The Favor (8 page)

Outside, the black landscape slipped past
them. You couldn’t see anything, nothing except a sense of movement
in the darkness. Once, he thought, he saw a glimmer, a kind of
murky sparkle. A river, maybe. Or maybe just a little cow pond
magnified into something larger by its own vagueness.

After Mainz, they would be traveling along
the Rhine, which they wouldn’t be able to see either. Maybe that
was to be part of his punishment—the runaway husband doesn’t get to
see the Rhine.

Had Bateman? Perhaps it hadn’t been on his
itinerary; perhaps he’d only been interested in brown dumplings and
the ladies. Had Kätzner?

Of course, his flight from the nest had been
back in the early sixties, and there had been plenty of time since
if he had been so inclined. And perhaps you got a break if you
could plead extenuating circumstances.

“It was a question of freedom versus
extinction, you see,” he had explained, smiling the way one does
when called upon to apologize for some breach of etiquette. “I was
sufficiently compromised that the Dutch police were within a few
hours of arresting me—it was the accumulation of all the tiny
mistakes one commits over so many years—and so it was necessary for
me to disappear. On my side of the wall, one’s masters tend to
assume the worst if you have allowed yourself to fall into enemy
hands. I didn’t even pack a bag. I simply hired a car and drove
over the border into Germany. Within twelve hours I was back in
uniform, making my report in East Berlin. So, you see, the question
of desertion hardly comes up—I could scarcely have taken them with
me.”

He was right, of course. He could scarcely
have done that.

Guinness was a specialist, a technician. He
killed people; he didn’t break into security installations and
rifle the safe—intelligence gathering was out of his line. So he
had never had to think in terms of maintaining a cover for years at
a time, while of necessity the face grows to fit the mask. It
struck him as an unnatural proceeding, and apparently he wasn’t
alone. Apparently it had struck Kätzner the same way.

“You have no concept of the strain,” he had
said, the memory of it pulling at the corners of his mouth as they
walked back toward the car. “I was in Amsterdam for six years—one
either comes to believe in the role or, eventually, one begins to
crack around the edges.”

He looked up at Guinness and smiled, as if to
recognize that the joke was entirely on himself.

“And, I suppose, I began to feel very Dutch.
I suppose I thought I would stay on there forever, and so it seemed
safe enough to marry. It was madness, of course—I told myself it
would enhance the cover, if you can imagine. But Margot was a sweet
woman, and we all tell ourselves lies. So I did it. I married, and
pretty soon we had the child. Somehow I never really supposed I
would have to go, never have to leave them, but, as you see, it
became necessary.”

And Guinness had understood perfectly. He had
made the same mistake himself, twice. You imagined you could live
like everyone else, that the Little Woman would never find out and
you could have it both ways. But the first Mrs. Guinness had left
him, precisely because she had found out, and the second had ended
up dead on his kitchen floor because she hadn’t. And Guinness too
had a daughter who was growing up somewhere without a father, whom
he had only seen a single time since infancy. Kathleen had been
right to pack her traps and disappear, because there was too much
blood on his hands and because, if she hadn’t, it would have been
her name on the little steel plate in the mausoleum at Colma. So
Guinness understood, both the desire for something like normal
happiness and the magnitude of its folly.

The dining car was nearly empty, and the
waiter, who was sitting at a table near the galley smoking a
cigarette and sharing a pot of coffee with the cook, appeared less
than pleased when Guinness came in and looked like he expected to
be fed.

He was directed to a table very near the end
of the car, as if they wanted him as far away from them as they
could manage, and the waiter brought him a menu and then told him
they were out of nearly everything.

“Then, whatever you do have—I leave it to
you.”For some reason, that seemed to have shifted the balance in
his favor. The waiter smiled, apparently having forgiven him for
prolonging his workday, and they talked for several minutes about
all the wonderful things that could be done with what was left
around in the pantry. It didn’t look like anyone was going to
starve.

Would he care for a bottle of wine? Sure, why
not? It would be six hours or so before they reached Amsterdam, and
he would need his wits about him then, but six hours was six hours.
He could go back to his compartment and sleep—he would do that
anyway—so it didn’t make any difference.

The waiter retired to his galley, walking
with that peculiar splay footed gait that reminded you so
forcefully of a duck but that was, on a moving train, the absolute
precondition of maintaining one’s balance.

The tablecloth was white and heavily
starched, and, on its own little plate, with a pat of butter, was a
hard roll of the kind you simply couldn’t seem to find in the
States. There was even a little yellow flower in a weighted holder
in the center of the table—the Europeans knew how to do these
things right.

The first course was a cream of asparagus
soup, served with about half a dozen croutons bobbing around in it,
obviously there just for the aesthetic effect. The waiter brought
it and then retired to the other end of the car, where he could
watch Guinness’s progress with the discriminating eye of a
connoisseur. He didn’t try to hurry him; there was all the time in
the world. He seemed to take a vicarious satisfaction in the whole
process, and maybe he did.

And the main course—well, what more could you
have asked for? A veal steak in clarified butter and lemon sauce, a
little rice, a little creamed spinach, and a grilled tomato topped
with toasted breadcrumbs. There was even a salad, with an oil and
vinegar dressing and sprinkled over with finely chopped egg, the
sort of thing that made you think you wouldn’t mind if you never
saw another head of iceberg lettuce again.

Guinness cracked open his roll and made his
slow, gratified way through it all, helped along by a bottle of
delicious topaz colored wine.

The train stopped in Frankfurt for about six
minutes, and Guinness noticed that the Swiss couple got off. They
went past his window before they were met at the end of the
platform by a stout, fortyish, unhappy looking woman whom their
manner betrayed as the prodigal daughter. She was wearing a heavy
raincoat, and her drab, dark yellow hair hung in thin little
strands down to the collar. The reunion didn’t seem very cordial,
and parents and child disappeared beyond Guinness’s field of
vision. In a few moments, the platform was all but empty again.

When they were once more underway, the waiter
brought out a cup and a silver teapot clutched awkwardly in one
hand and a bowl of vanilla ice cream, with two peach halves sliding
slowly away from each other toward the sides, under a covering of
raspberry syrup, in the other.

“Peach Melba,” he announced, grinning like a
gargoyle. Guinness had nearly finished it, and was sipping on a
second cup of very strong tea, when a man who looked to be in his
very early thirties, wearing a short camel hair coat that was
belted around the waist and a brown hat with a brush sticking out
of the band, came in and sat down three tables in front of him,
with his back turned. The waiter approached to inform him that
dinner was no longer being served, but he shook his head and asked
for a cup of coffee—“
Etwas Kaffee, bitte
”—and the waiter
shrugged and brought it to him. He barely touched it. Guinness
called for his bill, paid it, counted out the tip, and got up to
leave. The other man was very scrupulous about not turning around,
but even through the back of his heavy coat he seemed tense, as if
he would jump if someone happened to touch him on the shoulder.

Etwas Kaffee, bitte.
The clothes were
German, but the accent wasn’t. Guinness wondered whom he could have
been working for, and why these guys never learned to relax and act
like the rest of the human race. He had just boarded—hell, he
hadn’t even thought to take off his hat yet—and who got on a train
and immediately went to the dining car for coffee? Probably he
could have ordered it in the station and paid a third of the price.
They never seemed to learn.

What to do. What to do, what to do. What did
the stupid son of a bitch want? Well, the only way to find out was
to ask him.

Of course, trains had certain obvious
disadvantages in that respect; they tended to be a little public,
and there weren’t very many corners you could jump out from behind.
Trains—let’s face it—were distressingly straightforward. One would
simply have to make the best of it.

What did the guy want? Guinness checked his
watch—it was a few minutes after ten. The next stop was Mainz, but
not for at least another half hour, so the chances that our friend
in the brown hat would simply pull a gun and start shooting were at
least diminished. You didn’t want to have him surprising you
between cars, where he could chuck your corpse out into the pitch
black at forty miles an hour and nobody would be the wiser, and for
the same reasons it might be just as well to stay away from easy
access to windows; but otherwise, if you could keep the game in
your own court, you were reasonably safe from murderous attack.
People didn’t do that sort of thing, not on a moving train, not if
they weren’t complete morons.

The problem was getting away afterward. It
was only in the movies that you made a leap for freedom and went
rolling dramatically through the underbrush as the Orient Express
steamed off into the distance, and you sure as hell didn’t do it in
the middle of the fucking night; you might as well just take a head
first run at a brick wall.

No, if you wanted to kill somebody, you
waited until two or three minutes before the next station, when
everybody was busy with their luggage, and then you slipped away
before anybody spotted your victim slumped to the floor. Otherwise,
you might find yourself walking right into the arms of the law.
After all, trains were equipped with radios. They could always call
ahead.So, assuming the worst case, that Brown Hat was a thug and
that whoever gave him his orders meant business, we were reasonably
safe for a while. There were limits, but the risks were manageable.
But we also had to do something about him pretty quick, because the
free pass wasn’t going to last forever. Twenty minutes, no more.
Brown Hat had to be in the bag in twenty minutes.

Another thing Guinness had always admired
about the dining facilities on European trains was the wonderful
cutlery. They didn’t expect you to go after a piece of meat with a
butter spreader; you got a real knife, with a scalloped edge, and a
point that would go through something tougher than a potato skin.
Guinness had palmed it, slipping it up inside his shirtsleeve,
under his watchband to keep it from falling out, and he had left an
extra twenty marks with the tip so the waiter wouldn’t think to
come after him when he noticed it was missing—never in his life had
Guinness had any trouble with an overtipped waiter.

Well, it wasn’t an act of thievery that would
rest very heavily on his conscience. He needed the damn thing a lot
worse than The Trans European Express did. It wasn’t considered
good form to carry a weapon when you were traveling—customs
officers were touchy about that sort of thing these days, and you
never knew who was likely to end up going through your pockets; it
just wasn’t worth the risk. But he didn’t particularly feel like
stepping into this particular dance contest without so much as a
darning needle. This guy could be anybody—somebody’s harmless
little gumshoe, Jack the Ripper, anybody—but taking chances wasn’t
the way to grow hoary with age in this business.

The doors between carriages were pneumatic.
You pressed a little plate near the latch and it would slide open
of its own accord, with a very audible thud. So Guinness had no
trouble keeping track of the gentleman’s progress; he tried to
maintain a car’s length between them, and all he had to do was to
listen for the sound of the door. Brown Hat was making slow work of
it, but of course that was to be expected. He had to check all the
compartments along the way to make sure Guinness didn’t manage to
double back behind him.Almost the whole train was dark. Here and
there a few souls still had their reading lamps on, but for the
most part everyone was trying to get a little sleep, or at least to
rest their eyes—most of them, probably, were going at least as far
as Bonn, which was a good two hours away, so there wasn’t anything
to keep alert for. That was fine. Provided nobody had to go to the
can suddenly, he and Brown Hat would pretty much have the place to
themselves.

He went by his own compartment and found that
the Swiss couple had been replaced by a pair of middle aged men in
hiking clothes—jeans, flannel shirts, high laced lumberjack boots,
the works. They seemed to be in very earnest conversation, their
heads almost touching, like a pair of newlyweds. Guinness didn’t
disturb them. He never even slowed down.

It was a long train; Guinness and his little
friend could play hide and seek almost indefinitely. But these
matters required the nicest sense of timing. The trick, of course,
was to string your man along just far enough to allow him to get
careless, to begin to feel a certain impatience, or a nagging
suspicion that perhaps he’d lost you somewhere, but not far enough
that he begins entertaining any inconvenient suspicions that
perhaps up ahead something is being prepared against his arrival.
You have to have some sense of whom you’re dealing with—if Brown
Hat had looked like an old hand, Guinness would have jumped him
after the second car; but that kind of paranoia only comes with
experience, and this one didn’t strike him as a terribly
accomplished heavy. No, better to let him wait a while.