The Favor (27 page)

Guinness closed his magazine, wishing
suddenly that this could have been simply another job, that he
could have concerned himself with the relatively uncomplicated
problems of effecting a murder, pure and simple, that he could have
been spared these nice questions of credence and feeling. After
all, when you killed someone at least you didn’t have to persuade
them that they were dead.

“I’m just a messenger boy,” he said at last,
his voice flat, as expressionless as he could make it. “For myself,
I don’t care anything about the matter. I was sent by someone else;
he wants you gotten clear.”

“Then who is this ‘someone else?’”

“I’ve already told you, although probably you
weren’t listening. I come from Maarten Huygens—I trust you can
still recall the name.”

Guinness also had a daughter. He doubted he
would ever see her again—she was almost as much of an abstraction
to him as the little curly haired Amalia had been to Emil
Kätzner—but he hoped she might entertain a kinder memory of him
than, apparently, the grown-up Amalia did of her father. Either
that, or no memory at all—in the final count, that might be the
best. But he hoped he wasn’t hated. He hoped no one would ever see
such an expression on his child’s face at the mention of his
name.

“Maarten Huygens never existed,” she answered
coldly, when finally she could bring herself to answer at all.
“Maarten Huygens was a fiction, a bad dream, and when we all woke
up we saw that there was nothing there but an empty space. So how
could he have sent you?”

Guinness got off his stool—he discovered that
his ass was beginning to hurt, so he slipped the automatic back
inside the waistline of his trousers and stretched his legs,
walking back and forth to the middle of the narrow little room. He
didn’t look at Amalia Brouwer’s face anymore.

“Very well, have it your own way. But I met
someone who remembers having been Maarten Huygens, who remembers
you and would be just as happy if you could be kept alive. Do you
remember your father at all? I’ve only met him twice in my life,
but I should say he was the sort to leave an impression. He still
has his red moustache.”

“You might know that from a photograph—it
proves nothing.”

“No, I didn’t get it from a photograph.” He
shook his head and smiled. “Did you ever see a photograph of your
father? I doubt it. He was an East German agent, and a very good
one. Before that he worked for the NKVD against the Nazis, and
before that he fought against the Fascists in Spain. Like I said,
he’s very good—I don’t imagine he’s ever been dumb enough to leave
any photographs behind him, do you?”

He would never know what she was going to
say, because that was the moment the telephone chose to ring.

. . . . .

The conversation took place in French, which
was not Guinness’s strongest language. But he imagined he
understood enough to know that she hadn’t told “Günner” that she
had a visitor. But you never knew, of course; the language itself
might have been some sort of signal, and everybody always had just
oodles of clever little code words they could work into almost any
sentence to indicate they were in trouble—that sort of business was
standard practice. And she had asked about Renal. So you never
knew.

“Did you understand?” she asked, setting the
telephone receiver back down on its cradle. Guinness shook his head
he didn’t see why he should feel under any compulsion to tell the
truth.

“Not a word. What did he say?”

“Someone will be here in twenty minutes.”

“What did he say about Renal? I’m assuming
you were bright enough not to take it simply on faith.”

Amalia Brouwer regarded him with a kind of
weary antagonism, and he knew he had won. She realized now that he
hadn’t been lying to her, and naturally she resented it—hadn’t he
robbed her of something? She would grudge him his triumph over her,
but at least she would no longer proceed on any assumption that she
knew who her friends were.

“Yes—yes, I was bright enough. Günner said
that Jean was already there with them, that he had been brought in
half an hour ago.”

“Half an hour ago Jean was just beginning to
come down with rigor mortis. Did you ask to talk to him?”

“No. I did not think of that.”

“Just as well—your Günner might have smelled
a rat. I don’t suppose you’re usually so wonderfully solicitous
about your precious major.

It wasn’t a very nice way to treat her—she
stood next to the curtained doorway with her arms folded
shelteringly over her breast, and she looked as if another word
would knock her to the ground. She was thinking about Jean Renal
lying on her bedroom floor; Guinness had no idea what she might or
might not have felt for him, but it was fairly clear that the
contemplation of her own role in her sometime lover’s death perhaps
wasn’t the happiest train of thought that could have passed through
her mind. Well, there was no harm in that. It wouldn’t kill her if
she lost some of her romantic illusions about the life into which
Flycatcher had led her.

She closed her eyes, slowly twisting her head
down and to the side in a manner that suggested something like real
pain.

“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” she
asked again. There were tears in her voice and starting out from
between her tightly shut eyelids. It was pitiful to watch and, as
Guinness realized quickly enough, necessary to end—after all,
flycatcher’s man would be there in less than twenty minutes.

“Not in the cards, Sweetheart. If I just
leave you alone you’ll end up just as dead as Jean, and we can’t
have that—your papa wouldn’t like it. So come on. Pull yourself
together. You can have a good cry over your lost innocence another
time.”

He took his handkerchief out of his trousers
pocket and offered it to her, but she turned away from him. There
was a box of kleenex on the stockroom counter—she didn’t need
him.

“Would I be permitted to go to the washroom
and rinse off my face, or would you shoot me if I tried?”

“Go ahead—be my guest.” He smiled at her with
a contemptuous amusement he didn’t feel. She wasn’t going to pull a
fast one now; she wasn’t that stupid. And if detesting him was
going to help her to keep from coming all unstuck again, that was
all right too. Fortunately, it wasn’t part of his task to be
popular.

And she did come back, almost immediately.
She had washed away all evidence of her recent emotional crisis and
looked perfectly crisp and efficient again, as impersonal as a
department store mannequin. Guinness recalled the businesslike
white cotton underwear he had found in the drawers of her bureau
and decided that Amalia Brouwer probably wasn’t nearly as tough as
she thought she was, but it wouldn’t hurt if she hung onto her
sustaining myth perhaps just a little longer. Over the next few
hours, she might really need to believe she was the iron
maiden.

He told her what he wanted her to do when her
lift showed up. It wasn’t very complicated—all she had to manage
was to sit out front by the cash register and let him have the work
of convincing her that he wasn’t just another customer.

“Just be sure that you make him come to
you—will you know him?”

“No.” She shook her head. “If it were going
to be someone I would recognize, Günner would have said so.”

“So much the better. Just sit so you’re not
facing the window directly—we wouldn’t want him standing out in the
street and waving at you. He’ll come inside, and he’ll close the
door after himself, and then all you have to do is ignore him, just
the way you would if he were somebody who’s come in to check out
the naked ladies on the magazine covers. Once he’s inside, we’ve
got him cold, but the farther he gets away from the door the
better—we wouldn’t want him to get any bright ideas.”

“How do you know I will do as you ask? How
can you be sure I won’t signal him away?” It wasn’t so much a
question as a gesture of defiance. She stood in front of him, with
her arms down at her sides, hating his guts, but they both knew she
wasn’t contemplating anything of the sort.

“How do I know you didn’t signal Günner over
the phone? I just have to hope you’re not that stupid—besides, why
would I bother with any of this, why wouldn’t I just spirit you
away now, if I didn’t know I could make you believe me this way? I
just have to count on that—if you want to know the truth, you’ll do
as I tell you for just a while longer. You don’t have very much to
lose, do you.”

No, she didn’t have very much to lose. Even
she saw that. So she went out to the front and resumed her seat
behind the cash register, bending her head down over the same
magazine that she had been reading when he first came in. And
Guinness waited out of sight behind the heavy green curtains, far
enough away from them that not even the shadows cast by his legs
would be visible underneath.

It was a long wait, but it was always a long
wait when you had to stand perfectly still and count off the
seconds like a schoolboy watching the clock through the last hour
of the term. Actually it wasn’t more than twelve or fourteen
minutes before the little bell tinkled over the front door—it
seemed almost that long before Guinness heard the same sound again,
followed by the click of the lock catching as the door closed.

“Yes?”

He couldn’t hear the man’s reply, only a
faint murmur of indistinguishable words, only enough to tell that
it was, in fact, a man. Nothing more. Amalia Brouwer had spoken to
him in English, which meant that she believed this was the right
one.

“Yes.”

There—she had said it again. That was
Guinness’s cue. He stepped forward, sweeping the curtain aside with
his right hand. In his left was the automatic. And the man whose
voice had come to him as nothing more than a low rhythm of sound
stood in front of the counter, his hands thrust deep into the
pockets of a tan raincoat; he turned and looked at Guinness and
then looked at the gun in Guinness’s hand—it was impossible to say
which surprised him more.

“You’ve got just the one chance,” Guinness
said quietly. “I want to see the palms of your hands, so bring them
out where I can look at them and do it very slowly. I hate
surprises.”

15

He was a chubby, popeyed man of slightly more
than average height, with curly dishwater blond hair and greasy,
yellowish skin. But if he wasn’t very prepossessing, he also wasn’t
a hopeless fool—he brought his hands out of his pockets, empty and
with the fingers spread. Guinness nodded and motioned him forward,
pulling him through the curtained doorway, into the stockroom and
out of sight of the street. They had things to discuss.

“You did that very well,” he said, running
his right hand over the man’s pockets and along his rib cage as he
felt for a weapon. There was a .45 Colt automatic in a shoulder
holster—Guinness had never been able to understand how anyone could
bear to walk around with a lump like that under his armpit, but
there seemed to be something about shoulder rigs that appealed to
some men’s sense of
machismo
—he reached in under the
raincoat and pulled it out, keeping the muzzle of his own pistol
pressed hard against his prisoner’s soft belly while he did it. For
some reason fat men always lived in deadly fear of being gut shot;
just the merest threat of it settled them down wonderfully.

“I’m not an idiot, mister.” Without moving
his head a millimeter, the man looked down over the curve of his
cheeks at the weapon in Guinness’s left hand. “I know who you are,
and I like breathin’.”

“Good for you.”

Amalia Brouwer was still standing with her
back against the green curtains, her hands lost somewhere behind
the folds of her skirt. She didn’t give the impression she was much
enjoying the proceedings. Guinness held out the .45 to her and she
stared at it blankly, as if she couldn’t imagine the uses to which
such a device could be put. Maybe she couldn’t.

“Here, hold onto this.”

In the end, the best she could manage was to
bring one of her hands out from behind her skirt, extending it palm
up. Guinness laid the huge weapon there, keeping hold of it as her
fingers began to curl around the barrel and the trigger guard. She
would accept possession of the thing and that was all; that much
was obvious. She was a neutral—she wasn’t going to point it at
anybody.

Guinness had half turned away from the other
man. He kept his eyes on Amalia and he transferred the little
nickel plated automatic over to his right hand.

And then he took a quarter step back with his
left foot and, in a single smooth movement, twisted around
counterclockwise at the waist and drove his left elbow into the
man’s midsection, just an inch or two below the breastbone. There
was a short, painful sounding gasp, and the man doubled over and
crumpled to his knees, holding his stomach with both hands and
pressing inward with his fingers, seemingly in an effort to keep it
from tearing open.

After a moment, when he seemed unable any
longer even to kneel, he brought one hand down to the floor to
steady himself. Guinness waited perhaps a second and a half, while
the arm began to accept some of the strain, and then swept it away
with his foot. The man toppled over face first and, as soon as he
was down, Guinness kicked him, hard, just under the right
armpit.

The sound he made as he lay there writhing on
the cement floor was something between a sob and a deep,
excruciating gurgle, terrible to hear.

“Have you got any twine?”

When there was no answer, Guinness turned
around and found Amalia Brouwer staring at the man on the floor
with a kind of appalled fascination. The .45 automatic was still
cradled in her hand, but she seemed to have forgotten all about it;
the only object in the universe was the man on the floor in front
of her. Guinness put his gun back inside the waistband of his
trousers.