The Favor (6 page)

So he had gone ahead with it. On the second
afternoon, while Janik ate his minced pork and pickled cabbage, he
had scouted the building with the “For rent” sign and had found an
empty front office on the second floor, picking the lock almost as
fast as if he had been provided with a key. The window faced
directly across to the spot where, two days in a row now,
Shevliskin had stopped to relight his cigar, and there was a stack
of packing cases in one corner, so there wouldn’t be any problem
about concealing the rifle; he didn’t want to be seen carrying
around any funny looking bundles on the big day.There was an
Alitalia office on the fourth floor, which would provide a suitable
cover story if he should for some reason be called upon to explain
what he was doing in that particular place. After all, he was a
tourist. He walked up the two flights of stairs and asked for a
flight schedule, involving the girl behind the counter in a long
and grotesquely complicated conversation—Guinness only knew about
three hundred words of Italian, most of them inconveniently
Dantesque—about the customs regulations. The idea was to be
remembered as absorbed in his travel plans.

For the rest there was precious little to do.
While his target was working in the inaccessibility of the State
Security Office, Guinness followed his guidebook around the streets
of Belgrade, trying not to get lost. It wouldn’t have been hard—the
guidebook was in English, German, and French, but most of the
signs, and all the street markers, were in the Cyrillic alphabet,
which he had to figure out by analogy with Greek, with rather
questionable results. Finally he gave up and found he could do
fairly well navigating by triangulation from three or four of the
more obvious public buildings. After all, if worst came to worst,
he could always just strike west and he would have to run into the
Sava River—from there he knew how to find the boarding house where
he had a room.

On the morning of the fourth day, he waited
until about twenty minutes after they opened the main doors, when
he could be reasonably sure no one would notice him, and slipped up
to his vacant office to wait. It would be over three hours before
Shevliskin would start thinking about lunch, but there were
preparations to be made and, besides, Guinness was simply too
nervous to be anywhere else. It was always that way.

During a five hour stopover in Paris, he had
taken a taxi into town, to a department store on the Boulevard
Haussmann, where he bought, along with a couple of silk neckties
and a bottle of the foulest smelling aftershave lotion you could
imagine, a pair of thin leather driving gloves. The label indicated
they had been made in Poland, and they were two sizes too small. He
folded them neatly and laid them on the packing crate he had set up
in front of the window for a shooting stand, where they would be
found by the police.

You had to be prepared for getting caught,
and policemen tended to be very big on clues; these would give them
something to feel uneasy about. The gloves he actually had on were
made of plastic and came in rolls of a hundred. There was a little
closet of a bathroom in this particular office, and when he was
ready to leave he would flush them down the toilet, one at a
time.

The rifle was assembled and loaded, and the
scope was calibrated against the approximate width of the
square—Guinness had paced off the distance the afternoon before.
The window was open, only about seven inches because anything more
would be a dead giveaway, and there wasn’t a thing in the world
left to do. Every few minutes Guinness would take a quick look
outside to check the wind, but the leaves on the elm trees across
the street were perfectly still.

The building had no air conditioning—or, if
it had, it had been turned off in the unoccupied office suites—so
by eleven thirty, while he sat on the floor glancing at his watch
two or three times a minute, he was uncomfortably warm.

These things were always the same—you waited
through an eternity, it seemed, and then everything was over in an
instant. Shevliskin turned the corner, walked perhaps eight or nine
paces, stopped, took his stub of a cigar out of his mouth and
looked at it disdainfully, and put his hand into his jacket pocket
to retrieve his matches. The box was still in his hand when he
died; it went skittering into the street as his arms flailed out
like things trying to escape on their own and he collapsed
grotesquely to the sidewalk. For years afterward, probably for as
long as he could remember anything, Guinness would remember how
Shevliskin’s life had stopped, in a kind of nerveless, sinking
pirouette that seemed to go on forever but probably took no more
than three quarters of a second. For an instant he seemed to be
reaching, with both hands, for anything at all and in every
direction, and then he just fell down. There should have been blood
everywhere—a nine millimeter bullet is a cruel thing—but there
wasn’t. He just died, as if all the life had gone out of him at
once.

Guinness didn’t hang around to gloat. He
hadn’t heard the shot—somehow you never did when it went home—but
that didn’t mean nobody else had. As soon as he saw Shevliskin
lying on the sidewalk, and was sure the thing was done, he set the
rifle down and got rid of his gloves in the toilet. Taking his
handkerchief out of his pocket to put over the door handle, he let
himself out into the corridor, where there wasn’t a soul, and
walked up the stairs to the Alitalia office, forcing himself not to
hurry. Ten minutes later, with a ticket for Rome in his inside coat
pocket, he left the building.

Or, more accurately, he tried. They arrested
him at the door.

. . . . .

To be perfectly truthful, he didn’t even make
it that far. The column of police came through first, bursting in
so suddenly that they almost ran right over him. There were five of
them; the first one peeled off and backed him into a wall, pushing
at him with the heel of his hand, and the others bulled up the
stairwell—left, right, left, right—in step, by God.

“Hey, man—Jesus!”

What did the innocent traveling public sound
like when all of a sudden they found themselves being muscled
around by some uniformed goon with a nightstick the length of a
fence pole? He tried to make it come out convincing, to give it the
proper mixture of fear and startled indignation, and the fear, at
least, was no problem. This one looked for all the world like a
gorilla, grabbing him by the shoulder and spinning him around so
that he had to catch the wall with both hands to keep from cracking
his forehead.

“Now look, fella. . .”

It was a calculated move, part of the
impersonation of harmless American outrage, but he knew what the
result would be when he tried to turn around and confront this. . .
hell, he could have been anybody, a bus driver, for all Raymond
Guinness, who was an inoffensive tourist—who, after all, had
rights—had any idea. The trick was not to look like you saw it
coming when, just to teach you the customs of the country, our
friend brought the handle of his baton down across your cheekbone
in the manner of someone striking a gong.

From then on everything was easy. You just
curled up on the floor, like a good boy, trying to hold your eyes
in until somebody turned down the voltage enough so that you could
breathe again.

Three hours later, while he waited with
eleven other detainees in a white tiled containment cell with only
a single plank bed upon which to sit, his face still hurt. If he
forgot and happened to touch the welt that extended from his right
temple down to about the middle of his chin, he would experience a
wave of nausea that almost wouldn’t allow him to stay upright. He
would have liked to pound on the door and holler in a loud voice,
demanding to see someone from his embassy—it was the sort of
gesture you imagined they would expect—but the sound of his own
voice at anything louder than a whisper, or just about any sound at
all, made his whole body throb. The guy who hit him had known what
he was doing.

Guinness sat on the far left side of the bare
plank bed, where he was able to lean against the chain that ran
diagonally down from the wall behind him and attached itself to his
corner with a heavy iron plate. The cell was so narrow you couldn’t
have lain down widthwise on the floor, and you wouldn’t have wanted
to in any case because it was covered with cigarette butts and
streaks of mud and suspicious looking stains. There was a toilet
bowl, the seat of which had been removed for some reason, and it
was occupied on a more or less permanent basis by a scrawny, stone
hard, elderly peasant with yellowish white hair and terrible
diarrhea; the old man crouched there with his trousers down around
his ankles and his head in his hands, the nails of which were
blackened and claw like, in a perfection of physical misery that
left no room for shame.

There were four others besides Guinness on
the bed, and the rest stood around, leaning against the walls and
looking at nothing. No one spoke except for a small, balding man in
a dirty blue shirt and coveralls who seemed to know about four
different languages, including English, and who was so obviously a
police spy that everyone ignored him until he too fell silent.

Guinness had never been in jail before and
was astonished at how quickly he was getting used to it. Of course,
for most of the first afternoon his face bothered him too much to
allow him any great leisure to consider anything else. They hadn’t
killed him, or even questioned him yet, and at least three of the
other men in the cell had been picked up in the same sweep of the
area in which he had been arrested, so perhaps he wasn’t the only
suspect. Perhaps he wasn’t a suspect at all—maybe they just wanted
to question him to find out if he had seen anything. At any rate,
the next move was theirs and he could wait. He had been careful, so
they didn’t have a thing on him. They couldn’t have. He kept
reminding himself of that consoling fact, over and over. For the
rest, he thought about how much his face hurt, so by the time he
was ready to pay anything like attention to his surroundings they
had lost their novelty.

The cell was without a window, and they had
confiscated Guinness’s watch, so he had no way of knowing with any
certainty what time it was when they came to get him. One assumed
night—it had been some time ago that a trustee, in a heavy gray
outfit that looked like a suit of pajamas, had brought them little
tin trays of a purplish stew that smelled bad enough to overcome
any curiosity you might have had about how it would taste; Guinness
had given his to the old peasant, who seemed to need fortifying
after his ordeal.

Anyway, he was beginning to figure out that
time meant very little in a prison. All he knew for sure was that
it was late enough to make him wish they would just let him curl up
somewhere and get some sleep. He hadn’t closed his eyes the night
before—he never could before a job.“Mr. Guinness? Please sit
down.”

The interrogation room was tiny, perhaps only
half the size of his cell, and there were six uniformed policemen.
Only one of them was seated; he smiled and motioned for Guinness to
take the only other chair, across the table from himself.

But Guinness remained on his feet. He looked
around at the faces of his captors, from one to the next, trying to
read them, to discover what they wanted, how much they knew, what
they might have guessed. But they all seemed to be wearing masks,
even the one seated at the table, whose smile might have been
painted on for the occasion—perhaps him most of all.

“I want to talk to someone from my embassy.
And I want a doctor.”

He brought his fingertips up to the huge
oblong welt which, among other things, had nearly closed his eye
for him. “I don’t know what this is all about, but that thug of
yours could have killed me.”

And then he sat down. He folded his hands
together and rested his forearms on the tabletop, allowing himself
to hate them. He was exhausted and—yes—frightened, and the inside
of his head felt like it might come leaking out of his ears, but to
hell with them. They had gotten all they were getting.

After a few hours, they figured that out for
themselves and had him taken back to the cells.This time he had one
all to himself—but he had been expecting that. Two years before,
when he had been going through his training up in Scotland, they
had told him how these sorts of things were done.

“When they want you to think,” they had said,
“they let you be by yourself. They aren’t being nice—they just
don’t want you to get distracted while you’re imagining what a fix
you’re in. It’s harder to be a hero in a vacuum, and they know
it.”

Was it the same cell? It could have been—the
same plank bed, the same toilet with the seat removed, the same
white tile walls. He lay down on the bed and glanced casually
around, the back of his head resting on his right hand, trying to
see if he could find anything different, but the light was too dim.
Perhaps that was something different right there.

They had said they had him cold—that was what
they said. But they wouldn’t even tell him why he’d been arrested.
To hell with them; they were bluffing. They had spent the whole
three hours trying to trick him into betraying himself. They didn’t
have anybody cold.

“What is your real identity, Mr.
Guinness?”

“You have my passport—you can read.”

“Why did you leave the gloves behind?”

“What gloves?”

“Who paid you?”

“For what?”

“Who sent you here?”

“I’m a tourist.”

“What were you doing in that particular
building?”

“You have the ticket. Talk to the Alitalia
people—ask them what I was doing.”

He didn’t know anything, he was a tourist
buying space on the flight to Rome, he wanted to see someone from
his embassy, he didn’t know anything about any damn gloves. Over
and over and over. And now they wanted him to sit in his cell and
conjure up all the terrible things they were going to do to him if
he didn’t break down in big salty tears and confess everything. To
hell with them.