Don't Ask

by Donald E. Westlake

  Or any ship at all. A few garbage barges, the Circle Line boat, an occasional weekend cruise ship, the waddling Staten Island ferry, now and then a small freighter that looks as though it must have made a wrong turn somewhere; the teeming New York Harbor of yesteryear is no more. So how come the water's still so disgusting?

  Captain Bob steered hcMargaret C. Mornn southward past the new Imperial Ferry pier with its recently established ferryboat service over to New Jersey (an eminently reasonable technology) and down past Battery Park City, where the World Trade Center (so good they did it twice!) stands as the final failure of architecture; not an idea, not a design, not a whimsy, not a grace note, not a shred of art or passion wrinkles those sharply creased trouser legs.

  Then the heliport, where a very loud helicopter took off through Dortmunder's head; in the left ear, out the right, scrambling his brains along the way. Then, at the southern tip of Manhattan, the Staten Island ferry terminal, with the fat ferries as a Mother Goose--like reminder of a more possible New York.

  Down here at the tip of the island, the seas got a little rougher.

  Dortmunder held on to his coil of rope with both hands and both knees, and the magnificent view went up and down and up and sideways and down and up and down and sideways and up…

  Tiny held on to him while he leaned over the rail.

  Later, he felt somewhat better, though kind of hollow. And by now, they were in the East River, between Manhattan and Brooklyn, a much more bustling world, though still eerily unpopulated on the water. But you've got another heliport, and then two bridges in a row crawling with traffic--the Brooklyn, and then the Manhattan--an dover on the Brooklyn side you've got the Promenade, which looks nice, people standing around, posed as though in the artist's impression of how it will look if the money is raised and the project completed.

  Dead ahead was the Williamsburg Bridge. Kelp nudged Dortmunder's arm and pointed at it, grinning. "Remember the fish truck?"

  "No," Dortmunder said.

  Off Twenty-third Street is a dock for seaplanes, mostly taking people out to the Hamptons or Fire Island, or maybe up to New England.

  Dortmunder hadn't known about that until he looked up--one of the rare times he looked up--and there was an airplane taxiing directly at them!

  On the water!

  "Holy shit!" Dortmunder commented, and stared up at Captain Bob, who was cheerily--a madman, a definite madman-- waving in comradely fashion at the oncoming airplane.

  Which veered off, roaring, and suddenly ran away northward, and now Dortmunder could see the pontoons and understood it was all right for that airplane to be out here in the river, and particularly all right when, thirty or forty blocks farther uptown, it lifted off the water and banked away over Queens, taking four or five of the nation's trendsetters out east for R and R.

  "There it is," Kelp said at the same moment that the low growl of the Margaret C. Momn's engine changed quality, becoming lower and less powerful. Feeling the ship slow beneath him, Dortmunder looked where Kelp was pointing, and, after a minute of not knowing what the hell he was staring at, there it was. The Pride of Votskojek, hunkered down in its slip, pointing out, dwarfed by the piled layers of brown and black and gray apartment buildings behind it.

  Their vessel was slowing and slowing, almost to a complete stop, or as complete a stop as you can get on a ceaselessly moving surface like a large body of water. Dortmunder looked around, and out toward the middle of the river, some distance away, another tug was pushing a big bargeful of junk downstream, toward the ocean. Other than that, they were now the only vessel in sight--except for the moored hulk of the Pride of Votskojek, of course.

  Stan came down from the wheelhouse to say, "Cap'n Bob's gonna bring us in a little closer, then just hang around there until we're ready to go."

  Dortmunder looked at him. "Cap'n Bob?"

  Stan looked back. "So?"

  The Margaret C. Moron made a long slow loop till it faced downstream, and was now close enough to the Manhattan shore so that individual details on the Pride of Votskojek, like the windows up above and the rust streaks down below, were clearly visible.

  They all sat on the coils of rope or the rail and looked at that ship moored over there, and Tiny said, "I don't get it. The Tsergovia mission's just a storefront, anybody can walk in, no armed guards, no fences, none of this crap."

  Stan said, "That's security for the bone."

  Tiny said, "Not that fence. Posts sunk into concrete? For a bone's gonna be there just a couple months?"

  Kelp said, "All that stuff would have been there anyway, from before, put up by the city because the ferry building isn't safe and they didn't want any junkies to sneak in there and hurt themselves."

  Tiny said, "Why not?"

  Nobody had an answer to that, so they turned their attention back to the Votskojek mission floating over there.

  The wake from the barge finally reached theMarpfaret C. Moran just about then. The wake consisted of very long slow mounds of water, ridges of water like corduroy that rolled in stately inevitable fashion across the surface of the river, like cows coming home at the end of the day, one after the other, each billow rocking the tug first this way, then that way, then a pause, then this way, then that way, then a pause. And so on.

  "That's it," Dortmunder said.

  Kelp raised an inquiring eyebrow. "John?"

  "I've had enough," Dortmunder said.

  Tiny said, "Dortmunder?"

  Dortmunder turned to Stan. "Tell your cap'n," he said, "I want to go ashore."

  Sounding surprised, Stan said, "You saw enough? You know how to pull the job?"

  "I didn't see anything, and I don't know anything," Dortmunder told him,

  "except I want off this carnival ride now. Tell Admiral Bob to put me ashore." He pointed toward the Pride of Votskojek. "There," he said. so far as Hradec Kralowc was concerned, he had the finest apartment in New York City, with the finest views, the best closets and other amenities, and an unbeatable location. His apartment was, in fact, the former captain's quarters aboard the former Mstslov Enterprise III, now the Pride of Votskojek, and he luxuriated in its lushness, far from the stony splendors of Votskojek, and just as far from the stony splendors of Mrs. Kralowc.

  Hradec Kralowc was, at forty-seven, his brand-new nation's ambassador to the United States (with a small apartment at the Watergate in Washington where he was almost never in residence) and was soon to be its UN delegate as well, once this nonsense about the authentication of the femur of St. Ferghana was cleared up. In the meantime, he had to live here in a somewhat seigelike fashion (security for the femur), but he did not permit that fact to keep him from enjoying his position in life and in New York and in this glorious apartment.

  He was a friendly man, Hradec Kralowc, a diplomat to his toes, and it so happened that one of the people he had befriended a few years ago was a hotel mogul named Harry Hochman, who had grown interested in the idea of constructing some of his world famous Happy Hour Inns behind the Iron Curtain, once the Iron Curtain had been taken down and packed away in the attic with iron mothballs (just in case it's ever needed again).

  Harry Hochman also owned upscale hotels in major cities, and ski resorts, and Caribbean islands, and was generally a good sort of millionaire to know. More specifically, he also had access to an army of carpenters, plumbers, and electricians, and when Hradec had arrived in New York last year on the Pride of Votskojek Harry Hochman had been as happy as one of his inns to provide all the services necessary to convert what had been a fairly grim and utilitarian set of rooms aboard the ship into a diplomat playboy's fantasy. (Previously, back in Novi Glad, capital of Votskojek, Hradec had found it possible to be of some small service to Harry Hochman, seeing to it that the bureaucratic snarls in which the representatives of Hilton, Marriott, and Sheraton found themselves enmeshed faded away somehow whenever the Harry Hochman representative appeared. One hand washes the other.) The apartment that had resulted from all this hand wash
ing, here on the top deck of the Pride of Votskojek, was a sheer delight. Its living room was toward the stern, with large wraparound windows through which could be seen, unfortunately, the dead carcass of the former ferry building; but if one ignored that and looked up and beyond, all of Manhattan's skyline was spread out before one, magnificent by day, romantically beautiful by night.

  The bedroom was forward of this and rather large and pleasant now that the wall had been removed from between what had been two small and nasty cabins. The views from here were southward, toward the necklaces that were the bridges strung between Manhattan and Brooklyn.

  And at the forward end was the former bridge, now a sitting room with views eastward across the river at Brooklyn and Queens. Less of a view than the living room's under normal circumstances, but wonderful in stormy weather; ah, the lightning displays over Long Island City! When the sun shone, Hradec tended to ignore the bridge and the scenery beyond its windows, but today he just happened to be passing through, checking the apartment for general tidiness, since he expected to entertain a Hungarian ballerina this evening, after her work at Lincoln Center was completed, when he noticed the tugboat out there on the river.

  What attracted his attention first was the fact that one so rarely saw tugboats at all, and then they were never alone. Any tugboat one saw would be either pushing or pulling some larger and much more ungainly vessel. A tugboat at rest, or at play, was a diverting thing to see.

  Then there was his realization that this particular tugboat wasn't going anywhere. It merely bobbed along in more or less the same place, pointlessly. Was it adrift, lost by its owners? Was it out of fuel, or in some other way in trouble? As a fellow boat person--boat resident, as it were--should he phone someone, take some sort of action?

  He was still considering exactly what sort of action he might take, should he decide to take some sort of action, when the tugboat abruptly began to move. What a relief; no action would be needed.

  But then it became clear the tugboat was moving in this direction. It was coming here, to the old ferry slip, to the Votskojek mission, to Hradec Kralowc's happy home.

  For one mad instant, Hradec thought of the femur of St. Ferghana, locked away in the makeshift laboratory below. Could this be a nautical attack by the depraved Tsergovians, hoping to steal the relic to further their own miserable United Nations aspirations? But that was absurd. Wasn't it?

  Still, the tugboat was definitely steaming this way. There was at least one person up in the wheelhouse, and four more in back, on deck. Did they look Tsergovian? As a matter of fact, one of them did; huge and heavy, like a full oil drum.

  Should he call the guards, out at the gate? The walkie-talkie they'd given him, in case instant communication were ever required, was around here somewhere. True, he'd never used it, but how difficult could it be if the rather simple thugs employed by the security agency could routinely use the things?

  Hadn't he put the walkie-talkie somewhere in this very room, the former bridge, as being somehow a more philosophically correct location than any of the nonprofessional precincts farther back? Yes, he had; but the former bridge had retained more of its former decor than the rest of the suite, including the wheel itself and all the equipment for captaining the ship. (It was still a ship, and could theoretically still be moved about on the open sea if desired, though not, DV, with Hradec Kralowc aboard. That transatlantic crossing on this fat and awful old scow had been more than enough, more than enough.) Drawers, too; beneath the former bridge's many windows were many drawers, containing God knows what. And somewhere, somewhere in all this nauticalness and officialese and professionalismo there reposed, Hradec was almost sure, the walkie-talkie.

  But wait. What if he did find the walkie-talkie, and did figure out how to operate it, and did call the current two guards in from the gate, and it turned out this tug was a Tsergovian feintf That the real attack would be coming from the land, not the sea?

  What to do? What to do?

  While Hradec dithered and did nothing--the primary and most necessary character trait of the professional diplomat--the mysterious tugboat have to at the end of the ferry slip, just barely within Hradec's sight.

  He pressed his forehead to the--cool!-- glass of one of the former bridge's windows and gazed downward past his cheekbones. What was going on down there?

  An argument, apparently. The huge man who looked very much like a Tsergovian had clamped one meaty fist around a metal pole at the end of the slip, thus holding the tug in place while the other three on deck argued and the one up in the wheel house occasionally shouted down some valuable addition of his own.

  At last, one of the men in back, not the possible Tsergovian but a slope-shouldered, furrow-browed individual whose lifeless brown hair flopped around on top of his head in the breeze like dead beach grass, clambered up over the side and off the boat. He stood on the rotting planks of the slip and continued to argue with the men still in the boat, until at last he gave what appeared to be a disgusted wave of dismissal and turned away. At the same time, the perhaps-not-Tsergovian giant released the pole and the tugboat angled off, heading back out into the river.

  There were doors on both sides of the former bridge, leading out on deck. Hradec took one of these, saw the stranger clumping along shoreward two decks below, and called out, "You, there!"

  The man stopped. He looked around. He started forward again.

  "You, there! Up here!"

  The man stopped again. He angled his head back horribly and stared straight up to meet Hradec's eye.

  It was a strange moment, the two staring at one another through the vertical air. Hradec, a cultivated and civilized man, was horrified to find that he wanted to spit. Quelling that unworthy notion, he called instead, "This is private property!" (That was usually the best magic rune to pronounce in America.) "I'm just going through," the man called, pointing landward. "Catch a cab."

  "Why didn't you stay on your boat?" Hradec called, more out of simple curiosity than anything else.

  "Not me," the man said with gloomy fervency. "Not on that thing. No more."

  A fellow sufferer, Hradec thought, remembering again, more vividly than before, his own trip to the New World aboard this very tub, and an unexpected sense of camaraderie came over him, a rare feeling in this faraway posting among aliens, with only a few serfs around who spoke his native tongue (Magyar-Croat). "Wait there," he called. "I'll be right down. Wait there; the guards won't let you out without me."

  There was an elevator amidships, across from his bedroom. It was small, noisy, dark gray in color, and smelled of crankcase oil, but it was better than the stairs. Hradec unreeled downward through the ship's innards and stepped out to what had once been the upper center hold, the ship's lowest two decks having been devoted to storage, with large, wet, smelly rooms called holds, three on each deck, all with oval doors through the ship's side for access.

  Nowadays, however, five of these six holds were simply ignored, the Votskojeks having no use for damp, cavernous storage spaces, but Harry Hochman's carpenters, with the aid of inexpensive paneling and carpet, had made of the sixth a suitably ambassadorial entrance to the ship and its elevator. Beyond these smooth walls and this dropped ceiling, the rest of the upper center hold continued, no doubt, to echo and to reek, but Hradec had no need to concern himself with that.

  The oval door to the outside world stood open, as it always did in good weather. Hradec went up the one gradual ramp and down the other and there he was on the dock, with the stranger a bit to his left, looking sullen. Hradec approached him and, with one of his stock, amiable opening gambits, said, "You will probably be surprised to hear that you are no longer in the United States of America."

  The fellow, naturally, looked at him as though he were a lunatic, possibly dangerous. "Is that right," he said.

  "That is very right," Hradec told him, with his faint but friendly smile. "Embassies and missions of foreign nations on American soil legally exist in their own countr
ies. Our law and our flag, not yours.

  Therefore, this is not America." With a sweeping gesture, he concluded,

  "Welcome to Votskojek!"

  "Oh, yeah?" The man looked up at the ship, seeming not that impressed.

  "That's what it says on the back of this thing," he commented, and jabbed a thumb in the ship's direction. "That's the whole country?"

  "No, no," Hradec said, delighted at the response, thinking of fellow diplomats over at the UN he could share this anecdote with. "We are the United Nations mission, or soon shall be, and the embassy." He drew himself to attention. "I am Hradec Kralowc, the ambassador." Extending a hand, he said, "And you--?"

  The man seemed to have to think a minute before remembering his name; he must have really disliked that boat ride. Then he grabbed Hradec's hand, pumped it, and said, "Diddums."

  Hradec blinked. "Diddums?"

  Diddums blanched, then recovered. "It's Welsh," he said.

  "Ah," Hradec said. "And the first--"

  "John. John Diddums."

  "Well, uh… John. May I call you John?"

  "I was just gonna get a cab."

  "I take it, John," Hradec went on, "you didn't much care for the motion on that small boat."

  "Don't remind me," John Diddums said, and pressed a hand to his stomach.

  "I feel the same way," Hradec said. "Believe it or not, I came here all the way from Odessa on that thing"--jabbing his own thumb at the ship--"and it was horrendous."

  "Boy, I don't doubt it," John Diddums said.

  "Along the way," Hradec said, "I learned a wonderful cure, just the thing to make that discomfort go away. Have you a few moments?"

  John Diddums seemed surprised. "You want me to go on that thing?"

  "It doesn't move," Hradec assured him. "Not like a small tugboat, at any rate. Frankly, I have nothing to do till the ballet this evening. Come aboard and I'll fix you the restorative and you can tell me about yourself."

  "Ballet?"

  Never had Hradec heard so much blunt suspicion packed into one small word. To deal with that problem once and for all, "I'll be having supper with one of the featured ballerinas after the performance," he explained. And then, just in case that explanations wasn't enough, he explained further: "Ballerinas are girls."