Don't Ask (20 page)

Even so. Kelp trudged fenceward.

All this planning, for nothing. Finding just the right truck, a big boxy thing with a door in its side. Giving it new license plates and a quick spray-paint job. Paying just the right city employee a small honorarium for a Xerox of the appropriate architectural drawings of that section of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel containing the ventilation tower. Studying the actual physical tunnel and locating the door beside the catwalk that led to the service area beneath that tower. Riding in the back of the truck while Stan Murch drove it into the tunnel at a late enough nighttime hour that there would be moments when no other vehicle was in sight and the duty cop dozed in his glass cage, so he could stop it right next to the access door and Kelp could step briskly from truck to catwalk over the railing and through the door while Murch drove on.

Coming here like a mouse in the walls while Murch circled the boroughs in the truck, commissioned to return to that spot in the tunnel every half hour until Kelp should emerge from the access door and slip back into the body of the truck. And all for what?

Bitter disappointment.

Kelp moved away from the denuded boat toward the chain-link fence.

Something to his left caught his eye. When he veered toward it, he saw a something or other neatly folded and placed on the concrete ground next to the white building. He bent and lifted a corner of it. A tarpaulin, folded as neatly and compactly as an American flag. The tarpaulin?

Next to the possible tarpaulin was a round trash barrel, bright white plastic body and dark blue domed top with a little swing door inset in it. An exhortation of some sort was printed on the body of the barrel, as though such exhortations were needed around this place.

Kelp would never make a Coastguardsperson; he just didn't have that innate natural neatness. For instance, when he ripped the blue dome off the trash barrel, he just flipped it away any which how. And the Burger King wrappers and chewing-gum wrappers and Reader's Digests he pulled from the barrel, he flung behind him to left and right without any regard for symmetry or order. Just a mess.

It was at the bottom of the barrel. Kelp had this much neatness in his character; he wiped the stray flecks of ketchup off the bone with a couple of used Kleenexes before kissing it.

Diary of an Escapee e kept to the woods, which made the going pretty slow. Also, he was not very much by way of being a woodsman, but was more of a city person by habit, experience, and inclination, so that made the going kind of difficult. On the other hand, when the going gets slow and difficult, even a city person knows to keep going Downhill wasn't so bad; you could always fall. Roll into a doughnut, breathe slowly and evenly, and hope you don't meet any rocks.

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 an 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.