The Favor (23 page)

It was at this point that a muffled
conversation took place, only one side of which Guinness could hear
distinctly enough to make out the words but which was of a
sufficiently acrimonious tone, especially on the lady’s part, to
suggest that the phone had rung at an awkward moment.

The exchange was terminated by the sound of
what was probably Ernie’s bedroom door being closed with excessive
force.

“Okay, pal,” he answered wearily. “What about
him?”

“What did he do? What’s he supposed to have
ripped off that the people in Brussels are in such a lather? I want
to know, Ernie.”

But Ernie hadn’t been terribly forthcoming—it
seemed that someone, either Brussels or Ernie himself, was playing
it coy.

“How long has it been since NATO sprang its
leak? Can you tell me that, at least?”

“About seven months—they’ve been certain for
seven months, so it’s been at least that long. Why, Ray? What are
you building?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hang on a second.”

What happened during the next several
seconds, whether Ernie went into the next room to soothe someone’s
ruffled feelings or simply wanted to make sure the door was closed,
Guinness would probably never know. But when Mr. Tuttle came back,
he was the Company’s man.

“I just want to remind you again,” he said,
his voice harsh and flat and only this side of menacing. “Nobody
here has any interest in Renal. He’s Brussels’ problem, not ours.
You just close the account on Flycatcher and everyone will be
thrilled to death. But don’t amuse yourself with stirring up the
mud at the bottom of any quiet pools. Leave them alone. I mean it,
Ray—leave Renal to his fate.”

Well, there it was. The cross every field
man, no matter what his allegiance or political complexion, had to
bear—“Stay out of it, it’s none of your business.” It was a hedge
against capture and defection, to tell a man the absolute minimum
he needed to know in order to carry out his assignment. You weren’t
so much of a loss that way if you happened to fall into bad
company. The Sacred Principle of Compartmentalization.

They never let you see how your piece of the
puzzle fit in with the rest, and they always assured you that what
you didn’t see wasn’t there. It was always all right, because the
Powers That Be had everything well in hand and you really didn’t
have to worry about a thing. Except that sometimes their highnesses
made a mistake—or decided that, too bad, you’d just have to be a
casualty to the grand design—and the little insignificant detail
they just couldn’t bring themselves to share with you was what got
you killed. It wasn’t as if that sort of thing had never
happened.

So, if you were smart and wanted to live to
collect your retirement benefits, you stayed curious. It wasn’t
something they encouraged, but that was just too damn bad. There
had to be a limit to team spirit.

And he didn’t like this one.
“He’s
Brussels’ problem, not ours.”
It just didn’t smell right—for
one thing, Ernie hadn’t even asked him if he knew where Renal was.
Guinness wouldn’t have told him, but what was there to lose in
asking? Washington might not have any interest (although how much
was there, really, in which Washington had no interest?), but it
was the sort of information that would be worth having for a trade.
It never hurt if someone in Brussels owed you a favor. But Ernie
hadn’t even asked.

And why was Flycatcher being so terribly,
terribly ostentatious about the flight of his little pet NATO
snitch? First he runs him through Amalia Brouwer, an amateur, a
child who still thinks it’s safe to write things down—the sort of
person who’ll attract attention like a red flag.

And then, when the lads back home finally
tumble to the fact that Major Renal isn’t exactly squeaky clean,
Flycatcher allows him to run away on his own, all the way up to
Amsterdam, to the arms of the beloved Amalia. Why not just pick him
up on a street corner in Brussels and spirit him off? Why let a
bumbler like that leave a nice untidy trail behind him? No matter
what his ultimate plans for those two, why would Flycatcher leave
so much of the execution of their retreat in the hands of a thick
witted army officer and a schoolgirl?

Pour Amalia, avec mon amour, Jean.
Holy Jesus.

Seven months. Had Ernie really said seven
months? Renal? NATO was one of the world’s most sensitive and
difficult intelligence assignments; it would take a very good man
to keep from getting caught for three months, let alone seven. And
seven months was the minimum—God knew how long they had had a leak
before that. And one was asked to believe that Jean Renal, the man
who gawked nervously over his shoulder, looking up and down the
street to see if anyone was following him, that this clown had
managed to hang on at the military nerve center of Europe for seven
months without getting caught. It simply wasn’t credible.

So Guinness felt he could be excused for
thinking that he might have stepped into something that wasn’t just
precisely what it seemed. And if they had their little secrets, so
had he—Amalia Brouwer was his little secret, his and Kätzner’s, and
she was going to stay that way, at least for the time being. God
knows what Ernie would make of her. Fishbait, probably.

. . . . .

“Forgive me for being late. She did not go to
her shop until a quarter to ten, and I thought you would wish me to
make certain she planned to stay.”

Reflexively, he looked back up at the wall
clock—it was eleven minutes after ten. Janine had gotten as close
as his elbow without his having so much as noticed her. He was
going to have to start watching himself.

She touched him on the arm, and it made him
smile.

“Why was she late? What was she up to?”

“She went to the bank. I stood at the next
window but one and she withdrew all her money, some four or five
thousand florins. She put the money in her purse and went directly
to the bookshop, so she must still have it.”

“And she didn’t spot you?”

“No, she didn’t spot me. She was far too
preoccupied to notice anyone—she seemed excited, and happy. What
does it mean, Soldier?”

He let his hand rest on her shoulder and
smiled again, but it was a painful smile.

“I imagine she thinks she’s about to set out
on her honeymoon.”

. . . . .

And then a curious thing happened. Guinness
turned around, for no particular reason, and saw that someone was
waving at him from the other side of the room. Before he knew it,
he discovered that he had raised his own hand in a tentative
greeting, and the two high school teachers from Portland were
coming toward them through the crowds.

“Well, how are you enjoying Amsterdam?” he
asked, slightly appalled by the triteness of his own question—he
simply couldn’t seem to think of anything else to say. The shorter
of the two men, the one who had done most of the talking for them
on the train, looked up at him from a frankly appraising inspection
of Janine and grinned through his tangled beard.

“Very much. It’s awfully expensive, though—we
think we’ll probably have to leave in a couple of days.”

The other one, who seemed a little
embarrassed and kept glancing down at the floor, grunted in
agreement.

“Pardon me—this is Mrs. de Witt. Beatrix,
these are two gentlemen I met on the train coming in.” He turned to
them and made an apologetic gesture and smiled. “I’m sorry, I’ve
forgotten your names.”

The short one let his eyes drift over to
Janine’s face, and the wolfish grin reasserted itself. Guinness
decided he didn’t like either one of them—the intrusion came at a
bad time, but he didn’t like them anyway. He didn’t care for the
way this guy kept looking at Janine as if she were a piece of
meat.

“Painter, Jeff Painter. And this is my
friend, Hal Dietrich. Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

Janine smiled in that bright, graceful, only
slightly artificial manner that all women seem to have as a
birthright, putting out her hand first to the one and then to the
other—it was a Continental mania, shaking hands, and it always
struck Guinness, upon whom an eight year residence in Britain had
left its indelible mark, as rather too hearty, appropriate perhaps
to spinsterish Girl Guide leaders but not to a pretty woman
greeting a couple of perfect strangers.

But Painter, who obviously wasn’t so
squeamish, grabbed hold eagerly enough. While he talked to Janine,
holding her hand perhaps a little longer than absolutely necessary,
he kept dropping into a faint Border States drawl, a half cajoling,
half intimidating cadence that some men seem to imagine absolutely
devastating and that had been entirely absent before.

Guinness’s mind was made up. He really didn’t
like the guy.

They talked for a few minutes, exchanging
observations about traveling, and Janine was solicited for her
opinion concerning what was most worth seeing in Holland over the
few days before Messrs. Painter and Dietrich were driven to Spain
by their dwindling resources. And then Guinness reminded her that
“Willem” was probably waiting for them, and they made their
escape.

“‘Willem?’“ she asked as they clattered down
the cavernous main stairway toward the street.

“Your husband, Mrs. de Witt—don’t you
remember?” He showed his teeth in something approaching a smile. “I
had to think of something to get us away from those two
cowboys.”

Outside, in the harsh morning sunshine, there
were orderly lines of schoolchildren being readied by their
teachers for the onslaught, and crowds of tourists, mostly
clustered around the several stainless steel vending carts manned
by elderly, dark faced women who might have been gypsies. Once
again, Guinness was oppressed by the feeling that he was being
watched, that somehow he had forfeited his anonymity and was under
the gaze of someone with an unhealthy interest in his every move.
That, or perhaps only the change of light, made him narrow his eyes
and frown.

“Are you angry, Soldier?” Janine took his arm
and looked around into his face with placid curiosity. “I thought
they were rather nice.”

“Who?”“Those two men—your friends from the
train.”

Yes, of course that was who she would mean.
He had almost forgotten them. His friends from the train.

“They seemed to think you were rather nice
too,” he said, smiling. “No, I’m not angry.”

Her car was parked on a side street only a
few blocks away. They walked there together, preserving the silence
between them while Guinness tried to blank out his mind, to not
listen to or look for anything so that he could see and hear
whatever dissonance it was that seemed to be trailing along behind
them. It was back there somewhere, just out of reach. Or perhaps it
was just that he was tired and beginning to imagine things. That
happened too.

Janine had been right, though.
“I do not
think someone with eyes would take you for a Dutchman. You are too
big—you spread out too much.”
It wasn’t a congenial city for
him; he felt crowded and strangely accessible. He was probably easy
to spot. Flycatcher’s people, if they were looking for him with any
concentration, had probably stumbled over him half a dozen
times—just like the late Mr. Lind of blessed memory, for all the
good it had done him.

Guinness had done his best to be hard to
follow and, if they had found him, he was reasonably sure he had
always been able to shake them off. But nobody was invisible.

So there was nothing to do but to keep
shaking them off. They weren’t dangerous unless they found out
where you nested, unless you gave them a chance to organize
something unpleasant in some nice quiet place where you wouldn’t be
looking for trouble and you wouldn’t have anywhere to hide.
Guinness didn’t imagine they would try for him in the middle of the
public sidewalk, not unless they had the traditional black sedan
with four or five guys with shotguns all primed and ready. No
simple garden variety thug, unless he was an idiot and as a
consequence reasonably harmless anyway, was going to try gunning
him down just on inspiration, just on the spur of the moment. In a
way, his reputation protected him from that; he was considered
simply too formidable. There was something to be said for casting a
long shadow.

But there might be something in getting
Janine away from him, at least for a little while, until things
were a little more under control. It might be true that he
personally was possessed of nine lives, but that hadn’t always
helped the people who stood too close to him. Enough of them had
died to keep him from thinking that he was necessarily the best
thing that could happen to someone.

When they reached the car, Guinness took the
keys out of Janine’s hand.

“There’s a man in the consulate in
Düsseldorf, Teddy MacKaye; he’s one of ours. I want you to go back
to your apartment—on foot, because I’ll be taking the car—and pack
a bag. Not much, not enough to get in the way. When I come back
I’ll have Amalia Brouwer with me, and I’ll want you to get her the
hell out of here. When you find MacKaye, tell him that the two of
you are to be tucked up somewhere safe until I come in person to
fetch you—if I don’t come within a week, then Miss Brouwer should
be shipped to the States, and you can come back to Amsterdam. I
don’t suppose anyone will bother you, but just to be on the safe
side I’d stay out of the cloak and dagger business for a nice long
time—forever, if you’ve got any sense.”

She took his hand, the one that was holding
the keys, and squeezed it, and peered up at him out of her enormous
eyes, to which a worried look had returned for the first time since
he had announced himself in her little rented room up an alley in
the red light district. Since there wasn’t anything else he could
do, he smiled, as if it were all a big joke.