Don't Ask by Donald E. Westlake

each with two chairs and one wastebasket, all bought from a used office furniture store on West Twenty-third Street. One of these desks was near the door, where a young black American woman named Khodeen, their only non-Tsergovian employee, deflected tablecloth bearers. The other two desks, back toward the rear corners of the deep room, formed a long triangle with the first. The left one of these was home base for a stout older woman named Drava Votskonia, who wore a different dark headkerchief ever}' day, who had warts on her face you could use for cup hooks, and whose portfolios were Commercial Attache, Director of the Tourist Office, and Mistress of Cultural Exchange. The other desk belonged to Grijk Krugnk, and his areas of responsibility were Military Attache, Passport Control Officer, and Chief of Security (also the entire security staff) for the embassy, the consulate, and the mission (pend.).
    It was at this desk that Grijk and Tiny now sat, each with one meaty forearm on the scarred surface as they talked. Across the way, Drava Votskonia was on the phone, continuing her perpetual quest for an American interested in reviving the craze of the pet rock. "Imported pet rocks!" (After all, the hula hoop had come back, if briefly, had it not?) And up front, between tablecloths, Khodeen retied her cornrows.
    "We're talking about renting a boat," Tiny now explained. "Not buying one."
    "Dafs for sure," Grijk agreed. "Vad are we gonna do vid a boad? We're a landlocked country."
    "So that's why we'll rent," Tiny explained. Sometimes he had to be very patient with his cousin, a lot more than with somebody whose blood, when spilled, would not be familial.
    "How much you rent for, dis boad?" Grijk demanded.
    "I don't know yet," Tiny said. "This is just I'm dropping by to keep you informed, let you know, there's gonna be an expense."
    "Vad informed? You don't know how much expense."
    "Let's put it like this," Tiny said, reminding himself that this was, after all, a distant cousin, an extremely distant cousin, and maybe he didn't have to be that patient, maybe. "What we'll say is, if the boat rent's less than five hundred dollars, we'll go ahead and do it, and you'll pay us back. And if it's over five hundred dollars, we'll call you and let you make the decision."
    Grijk thought this over. "I donno," he finally decided. "I tink I godda talk to my boss. You wait a minute?"
    "Even a couple minutes," Tiny offered.
    'Tanks." Grijk reassured himself that all the desk drawers were locked, and then he hurried away to the back room, where Tiny'd never been, to confer with his "boss," whom Tiny'd never seen, and who was presumably the ambassador, consul, head of mission (pend.), and chief spokesman for Tsergovia in the United States. And a hard guy to get along with, from Grijk's nervousness every time he thought about the "boss" or actually had to go in and deal with him.
    Tiny stretched in his seat, wondering whether this was a good idea in the first place, to be involved with these clowns, old country or no, and to pair up with Dortmunder and that crowd again, or if maybe what he ought to do was make a clean break with the past and…
    "Pah!" The smack of Drava Votskonia's telephone into its cradle roused Tiny from his reverie. He glanced over and La Votskonia was looking stormy. She noticed Tiny watching her and turned her glower in his direction. "You're an American," she said accusingly. Her accent was similar to Grijk's but less pronounced, more like an irritating buzz around the words than real distortion of the words themselves.
    Tiny thought that over and shrugged. It was an admission he felt he could safely make. "Right."
    "So tell me," she said, "what do Americans do with rocks?"
    Now, here we have an unexpected question. Tiny's brow puckered with thought. Rocks? What do Americans do with rocks? What, Tiny asked himself, do / do with rocks, and the answer was, nothing. "Well," he said, thinking as fast as he could, "they used to