The Favor (22 page)

In the pause before she answered, Guinness
realized that, once again, he had probably put his foot in it. The
lady made her living by entertaining men in a little room she
rented by the hour and, not very remarkably, she seemed to suffer
from a certain sensitivity about the topic—about any topic, in
fact, that even came close. So why couldn’t he just remember that
and learn to keep his big mouth shut? It seemed little enough to
ask.

“No. The boys did not like me at that
stage.”

“They must have been out of their minds.”

Women were unaccountable creatures—her face,
as usual, betrayed no emotion whatever, but she picked up the hem
of her sweater and guided him underneath. He could feel her heart
beating under his fingers and the warm smell of her hair was in his
nostrils, and, naturally, it made him feel like a seducer of
children.

All he would have had to do was to push her
back against the seat and she would have slipped down her corduroy
trousers and given herself up to him, for whatever reasons of her
own, without a murmur. It was what she wanted him to do, and it
would have been impossible.

After a moment, she realized it herself, and
she brought her hand up and covered the outline of his beneath her
sweater, pressing him against her breast as if she wanted to crush
it flat under his palm.

“And you?” There was a hint of mockery in her
murmuring voice. “Did you take the girls out in your car and make
love to them in shadowed places?”

“I didn’t even own a car until I was
twenty-six, and by then it was too late.”

And they could both laugh.

About half a block away, some kids were
coming up the cross street. There were three couples, and they were
noisy and young, and Guinness saw through the field glasses that at
least two of the fellows were carrying open liquor bottles in
crumpled brown paper bags. On the evidence of the loping way they
walked, it had been a long night for some of them. Guinness
wondered why they couldn’t be home gang banging—they annoyed him.
Anyone who was out on the street and wasn’t Jean Renal annoyed him.
They went over the intersection and were gone, although it was
still possible to hear them for several seconds after they had
disappeared from sight.

According to his watch, it was nearly two
o’clock.

“I’ll give him another hour, and then we’ll
call it a night. He might not come—he might check into a hotel
somewhere and try contacting her tomorrow morning.”

Even as he said it, he knew he didn’t believe
it. Renal wasn’t going to bother with any hotels.
Avec mon
amour, Jean.
He wouldn’t have the imagination to be that cagey.
If they hadn’t arrested him yet, he’d come right to his little love
nest, straight as any arrow.

And then what? The problem would remain what
it had been all along, persuading Miss Brouwer that her friends
were not the sterling characters they seemed. Really, from the
first, there had been only two options—to move her out of harm’s
way, kicking and screaming if absolutely necessary, or to kill
Flycatcher and thus render his little scheme, whatever it might
have been, a thing of purely academic interest. Of course, Guinness
would have vastly preferred the second.

But, as he had discovered long ago, life
wasn’t organized around his preferences. So it would probably work
out that he would have to drag Colonel Kätzner’s little baby girl
off by the hair—and then what? Put an announcement in the papers
daring Flycatcher to come out of hiding and settle up, man to man?
Fat chance.

Well, he’d think of something.

“I do not understand why you should care,”
Janine said wearily. Her head was resting against Guinness’s chest;
it was obviously way past her bedtime, and she seemed ready to
slide down into his lap and go to sleep. “If Flycatcher is as
clever as you say, he will not let this Renal come near him. So why
do we wait?”

“We wait, my dear, because Flycatcher is not
our target—not the main one, anyway. I’m thinking of the girl. I
want to know how she hails the conquering hero. I want to know
which way she’ll jump when I light a fire under her.”

But it was obvious that she had already lost
interest in her own question. He could hear her breathing; in a few
minutes, if he left her alone, she would be asleep. She had clamped
her arm over his, as if the presence of his hand on her breast was
something she didn’t want disturbed.

So be it.

At two twenty-seven, with her head nestled on
his thigh, Janine was conked out. At one point she reached up to
scratch her nose, but otherwise she hardly stirred. So Guinness
didn’t trouble her when the man in the black raincoat came into
view at the corner and turned toward the street with the apartment
building. His back was turned—you couldn’t see the face—but
Guinness didn’t have a doubt in the world.

And then the black figure stopped, directly
in front of Amalia Brouwer’s front door, and turned around. It was
Renal, right enough. Guinness picked up the field glasses for a
look, just to be sure, and the handsome, rather meaty face was
unmistakable. The eternal amateur, he was craning his neck to see
if anyone had followed him, probably not even noticing the gray
Opel parked perhaps only seventy or eighty yards away—no, that
wouldn’t be obvious enough.

He disappeared into the doorway and, a few
seconds later, the light was visible from behind the living room
window. It went dark after about five minutes.

“Come on, Sweet Pea. Rise and shine. You
missed the big show—lover boy’s come and gone.”

Janine stirred, opened her eyes, and looked
at him with a mixture of curiosity and resentment. He smiled and
kissed her on the eyebrow.

“She was expecting him, Toots, and if she
knows, Flycatcher knows. The poor suckers, I’ll bet he’s already
got their graves dug.”

12

Guinness was awake when the alarm went off—he
had been waiting, with one eye open, for about four minutes and
managed to smother the fierce metallic buzz almost at once. It was
a quarter after six.

Three hours of sleep. When this was over he
would go to bed for about three days. He would check into a hotel
and have his meals sent up so he wouldn’t have to change out of his
pajamas. He would go to London and find a room that looked out over
a garden, where the loudest sound you could hear would be the chit
chit chit of a sprinkler turning on the lawn.

He rolled over so the clock face couldn’t
taunt him and pressed his nose against Janine’s shoulder blade. She
didn’t stir, and her skin was warm and smelled of bed; he knew if
he didn’t get up right that instant he would fall asleep again, but
somehow it was difficult to care.

Maybe he would take Janine with him when he
went off for his rest cure. Hell, it couldn’t last forever—they
weren’t by any stretch of the imagination “in love,” and he had
learned through the bitterest experience that his profession did
not allow him to form any but the most ephemeral of attachments—but
they could string it out a little longer. Just a little longer.

But, of course, she might not want to come.
There would be all kinds of reasons why she might prefer to quit
while they were ahead.

Under any circumstances, it wouldn’t do any
harm to ask.

But not until this business was over—it
wouldn’t be fair until then.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could watch
the curtains stirring in the light morning breeze. The sky was
still a dull gray, but they weren’t more than ten or fifteen
minutes from bright sunshine. He could see why Janine liked to keep
the door to her balcony open when she was home; the floating
curtains did afford a certain measure of solace.

She turned toward him, draping an arm up over
his shoulder. Their faces were almost touching, and she opened her
eyes and smiled.

“Are you awake?” she asked. He drew the
covers up over her bare back and allowed his hand to linger for a
moment, just touching her soft, silvery brown hair where it brushed
against her neck.

“Yes. Did I disturb you? I’m sorry.”

“No.”

Which, of course, rendered him without
excuse. He didn’t have any choice now; he had to get up.

Janine made them some breakfast while he was
in the shower; she brought it in on a little wooden tray and set it
down on the bed and waited for him until he had put on his shirt
and combed his hair. Just a little basket of hard rolls and a pot
of tea—the plates were tiny and he had a lot of trouble to keep
from scattering pieces of crust all over everything. But it was
very pleasant to be sitting together on the edge of the bed and
smiling at each other, and they ate in cheerful silence as the
street noises began to filter up through the open balcony door.
They didn’t want to say anything for fear of breaking the
spell.

But even that couldn’t last forever.

“I want you to go back to where we were
parked last night,” Guinness said finally, looking back at her
through the mirror in which he was tying his tie. “When she comes
out, tail her—they won’t be looking for you, but stay cagey; I
wouldn’t be surprised if we aren’t the only ones who might be
keeping a casual eye on things this morning. Whatever else she
does, she’ll probably go to work just to keep anyone from checking
up on her. If she does, meet me at the Rijksmuseum at ten o’clock.
If she doesn’t, phone me at Aimé’s apartment at eleven.”

“Where in the musuem?—it is a big place.”

He smiled at her, thinking she was a bright
girl and a good trooper, thinking how much he liked her and how
much fun a couple of weeks on neutral ground with her could be.

“You’ll find me at the
Royal
Charles
—just ask a guard.”

“And what will you do? Will you follow the
other one?”

“Renal?” Guinness shook his head. “No, he
won’t show his face. He’s not very good, but I don’t suppose he’s
retarded enough to go sightseeing—too many people are mad at
him.”

. . . . .

That pleasure-boat of war, in whose dear
side

Secure so oft he had this foe defi’d,

Now a cheap spoil and the mean victor’s
slave,

Taught the Dutch colors from its top to
wave—

Not very good poetry, really—it hardly even
scanned—but then nobody could be a genius all the time.

On June 12, 1667, in the last year of the
Second Dutch War, Admiral De Ruyter had sailed up the Thames
estuary to sink many ships and capture the
Royal Charles
,
which had carried the King home from exile in 1660. It was the most
humiliating defeat in British naval history, and Andrew MarveIl,
about whom Guinness had written some humiliatingly boring
monographs before the facts of life pulled him out of academia and
returned him to his old profession, Andrew Marvell had written a
verse satire about the business, “The Last Instructions of the
Painter,” which had been good fun back in its day but required an
almost encyclopedic knowledge of mid-Seventeenth Century political
and social history to be read with anything like real pleasure
today.

In any case, the Dutch had preserved the prow
of the
Royal Charles
; it was on display at the Rijksmuseum,
where a series of maps, rusty artifacts, and multilingual
explanatory notices recounted the story of De Ruyter’s triumph.
Guinness had seen it all in 1970, on his last visit, but he studied
all of it over again with methodical seriousness—these, apparently,
were not a people who neglected the memories of their heroes. Well,
good for them.

He paced around on the hardwood floors,
conscious that his feet were beginning to hurt—it always happened
to him in museums; he could feel the weariness creeping up his
Achilles tendons—peripherally aware of the murmuring crowds that
surged behind him, crackling their guidebooks and coughing
impatiently as they did their cultural duty and chaperoned the
children through the national attic. He tried to ignore them, to
pretend there was nothing in the universe except himself and the
Grand Admiral, but it was a losing battle.

The wall clock said it was six minutes after
ten. He would give Janine nine more minutes, and then he would go
back to Aimé’s apartment and wait by the phone. If she didn’t show
up it would mean that Amalia Brouwer was on the move, and that was
a possibility he didn’t want to think about until he had to. So he
tried to think about the
Royal Charles
instead, except that
it was impossible.

He seemed fated to pass through all the great
museums of the world, waiting for the man with a rose in his lapel
and a folded copy of the
Manchester Guardian
sticking out of
his jacket pocket. Sometimes the work seemed on the point of
absorbing him totally, leaving him no identity at all except that
of Raymond Guinness, celebrated killer of men—the Soldier.

When this business was cleared up, he would
go to the British Museum and spend an entire afternoon staring at
the Elgin Marbles; he would stand in rapt attention before the
Sutton Hoo exhibit until the guards concluded that he had become
rooted to the floor. He would go to plays in the West End, and if
anyone approached him it would merely be to inquire the time.
Sure.

An hour after leaving Janine’s apartment, he
had gone back to the huge, noisy hotel perhaps half a dozen blocks
away and had put in another call to Ernie Tuttle. It had probably
been about one in the morning in Washington, and the low, feminine
voice and the slamming door he had heard in the background
suggested that Ernie was probably entertaining—he hadn’t seemed too
terribly pleased about the interruption.

“Jesus, Ray—give me a break, will you?
Haven’t you got any idea what time it is?”

“You’re smothering me in guilt. Tell me what
Renal is supposed to have done.”