Don't Ask

by Donald E. Westlake

  It was now 12:17. "Let me know," Dortmunder said, "when it's ten minutes to one."

  "Vha'd we do in the meandime, Chon?"

  "I'm gonna nap," Dortmunder said, and went back to the Hyundai, and was just settling into some nice soothing sleep when Grijk knocked on his knee and said, "Den minudes do one."

  "Okay," Dortmunder said, sitting up, yawning. "Let's go do it again."

  "Da same ding?"

  "The same thing," Dortmunder agreed, and led the way back to that unlocked window--still unlocked, they hadn't found it-- where he did it again.

  Second go-round, response time from the house even shorter, almost down to thirty seconds. Sheriff response also shorter, nine minutes.

  Ah, but the search of the chateau was also shorter than before, nor was there any eyeballing this time of the Hyundai and the dump.

  "Good," Dortmunder said when everything was quiet once more. "Before we do it again--"

  "We gonna do id again, Chon?" 'That's why we're here, Grijk."

  "Id is?"

  "It is. But before we do it again, let's use some of that spy stuff of yours."

  So this time, while wandering around the buildings, they used some of the spy stuff. Grijk had brought along, for instance, little microphones with suction cups. You stuck one of these in an inconspicuous spot on a window, and your radio, once you tuned it to the right frequency, would play for you every sound taking place in that room.

  For the art gallery, a windowless room, there was an even more sensitive and powerful microphone that attached with two sharp--"Ouch!"--talons to the wood of the door. Other equipment hooked into the four phone lines emerging from the chateau and the residence. All of this stuff was twinned to radio equipment stuffed into the trunk of the Hyundai.

  Everything was old and used and thirdhand, like the Hyundai itself, but everything had just been tested by Grijk, back in New York, and it all still worked.

  It was five minutes after two when they were finished. By now, all the lights were out and the TV switched off over in the occupied residence.

  This was a very quiet and peaceful mountain when Dortmunder headed for that unlocked window to do it again… and found it locked. "They got it this time," he said.

  Grijk had been yawning and yawning. "So now we go home?" he asked.

  "Not yet."

  Dortmunder tromped around to the front of the house, used his own square of flexible metal to open the main door there without leaving any marks, counted slowly to five, then shut the door and strolled away with Grijk as, behind them, lights popped on in the other building.

  Slowing down now. Almost two minutes response time from the two armed guys next door, and sixteen minutes for the sheriff's three cars. A very brief inspection of the chateau, this time listened to by Dortmunder and Grijk, moving from frequency to frequency, microphone to microphone, as the searchers moved from room to room.

  The searchers were getting irritated. "It's iustgotta be a short," they kept telling one another, and the guys from next door kept assuring the sheriff's men they'd phone the alarm service first thing in the morning.

  Dortmunder was most interested to hear what they had to say when they reached the art gallery. "Wait a minute, there, let me turn off the other one," said a voice he recognized by now as one of the locals.

  "Shit," said a deputy's voice, "I can see in there from the doorway; there's nothing and nobody in there. Ilfsgotta. be a short."

  "Well, do you want me to turn it off or not? I got the picture down already."

  "Nah, the hell with it."

  "If you say so."

  It was a brisk walk the searchers took through the chateau this time, scanning most of the rooms merely from the doorway, as they'd done with the art gallery. In hardly any time at all, they were through and outside and saying good night to one another.

  Once the crowd of them were out, and the front door had been slammed shut, Dortmunder and Grijk shut off the radios to the chateau but kept the telephone intercepts alive. "They should be about due to make a phone call now," he said, and as he said so the sound began: the beeps and quinks of an outbound long-distance call.

  There were half a dozen rings before a sleepy male voice somewhere else in the world said, "Hochman residence."

  "Simmons again," said the local voice, and it sounded really annoyed.

  "The damn alarm system just keeps going off and going off. There's nobody there, there's nothing--"

  "Well, what do you want me to do about it?" demanded the long-distanced voice, also sounding irritated. "I'm certainly not going to wake Mr.

  Hochman at this--"

  "Just tell him, in the morning, the system's--"

  "I said I would, the last time you called."

  "He's gotta get them on it, first thing."

  "He will, Simmons, all right?"

  "It just keeps going off."

  "You need not," said the long-distance voice in a very frosty manner,

  "report it to me if it does so again. Not tonight. Good night, Simmons."

  And the phone went bang.

  "Good," Dortmunder said. "We can shut all this stuff down now."

  They did, and closed the Hyundai trunk, and Grijk said, "What now, Chon?"

  "Now," Dortmunder said, "we give them a quick one." And he walked briskly up the dirt road an dover to the chateau to open and close the front door, then retired to the usual vantage point.

  The response this time was pathetic; one guy without his shotgun but with his flashlight came clumping across, a full three minutes after Dortmunder had tripped the alarm. One sheriff's car, no sirens, no flashing lights, showed up five minutes later, but of course he wouldn't even have been back to headquarters yet when the new call had come in; and his two pals had continued on, not bothering to come back.

  This time, there appeared to be some sort of heated words expelled into the night air in front of the chateau, between local and deputy, before the sheriff's car peeled off over the mountain, burning rubber, and the unarmed resident stomped back home and slammed his door.

  "What time is it?" Dortmunder asked.

  "Den minudes do dree. In da morning."

  "Wake me," Dortmunder said, "at five after four."

  "Chon? Vad am I supposed to do vile you're sleeping?"

  "Bring back all your spy stuff. We don't need it anymore." And, ignoring Grijk's wounded eyes, Dortmunder curled up on the backseat of the Hyundai, snoozed very satisfactorily for over an hour, and got up with hardly any aches or spasms when Grijk awoke him at five after four.

  Dortmunder scratched and stretched in front of the sagging Grijk. "This one should do it," he predicted, and went cheerily off to open and close the chateau's front door.

  That one did it. Not a light went on in the other house. No sheriff's car showed up. "Now," Dortmunder said, "we can go home and get some sleep."

  The last time the back room at the OJ had been this crowded was when everybody was trying to figure out who among them had stolen the Byzantine Fire, a priceless ruby belonging to Turkey or the United States or somebody, the lifting of which had caused such official wrath, such unrelenting heat, there were still people serving sentences upstate only because they were holding the wrong items at the moment they happened to be dredged up in the sweep. Many people then had blamed Dortmunder for the situation, until the true culprit had been exposed. A peaceful person, Dortmunder had long since forgiven everybody.

  But there was still a little pang of remembered terror when he found himself once again in this setting with all these people. Fortunately, he was fresh and rested from his vacation yesterday and this morning in the mountains, and he knew nobody here harbored any more suspicion concerning him and that miserable ruby, so he could rise above his instinctive fears and chair the meeting. "Tiny Bulcher and Andy Kelp gave you all the rundown on what we're doing here, right?" he asked, and looked around to receive general agreement from all these familiar faces.

  Familiar faces. Over there w
as Wally Whistler, tanned and ready, back from a long stay in Brazil. A longer stay than he'd planned, in fact.

  Usually, the way Wally Whistler traveled was by extradition; confess to the local police a crime you claim to have committed in the country to which you wish to travel, then retract the confession and demonstrate your ironclad alibi once the extradition is complete. Unfortunately, between Brazil and the United States there is no extradition treaty, a fact Wally had learned only too late. It had galled him, but finally he'd admitted defeat and performed enough burglaries around Sao Paulo to buy a first class ticket home. The worst of it, he now said, wasn't spending the money; it was the traveling alone, without the accompanying police escort who usually helped so accommodatingly to while away the time.

  And there was Jim O'Hara, out of prison again, skin still pale and gray-looking. It seemed to Dortmunder that every time he saw Jim O'Hara, the guy was either going into prison or coming out. Their last encounter, a few years ago, had ended on a rooftop downtown, when Jim had made the error of taking a fire escape down into the arms of the waiting police while Dortmunder had more sensibly legged it the other way.

  And over there was Fred Lartz, the driver, almost as good as Stan Murch (but don't tell Stan that). Of course, Fred's wife, Thelma, did all the actual driving these days, but Fred was still the one who made the meetings.

  And here's Gus Brock, sitting blunt and four-square, with a grim expression on his face, as though his mustache was too heavy. And Harry Matlock and Ralph Demrovsky, a burglary tag team so proficient and persistent, they always traveled by van, just in case they happened across something too heavy to carry. And Ralph Winslow, debonair lockman, who always had a glass in his hand with ice cubes cheerfully tinkling, which meant he'd by necessity become adept at stripping locks one-handed.

  "What we're doing here," Dortmunder told all these people, "is two different jobs. Well, no, it's three, but we're not doing the third one; a bunch of people over in Europe are doing that. In fact, the word is, they already did it. Right, Grijk?"

  Grijk grinned and held up his massive left fist, around which was curled a sheet of slippery, shiny, crappy paper. "We god a fax," he announced. "We incurzed da Rivers a Blood Catedral; we god da box; id's flyin here righd now on a Coca-Cola plane." Dortmunder frowned. "I thought you said Pepsi-Cola." "Vun a dem," Grijk said, and waved a dismissive hand, the one with the fax wrapped around it. Because, after all, to an Eastern European, all American logos look alike.

  Here's the situation: As major American corporations rush to bring Western culture to the opening markets of Eastern Europe--Pizza Hut, Kleenex, Budweiser--there's a certain amount of quidding taking place among all the quo. (Not necessarily to the extent that Harry Hochman and Hradec Kralowc were fondling one another, but still.) Corporate jets traverse the globe all the time, bearing vitally important executives to vitally important meetings, and there's always room aboard for a diplomatic courier from a recently friendly--that is, profitable-- nation. The soft-drink Lockheed currently skying NYward would not be subjected to any customs and immigration indignities upon landing in New York, nor would the courier riding it, bringing with him the medium-size pet carrier labeled:

  MITZI

  Ambassador Zara Kotor's PomeranianBeware of Dog Extremely Dangerous

  Extremely quiet, too, as it happened.

  "Okay," Dortmunder said. "Part one is taken care of. Now, part two, I've got to tell you, and I'm sorry about this, but part two is ridiculous.

  Part two is, we steal a bone. It isn't worth anything to you and me, but it's worth something to Grijk there and the people from his country, so we're doing it for them. Because, part three is where we get our own.

  Part three is rare and valuable art, worth more than six mil, and Grijk and his country are gonna help us lift it. Right, Grijk?"

  "Right!" Grijk flew his fax again briefly and beamed around at the mob.

  Harry Matlock, speaking for himself and his partner, Ralph Demrovsky, said, "Dortmunder? Six mil, you say."

  "Around that."

  "What's in it for us?"

  "We got a very high-powered fence," Dortmunder told him. "Not like the usual run of guy. He's gonna dicker with the insurance company for us."

  Gus Brock said, "But…" and looked alert.

  "But he gets half."

  Nobody in the room liked that. That is, those who'd been aboard this thing from the beginning--Tiny Bulcher, Andy Kelp, and Stan Murch--understood the situation and didn't bother to like it or dislike it, but the seven new guys all didn't like it, and made that clear with grunts, body language, and the shaking of heads. Ralph Winslow cleared his throat, clattered the ice cubes in his glass, and said, "Does he get half of a bigger pie? Is that why he's worth it?"

  "We hope so," Dortmunder said. "But for now, let's say it winds up he gets a million."

  "He should do better than that," Ralph said.

  "Probably he will," Dortmunder agreed. "But we're doing worst-case here.

  Worst-case, he gets a mil, he keeps half, we split half a mil about eleven ways, that5s--"

  "Forty-five thousand," Ralph Demrovsky said, "four hundred fifty-four bucks. More or less."

  "So that isn't bad," Dortmunder pointed out, "for a weekend's work."

  "It should be more," Ralph Winslow said, and Ralph Demrovsky said,

  "Ralph's right," and Ralph Winslow said, "Ralphs are always right," and Ralph Winslow and Ralph Demrovsky smiled at one another in perfect convivial understanding.

  Dortmunder said, "So that means you two are out?"

  The Ralphs stopped smiling. Ralph Demrovsky said, "Who said such a thing? Did I?"

  Ralph Winslow said, "John, if you can renegotiate with this amazing fence, I know you'll do it. If you can't, and what we get is what we get, then that's what we get. I'm in."

  "Naturally," Ralph Demrovsky said.

  Dortmunder looked around the room. "Everybody?"

  There was more shuffling, there was more body language, there was more grunting of discontent, but in the end everybody agreed with the Ralphs; they were in. "Good," Dortmunder said.

  Then Harry Matlock said, "You say a weekend's work, and you say two jobs. When do we do all this?"

  "Well," Dortmunder told him, "the main stuff is tomorrow night, but there's some setting up first. We need places to stash some stuff, and vehicles, and like that. Also, tonight we got to send a team up to Vermont, with Grijk here in charge, to keep the burglar alarm active."

  Fred Lartz said, "That's sounding like a job for me."

  "It is," Dortmunder agreed. "I'll give you a credit card; you and Thelma might as well stay at the ski place up there. I can recommend it."

  Wally Whistler, who seemed to speak now with a faint Portuguese accent, after his long stay in Brazil, said, "You got something now in Vermont.

  Nothing in New York? That's it for tonight?"

  "Well, no," Dortmunder said. "Like I say, the main robbery's tomorrow night, but tonight we got to do a little preliminary something here in town." 'What?"

  "A kidnapping," Dortmunder said.

  Karver Zorn, M.D., F.A.C.S., F.R.C.S., P.C., R.N., C.N.M., D.D.S., D.M.D. (all disputed), sat at the old organ in the chancel of the deconsecrated church he called home and played an execrable version of Also Spracht Zamthustm. Well, in the first place, it's getting harder and harder these days to find a competent organ tuner; in fact, in some parts of the world, it's just about impossible. So when Dr. Zorn's scrubbed fingertip pressed upon a particular stained ivory key, the note that groaned or squawked out of the mighty machine curving all around him like an Art Deco half-moon was not necessarily the note that was supposed to emanate at that moment. In the second place, Dr. Zorn was a pretty miserable musician, and the key his scrubbed fingertip pressed upon was just as likely to be the wrong one. But none of that mattered, really, because, in the third place, Dr. Zorn was tone-deaf.

  Given all of the above, it was fortunate for Dr. Zorn's neighbors that he didn't h
ave any. The slum clearance project that had made this church de trop had swept through this once-bustling and -vibrant community in the South Bronx like the twentieth century's version of the black plague, but had done it a full genera tion ago, demolishing, leveling, razing, pounding everything flat and then pulverizing the remains beneath the treads of mighty yellow machines as intelligent as their masters.

  And why didn't St. Crispinian succumb when all about it fell to the planners' scythe? The building had to be deconsecrated before it could be destroyed, an arcane ritual that causes no harm to the structure but the lack of which can cause political harm in the general area. By the time the two bureaucracies, divine and mundane, had completed all their mumbo jumbo, yet another of society's agonizing reappraisals had taken place, it had belatedly been realized that the wanton destruction of living communities for the sake of the erection of dead projects was wrong, and the whole plan had been scrapped. A chain-link fence was put around the area, and the planners all turned their serious, busy, college trained numskulls to the next corner they could brighten.

  Leaving St. Crispinian. The Church didn't want the church back, having deconsecrated it and it having been stripped of its entire congregation.

  The city didn't want to know about it-- though the city owned it now--because past errors are not merely embarrassing but are also uncomfortable hints that present schemes might also be imperfect. Yet leaving it there, all alone for blocks and blocks in every direction, boarded up however efficiently, was an open invitation to vandals, druggies, general criminals, cultists, and all sorts of undesirables.

  Many are the small accommodations that take place between the United Nations headquarters apparat in Manhattan and the city government of New York. Each finds the other irritating but indispensable, and each occasionally finds the other useful. And so it was that the UN, once upon a time, took over control of St. Crispinian from the City of New York on a long-term no-cash lease, in aid of some forgotten scheme put forward by a Third World representative, whose government, unluckily, was overthrown, boiled, and eaten before the scheme, whatever it had been, got any further than the signing of the lease. Since when, the UN struggled to return the church to the city, which refused to take it, and in the meantime the world body tried everything-- guard dogs, private security, blue-helmeted soldiers from Sweden and Finland--to keep those aforementioned undesirables away from St. Crispinian, but nothing really worked until Dr. Zorn.