Don't Ask Page 15

  But then there was uphill; inevitably, after every downhill, there was another uphill.

  From time to time, roads crossed the escapee's path, blacktop or dirt roads of a sort a city person could identify with, employ, travel on; but not this time. This time, whenever he met a road, he paused a while in the deep forest, listened to be sure there was no traffic coming, and then did his awkward, panting lope across the open width to the protective cover on the other side, where he usually leaned for a while against a handy tree before proceeding. And so he wended roughly southwestward. Very roughly. It was a warm afternoon, filled with bird song and insect buzz. His progress was a slow and dreamy movement through meadows nodding with wildflowers, pine woods rich with sweet aromas, and now and again from afar the tinkling of a brook. Once, the escapee even paused to drink the water from one such brook, clear icy water, delicious; nectar of the gods.

  Another time, a little shaky on his pins after jogging over yet another road and then climbing up yet another long, steep hill, he came to a small mountaintop clearing with a spring. Dappled sunlight through the trees made a soft light. The bubbling spring produced a clear music blending with the chatter of the birds. I'll just sit here a few minutes and catch my breath, the escapee thought, and when he opened his eyes it was night.

  Dark. You don't get dark like this in the city. Teeny stars way up there in the sky, farther away than you could even think about, and that was it for the light. No bird song. The birds had all gone to sleep, high up on the tree branches, away from the predators of the night.

  Uh. The escapee struggled to his feet, wincing and moaning as he discovered himself to be as stiff as if Dr. Zorn had injected starch into his veins. He was rested at last--he'd needed a nap, actually, after last night's disturbed sleep--but stiff.

  And alone in the woods. Just him, and those predators of the night.

  What would they be? Bears, maybe? Wolves? What do they have in the Schtumveldt Mountains? Mountain lions; why not? Mooses and elks; are they predators? Who cares? That big, what difference does it make if they're knocking you down for dinner or for fun?

  I wonder if I'm in Tsergovia yet? he thought, and then he thought, I better keep going just to be on the safe side, and then he thought, Whoops. No sun. Which way is southwest, at night?

  Well, he couldn't stay here, that was for sure. Aside from stiffness, and predators of the night, and the likeliness of pursuit-- hunting dogs, there's something else to think about--there was the fact that it was no longer warm and cozy up here in the mountaintops. It was cold.

  Time to move on.

  He had paused here for his nap, as best he could remember, just as he'd entered the clearing, with the spring still out ahead of him. The only sound at the moment in all this mountain darkness was the bubbling of that spring--covering the approach of predators of the night, no doubt--and the sound came from over that way. Theoretically, then, if he walked that way, and managed to keep on in a straight line, he would still be traveling southwest. It was a pretty shaky theory, but it was all he had, so he did it, and immediately got a shoeful of water.

  Well, hell. Left foot squooshing and squeeging, hands out ahead of him in search of trees, he moved on, the sound of the spring now receding behind him, and now gone. The land in front sloped downward. The escapee slogged on, and his thoughts were blacker than the night.

  The next fifteen or twenty minutes were all sound effects-- thuds, groans, grunts, gasps, the cracking of branches, and the occasional great flurry of whooshes and wheezes and yelps whenever he found himself jammed once again into a mass of bony fingered shrubbery.

  Then he found the road. He was already on it when he realized the hard smoothness underfoot was not a natural forest ground cover. It was a road. Being a road, it was very unlikely to have trees or shrubs or bushes or briar patches growing on it. It was also unlikely to have knee-high boulders concealed on its surface. In human terms, particularly city human terms, it was user friendly.

  Please, let's take it, he begged himself, and told himself that if he followed the road to the left, that was probably southwestward, anyway.

  And besides, he was surely in Tsergovia by now, so this would be a Tsergovian road, and nothing to worry about. And besides all that, he'd had enough midnight forest for one day. Please?

  And so it was agreed, and the escapee turned left, and limped down the middle of the road, a slightly paler gray surface in the general gloom of night. He never could refuse himself anything.

  Headlights. Behind him, coming along. Wheezy old engine, rattletrap vehicle.

  The escapee shuffled to the side of the road, automatically thinking to hide himself, then abruptly changed his mind. Enough already. Turning back, standing in the fitful glare of the headlights, waving his arms over his head, trying to look both honest and Tsergovian--neither was possible--the escapee threw his fate into the hands of the gods. Or whoever was driving that truck.

  Pickup truck. It rolled to a stop beside him. A heavyset, old, gnarly guy, a farmer from the look and smell of him, gazed out at the escapee and said, "Yar?"

  The escapee panted. He said, "Tsergovia?"

  "Hah?"

  Ready to turn and run into the nearest tree at the first sign of trouble, the escapee said, "Is this Tsergovia, or Votskojek?"

  "I don't know them towns," the farmer said.

  The escapee gaped. "What?"

  The farmer pointed a thick finger at his windshield. "Fair Haven's down that away," he said.

  The escapee clutched the pickup's door for support as all his world whirled about him. "Where am I?"

  The farmer stared at him as though he were an escaped lunatic, which by now he almost was. "Where are you?"

  Dortmunder said, "This isn't… Votskojek?"

  "Brother, you are lost," the farmer said. "You're right here in Vermont." w What do you do with a ski resort in the summer? What Hradec Kralowc's good friend, hotelier Harry Hochman, tried to do was make the damn place--scenery, employees, rooms to rent, entertainment facilities, bars, infrastructure--double as something else. Mount Kinohaha (Ogunquit for Broken Ankle), Happy Hour Inns ski center in Vermont, for instance, housed in the snowless months a summer theater, an arts fair, and a variety of conferences and group meetings. Still, the volume of business at the end of ski season dropped off so drastically that most of the shops in the Alpine Village compound attached to the resort simply shut down, their operators living other warm-weather lives somewhere else.

  Since Kinohaha was one of the seven Happy Hour Inns around the world where Harry Hochman maintained a nearby residence--a chateau, in this case, based on Swiss models but rather more grandiose when the adaptations to Harry and Adele's tastes were completed--this failure of the ski center to be a year-round money churner griped his ass more than it might have. But what was he to do? Take the bitter with the sweet.

  From the instant Hradec, in his office on the Pride of Votskojek, staring hopelessly at the mulish Diddums, thought to him self, It's a crazy idea, but it just might work, he had become a kind of necromancer, a magus, the Wizard of Vermont: "Pay no attention to the man behind that curtain."

  Hradec had been able to do some kindness for Harry Hochman in the past, as Harry had been able to provide skilled craftsmen for the refurbishment of Hradec's quarters aboard the embassy. Harry was very actively interested in Votskojek getting the UN seat it deserved. When, once Diddums had been knocked out by Dr. Zorn's magic elixir, Hradec had phoned Harry and reminded Harry of his, Hradec's, onetime visit to the Vermont chateau, and then went on to explain the situation--"We have him; we must make him talk; we can't permit this to become public; I dare not let my superiors in Novi Glad know I've lost the relic"--Harry fell in with the idea at once. "We'll gaslight that fella to a fare-thee well!" he yelled down the phone, with that raspy roar of his.

  Hradec didn't get the reference, but he got the idea. "Good," he said.

  It had taken a little while to prepare Mount Kinohaha to impersonate a
n idealized Votskojek, during which time the first part of the charade had taken place in a barn on a nearby former farm, land that Happy Hour Inns had purchased some time ago but not yet turned into anything useful. For this part of the work, two Votskojek college students, currently enrolled at Yale, had agreed to play soldier (one of them was a drama major, anyway, not the one Diddums eventually slugged, that one was an economics major), while two of Harry Hochman's household staff from the chateau played prisoner/serfs with a conviction born of years of rehearsal. (The fat, uniformed interlocutor who'd mistakenly spoken English to the "soldiers" in Diddums's presence was the only actual military man involved, being Maj. Jhalmek Kuur, Votskojek's military attache down at the embassy, dragged away for the purpose from Washington, D.C., and his endless quest for more assault vehicles and medium-range missiles.) The summer theater proved useful in phase two. As everyone in the whole world knows, if you want your summer theater to be a financial success, you have to give the public three things: musicals, musicals, and musicals. The Mount Kinohaha Music Theater's repertory troupe, augmented by local talent, were happy to accept an unexpected bonus in the form of modest amounts of cash to play extras in an industrial film for the Happy Hours corporation, to be shot at the ski center; hidden cameras, they were told, would record the scene in the manner of cinema verite. (The semipros among the actors rolled their eyes at one another that so old hat an idea as cinema verite was still in use anywhere in the world, even at so talentless a level as industrial films.) The wardrobes for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Bryadoon, Annie Get Tour Gun, Finian's Rainbow, and Barnum filled in nicely as generic native costume.

  The Lada in which Diddums was driven through the redressed Alpine village was an actual embassy vehicle, a Russian built car from a factory built in the then-Soviet Union by the Italian company Flat It had been given to an earlier ambassador by an earlier Soviet ambassador, when the Soviets were still trying to win friends and gain influence in the world's various muddy waters. (European joke: How do you double the value of a Lada? Fill the gas tank.) The Lada's license plates were spray-painted cardboard. Unfortunately, Hradec's talent pool of available speakers of Magyar-Croat who could be entrusted with knowledge of the plot was so limited, he'd been reduced to having Terment, clearly an office clerk, double as chauffeur; fortunately, Diddums didn't seem to notice.

  But then, Diddums didn't seem to notice much at all, did he? All this elaborate preparation--and the mad scientist's laboratory that had been cobbled together in the basement of the chateau was a wonder; a real pity they didn't get to use it--and it all seemed to wash over Diddums like so much rainwater over a particularly retarded duck.

  The problem was, Hradec never did understand Diddums. He neither knew nor understood that Diddums was a prisoner and knew exactly how to be a prisoner. Hradec acted throughout as though he were dealing with an amateur, but Diddums was a pro, from his expressionless face to his barely moving feet, and would not be impressed.

  All that talk, all those displays of cooling towers and happy peasants.

  The man Hradec called Diddums cared nothing about any of that. A prisoner does one of two things: (1) he goes along, or (2) he escapes.

  That's all there is. His keepers give orders and he obeys them. He doesn't think; he doesn't argue; he doesn't engage in philosophical discussion. He does exactly what he's told, and all of his concentration remains exclusively on watching for a chance to move onto (2). Then he sees an opening, and he coldcocks the economist from Yale, and he's gone.

  Fortunately, Hradec Kralowc is a resourceful man. He had more than one string to that bow.

  The only thing that put any kind of damper on the occasion was that Grijk just didn't seem too excited about it. Maybe he wasn't used to getting up early in the morning. Or maybe he was one of those people who enjoys the pursuit more than the capture, like guys who chase women all the time, or dogs that chase cars. Anyway, when they got to the shop, Grijk was a lot less enthusiastic than he'd been over the phone.

  Well, the first moment was the one that counted. And the first moment had come at 3:22 a.m., when Andy Kelp and Stan Murch had tumbled into Titty's apartment waving the bone, big grins on both their faces. Tiny didn't mind it at all that they interrupted his beauty rest. He held the bone flat on his two big palms and smiled on it like it was a baby and said, "So this is the goddam thing, is it?"

  "If only John was here," Kelp said.

  "He isn't," Tiny said, and so much for sentiment.

  Then they called the Tsergovian embassy and, Grijk being head of security over there, it was Grijk they woke up, Tiny telling him, in simple modesty, "We got it."

  The initial Grijk reaction was all anybody could ask: "You god id? XoMgoA id?" All three of them in Tilly's living room could hear Grijk's voice squawking out of the telephone. Tiny flinched and held the receiver away from his head and said, "Yeah. Okay, Grijk? Yeah. Quit hollering like that. We got it. We'll be right over."

  And they were, and all of a sudden Grijk wasn't that enthusiastic anymore. He seemed more fatalistic than anything else when he unlocked the front door and let them in. Maybe he'd just remembered that now he was going to have to fork over the other fifteen large; Dortmunder's five would go to May, of course, since nobody could be sure he wouldn't someday come back.

  So anyway, here they were in the Tsergovian storefront on Second Avenue, one small fluorescent lamp on Drava Votskonia's rock-obsessed desk the only supplement to the pale gleam angling in through the front windows from the streetlights and an occasional taxicab, and Grijk Krugnk somehow just wasn't with the program. In the pale light, his smile was sickly as Tiny put on Drava's desk under the fluorescent glare the violin case he'd once taken away from a fella he'd suspected of not being a musician--he was right, too--and opened it to show the sacred ossicle nested in the blue felt within. "Is that sumpin?" Tiny asked.

  "Dod's vunderful," Grijk agreed, but somehow he didn't sound convinced.

  Fortunately, his deputy was there to make up for Grijk's lack of enthusiasm. "Holy bone," this guy said in awe, gazing into the violin case.

  The guy's name was Haknal Vrakek; maybe. Something like that, anyway.

  Who knew? with Grijk's accent. "Dis is my depudy chief a securidy, Haknal Vrakek," Grijk had said when they'd first come in, gloomily pointing to this tall, wolfish, skinny, grinning guy with big teeth, who nodded and nodded, grinning away, until Tiny opened the violin case, and then he said, "Holy bone." Not like Robin the Boy Wonder being a smart aleck, but like anybody having a religious experience.

  "So now you're set," Tiny said.

  "We sure are," Haknal Vrakek said, rubbing his hands together. He didn't so much have an accent as an internal echo chamber, as though his voice had been prerecorded, as though he were about to tell you the time and temperature, or suggest if you need assistance, push One now.

  Everybody looked at Grijk, who was not what you would call forthcoming.

  Not in any sense. Not in the sense of being as up and excited as he ought to be, given that his fondest dream had just come true, and not in the sense, either, of forking over the fifteen grand. In fact, Tiny--who wasn't even in on the profit this time--had to remind him, "You gotta pay the guys now, Grijk."

  "Oh!" Could he really have forgotten? Maybe so. He stared at his deputy, who gazed mildly back at him, then stared at Tiny, then stared at Kelp and Murch, then finally got himself caught up with events. "I'll get you da money," he said.

  Grijk took a step forward, hands out, as though he expected to do something with the violin case or its contents, but Tiny closed the lid and rested his paw on the case and said, "We'll watch the bone for you while you're gone."

  "Oh," Grijk said. He looked again at his deputy, then nodded at Tiny.

  "Dod's good," he said, and went away through the door in back, the deputy following after him, leaving the three to look at each other and say, "What's with him?" and "Beats me."

  The wait was a little longer than it should h
ave been, but then at last Grijk returned with two white legal-size envelopes, one of which he gave to Kelp and the other to Murch, saying, "Da nation of Tsergovia tanks you a tousand dimes. You have saved us." Only he said it like it was something he had memorized, like he was just being polite.

  It was the deputy who showed the real spirit of the occasion. "It's wonderful to see the sacred relic," he assured them with his echo-chamber voice. "Awe-inspiring to touch it with this hand. What magnificent work you have done!"

  "Thanks," Tiny told him, pleased; but he would have preferred to hear it from Grijk.

  Kelp smiled again at Grijk. He held up his envelope and said, "This is five thousand."

  "Dod's right." Kelp pointed at Murch's envelope. "And that5s five thousand."

  Before Grijk could answer, Tiny said, "Grijk, are you gonna embarrass me again? Come up with the other five, Don't fool around."

  Grijk didn't even look ashamed of himself, just gloomier than before.

  Talk about cheap. "I wasn't sure," he said, pulling a third envelope out from his inside jacket pocket, "vad I should do vid--"

  "We're sure," Tiny said, plucking the envelope out of his hand. "And I'll tell ya, Grijk, don't ask for no more favors."

  "You fellas did vunderful," Grijk said, sounding tragic but smiling through. "I mean id, and I'm gradeful. You was really vunderful."

  "Thank you," Tiny said. "And now we're going home."

  "Okay, Diny."

  The deputy unlocked the door to let them out. "Goodbye, Diny," Grijk said.

  "Sure," Tiny said, and led the way up Second Avenue.

  Very few empty cabs this time of night; maybe up at Thirty fourth Street. They sloped along, hands in their pockets, feeling dissatisfied, incomplete somehow, and Kelp said, "I'm really surprised at that cousin of yours, Tiny."

  "I'm embarrassed by him," Tiny said. "I don't even want to talk about it."

  Stan Murch had been walking along, silent, frowning, and now he said,