The Favor (24 page)

“Tell them to squeeze her good when they get
her to Washington; she probably knows a lot she’s not even aware
of. After, if they feel like it, they can keep a check on her for a
while, but I don’t think she’ll ever present a menace to anybody’s
national security ever again, not after she’s found out what a
sucker Flycatcher has made of her. And then they can damn well give
her a new identity and let her bury herself somewhere—she can marry
a toaster salesman and sit in a semidetached house in Teaneck,
reading Lenin.”

“Where will you be if you don’t come?” she
asked, her voice calm, not from indifference but from the fatalism
that already knows the answer to such questions.

“Silly girl—I’ll be dead. What did you
think?”

13

Amalia Brouwer had drawn all her money out of
the bank, and Jean Renal, so far as anybody knew, was waiting for
her back at her apartment. It was just as clear as day what they
had in mind, the poor foolish babies—they were getting ready to
shoot the moon, to seek refuge in foreign parts, doubtless under
the kind protection of friend Flycatcher.

Of course, at some point in the proceedings
their expectations would begin to diverge. What did the major look
forward to? Life with Amalia in a rose covered cottage somewhere
within easy commuting distance of the Kremlin? The silly fool—but,
naturally, he didn’t know that he wasn’t the only one clogging up
the drain in his lady love’s bathtub.

And the fair Miss Brouwer, what was on her
agenda? Tying the knot with the handsome, silver haired stranger?
An exciting life as a socialist Mata Hari, tempting the Enemies of
Progress to their dooms? Some such piffle, surely.

“
Why do you care so much about her?”
Janine had asked.
“What is she to you that you risk your life
for her?”

It wasn’t the implied rebuke, or even
jealousy—Janine wasn’t staking any claims, God knows—just a simple
question. So he had kissed the inside of her hand and smiled.

“Not a thing, sweetheart. Not a thing. I’m
doing it as a favor for a friend—just to oblige a friend.”

And, as it turned out, it was almost that
simple. Guinness discovered that, as a matter of fact, he really
didn’t much like Amalia Brouwer. Possibly, if you could separate
out the claims of parental love, neither did her own father. Maybe
she would improve with age, once she’d had her eyes opened, but at
the moment she struck Guinness as a puritanical, doctrinaire little
pain in the ass.

But there were compensations. There was
Janine, for instance, who had turned out to be quite another matter
altogether.

“When this is finished up,” he had said to
her, still holding her hand between both of his own while they
stood together in the middle of the sidewalk, “what do you say to
the two of us going over to London for a couple of weeks? We could
have a good roll in the hay—put on ten pounds apiece, get twelve
hours of sleep every night, find out how the rest of the world
lives when it’s at home. It could be like one long Sunday
afternoon.”

He hadn’t meant to ask her, not until they
were both well clear of this mess, but what the hell. In a few
hours Janine would be on her way out of the country—she was almost
clear—and now seemed as good a time as any.

But perhaps he had made a mistake. Perhaps he
had misread the whole thing between them, because there was
something like an accusation in her eyes as she withdrew her
hand.

“What did you think—that you could carry the
little whore off with you, like a part of the luggage?”

“No. I thought perhaps it could be after
working hours for both of us. We could make a pact—you wouldn’t
have to turn any tricks and I wouldn’t have to kill anybody. We
could try being human, at least for a little while.”

They stood facing each other for a moment,
like weary enemies, and Guinness had almost made up his mind to the
idea that it had all been a ghastly miscalculation when, quite
suddenly, she threw her arms around him, pressing her cheek against
his ribcage. And then, just as suddenly, she released him and
hurried away. He didn’t try to stop her, hoping that was the right
thing and that now, finally, they might have come to an
understanding. He watched her until she turned the comer and was
out of sight.

There was no future in it, none at all. And
it didn’t have anything to do with Janine, who was no fool and knew
the sort of man he was and the sort of work he did and who wouldn’t
expect—probably wouldn’t want—anything more than a couple of weeks
of pretending that things like futures didn’t matter.
“We
laughed when we met, and we laughed when we parted”
was the way
they would play it. Things didn’t really work like that, but you
had to have something. Nobody could be asked to live out his life
as if he were alone on the planet, so you settled for the short
term loan at high interest and you took your lumps. You left the
future to take care of itself.

And you tried to buy a future for Amalia
Brouwer, because the one she had in mind wasn’t going to lead
anywhere except to the butcher’s block.

The detail that kept sticking in Guinness’s
mind was the seven months. You had a Belgian major who seemed to
have nothing but meat between his ears and who was run by a teenie
bopper, and you were asked to believe that this winning combination
could keep itself out of the slammer for seven months? It just
wasn’t in the cards.

The whole thing—Renal rushing to his lady’s
arms, the big escape, everything—was just too damn theatrical to be
real. You wondered why Flycatcher didn’t put out a big flashing
neon sign and charge admission. You wondered what the son of a
bitch was staging, and for whose entertainment.

“
Don’t amuse yourself with stirring up the
mud at the bottom of any quiet pools. Leave it alone.”
So goeth
the gospel according to Ernie. Turn a blind eye, Raymond—we
wouldn’t want you to disturb anyone’s illusions; anything but
that.

It sounded like a goddamned love match. It
made you wonder just exactly who was conning whom.

It was one of the abiding prejudices of
Guinness’s professional life that the people who gave him his
orders were simply not to be trusted. He was not an Emil Kätzner—he
hadn’t joined up out of enthusiasm for any causes. In those days,
his only cause had been himself. It still was.

To be sure, one developed a sense of fidelity
to the work itself. If it became absolutely unavoidable, if there
wasn’t a way in the world he could get out of it, he might allow
himself to be killed rather than blow a job. Even a mercenary had
to find his integrity somewhere.

But that, basically, was what he was. He had
worked for the British because they had paid the bills and, after a
while, because they hadn’t given him a choice; and now he worked
for the Americans for much the same reasons. You didn’t get to
retire—he had tried, and it simply hadn’t worked out. They kept
their hooks in you; they expected you to die in their service and
were prepared, if necessary, to see that things worked out that
way.

And there was that in his own nature that
bound the cobbler to his last. Guinness needed this life, he needed
it to remind him that he wasn’t simply a piece of the dead earth.
Evil, be thou my good.

But one of the necessary conditions of the
work, he had found, was that he trust no one, so Guinness didn’t
take it as an absolute article of faith that Major Renal wasn’t a
matter with which he had to concern himself. That conclusion was
being drawn just a shade too emphatically for his taste—he didn’t
like the idea that people were playing games behind his back.

And, of course, there was the awkward fact
that he still hadn’t hit upon any instrument whereby to convince
Amalia Brouwer that she would be well advised to accept his kind
offer and let him get her the hell out of Amsterdam before
Flycatcher used her for landfill. She was in up to her righteous
little socialist eyebrows, it seemed, and would probably take some
persuading beyond simply his solemn assurances. He would need
something in the way of evidence. Something she would believe.

In all fairness, Guinness did suppose it
would have been a bit much to ask her to take him at his
unsupported word. After all, he wasn’t even clear in his own mind
yet what was happening. If it was Flycatcher’s show it was going to
be nasty—after all, a rattlesnake bite wasn’t ever the kiss of
peace—but he and Amalia Brouwer evidently didn’t understand that
gentleman in the same terms.

No, he didn’t know precisely what was up. But
Renal might. At least, he might be in possession of those few stray
pieces necessary to make the thing fit together, even if he himself
didn’t know what they meant. Renal could very easily turn out to be
a goldmine.

And there was only one way to find out, and
that was to ask him.

So, much as it would grieve his conscience,
Guinness decided that he was just going to have to ignore the
wishes of his superiors and stir up a few quiet pools. Renal, he
had decided, was very much his business.

Janine’s Opel was a jerky little thing—the
clutch popped you into gear about a half inch off the floor—but it
had a full tank of gas and, according to the odometer, had managed
somehow to go 34,567 kilometers without breaking down entirely. So
maybe it could be trusted to get him around the city of
Amsterdam—and Janine and Amalia Brouwer to Düsseldorf—before
anything dire happened. It seemed at least even money.

He hadn’t gone very many blocks before it
occurred to him that he no longer had any sense of being followed.
They just weren’t there anymore.

Well, maybe they had never been there at all.
Maybe he had just been suffering from an overheated imagination and
the world was filled with anonymous strangers, or maybe whoever had
been lurking in the shadows hadn’t been able to hot wire some poor
innocent tourist’s parked car fast enough to follow him. Anyway, he
seemed to have the place all to himself now.

Still, there wasn’t any point in taking
chances. He tried a couple of long boulevard stretches, changing
lanes every so often and letting his signal lights flash to see if
anybody reacted. Then there were a couple of abrupt right hand
turns—out of the inside lane, right across the line of traffic—but
nobody seemed to be making any Herculean efforts to keep up. He got
a couple of dirty looks, but that was all.

Finally, Guinness pulled into a parking space
along a nice, busy stretch of the Amstelveense and just waited. He
studied the rearview mirror and, after a moment, got out of the car
and took a quick walk around the block. When he got back he felt a
lot better; he was as clean as a newborn baby’s conscience and
could go on his merry way without more than the customary
misgivings.

So now, he thought, he would just pay Major
Renal a little unexpected visit and see if perhaps he couldn’t
catch him in a communicative mood.

It was close to eleven o’clock by the time
Guinness drove past Amalia Brouwer’s apartment. Everything looked
perfectly orderly and suburban, although one would hardly have
expected the bad guys to be doing sentry duty behind sandbag
barricades, so he coasted on for another two blocks and then pulled
into a side street.

He set the handbrake and dropped the car keys
into his jacket pocket, wondering if he wasn’t making a mistake to
bother with Renal, if perhaps he shouldn’t go right to the
bookstore and simply drag Kätzner’s daughter out in a gunny sack.
It wouldn’t be a very difficult operation to fill her full of
sleepy juice and stuff her in the glove compartment until he could
wheel her to Düsseldorf himself and put her in the custody of some
nice men who would babysit with her and teach her how to cut out
paper dolls until it was safe to allow her to return to
Amsterdam.

Except, when would that be? Unless Flycatcher
was dead—and that was about as uncertain a prospect as Guinness
could imagine—it would never be safe. He would always assume that
Amalia had crossed him, and he had a long memory for things like
that; all they would have succeeded in doing was in putting off her
execution for maybe a few months. It wasn’t enough. Kätzner had
wanted his little curly haired girl definitely and permanently out.
He had wanted her out of harm’s way and cured for life, so that she
would realize once and for all that messing about with terrorists
and spies could be hazardous to one’s health, that the toaster
salesman and the semidetached house in New Jersey really were a
better idea than trying to reform the world out of the muzzle of a
gun.

So it would have to be Renal. Renal, or
something else—and right at the moment Renal was about the only
game in town.

The morning sunlight came through the
windshield as a bright smear; as soon as he opened the car door,
Guinness could hear birds chirping from the branches of the compact
little trees that stood every several dozen yards along the curb—it
threatened to be a very pleasant day.

Across the street a mob of small children
were gathered on a tiny patch of lawn to play some incomprehensible
game that seemed to involve a lot of screeching. That was fine; it
constituted a perfectly suitable cover noise, since there was
nothing that attracted so much attention as the sound of a man’s
shoes on a concrete sidewalk if he happened to be the only human
being in sight.

There was a problem about apartment
buildings—they were generally provided with back doors. The rear
staircase at Miss Brouwer’s was accessible through a door in her
tiny kitchen, if memory served, and it wouldn’t take anyone more
than a second or two to slip out into the alley and be gone forever
if he were to imagine himself under siege.

And, complicating matters even further, the
lady had been inconsiderate enough to install a chain on her front
door. If Renal was inside, and feeling anything like as spooky as
he looked, he would have it up. So there wasn’t any point in trying
to pick the lock; the quicker, better, more efficient way was just
to kick the whole god damned thing right off its hinges.