The Favor (14 page)

“Did you know that I attended the university
here?” he asked, turning to Guinness and smiling. “I came up from
Sigmaringen when I was eighteen—my mother wanted me to be a priest,
but my father was a lawyer, so. . . At any rate, I stayed only a
year. Hitler and
Das Kapital
saw to that—I was young and
believed I was witnessing the twilight of the world.”

Had he expected some kind of response?
Guinness merely stared out at the road, hoping Kätzner would shut
up. He didn’t want to be bothered with this man’s disillusionment;
he didn’t want to hear any sad, sad stories about how life was a
snickering harlot. You catch any field man in just the right mood
and it’s always the same thing—the world was a bad dog, sure to
bite you if you tried to scratch it behind the ear. Everybody had
his favorite metaphor for lost innocence and the corrupting power
of service to wickedness.

But he understood. He liked Kätzner, even
admired him—God knew, Kätzner was a better specimen than himself.
It was just that each man’s portion of misery was sufficient for
his own needs; it did you no good to pity anyone.

Still, he did understand. Kätzner had been
studying jurisprudence and Karl Marx when the Spanish Civil War
seemed to demand that he choose sides, and 1936 had found him on a
train to Barcelona, to join the Communist militia there and lay
down his life, if necessary, in the struggle against the forces of
reaction. The acolyte had found his new god, and he rushed to his
baptism, his confirmation in the mysteries of hopelessness.

And that was how it had begun. After the fall
of Madrid, he and a few other die hards made their way over the
border into France, and from there Kätzner was routed to the Soviet
Union for training as an agent for the by then inevitable war
against his homeland. By 1941 he was a captain in the Russian army
and their man in the East Prussian city of Königsburg, In 1942 he
was in Dresden, in 1943 in Waldenburg and Gleiwitz, and from 1944
through the Russian conquest in Berlin itself. Apparently it had
been a pretty gaudy career.

“I was even arrested by the Gestapo once,” he
said, the way someone else might mention their reception by the
Queen. “That was just after the retreat from Stalingrad—excuse me,
Volgodrad—and they were excessively nervous. But I escaped. And
then, in forty-five, the Russians nearly shot me before I could
convince them to confirm my identity with the NKVD offices in
Moscow. I never in all those years felt like a traitor, not until I
found myself in that detention camp outside of Potsdam—we had won,
we had defeated Hitler, and I felt like a criminal and longed for
death. It is odd, isn’t it.”

Maybe so. Maybe that was the disadvantage of
having a moral sense, without which Kätzner would probably have
stayed in Munich to finish up his degree and settle for a wife,
five children, and a fat law practice in this imperfect world.
Maybe he saw the folly now of running off to fight in
Cataluña—maybe he had seen it then and hadn’t cared. Apparently he
cared now.

And Guinness—who had begun with no sense of
anything except his own purposes, who had taken a British contract
on a man he had never even seen from no higher motive than a
certain sum of ready money, and thus had set the pattern of his
whole adult life, Guinness understood perfectly well. You begin at
opposite ends and meet at the hollow center. All illusions are
betrayed—belief in causes, belief in righteousness, belief in self.
Nothing is left except the work and, since every man has to have
something, the work itself, the integrity of that, becomes its own
search for the Grail.

So you don’t imagine you can win; you merely
hope to discover the terms on which you could be prepared to
lose.

And thus he knew what Kätzner had meant when
he had said of his daughter,
“She is nothing.”
Let her stay
with her illusions, he was pleading—at least, so many of them as
might not kill her. There was no knowledge of good and evil, only
of evil. Let her marry some harmless man and have babies and die in
bed, never dreaming of dark truths.

Guinness stood leaning against the embankment
that ran along the great Amstel Canal, just below the bridge of the
Sarphatistraat. The wad of paper towel containing the hair from
Amalia Brouwer’s bathtub drain was clutched in his fist—he didn’t
look at it now; there wasn’t any need. The short threads of pale
gray, he knew whose they were now. Suspicion had hardened into
certainty. And he knew that Kätzner had known and why he had kept
it to himself. He had wanted Guinness to see the girl first, and
then to discover her danger. He had wanted Guinness to make good on
his promise—the girl had to come first.

And he would—he would try to keep her well
out of it. But the man with the bone white hair was known for the
brutality of his methods. It wasn’t going to be easy.

Oh God—oh God, oh God. He closed his eyes and
tried not to see Kätzner’s child. Not that way, not with her throat
cut or the side of her head a ragged crater. How many times had he
thought of his own daughter, his own baby, his Rocky, whom probably
he would never see again—how many times had she come to him in his
dreams, just that way. It hadn’t happened, but it might have, and
it couldn’t happen now. He just couldn’t let it happen.

In a sudden and, for him, inexplicable moment
of fury, he crushed the little package of loose hair in his fist
and threw it at the water sweeping past his feet. As if to mock
him, his angry missile floated down to disappear under the bridge,
as gently as a snowflake.

8

“A telephone number,” she said—so much for
that mystery. Janine looked up from the slip of notepad paper upon
which Guinness had written out the six digit sequence he had found
on the underside of the drawer in Amalia Brouwer’s night table.

“Without the prefix. I would think it must be
here in Amsterdam.”

“Can you find out the address?”

“Yes—but not today. Tomorrow. Is that all
right?”

“That’s fine.”

They were sitting in the kitchen of her
apartment—hers, not Aimé’s, although there was little enough to
choose between them. They were drinking tea at a square table not
much bigger than a chessboard, and the tea came in clumsy
earthenware mugs that you could warm your hands around. In the
artificial light Janine’s eyes had taken on the color of emeralds,
as if they had been illuminated from behind. They made her look
even paler, and more vulnerable.

Guinness shifted uncomfortably in his chair,
wishing he had caught his plane to Rome and the brutal logic of his
existence had been left alone. He didn’t want to take
responsibility for anyone.

“This is private, you know,” he said slowly,
staring down at the table, giving the impression he might have
wanted to bore a hole through it with his gaze. “I think there’s a
connection with the man they want me to nail here, but he’s not my
object. It doesn’t have to do with Ernie Tuttle; it’s not any
interest of his, so maybe you’d better just back out of it. Get the
phone number for me in the morning, and then just pretend you’ve
never heard of me. Nobody’s going to pin any medals on you for this
one.”

“But you do think it touches Flycatcher,
yes?”

Except for a slight tightening around one
side of his mouth, he didn’t register any surprise. But certainly
he was surprised, and he didn’t like it. He hated these little
unexpected turns—they almost always meant trouble.

So he forced himself to smile, the way you
might smile at a precocious child.

“Who’s been telling you about that?”

“Everybody—nobody.” She held her hands apart,
shooting her eyebrows into the little fringe of bang that came
about halfway down her forehead. “He has been seen here, and now
you are here. One draws a conclusion—there are not many who have
not heard of your quarrel, that you have made it your object to
kill him. You will kill him, yes?”

“Yes—if I get the chance.”

“Then it is not private.” And then she
smiled—it was a nicer smile than his. “Flycatcher is on the list,
yes? Then it is not private.”

How could he explain it? To go for Flycatcher
was chancy enough, but to try working around him to the girl was
increasing the risk geometrically. At least when you wanted to kill
somebody, you knew where you were. But this—it was going to be like
sticking your hand into an anthill. But you could never make that
clear to anyone. They just didn’t believe you.

“Do you know anything about him?”

“What everyone knows—that he is a bad
man.”

“So am I.”

She shook her head, as if he were talking the
most arrant nonsense, and covered one of his hands with both of
hers.

“Not like him. Some men are like terrible
diseases; they murder with no logic. They say he is like that—like
a small child who wants to leave a mess.”

“See to it you don’t end up a part of the
mess,” he said, getting up from the table. It was after eight
o’clock, and this conversation wasn’t getting him anywhere. He
decided he was hungry.

“How do you like the shoes?”

He turned around suddenly to face her and
pulled up his trouser legs three or four inches to display a pair
of high topped brown walking shoes, like cut down infantry
boots.

Janine put her hands up to her mouth and
began to laugh.

“Oh, yes,” she was able to sputter out. “Yes,
very elegant.” And then she started to laugh again—she couldn’t
help it, apparently. And it was a pretty laugh. Oddly girlish, if
that word meant anything.

“Well, hell. I was planning to take you out
to dinner, but if you feel that way. . .”

“No.” She waved a hand at him, the fingers a
little spread apart, and then had to put it back over her mouth to
smother another hilarious collapse. “No, they are very good. The
disguise is perfect—you could be a big farm boy, in the town for a
holiday. I see a hundred pairs just like them every day.”

And then, of course, both of them were
perfectly silent again, because they had both understood what she
had meant. She was without embarrassment and didn’t even look away,
and Guinness, realizing that it was his problem, tried to think of
something to say to indicate that he didn’t care about all those
other pairs of shoes—he didn’t care, really, and he didn’t want to
seem to be passing judgment.

“Good. Then the big farm boy wants to know
where we should have something to eat—our young lady doesn’t show
any signs of having plans for the evening and, anyway, I don’t want
to have her tumble to anything just yet. We can give it a rest
until tomorrow.”

He smiled, trying to look persuasively eager,
and it seemed to work.

“I will just change then, yes?”

. . . . .

The door to Janine’s bedroom had been left
ajar. Living alone, perhaps she had gotten out of the habit of
closing it, or perhaps she simply didn’t care. It was by far the
largest room in the apartment and was even equipped with a pair of
sliding glass doors to a small veranda—she had the top floor, so it
afforded a good view over several smaller buildings to the trees
and serpentine waterways of the Vondelpark—but apparently it still
wasn’t large enough for comfort. In any case, the door was standing
open.

Guinness sat at the tiny square table at
which, one assumed, Janine ate most of her meals in solitude—there
was nothing about the place to suggest she entertained many
visitors—nursing his second cup of tea and wondering if he
shouldn’t move over to one of the uncomfortable looking beanbag
chairs by the opposite wall, where he wouldn’t enjoy quite so
unobstructed a view inside.

Most of the bedroom, of course, was out of
his direct line of vision, but right across from the entranceway
was one of those peculiarly European oddities, a huge, ornately
carved armoire, infinitely more suggestive of a bank vault than of
anything in which to hang one’s clothes, and the door to that too,
into which was set a large mirror, had been left slightly ajar.

Janine had come out of her bathroom and was
sitting on the edge of her bed, smoothing on a pair of nylons. She
had her back to him—or, more accurately, to the mirror—and she
looked perfectly delicious in her underwear, which wasn’t the least
little bit nunlike or self effacing. Guinness’s second law: a woman
who goes in for pink garter belts can’t be all bad. He felt a
slight tightening in his chest and realized that it had been a very
long time since he had sat watching any such performance.

Was that what it was? Women weren’t stupid,
most of them—the view was there to be enjoyed. So fine, she wanted
to remind him that neither of them had their insides stuffed with
rose petals. He was reminded.

And then she glanced over her bare shoulder
at him, and her expression suggested nothing at all. She knew he
was watching her; she seemed to take that for granted. There was
nothing in her eyes—not surprise, not amusement, nothing.

And Guinness discovered that, quite
unaccountably, he was deeply stirred.

“There—that was not long, was it?” She stood
in front of him in a green silk dress that, without being vulgar
about it, managed to suggest quite forcefully the outlines of her
body, holding a small, shiny white leather handbag. There was just
the faintest trace of pale pink on her lips, making her smile look
wet and enticing—no doubt about it, the lady was coming on to him.
It was nice to deal with people who knew their own minds.

“Not long at all.”

. . . . .

They settled on an Indonesian restaurant, not
a hundred yards from Amalia Brouwer’s bookstore. The drill was that
you ate about five dozen different courses, all served on tiny
earthenware dishes about the size of ashtrays—just a taste of
saffron stained vegetables and little piles of shredded meat and
strange onionlike things that reminded you somehow of grapes, all
managed with the fingers so that pretty quickly, if you weren’t
careful, your place setting started to look like Miss Havisham’s
wedding feast.