The Favor (33 page)

When the shoulder holster, which held a
small, elegant looking beretta, was dumped in the middle of the
floor, George was allowed to sit back down again on the corner of
the bed and Guinness could turn his attention back to Painter, who
was beginning to stir slightly as he tried to remember how to
breathe. Painter wasn’t any threat anymore. It would be a couple of
minutes at least before he was alive to anything except his own
physical agony, and Guinness was willing to wait. So he stood up
and walked back across the room until he had his back to the
opposite wall—he wasn’t worried about a thing except keeping
himself from getting splattered with the mess.

Finally Painter managed a wheezy groan and
let his head drop to one side so that he was looking at Guinness,
as if through the obscuring veil of his own pain. And, in the end,
even that passed away a little, and he could see his Luger in
Guinness’s hand. His lips began forming some word, but Guinness
only shook his head. Guinness didn’t want to hear anything about
it.

“You shouldn’t have done it,” he said
quietly. “You should have left her alone.”

He raised the Luger and fired.

. . . . .

A pistol shot is far less noisy than most
people imagine. You always expect it to sound like the announcement
of Armageddon, but actually, provided that you keep to well made
weapons of reasonably small caliber, the report isn’t much more
than a sharp crack, rather like the sound you might make stepping
on a dry branch.

Of course, there are psychological factors
involved; you blow a man’s brains out in a quiet suburban bedroom
and you have the impression you’ve made enough racket to wake the
dead. Partly it’s a question of acoustics, the fact of an enclosed
space, and partly it’s the surprise—somehow you don’t imagine that
anything could interrupt the domestic serenity of the room where a
pretty girl is wont to take her repose. And partly, no doubt, it
has something to do with the damage a bullet traveling in excess of
eight hundred feet per second can do to the human cranium. Painter
really didn’t look very good lying there on his face with the blood
pouring, simply pouring, out of the socket formerly occupied by his
right eye, and the sight of him—or the sound of the explosion, or
its suddenness, or all three in combination—seemed to be playing on
poor George’s nerves.

“Jesus.”

It seemed to be all he could say, and he
could only whisper that. He sat on the corner of the bed, visibly
trembling, unable to take his eyes from the spot in the middle of
the floor where his late partner had left the concerns of this
weary world behind. Jesus. Whether the one word was a prayer or
simply a muted exclamation was something impossible to tell.

So George watched the floor stain and
Guinness, who regarded his business with Painter as finished and,
anyway, had long since ceased finding anything interesting in the
sight of corpses, watched George. Probably both of them were
wondering if they had just beheld the future.

At last George was able to tear himself away,
and he looked at Guinness with that species of abject,
unselfconscious fear with which we all consider the instrument of
our annihilation. His mouth opened and he seemed to be trying to
say something, but now no sound came out at all. It wasn’t until
the second attempt that he was able to frame his question—which
wasn’t even that so much as the confirmation of a fact.

“You knew, didn’t you. You knew we were up
here waiting for you,”

“You guessed it.”

Guinness smiled, and the poor man’s face
seemed to collapse, as if this were the final warrant of his
helplessness.

And Guinness felt sorry for him, and subtly
ashamed because, after all, there were no victories over mortality
and to be the object of dread was to presume to a kind of safety
that rested on nothing but lies. They were the same clay, the two
of them, and the fact that Guinness now held the gun hardly meant
he had assumed the nimbus.

“I want Flycatcher, George.” The sentence,
although spoken softly enough, cut the silence like a knife blade
parting taut silk. “Frankly, it doesn’t matter to me whether I kill
you or not—I’ll leave that up to you. Tell me where to find your
boss, and how many of his playmates he has with him and how they’re
deployed, and as far as I’m concerned you can take a walk.”

Poor George, he didn’t seem to know what to
believe. Possibly it just seemed too easy. He shifted uncomfortably
in his seat and stared down at his hands as if he had never seen
them before. Possibly he wondered if it wasn’t a con, and if he
might not end up on the floor next to Painter if he said anything.
Possibly he thought to play for time—after all, it was better to be
alive for five minutes than for only thirty seconds.

“How do I know you won’t just kill me
anyway?”

Guinness smiled again. It was a reasonable
question, and he never minded a reasonable question. It was even a
good sign, an indication that perhaps the intelligence of self
interest would prevail at last.

“I won’t because I won’t have to—come on,
George, you know who I am. I don’t kill anybody without a reason;
that kind of thing is the mark of the amateur. You’ll tell me the
truth because you’ll have to, because if you lie to me there’s
nowhere in the world you can run where I won’t find you. I don’t
close accounts on people until they’re dead.”

With just the merest shrug of his shoulders,
with no more than that, he conveyed the depth of his scorn for any
attempt to evade the impersonal harshness of his wrath. He was the
Soldier, the celebrated killer of men. He was the Angel of
Death.

“Think it over, George. And don’t let any
lingering traces of team spirit cloud your judgment. You’ll have to
tell me everything—you don’t want Flycatcher after you too. Right
now the only hope you have is that I come up winners. He’ll know
you sold him out because all the rest of them are dead, and he
isn’t any more forgiving than I am.”

18

The houses along the road out of Amsterdam
seemed conspicuous for their lack of privacy. None of them appeared
to have any curtains in their front windows, unless one used that
word to describe the intricate and almost transparent panels of
lace that were tied back at the sides—at any rate, there was
nothing to interfere with an unobstructed view directly into the
living room, which was invariably spotless, a cozy little interior
world of gleaming hardwood floors and arrangements of flowers on
dark, polished tables. Perhaps that was the idea; perhaps all those
Dutch country housewives understood their parlor windows as a
medium for displaying the blamelessness of their lives.

It was hot. Guinness cranked down the window
of his car—well, George’s car—to let in as much of a breeze as he
could make going fifty miles an hour over a single thin strip of
faded asphalt that seemed to wind around like a tapeworm as it felt
its precarious way along the narrow ridge of ground between the
flat, marshy farmland on the one side and the sea on the other. The
late afternoon sunlight was yellow and heavy. Even the trees seemed
to be sweating. In the last five minutes the only other car he had
seen was a bright red tour bus scurrying back to town so no one
would be late for dinner.

“We’ll just walk down together to where
you’ve parked,” he had told George, smiling benevolently, “and
we’ll sit side by side on the front seat while I turn the ignition
switch—you’ll have to forgive me, but I’m the cautious type; I had
a bad experience in that line once, and I worry about booby traps.
And then I’ll let you off somewhere and you can make whatever
arrangements you like for getting out of the country. I hope you
haven’t been spinning me yarns, pal.”

George had shaken his head and frowned. No,
George was the sensible type who wanted to live in obscurity to a
ripe old age.

“Don’t worry. I just worked for the guy; we
were never joined at the hip. I haven’t got any ambitions to become
a high priority item with you—I’ve seen what that’s like.”

It seemed that George had been another one of
the ones in Mexico. He hadn’t happened to be in the house that
particular night, but he had seen the consequences and had been
brooding about them, apparently, ever since. He was a realist, was
George. He figured Flycatcher was beginning to look like a bad
investment.

“You killed Olsen and Sweeney down there, and
then yesterday Lind gets found in an alley, and now you’ve killed
Painter and Dietrich. No thanks. I don’t want to retire that way.”
He shook his head again, looking sadly down at the carpet in Aimé’s
narrow little hallway, his hand resting on the doorknob. “No
thanks. You can have him. He’s all yours.”

The impression was that working for
Flycatcher hadn’t been a very rewarding and fun filled experience
over the past several months, which was nice to hear. Apparently he
had nearly bled to death after the Battle of Puerto Vallarta, and
the gunshot wound to the chest had messed him up pretty badly.
There had been perforce a long convalescence, and he had come out
of it a changed man. He had discovered what it was to live on a
steady diet of fear, and the judgment seemed to be that it hadn’t
improved either his disposition or his professional performance.
George didn’t seem the chatty type, but on this particular subject
he was able to screw himself up to a certain laconic eloquence.

“He’s gotten nastier. He was never much of a
charmer, but it’s out of hand now. And he spends more time on
looking out for you than on anything else—it’s no good when the
boss is always watching over his shoulder; it’s bad for morale.
We’ve always been a high turnover operation, and he can’t attract
the talent anymore. These days it’s all screwballs like this guy
Painter. Dietrich wasn’t a bad guy, though. Strictly a coat holder,
but not a bad guy.”

“What do you want, an apology?”

No, he didn’t want an apology. Perhaps he
just wanted Guinness to know that not everybody in Flycatcher’s
organization would immediately think about extracting information
with a hot iron.

But Guinness didn’t want to hear about that.
He didn’t want to know what role George might or might not have
played in Janine’s peculiarly sordid death—after all, he was
letting the guy go and he didn’t want to regret it—and George was
smart enough to maintain a discreet silence on the point.

But for the rest he had been communicative
enough, which was hardly surprising since his life depended on it.
Flycatcher was waiting in an isolated farmhouse about a hundred
twenty miles from Amsterdam. It had the further advantage of being
on perfectly flat land, so anyone sneaking up on the place would
have his work cut out for him, and the German border wasn’t more
than a half hour’s drive away. He had five men with him—no dogs
this time, only men; apparently he had learned his lesson—and the
men were equipped with automatic rifles. George said that it had
been months since Flycatcher had gone anywhere without such a
bodyguard; even when he had ventured into the city to pay his
amorous little visits to Amalia Brouwer, the goon squad would be
parked out in the street, glowering at the passers by, tossing
cigarette butts out of the car windows while they waited for him to
finish. It must have been fun for everyone.

And what about now? Was he sitting in his
bedroom, staring at his packed suitcases and waiting for it to be
over? Was he thinking how much easier he would rest when he had
seen Raymond Guinness with the brains leaking out through the back
of his head? Guinness couldn’t help but wonder what sort of death
had been planned for him, what would have seemed humiliating and
painful enough to make amends—and he wondered if, in the solitude
of his private reflections, Flycatcher didn’t understand perfectly
well that it wasn’t going to be that easy, that no one was going to
bring him his heart’s gall all trussed up in a neat little package,
like a waxed paper bag of jelly doughnuts, that this had long ago
ceased to be a quarrel that could possibly involve anyone except
themselves.

Guinness was glad that he had a nice long
drive ahead of him and glad of the opportunity for being alone
before this final confrontation. He might not have been as ready if
Flycatcher had been waiting just around the corner or on the other
side of the city. It had already been a harrowing day and it was a
long way from over; already he felt burnt out, as if he hadn’t had
a moment’s peace since the day he was born, and it was hard to care
about living through even the next quarter of a minute, let alone
all the hours and hours that separated him from any quiet of
mind—and that was a dangerous way to feel, because it made you
careless and could get you killed.

But he had a little time now to compose
himself, and, taking advantage of it, he discovered with something
like relief that at least the anger was gone. That was good—he
would kill Flycatcher; somehow or other, he would manage that. He
still wanted Flycatcher’s death more than his own life, but in the
ensuing war of nerves, their contest of blood and dishonor, anger
would have been just something in the way. The victory would go to
the dispassionate, even if he didn’t live to enjoy it.

Guinness hadn’t had anything to eat since
breakfast—God, he couldn’t even remember breakfast—so, in the first
little town that turned up, he pulled into one of the parking
spaces with which the picturesque old central square had been
painted over and found himself the Dutch equivalent of a sandwich
shop.

Actually, it was closer to a British pub, a
sort of cross between a tavern and what the Americans
euphemistically called a “family restaurant.” The main staple of
business seemed to be drinks of various kinds—most of the dark
little cellarlike room was filled with circular tables at which
spruce clerks and farmers in heavy, mud stained boots and black
trousers sat moodily over glasses of brown beer—but there was a
kitchen, and they would make you up a plate of any one of a half
dozen different things if you asked them. It wasn’t Burger King,
but it wasn’t a den of iniquity either.