Don't Ask

by Donald E. Westlake

  "What?"

  Tiny shook his head, having expected something like this. "You forgot, huh?"

  "Oh, the helicopter," Dortmunder said, and spilled beer on himself while sitting down. Ignoring that, he drank some of the brew and said, "Okay, no helicopter."

  Kelp said, "That doesn't louse up your plan?"

  "What plan?" Dortmunder asked him; he was really interested.

  "I just thought you had something," Kelp explained.

  Dortmunder nodded, understanding. Then he went on nodding a while, so the others went back to their conversation, Stan saying to Tiny, "If this country doesn't have any helicopters, what about their boats? Maybe we could disguise an aircraft carrier or something, probably something smaller, sneak up the East River, grapple onto their boat, do it that way."

  Tiny shook his head. "They don't have a navy," he said.

  Kelp said, 'Tiny, everybody has a navy. Every country, I mean."

  "Not Tsergovia," Tiny said. "Or the other one, either. Votskojek. They don't have any seacoast, so they don't have a navy."

  Disappointed, Stan said, "So they won't have any boats, then."

  "Well," Tiny said, "they'd have a hell of a time getting them into the water."

  May said, "Maybe that's why the Votskojeks put their embassy on a boat.

  Maybe to them it's romantic, something different."

  "Could be," Tiny said without much interest.

  Dortmunder said, "Andy."

  Everybody looked at him. Kelp said, "Yes, John?"

  "You know a lot of people," Dortmunder told him.

  Kelp grinned. "I don't know everybody" he said, "but I do know a lot, you're right."

  "I'm thinking about fences," Dortmunder said.

  Kelp said, "John? That you sell to, or climb over?"

  Dortmunder struggled for an answer. "The one with money," he decided.

  "Okay."

  Tiny said, "Dortmunder, isn't this a little early? Shouldn't we go get the stuff first?"

  "Not this time." Dortmunder reached out in front of himself and made little feeble clutching gestures with the fingertips of his right hand.

  "What I've got," he said, "is I got a corner of something, I think I got a corner of something, and if I'm right we got to know we got the fence ahead of time. A very special fence."

  Kelp said, "You know the same guys I do, John."

  "I hope not," Dortmunder said. "What I hope, I hope you know a guy we wouldn't normally use, that you'd only use if you had a big, major, important big-league haul, a guy that wouldn't be interested in just some little jewelry store."

  Nodding, Kelp said, "A conservative estimate six million dollar value fine art collection kind offence, is that what you mean?"

  "Yes," Dortmunder said simply.

  "Well, John," Kelp said, "I haven't had that much call in my life for guys like that, but it could happen that I might know guys that know guys. Let me look around, okay?"

  "Go ahead," Dortmunder said.

  "It's not the kind of question you ask on the phone," Kelp pointed out.

  "I'd have to go talk to people."

  "Fine," Dortmunder said, and sat there looking at him.

  Kelp gazed around the room, and now they were all looking at him. He met Dortmunder's eyes again and said, "Oh, you mean now?"

  "Couldn't hurt," Dortmunder said.

  Kelp had been enjoying the party, sitting with the others around Dortmunder's burning brain, chatting about things. Oh, well. "Sure, John," he said, and got to his feet. "If it won't be too late, I'll come back here."

  "It won't be too late," Dortmunder assured him.

  "So that's what I'll do," Kelp said, and Dortmunder nodded. But then Dortmunder's head kept slowly bobbing, up and down, up and down, so Kelp knew this latest contact between John Dortmunder and Planet Earth had come to an end for now, so he said so long to the others and left, and six minutes later Dortmunder interrupted general conversation again to say, "Stan."

  "Here," Stan announced.

  Dortmunder gazed piercingly at him. "Who's a good driver?"

  Stan reared up a little. "What kind of question is that? I'm a good driver!"

  "Another one."

  "My Mom!"

  Dortmunder sighed a little. He said, "Could we move out beyond you and your family a little?"

  Stan said, "How many drivers you gonna need?"

  "I don't know yet. Who's good?"

  "Well, there's always Fred Lartz," Stan said, and grudgingly added,

  "He's pretty good."

  Dortmunder said, "I thought he gave up driving."

  "Well, yeah," Stan said, "but now his wife, Thekna, drives. He kind of just sits beside her."

  "So Thelma's the driver."

  "In a way. I thought you knew that."

  "How is she?"

  "Good, John," Stan said with an air of some surprise. "You know, she's better than Fred ever was."

  May said, "I never did understand why Fred Lartz gave up driving."

  Stan did the explanation, since Dortmunder was getting that faraway look in his eyes again. "Seems like, coming home from a wedding, he took a wrong turn off the Van Wyck, out by Kennedy airport, he wound up on taxiway seventeen, ran into an Eastern Airlines plane out of Miami, spent a couple of months in the hospital, doesn't trust his instincts anymore. So Thelma drives, and Fred sits beside her."

  Dortmunder focused again. "Can we get him?"

  "Her, you mean," May said.

  "Well, both of them."

  Stan said, "For when?"

  That was the question, wasn't it? Dortmunder looked in absolute agony, as though undergoing some sort of anesthetic-free operation in the area of the lower torso. Finally, he said, "Today is,uhhhhhh…"

  "Wednesday," May told him.

  Dortmunder sighed. Now he looked as though he had a toothache, probably an abscess. "Saturday," he decided.

  Everybody was surprised. May said, "That soon?"

  "Saturday isn't soon," Dortmunder said. 'They've got, uh… Is Wednesday the day just finished, or the day just starting?"

  "What, today?" May had to think a second. "The day just finished."

  "So that gives them two more full days with the bone," Dortmunder said.

  "To take pictures, measurements, X rays, all this stuff, all this record. Ifd be better if we could do it tomorrow, but we can't."

  Tiny said, "There you're right."

  Stan said, "So, do you want me to get ahold of Fred?"

  "Thelma, you mean," May said.

  "Well," Stan said, "Fred does the bookings."

  "Go see them," Dortmunder said, with unexpected tact, "and ask are they ready Saturday for a maybe."

  Stan sat back to think it over. "They moved up to the Bronx to get away from the airport," he mused. "So, with the construction on the Bruckner, I think I'll stay on the Henry Hudson. It's a toll across Spuyten Duyvil, but it's worth it."

  "Good," Dortmunder said. He watched Stan, waiting for him to go away.

  Stan finished his beer at his leisure, and looked around. "Anybody want a lift?"

  "You're the only one going," Dortmunder said.

  "Be back," Stan decided, and got to his feet, and left.

  Tiny said, "Dortmunder, don't send me nowhere."

  But Dortmunder wasn't listening. Instead, spilling a little more beer, he pawed around on the floor beside his chair and came up at last with the torn-out magazine pages he'd borrowed from Zara Kotor. ("Tiny can bring them back," she'd suggested, "when you're done.") Beetling his brow at the pretty color pictures of the interior of Harry Hochman's Vermont chateau, he said, "Call them, see do they have any spy stuff."

  Tiny and May were the only others left in the room, and both guessed it was Tiny that Dortmunder was talking to. Tiny was on much of the sofa, with the phone on the end table perilously close to his right elbow.

  Picking up the receiver, dialing, he said, "If you had a phone with redial, this would be easier."

  "Don't t
alk like Andy," Dortmunder said.

  Apparently, the phone rang a long time. Then Tiny began to talk, and at one point they heard him say, "No, I didn't know it was that late," but not as though he cared. Then he asked his question, and turned to say to Dortmunder, "Grijk says, sure. They got all kinds of spy stuff. What kind of stuff do you need?"

  Dortmunder shrugged. "Telephoto lenses," he suggested. "Microphone bugs that you can shoot with arrows. All that James Bond stuff."

  James Bond stuff, Tiny said into the phone, and then reported to Dortmunder, "He says they got a ton of that kind of crap. The only thing is, it's thirdhand. They bought it from Pakistan and Cyprus, and they bought it from Mexico and Australia and Kuwait."

  "Does it still work?"

  "Oh, sure. Usually. Except it's long off the warranty, you know."

  Dortmunder looked at May. "It's discouraging, sometimes," he said. "Not working with the best equipment. I feel like it's holding me back."

  "You'll do the best you can," May assured him.

  "Well, yeah, sure." To Tiny, Dortmunder said, "Tell him we'll come around tomorrow--I don't know, eleven o'clock--see what he's got."

  "Morning or night?"

  "What?" Dortmunder worked his way back through the conversation, found the area that matched the question, and said, "Morning. Eleven tomorrow morning." While Tiny spoke into the phone again, Dortmunder frowned massively at May, and eventually said, "Do we have a map?"

  May, used to his behavior under these circumstances, and not fazed by it, said reassuringly, "I'm sure we do. Anything in particular you want to see on it?"

  He gestured with both hands, the magazine pages flapping. "You know, here and, uh, there. Vermont."

  "Vermont," she said, getting to her feet.

  "And here."

  She left the room, and Dortmunder looked at the pages in his hand as though they were an anonymous crank letter. After a while, Tiny got off the phone and said, 'They'll be waiting for you tomorrow, eleven o'clock, with all the stuff, whatever they got."

  "Waiting for us," Dortmunder corrected.

  But Tiny shook his head, refusing to accept the correction. "Waiting for you. Zara already knows, I got this dental appointment tomorrow, just can't break it."

  "Oh, I didn't know that," Dortmunder said.

  "Now you do," Tiny said with emphasis. He looked around. "Where'd you send May?"

  "Vermont."

  "What?" Tiny said, but then May came in with the results of her search of the bedroom and kitchen: two roadmaps and a fifteen year-old almanac.

  One road map was New York City and environs and the other was New England. The almanac contained maps, though mostly of larger groupings like continents. "The nice thing about the New England map," she said, dumping all this into Dortmunder's lap, "you can see New York City down at the lower left."

  Yes, he could. And after a long and irritating search, he could also see Middleville, Vermont, the flyspeck that was the mailing address of Mount Kinohaha Happy Hour Inns Ski Resort and Summer Arts Center, which the Harry Hochman chateau was somewhere near.

  And all of which was quite a ways up this map from New York City. Dortmunder tried to work out the mileages, point A to point B to point C, and so on, and so on, and finally decided Mount Kinohaha was somewhere between 240 and 320 miles from New York. Say five hours by car. Bennington, Vermont, had an airport--an international airport, thank you very much--but, given their travel motivations, maybe they should forget public transportation.

  So, you'd go from here to there, and from there to here…

  So what? Dortmunder lifted his head to stare piercingly through Titty's forehead at something a block away. "Do they have a picture?"

  "Sure," Tiny said. "Who, of what?"

  "Them," Dortmunder explained. "When it's in the church."

  "Oh, you mean the bone? How it's displayed? When it's at home?"

  "The Rivers of Blood Cathedral," Dortmunder said, remembering Hradec Kralowc's sales pitch when he'd been Diddums the tourist. "In Novi Glad."

  "Grijk's gonna love this," Tiny suggested, and made the call.

  Dortmunder looked around the room, but May wasn't there. He was trying to figure that out when she came in with fresh beers for all three of them, already opened. She put Titty's down next to the phone--he was rumbling at somebody on it, presumably Grijk-- hers down next to her chair, and came over to take Dortmunder's empty out of his other hand and insert the fresh one in its place. Now he had maps in one hand, beer in the other, and almanac and magazine pages on his lap. He looked up at her and said, "I forget."

  "Forget what?"

  He shook his head. "I don't know. Something."

  Tiny said, "Grijk says they got lots of pictures."

  Dortmunder said, "Have him describe it. Where's the thing kept? Out where people can see it?"

  Tiny relayed the question and the answer: "Yeah."

  "How? Is it in anything?"

  Question; answer. "It's in a glass box, like a little glass coffin, on an altar cloth, on an altar, in one of the side places in the cathedral.

  Wait a minute." Tiny listened some more, then said, "A glass box vid--with jewels on it."

  "Can he find out where it is now?"

  "Dortmunder, why don't you talk to him yourself)"

  "He's your cousin," Dortmunder said. "And you're right there with the phone."

  Tiny muttered but then asked the question and reported the answer:

  "He'll call Osigreb in the morning."

  "Who's that?"

  "It's a what, Dortmunder not a who. It's the capital of Tsergovia."

  "Okay."

  Tiny listened to the phone, nodded, and said, "Grijk says, you got more questions, why not ask in the morning?"

  "Dr. Zorn," Dortmunder said.

  Tiny lowered an eyebrow at Dortmunder, but he repeated the name into the phone, then said to Dortmunder, "He's a very bad man. You want a doctor, Grijk'll recommend you a great doctor, official doctor to the Tsergovia Olympic team. You don't want Dr. Zorn; he murders babies."

  Dortmunder said, "He doesn't eat them?"

  "I was leaving that part out," Tiny explained, "on account of May."

  "Thank you, Tiny," May said.

  Tiny was still listening to the phone. "He's got no morals, he sells out to the highest bidder." Then he interpolated, hand over mouthpiece,

  "We're still on Dr. Zorn here."

  "I got that," Dortmunder assured him.

  "Okay." Into the phone, Tiny said, with surprised interest, "Oh, yeah?"

  Then he said to Dortmunder, "He lives in a big castle in Votskojek that he bought from the Frankenstein family."

  "Sounds like the right guy," Dortmunder said. "Does Grijk know where he is?"

  Tiny asked, and answer came there, "In New York. He's working for the UN on famine relief. Grijk says it's a trawisty. What's a trawisty?"

  "Something they have in Eastern Europe," Dortmunder told him.

  "Oh." Tiny listened to the phone, nodded, looked at Dortmunder again.

  "Now he's got a question for you." Listened some more. "He wants to know, can he go to sleep now?"

  "Why not?" Dortmunder said.

  Tiny gave him a look, then spoke reassuringly into the phone and hung up, and it rang. So he picked it up again, said a very belligerent "Yeah," and looked over at Dortmunder to say, "It's Kelp."

  "Good."

  Tiny extended the receiver. "You want to take this call?"

  But Dortmunder shook his head, saying, "You're right there."

  "I may have to move this phone," Tiny said. "In fact, I may have to move the wall." Into the phone, he snarled, "So what's your good news?" He listened. "Oh, yeah?" Listened some more. "Okay." Listened some more.

  "Sure." Listened some more. "Wait, I'll tell him."

  "About time," Dortmunder said.

  Tiny said, "He says he's got a guy. A fence. He talked to the guy, and the guy is maybe interested, but not without a meet."

&n
bsp; "Good," Dortmunder said. "He's coming over to pick me up?"

  "Dortmunder," Tiny said, "it's nighttime."

  "Oh, right," Dortmunder said. "Late, huh."

  "The guy wants to meet you at one o'clock tomorrow," Tiny said. "So Kelp'11 come by, twelve-thirty."

  "No," Dortmunder said. "He can meet me at the store at eleven."

  "It's an embassy, Dortmunder."

  "He'll know what I mean."

  But when Tiny passed the message on, he used the word embassy. Then he hung up and said, "He'll be there. I won't, he will," and the phone rang. Tiny looked at it without love. Tm getrin tired of this," he said.

  May said, "We don't usually get this many calls late at night."

  "Nobody does except hospitals," Tiny said, and picked up the phone and bit it in half. Well, not quite; but his hello could give you a cauliflower ear. Then he modulated slightly, saying, "Hello, Stan. No, nothing's wrong."

  "I knew it was Stan," Dortmunder said.

  "I'll tell him," Tiny said, and did: "Fred can do it."

  "Thelma, you mean," May said.

  "Both of them," Tiny told her. "They're on tap." He listened to the phone again, nodded, and said, "I'll be sure to pass that on." Then he whomped the receiver back onto the hook and said, "He says stay off the Henry Hudson, they're working on the tollbooths."

  "I'll remember that," Dortmunder promised.

  "Good. And here's another. If this phone rings again, Dortmunder, you're gonna need a new one. You may need a proctologist." However the phone kept silent as Tiny heaved himself to his feet, saying, "We're done for tonight."

  "I guess so," Dortmunder said. He had started to look his normal self again, depressed, but not brain damaged.

  "I'll walk you out," May told Tiny, and did, while Dortmunder sat drinking beer. When she returned, he had the almanac open and was squinting at it. "You know," he said, "there really are all these weird countries."

  "Well, at least now you've got a plan," she said.

  He gaped at her. "I do?" i's id," Grijk said.

  Dortmunder looked at the top picture of the stack of glossy eight-by-tens. It showed, in brilliant but washed-out color, what was apparently a cathedral niche, an ancient gray stone wall across die back, a crumbly stone arch up above in front. A stone step raised the rear half of the niche's floor, on which stood an altar swathed in cloths of many colors. Centered atop the altar was a glass box edged with gold or brass and surmounted by an elaborately carved golden handle that looked as though it would cut you if you weren't careful. Gleaming dots of red and green and blue and brilliant white were either gemstones fixed to the metal or unwanted light refractions; the lighting of this picture was really very crappy. Inside the glass box lurked something pale and unidentifiable.