Don't Ask (7 page)

"Ecological unsound," Ms. Votskonia told him. "Already I have pursued this question with many beachfront communities, and they have all turned against it."

Tiny felt a sharp little pain growing between his eyes. What do Americans do with rocks? Cairns? No, not anymore.

The inner door opened and Grijk stuck his head out to say, "Tiny? Could you come in here vun minute?"

"I could," Tiny told him, and rose to his feet. With his biggest and most insincere smile, he told the fuming Ms. Votskonia, "Sorry I couldn't be more help," and lumbered away through the door Grijk was holding open into a small office where he found himself confronting a woman who made Ms. Votskonia look like Mother Teresa.

This woman was about the size and shape of a mailbox, with a black-haired white lunch box on top for a head. She wore a uniform much like Grijk's--the dark olive tunic, the black piping, the dark wide trousers, the black boots--and, in fact, she looked much like Grijk, in the same way that Grijk looked much like Tiny. In other words, this was a woman who looked like the paperback version of Tiny, which is not a good way for a woman to look.

Grijk, as nervous as a kid introducing his father to the school principal, said, "Tchotchkus Bulcher, dis is Zara Kotor, Tsergovian ambassador to the United States."

When called upon, Tiny could be a social animal. Nodding pleasantly,

"How are ya?" he said.

Zara Kotor said, "Extremely unhappy." She sounded tough as nails, and had no accent at all.

Ignoring the content of the words, and referring only to their delivery, Tiny beamed and said, "You talk good."

"I was educated in your country," she said grimly. "Bronx Science."

"Oh, yeah? I hear that's a good school."

"We learned our mathematics there, in Bronx Science," Zara Kotor said, beetling an already beetled brow at Tiny. "And five hundred bucks could never be the answer to 'How much does it cost to rent a boat for a little ride on the river?'"

Tiny felt himself getting just the teeniest bit annoyed. To go through all this crap for no gain, and then to have your judgment questioned? He could roll this dame in that cheap broadloom out there and take her for a little boat ride. He said, "If all we were doing was a nice day on the water, we could go rent a rowboat in Central Park. The idea is, we gotta spend a bunch of time on the river and not have anybody wonder who we are and what we're up to."

"And for this you need a luxury yacht," Zara Kotor suggested. "Probably with champagne, and girls in bikinis, to make it look more natural."

"For five hundred bucks?" Tiny grinned at her, not in a friendly way.

"You got a deal," he said.

She shook her head. "I don't see why all this expense is needed at all.

You know where the Votskojek embassy is, you--I've told you before, Grijk, don't do that--have even seen the place. I understand that you and your friends are professionals."

"That's why we do things right," Tiny said. "Or not at all-- that's another possibility."

"I don't see," Zara Kotor said, speaking as though used to her word being law, "the necessity for this expenditure. I don't see that it can be approved."

"Okay by me, lady," Tiny said. "Find yourself another descendant; I'm gone."

He was turning away, reaching for the doorknob, when she said in tones of outrage, "You've taken our money!"

"Not me," Tiny told her.

Grijk hurriedly muttered something in some language that sounded like a can opener being used on a rusty can. Zara Kotor raised a cynical eyebrow. "And I suppose your friends won't share with you?"

"They never did before," Tiny said. "I got into this because Grijk here talked me into it. And now you talked me out of it again, and that's fine." And once again, he reached for the knob.

"Now, wait; now, wait," Zara Kotor said, and when Tiny turned back, exasperated, he saw that doubt had somehow penetrated that lunch box she used for a head.

This time, he kept his hand on the knob. In fact, he considered removing the knob from the door, opening the top of the lunch box, and placing the knob inside it. Instead, "What is it?" he demanded. "I gotta hurry.

I gotta go tell the guys, don't buy that sunscreen after all."

"What boat," she wanted to know, "costs five hundred dollars a day to rent?"

"I don't know," Tiny said. "See ya."

"Wait!"

"For what*"

"All right" she shouted, as though he'd been the one browbeating her all this time. "All right. You say you're doing this pro bono, is that what you're saying?"

Now Tiny beetled his own beetled brow. Staring hard at this woman, as though she were an assistant DA, he said, "You putting words in my mouth?"

"Pro bono," she repeated, as though it would make more sense the second time around. "You're, you're… you're not doing it for profit."

"Damn right I'm not," Tiny said, "and beats the hell out of me why, so I'm just as happy to say--"

"No, no, wait," she said, patting the air between them. "We started ofFon the wrong foot, that's all."

"Oh, yeah?"

"We are a very poor country," she reminded him.

"That's no excuse."

Surprisingly, she nodded. "You're right," she said. "I was too suspicious. Could we begin again, as friends this time? As fellow patriots of Tsergovia?"

Tiny thought it over, and shrugged. They'd started. And the thing had some interesting aspects. "Sure," he said.

"You'll spend what you have to spend on the boat," she said.

"Good," he said. "And we'll keep it down as much as we can."

"I'm sure you will." She stuck out a hand like an order of cold cuts.

"Friends? Partners?" (Grijk stared openmouthed at this development.) "Sure," Tiny said, and took the hand, which also felt like an order of cold cuts. He shook it.

Suddenly, she was twinkling at him. "I wouldn't want to be enemies," she said, "with a cute guy like you."

Tiny fled. that's an awfully small boat," Dortmunder said.

"It's plenty big," Stan said. As the vehicle specialist in the group, he was the one who'd made the arrangements for the boat and, as he'd assured Dortmunder several times already, he'd kept Dortmunder's qualms about water transport in the forefront of his mind throughout the decision-making process.

Nor was he even going to drive this boat--"pilot," they liked to say, as though it were an airplane. He would leave that to its owner, the cheerful bearded giant over there in the wheelhouse, looking out all his windows and waiting for them to board, which Tiny and Kelp had already done.

But not Dortmunder, who stood on the pier and frowned and said, "It just looks small. To me, it looks small."

"Dortmunder," Stan said, losing his patience, "it's a tugboat. It's the safest thing in New York Harbor. This boat has pushed around oil tankers, passenger liners, big cargo ships from all over the world."

But not recently. Labor strife, changes in the shipping industry, competition from other Eastern Seaboard ports; what it all comes down to is, the New York City tugboat is an endangered species.

Most of the sturdy little red and black guys with the hairy noses and the old black automobile tires along the sides are gone now, and the few still struggling along, like the hero of a Disney short, don't have much of a livelihood to keep them going.

So it hadn't been hard for Stan to find a tugboat owner--a good percentage of the surviving boats are still privately owned-- happy to swing around the Battery an dover to the East River and spend an afternoon dawdling in the offing, no questions asked, no heavy lifting involved, for three hundred bucks. (Tiny had kept his promise to Zara Kotor. He would also keep his distance from her.) Dortmunder stood on the pier, this tugboat--the Margaret C. M.oran, it was called--at his feet, and memories of the Vilburg town Reservoir rose up around an dover his head. "It's moving up and down," he complained, watching the side of the boat do just that in relation to the pier.

"Sure it's moving up and down," Stan said. "The water's moving up and down. All New York Harbor is moving up and down."

"I'm sorry you pointed that out," Dortmunder said.

"Look, John," Stan said gently, his manner calm and patient and sympathetic, "I understand how you feel, I do. But we either gotta do this or don't do it, and one way or the other I gotta pay Captain Bob.

So you wanna get on the boat, or you wanna go home and get three hundred clams?"

"Not clams," Dortmunder said. "Smackers; bucks; simoleons; even dollars."

"Come on, John, which is it?"

"Forward," Dortmunder said, and stepped onto the top of the tug's rail, which dropped away beneath him, so that he pitched forward into the boat, to be caught like a beach ball by Tiny, who stood him on his feet, brushed him off, and said, "Welcome aboard."

"Right," Dortmunder said.

The cheery madman up in the wheelhouse smiled down upon them and roared,

"All set?"

"Ready," Stan yelled back, leaping lightly aboard, and half saluted, as one wheel man to another.

Dortmunder looked about himself and the tugboat was small, dammit. The front half was dominated by the wheelhouse, an oval superstructure built up from the deck, with an octagon of windows around the top, inside which Captain Bob could steer his mighty mite and keep an eye on everything that was happening everywhere all around him.

The back half was a small deck area crowded with coils of rope, jerricans of fuel and oil, harpoons, clubs, and general stuff. Under Captain Bob's station at the wheel, a door led into the lower part of the superstructure, and when Dortmunder looked in there he saw a tight spiral staircase coiling downward into a constricted area of loud humming. Tugboats are, after all, merely the smallest possible superstructure surrounding the largest and most powerful possible engine.

Kelp reclined at his leisure on a coil of rope, back against the side rail that had so betrayed Dortmunder as he fell aboard. Having caught Dortmunder then like a forward pass, Tiny was now seated on the net-covered rail at the stern, seemingly relaxed even though he was just above the churning, foamy wake. Stan had chosen to scramble up to the wheelhouse with Captain Bob, where he stood swaying in the doorway, exchanging shouted pleasantries with the pilot. Dortmunder looked around at all this, wondering where safely to stash himself, and then Kelp patted the coil of rope beside him. "Grab a seat," he said. "Take a look at the view."

Dortmunder grabbed the seat, grateful to give over the question of balance from his feet to his ass, and took a look at the view, just as Captain Bob vroomed the engine and they went angling and roaring away from the pier and out into the greasy, gray, grimy Hudson.

Well, it was a view, no argument about that. You don't get to see a sight like this every day, unless you happen to own one of the few remaining tugboats working New York Harbor. On one side, Manhattan, a narrow, crowded aisle of stalagmites that have lost their cavern and been unaccountably exposed to the open air, making for a scene as outlandish as it is spectacular. Look at all those windows! Are there people inside all of those? You see all those buildings, you don't see any people at all, and yet all you're put in mind of is human beings, and just how many of them there must be for the world to contain a view like this.

So much for Manhattan. On the other side, New Jersey, and so much for New Jersey. Up above, far away, the George Washing ton Bridge, like the hawser holding Manhattan to America (reluctantly, on the part of both), and down below, the jolly green giant's mother, looking for an honest ship.

Or any ship at all. A few garbage barges, the Circle Line boat, an occasional weekend cruise ship, the waddling Staten Island ferry, now and then a small freighter that looks as though it must have made a wrong turn somewhere; the teeming New York Harbor of yesteryear is no more. So how come the water's still so disgusting?

Captain Bob steered \hcMargaret C. Mornn southward past the new Imperial Ferry pier with its recently established ferryboat service over to New Jersey (an eminently reasonable technology) and down past Battery Park City, where the World Trade Center (so good they did it twice!) stands as the final failure of architecture; not an idea, not a design, not a whimsy, not a grace note, not a shred of art or passion wrinkles those sharply creased trouser legs.

Then the heliport, where a very loud helicopter took off through Dortmunder's head; in the left ear, out the right, scrambling his brains along the way. Then, at the southern tip of Manhattan, the Staten Island ferry terminal, with the fat ferries as a Mother Goose--like reminder of a more possible New York.

Down here at the tip of the island, the seas got a little rougher.

Dortmunder held on to his coil of rope with both hands and both knees, and the magnificent view went up and down and up and sideways and down and up and down and sideways and up…

Tiny held on to him while he leaned over the rail.

Later, he felt somewhat better, though kind of hollow. And by now, they were in the East River, between Manhattan and Brooklyn, a much more bustling world, though still eerily unpopulated on the water. But you've got another heliport, and then two bridges in a row crawling with traffic--the Brooklyn, and then the Manhattan--an dover on the Brooklyn side you've got the Promenade, which looks nice, people standing around, posed as though in the artist's impression of how it will look if the money is raised and the project completed.