Don't Ask

by Donald E. Westlake

  "You're right about that," Tiny said.

  Zara Kotor," Tiny said, "and Drava Votskonia, this is John Dortmunder and An-drew Kelp."

  "Hi."

  "How are you?"

  "Call me Andy."

  "Sit down, sit down."

  They were in the upstairs parlor at the Tsergovian embassy, amid the tasseled shades and the commemorative plates. All the chairs and sofas up here were deeply stuffed mohair; you sank way down into them, and they itched. Zara Kotor, settling into the big maroon sofa under the ornately framed painting of a corner of a cul-de-sac at midnight during a power failure, patted the mohair seat cushion beside her--puff, puff, the dust lazily rose--for Tiny to come sit beside her, but somehow he managed not to notice and took the settee on the other side of the room.

  All the settee.

  It was Kelp who wound up next to Zara on the sofa, but she paid him no attention. Her eyes were on Tiny as she said, "I'm glad you fellows came around. I was afraid we wouldn't be seeing any more of you, lose touch with one another."

  Tiny shifted on the settee, which groaned piteously, and said, "It's Dortmunder wants to talk to you. That one there."

  "Oh yes," Zara said, eying Dortmunder with wary interest. "You're the one who was captured."

  "And given the runaround."

  "But you escaped." 'They treated me like a rube," Dortmunder said. He was feeling sullen and embarrassed, having to explain himself this way. Treated like a rube; if he didn't do something about that, then they were right, right?

  She looked at his face and nodded, with a little smile of understanding.

  "You want revenge."

  "I want my own back," Dortmunder agreed. "But first I got to know, if you and Votskojek are all so poor, how come they could pull such a major scam?"

  "That's an easy one," she said, her smile turning grim. 'The answer is Harry Hochman."

  "Never heard of him," Dortmunder said.

  "He owns hotels," Zara told him. "Happy Hour Inns."

  "Oh, them," Kelp said happily. "I've got some of their towels."

  "And they've got some of my goat," Dortmunder said. (Grijk looked briefly puzzled.) "But Harry Hochman," Dortmunder went on, "doesn't sound like a Votskojek name."

  "He's an American," Zara said. "He came to Novi Glad years ago, with money in both fists, trying to buy people and governments, and when our country split up he decided to put his bets on Votskojek. If they win, he gets richer."

  "So he financed it, huh? Running me around in Vermont."

  "I think he has a place there." Turning to Grijk, she said, "Get the Hochman file. It's in the black drawer."

  As Grijk obediently lumbered away--thud thud thud, down the stairs--Dortmunder said, "You got a whole file on this guy?"

  "We keep tabs on our enemies," she said, with a glint in her eye. "When the day comes, we'll get our own revenge."

  "If the day comes, you mean."

  "When."

  Dortmunder nodded, thinking about that. He said, "What are you gonna do next, about the bone?"

  "We can't steal it anymore," she said. 'They're alerted to that now."

  "What else is there?"

  Looking very serious and ambassadorial, she said, "We are presenting a formal objection to the General Assembly concerning the makeup of the advisory committee."

  "The archbishop, you mean."

  "Yes."

  "You're saying he's prejudiced or whatever, you want him off your case."

  "Yes."

  "Isn't it kinda late to make that beef?"

  "I'm sorry we didn't do it earlier, yes," she admitted.

  Dortmunder nodded again. "And it won't work now, will it? On account of being so late. So then, besides the archbishop's already got a religious thing against you, because of the bone, now he's gonna have a personal thing, because you said he couldn't be fair."

  "He can't be fair!"

  "Less now than before," Dortmunder pointed out.

  Zara sighed. She was looking less like an ambassador and more like a Bronx Science student. "We know that," she said. "But we tried the other way, and we failed. Now they're on guard against us, and we don't have any more money…"

  "You have a little more," Dortmunder said.

  Instantly, she was all suspicion again, gimlet-eyed and stern jawed, but before she could say anything the thud-thud of Grijk's return sounded, and they all turned to look at the doorway. Grijk stomped in carrying two maroon expansion files with cloth ties in neat bows. He carried these to Zara and she handed one to Kelp, beside her, for safekeeping while untying the other one and fingering through its contents.

  Meanwhile, Grijk went back to his own mohair seat, passing Dortmunder on the way, pausing to say, with quiet sympathy, "I lost a goat once. It was werry sad."

  Dortmunder contemplated that piece of personal history. Grijk resumed his seat, and Zara grunted as she leaned forward to put some papers from the file on the massive dark-wood coffee table, saying, "Mr. Hochman owns a ski resort in Vermont."

  "Does he." Dortmunder picked up from the coffee table a full color brochure of the Mount Kinohaha ski resort. Leafing through it, he saw a bright wintertime photo of the shopping area. "The village," he muttered. "That's it right there, the village they ran me through."

  Kelp got up to come over and peer past Dortmunder's shoulder at the picture. "Gee, John," he said. "With all those skis and things in the windows? And you didn't catch on?"

  "They didn't have skis in the windows," Dortmunder said, with what only looked like patience. "They had food and stuff. And people all dressed in--Ah hah!"

  Kelp looked alert. "Ah hah?"

  "Summer-stock theater," Dortmunder read from the brochure, and pointed to the phrase. "That's where they got all those goddam villagers and their goddam native goddam garb."

  "Boy," Kelp said. "They really put on a whole production for you."

  "Sure," Dortmunder said. "So I'd give up and tell them where the bone is, if they'd promise to bring me back to the States. From Vermont."

  Then he frowned over at Zara, who was still frowningly going through the files. "But what about that Dracula's castle place? Where they were taking me when I got away."

  "Hochman owns a house near there," she said, "They call it a chateau.

  I'm looking for a--Here it is."

  This time, what she'd produced out of the file was a bunch of pages cut from a magazine and stapled together in one corner. She held them out, and Kelp came over to take them and deliver them to Dortmunder; except he moved very slowly coming back, leafing through the pages, becoming absorbed in what he saw.

  Dortmunder said, "Andy? Do you mind?" "What? Oh, no, no. Here." And Kelp handed over the pages.

  Which were from an architecture magazine; a whole article about Harry Hochman's brand-new chateau up in the Green Mountains of Vermont.

  Interior and exterior photos, and gobbledygook copy, leaning heavily on the word volume, as in "volume of air," "volume of space," "contrasting volumes of light and darkness." The "volumes flanking the fireplace" turned out to be books, which confused matters.

  "Doesn't look like Dracula's castle to me," Kelp said. "Looks kinda pretty good, actually."

  Dortmunder pointed to a view of the building from downhill, looking up, the volumes of the design darkly silhouetted against the pale blue volume of the sky. "That's where I saw it from," he said. "Okay?"

  Kelp squinted, the better to see, and gazed judiciously at the picture for so long that Dortmunder finally, to make a point, turned the page and looked at the rest of the article. He studied it briefly, turned back and forth through the pages, then looked over at Zara Kotor.

  "Maybe," he said, "we could help each other out here."

  When in doubt, Zara Kotor invariably fell back on paranoia: "I don't see how," she said, with a frosty look that somehow exempted Tiny, who was keeping as low a profile as possible, given that he was about the size of a minor Alp. "I don't see it at all."

  "Well,"
Dortmunder said, and patted the magazine article open on his knee, "we both want something, seems to me. You want your UN seat, which means you want that bone, and I want to even the score with some smartass room-renters."

  "I told you," she said, "we've given up that approach. Security will be much tighter there now. Besides, if s almost too late anyway. They already have photos of the relic, X rays, some test results."

  "Not enough to prove it's the right one," Dortmunder said.

  "Not yet," she agreed. "But very soon. Then, if we take it, they'll be able to demonstrate they once had it."

  "But not yet."

  "But soon."

  "But not yet. Also, we could lift the test results while we're in the neighborhood."

  Zara expelled an exasperated sigh. "All right. Fine. But it isn't going to happen."

  "Why not?" Dortmunder asked her. "If we move fast, we can do the whole thing. You can join that club you're so hot for, and I can poke this guy Hochman in the eye. If we move fast, and if we help each other."

  "How?"

  "I don't have the details worked out yet," he admitted, "but I will, as long as I know I can count on you people."

  "For what?"

  "Well, you know," Dortmunder said, "behind you, you got a whole country. You got…" he searched for the word "… assets we don't have, being a country."

  "Such as?"

  "Armies, air forces--"

  She recoiled, shocked, bouncing off the sofa-back. "My God, we're not going to war with Votskojek! Not here in New York!"

  "They'd hardly notice, in this town," Dortmunder told her. "But that isn't what I meant. What I meant was, you could give us like backup support, whatever we decide to do."

  "Not necessarily whatever," she said, with a very guarded look. "You know," she said, "you're beginning to remind me of those guys in high school, kind of nerdy guys that you didn't notice very much--Bronx Science was full of them--and one day they'd say, 'I have this idea,' and they'd go off, talking to themselves, and the next thing anybody knew, the lab was on fire."

  "Not this time," Dortmunder said. "If anything catches fire, it won't be your stuff." Turning to Tiny, he said, "You busy, the next couple of days?"

  "Absolutely," Tiny said.

  Dortmunder was interested. "Yeah? Doing what?"

  "Staying away from you," Tiny said.

  Dortmunder nodded. "I understand your feelings," he said.

  "Well," Tiny said, "let me express them, anyway. I'm surprised at you, Dortmunder. Maybe you can make a nice meal outta revenge, but I'm a meat-and-potatoes man."

  "I agree," Dortmunder said.

  "So what I'm saying to you now," Tiny said, "is what you said to me before, when I first brought you this bone thing. You remember?"

  "My family crest, you mean."

  "That's it," Tiny said. "How did that go again?"

  "Quid lucrum istic mihi est?"

  "Yeah, that was it," Tiny agreed. " What's in it for me?' Sorry, Dortmunder, I gotta go along with your forebears."

  "Don't be sorry, Tiny," Dortmunder said. "Just listen to this." And he bowed his head, to read from the magazine pages on his lap: "'Into its own windowless and climate-controlled gallery space beneath the main building, cut dramatically into the volume of the rock-walled mountain itself on which the chateau stands, the Hochmans have moved the bulk of their extensive collection of modern and ancient art. Here Matisses and other Impressionists rub shoulders comfortably with Cretan statuary and early Italian church art. In the low-ceilinged and gently lighted volume of this intricate space, far from the prying eyes of the maddening crowd, the Hochmans can be alone with their beloved art, conservatively valued at more than six million dollars.'"

  "Holy shit," Tiny said, and Kelp looked extremely happy.

  Dortmunder lifted his eyes from the pages. The expression around his mouth was almost a smile. "Turns out," he said, "there's a profit in this thing, after all. My ancestors would be proud."

  The meeting this time was at Dortmunder's place, which meant May's two grocery bags of fringe benefits from the Safeway this evening had assayed out 90 percent beer, 10 percent potato chips. Squatted around the living room, filling it to overflowing, swigging and chomping, May and Kelp and Tiny and Stan Murch all waited for Dortmunder to say something, but Dortmunder was in a brown study, slumped in his favorite chair, brooding at his beer can, eyes clouded. While waiting for Dortmunder to talk, therefore, everybody else talked.

  "I was about ready, with that crowd," Tiny announced, "to see if blood is thicker than water, but maybe this way is better. You got a friend at the UN, it could maybe come in helpful sometimes. With airline tickets or like that."

  "For myself," Kelp said, "I feel I've got a kind of a personal relationship with that bone now, like I knew the kid, whatser name."

  "Ferghana," Tiny reminded him.

  "That's her." Kelp raised his palms, as though hefting a watermelon. "I held that bone," he said. "I moved it from place to place. I rescued it from the DBA. I feel involved with it."

  "What I'm thinking about," Stan said, "is those Vermont mountains. I understand, the quickest way down those things is, you kick it out of gear and shoot down in neutral."

  May said, "Why not just turn the engine off?"

  "You could," allowed Stan. "Of course, now and again, you might want your brakes. Power brakes, you know, they need the engine. Of course, maybe not, if you don't have any real sharp curves in the real steep--"

  "The problem is…" Dortmunder said.

  Everybody shut up and looked at him. But then he didn't say anything else, just sat there and frowned across the room at Kelp's left knee.

  The problem was: time. Dortmunder wasn't used to thinking under pressure like this. Usually, you'd decide what you wanted to take, you'd think about where it was and what security you'd find around it, you'd consider the personnel and the geography and maybe the weather and whatever other factors might be involved, and after a while you'd come up with the way to go in and get it and come back out again without stepping in anything. But here in this situation, he'd become annoyed, he'd become irritated at having been treated with such dismissive disdain, and in front of everybody he'd vowed vengeance, and he'd included Tsergovia and their goddam sparerib in the equation, partly for the tactical support they damn well better provide, and that meant a deadline. If this thing were gonna get done, it was better that it got itself done soonest. So that was the problem; anybody can think fast, it's how to think fast when you have to.

  Dortmunder not expressing any of this aloud--how could he, when it was more mood and feeling than coherent thought?--the others gave up waiting and started to chat again among themselves.

  "The nice thing," May said, "is that we don't have to go to Vermont in the winter. I understand it can get brutal up there."

  Kelp nodded soberly. "Slipping and sliding down mountains with paintings in our arms," he said. "Not a pretty picture."

  "Oh, I don't know," Tiny said "Some of them modern things are okay. We could use something in our living room, Josie and me, over the sofa.

  Something in, you know, different shades of green. That's what Josie says. Maybe Fll take part of my piece in a painting."

  May said, "You'd better have J.C. pick out the painting herself."

  "Oh, yeah," Tiny agreed. "I know that much."

  Stan said, "I don't know how my Mom's gonna take to Vermont, should she has to go there. You know how she gets, outside the city. You think we'll need her?"

  "No telling," May said.

  Kelp said, "If she could look on it like a vacation, maybe--" 'The other problem is," Dortmunder said, and stopped, staring sightlessly at a stain on the opposite wall where an intrusive policeman had once rested the palm of his hand, at a moment when May had been explaining that she had no suggestion to make concerning her consort's then-whereabouts.

  The other problem was, this was two jobs in one, and they were two hundred miles apart. Security around the bone was gon
na be a lot tighter now than the last time, and who knew what kind of security Harry Hochman had at his chateau in Vermont? Wasn't there something in history about not opening a war on two fronts? Where's the manpower coming from, just to begin with? And how do you keep control over what's happening in New York and Vermont at the same time?

  Do you do them at different times?

  Is there any way to tie them together?

  The observers waited, and waited, wondering not only what the other problem was but also what the first problem had been, but Dortmunder seemed to have nothing else to say. Then he was seen to sigh, and to drink from his beer can--but not. It was empty. He gave the thing a reproachful look, shook it--no slosh--and got to his feet. He left the room, and Kelp said, "I don't know, May, could be this time John bit off--"

  Dortmunder stuck his head back into the room. "Tiny," he said.

  "Yeah?"

  "Call your people over there, ask them, can they get us a helicopter."

  And Dortmunder's head retracted from the room again.

  "I don't know about that," Tiny said, but he reached for the phone.

  With a happy smile, Kelp said, "We haven't been in a helicopter in a long time. Remember that, Stan?"

  Stan looked a little grumpy. "Probably," he said, "these people would have their own driver."

  In the kitchen, Dortmunder stood in front of the open refrigerator, thinking. "And the other other problem is," he said aloud, "the UN," finishing a sentence for once.

  The problem with the UN was, if the Tsergovians got their bone with any kind of cloud on it, questions about how they happened to have it in their possession, stufflike that, it could make things worse for them instead of better, when it came to influencing people over at the United Nations to give them that seat. So, however the heist was pulled, it had to wind up with the bone clean. Like a stolen car where you've got beautiful paper. Somehow they had to find the equivalent of beautiful paper for a bone.

  Dortmunder began to shiver; it was damn cold in here. Then he realized he was still standing in front of the open refrigerator, so he closed the door, turned away, turned back, opened the door, took out a beer, closed the door, opened the beer (bending his thumbnail back so it hurt), and, sucking his thumb, walked thoughtfully back to the living room, where Tiny said, "No helicopter."