The Favor (28 page)

“Some twine? You know—string. Something like
that. What’s the matter, have you gone stony deaf? Get me some
fucking twine, for Christ’s sake!”

Finally, when she could tear her eyes away
from the little drama of the man on the floor, she looked up at
Guinness with an expression of dumb incomprehension. He reached
over and took the .45 away from her, not out of any concern over
her intentions but because she seemed ready to let it slip from her
hand to the floor out of sheer absence of mind.

“My God,” she said slowly, apparently still
not quite able to comprehend what had happened. “Why would you. .
?” The question simply trailed off into silence.

Guinness, by this time, had found the twine
for himself—there were several spools of it in a drawer under one
of the counters, along with a pair of scissors and a great quantity
of mailing labels—and he was industriously tying his victim’s hands
together behind his back. There was little enough danger the man
would try anything, but people always feel so much more helpless
and vulnerable when they’re lying face down on the floor with their
hands tied.

“We were going to ask him a few questions,
remember? Well—I just wanted to make sure we’d have his undivided
attention. There now.”

He stood up, taking the .45 from where it had
been laying on a cardboard carton, and wiped off his hands on his
trousers—first the left one, then the right, shifting the huge
automatic back and forth between them. Then he stepped over to
Amalia and took her by the arm again, rather more gently this time,
and led her over to where the man was trying to look up at them
through large, terrified eyes. She was still speechless and
followed along as meekly as a lamb. Guinness sat her down on
another of the dozen or so book cartons in the tiny room, one where
she would have a ringside seat to the proceedings, and then sat
down himself on the floor, almost at her feet.

He wasn’t more than eighteen or twenty inches
away from his nameless victim’s face, and he cocked the hammer of
the .45 and rested the muzzle casually against the man’s thick
neck, just below the corner of his jaw.

“Tell you what, pal—I’m going to ask you a
couple of questions. I already know the answers, but the lady
doesn’t. If you tell us the truth, then everything will be fine,
but if you try to lie to us, then I’m going to pull this trigger. I
hope you believe me, pal, because I’ve used one of these mothers a
couple of times before and they make a terrific mess. You believe
me, pal, don’t you? Hmmm?”

The man’s face was badly bruised—Guinness
wouldn’t have been surprised if his nose was broken; there were
thick tracks of blood streaming down from his nostrils—and he
nodded painfully, trying not to move at all where the .45 pressed
into the folds of his neck.

“Yeah. Yeah, I believe you.”

And he did, too. Guinness glanced up at
Amalia Brouwer, whose hands were folded together in her lap and
whose slender body seemed coiled like a steel spring. She believed
him so much that if he had fired at that moment she would have shot
straight up through the ceiling. She was all primed for it.

“Okay, question number one: where’s
Renal?”

“He’s dead.” The man’s tongue came out
perhaps a quarter of an inch and he made a brief stab at licking
his lips, which were already so dry they almost looked cracked, but
his tongue was just as dry, so it didn’t seem to help. “They shot
him. I wasn’t even there—I didn’t shoot him.”

His eyes flickered up at Guinness, begging to
be believed, and Guinness nodded, smiling.

“He was the lady’s friend, pal, not mine. I
really don’t care whether you killed him or not. But try again.
He’s dead—where is he dead? I want to know where they left him,
understand?”

“In the girl’s apartment. Please, mister. .
.”

But Guinness silenced him with a touch of the
muzzle of the huge automatic.

“We’re not finished, pal. I want you to tell
the lady what they had in mind for her. Go ahead—don’t be shy.”

The man’s eyes once again hunted for
Guinness’s face. Would he have to say it? Would he really have to
say it? Yes—he would have to.

“We’ve got a farmhouse—it’s away from
everywhere, and one of the fields was turned over with a tiller
just a couple of weeks ago. I was told to bury her out there.”

Guinness glanced up at Amalia Brouwer and
raised his eyebrows in a silent, half mocking question. Was she
satisfied? Would she believe him now? His answer was a barely
suppressed shudder, as if she were already looking down into the
damp, earthy smelling grave.

“Now, one last question—who gave the order? I
want her to hear his name.”

They waited, and the man tried once again to
wet his lips, and then he shook his head.

“I don’t know his name—if he has one. You
know him, though. You’ve hunted him long enough.”

“Is it Flycatcher?”

The man neither moved his head nor spoke, not
for several seconds. He merely stared up into Guinness’s face. And
then, once more, his tongue passed over his dry lips.

“You know him, and he knows you. He don’t
scare easy, but you follow him around like a ghost. He hates
you.”

“Then it’s Flycatcher.”Guinness put his thumb
on the .45’s hammer and let it down very slowly. He rose from the
floor and looked around the room, as if searching for something.
Then he pulled back the sleeve of his jacket and checked his
watch.

“When will the old woman come back?”

The question had been directed at Amalia, but
she didn’t seem to hear him. She sat on the cardboard carton, her
hands still folded in her lap, seemingly lost in some private grief
where she couldn’t be reached by the sound of the human voice.

Had she loved Flycatcher? Or was she mourning
for Jean Renal, and for her part in his cruel, sordid end? Or was
it for herself she mourned, for the believer in causes, for the
child warrior who had been so happy to lose herself in the larger
struggle? And now Flycatcher had been revealed as her worst enemy,
and Renal was dead, and the cause was nothing but the taste of
ashes. Guinness was sorry, at that moment, that he couldn’t have
been Emil Kätzner. He was himself nothing but a common mercenary
who had never believed in anything, who had never had an innocence
to lose. Her father would have understood better and might have
found something to say, some word of comfort—or, at least, of
understanding—in this most terrible moment of her young life.

But he wasn’t Emil Kätzner; he was only
himself. So he put his hand on her shoulder and waited until she
noticed and looked up into his face.

“The old woman, when will she come back?”“She
will not,” she said, her brown eyes, so like her father’s, swimming
with tears. “I told her I would watch the store today so she could
visit her sister—I did not want her here when the time came.”

Guinness nodded. “Go get your coat and your
handbag—it’s time to go.”

And while Amalia was gone, to fetch her
things and perhaps to once more wash the sting from her face,
Guinness crouched down beside the figure on the floor, who was
still watching him with an intensity that hardly allowed for the
taking of a breath.

He reached into the pocket of his jacket and
took out a hard leather case, smaller than a pack of
cigarettes—inside was a syringe, about the length and thickness of
your little finger, and three tiny numbered vials of clear fluid.
He filled the syringe out of the vial marked “2” and gave the
plunger a slight push to force out the last bubble of air. Vial “2”
was worth about five hours of deathlike sleep—you woke up with a
crushing headache, but you woke up alive.

“What’s that stuff?”

Guinness looked down at the puffy, frightened
face and grinned rattily.

“You’re taking a nap, my friend. A little
snooze. When you wake up, if you’re lucky enough to wake up before
Flycatcher gets impatient and sends a couple of goons out looking
for you, you’d be well advised to get yourself far, far away. He
doesn’t like screw ups. Sleep tight.”

He forced the needle in just where the
trapezius muscle joins the neck. There was a little gurgling sound,
and the body on the floor went perfectly slack. You couldn’t even
hear him breathe—Guinness pressed his thumb against the man’s
carotid artery just to be sure he was still alive; there was a
heartbeat, but it was already very slow.

He noticed that the man’s hands, which were
still tied behind his back, were beginning to take on a reddish,
puffy look—in another few hours they would probably be black. When
he remembered the pair of scissors in the drawer where he had found
the twine, he got up and fetched them and severed the bonds. Both
arms immediately slipped to the floor with a thud.

When Amalia came back into the room, the
first question she asked was, “Did you kill him?”

She seemed to expect that he had.

“No, I just gave him something to put him to
sleep. I’m glad the old lady is out of the way; she’d probably drop
dead from shock if she saw him lying here like this. In a couple of
hours he’ll wake up and leave under his own power—no one will ever
know he was even here.”

Was it possible she was disappointed? She
stood there, gazing down at the two of them as she clutched her
large envelope shaped pocketbook in both hands, her face an
unreadable conflict of emotions. Perhaps she was expecting to exact
some sort of revenge.

Guinness stepped over to the workbench and
took the .45 automatic from where he had set it down while he was
looking for the scissors; he held it out for her to see.

“He didn’t shoot Renal,” he said quietly. “At
least, not with this. Renal was killed with something smaller,
something on the order of a nine millimeter, I would guess.” He
gestured toward the limp, almost corpse like shape at their feet
and shook his head. “If you think it’d make you feel any better, go
ahead. Take the gun, put the barrel in his mouth, and pull the
trigger—you’ll scatter his brains all over the room, but you won’t
have settled anything. It really never helps, take my word for
it.”

She looked at the weapon, and then at
Guinness, and when it occurred to her that he wasn’t kidding, her
fingers tightened on the pocketbook and she shook her head, her
lips soundlessly forming the word “no.”

“Then can we go now? You’ve got a long drive
ahead of you.” Guinness led the way through the alley behind the
bookstore, his hand closed over the nickel plated automatic, which
he had transferred to his jacket pocket. But there was no one
unpleasant around—the police hadn’t even ticketed Janine’s car.

“Get in the back seat,” he told her, speaking
over his shoulder as his eyes worked over the sidewalks and the
shop windows along either side of the alley and across the street.
“And stay down, where you can’t be seen from the outside, until you
hear different from me. I want to make perfectly sure we’re not
being followed before we pick up your driver.”

“Where will I go?”

“Into Germany—to Düsseldorf. Someone will
meet you there. I’m not sure what will happen then, not exactly
sure, but they’ll find a way to put you somewhere Flycatcher will
never find you. If you don’t do anything to attract attention to
yourself, you’ll be perfectly safe.”

He heard the car door open behind him.

“Won’t you be taking me?” she asked. He
couldn’t see her—his back was still turned—but he knew her hand was
resting uncertainly on the window frame and she was thinking that
this was her last moment of opportunity, that now, if she entered
the car and went away with him, she had surrendered her freedom,
possibly for the remainder of her life, and was entirely and
irrevocably in his unfamiliar hands.

“No, I’ll stay behind here. A woman I know
will get you to Düsseldorf. You’ll be safer with her than you would
be with me. Too many people know me.”

The door closed behind him and, in another
moment, they were on their problematic way.

What lay heaviest on Guinness’s mind was the
consciousness that, by helping Amalia Brouwer to safety, he was
putting Flycatcher out of his reach. All along, from the first
moment, it had been a choice between the life of the one
and—perhaps, if he got lucky—the final extinction of the other, but
he was bound by his word to Emil Kätzner, who had known all along,
he wouldn’t have been surprised, that Flycatcher was behind his
daughter’s troubles and had kept his own counsel to tie Guinness
even closer to him. After all, by the time Guinness had found out
it had become impossible to turn back on what he had said he would
do.

Which didn’t mean that he wasn’t entitled to
regret it—just that Amalia Brouwer had to take precedence.

And so, when he was putting his questions to
Flycatcher’s errand boy, he hadn’t even taken the trouble to ask,
where is he? He hadn’t wanted to tempt himself. No, Amalia Brouwer
came first, and if he saw her to safety it would have been too late
anyway—Flycatcher would have had time to discover that his man was
taken and he himself betrayed, and he would have been long
gone.

That had been the way of it, all along.
Guinness had continually found himself just a beat off the tempo.
Always before it had been a matter of circumstance—Flycatcher had
good people watching his back, and there wasn’t much you could do
about that—but now it was something Guinness had done, had chosen
to do, to himself.

He just hoped that Amalia Brouwer somehow
turned out to be worth it.

After a dozen or so blocks he let her come up
for air. She sat directly behind him and he could see her in the
rearview mirror, picking at her hair in that way women have when
they imagine it has become disarranged.

“How did you meet him?” he asked suddenly,
for no particular reason he could think of. Their eyes met through
the mirror and, from the way hers narrowed, it was sufficiently
clear she understood to whom he was referring.