The Favor (21 page)

And, directly or indirectly, whether he was
aware of it or not, Renal was Flycatcher’s agent. That was his
problem and was shortly to be his fate. Flycatcher owned him. With
Flycatcher in the game at all, there just wasn’t any other way to
figure it.

The question was—granted that he was
Flycatcher’s tool—who was his handler? The ardent Miss Brouwer of
the white cotton underwear? She was the obvious candidate and,
provided that the sexual inclinations matched up, it was more or
less standard operating procedure for a lot of handlers to sleep
with their foot soldiers. Sometimes it helped to keep them in
line.

But somehow it didn’t quite ring right—which
was not to say that Amalia wouldn’t see herself as the puppet
master. She just didn’t strike Guinness as the type. It was just
too hard to imagine Flycatcher putting her in a position that would
require that kind of long range cynicism.

Amalia, after all, was an idealist, a
believer in causes—we had her father’s word for that—which
condition of existence was only a kind of laughable weakness in the
eyes of someone like Flycatcher. And Flycatcher, we had all long
ago agreed, was a man with a keen eye for weakness. After all, you
had to trust your sergeants, trust their judgment as well as their
loyalty, and trusting Amalia Brouwer wasn’t the sort of mistake you
would have expected Flycatcher to make.

So what had he set up between these two, our
accomplished villain? What, precisely, had he arranged for the
maiden and the major, and toward what end?

The wind had shifted and was blowing in now
from the sea. Guinness found himself wishing that, when he had made
his escape from the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky, he had thought to
take his raincoat with him; he wasn’t particularly enjoying how all
the merry little breezes found their way down the back of his neck.
He tried staying close to the sheltered side of buildings as he
walked along, but it really didn’t help much. It was as if the
evening cold and the not quite unpleasant smell from the canals and
the pressure of sound that the wind carried with it had somehow
found their way into the very fiber of his soul.

It was just uneasiness; he knew that. He was
merely blaming his apprehension on the weather. Because, whatever
else Renal’s flight might mean, it would certainly accelerate
matters. Whatever obscure danger Kätzner had perceived for his
child was upon her now, because if Flycatcher meant to strike her
down he would do it within the next twenty-four hours. If little
Amalia had been Renal’s handler, then he wasn’t the only one who
had outlived his usefulness. Flycatcher would decide quickly enough
to cut his losses, and they would both be killed. That was the way
he worked—he didn’t like loose ends, and Amalia, who wrote little
notes to herself and hid them under her night table drawer, whose
bathtub had collected samples of his bone white hair, Amalia would
be too much of a hazard to leave behind.

. . . . .

“One’s domestic sins are merely points in a
line of consequences, nothing more. You see what a good Marxist I
am? I believe in historical inevitability, even as it applies to
the mysteries of private life.”

Kätzner had been narrating the history of his
marriage, squinting out through his rain streaked windshield as
they drove back to Munich. Like the drowning man who sees his life
passing before him, he seemed so preoccupied with the steps by
which he had made his way back full circle to the gardens of the
Nymphenburg and this city where he had parted company with his
innocence that it would have been unspeakably rude to do anything
except listen. So Guinness had listened.

Perhaps that was the point—perhaps Kätzner
was simply sucking him in, allowing him to commit himself more and
more as with each succeeding word the subtle dialectician enforced
his own reality and that of the child he had left behind him in
Amsterdam back in the first beginnings of the fallen world.

“I am guilty of a vast dereliction in
persuading you to this thing; my government’s interests are
involved, one presumes, and doubtless I betray them—it would be the
first time in my life I have put anything above that duty. In 1962,
the choice seemed simpler, and I left behind wife and child and
returned to Berlin. Perhaps I could have done something else, taken
them with me to some third country or asked for political asylum
with the Dutch—I suppose I could have bought my freedom with a few
well chosen pieces of political gossip—but such a course simply
never crossed my mind. And now, to preserve my child, I reverse
myself. One hopes that somehow the two come into some kind of
balance. I would like to believe that now I have paid all debts and
nothing more is required of me, but I don’t really imagine it is
so.”

And he smiled his sad smile, as if the
inescapable tragedy of life were something so well understood
between them that it hardly needed to be mentioned at all. The
veteran of Madrid, who had prevailed over Franco and Himmler and
even the NKVD, the East German colonel who had perhaps saved
Raymond Guinness’s young life out of, as much as anything, a sense
of aesthetic fitness, looked tired and old and disenchanted even
with the range of his own self contempt. And still he could talk of
debts and balance and the keeping and breaking of faiths, as if all
that could possibly still mean something in whatever was left to
have survived the final twilight. It made you marvel at the
resilience of dead illusions.

One wondered what sorts of illusions he must
have been harboring in the winter of 1962, when the February snow
had become packed down to ice along the sidewalks and the canals
were frozen into obscure gray mirrors that reflected nothing. In
Amsterdam, between October and March, the sea winds drench you with
a wet, penetrating cold that seems to amount almost to a personal
affront, making it hard to support very strenuously any exalted
ideas of yourself.

Humanity, with its chapped fingertips and its
splintering feet and its head colds and its sad weariness under
layer upon layer of sweaters and woolen scarves and heavy, sodden
overcoats, is reduced by winter to some semblance of the truth
about itself, is revealed as feckless and woeful and spiritually
puny, mere vermin clinging to a speck of frosty mud.

Emil Kätzner, who for the next forty-eight
hours, until the morning after his return to Berlin, would remain
unaware that four months before he had been promoted to the rank of
lieutenant colonel in the Army of the German Democratic Republic,
had stamped his galoshes against the paving stones in front of his
office door, trying to establish whether his toes could really be
as numb as they felt. For six years he had been telling himself
that he loathed the Netherlands, that it was worse even than the
mud filled trenches in Cataluña, a purgatory from which,
apparently, nothing could release him. And now, on the brink of
escape, he felt like a banished angel looking back for the last
time on the green hills of Paradise.

It was eleven thirty in the morning. He never
came home for lunch, so his wife wouldn’t be expecting him for
hours—probably by the time she missed him he would already be in
Hannover. When she woke up tomorrow morning, her husband of five
years would have ceased to exist.

Her husband of five years. Maarten Huygens,
the little man who worked as an insurance broker and was the father
of the three and a half year old Amalia—at that moment, as he
weighed the door key in his hand, he was being murdered by the Emil
Kätzner who was struggling to be reborn.

Margot—what would she think when finally it
sunk in on her that she was alone? She was still in her early
thirties, a good ten years younger than Heer Huygens, and not
unattractive if you liked them a little
saftig
. Emil—for he
was already Emil, and viewed her with the disinterested compassion
of someone who had somehow stumbled into the anonymous tragedy of
strangers—Emil, the Communist spy, remembered as if the
recollection were years distant from him that Margot did, however,
have a certain tendency towards moroseness, and he wondered if the
disappearance of the mythical Maarten would sour her life
forever.

He went inside, and the door rattled as he
closed it behind him. There were one or two things he wished to
retrieve from his office safe, documents that, if of no great
importance, might cause some embarrassment in Berlin if they were
discovered. Kätzner was a thorough man, and there was time. His
usefulness here was at an end—certainly the police were no more
than a few days away from making an arrest—but there was no
particular reason why they should have the satisfaction of
announcing his activities to the newspapers as another instance of
“Iron Curtain” treachery. What they might suspect was their concern
entirely.

There was a photograph on his desk, a color
snapshot, in a small brass frame, of Margot and the baby. He
hesitated for a moment and then decided to leave it behind. All of
that was no part of his life now—it never had been; it had belonged
to Maarten Huygens, and he was dead and buried now—it was better to
make as clean a break as possible.

What would happen to them? The rather
strained looking woman and the little girl with the bright curly
hair, what would become of them now? It was a question he could
ask, even at that moment, with a certain detachment, since their
fates were well distant from Emil Kätzner’s sphere of concern. He
had been exonerated from responsibility—that, again, belonged to
Maarten Huygens.

Because, of course, the ethics of his
profession exonerated him. The ideology of the class struggle, for
which he had killed many times, in the open warfare of Spain and in
secret ever since, for which he was willing, should it come to
that, to allow himself to be killed, his faith that the movement of
history rendered insignificant the sufferings of individuals
rendered him guiltless. Not unmoved—after all, he was not a monster
or a saint, to be entirely consumed by the egotism of his own
dedication—but guiltless. He was fond of his wife, and he adored
little Amalia, but he discovered that, even at the moment of
departure, he could maintain a certain detachment from them, and
from the sorrow of the man he had been even the day before.

So he didn’t take the photograph. On the
whole, it was better not to nurture the remembrance.

“You see? Do you see the error? I hadn’t yet
learned—the zealot had not yet learned that, after all, flesh is
mere flesh and must, one time or another, have its way.

“But, after all, there is a fatality in all
commitment. To love anything, from a child to an ideal of social
justice, is to step into a trap. They fail, causes and people—or
they blind us, or maim our souls, or force us to give over some
version of ourselves.”

And the rain streamed down the windshield,
and the throbbing wiper blades beat it away, and Kätzner smiled,
looking straight ahead, as if at some point in the far
distance.

. . . . .

“What lured you into this business? Did they
give you the big pitch about saving Western civilization from the
forces of darkness?”

She merely shrugged her tiny shoulders,
suggesting that, if they had, they had failed to make much of an
impression. “I am a whore—it is a tiresome existence.”

“More tiresome than this? I can’t
imagine.”

Janine’s car was parked across an
intersection and three quarters of a block away from Amalia
Brouwer’s apartment building. From behind the wheel, Guinness had
an unobstructed view; with the Leica field glasses his companion
had thought to bring along he could even count the leaves on the
tree that stood out next to the sidewalk in front of the living
room windows and reached almost that high.

Janine had made a thermos flask of tea, which
she held between her thighs as they passed the cup back and forth,
taking tentative sips because the stuff was still blindingly hot.
She sat flush up against him, and he had his arm over her
shoulder—not simply because it was more fun that way but for
protective coloration; the Dutch were a very tolerant people, and
nobody had to invent any reasons why a man and a woman might be
sitting in a parked car together at one fifteen in the morning.
Besides, it was more fun that way.

“Do you believe he will come?” she asked,
letting her hand nestle in his lap like a small animal.

“He’ll come. I’m not worried about that—I
just want to see how he’s received.”

Amalia’s window was dark, but of course it
would be. She had come home immediately after work and, as far as
they could determine, she was up there by herself. Probably she’d
been asleep for hours.

All the houses in both directions were dark.
Apparently it wasn’t a very lively neighborhood. Guinness wished he
could get out and walk around for a few minutes; he had been
sitting for hours and his ass was killing him.

“Would you like to spend the night
tonight?”Guinness smiled, not looking at her, not taking his eyes
off Amalia Brouwer’s front door, and let his hand slide down
Janine’s arm until the fingers came to rest on the curve of her
elbow.

“You mean, what there is left of it? I
thought you had to worry about your landlady.”

“This once, we will take the risk.”

Well, it was nice to be asked. Guinness
simply hoped that Renal would make it sometime before dawn—tomorrow
was likely to be a busy day and, passion aside, it might be nice to
get a little sleep first.

He moved his hand around to the inside of her
arm and, as he felt for her breast, she moved closer to him,
pressing her shoulder against his ribcage. As usual, there was no
brassiere in the way—even through the rough wool knit of the
sweater, he could feel her nipple hardening under his thumb.

“Did you do this sort of thing when you were
a kid?” he asked. “Did all the little Dutch boys and girls sit
around in cars and play slap and tickle?”