work. Beautiful documentation.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘We aim to please,’ Kelp added.

  ‘And these other photos, as the truck is being loaded,’ Claverack said, fanning out the pictures in his hands. ‘Is that where the material is now? Still in this truck? Or did you move it somewhere else?’

  ‘It’s safe,’ Dortmunder said.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Safe? Dortmunder certainly hoped so. He didn’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be safe, given the decision they’d made. Keep the goods in the truck so they’re easily movable, and keep the truck where nobody will pay any attention to it.

  Therefore, when they’d left the scene of the crime early Sunday morning, Stan and Murch and Jim O’Hara had run at first along back roads eastward to Interstate 91, then took that south past Brattleboro and out of Vermont into Massachusetts. They’d dropped through Massachusetts from north to south, on into Connecticut, and finally left 91 at Hartford, taking Route 2 southeast to the Connecticut Turnpike, then south on the Pike to the coast at New London in plenty of time for the noon ferry across Long Island Sound to Orient Point, the eastern tip of Long Island’s more expensive and more residential north shore. Then at last they’d turned west toward New York but angled down along local streets to the island’s less expensive and more industrial south shore. Finding a commercial area full of parked trucks, within walking distance of a Long Island Railroad station, Stan had parked their truck in among all the others on a warehouse block, and he and Jim had taken the train to New York, calling Dortmunder at home a little after six to report the job was done. Every couple of days, until the deal was complete with the insurance company, Stan would take the train back out to the island and move the truck a town or two, to keep it from becoming noticeable. Being a big, boxy, gray-bodied, green-cabbed, anonymous International Harvester of a certain age, with J & L CARTING hand-stenciled in black on both doors, it would take a lot to make that truck noticeable. Safe? Yeah.

  ‘I should think,’ Claverack said at last, ‘there shouldn’t be too much difficulty with the insurance company. These photos pretty well establish you people as the perpetrators, the ones with actual possession of the collection. We’ll simply dicker a bit, I think. How will I get in touch with you?’ he finished, and started to put the thick stack of photos into his inside jacket pocket.

  ‘Hold it,’ Dortmunder said, pointing at the pictures. ‘You don’t get those yet.’

  ‘I don’t?’ Confused, Claverack stopped putting the pictures away. Instead, he looked down at them, looked up at Dortmunder, and said, ‘I can hardly negotiate without them, you know.’

  ‘I know that,’ Dortmunder agreed. ‘Give em here.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’

  A bit miffed, Claverack handed back the pictures, and Dortmunder put them away in his own inside jacket pocket, saying, ‘The thing is, it took a bunch of us to do this, and we’re out certain expenses here.’

  Claverack looked wary. Carefully, he said, ‘I don’t see what that has to do with me.’

  ‘What we estimated, when we talked about this before, you remember that time—’

  ‘Of course I remember.’

  ‘What we estimated, we estimated twenty percent of value from the insurance company, right?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Half for you,’ Dortmunder said, ‘and half for us.’

  ‘That’s what we agreed, yes.’

  ‘Now, normally,’ Dortmunder reminded him, ‘you’d get maybe a quarter, maybe a little more than that. But this time, you’re getting half, on accounta you’re doing it exactly like we want you to do it, right?’

  ‘Certainly,’ Claverack said. ‘We’ve already agreed to that. I show those photos to no one but the insurance company
– or companies, I suppose, unlikely to be just one of them at this level of valuation – the companies involved.’

  ‘And you give us an advance,’ Dortmunder said. Beside him, Kelp smiled.

  Claverack didn’t smile. ‘You never said this before.’

  ‘There was nothing to talk about before,’ Dortmunder pointed out. Patting the pocket with the pictures, he said, ‘Now it’s real, now we got something, now we can talk it over. So far, we’re out all these expenses and travel and trouble and all this, and we’re taking half. So far, all we get from you is you nod and smile and say that sounds nice, and you’re getting half. So what we figure, we need you to contribute.’

  Claverack nodded, but he didn’t smile and he didn’t say that sounds nice. Instead, he said, ‘How much?’

  ‘We figure,’ Dortmunder said, ‘five percent. Our piece ought to be, minimum, six hundred grand, though we’d like more, you know.’

  ‘I’ll do my best, for both of us,’ Claverack said rather stiffly.

  ‘I know you will,’ Dortmunder agreed. ‘And five percent of six hundred grand is thirty.’

  Claverack gazed at him, absorbing that. ‘Thirty thousand dollars? Is that what you want?’

  ‘An advance,’ Dortmunder repeated. ‘You take it outta our half when the insurance people pay.’

  ‘Thirty thousand dollars is, well, uh …’

  ‘Nonnegotiable.’

  ‘Mm.’ Claverack shook his head. ‘Do you expect me,’ he said, ‘to have thirty thousand dollars in cash, just lying around? I presume you wouldn’t take a check.’

  ‘What I expect,’ Dortmunder said, ‘I’ll call you tomorrow, unless that’s too soon, you tell me, and if you got the thirty we’ll come back and we’ll give you the pictures and you’ll give us the cash.’

  Kelp had been quiet up till now, letting Dortmunder do the haggling, but now he played good cop a little, saying, ‘If tomorrow’s too soon, that’s okay. We don’t want to rush you.’

  Claverack brooded. He chewed a bit on a thumb knuckle. He sighed. He said, ‘Tomorrow’s not too soon.’

  48

  Home at last, in a false beard and turban, surrounded by blue-uniformed Continental rent-a-cops, all to avoid the ravening press. Reporters squealed and squirmed around the Pride of Votskojek like dogs around carrion, the landward contingent buttressed by seagoing journalists in every kind of boat they could rent or steal; and a helicopter from the Star hovered overhead.

  But the press wasn’t Hradec’s main concern, and he knew it; though they were certainly pestiferous. And the blow to his manly reputation wasn’t his main concern, either, though the newspaper accounts had wounded him deeply, where he lived. Since Harry Hochman’s lightning trip to Vermont, verifying Hradec’s hastily concocted claim to have been a legitimately invited houseguest – ‘Hradec, do you know where my shit is?’ ‘No!’ ‘Your word’s good enough for me’ – neither legal action nor Harry’s mistrust was anymore an overriding consideration.

  As to the faxes and telegrams and telephone messages that were surely awaiting him aboard the embassy from his wife back home in Novi Glad, wanting to know who and what is this Krystal Kerrin (because she would have no doubt as to his sexual orientation), they were a mere dermatitis in the array of his afflictions. No, his main concern, his main problem, the main disaster he knew still faced him was … the relic.

  The sacred femur of St Ferghana. Somehow, some way, it was gone. Hradec knew that as well as he knew that Votskojek’s future, Harry Hochman’s future, and his own future depended on the relic’s presence. But it was not going to be present; he knew that. There wasn’t a chance of it, despite the assurances of the Continental security people that Saturday night had passed without an incident of any kind aboard the Pride of Votskojek.

  Well. Here he was aboard at last, though hardly alone. A helicopter loudly coughed overhead, zoom lenses were aimed at every porthole, and reporters were being repulsed in every direction. (Oh, for the days of boiling oil!) Tearing off the turban, flinging it at the useless Terment, beaning Lusk with the beard, Hradec strode to the lab, used his keys, threw open the door, and …

  ‘You fainted, sir,’ Lusk said.

  ‘What? Of course I did!’

  Hradec sat up. Lusk and Terment stooped with concern at the foot of his bed. They had carried him here to his bedroom, where the iron storm panels had been closed over every window and every light had been switched on. Midnight at noon, the perfect metaphor. Hradec’s dark midnight.

  I can’t report the theft, not with seven guards, my own employees, who insist that nothing went wrong. A simple wiretap won’t get the relic back to me like last time; the Tsergovians aren’t that stupid. Where is it? Can I get it back without the outer world being the wiser? Can I get it back at all? There isn’t a clue, a hint, a single thread to follow. Like Harry’s art collection, and just as impossibly, the relic has simply vanished into thin air.

  That fiend Diddums! He’s my Moriarty, Hradec thought, but Hradec had never particularly wanted a foeman worthy of his steel. All he’d ever wanted was a life of ease and comfort, that’s all, to be his nation’s representative at the United Nations and in Washington, to be Harry Hochman’s friend, to be escort of an endless supply of sweet young things. Was that too much to ask?

  Apparently. The revenge of Diddums; the phrase ought to have more of a ring to it.

  Think, Hradec, think. It isn’t over. What’s Diddums up to? What happens next?

  ‘Sir?’

  He glowered at his faithful servants. The only thing in the world he had to rely on, and it was them. ‘Leave me,’ he said. ‘I must think.’

  ‘Sir,’ they murmured, and bowed themselves from the room, snicking the door shut after themselves.

  ‘And no phone calls!’ he screamed at the door.

  ‘No, sir,’ wafted the faint reply.

  Hradec adjusted the pillows and reclined to muse. The theft of the relic and the theft of Harry Hochman’s art, it was all connected somehow. And Diddums’s revenge isn’t complete yet, is it?

  Of course not.

  What next?

  49

  What I think you ought to do,’ Dortmunder said to Zara Kotor, back in their upstairs living room over the embassy, ‘if you don’t mind me giving you a little advice—’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Zara said, though brusquely. ‘I see these pictures of the sacred relic, I see you’ve apparently done what you set out to do, and even more, so I don’t mind at all if you give me advice. What I wish you’d give me, though, is the relic.’

  Present for this meeting, in addition to Dortmunder and Zara, were Grijk and Andy Kelp. (Once again, Tiny had been unavoidably tied up elsewhere, though Zara had asked specifically that he be along, and some of her present bad temper was probably a result of his absence. Dortmunder didn’t know what Tiny’s problem was with these people – they were his relatives, after all, and nobody else’s – but he was sorry the big man wasn’t here, if only so Dortmunder didn’t have to keep repeating himself to the mulish Zara all the time.) ‘If I give you the bone,’ he said, demonstrating a patience he didn’t feel, ‘what are you gonna do with it? You can’t show it to anybody or admit you got it, or they’re gonna ask you where you got it from, how long you had it, how come you never showed it before, how’d it get to the States, all these questions. The main thing about this bone is, when you claim it, your hands have got to be clean, or this archbishop’s gonna take against you. Am I right?’

  ‘Conceivably,’ Zara admitted.

  ‘Good,’ Dortmunder said. ‘So conceive it. Now, here’s my advice. Today, this afternoon, you do a press release or a press conference or however you work it, and you announce you’ve privately had tests done on your own St Ferghana bone, the one you’ve been claiming all along you’ve got, the one that made Votskojek have to test theirs all this time, and the tests you did on your own prove conclusively it’s a fake. You apologize to Votskojek—’

  ‘Never!’ Z
ara cried, and Grijk actually jumped to his feet and looked around for a pike or a halberd.

  ‘Just wait for it, okay?’ Dortmunder said. ‘Sit down, Grijk, it comes out okay at the end.’

  Frowning like an avalanche, Grijk resumed his seat while Zara said, ‘I will never apologize to Votskojek for anything.’

  ‘Okay, fine,’ Dortmunder said. ‘Apologize to the UN instead; that’s even better. You apologize to the world, okay? Sorry to cause this delay and trouble, but you always believed you had the right bone, but now you have to admit Votskojek has it, so all they have to do is show it in public and you’ll withdraw your application to join the UN.’

  Zara stared at him in wide-eyed disbelief. ‘And what do I get out of that?’

  ‘Your seat at the UN,’ Dortmunder told her.

  50

  Well, well,’ said the archbishop.

  Having come here to his office at the United Nations building on New York’s First Avenue directly from yet another memorial service, the archbishop was outfitted in full funereal vestments, with the purple cassock and purple cope piping nicely setting off the dazzling white linen of the stole and cope, the whole ensemble belted and sashed with an array of cinctures. The lacy rochet below the stole contrasted with the massive, dark – and heavy – mahogany pectoral cross lying on his sunken chest like the stone before the grave at Gethsemane. He had removed the tall white miter from his head and placed it on a corner of his desk, and had then dropped like last year’s leaf into his swivel chair, just to get a few minutes rest. And he was no sooner settled, a scrawny little old guy gasping for air inside all the panoply, when one of his clerical clerks brought in a fax, uncurled it like the scroll it was, and held it up for the archbishop to read. Which was when the archbishop said, ‘Well, well.’

  ‘Yes, Your Grace,’ said the clerk.