Don't Ask

by Donald E. Westlake

  The prisoner looked around. They were parked near a broad, leafy tree.

  Tire tracks crushing weeds led back around the tree and out at a long angle to the two-lane road. Beyond the road was another view of the Schtumveldt Mountains, with another of those long meadows cut into it.

  Maybe it was logging. Unfortunately, the salt and pepper shakers couldn't be seen. Still, up there was the sun, so over there--no, over there--was southwest. Tsergovia.

  On this side, a simple dirt track up from the road skirted around to the other side of the tree and headed upward into the pine forest. That must be where they were going.

  But not yet. First, Kralowc had to point at the path and give a lot of quick orders to Terment, who nodded and nodded and nodded and turned to trot away up the path, soon disappearing.

  One of the soldiers made a comment, apparently a warning of some kind, with a gesture at the road, and Kralowc said, "Yes, of course. Come along, Diddums."

  The prisoner went along. For a while, they just slogged up the path, through the pines, listening to the bird song and batting at the blackflies. Nasty blackflies, bite chunks out of you. Kralowc went first, then one of the soldiers, then the prisoner, then the other soldier. Up they went, feet thudding on the packed-down path, and the prisoner was pleased to hear, from the panting of the soldiers, that they were in worse shape than he was.

  After about five minutes of this, they emerged from the forest into a large, sloping meadow, with Terment way out there on its far side, bobbing right along. Beyond the meadow, more trees clothed a further upward slope, and at the top of that slope was… the castle.

  Oh, boy. Black against the blue sky, stone, turreted, there it stood, on top of the mountain. The prisoner automatically jerked to a stop at the sight of it, and the soldier behind him went "Oof!" when he blundered into the prisoner's flinched-back elbows.

  Kralowc turned, saw the effect the castle was having, and came back a pace to say, "Yes, Diddums, that's where we're going."

  "I figured," the prisoner said, trying to act cool.

  Kralowc stood beside him, and they gazed up at the castle together. "Few men who go in there," Kralowc said, "ever come out."

  "Uh-huh." The prisoner swallowed and cleared his throat. "I guess Dr.

  Zorn'll be there."

  "Waiting for you. And General Kliebkrecht."

  "Uh-huh."

  "Diddums, they have ways to make men talk."

  "Uh-huh."

  "I don't want this to happen to you, Diddums. You and I understand each other; we're both gentlemen; we don't want to have to deal with thugs."

  "Uh-huh."

  "I hoped, when I showed you the peaceful village of Schtum, you would understand. Tell me where the relic is; don't force me to have Dr. Zorn ask you."

  The prisoner licked his lips. He gazed at the castle. He said, "I gotta pee."

  "Of course," Kralowc said, as one gentleman to another. "And do take the opportunity of that time to think things over."

  "Uh-huh."

  The prisoner moved back down the path into the forest, one of the soldiers following. In tandem, they veered away from the trees, until the prisoner stopped and said, "Gimmie a little privacy, okay? You wait on this side; I'll go around that side."

  For answer, the soldier--who was still more or less pretending not to speak English--stood where he was but aimed his machine gun at the prisoner, who said, "Fine. Just like that," and walked around the big pine tree.

  He really did have to pee, and, as he'd promised Kralowc, while he was doing so he thought things over. And here, even before he was finished, came the soldier, just making sure. "Come on, will ya?" the prisoner said, and then looked down and became wide eyed as he cried, "A snake!

  Jesus, shoot it!"

  The soldier came closer, peering. The prisoner's free hand pointed shakily at something under the lowest branches of the tree. The soldier extended the gun barrel down ahead of himself into the mass of old needles and general mulch, and the prisoner, all his weight behind it, coldcocked him with a beautiful right across that big jaw.

  The soldier fell into the pine tree like a bale of cotton thrown off the River Queen, and the prisoner ran pell-mell into the depths of the forest.

  Ten extremely painful minutes later, no longer hearing the sounds of pursuit, the ex-prisoner stopped long enough to zip up. Then he looked for the sun, figured out which way was southwest, and made tracks. Next stop, Tsergovia.

  Just five hundred yards south of the island of manhattan (qv) and even closer to the onetime proud city of brooklyn (qv) across Buttermilk Channel, but nevertheless governmentally considered a part of the borough of manhattan (qv), lies a darling button of an island that the Indians called Pagganck, which seems unkind, but there you are.

  In 1637, some enterprising Dutchmen bought the island from the Manhatas Indians (so that's why!) for two ax heads and a handful of nails and beads, and changed its name to Nutten, which wasn't much of an improvement. But they were still a lot sharper than those other Dutchmen who bought Manhattan Island itself from the Canarsie Indians, who didn't own it, but were just passing through and knew a live one when they saw a live one.

  The Dutch held on to Nutten only twenty-seven years before the British adopted it, not payin nobody nuttin for Nutten, and changed its name to Governor's Island, because the governor of the colony of New York was going to live there. And so he did. * Optional--historical aside--not for credit The first one, Lord Cornbury, was asked to leave when he insisted on wandering around in lady's clothing and instituted a bachelor's tax, but some of the others kept a lower profile and would surely be proud to learn they are utterly forgotten.

  Soon the colonists of eastern America declared themselves ready for self-government, and in 1797 built Fort Jay on Governor's Island to deter anybody who might wish to argue the point. The British did argue the point, as it turned out, but John Jay's one hundred big guns deterred them from shelling the bejesus out of New York, so they went and shelled the bejesus out of Washington, D.C., instead, and God bless them for it.

  During the Civil War, one of those awful Civil War prisons was set up on Governor's Island, from which only one Confederate prisoner ever managed to escape. He was Capt. William Webb, and he didn't escape to either Manhattan or Brooklyn, though both were quite handy. A true Southerner, he escaped by swimming south. Twelve miles later, he found New Jersey, which was enough to keep him heading south, and after the war he became a United States senator from tennessee (qv).

  Around the turn of the century, two transportation developments elsewhere impinged on Governor's Island. One was the Lexington Avenue subway line; earth excavated from that tunnel was used to expand the landmass of Governor's Island from 100 acres to 175 acres, all of them charming. And the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, four lanes of automobile traffic between Manhattan and Brooklyn, ran directly beneath the island without stopping.

  During World War I, Gen. John J. Pershing (qv), commander of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in france (qv), lived in one of the nice old colonial houses on Governor's Island, which seems pretty darn far from the front, but never mind. In World War II, the island was headquarters of the First Army, but it was a hard place to march to, so in 1966 the army turned it over to the Coast Guard, who intend to keep it. They like it.

  Well, why not? It contains Manhattan's only golf course, the only Burger King in the world that serves beer (it's in the bowling alley, and as one Cmdr. Richard R. Bock explained to the new york times (qv), "You can't have a bowling alley without beer. That's un-American"), and, best of all, nobody else can go there unless the Coast Guard says okay.

  The five thousand residents--four thousand mostly deskbound Coastguardsmen and Coastguardswomen, plus their families-- have their own frequent ferry service over to a slip at Battery Park on Manhattan right next to the Staten Island ferry, but they rarely use it unless they have to. After all, these are real Americans, which means they're afraid of New York. They'd much rat
her stay on their neat little island, golf by day, bowl or watch television in the evening, and tuck in nice and early; the morning bugle sounds at 7:55 a.m. and everyone on the island is expected to be up and saluting, clear-eyed, pink-cheeked, as mentally and physically alert by 8:00 a.m. as that Burger King beer allows, when the loudspeakers that are spread across the island like something from 1984 all start chugging out "the star-spangled banner" (qv).

  The shore of Governor's Island is ringed by nautical installations. The Coast Guard cutter Gallatin lies up here when it isn't rousting undesirables in the Caribbean and other eastern waters, and there's a marina where other Federal services--including the DBA--sometimes keep boats, and of course the ferry dock for scary old New York City.

  There is also one small structure just off the right shoulder of the island, like an epaulet, that is under the control of the Coast Guard but not directly concerned with its mission. This structure is round and brick-clad and it sticks up out of the water like an extra bit of Vulcan's smokestack. It is connected to the island by a narrow pier, and it is a ventilation tower from the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, down below.

  Andy Kelp's head appeared over the top edge of the ventilation tower.

  Fox eyes in a fox face scanned the darkness. It was two in the morning, and while the dishonest burglar in the ventilation tower conned the scene the honest burghers of Governor's Island lay peacefully asleep in their beds, dreaming of strikes and spares. (Some were having nightmares about splits.) The fox face withdrew. The snipping of wire cutters vibrated faintly in the air, like the chirps of an android cricket. Then, folding up and away, came the thick mesh screen that kept Coast guardschildren from falling into the ventilator and plummeting like Alice down the rectangular sheet-metal opening with the repair-access metal ladder rungs fixed into its side and through the other mesh screen at the bottom; don't strain yourself.

  Kelp climbed out, a lithe, narrow figure all in black except for the gray elks on the ski mask he'd just donned and the amber coil of rope slung over his shoulder. A large four-clawed metal hook was attached to one end of this rope; Kelp fixed it to the edge of the tower opening, dropped the rope over the side, and shimmied down to the narrow wooden doughnut circling the tower not far above the waterline.

  Once down, and before crossing the open pier to the main island, Kelp briefly removed the ski mask, leaned back, and just breathed for a while. The air in the ventilation tower, even with the low volume of traffic in the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel at this hour, had been less than ideal. Gratefully inhaling air that had not been treated by the automakers of America and Japan, Kelp fingered the ski mask with its cheerful prancing elks and remembered buying it some time ago in a sport shop on Madison Avenue. Him and Dortmunder, they'd happened to need ski masks for a certain thing they planned to do, which didn't include skiing. His had these nice chipper elks loping around it, and Dortmunder had wound up with a purple mask splotched with big green snowflakes; not really attractive. Kelp had never told his friend this, but, with the ski mask on, Dortmunder's head looked mostly like a diseased eggplant.

  With eyes.

  And where was John Dortmunder now? Not here on Governor's Island, or his pal Andy Kelp would certainly take the extra few minutes to rescue him--if it seemed safe. Where was the poor guy?

  Ah, well. There is, first of all, the task at hand. Pulling the ski mask over his head once again, Kelp moved away from the tower's brick wall.

  Bent low, he hurried across the open pier, with New York Harbor lapping away below him on all sides, and in Ј few minutes he stood on a smooth, uncracked sidewalk containing not even one cigarette butt.

  No one around. So far, so good. Kelp strode along silently on his crepe soles, almost invisible in his dark garb, absolutely alone. What theoretical security measures there might be on this military base were lax to the point of inexistence, since the real security was at the frontier of the island's only (normal) access; that is, the ferry dock over on Manhattan.

  Kelp continued to stroll, past neat houses in neat settings, with unlocked bicycles neatly placed at their sides, and he could understand why the residents here preferred to see Manhattan--that big thing over there, with all the lights--exclusively on their television screens.

  After all, it is well known that if you keep a creature for a long time in an antiseptic environment and then put it out in the normal world, it will immediately get sick and die.

  The casing of the island, prior to the actual commission of the crime itself, had been a mostly unsatisfactory matter, consisting in its entirety of passing its western shoreline twice on the Staten Island ferry, and both times seeing neither Pepper LaFontaine's boat nor a location that looked as though it might contain it.

  So Kelp could leave the westward alluvium for last. Instead, he could walk northward--toward that big thing over there with all the lights--and then skirt the water's edge to east and then south. Which he did, and found many items of interest, and passed them all by, until, well down the eastern side of the island, near the southern end of Buttermilk Channel, there it was. There, by golly, it was, Pepper's little runabout, bobbing in the ceaseless motion of the sea, tied fore and aft to metal stanchions sticking up like iron crabgrass from a concrete dock the other side of a chain-link fence.

  You know what a chain-link fence is? A ladder.

  Inside the fenced area, Kelp crossed to the motorboat, one of five vessels of varying sizes penned in here, and as he hurried forward he could only hope the bone was still there. He'd watched a quick tossing of the boat--what's known as a "cursory inspection," whatever that might be--from the unmarked car in which he'd been at that moment a resident, back at the mailbox manufacturer's dock, where the DEA had made its unwelcome surprise visit (like that old bit about the Spanish Inquisition, come to think of it, except in blue instead of red), after the boat had been dragged from the water but before it had been trucked away, and he hadn't seen anything taken from it. With any luck, the old cursory I. had been it, and the bone would still be aboard, tucked away under that crumpled tarpaulin where Kelp had kicked it in the excitement of the moment.

  A bright floodlight on a high pole lighted Kelp on his way, and when he got to Pepper's boat that illumination showed him an interior as clean as Governor's Island itself. Even the tarpaulin was gone.

  Kelp got down into the boat--rockingrockingrocking--to be absolutely certain, even though he was absolutely certain, and the damn thing looked as though the cleaning lady had been. Empty, stripped, bare. You could eat off that boat, if you were really hungry.

  This was a blow. To return to Tiny, and to Tiny's cousin, and to Tiny's cousin's entire nation, boneless, was an uncomfortable prospect. But what else was there to do?

  Nothing.

  Reluctant, still hanging back, still studying this spick-and-span bathtub as though a foot-long bone might yet somehow be concealed within it, Kelp abandoned ship. He stood on the dock, loath to depart. Above, the bright light gleamed down, creating of him a shadowed shadow in the pool of white. On one side chuckled the restless water contained in the concrete U of the dock. On the other side stood the clean white clapboard wall of some sort of storage building that looked as though it had been painted no more than twelve hours ago. Behind, the dubious waters of Buttermilk Channel. Ahead, the chain-link fence, departure, and defeat.

  Even so. Kelp trudged fenceward.

  All this planning, for nothing. Finding just the right truck, a big boxy thing with a door in its side. Giving it new license plates and a quick spray-paint job. Paying just the right city employee a small honorarium for a Xerox of the appropriate architectural drawings of that section of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel containing the ventilation tower. Studying the actual physical tunnel and locating the door beside the catwalk that led to the service area beneath that tower. Riding in the back of the truck while Stan Murch drove it into the tunnel at a late enough nighttime hour that there would be moments when no other vehicle was in sight and the duty cop dozed in
his glass cage, so he could stop it right next to the access door and Kelp could step briskly from truck to catwalk over the railing and through the door while Murch drove on.

  Coming here like a mouse in the walls while Murch circled the boroughs in the truck, commissioned to return to that spot in the tunnel every half hour until Kelp should emerge from the access door and slip back into the body of the truck. And all for what?

  Bitter disappointment.

  Kelp moved away from the denuded boat toward the chain-link fence.

  Something to his left caught his eye. When he veered toward it, he saw a something or other neatly folded and placed on the concrete ground next to the white building. He bent and lifted a corner of it. A tarpaulin, folded as neatly and compactly as an American flag. The tarpaulin?

  Next to the possible tarpaulin was a round trash barrel, bright white plastic body and dark blue domed top with a little swing door inset in it. An exhortation of some sort was printed on the body of the barrel, as though such exhortations were needed around this place.

  Kelp would never make a Coastguardsperson; he just didn't have that innate natural neatness. For instance, when he ripped the blue dome off the trash barrel, he just flipped it away any which how. And the Burger King wrappers and chewing-gum wrappers and Reader's Digests he pulled from the barrel, he flung behind him to left and right without any regard for symmetry or order. Just a mess.

  It was at the bottom of the barrel. Kelp had this much neatness in his character; he wiped the stray flecks of ketchup off the bone with a couple of used Kleenexes before kissing it.

  Diary of an Escapee e kept to the woods, which made the going pretty slow. Also, he was not very much by way of being a woodsman, but was more of a city person by habit, experience, and inclination, so that made the going kind of difficult. On the other hand, when the going gets slow and difficult, even a city person knows to keep going Downhill wasn't so bad; you could always fall. Roll into a doughnut, breathe slowly and evenly, and hope you don't meet any rocks.