The Favor (31 page)

But there was no one else there, so there was
no one left to kill. He had expected there would be more; he had
expected that he would probably have caught a bullet by now—he had
only hoped for enough time to take as many as he could with him
into that good night—but suddenly he saw that he was alone, and the
disappointment was almost painful. It was all over, almost before
it had happened, and it wasn’t fair. There had been only the one,
and it wasn’t fair.

But the one was still alive. Just barely, but
still alive.

Guinness knelt down beside him, hating him
with a peculiar intimacy, as if they had been enemies forever. He
picked him up by the lapel of his denim jacket and shook him
exactly as if he had been a rag doll instead of a man.

“Oh, you son of a bitch,” he crooned in his
ear. “Don’t you die on me. Don’t you dare.”

But it was already too late. The light went
out of the man’s frightened, bewildered eyes, and in an instant he
was beyond anyone’s powers of vengeance.

But Guinness couldn’t seem to let him go. He
stayed crouched over him for a long time, unwilling to accept that
the man was dead and their business was completed. He couldn’t even
bring himself to relinquish his hold on the denim jacket.

“Don’t you die on me,” he whispered. He was
still half heartedly trying to threaten the dead man back to life
when he heard the knocking on the front door.

Three sharp raps. Guinness experienced a few
wild seconds of hope before he remembered Amalia Brouwer and rose
to let her in. He wasn’t fast enough, however, to catch her before
she knocked again—ten seconds, and three more short, insistent
points of sound, like Morse code.

“Okay—I hear you.”

He pulled the doorknob toward himself and was
initially surprised to see no one. And then he remembered his own
instructions and, peeking around the edge of the frame, found
Amalia Brouwer flattened against the outside wall. At least she
knew enough to do as she was told.

“It’s all right. Come in.”

She said nothing, and as he closed the door
behind her he found she was standing over the dead body that lay
straddled over the backrest of a tipped over chair, peering down
into his face in a way that suggested she was trying to remember
where she had seen him before.

“Was he another friend of yours?” he asked,
perhaps not very nicely. His juices were still pumping pretty hard;
he could feel the first surge of his anger still bottled up inside
him and he found he really didn’t much like anybody. Another
time—if there was ever another time—he would be sure to
apologize.

“No.” She shook her head. “No, I have never
seen him. Is he the one who killed Jean?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’ve run into him once
already this morning, and I don’t imagine he could have been in two
places at the same time.”

And then she noticed the open bedroom door,
and what was lying on the bed, and she uttered a little sound that
was somewhere between a groan and a sob. Guinness was standing
behind her, far enough off that he couldn’t simply reach out and
stop her, and the next thing he knew she was clinging to the edge
of the door frame and her slender body was being shaken by episodes
of choked weeping—it was quite impersonal; she had never set eyes
on Janine, but who could have seen her like that without at least a
spasm of pity and fear? Guinness didn’t think any the less of her
for it.

He took her by the shoulder and, very gently,
turned her around to face him, to face away from the contents of
Janine’s bed.

“If you don’t like it, don’t look at it,” he
said quietly. He wasn’t really being snide; at the moment it was
the best advice he could think of. And immediately she began trying
to compose herself—he could feel the tension in her arms as she
forced herself back under control. And then it was done. Emil
Kätzner’s child looked up at him out of a face that was tear
stained but calm.

“Is that why you killed him?”

“Yes. That’s why I killed him.”

They stood facing each other for a moment,
and then, when Guinness was sure she was all right, he went into
the kitchen and found a steak knife in one of the drawers next to
the sink.

Already he realized that he had been betrayed
into a mistake, that the man watching him from the floor with dead
eyes would have been more useful alive, but there was nothing he
could do about that. His moment of wrath might end up costing him
his life, but there was nothing he could do about that either. The
die was cast.

He closed the bedroom door behind him and cut
away the bathrobe belts and nylon stockings and strips of
pillowcase they had used to bind Janine, and when he had released
her he took her under the arms and pulled her poor mangled little
body so that it lay straight on the bed. Then he rearranged her
clothes so that they covered her again and folded the bedspread
around her like a winding sheet.

It was a perfectly meaningless gesture, of
course—Guinness had never been able to bring himself to believe
that it could matter to the dead how they were treated—but somehow
it made him feel a little better. He couldn’t have left her to be
found like that by the police. She had been through enough as it
was, poor little thing. He left the glass doors to the balcony
open.

And then he went back out into the living
room, where Amalia Brouwer was sitting on the edge of the sofa,
facing slightly away from the dead man on the floor, apparently
waiting for Guinness to come back and settle her destiny as
well.

“You’ll have to get to Düsseldorf by
yourself,” he said, sitting down beside her. “Our friend on the
floor had a partner; they were like Mutt and Jeff, so I thought
since I’ve killed the one I might as well kill the other. I’m going
to try to kill all of them—every damned one of them.”

“What of Günner? What am I to do if he
pursues me?”

It wasn’t a panicky question. She was a good
kid; she just wanted to know whether there were any instructions
about such a contingency. Guinness smiled at her and shook his
head.

“Not to worry. Günner won’t even give you a
thought. Günner’s going to be much too busy.”

17

And so Amalia Brouwer was on her way.
Guinness had waited with her until her nerves had settled a bit and
then walked her back down to the car. She would sleep that night in
Düsseldorf, under the protection of Teddy MacKaye. She was Teddy’s
problem now, and her own. And now Guinness was free of his promise
to Emil Kätzner and had only Janine to think about—Janine and
Flycatcher. Now he didn’t have to choose anymore.

Because Flycatcher would wait for him now. He
had known all along, from the very beginning; he had even managed
to put his men on the train to Amsterdam, so he had known at least
as early as Ernie Tuttle had known. Ernie seemed to have a snitch
in his office, but that was his problem. All Guinness cared about
was the fact that he seemed to have an appointment.

The other schoolteacher—why did he continue
to think of him as a schoolteacher? The guy probably hadn’t held a
piece of chalk since high school—the one who had looked at Janine
with such ravenous eyes in the Rijksmuseum hadn’t been standing
guard duty with his buddy in her apartment. And, in the general
course of things, you didn’t work over the soles of somebody’s feet
with a hot iron just for your own private amusement—you did it
because you wanted something. They had followed Janine, followed
her because they hadn’t dared to follow Guinness, and the only
thing they could have wanted from Janine was himself. Q.E.D. They
had put her through all that—doubtless enjoying it, but they
wouldn’t have run the risks involved, they wouldn’t have just
picked on Janine, without a specific purpose—all that, just to find
out where they could set up an ambush for the Soldier, the
celebrated killer of men. And all because Flycatcher had finally
decided that the cat and mouse game had gone on long enough.

And, of course, Janine had told them. How
could she have kept from telling them? How much could mere flesh be
asked to bear? No one, no one in the wide world, had the right to
say a word against her.

But she had told them. They had shot her in
the head; that was the seal on her confession. They never would
have killed her if they hadn’t believed her every word. So they
would be waiting for him now at Aimé’s apartment—to which, perhaps,
Janine had hoped he would never have any reason to return.

After all, she knew he was coming to meet
her. Had she told them that? No, he didn’t think so—they had only
left the one man behind, against the off chance; there would be
more of them waiting at Aimé’s, No, she had kept faith and given
him his chance to get away. That was like her.

Aimé, who slept next to her elderly boyfriend
within sound of the sea, she might never come back to her apartment
now. Sugar Daddy might marry her now and she could forget about her
starvation diets and live to be a plump, respectable Dutch matron.
She might never come back.

But Guinness would. He would walk right to
the front door, with no tricks, and let them have him. It was the
only way he could put himself within reach of Flycatcher, on
Flycatcher’s terms. It was what Flycatcher was hanging around for,
and Guinness wouldn’t have disappointed him for worlds.

Of course, they might do the smart thing, the
thing Guinness would have done himself, and burn him down the
second he stepped across the threshold. If all Flycatcher wanted
was to be able to sleep easy at night, those would be the orders he
would give, but Guinness had an intuition that that wasn’t all
Flycatcher wanted. It wasn’t even the half of what he wanted.

You hunt a man for a long time, and you
develop a sense of him. A feeling for his character, for the
interior logic of his actions. And Flycatcher wasn’t going to
settle for a quick, safe bullet in the head—after all, Guinness
wasn’t Janine.

Guinness had threatened him in a way that
went considerably beyond the simple fear of death; Guinness had
made him feel small and vulnerable. Guinness had frightened him and
would have to pay, and the payment would have to be made in person,
face to face, or Flycatcher would never get back his self esteem,
would never feel the same about anything again. It was too personal
a matter between them to be left to subordinates.

Still, the odds were lousy. Guinness had to
assume that he was reading Flycatcher right, who, after all, might
just be frightened enough not to worry about his self esteem, and
he had to assume that he could somehow extricate himself from the
trap that had been set for him, that he would somehow find a way of
striking back. The chances of survival were negligible, and the
chances of success weren’t very much better. After all, people had
tried for Flycatcher before—Guinness himself had tried—and the man
was still alive. It didn’t fill you with optimism.

But it had to be tried. Janine was lying
tucked up in her bedspread with her feet nearly burnt off and a
bullet in her brain, and she was there because of Raymond Guinness,
whose name she had never even been allowed to know. If they had
simply been working on a job together, a couple of paid government
functionaries, that might have been something else, but Guinness
had been in Amsterdam in the service of no master for whom Janine
should have felt herself obliged to lay down her life; he had come
on a personal matter, a favor for someone to whom he owed a purely
private obligation. And Janine had died for that. She knew nothing
of Emil Kätzner; she owed him nothing. She had died for Raymond
Guinness—for the Soldier. And so his obligation was to her.

It wasn’t much of a walk between the two
women’s apartments, not more than ten or twelve minutes at a good
crisp pace. Guinness didn’t hurry, however. It was a nice day, and
he wanted to enjoy it. He wanted to keep in the sunshine and to
bake the chill of Janine’s bedroom out of his bones. He wanted to
lose his anger, which had cost him enough already—now, if he made
his score, it would have to be the hard way or not at all. Anger
was just a nuisance; he wanted to clear his mind, to catch hold of
the sense that the world had only begun for him since he had
stepped back out into the light.

He took the long way, skirting the canal to
give his eyes something to rest on besides the fifteen or twenty
some odd feet of sidewalk directly in front of him. He liked to be
able to smell the water, which was a greenish gray and half covered
with shadow from the embankment walls, and he liked the rough
texture of the stone. He wondered whether there were any fish in
these waters, or if they had all died off ages ago from the
gasoline fumes.

He had the walkway pretty much to himself—it
was an odd thing, but for some reason people didn’t seem to like
walking along the canal ways. Perhaps because there was only the
canal to see and they were more interested in the contents of shop
windows. Or perhaps there was some other reason. He tried to
imagine what it could be, but he couldn’t.

Kätzner would have liked the shop window
idea, since he was a Marxist—or perhaps he had given up ascribing
everything to the sovereign power of economics. Perhaps, by now,
Kätzner too had lost interest in the motives of other people or had
simply decided that they might be as inexplicable as his own. Under
any circumstances, Guinness decided, he would stop worrying about
why he seemed to be the only human being for thirty yards in any
direction; the question of his own isolation was beginning to lose
its charm.

The canal made a slight turn and suddenly,
from where he was standing on the sidewalk, he could see Aimé’s
building. If there was a reception committee, and there didn’t seem
to be much doubt about that, they could see him too, and Guinness
had made up his mind he was going to make his entrance nice and
conspicuous. After all, he was just a poor frazzled assassin coming
home to his borrowed digs after a hard day of plying his trade—why
should he harbor any suspicions? Hell, he wasn’t even carrying a
gun.