Ross Thomas: No Questions Asked

“You aren’t married again, are you?”

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t think so. I got married.”

“Really? Congratulations.”

“Don’t bother,” he said. “It’s not working out too good.”

We didn’t seem to have any more old times to catch up on, so we drove in silence until we got to the hotel. The bar we chose was downstairs, a small place that was presided over by an elderly bartender and a waiter who might have been his uncle. There were only two other persons in the bar, a young man and a girl, but they were unaware of anything except each other.

Both Fastnaught and I ordered Scotch and water, and after the old man served the drinks Fastnaught took a big, thirsty swallow of his, and then took another one, quickly, as if the first swallow hadn’t done for him quite what he had hoped it would do.

“I’m drinking too much,” he said.

“So is everybody.”

“Nah, I’m getting close to the edge. I can tell. I’ve watched too many guys get close to the edge and then slide over. I don’t know whether I’m going to slide over or not. Either you do or you don’t. I worry about it.”

“Drink something you don’t like,” I said. “If you like Scotch, switch to rye or Irish.”

“Does it help?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The guys who told me about it are all in A.A. now.”

“Maybe I’ll do that. Just quit altogether.”

“Maybe you will.”

“But not right now,” he said and signaled the old waiter for another round.

After it came, Fastnaught took a swallow, relit his cigar, which had gone out, and blew some smoke up into the air. I noticed that he inhaled the cigar smoke. “Like I said,” he told me, “I’m not in robbery anymore. In fact, I haven’t been in robbery for five years. I was in homicide for quite a while, which was kinda interesting, but now I’m in the government liaison section. In fact, I am the government liaison section, me and a girl who answers the phone and does the typing.”

“I don’t think I’m going to congratulate you again,” I said.

“No. Don’t. You wanta know what the government liaison section does? Well, it tries to make sure that if somebody gets busted who shouldn’t, the public doesn’t have to get all worried about it. Hell of a job for a grown man, isn’t it?”

“Does it keep you busy?” I said because I felt I should say something.

“There are about three or four thousand people in this town who, if you’re an ordinary cop, it’s better not to mess with. You got the members of Congress, that’s one. Then there’s the Cabinet, the other government big shots, and the diplomatic corps. And then there’s the heavy money crowd, which is about the same as it is in any town. Well, sometimes these people get in jams. Maybe they get tanked up and drive their car into the reflecting pool, or maybe they knock their wife or girlfriend around a little, or maybe they go pick up a nigger whore over on Thirteenth or Fourteenth and get in trouble with her pimp. My job is to sort of smooth these things over and maybe, if it’s not too bad, keep it out of the papers and off of the TV.” Fastnaught took another big swallow of his drink and a gloomy look settled over his face. “I’ve had what maybe you could call some notable failures.”

“I can think of a couple,” I said.

“But most of the time you know what I do?”

“What?”

“I fix parking tickets.”

“Well, I guess somebody has to do it.”

Fastnaught shook his head. “I gotta get out of it. I either gotta get out of it or I gotta quit. And that’s where you come in, St. Ives.”

I shook my head. “You know how I work,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. You stay in the go-between business because you’ve built yourself up a reputation with the thieves. They know you’ll do what you say you’re gonna do. And the cops don’t mind working with you because after you get through go-betweening, you tell ’em anything they wanta know, and the thieves don’t mind that because by then they’ve got the money, and they’re spending it down in Mexico or someplace. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s close.”

“Well, when the book got stolen the department touched base with me because the Library of Congress is just what its name says it is, it’s part of Congress and if possible Congress don’t want something like this written up in the papers, because it might give somebody else ideas about how they could do the same thing.”

“It wasn’t stolen from the Library,” I said. “It was stolen after it left the Library.”

Yeah, I know all that. But I sort of brushed over that when I made my pitch down at headquarters.”

“What pitch?”

“I told them that I’d worked with you before and I knew how you operated. I told them I thought I’d better be assigned to this thing full-time and stick close to you, and when you got through paying the quarter of a million and got the book back all nice and safe, then I could make my move and box in whoever stole the book before he got the chance to spend the money. Well, they didn’t buy it.”

“Too bad.”

“Yeah. Well, maybe you’ve sorta guessed that I don’t sit too well over there on Indiana Avenue. My name isn’t mud over there, it’s shit, and maybe it’s my fault and maybe it isn’t, but I know if I don’t work a big one like this, something they’ll have to sit up and notice, then I’m gonna be fixing parking tickets for the rest of my life. Either that or I quit and I don’t wanta quit because I don’t know what else I could do.”

“Did you ever think of going into selling?” I said. “You’d make a terrific salesman.”

“Funny. Jesus, you’re real funny, St. Ives, you break me up.”

“You worked it somehow,” I said. “I know you worked it, or otherwise you wouldn’t be sitting here telling me about it.”

“Yeah, I worked it. About a year ago I got a Senator out of a jam. A real bad jam, the kind that if I hadn’ve got him out of Jack Anderson would have told all about it in about eight or nine hundred papers. Well, nobody knows about this jam except me and the Senator and a couple of other parties who aren’t gonna give him any trouble anymore. I never reported it in like I’m supposed to and the Senator’s sort of grateful, if you know what I mean.”

“The Senator put the squeeze on for you.”

“That’s right. He put it on in a real smooth way so that they didn’t even know he was putting it on for me. This morning they called me back in and said that they’d changed their minds, and that maybe I’d better liaise with you after all. Liaise isn’t really a word, is it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“They use it all the time down there, but I didn’t think it was really a word.”

I leaned back in my chair and looked at him. The drinks had spread to his face, giving it a shiny, wet flush. He was huddled over his glass, clutching it with both hands. The cigar had gone dead in his fingers. There was a wet stain on his tie. He looked tired and middle-aged and a little desperate.

“What do you want?” I said.

“I want the thief.”

I shook my head. “Not from me. I don’t serve them up. You know that.”

“Your rules,” he said. “We play by your rules.”

“My rules sometimes give the thief an edge.”

“Let me worry about that.”

“All right,” I said. “I will.”

The thief called at 8:32 that night, and I couldn’t decide whether the voice belonged to a countertenor or a low contralto. Whoever it was seemed to have put something into his or her mouth to alter the voice. All you really have to do, if you want to do that, is stick your finger into your mouth and talk around it. But some of them use marbles and handkerchiefs and even voice-altering devices, although none of them works much better than a finger.