Don't Ask (13 page)

So why was their landing spot--thick, splintery planks and rusty old iron mooring posts that used to front a rural mailbox factory until its owners gave up on the city and moved to pleasant, safe, cheap, boring quarters in deepest Pennsylvania--full up with prissy guys in blue with shiny badges? Guys who wanted Kelp and Murch outta the boat now.

Could the Votskojeks be that fast? Impossible; it was a bare five minutes since they'd zoomed away from the ferry slip. Nevertheless, feeling he'd rather not work out an answer to the question "What are you doing with that bone?" Kelp kicked the sacred object under a corner of tarpaulin in the puddly bottom of the motorboat while climbing out.

"Here I come, here I come."

And here came another surprise; like the first, not a happy one. A couple of the many guys--many guys--in blue hanging around on this pier happened to turn their backs while moving briskly about their brisk business, and in big block white letters on the back of their dark blue zip-up jackets--they were all making essentially the same fashion statement--were the letters D and E and A.

Oh, boy. The feds. The Drug Enforcement Administration. Murch and Kelp looked at one another knowing they were in deep shit but not whose, and one of the boys in blue came over to say, "Which of you is Walter 'Pepper' LaFontaine?"

"Neither of us," Kelp said.

"He's the guy we borrowed the boat from," Murch said, which was probably true when you stopped to think about it, and pretty quick-witted of Murch, all in all.

"You borrow it from him often?" asked the guy.

"First time," Murch said. "And if it's gonna be like this, last time, too."

"Let's see some ID."

Easiest thing in the world. Kelp and Murch showed impeccable identification, in the form of actual driver's licenses with their actual photos and names and addresses on them, ID reserved for only the most special circumstances. The guy glowered over these licenses as though he mistrusted the State of New York, which had issued them, and then turned everything over to somebody else. That is, he turned the licenses over to one guy to "check" and Kelp and Murch over to a number of other guys to "hold on to."

Which meant being placed in the backseats of two vehicles laughably known to the trade as "unmarked" cars. (Tip: If you see an American car, a few years old, pale gray or pale blue or medium tan, kind of beat-up-looking, with no whitewall stripe on the tires and no styling package on the body, containing two beefy guys in the front seat who keep looking left and right as they travel, that is an unmarked car, and those are police--federal, state, or local. A CrimeStarter.®) Being placed in separate cars meant that Kelp and Murch couldn't get together and plan their strategy or their testimony or any of that, but it didn't matter. They were both professionals and they both knew the code of the underworld, which is: Never sell out your partner until you get your price.

After a while, both Kelp and Murch individually got chummy young cops in the front seats of their cars, to chat with them about the weather and sports, offer cigarettes, and kind of lead the conversation this way and that. Both Kelp and Murch knew how to be friendly and easygoing and give them not a damn thing they could use, and after a while both chummy cops gave up, and law enforcement went into Phase Two of the overall strategy, known as "let em think it over for a while."

About an hour, actually. During that time, the detainees in the backseats of the unmarked cars got to watch many conferences among the troops in dark blue plastic; got to watch a big truck back (beep beep beep beep) onto the pier and hoist the little motorboat out of the water and drive it away; got to watch the city police cars arrive and the city police walk around being sure they were a part of the joint operation; got to watch an older guy in a suit (he would have been cast black in the movie) come around and glare through their side windows at them but not speak to them; and then got their own interrogators.

These were older men, but in the blue plastic zip-up jackets, as though they were coaches of Little Police League teams. They got into the front seats of the cars, grunting because they were just a tiny bit overweight. They rested one arm on the seat-back, leaned against the passenger door, nodded at Kelp and Murch, and said, "This shouldn't take long, and you'll be on your way. How long you known Pepper?"

"I don't know him," Kelp said, "my pal Stan knows him."

"He's my wife's cousin," Murch said. "I hardly know him at all."

"But you're in his boat," the interrogators said.

"It was a nice day," Kelp and Murch both responded, but then their answers veered. Murch explained he knew his wife's cousin had a little boat, and he'd asked could he make a borrow and Pepper said sure. And Kelp said his pal Stan had told him he was borrowing for the first time this other guy Pepper's boat and would Kelp like to go along and Kelp said sure.

It went on like that. They didn't know anything, they hadn't done anything, and they were more than happy to be of any assistance they could, which was none. And would they object to a frisk? Certainly not.

All of this was so neatly choreographed that Kelp and Murch emerged from their unmarked cars within a minute of one another, assumed the lean-forward, legs-spread position against the unmarked cars, got frisked, and were found clean. Just like that. Simple.

At that point, the two watermen were permitted back in each other's presence, while one of the interrogators--Murch's-- joined them to say,

"It could be we'll want to talk to you fellas again, but at this point you're free to go."

And he himself at that point would have gone, except Murch said, "Excuse me. If you don't mind, my wife's gonna want to know what this is all about, that if s her cousin and all. Is there anything I can tell her?"

"Well," the interrogator said, "we're DBA, and your wife's cousin is now in custody, and the boat has been impounded. What do you think is going on?"

"It's beginning to look," Murch said, "as though Pepper was using that boat to move illegal drugs from one place to another."

"Very good," the interrogator said. Then he thawed a little and leaned close to speak a bit more confidentially. "Just between us, Pepper's claiming he doesn't even know you guys. He's claiming you stole his boat."

"Why, that nasty person," Murch said. "Wait'111 tell my wife."

"What he's claiming," the interrogator said, "is that he never did any dope smuggling or dope dealing at all, it was always you two guys stealing his boat."

Kelp looked astounded. "Can you believe there are people like that?" he demanded.

"Yes, I can," the interrogator answered. "Fortunately, we've got the goods on Pepper; we've got videotape; we've got witnesses; we've got him cold. Otherwise, I'll be honest with you, you two guys could maybe of had a couple bad weeks."

Murch and Kelp looked at one another. "Just for a boat ride," Murch said.

"Go know," Kelp said. "Go figure."

"Here's a tip for you," the interrogator said. "Your wife's cousin isn't necessarily your friend."

"I'll remember that," Murch said.

"He isn't even my wife's cousin," Kelp said.

"You're free to go," the interrogator said, and turned away.

Kelp said, "Uh."

The interrogator turned back. "You want to be driven someplace?"

"No, no, that's okay. It's only--I left some personal property in that boat."

The interrogator looked troubled. "I'm sorry to hear that," he said.

"You should have taken your property with you when you debarked."

"Well, it was all kind of nervous and exciting," Kelp explained.

"I suppose so." The interrogator thought it over. "What you'll have to do," he said, "you'll have to come down to our offices in the Federal Building, fill out a form, describe the articles that are yours. Because that boat and everything in it has been impounded."

"Well, if I could just go get the stuff," Kelp said, imagining himself writing the word bone on a form down at the Federal Building.

"Sorry," the interrogator said. "It's impounded."

"Where?"

"Impounded."

"No, I mean where is it impounded?"

The interrogator gave Kelp a less friendly look. "You just go on down to the Federal Building," he said coolly. "They'll fix you up."

I'll just bet they will, Kelp thought. "Thanks," he said, with a nice smile, and the interrogator stalked off, and Kelp and Murch slunk on around the onetime mailbox factory and down the block and into the stolen car and drove away from there.

When Dortmunder woke up, he was in a dungeon. His bruised eye hurt, his head hurt, his stomach hurt, his shoulderbiades hurt, his… Well. He hurt.

Recent history passed before his eyes like an atrocity reenactment on television. Diversion, delay, capture. Interrogation by Hradec Kralowc.

"Time for Dr. Zorn."

When Kralowc had said that, Dortmunder had really started to worry.

Thoughts of truth serum flashed through his mind. How would his system react to truth serum? Wouldn't it be like an antibody inside him? Would his vital parts survive such an invasion?

Was there a story he could tell? Was there any gloss on events, any spin-doctoring he could do before the real doctor got here? He cast his aching mind back over recent events, and was appalled at the sight.

Something had delayed Kelp--that much was clear--so that he hadn't been in position when he should have been in position. If ever Dortmunder managed to get his hands on Kelp--that is, if he ever in the future found himself in a position to have an opportunity for a quiet chat with Kelp, it would turn out not to be Kelp's fault, and yet, as Dortmunder already knew without a doubt, at some deeper level, at some more totally true level (far below the level truth serum could possibly reach), it was Kelp's fault1.

Why do I do it? Dortmunder asked himself, not for the first time. Why do I associate with bad companions, by which I do mean Andrew Octavian Kelp? But answer came there none.

It was too late to claim mistaken identity. Seated there in Kralowc's office on the Pride of Votskcyek, handcuffed to a chair, Dortmunder studied again that moment when he'd been lying supine on the ferry slip as the bone-wielding Kelp shouted, "Run, John!" Followed--click-click, the slide show--by that moment when he'd been somehow on his feet, everyone intensely aware of his existence, and Kelp whispering, "You weren't blown?"

Oh, is there no story to cover this? Let's see:

"I'm an undercover CIA agent, infiltrating the Tsergovian secret police, and…"

"I had amnesia! Wait a minute, my past life is coming back to me! The year is 1977, and I live in Roslyn, Long Island, with my dear wife, Andreotta, and our two charming children, uh…"

"FBI! You're all under arrest!"

"Thank God you understood those signals I was sending. Those bloodthirsty fiends kidnapped my mother and forced me to help them in their evil…"

"My left leg is artificial, and filled with dynamite. If you don't release me at the count…"

"Whu-- Where am I? Who are all you people?"

That last one was almost worth a try. Dortmunder was still trying to work out exactly the facial expression that went with it-- and where this particular ploy might likely lead--when Dr. Zorn entered the office.

No question. You could see this person anywhere, the supermarket even, and you'd say, "Thafs Dr. Zorn." And not just because of the floppy black leather doctor's bag with stainless steel locks that he carried in his big white thick-knuckled, hairy backed, scrubbed fist, either.

The strangest thing about him was, he didn't look old. Or parts of him didn't. He was tall and slender, with a lithe and youthful body like a long-distance runner, but on top of that body was the absolute Dr. Zorn head: round, bald, without eyebrows, gleaming, with jug-handle ears, like an old chamber pot. The manically glittering eyes shone from the bottoms of deep crystal-cave eyeglasses, eyeglasses with hypnotic spirals etched in the lenses, eyeglasses with clear plastic frames hooked over the big pale ears, so there was no color at all above Dr. Zorn's neck except for those eyes deep inside the eyeglass lenses, which were: red.

Was Dr. Zorn twenty-five, or sixty-five? Was he really an old guy, a successful mad scientist who'd managed to graft his own head onto a young and virile body? That would have been some operation to watch.

Dr. Zorn and Hradec Kralowc proceeded to engage in a conversation together in some language that sounded mostly like crickets in armor jousting, in which Kralowc made detailed explanations of something or other while pointing at Dortmunder, and Dr. Zorn cackled maniacally a lot while looking at Dortmunder. None of this was reassuring.

Nor was the lethal-looking hypodermic syringe when it made its inevitable appearance from Dr. Zorn's black bag. "I'm allergic!"

Dortmunder cried out at the sight of the thing.

Kralowc and Dr. Zorn stared at him. Even Lusk and Terment gazed in his direction. Dr. Zorn spoke in English for the first time, a rubbery, feltish kind of English, best suited to obscene phone calls: "You are allergic? To what?"

"Truth serum!"

Dr. Zorn gave him the simpering, condescending chuckle of the scientist for the layman. "This is not truth serum, you pathetic creature," he said. "Truth serum does not work." His smile turned toward Kralowc, becoming conspiratorial. "We have learned that, have we not?"