Don't Ask by Donald E. Westlake Read Free Book Online Page B

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.