Free Don't Ask by Donald E. Westlake Page A

still a ship, and could theoretically still be moved about on the open sea if desired, though not, DV, with Hradec Kralowc aboard. That transatlantic crossing on this fat and awful old scow had been more than enough, more than enough.) Drawers, too; beneath the former bridge's many windows were many drawers, containing God knows what. And somewhere, somewhere in all this nauticalness and officialese and professionalismo there reposed, Hradec was almost sure, the walkie-talkie.
    But wait. What if he did find the walkie-talkie, and did figure out how to operate it, and did call the current two guards in from the gate, and it turned out this tug was a Tsergovian feintf That the real attack would be coming from the land, not the sea?
    What to do? What to do?
    While Hradec dithered and did nothing--the primary and most necessary character trait of the professional diplomat--the mysterious tugboat have to at the end of the ferry slip, just barely within Hradec's sight.
    He pressed his forehead to the--cool!-- glass of one of the former bridge's windows and gazed downward past his cheekbones. What was going on down there?
    An argument, apparently. The huge man who looked very much like a Tsergovian had clamped one meaty fist around a metal pole at the end of the slip, thus holding the tug in place while the other three on deck argued and the one up in the wheel house occasionally shouted down some valuable addition of his own.
    At last, one of the men in back, not the possible Tsergovian but a slope-shouldered, furrow-browed individual whose lifeless brown hair flopped around on top of his head in the breeze like dead beach grass, clambered up over the side and off the boat. He stood on the rotting planks of the slip and continued to argue with the men still in the boat, until at last he gave what appeared to be a disgusted wave of dismissal and turned away. At the same time, the perhaps-not-Tsergovian giant released the pole and the tugboat angled off, heading back out into the river.
    There were doors on both sides of the former bridge, leading out on deck. Hradec took one of these, saw the stranger clumping along shoreward two decks below, and called out, "You, there!"
    The man stopped. He looked around. He started forward again.
    "You, there! Up here!"
    The man stopped again. He angled his head back horribly and stared straight up to meet Hradec's eye.
    It was a strange moment, the two staring at one another through the vertical air. Hradec, a cultivated and civilized man, was horrified to find that he wanted to spit. Quelling that unworthy notion, he called instead, "This is private property!" (That was usually the best magic rune to pronounce in America.) "I'm just going through," the man called, pointing landward. "Catch a cab."
    "Why didn't you stay on your boat?" Hradec called, more out of simple curiosity than anything else.
    "Not me," the man said with gloomy fervency. "Not on that thing. No more."
    A fellow sufferer, Hradec thought, remembering again, more vividly than before, his own trip to the New World aboard this very tub, and an unexpected sense of camaraderie came over him, a rare feeling in this faraway posting among aliens, with only a few serfs around who spoke his native tongue (Magyar-Croat). "Wait there," he called. "I'll be right down. Wait there; the guards won't let you out without me."
    There was an elevator amidships, across from his bedroom. It was small, noisy, dark gray in color, and smelled of crankcase oil, but it was better than the stairs. Hradec unreeled downward through the ship's innards and stepped out to what had once been the upper center hold, the ship's lowest two decks having been devoted to storage, with large, wet, smelly rooms called holds, three on each deck, all with oval doors through the ship's side for access.
    Nowadays, however, five of these six holds were simply ignored, the Votskojeks having no use for damp, cavernous storage spaces, but Harry Hochman's carpenters, with the