The Favor (20 page)

And yet there had been something. It had been
enough to persuade Janine to keep her own questions to herself,
even after the two of them were well away and were sitting together
in the dark interior of a restaurant across the street from what
one assumed was the main post office. The waiter had brought a
smoking plate of veal chops and mashed potatoes and set it before
Guinness, who hardly seemed to know it was there. He remained
crouched in his chair, apparently lost in some private vision, his
face a dark and impenetrable mask, as if it had been cast in
bronze.

And then, quite suddenly, he leaned forward
and picked up his fork. You could have thought he hadn’t taken a
mouthful of food in days.

“Tell me again,” he said. Just as suddenly as
he had started, he seemed to lose interest and pushed the plate
away from him. “About the warehouse—tell me again. Did you go
inside?”

Janine, who hadn’t touched the cup of coffee
that had been placed in front of her, shook her head.

“No? Good. That was the right move.” And he
smiled. “What did you do?”

What had she done? Just coasted by, telling
the driver that there must have been some mistake about the
address. He had dropped her about half a mile farther on, and then
she had doubled back on foot to see what could be seen from the
sidewalk.

“There was nothing.” She hugged her arms
across her chest and shrugged, as if surprised that she hadn’t
found the place crawling with guys in numbered sweatshirts with
“Flycatcher’s Goon squad” written in big letters across the
shoulder blades. “The windows were dark—there was no one near. So I
came back to look for you.”

“I’ll have a look for myself,” he said. “You
go back to your apartment and sit on your hands.” He smiled—it was
a joke. He would call her, and she was to wait where he could reach
her. She would wait.

What he wanted, really, was simply to be by
himself until he shook off the peculiar feeling that was, he knew
from experience, nothing more than a visceral reaction to the
events of the morning. No one, not even Raymond Guinness, the
celebrated killer of men, could do it with perfect impunity. There
was always, at the very least—unless one had become so hardened as
to have no feeling at all—there was always the self-imposed
retribution of a few hours’ jangled nerves. Guilt, he supposed,
refined to the purely physical.

For Guinness it took the form of a kind of
claustrophobia, a sensation of being buried inside his own body. He
couldn’t get out, he couldn’t breathe, he would never be able to
talk to anyone again. He was covered over with something that was
merely himself, his own vileness, and he would never, never get
free of it. The effect was in a range between panic and shame, and
there wasn’t anything he could do about it except to wait until it
went away.

Walking helped. If you simply sat around in
your hotel room, it might last all day—at night it could be a
perfect horror—but five or six miles of crowded sidewalk would
usually turn the trick.

The locked closet of the mind. A professional
hazard, like hemorrhoids for truck drivers. And a safeguard. A
reminder that, after all, human life meant something and should not
be destroyed wantonly. The worst thing in the world would be to be
able to kill and suffer nothing. Perhaps even to enjoy it. Better
to lose life than one’s simple humanity.

Sometimes Guinness wondered whether he wasn’t
conning himself, trying to invent some fragile little shelter for
his conception of himself as a moral being. After all, perhaps it
was too fine a line he was drawing between his own slender claims
to something like integrity and. . .

What? Who? I do evil and know it to be evil
and this fact makes me better than someone like Flycatcher—was that
the line? The unrelinquished possession of his tattered conscience?
A damned soul but mine own? Maybe it was all just self deception.
Maybe there weren’t any lines to be drawn.

Janine’s warehouse faced one of the piers of
what his map referred to as the Oosterdok. There was a stone
embankment at the edge of the roadway, a drop of perhaps as much as
thirty feet, and then the harbor complex. Guinness found himself
almost parallel with the roof—the billboard that advertised that
these premises were available for lease was just at the apex of the
front wall, almost exactly at eye level. Here and there, along the
other end of the wharf, men in heavy dark work clothes moved
around, but there was no one near the warehouse, which seemed
perfectly lifeless.

He didn’t expect he would burst in to
surprise Flycatcher and all his fellow evil doers—he would hardly
want to; all he had with him was that silly little nickel plated
automatic of Janine’s—but he supposed it might be worth something
to have a look inside. You never knew. You might learn something,
although the odds weren’t very good that Flycatcher would leave
much in the way of useful information lying around in a deserted
warehouse.

There was a stairway leading down to the
stone quay.

Guinness decided it would attract less
attention if he simply walked down in broad daylight and tried the
door—there wasn’t any point in making a big sneaky production of
it, after all.

The door was fastened with a heavy padlock of
the kind you could open with a nail file in about fifteen seconds;
with the government issue lock pick he was carrying, it took even
less time. He closed the door behind him and stepped inside onto a
board floor that sounded like a drumhead with each footfall. No one
had been inside for some time, he felt sure of that.

There was an office; the door was standing
open. And inside, on a plank shelf, was the famous telephone.
Guinness picked up the receiver—there was no dial tone. So much for
little Amalia’s lifeline in case the sky should fall.

He wondered whether Flycatcher had also found
that slip of paper taped to the underside of her night table drawer
and had decided to cut his losses. After all, people who wrote them
down couldn’t be trusted with secrets. Or perhaps it was simply
that this particular plan was so close to fruition that lifelines
were no longer considered either necessary or advisable. That was
possible too—and perhaps more dangerous.

There was a bare little table in one corner,
in the center of which was a paper coffee cup with perhaps as much
as a quarter inch left at the bottom. Dark stains along the sides
indicated that it had probably been about half full when someone
had set it down there and then walked off and forgotten its
existence. How long would that take? Even in the cool, moisture
laden atmosphere of a dockside warehouse, no more than a couple of
days.

In a wastepaper basket, Guinness found
several sheets of notepaper covered over with figures arranged in
columns of three. He thought for a moment he might have stumbled on
something until he realized the numbers were gin rummy scores.
About thirty games—someone must have been awfully bored. He
wondered whose writing it was, if perhaps this hadn’t been how Mr.
Lind had whiled away his time as he waited for his marching
orders.

Guinness tried not to think about Mr. Lind,
who, after all, had had to take his chances with the rest of them.
There was no way in the world he could have left him alive—from the
moment Flycatcher knew that he had any interest in Amalia Brouwer,
her life was forfeit.

He hadn’t come to Amsterdam to be kind to
thugs, but to keep his word to Kätzner. Kätzner wouldn’t care how
many of Flycatcher’s troops ended up with their skulls bashed in.
Kätzner didn’t approve of Flycatcher.

“
You cannot conceive of what these people
are like,”
he had said.

Well, actually—yes, Colonel, perhaps I can.
Perhaps they aren’t so different from the man you sent to stop
them.

11

“He’s a Belgian major, assigned to the NATO
command there, and he seems to have taken a walk.”

Guinness had gone to the public telephone in
a hotel about six blocks from Janine’s apartment; it was a huge
place and seemed to cater mainly to tours, so the lobby was
frantic. No one could have asked for anywhere more private,
especially at that hour; half the human race seemed to be coming
back from excursions to the Rijksmuseum and the pottery shops, and
the remnant were collected around the elevator banks and the main
entrance, trying to figure out where to go for dinner. There wasn’t
a soul to care about one more body stuffed into a phone booth.

“When?—how long has he been gone?” He covered
his other ear with the heel of his right hand, trying to screen out
some of the noise from the busload of tourists who had just arrived
and seemed to be intent on battering down the front doors with
their suitcases. But even then all he could hear was the crackle of
the long distance lines. “How long, Ernie?”

“Since this morning, apparently.” Ernie’s
voice had acquired that confidential quality that always went along
with the disclosure of the world’s darkest secrets. He had a
weakness for inside information; it was something you learned to
put up with.

Which, of course, presupposed that there was
inside information—Guinness wondered what kind of mess he would be
walking into now.

“So what makes one day away from work such a
great issue? Maybe he’s home sick with the flu.”

“No chance, pal. He’s skipped; they can’t
find him anywhere. I’m told he’s been under surveillance for some
time—the best guess is he took himself off to avoid arrest.”

Renal? It was a myth that the camera didn’t
lie, but the man in the photograph that Amalia Brouwer kept on her
night table hardly looked like a menace to the Western Way of Life.
Or was he another one like Bateman, just a poor little schlub who
had gotten in way over his head?

But perhaps that wasn’t being quite fair to
Bateman—Bateman, in his own suicidal fashion, had at least known
what he wanted, had had the imagination to know when he was taking
a wild leap into the abyss. It would be necessary to reserve
judgment on Major Renal, but he had hardly impressed Guinness as a
paragon of originality.

“And, Raymond—our employers wish me to remind
you that we are not in the business of playing housemother to the
European allies. Our inquiries about this matter sparked a good
deal of interest in Brussels—I’m sure they’d just love it if they
could have their boy back—but I hope I don’t have to remind you
that we have no interest in wandering NATO officers. Just remember
what we pay you for. Your concern is Flycatcher, not Renal.”

Guinness hung up without replying. He didn’t
feel sure he could trust himself, really. For the moment, at least,
he wasn’t Washington’s man—he was Kätzner’s. There was no way he
could explain that to Ernie, so perhaps it was simply better not to
try.

G Street could think what it wanted, and if
it worked out that Flycatcher came within range then everything
would be fine. But Guinness knew perfectly well that, bloodcurdling
threats notwithstanding, if Ernie got any idea his man wasn’t on
the square with him, Amsterdam would be hip deep in American agents
before tomorrow lunchtime.

Across the street, on the corner of a bank
building, was a sign that flashed the time and the temperature. In
the old days Europe had been free of such monstrosities, but now it
seemed that every city on the Continent wanted to be mistaken for
Cleveland, Ohio. A month before, Guinness had been in England on a
six hour layover between flights and, having decided to kill the
time with a little local sightseeing, had discovered a
Baskin-Robbins ice cream store almost directly on the other side of
the road from Windsor Castle. There was no safety anymore.

He checked his watch against the bank
building and confirmed that it really was only a quarter after six.
In a little more than an hour he was supposed to show up at
Janine’s apartment, where the two of them would press their knees
together under her tiny kitchen table while they pretended to eat
dinner, but he wasn’t sure they would have a chance for any of that
now. There wasn’t going to be any time for romantic dalliance—Jean
Renal, who would probably be arriving at his own lady love’s front
doorstep any moment now, was going to bring anything of that kind
to an abrupt halt.

But he would have to make time—not for
Janine, for himself. He had to have a moment in which to think, to
fit all the pieces together, or he wouldn’t have even a clue about
what the next move should be.

Renal, the Belgian soldier
cum
greeting card heart throb, NATO’s bad boy, location uncertain,
immediate destination a dead cinch. Amalia Brouwer, book merchant
and part time laborer in the People’s Struggle, second generation
idealist. Flycatcher, terrorist, criminal, fashion plate, recent
casualty of the Battle of Puerto Vallarta. These three, the lady
and her lovers. Where did the one begin and the next end? What had
they cooked up among themselves?

The main point was that Renal had done a flit
and was in transit to whatever rewards had been promised to him in
exchange for whatever minor secrets the people in Brussels had been
stupid enough to put within his reach. He was on his way to the
arms of his beloved Amalia—and, presumably, some unspecified place
of safety and comfort. At least, that would be his treasured
assumption.

He could hardly have been expected this early
on to appreciate the fact, of course, but Major Renal was a dead
man, a walking corpse. That was going to be the real payoff. It was
such a foregone conclusion that Guinness had already counted him
out of the game. From the moment he arrived in Amsterdam, he was
simply no longer a factor.

Renal was a defector. Unless he happened to
have bounded off with the transcripts of the last ministerial
council in his wallet, he wasn’t of any further use to anyone—and
probably not then either. He could come bearing the battle plans
for World War III, and Flycatcher would express his thanks by
ordering him shot in the ear. Renal was going to end up fertilizing
the tulips somewhere, since no one had ever accused Flycatcher of
entertaining any sentimental fondness for keeping his word.