Don't Ask (14 page)
Kralowc shrugged, uncomfortable and nervous. "Let's just get on with it."
"But of course." Turning back to Dortmunder, Dr. Zorn said, "Someone roll up his sleeve."
Lusk and Terment both dashed forward to do it, the four hands like spiders on Dortmunder's arm, getting in each other's way, delaying the process, but not, unfortunately, forever.
And while it was going on, Dr. Zorn smiled his smile again at Dortmunder and said, "Some powerful personalities can override the impetus of either amobarbital or thiopental, the so-called truth serums.
While you probably do not have a powerful personality --just a first impression, of course--the results of such things are too likely to be unreliable."
"And we don't have a lot of time," Kralowc said, cracking his knuckles.
Dr. Zorn pointed the needle upward and did that little pumping thing that gets out the deadly air bubbles and puts a tiny, beautiful, brief spray of serum into the light. Then he cupped one hand around Dortmunder's arm and approached it with the needle. "Hold still."
"Then what is it?" Dortmunder asked, trying and failing to hold still.
"It will render you unconscious," Dr. Zorn told him, "and therefore malleable for the flight."
"Flight? Where am I going?"
"Why, to Votskojek, of course," said Dr. Zorn. "Isn't that where you wanted to go?" And he smiled and jabbed with the needle.
"But--" Dortmunder said, and woke up in a dungeon. On a rough wool blanket on the cold concrete floor of a low, nasty, dim room with stone walls and the combined smells of hay and mildew. One small window, a rectangular opening in the deep stone wall, was covered on the outside by a thick metal mesh screen; that was the only source of light. Peering through that window, Dortmunder could see a bit of dirt ground under what was apparently a cloudy sky, and across the way another stone wall.
Nothing else.
A dungeon. In Votskojek.
How do I get out of this? Dortmunder asked himself, and as he did so a soldier went by out there, a sentinel on duty, wearing a bulky uniform of a particularly decayed-looking grayish blue, plus mean-looking black boots. And a submachine gun on a leather strap over his shoulder.
Dortmunder flinched away from the window at the sight of that guy, and when he dared to look again the soldier was gone. But wafting in the window, on the coolish air (colder than New York, he noticed), from far away, thin, attenuated, barely audible but unmistakable, came the sound of a human scream.
Oh, boy, Dortmunder thought. He looked around his dungeon and there was no furniture at all except that insultingly thin rough brown blanket on the floor on which he'd awakened. So he slid down the wall beneath the window, sat on the cold floor, rested his back against the hard stone wall, and thought it again: Oh, boy.
There's no way out of here, out of this dungeon in this prison or whatever it is. And if there was a way out, what then? I'd be in Votskojek, that's what then, without a draff to my name. No useful ID, no sensible story to tell, and no language to tell it in.
Maybe I could trade them the bone for letting me go, he thought, and even as he thought it he also thought, That's what they want me to think. Okay, fine, that's what they want me to think, and I'm thinking it. Maybe I could trade them the bone for letting me go. Because what else do I do?
But wait a second. If that's what they want me to think, what is it they don't want me to think?
Well, they don't want me to think there's any way out of here. So that's one for their side, then. I don't think there's any way out of here.
I hope the guys are taking good care of that bone.
Tl^m -any said, "You lost it?"
"And Dortmunder, too," Kelp pointed out. "We also lost Dortmunder." "I don't give a fat rat's ass about Dortmunder,"Tiny explained. "Dortmunder ain't gonna get nobody into the UN."
"Unless he breaks in," Murch commented.
"So let him break out," Tiny suggested, "from wherever he is. The question is, What about the fucking femur of Saint Ferghana?"
"The feds filched it," Kelp said, and Grijk Krugnk, seated over there in what was normally J.C.'s chair but she was still out of town, moaned low.
This was supposed to have been the triumphant meeting, the celebration, the victory party. There were Tiny and Grijk at Tin^s place, waiting, expectant, eager for the whole experience to be over and done with and accomplished and successful, and here came Kelp and Murch with bad news.
Which neither Tiny nor Grijk was taking at all well. Tiny was becoming more aggressive and hostile and generally dangerous by the minute, but Grijk had undergone some sort of collapse; perhaps the crash from his high hopes had given him the bends. Anyway, he merely slumped over there in that morris chair like melting ice cream, and from time to time he moaned, and from time to time he muttered what might very well have been imprecations, in Magyar-Croat.
They sure sounded like imprecations.
Tiny said, "We gotta get it back."
"I thought you'd feel that way," Kelp admitted.
Murch said, "They impounded it, Tiny. The DBA. You don't get a thing back when the DBA impounds it. Everything they impound, they use later on in their task forces."
Tiny gave him a look. "How are the narcs gonna use a bone in a task force?"
"Maybe they feed it to their drug-sniffer dogs," Murch suggested, which wasn't a very tactful thing to say in the presence of Grijk Krugnk, who made that clear by leaping to his feet and bellowing out several short sharp statements in MagyarCroat.
Tiny nodded. He didn't speak Magyar-Croat, but he understood the general idea behind Grijk's distress. "We can't lose that bone," he said. "It's a relic; it's a sacred Catholic relic and a important historical whatchathing."
"Artifact?" Kelp suggested.
"That's it," Tiny agreed. "One side or the other, they got it, they fight over it, that's one thing, but at least they know it's still somewhere on display, it exists. But if it disappears--"
Grijk groaned.
"If it's destroyed--"
Grijk groaned louder.
"If it isn't around anymore," Tiny shouted over Grijk's whale music, "if nobody's got it, there's gonna be blood in the streets. These people will kill each other to the last baby, believe me they will. There's things that these people got no sense of humor. I mean, look at Grijk for yourself."
They did. They nodded. They saw what Tiny meant.
Tiny spread big hands. "I'm telling you two guys," he said, "and I'm telling you now. You went out to get that bone. You're gonna come back with it. Or you're gonna answer to me."
"I thought you'd feel that way," Kelp said again.
Tiny glowered. "So you thought I'd feel that way, did you? So what are you doing here›"
"Well, these things take time," Kelp said.
Tiny lowered an eyebrow at him. "What things take time?"
"Well," Kelp explained, "the first question is, When the DBA impounds something, what do they do with it? Where do they put it? The guy at the place wouldn't tell me, so I gotta ask another guy, so I called him, and we're gonna do lunch."
Tiny lowered the other eyebrow. Now he looked like an angry shag rug.
"You're gonna do lunch? What is this guy, in the movie business?"
"No," Kelp said. "As a matter of fact, he's a cop."
When May got back to the apartment early that evening from her cashier job at the Safeway, carrying the bag of groceries that she thought of as a fringe benefit the company just hadn't happened to think of offering on their own, John wasn't yet home. She knew he and Andy Kelp and Tiny Bulcher and Stan Murch had gone off to retrieve something or other for a friend of Tiny's today, and such retrievals sometimes took a little longer than expected, so she didn't worry overly but merely planned a dinner menu that would make maximum use of the new microwave once John did walk in. A tall, thin woman with slightly graying black hair, who still had many of the twitchy mannerisms of smoking even though she'd given up the filthy habit some time ago, she carried her fringe benefits to the kitchen, put them away, opened a beer for herself, put on her after-work gray cardigan, and went to the living room to relax and watch TV until John got home.
Also to look at the mail, which was mostly magazines--May subscribed to everything--but which today also included a long, chatty letter from her sister, that she couldn't stand, in Cleveland. Thank God she was in Cleveland.
May was just finishing this letter--tonsillectomy, pregnancy, and second-prize essay award were prominently featured-- when the phone at her elbow rang and she picked it up. "Hello?"
"Hi, May." It was Andy Kelp, sounding as chipper as ever, but with maybe a bit of an unfamiliar edge in his voice. "John there?"
May knew. Don't ask how she knew, she just knew, that's all. The literature is full of such instances, anybody can tell you. She knew.
She didn't know exactly what she knew, but she knew. Something in Andy's voice maybe. "No, he isn't," she said. "Why? Should he be?"
"Well, May," Andy said, "maybe I better come over," and before May could point out that that was no way to leave the conversation, he'd hung up.
Twenty minutes later, the doorbell rang. Not the outside bell by the street door, the upstairs bell by the apartment door. Could this be Andy? Usually, Andy just picked the lock and walked on in. If this was Andy, and he was standing on ceremony enough to ring the doorbell, having only picked his way in through the street door downstairs, this was anything but a good sign.
May left the living room and went down the hall to open the door, and indeed it was Andy, with a worried smile on his face. Even worried, he was smiling, but nevertheless he was worried. "Come on in, Andy," she said. "What are you worried about?"
"Well, I wouldn't say I was worried," Andy said, brow furrowing. "You been watching the news at all?"
May shut the apartment door and they walked together to the living room as she said, "Why? What's on it?"
"Nothing, I think." They entered the living room and he gestured at the set, saying, "Okay?"
"Sure."
Switching it on, looking for the evening news, he said, "There was nothing on the radio news, anyway, in the cab, but radio news is all sports, so who knows?"
Here was the local evening news, well under way. They both studied the newsreader, a blond lady who seemed delighted to report the deaths of four infants in a tenement fire, then switched them over to a blackhaired, stocky, blunt-featured guy who gripped actual paper notes in his fist and told you the news like he'd much rather punch you in the mouth. "That's Tony Costello," Andy announced,
"their police and crime reporter. Let's see."
Tony Costello announced that again today federal and state law-enforcement officers in a joint operation had impounded the largest haul of illegal drugs in history, umpteen zillion dollars' worth of this and that, all found in an apparently undistinguished house in the middle of Long Island. Some fat people who lived down the block were asked what they thought of this; most thought they didn't know what they thought, is what it came down to. And back to the blond lady, this time brimming with the happy news of a midair collision.
Andy said, "Is this one of the ones that does the recaps?"
"I think," May said uncertainly, "this is one of the ones that does coming-next."
Andy shook his head. "I went by the mission," he said, "and there wasn't nothing, no police cars, nothing. In fact, it looked kind of closed up.
I phoned their number, and they got their answering machine on, in some foreign language. Can you imagine? A whole country's mission, and not only they got their answering machine on, it's a foreign language."
"Andy," May said, switching off the TV right in the middle of ethnic violence, "if you don't settle down and tell me what's going on, you're going to drive me back to cigarettes."
"Oh. Sorry. Sit down, I-- Listen, could I have a beer first?"
"Yes," May said, long-suffering. "And get me another. You know where it is."
He knew. He went and came back, and they sat in the living room together and he said, "Tiny's got this foreign cousin, and to help him out we lifted this special thing from another country's mission, that's got offices on this boat on the East Side. We got the thing, at least for a while, but John got stuck getting away from the boat. I figured, we'll find out where the cops have him, maybe bust him out, something, I don't know. But there's no cops around, the mission all shut down, nothing on the news; it's like they didn't even report the theft. So, I'm sorry, May, I hate to be the one that brings the bad news, but the thing is, we don't know where John is, right now, this minute."
May's left hand clawed in her cardigan pocket for nonexistent cigarettes. She said, "You don't know if he's dead or alive?"
"May," Andy said, "when I last saw him, these private guards had their hands on him. He was alive and standing up, and he wasn't resisting or being hit or anything like that, and for sure they'd want him to tell where we were going with the special thing. So he's alive, we know that much. We just don't know where he's alive."