The Favor (11 page)

The food shop had a “146” painted in yellow
overhead on the side street, so Number 23 would be across. A couple
of women were standing in the middle of the passage, their arms
folded across their breasts, talking. Only one window on that side
showed any illumination, and it was approximately where he would
have expected Number 23 to be. The woman with her back to it was
small, almost frail looking, and her hair was cut very short,
forming a little cap around her head. At that distance, and in the
decidedly poor light, there was no more you could say with any
conviction. The other one was taller, but even more obscured.

Guinness discovered that he had finished his
rice and what was apparently chicken. He ordered a glass of tea,
poured a teaspoon of sugar into it, and drank it off. The food had
been a mistake—he was beginning to feel sleepy again.

He paid, counting out the amount from his
slender supply of florins, and took a final look around to prove to
himself for perhaps the twentieth time since leaving the hotel that
there were no familiar faces in evidence. He stepped into the side
street and started walking slowly toward the small woman with the
pixie haircut. No one seemed to pay any attention.

“Yes?” She came up to him as he stood in
front of her doorway, staring up at the yellow numbers painted on
the brickwork overhead. “I can help you, maybe?”

He diverted his attention to her, curious
about her rather nasal accent and the fact that she had thought to
address him in English, and noticed that she didn’t automatically
smile the moment his eyes touched her. He regarded that as a point
in her favor and smiled himself.

“I hope so. Is this your place?”

“Yes. Would you like to come inside?”

She opened the door for him, and he stepped
into a tiny room that was nicer than he had expected. There was a
carpet on the floor, a chest of drawers, a mirror, and a small bed
covered with a bright Madras spread. Another door led to a
bathroom, hardly larger than a phone booth—there were even a few
chairs. Perhaps this was something else that the Europeans did
better. He stood by the chest of drawers while the woman drew an
outside pair of drapes; the big picture window and the bar stool
were, in any case, hidden behind a curtain, so they didn’t demand
to be acknowledged. There was no sense of one’s privacy being in
danger, almost no sense that outside there was a world to intrude.
It was an atmosphere that just missed being intimate, like part of
an estranged past.

“You are American, yes?”

She really was a small woman, and her hair
was a pale, pale brown that looked as if it might have been frosted
with silver. Her eyes were large and green and worried as she
smiled at him—but one imagined that her kind of work was burden
enough. Guinness would have put her age at thirtyone or two.

“The clothes, yes? But it is very fashionable
to look like an American now, so perhaps you are not. You are
English, yes?”

She began taking off her sweater, rolling it
up over her shoulders, and it was then that Guinness noticed how
white her skin was, almost bloodless. Perhaps she was cold—as soon
as the sweater was off, she reached down and turned on an electric
heater. The flesh on her breasts looked tight and drawn up.

“You are English, yes?”

“I’m the Soldier, Janine.”

It was a perfectly instinctive reaction, but
the first thing she did was recoil, drawing in her breath and
clutching a corner of her sweater to her bosom as if she had been
startled in the bathroom by a spider. Guinness turned his eyes
away, giving her a moment of privacy, and found himself wondering
why it was that he hated his life so much. When he looked at her
again, she had put the sweater back on.

“I was not expecting anyone,” she said
calmly, the way any woman might who finds herself encumbered with
an unwelcome and bothersome guest, someone whom she cannot simply
dismiss. “But I know who you are—everyone has heard of the
Soldier.”

Guinness said nothing, and the woman’s faint,
mocking smile slowly died. He wasn’t angry, precisely; he was
merely disappointed—“
Everyone has heard of the Soldier.”
It
made him feel like a freak.

“I need a place to stay, somewhere I can get
some sleep and not worry about who has a key. I’ll probably have to
have a car.”

She shrugged her narrow shoulders, suddenly
all business, and Guinness experienced a little flicker of
sympathy. It was probably like this all the time for her, men who
knew just what they wanted. But clearly, standing alone in this
tiny room with Raymond Guinness, celebrated killer of men, she felt
no need for compassion from anybody. In her dark green turtleneck
sweater and her boots and her heavy brown skirt, she looked very
self-reliant, very tough—he liked her, although he perceived that
it would be a mistake to show it. And maybe she really was
tough.

“Anything else?”

“Yes. As you say, the clothes are
American—get me some new ones, and a razor, that sort of thing. I
had to leave all that, to buy some time. Can you manage
everything?”

Outside, on the street, there was a woman’s
laughter. Apparently one of Janine’s neighbors had found herself a
live one. But that might have been on another planet for all it
mattered now.

This one, whom Ernie had called “Janine,”
whose customers, if they knew her by any name, probably called her
something else, who might really be anybody, regarded Guinness with
dispassionate, appraising eyes. It was very possible she was trying
to decide what size suit he would need to blend in with the
shipping clerks and the cheese merchants.

“Yes, I can manage everything. Tomorrow
morning? Is this soon enough?” It was a real question, and he
nodded.

Yes, this would be soon enough. She had only
perhaps five hours, and that seemed all the time in the world.

. . . . .

“My friend Aimé has gone to Spain for two
weeks with her boyfriend. He is very rich and not so young anymore,
so perhaps he will marry her now and then she will never come back.
She left me the key to her flat. You will not have any disturbance
there—this one has been her boyfriend for a long time now, and she
never brings her other boyfriends there. Two weeks—you will not
stay so long as that, I think.”

She gave him the key and smiled.

“You go now. It is only a dozen blocks from
here. I will follow, but it would seem odd if we left
together.”

The sky was already beginning to change from
black to slate gray when he found the place, up two flights of
stairs on a building that faced one of the canals. Apparently, from
the mailboxes, there were only three other apartments in the
building, and one of those seemed to be vacant. That was fine—he
didn’t want to attract anybody’s attention. But with only a few
other people to worry about, he could time his departures and
arrivals so no one would be likely even to know that he was there.
The place immediately beneath him seemed to be the one that was
empty, so no one would even hear his footsteps.

It wasn’t much, just a bedroom, a bathroom
off the hall, and a little kitchen that was like an annex to the
front sitting room. Guinness made a quick tour, just to prove to
himself there weren’t any booby traps, and then went back into the
bedroom, sat down on the bed, and kicked off his shoes. He was
tired. He looked around the room with stupid, incurious eyes,
hardly seeing anything at all.

He wondered if Aimé was having a good time
down in Spain, and if her elderly boyfriend had taken her to the
seaside, where they could sleep with the windows open and listen to
the waves breaking. But, of course, you didn’t listen to anything
while you were asleep—unless you were Raymond Guinness, celebrated
killer of men, and then you listened to the wallpaper peel because
there were people in the world who didn’t like you. You were
famous. Everyone has heard of the Soldier. You didn’t dare relax
because somewhere along the line you had become a celebrity, and
people stood around in train stations waiting for a glimpse of you
so they could earn a little extra money by phoning somebody with an
interest in spattering your brains all over the bathroom tiles.
Aimé was asleep down there in Spain, and in her bedroom in
Amsterdam Raymond Guinness was trying to work up the nerve to lie
down and close his eyes. It seemed a remote enough possibility.

He had a headache, a knocking sensation. He
was about to get up and go into the bathroom to look for some
aspirin when he realized that the knocking was coming from the
front door. He assumed it was Janine, and she must have been trying
to raise him for a long time, because the sound was beginning to
take on a certain urgency. He got up, slipping his shoes back on
simply as a precaution, and went to the door.

In certain lines of work, if you wanted to
live to enjoy your troubled conscience, you didn’t proceed merely
on the basis of an assumption. Guinness flattened himself out
beside the door, gripping a small glass ashtray in his left hand,
and reached over with his right to throw the bolt open. Nothing
happened—there weren’t any sprays of automatic weapons fire or
anything like that. The knocking just stopped.

“Soldier?”It was a perfectly familiar
feminine voice and, feeling like a chump, he pushed himself away
from the wall and opened the door for her.

“Soldier, are you. . .”

She stood in the hallway, looking at him—or,
more specifically, at the ashtray in his hand—aware, apparently,
that he had intended to beat her skull in. Well, not hers, but
whoever else’s it might have been at that unholy hour. For some
reason she seemed to resent what struck Guinness as a perfectly
reasonable precaution, but he was tired of worrying about whether
people liked and understood him. He set the ashtray back down on
the table from which it had come and went back into the bedroom to
lie down, kicking off his shoes again. What the hell.

“You would like some tea, yes?”

She had followed him and was sitting on the
corner of the bed, holding onto the strap of her shoulder bag with
both hands, as if it would brace her against falling to the floor.
When he shook his head, she reached into the bag and brought out a
small, nickel plated automatic pistol, letting it rest in the palm
of her hand, an offering rather than a threat.

When he didn’t take it, she set it down on
the bedspread.

“It was all I had right now—later, when you
know what you will need, I will find it for you.”For a long moment,
they both looked at her ludicrous little toy popgun—you might
almost have imagined it to be a piece of wedding silver someone had
given them and they couldn’t quite figure out what to do with it.
And then he realized, with a certain amount of surprise at his own
dimwittedness, that she had been trying, after a fashion, to
apologize. He picked the thing up and set it on the night table,
next to his head.

“Thank you.”

“I will need your trousers,” she said
abruptly, without seeming even to notice the change in
subject—perhaps it hadn’t changed.

Guinness was startled enough to laugh, but if
it had been a joke she was hanging onto it. She seemed very
composed, her hands folded together in her lap, and he noticed that
her green eyes had lost their worried look.

“I need them if I am to get you new
clothes—at least, I need to measure them. And the jacket and the
shirt. The shoes as well,” she went on, pointing down at where
Guinness’s scuffed loafers were tipped over on the floor, like
beached canoes. “Although perhaps you are not so worried about
them, yes? A European would not wear such shoes, but perhaps no one
will think to look at your feet.”

“No, perhaps not.”

He swung up to a sitting position and started
to unbutton his shirt. When he took it off and handed it to her,
she went over to the chair on the back of which he had hung his
coat, turning her back while he undid his trousers. When she had
them, she took a tape measure from her pocket and measured the
waist and the inside seam of the right leg, always with her back to
him, while he pulled away the bedcovers and crawled inside. The
sheets were like ice.

“While you’re at it, my wallet’s in the
inside jacket pocket; almost everything I have is in dollars and
marks—can you get it changed for me?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks.”

When she turned around she was holding his
wallet in her hand. She watched him with an odd, speculative
expression for a moment, and then she took the money out, counted
it, and returned the wallet to his jacket pocket.

“The stores will be open at eight—I will be
back here at nine. Is there anything else you need?”

“No.”

“Would you like me to stay until the
morning?”

He shook his head, wondering whether common
politeness didn’t require him to offer some explanation, but
apparently it wasn’t expected. She picked up her shoulder bag and
left, without another word, without giving him any chance to do
anything more than wonder. As the door closed behind her, he had a
second in which he remembered that he really ought to get up and
see about the bolt, but somehow it no longer seemed to matter—let
the Bad Guys come if they felt like it; they were welcome.

And then, suddenly, he was asleep, dreaming
of Cornwall and the thundering sea.

. . . . .

There was an outdoor cafe on the Leisestraat.
If you took one of the outside tables, close to the sidewalk, you
could look up the street to a cobbled bridge that arched massively
over the canal, like a restraining hand. Several people stood at
the railing, including a number of children whose voices Guinness
was able to distinguish, even over the noise from the street, at a
distance of close to forty yards. One old man in a dark gray
overcoat was throwing small handfuls of what were probably
breadcrumbs down onto the water, so probably there were ducks in
the canal and they were what caused the children to laugh.