Don't Ask (6 page)

Who would have guessed there were so many mother and father lands? You could hide in a crowd like that.

And do what? 'Dortmunder looked at that Votskojek boat over there and was not impressed. On the way across and downtown, in a Honda Accord Stan had borrowed for the occasion, Tiny had told them the boat had originally been a tramp freighter on the Black Sea or the Bosporus or one of those places and had just barely made it across the Atlantic last winter, and Dortmunder could well believe that.

Much smaller than a Caribbean cruise liner, and a lot dirtier, too, the ship was a tall black hulk held by heavy, thick, hairy ropes around metal stanchions on both sides of the old ferry slip. If it weren't for the few lights on inside the vessel, defining circles and rectangles of dim yellow light, it would look mostly like a barge piled with scrap iron.

Their nearest vantage point to view the scene of the crime-to-he was the FDR Drive, the elevated highway running--crawling, really--up the eastern shore of Manhattan Island. This time of night, traffic on the Drive was moderate--if hurtling taxicabs, drunken commuters, and illegal aliens fleeing petty crimes could ever be called moderate--so Stan had merely stopped the borrowed Honda in the farthest right lane (there is no shoulder, no verge, no space to pull over on the FDR Drive) and everybody got out.

Stan opened the hood and stood in front of the car and from time to time glowered at the inoffensive little engine in there as though it had failed him in some way. Meantime, not very satisfactorily, they cased the joint.

Hell of a joint. The boat was tucked into that old ferry slip beyond a blocky brick three-story building that had been empty and unsafe and unused for years. On the boat's rounded black stern, seen beyond the building, Pride of Votskojek was faintly visible in dirty white letters.

Access. A potholed blacktop road came out from under the FDR, pointing toward the ferry building, but before getting even halfway there it ran into an eight-foot-high chain-link fence with rolls of razor wire across the top. The metal support poles of this fence were sunk into concrete right in the roadway, making it absolutely clear that no more cars or other vehicles were ever going to be invited through there ever again.

This side of the fence, to the right of the truncated road, a small parking area was illuminated by one floodlight; it contained five beat-up old cars parked with their noses to the fence, two of them with red-white blue diplomat plates visible at the rear. Near the cars, a narrow chain-link door was inset in the chain-link fence and was guarded by two short, squat guys in uniforms with side arms.

Beyond the fence, if it were possible to get beyond the fence, hulked the ferry building, as dark and dense as a Mayan temple, its boarded-up top-floor windows at the same height as the FDR Drive, so that from where they were standing they would be able to look right in, if the boards weren't there and the lights were on inside (and there were lights inside to be on), and if they cared, which they didn't. It was about twenty yards from where they now stood to the facade of the dead ferry building, not too far to bloop a little forward pass on a trap play, but far too far to stretch a plank over in case you had this idea, for instance, to crawl along, one end to the other, above the fence.

The top two stories of the building stood on two fat legs, which were the ground floor and between which used to be access (for cars? horse-drawn wagons? how long ago was this eminently sensible technology abandoned?) to the ferries. Beyond the building --best seen from just north of it on the FDR, where they were stopped, Stan giving the finger to the occasional wise-guy honker --was the slip where ferries used to dock for loading and unloading vehicles and foot passengers (eminently sensible) and where the Pride of Votskojek now wallowed, round rusty stern toward the building, blunt prow nodding stupidly at the river.

"The guards," Kelp said, "those armed guards down there, can see the parking lot. From the corner there, where they're stationed, they can see the whole fence. Those guards, those armed guards right there, could see us if they looked up, and they could see all along the FDR here. And those look to me like walkie talkies they got on their belts there, next to the guns. So what I think, I think if we go and put a bunch of sleeping pills in some hamburger meat and throw it over the fence, it won't work."

"I knew they were gonna get me on a boat," Dortmunder said. Not too long ago, he'd been involved in an involved little caper upstate involving a reservoir, which most of the time had been on top of him. His attitude toward boats and large bodies of water remained negative.

"Well, Dortmunder," Tiny said, leaning on the crumbling low wall of the FDR, "it does kinda play like that. A boat. At least to get a better look at the thing. By daylight."

"Nighttime, right now," Dortmunder pointed out, "is the best conditions we can hope for. And right now, our best conditions include armed guards, bright lights, chain-link fence, and razor wire. And that's just to get to the pier. We don't know what fun there is when you're trying to get on the boat."

"My guess," Kelp said, "is more lights and more armed guards, but probably no more razor wire. Just a guess."

"And thank you for it," Dortmunder said. Turning to Tiny, he said, "So this is an expense for your cousin."

"A boat, you mean," Tiny said.

"We shouldn't hang around here too much longer," Stan mentioned.

"Give me a minute here, Stan," Dortmunder said, and to Tiny he said, "A safe boat. No leaks, no running out of gas, no bad stuff."

"Naturally," Tiny said.

"There's nothing naturally about it," Dortmunder said.

Tiny spread his hands. "But he doesn't have to buy this boat, right?

Just rent it."

"From a renter," Dortmunder said, "that's never lost a boat."

Kelp said, "Also, it should look like a boat that you'd see out there.

One that would fit in."

"Sure," Tiny said.

"That doesn't sink," Dortmunder said. "That doesn't even get wet inside."

"You got it, Dortmunder," Tiny promised him.

"What I want," Dortmunder said, "is a boat you could grow cactus in." we are a very poor country," Grijk said.

"We know that," Tiny told him. "The guys know it, and I know it." And, he might have added, anybody who walked into the place would know it.

The Tsergovian mission to the United Nations was not on a former tramp steamer in the East River. It hadn't occurred to the Tsergovians, frankly, to come up with the kind of cute and clever way to avoid high New York rents that the Votskojeks had; another reason, if another reason were needed, for the Tsergovian nose to be out of joint.

No, the best the Tsergovians had been able to come up with was a storefront on Second Avenue, below Twenty-third Street, where commercially the property values are much lower than up in the Forties, nearer the UN and the live theater and the good restaurants.

They were on the east side of the avenue, and the other side was a whole block of taxpayers,* so the sun beat in through their big plate-glass windows all afternoon of every sunny day, or would if *A temporary structure, commonly one story in height and containing shops of the most ephemeral sort. Constructed by the owners of the land they didn't have the awning. So, with much reluctance but finally with fatalistic acceptance, they'd kept the awning, which still said, in white block letters on the dark green canvas, hakim cleaners & launderers, all but hakim very clean and neat. hakim was clumsily painted over irving, which in turn had been ineptly sewn over zeppi.

Even though the front door clearly said on its long glass window

FREE & DEMOCRATIC NATION OF TSERGOVIA

Embassy

Consulate

Commercial Attache

Tourist Office

Cultural Exchange Office

Military Attache

United Nations Mission (pend.) and even though the two large side windows both featured rather fanciful posters of the purported tourist attractions of Tsergovia, people still brought in their tablecloths after dinner parties.

The front room, which was all Tiny'd ever seen, no longer looked anything at all like a dry cleaner's. The functional dropped ceiling with the egg-tray fluorescent lights was all that had been retained (changing it would have been very expensive). On the floor now was some nice pale green broadloom, bought cheaply at a carpet sale out on Long Island, which was actually three remnants cunningly placed so that the seams--and the slight differences in color--were barely noticeable unless you were really looking for them.

On this thick-piled Reinhardt were placed three desks, when a delay is anticipated, sometimes of several decades' duration, between the razing of the previous unwanted edifice and the erection of the new blight on the landscape. Called a "taxpayer" because that's what it does. + + Didn't expect a footnote in a novel, did you? And a real informative one, too. Pays to keep on your toes. each with two chairs and one wastebasket, all bought from a used office furniture store on West Twenty-third Street. One of these desks was near the door, where a young black American woman named Khodeen, their only non-Tsergovian employee, deflected tablecloth bearers. The other two desks, back toward the rear corners of the deep room, formed a long triangle with the first. The left one of these was home base for a stout older woman named Drava Votskonia, who wore a different dark headkerchief ever}' day, who had warts on her face you could use for cup hooks, and whose portfolios were Commercial Attache, Director of the Tourist Office, and Mistress of Cultural Exchange. The other desk belonged to Grijk Krugnk, and his areas of responsibility were Military Attache, Passport Control Officer, and Chief of Security (also the entire security staff) for the embassy, the consulate, and the mission (pend.).

It was at this desk that Grijk and Tiny now sat, each with one meaty forearm on the scarred surface as they talked. Across the way, Drava Votskonia was on the phone, continuing her perpetual quest for an American interested in reviving the craze of the pet rock. "Imported pet rocks!" (After all, the hula hoop had come back, if briefly, had it not?) And up front, between tablecloths, Khodeen retied her cornrows.

"We're talking about renting a boat," Tiny now explained. "Not buying one."

"Dafs for sure," Grijk agreed. "Vad are we gonna do vid a boad? We're a landlocked country."

"So that's why we'll rent," Tiny explained. Sometimes he had to be very patient with his cousin, a lot more than with somebody whose blood, when spilled, would not be familial.

"How much you rent for, dis boad?" Grijk demanded.

"I don't know yet," Tiny said. "This is just I'm dropping by to keep you informed, let you know, there's gonna be an expense."

"Vad informed? You don't know how much expense."

"Let's put it like this," Tiny said, reminding himself that this was, after all, a distant cousin, an extremely distant cousin, and maybe he didn't have to be that patient, maybe. "What we'll say is, if the boat rent's less than five hundred dollars, we'll go ahead and do it, and you'll pay us back. And if it's over five hundred dollars, we'll call you and let you make the decision."

Grijk thought this over. "I donno," he finally decided. "I tink I godda talk to my boss. You wait a minute?"

"Even a couple minutes," Tiny offered.

'Tanks." Grijk reassured himself that all the desk drawers were locked, and then he hurried away to the back room, where Tiny'd never been, to confer with his "boss," whom Tiny'd never seen, and who was presumably the ambassador, consul, head of mission (pend.), and chief spokesman for Tsergovia in the United States. And a hard guy to get along with, from Grijk's nervousness every time he thought about the "boss" or actually had to go in and deal with him.

Tiny stretched in his seat, wondering whether this was a good idea in the first place, to be involved with these clowns, old country or no, and to pair up with Dortmunder and that crowd again, or if maybe what he ought to do was make a clean break with the past and…

"Pah!" The smack of Drava Votskonia's telephone into its cradle roused Tiny from his reverie. He glanced over and La Votskonia was looking stormy. She noticed Tiny watching her and turned her glower in his direction. "You're an American," she said accusingly. Her accent was similar to Grijk's but less pronounced, more like an irritating buzz around the words than real distortion of the words themselves.

Tiny thought that over and shrugged. It was an admission he felt he could safely make. "Right."

"So tell me," she said, "what do Americans do with rocks?"

Now, here we have an unexpected question. Tiny's brow puckered with thought. Rocks? What do Americans do with rocks? What, Tiny asked himself, do / do with rocks, and the answer was, nothing. "Well," he said, thinking as fast as he could, "they used to make these long low walls out of them, up in the woods, and--"

"Used to!" Ms. Votskonia cried. She was clearly at, or very close to, the end of her rope. "Don't tell me about used to! They used to make pets out of them! But what do they do with them wow?"

Tiny thought some more. "Heat them and put them in saunas," he suggested.

She considered that, then shook her head. "Too limited a market."

Tiny wracked his brains. "Groins," he said. "I don't mean nothing dirty, I mean like walls out of rocks they put out from the beach, out into the ocean, to keep the sand from going away."