The Favor

a novel by

The room by itself was a problem. Just a
square little box, not an inch of which you couldn’t take in the
second you stepped across the threshold. The door of the john was
even made out of glass, which was weird—the rippled kind, of
course, presumably as a small concession to modesty, but the light
inside worked off the main switch, so you’d be like a goldfish in a
bowl. Not much point in trying to hide in there. Not much point in
trying to hide anywhere. Guinness decided he wouldn’t bother.In the
end he settled for simply removing all the bulbs from the overhead
fixtures, even the one in the bathroom. What the hell, Harry
Bateman wasn’t exactly Public Enemy Number One; he wasn’t the sort
to duck and roll just because nothing happened when he walked in
and flipped on the light switch. His mind probably wasn’t much used
to concerning itself with the basic tactics of survival, which was
just going to be tough on him. And anyway, if the last few nights
had been any indication, he’d probably be half swacked in the
bargain.

God, what a bore. Guinness wondered how in
the world he’d sinned that they sent him after runaway file clerks.
For three days he’d followed this clown around, in the afternoons
through room after room of pink, fleshy Rubens nudes in the Alte
Pinakothek, and from six o’clock on through every strip joint and
brothel in Munich, with only a break for dinner and a nice big
bottle of Ürziger Schwarzlay. Friend Bateman certainly was having
himself a razzle on his ill gotten gains.

It was nine thirty, and the dining room
downstairs would be closed after eleven. Allowing, say, an hour to
take care of this business, he could still make it if Bateman would
hurry up and show. Christ, he hadn’t had anything to eat since
noon—it wasn’t the sort of job you much wanted to do on a full
stomach.

Thank heaven for small mercies, though. Our
little file clerk seemed to be a chap of regular habits—sitting
down to his schnitzel and brown dumplings every evening at a
quarter after eight, and then back upstairs to preen himself for
the whores. He’d be along directly.

And alone, unless Guinness had rather
seriously misread the man. No little friends up for a quiet night
of room service and heavy breathing; he seemed to prefer them in
their natural habitat. Or perhaps he was just afraid of the house
detective.

Did they still even have house detectives
these days? Did hotels still worry about the state of your
morals—at all? No, he didn’t think so. But Bateman, after all, had
until a few weeks ago been leading a sheltered existence in rural
Nebraska with a wife and two perfectly obnoxious daughters, so he
might still entertain all sorts of quaint notions about the
guardianship of the public virtue.

Anyway, the odds were he wouldn’t show up
with any easy ladies on his arm. At least, he hadn’t yet. That sort
of thing was for later, after he’d brushed the powdered sugar out
of his moustache and reapplied his Mennen Speedstik and was ready
once again to face the bright world.

Come on and hurry it up, Harry. My guts are
growling and it’s time you paid your score. You won’t make it any
nicer by putting it off.

Guinness sat in an armchair in front of the
only window, the drapes to which he had drawn closed twenty minutes
ago, after he had first picked the lock on the inside door and let
himself in. The Luger in his hand was threaded with a silencer,
which he kept unscrewing a quarter of a turn and then tightening
back on as he tried to make up his mind whether or not to bother
with the stupid thing at all. He didn’t like silencers; they struck
him as faintly melodramatic and they always threw your shot off a
little—although across the width of a hotel room that would hardly
matter very much. Still, somehow it made you feel silly to kill
someone with a gun that didn’t make any more noise than a champagne
cork. Bateman would probably prefer to go out with a bang.

Nonetheless, there were things like
instructions to be considered. It would be nice if he spilled his
guts before he died, but Harry Bateman had to die. Nobody wanted
him arrested and brought back to the States for trial; nobody was
interested in that kind of publicity. No slipups, nothing
fancy—just kill him where he stands. The fix was in, so for the
record it was going to be death by misadventure—a heart attack, a
fall in the bathtub, something like that—and it wouldn’t matter how
many bullet holes. If there were going to be bullet holes, however,
Guinness would rather make them without waking up the whole hotel,
and it was one of the myths of television that you could always
count on downing a man with the first shot.

But perhaps it wouldn’t come to that. Perhaps
Bateman would turn out to be the reasonable type and could be
persuaded to leave a nice presentable cadaver that wouldn’t
constitute too much of a trauma for the chambermaid. One could
hope.

The room was perfectly dark. Even the lamps
were disconnected, all except the one on the table next to
Guinness’s chair. He took another look at his watch, a digital job
he had bought for himself as a fortieth birthday present; you
pressed the stem for a reading and the numbers would pulse on like
a heartbeat, counting off the seconds. It was nine thirty-four.
Presumably Bateman was lingering over the last of his wine. It
wouldn’t be the first time.

What would he do when he came in? There were
two doors, an arrangement you only seemed to find in Europe, with
only a few inches of space between them. The first opened out into
the corridor and the second into the room, and only the second had
a lock on it. So Bateman would take out his key for that and stand
with his back to the outside door, which was equipped with a heavy
spring at the top hinge, to keep it from closing. Would he try
turning on the overhead before locking himself in? Yes, probably.
He would stay between the doors and see whether he could find the
switch in the narrow little patch of dull light from the corridor,
and when he discovered it wasn’t working he would step across the
threshold—it would be a reflex; he wouldn’t even think about it—to
get close enough to the dresser to pull the little cord on the
lamp, and the outside door would then slam shut on its own. And by
then our man would be well inside the trap.

The poor little slob. Of course, he wasn’t
thinking in terms of traps; in his mind he still lived in that
nice, safe world where you didn’t have to think. Doubtless all
Bateman’s anxieties were about policemen, about being dragged back
to Nebraska in chains to face a jury of his peers. He probably
didn’t realize that he had left all that behind him, that the
interests he had offended by running off with a briefcase full of
other people’s secrets hardly ever troubled themselves about due
process. The verdict was already in, and there was only the
sentence left to be carried out.

But Bateman didn’t know that. He had a fake
passport and lots of money and probably felt pretty safe. Why
should he imagine that there might be somebody waiting for him in
his room? Why should he suspect that anything was wrong when the
overhead light didn’t go on? Probably it just meant that the bulb
was blown. Sure it did.

It was nine forty-six when Guinness finally
heard a key in the lock.

Bateman was humming to himself, if that was
the right word for the erratic little honking sounds that became
audible as the inside door swung open, a kind of private jumble of
noise in which could be detected, almost as if by accident, some
approximation of a Strauss waltz—you heard them all over town, all
whipped cream and Gemütlichkeit, through the open doors of
restaurants and cafes and over the canned music systems in
department stores. And Bateman was humming one as he tried to
negotiate the entrance to his hotel room. He was feeling just fine,
it seemed—he didn’t have a care in the world. Not one.

He stood between the inner and outer doors,
perfectly visible in the yellow light from the corridor, and then
he pulled the outer door closed behind him and disappeared again
into the darkness of the room. He was still humming; the tune would
break off every once in a while as he breathed in thickly through
his nose.

The inside door wheezed shut. Guinness waited
for the click of the light switch, but it didn’t come right away.
Instead, there was a heavy scratching sound as Bateman made a
number of painstaking attempts to fit his key back into the lock.
What the hell did Bateman care? He wasn’t afraid of the dark.

Finally he made it, and the lock turned
closed with a rattle. And then the light switch—click, click.
Nothing. Bateman paused for a few seconds—the waltz tune got lost
in a concentrated, ponderously thoughtful exhalation—and then he
tried it again. Click, click, click. And then the flat sound of his
hand, feeling around on the dresser top for the base of the
lamp.

Enough was enough. Guinness reached up with
his right hand and pulled the cord on the lamp beside him, the only
one that was about to go on for anybody.

The room was flooded with light, or at least
that was what it felt like after all this time sitting in the dark.
For Bateman, too, the suddenness of it seemed a shock—it seemed to
catch him like a hammer blow, just at the base of the spine. He
pitched around, bracing his elbows against the dresser as if he
expected to fall down.

“Good evening.” Guinness’s voice was
marvelously even, considering. He tried not to blink as he brought
his Luger up so that it was pointing at a spot just under the left
side of Bateman’s ribcage. “If you move before I give you
permission, I’m going to kill you. I’m going to kill you anyway,
but I’ll do it right now instead of waiting. Do you understand
that? Just nod your head.”

Poor Bateman—it would have been possible to
feel sorry for him if he hadn’t looked so damned ridiculous, with
his knees locked and his back pushed up against the dresser to keep
himself from clattering to the floor as if somebody had severed his
spine at the top joint. His mouth kept opening and closing,
seemingly without any reference to the will, like a machine
somebody had forgotten to turn off. Finally all this up and down
motion managed to translate itself into a stiff nod. Well, good;
the message had filtered through at last.

He wasn’t any older than his late thirties—a
few years younger than Guinness, who was hardly ready to class
himself as an antique—but at that moment, as his pale blue eyes
glistened in his thin, suddenly rather withered face, he might have
been the mummy of Ramesses, come back to life to die all over
again. Even his little soup strainer of a moustache looked
comically too large for his shrunken mouth.

It happened that way sometimes, when you
were, say, two and a half sheets to the wind and all at once you
had to sober up much too fast. It seemed to squeeze something out
of you.

Bateman looked half dead already, his bony
hands dangling at his sides as if he didn’t quite know what to do
with them. The poor little bastard—he just wasn’t ready for these
kinds of games. And he wasn’t going to have much more of a chance
to get ready.

“Now I want you to sit down on the floor,
with your feet straight out in front of you. Just there.” Guinness
gestured with the muzzle of his Luger to a spot just to one side of
the center of the carpet, well clear of any furniture, where
Bateman presumably would be less subject to bright ideas.

“And it might be well if you remember that
for all I know, you’re in deadly weapons up to your eyebrows, and
you’re not likely to persuade me into thinking otherwise. So if you
reach into your pocket, or if either of your hands disappears from
sight, even for a second, you get your ticket canceled on the
spot.” Guinness pulled back his lips to let his teeth show in a
parody of a smile. “And don’t imagine I’ll be sorry if what I pry
loose from your cold, dead fingers is a wad of kleenex—I’m not the
compassionate type.”

He pointed to the spot again, with a movement
that suggested a certain impatience, and Bateman began his awkward
descent. It was painful to watch him as he slid slowly down to the
floor; his joints seemed to be stiff with age, and he gave the
impression of a man crawling backward into a hole. But he kept his
hands in plain view, and when finally he was still again, sitting
with his back bent forward in what looked like exhaustion, he kept
them flat on his thighs, the fingers widely spread.