The Favor (39 page)

He had long ago learned to live with the fact
that he wasn’t a very nice person—he didn’t ask anyone to approve
of him; he hardly even approved of himself. At the moment he was
the Company’s official Golden Boy. He had killed Flycatcher and
everyone was very happy about that, so the carnage that had led up
to such an agreeable outcome was passed over in ostentatious
silence. If he had problems dealing with his own attenuated moral
sense, that was entirely his own affair. Nobody was interested.
Nobody but Guinness, it seemed, cared about the victims of the late
massacre.

Well—that wasn’t quite true. They had cared
about Renal. In fact, Ernie had been reasonably pushed out of shape
with him until he had been assured that someone else besides the
celebrated killer of men had pulled that particular trigger. Then
it was all right, and Guinness was returned to everyone’s good
graces. But they had, in fact, cared about Renal. They were sorry
he had died, and one suspected this had little enough to do with
his purely personal charms.

They had wanted him alive for some reason of
their own. One wondered what it could have been.

Of course, Guinness was reconciled to the
fact that he would never find out. It was the curse of everyone in
the profession—you never got to find out. You had your little piece
of the puzzle, and you never got to see the rest of it and so never
knew whether anything you had done ever made any difference. You
were isolated from the consequences of your actions.

But they had wanted Renal to defect. And the
only possible conclusion to be drawn was that he was some sort of a
plant—either that or a decoy.

It was a familiar tactic. You stuff some poor
clown full of misinformation, you grind it into him like corn into
a goose, and then you arrange for him to get caught. The enemy
thinks they have a prize and everybody’s happy, with the possible
and unimportant exception of the goose. It was the sort of thing
that was done all the time.

And Flycatcher, of course, had made such a
roaring big deal out of the whole operation—could it have been that
he knew Renal was something less than the genuine article? Maybe he
was Flycatcher’s decoy; maybe Flycatcher had another line into NATO
and was drawing attention away from it by allowing Renal to so
pointedly display his disloyalty.

Were they all, perhaps without realizing it,
playing the same dreary little game? NATO wants Renal to defect
because he’s their plant, and Flycatcher wants the same thing
because he’s his decoy? Did NATO know about Flycatcher’s real
source? With Flycatcher’s death, it all became somewhat academic,
but one couldn’t help wondering.

And what about Kätzner? Had he turned out to
be somebody’s patsy too? Poor Kätzner. Guinness didn’t like to
think about Kätzner, didn’t like to think that the colonel had
finally ended up as the cat’s paw of his disdained superiors, but
still, it seemed entirely possible.

“
I know no details. I simply saw her name
on one sheet of an operations report, and, believe me, it was not
possible to inquire further.”

That was what he had said. Had it been
arranged that he should see that single sheet of paper? Had his
people had their own reasons for closing Flycatcher’s game down?
They must have known about Kätzner’s daughter; it was the sort of
thing intelligence agencies made a point of knowing. Could they
have set Kätzner up? Was that to be his reward for a lifetime in
the service of the Revolution?

But Kätzner had never been one to think in
terms of rewards or revenge or justice. Perhaps he had known he was
being used and simply hadn’t cared—that also would have been like
him. For Kätzner there was only the Cosmic Joke, and the only
rectitude lay in knowing when to play the fool and when to
laugh.

But Guinness didn’t like to think about
Kätzner. He had no desire to spend his middle years as a student of
such ironies. There were certain parts of the puzzle he thought
perhaps it might be better that he didn’t see.

Wheels within wheels within wheels. They took
everything away from you—your moral dignity, even your sense of
voluntary action. And all of it, probably, didn’t mean a fucking
thing.

So he tried not to think about it. He tried
to concentrate on
Middlemarch
. He would be like Mr. Casaubon
and spend his time pondering over Dagon the Fish God. He would go
over to London in a few days and spend hours and hours in the Tate,
looking at the Turners. He hadn’t spent any real time in London in
ten years—it would be interesting to see how much things had
changed.

But he would be going by himself. Just like
the first time, over twenty years ago, when he had come off a
freighter with a letter of acceptance from the graduate program in
English at the University of London and an ineradicable conviction
that the world was his personal property. At twenty-one, most of us
are dumb enough to believe almost anything.

He had friends in London, people who might
still remember him from the old days, but he didn’t suppose he
would look any of them up. He would keep to himself, trying to
attract as little attention as possible, and he would go to the
Tate and look at the pretty pictures. He would give his old
acquaintances a break, since there seemed to be so little recent
evidence that being on intimate terms with Raymond Guinness was
conducive to a long and fulfilled life. He would catch up on his
sleep and try to put on a few pounds and play the tourist. He would
leave it at that.

He might even be finished with
Middlemarch
by then, which would be just as well because he
wasn’t enjoying it very much. And maybe, after a week or so, he
would be able to get this cast off his hand before it drove him
crazy. Just the last two joints of his fingers were sticking out—he
could barely touch the tips of his first finger and thumb
together—so he was eating a lot of sandwiches and other junk that
he could manage with just the right hand. But the itching was the
big thing; it was destined to end with his smashing the bloody cast
into powder himself because the skin was still too tender for him
to get a pencil or something underneath to scratch the inside of
his palm. The doctor said at least another week, but, all in all,
it was gradually making Guinness pretty irritable and men had
killed for a great deal less.

He would give it another four days and then
he would just have to see. Ninety-five percent of full
function—what the hell did that mean anyway?

But it was only the third day, after all, and
Amalia Brouwer was going off to America. In forty-eight hours she
would be sitting in an apartment in Los Angeles, nerving herself up
to go down to Bullock’s to replenish that dreary underwear
collection of hers. Guinness wondered if perhaps he shouldn’t say
something to her about it, if perhaps it wouldn’t be the sagest
piece of advice he could give her under the circumstances: Go buy
yourself some mint green see through panties, Sweetheart, and see
about starting life all over again.

But he probably wouldn’t say anything at all
like that. He might be
in loco parentis
, but he was hardly
the person to advise anyone about the conduct of their lives.

He had seen her only once since his arrival,
for about fifteen minutes while he was waiting for the doctor to
come and paste his hand back together. She had wanted to know how
things had turned out.

“As you see,” he had said, with a slight
shrug that suggested he would regard the answer as self-evident.
“I’m here. That should tell you something.”

“Then Günner is dead?”

“Yes. Lots of people are dead—why should
Günner be any exception?”

She took the news perfectly calmly, as if she
were listening to reports of the football scores. She didn’t ask
any of the customary questions, so perhaps this particular lover
had failed to touch her heart. Perhaps they all had; she struck
Guinness as a cold little fish, which might turn out to be just as
well for her.

So they had sat together in one of the empty
offices at the consulate, with nothing further to say to one
another. He was tired; the only thing that had kept him awake
during the long drive from Holland was the throbbing in his hand,
and even that sensation was beginning to lose itself in a general
feeling of spiritual numbness. He wished to hell she would go away,
but she stayed, sitting quietly with her hands folded, like a
Victorian maiden paying a courtesy call on her senile old aunt. We
sit with the wounded Soldier until the doctor comes—he seemed to
find himself the victim of her sense of social duty.

He discovered he was unable to make up his
mind about Amalia Brouwer. She was like her father, without the
humanizing irony. And it had cost too much to have her sitting
there beside him on the green naugahyde sofa, but that was hardly
something for which he could blame her. Those were decisions that,
one way or another, he had made himself.

No, he didn’t imagine he would ever warm to
her very much. It mattered very little, however, since he was
unlikely ever to see her again. She was going to California. In
fact, the plane left that very afternoon.

And she was waiting for him in the consulate
lobby, her brand new raspberry Samsonite suitcase parked over by a
wall. It was rather an odd color, but he chose to interpret it as a
hopeful sign—she had decided, apparently, to enjoy a conspicuous
existence, just like the rest of the human race.

And she smiled when she saw him, as if
somehow he had become her only friend on this earth. Well, and
perhaps he had. Someone had taken her out to buy a new summer
dress—he had heard from Teddy MacKaye that she was afraid to leave
the building on her own—and she looked very pretty. If she didn’t
blow it, she would do all right for herself in her new life.

“I am on my way to become a capitalist
princess,” she said, smiling to indicate that it was a joke she was
making. “Perhaps I shall end by marrying a millionaire.”

Guinness made a sound that passed in polite
circles for laughter and wondered how Amalia Brouwer had come to be
gifted with this strange capacity to make him feel uneasy, as if
she were always dancing carelessly at the mouth of the abyss.

“You look very nice,” he said. “Have they
arranged everything for you?”

He tried to smile, but he kept seeing the
expression on Janine’s dead face. I tried, Soldier. I tried, but I
couldn’t stand it anymore. He couldn’t smile, and Amalia Brouwer
had no right to make jokes.

“Yes. They have arranged everything.”

“Then go. Be happy, stay out of trouble. And
when you get there, remember what the ticket cost. Janine, Günner,
a lot of other people you never saw or heard of. You weren’t
responsible—I’m responsible—but you were involved. California is a
long way away. Remember what the ticket cost.”

For a moment he thought she was going to
cry—so perhaps she wasn’t quite made out of ice after all. But she
didn’t. She simply looked up at him as if she expected somehow he
would exonerate and forgive her. As if the burden of guilt were
somehow hers instead of all his own. He reached down and took her
hand; it was very small, and somehow nerveless, as if it were
merely an object attached to her body.

“Nobody blames you, kid. Live your life, and
make the most of your second chance. There won’t be a third.”

“I know that. I feel as if I am abandoning my
whole past.”

“You are—you’re lucky.”

“I know that too.”

So it might be all right after all, and the
toaster salesman might have a chance for an unruffled existence,
when it came his turn. It seemed possible, at least.

“My father—will I ever see him?”

Guinness shook his head, sorry for her now
because now it was more than mere curiosity that had prompted her
question. Perhaps she felt the need of some new mooring as she
drifted away from all the old ones. Perhaps a little of her
gratitude extended to the man who had once been Maarten
Huygens.

“Forget about your father. He would prefer, I
think, to be forgotten; he knows he could never bring anything but
more trouble down on you now. Forget all of us, forget we ever
existed. Remember everything else, but forget us.”

And then some faceless consulate employee,
someone Guinness had never seen before, came along and ushered
Amalia Brouwer out to a waiting car. She turned around once as he
led her away, and Guinness smiled, at last, and waved goodbye. He
was glad he had decided not to tell her—she would have enough of
that sort of freight to carry through life.

And then she was gone. Emil Kätzner’s little
girl, who would now be swallowed up in the anonymous mass, to be
subjected to nothing more terrible than the ordinary tragedies of
ordinary life. For her, at least, there would be no dried blood
spattered over the wallpaper.

“You’ll never guess who they found shot to
death in his hotel room,” Ernie had said, as if he were posing a
riddle. “In Munich, and the very next day after you left—Emil
Kätzner. Can you believe it?”

It was one of those times when Guinness was
glad most of his conversations with Ernie Tuttle were conducted
over the phone. It was possible to lie to your friends over the
phone; they couldn’t see your face.

“Why shouldn’t I believe it? Did you think
I’d killed him?”

“No, man. The idea never even crossed my
mind. He killed himself, apparently; they tell me the gun was still
in his hand. I just thought it was an interesting coincidence, you
going rushing off to Amsterdam with blood in your eye on the very
same day a hard case like Kätzner decides to end it all—did you
know, his own people didn’t even know he was in town; his blowing
his brains out seems to have been as much of a surprise to them as
to everybody else. Of course, you wouldn’t have a clue about any of
this, now would you.”