The Favor (13 page)

Guinness shut the cabinet and frowned,
feeling very much at sea. He had always hated the beginnings of a
job, the sense that he was feeling his way in the dark, and this
one was rather out of his line anyway. Nobody had given him a
contract on Amalia Brouwer—quite the contrary, he was supposed to
save her life. But he was an assassin by training, not a bodyguard.
He didn’t even know what, precisely, he was supposed to be guarding
this body against.

But, then, neither had Kätzner. It was all a
great muddle.

“Somehow,” he had said, taking off his hat
and rubbing the back of his hand over his nearly bald crown,
although the gardens of the Nymphenburg were far from warm,
“somehow she has managed to put herself in some terrible danger. It
hangs around her like an atmosphere—real, but as undefined as that.
She is nothing more than a pawn; they will sacrifice her readily
enough. It seems they plan to kill her in the name of the great
socialist revolution.”

He pursed his lips and made a contemptuous
face—the Marxist policeman apparently had little sympathy with the
imperatives of amateur conspiracy.

The bathtub took up the whole far end of the
room. There was a hand held shower fixed to the wall with a
bracket. Guinness swept aside the curtain and ran his hand along
the inside of the worn porcelain basin. It had a gritty feel, as if
it hadn’t been scoured out in several days. He tried peering into
the drain, but it was too dark, so he probed tentatively with his
index finger until he found the trap, a coarse mesh basket, like
the bell of a sherry glass, that came out without difficulty. The
bottom was matted with hair and soap scum, probably two or three
weeks’ worth.

The hair came clean enough with a little
rinsing; Guinness wrapped it in a couple of thicknesses of facial
tissue and patted it dry. There wasn’t enough light in the
bathroom, so he took his little discovery back to the kitchen where
the sunshine streamed in through a window over the sink.

It sorted out into three categories—the
girl’s, not surprisingly, longish and a medium brown, made up the
bulk. But in with it were several strands of black, wavy hair,
short enough to suggest a man. The whiskey drinker?

And then there was a third kind, which
Guinness couldn’t have given his oath was human at all. Very fine,
very short, somewhere between white and gray. You might have taken
it for cat hair, except that not many people took their cats into
the shower with them, and there was no evidence of an animal
anywhere in the apartment. So one presumed it was human, and one
hoped it was male—otherwise Amalia had an awfully butch girlfriend,
and there was no evidence of that either.

So, two men. One dark, the other. . . what?
The dark one was the more frequent visitor—either that or Whitey
didn’t much care for using the shower.

Whitey. Were the unopened bottles for him?
Was he a cognac drinker?

Short whitish hair, short whitish hair. . .
Guinness decided he could think about it later and folded up the
whole loose fluffy wad in a paper towel and slipped it into his
wallet. He wouldn’t let it gnaw at him now—no point in jumping to
conclusions.

Curly met him as he walked into the bedroom.
He was right there, staring out of a picture frame on Amalia’s
night table; you couldn’t miss him.

Guinness picked up the frame and examined the
photograph of a smiling young man whose black hair was only
partially covered by a military cap—the insignia on his shoulders
indicated a major. It was a broad face, the sort of face a lot of
women might find appealing. A strong face, if you ignored the
faintly pleading expression of the eyes. The writing in the lower
right corner had been done with a broad tipped pen—“
Pour Amalia,
avec mon amour, Jean
.” Not a very imaginative sentiment, but
one that would serve. So now he had a name—or, at least, a given
name. Jean.

The cognomen was on the flyleaf of a volume
of poetry, an anthology of the type used by schoolboys. Jean
Renal.

Had he lent the book to Amalia? Given it to
her? Tried to use it at some point in his wooing and left it
behind? Under any circumstances, it was there, on a little shelf
over the dresser, along with a two volume edition of
Madame
Bovary
, the essays of Montaigne, and
Hard Times
in
English.

Jean Renal.

So, a military officer—not French, the
uniform was wrong; Belgian?—a major. Amalia’s lover—one of them. A
name, a rank, a face. What was he in all this? Did he matter, or
was he just a bystander, a probable casualty—a victim? Did he know
he was sharing his girlfriend with another guy? What in hell was a
Jean Renal anyway?

He would get in touch with Ernie. Ernie was
good at placing people—all those computer data banks in Washington
could use the exercise.

During the next hour, Guinness went through
everything—drawers, the contents of spare handbags, the wastepaper
basket, everything. And he concluded that Amalia Brouwer probably
wasn’t a very happy young woman.

Someday he would announce it to the world,
Guinness’s first law of frilly knickers. The clothes they wear out
on the street were a promise, a declaration—a dare sometimes. And
there was no truth in advertising. If you wanted to know how a
woman really felt about herself, you took a look at her dainty
unmentionables. Amalia Brouwer was a very practical soul, all white
bras and cotton panties, and her nightdresses were about as
interesting as so many hospital gowns. She was a pretty girl; she
should have been up to her eyebrows in silk and peek a boo lace,
but she wasn’t. It was all function and utility and no nonsense
with her—you could see that in the bareness of her apartment. She
just seemed to be camping out, poor little thing.

And then there was the absence of personal
mementos.

Usually, at that age, they have boxes and
boxes of letters on pretty notepaper and photographs of school
friends and maiden aunts and long dead pet poodles. Even Louise,
his second wife, that practical girl—even into her thirties she had
kept invitations to fraternity dances and college yearbooks and
funny hats from New Year’s Eve parties. Women were like that.

But all Amalia Brouwer had to prove she
hadn’t come into existence the day before yesterday was her large
framed photograph of Jean Renal,
“Pour Amalia, avec mon amour,
Jean.”
And she couldn’t very well throw that away—a man capable
of such astonishing originality of expression would miss it if it
were gone when he came back to get his rocks off and take his
shower, and no doubt he would be sure to ask what she had done with
it.

. . . . .

“She is nothing,” Kätzner had said. “She runs
errands, she takes messages over the telephone—the sort of thing
that is hardly even illegal. She is one of those who are
sympathetic to the people’s struggle.” His short syllable of
laughter might almost have managed to be cruel if it hadn’t carried
such obvious desperation.

“You see? I doubt if the police even have a
dossier on her—she could escape free of it all; she is not yet
entangled so completely as that. But now she is in something where
they will forfeit her life as casually as you or I might relinquish
the scrap of torn rag upon which we have wiped our hands. You
cannot conceive of what these people are like.”

You could see that it haunted him, this
danger to his faceless child. You could hear his breathing as he
walked along and watch the muscles of his neck thicken. Kätzner had
been around. He had seen such things many times before this, and it
would have required no great feat of the imagination for him to
picture to himself the fate of this highly expendable little Dutch
girl who just happened to have his blood in her veins.

“
You cannot conceive. . .”
The words
of a Communist secret policeman to a professional assassin—dear
God, what could they be like?

“I know no details,” he had continued, almost
to himself. “I simply saw her name on one sheet of an operations
report, lying on a colleague’s desk in Berlin, and, believe me, it
was not possible to inquire further. That was two days ago—perhaps
I was intended to see it; I do not know. I do not even care,
really. All I care for is that she was marked down as
‘
bevollmachtigte Auslage
,’ an authorized expense. Whatever
happens, they mean for her to die. It is part of their plan.”

. . . . .

“
These people. . .”
What “people”?
Kätzner must have had some ideas about the cast of characters, but
he hadn’t elaborated. One wondered why.

One wondered about a lot of things. Kätzner
was no fool—what was he suppressing, and for what ends? What was
it, just reflex party loyalty? Or was there something else,
something that might have made Guinness tell him that he would just
have to pass, thanks, that he had a plane to Rome leaving in a
couple of hours and the boys in Washington didn’t like him
moonlighting.

Well that was Kätzner’s business. Guinness
didn’t really mind not knowing—he didn’t frighten particularly
easily and, at bottom, he didn’t want a reason to back away. It
wasn’t simply that he owed the guy—he did owe him, his life in
fact, but there was more to it than that. They understood each
other; they belonged to the same species of man, which made the
sympathy between them immediate and compelling. That was why
Kätzner had saved his neck all those years ago in Belgrade, and
that was why Guinness had come to Amsterdam.

So he would play it on Kätzner’s terms and
hope for the best. The cast of characters didn’t matter.

And it wouldn’t have done him any real good
to know what was up, even if Kätzner had known—and it was possible
he hadn’t. Things came to you; Guinness would find out soon enough.
And at this stage it didn’t make any difference; he could hardly
just walk up to Amalia Brouwer in the street and tell her to take a
long vacation somewhere, that the bad guys were after her. She
wouldn’t believe him—she believed in The Cause. She would think he
was nuts, or something worse. No, he would have to wait until he
could rub her nose in the treachery of her friends, and to do that
he would have to find out more than Kätzner could ever have told
him. It was better if he came to his own understanding of the
thing.

. . . . .

Little girls, playing Mata Hari. It was
pathetic; it made you want never to see another James Bond movie
for as long as you lived. What did they think, that it was all just
some mildly entertaining indoor sport? Guinness sat on the edge of
Amalia Brouwer’s bed, wondering what the world was coming to.

Because, of course, Amalia Brouwer had done
just about the dumbest thing it was possible to do in the spy
business—she had written something down. He hadn’t the faintest
idea what it was, just a six number sequence: 230987. A four number
combination, a passport number, possibly even an address. If it was
coded, it could be anything. 230987.

But there it was, made hideously conspicuous
by the pains that had been taken to hide it—the poor little twit
had written it out on a tiny slip of paper and taped that to the
underside of the drawer in her night table, as if the undersides of
drawers weren’t the most obvious places on God’s earth to look for
people’s little secrets. Probably it referred to something or
someone she had been instructed to use or contact only under
certain specific circumstances, or probably only once, or perhaps
never. And she had been afraid she would forget, so she had lapsed
into the habits of the ordinary world and written the thing
down.

Well, maybe Guinness could figure out what it
meant, and maybe this time Amalia Brouwer would get lucky, and her
faux pas
would go some of the distance toward saving her
life. One assumed it was possible.

230987.

He traced through the apartment in his mind,
trying to discover whether there had been anywhere he might have
given himself away. No, she wouldn’t know anything had been
disturbed, not unless she had been setting little traps—threads
across the doorsill, that business—and probably not even then.
After all, his very expensive education at MI-6’s boy scout camp up
in the Hebrides was supposed to be fairly exhaustive about such
matters, and Amalia Brouwer didn’t strike him as the cagey type
anyway. The cagey type didn’t leave numbers taped to the undersides
of drawers.

And as to touching things. . . well, that
went without saying. You never knew—if it blew up on him, and
little Amalia ended up the object of a murder investigation,
Guinness didn’t want any of his fingerprints ending up mounted on
police slides. He had been a very careful boy.

He smoothed the bedspread back into
place—even an amateur might notice the outline of a strange man’s
ass on her cotton counterpane—took a last look out the living room
window to make absolutely sure there weren’t any interested
observers down on the pavement, and let himself out through the
front door. In five minutes he was nearly a quarter of a mile
away.

. . . . .

“A man must necessarily be mad to father his
first child when he is over forty. They say that is the age when we
commit our greatest follies, when we begin to feel the hot breath
of mortality on our necks, but one would imagine that one such as
I, who was in the resistance movement as early as 1936, that I
might have come to terms with the prospect of death. So I do not
think that was it—I think it was the illusion of safety.”They had
been driving back into Munich, and the rain had started up again.
There were small pools of water on the asphalt roadway, and Kätzner
had put on his glasses because, apparently, the glare through the
windscreen was bothering him. He looked older with his glasses, as
if he might actually be in his middle sixties. He looked tired, and
sick of living.