The Favor (12 page)

Guinness sat leaning back on one of the cafe
chairs, moodily staring at his shoes. Janine was right; they were a
dead giveaway. All morning long, he hadn’t seen another man wearing
anything like them. Later in the day, when he had a chance, he
would see whether he couldn’t find a shoe store and get himself a
nice, sturdy pair of brown lace ups.

“It is a good fit,” she had said, smoothing
out the material with her hands as he sat at Aimé’s dressing table,
which had the only mirror in the room, trying to knot his tie—he
could see her hands in the glass, working slowly and carefully, as
if she wanted to force the jacket into place over his shoulders.
“But I do not think someone with eyes would take you for a
Dutchman. You are too big—you spread out too much. You move like
someone who is used to plenty of space, and Amsterdam is too small
and crowded.”

She had stopped kneading him, but her hands
still rested on his shoulders in the easy intimacy of a man and a
woman alone together at nine-thirty in the morning. They might have
known each other for years.

“Have you eaten your breakfast yet?” she
asked, stepping back to let him get up from the little velvet
covered bench where he had been sitting amidst the bottles of
perfume and the cold cream jars; it had almost been like sitting on
the floor.

“No.” He smiled, shaking his head. “I’d just
gotten out of the shower when you came.”

“You would like some, yes?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Aimé apparently worried a lot about the state
of her waistline—“She is this thin,” Janine had said, holding up a
finger—so there hadn’t been much to choose from in the
refrigerator. Some vegetable juice and a few rye crackers, not even
an egg. The tea was English, a blend Guinness hadn’t tasted in nine
years, so that made up for a little bit—except that there wasn’t
any milk.

“Ah, you take milk!” she had said, laughing,
clapping her hands in front of her face and pretending to be
astonished. “How ver-r-r-ry Br-r-r-ritish.”

He smiled and raised his cup as if to offer a
toast, thinking it was nice to have a woman find you amusing, even
if it was only because of the way you drank your tea. It was
perfectly ridiculous, he was aware, but he felt almost as if he had
been given a present.

All of which subtracted nothing from his
present problem. That was what happened when, even for the odd half
hour with a pretty woman, you forgot that you hadn’t come all this
way to spend the time making daisy chains.

He had left the apartment at around a quarter
to ten; he could have walked to where he wanted to go in twenty
minutes, but in his profession that would have been considered the
most drastic lapse of technique. So he had spent a sensationally
boring two hours window shopping—picking up a cab for half a dozen
blocks and then circling back on foot, sneaking out the rear exits
of buildings, zigzagging all over the place just to make triple
sure he wasn’t being followed.

By five minutes to noon, he was satisfied.
Either they had an Olympic track team on him, or he was clean; he
would have run them pretty hard, and not even two or three men
could have stayed with him and kept from being spotted.

So everything was fine, except that he hadn’t
thought to ask Janine about what people did in this country for
lunch—he had been far too busy feeling all warm and runny and
masculine inside.

In Switzerland it was easy. The stores simply
closed up between the hours of twelve and two and everybody went
home for a veal chop and noodles and an hour’s nap. You didn’t have
to worry about any conscientious file clerks staying behind to tidy
up, and nobody hung around in the employees’ lounge to gab about
last Sunday’s soccer match. You didn’t do that; you went home and
listened to the radio while your wife dished up mounds of steaming
food and retailed her grievances. There were rules—it was as if the
whole damn country were unionized.

But, like an idiot, Guinness hadn’t inquired.
You had to know the quaint native customs, you understand, or you
could be in for no end of trouble. So, naturally, there wasn’t a
thing you could do except to sit in the sunshine, drinking a bottle
of Heinekin and pretending to read the newspaper, while you waited
across the street from a foreign language bookshop staffed for the
moment by a white haired old lady who looked brittle enough to
shatter like glass if somebody opened the door suddenly enough to
blow her off her chair, poor darling.

It was a nice bookstore. They had a whole
wall of Penguin paperbacks—you wondered how many copies of the
Venerable Bede they sold in a decade—and magazines from all over.
Guinness had purchased his copy of the
Times
there, somewhat
astonished to find that it was only a day old. The grandmother
behind the cash register had made change for him and smiled and
tried out a few words of English, glad at that hour, it seemed, for
the diversion.

Kätzner had told him about the bookstore, and
almost nothing else. “I can provide the necessary addresses,” he
had said, hunching his shoulders in a shrug as they strolled
through the Amalienburg, the sound of their shoes on the hardwood
floors echoing like pistol shots.

“But you must understand that I have not been
back in nearly twenty years now. I am too well known now—I would be
arrested at once, although probably they would not connect me with
the Heer Maarten Huygens who was the East German spy they never
quite managed to apprehend in 1962. And, of course, my own people
are involved in this matter—somehow, I am far from certain quite
how. My appearance in Amsterdam just at present would undoubtedly
have catastrophic consequences. No, my friend, it is you who must
go in my place.”

He had made it sound so simple, like waltzing
down to the corner grocery for a can of creamed corn. But, of
course, that was part of what had made him such a success—you
believed him. You saw the world through his eyes. You could know
perfectly well that, in all probability, you were going to get your
ass shot off, but you went anyway. Somehow all difficulties
evaporated in the presence of that amiable clarity of purpose.

Guinness tried not to think about it, so he
stared morosely at his shoes and thought about Janine, wondering if
she had forgiven him yet for not taking her up on her offer of a
little heavy breathing. She had been friendly enough over
breakfast; she hadn’t given any signs of harboring
resentment—apparently it was just part of the service and, after
all, she was a pro in that particular line of endeavor and probably
wouldn’t take a refusal personally. What the hell, though—she
hadn’t exactly tried to present him with a bill. Women were funny
about that sort of thing—you never knew what was going on inside
them.

Well, he’d make it up to her. If there was
time tonight, he’d take her out to dinner and make a pass at her.
If she went for it, fine; she was a pretty woman and Guinness
wasn’t made of balsa. If she turned him down, then at least she’d
have whatever satisfaction that could afford her. Under any
circumstances, he didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

He wouldn’t mind getting laid—it had been a
while.

But first, he thought, he would get rid of
the shoes. The first principle of surveillance: don’t do anything
that might make anybody curious. The shoes had to go.

He looked at his watch—it was almost two
o’clock; if people hurried up, he could have this phase of the
business over with by four, and that would leave plenty of time.
How long could it take to buy a pair of nice, heavy soled Dutch
booties?

About three minutes later, a small,
attractive woman of about twenty-three or four—shoulder length
brown hair swept back to half cover her ears, bare slender arms
coming out of the sleeve holes of a strikingly pretty cotton print
dress—turned the corner into the Leisestraat, crossed over the
bridge, and proceeded to the door of the bookstore.

Guinness waited until she was inside and then
folded his newspaper, finished his beer, and fished around in his
pocket for some tip money.

Fine—he was delighted. Now that she had
returned to work he could take a leisurely stroll back down along
the Amstel and toss her apartment.

7

“I know nothing about her,” he had said, his
attention absorbed, it seemed, by the rococo cherubs that kept
threatening to slide down from the ceiling of the king’s hunting
lodge. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his face
unreadable. “Nothing significant.”

A crowd of tourists flooded in through the
open double doors, and Kätzner glanced at them with distaste,
signaling to Guinness with a slight movement of his head that it
would be necessary for the two of them to retreat. When they were
outside again, on one of the wooded paths that led back to the much
more regal formality of the gardens, he stopped and turned around
for a moment, contemplating the elegant little jewel box of a
building, lost, apparently, in undemocratic satisfaction. Suddenly
he turned to Guinness and smiled.

“My little Amalia of the Amalienburg—I took
the name from that temple to decadence. It is a perfectly
respectable Dutch name; one hears it all the time. It was my little
joke.”

So little Amalia grew up, apparently.
Kätzner’s wife had remarried, a man named Brouwer, who adopted the
child. Mrs. Brouwer died of cancer in 1973, and what domestic life
between Amalia and her stepfather had been like was something about
which Kätzner hadn’t a clue. He had kept a discreet eye on her over
the years—she attended the University of Rotterdam briefly, just
long enough to put her in contact with radical politics—but
concerning the quality of her life, what she was like, how she felt
about herself, he understood nothing.

“It is an odd condition of existence, is it
not, to feel your own child a stranger to you. I haven’t even a
photograph to know her by, and thus she always is to me as she was
when I left—four years old, with curly hair and dimples in her
knees. One would think I should have grown indifferent by now—after
all, what is she but a shadow?—but somehow she draws closer to me
as that time recedes further and further into the past. Perhaps as
one grows old one becomes. . . what? I should like to say, ‘more
human,’ but I am not sure. Certainly more sensitive to what one has
discarded along the way. Did you ever marry and beget children, my
young friend? Can you have any conception of what I mean?”

Guinness thought it prudent not to answer,
and the two men walked on back over the canal.

By then it was late afternoon, and the wind
had begun to turn cold. They spoke very little.And so, as Guinness
stood in the living room of the tiny apartment, contemplating the
objects on a small round table in front of the curtained window—a
wooden cigarette box, two little ceramic statuettes of Dresden
shepherdesses, a colored pencil, half a dozen copies of an English
magazine called
Women’s Own
—he tried to form some sort of
impression of Amalia Brouwer, almost as if it were something that
could be carried back to her father, whom Guinness didn’t imagine
he would ever meet again. But he felt an obligation of sorts to try
seeing her through Kätzner’s eyes. Kätzner couldn’t be the one, and
so it was up to Guinness to concern himself with whatever it was
that could be found out from statuettes and colored pencils.

He looked around him, noting the dried
flowers in a pot next to the gas fireplace, and the tiny stain, the
approximate shape of Australia, where someone sitting on the left
side of the sofa had probably spilled a drink over the beige
carpet, and he thought about his own daughter, who was eleven now
and probably wore black patent leather shoes and worshipped John
Travolta with all the passion of her young heart. Two years ago, in
South Carolina, on the one and only occasion he had seen her since
infancy, it had been Old Maid and science fiction novels, but
nothing was constant. Now, probably, she wouldn’t even remember
him, and that might be for the better.

“We must bear the consequences of the ways we
have chosen for ourselves,” Kätzner had said. “There is very little
point in pretending to be the victims of circumstance, because what
is that but the sum of what we have done with our lives? Has it not
been so with you, my friend?”

Guinness decided he would be systematic and
save the bedroom for last. He knew he would be much more likely to
find whatever it was he wanted—and what that was he really couldn’t
have said—whatever it was that would untangle Amalia Brouwer’s
peculiar trouble, in the bedroom. Bedrooms were where women really
lived their lives; two marriages had been enough to teach him that
much. But he would wait, and thus miss nothing.

The kitchen was hardly large enough to fall
down in. There was almost nothing in the refrigerator except half a
dozen cartons of strawberry yogurt—you didn’t have the sense this
was someone who ate most of her meals at home. In the cupboard he
found several bottles of liquor, most of them with the seals still
unbroken—cognac, British gin, a half empty fifth of unblended
whiskey—not the things a woman drank. And too expensive a
collection to manage on what you earned selling paperback copies of
Balzac. The little lady had a friend, it seemed.

The hall closet yielded nothing. There was a
woman’s umbrella dangling from a hook, a wine red cloth coat hung
up in a paper dry cleaner’s bag, and a rather mannish raincoat.
Guinness searched the pockets, but they were empty.

The bathroom medicine chest, he was happy to
note, was uncluttered by fingernail files and night cream and old
pots of lip rouge. He took down a plastic squeeze bottle of sun
screen, unscrewed the top, and smelled it—it smelled like nothing
except sun screen. A little yellow box of laxative pills, a tube of
Chap Stik—“You’re a long way from home”—two or three drugstore
cartons with undecipherable Dutch names but with the sort of
packaging design that suggested the contents were useful against
the customary feminine complaints. Amalia had struck him, in the
glimpse he had had of her, as a healthy out of doors specimen, and
nothing so far contradicted that impression.