The Favor (10 page)

“Guinness—you are in Amsterdam, aren’t you?”
The tiny glint of anxiety in his voice probably should have told
Guinness something already, but he just wasn’t interested. He just
wanted Tuttle to get on with it. He wanted to hear about
Flycatcher.

“Of course I’m in Amsterdam, you fathead. And
you know it. I’ll bet you’ve got the train schedule spread out on
the desk in front of you, so why ask?”

“Then you’re not alone, pal. Your good friend
with the white hair has been spotted on four separate occasions
over the last three months—something’s up with him. I thought you
knew. I thought that was why you were there.”

“No. I didn’t know.”

There was a kind of fatality to the business,
he thought. For two years, ever since South Carolina, it had been
the sole permanent ambition of Guinness’s life to kill
Flycatcher.

Flycatcher had a favorite tactic, to
intimidate people through their children, to impress upon them how
easily little throats could yield to the knife, little heads
shatter under the impact of a sniper’s bullet, and he had always
found it a very convincing line of argument. But in South Carolina
the child he had threatened had been Guinness’s own. He hadn’t
succeeded—at the cost of several lives, Guinness had redeemed her
and returned her home safe—but from that moment on, Flycatcher had
acquired the distinction of his own very personal Nemesis.

Revenge had very little to do with it,
although there was plenty of motive for revenge. No, it was nothing
so vulgarly personal. And Guinness drew no moral judgment—he was
the last one who had any right to do that—but somehow it had
settled into a fixed conviction that Flycatcher’s mere existence
made the ground ache, as if the very globe itself was oppressed by
his presence. Life was simply insupportable as long as that man was
breathing.

And now, once again, Flycatcher had been
delivered into his grasp.

“Are you there, Guinness?”He looked at the
receiver in his hand with what amounted to surprise. “Yes—of course
I’m here. Where else would I be? What’s the matter with you, Ernie?
You getting deaf?”

“Don’t you worry about me, pal—you just worry
about Flycatcher. They say you nearly got him last time, that after
Mexico he was holed up in some private sanatorium in Costa Rica for
four months just making up his mind whether or not he was going to
keep breathing. But a miss doesn’t pay the bills, pal. You nail him
this time. And for God’s sake don’t show yourself until you
absolutely have to—the word is he’s so spooked about you he’ll bury
himself underground if he so much as knows you’re in the same
country.”

Guinness frowned, at nothing in particular,
and remembered that in the normal world it was the middle of the
night and people had been sound asleep forever. In three hours,
maybe even two and a half, the sun would be up.

“I don’t need a pep talk, Ernie.”From the
other side of the broad Atlantic came an odd, gurgling laugh. Ernie
really ought to go back into the field, Guinness confided to
himself—he was getting kinky with boredom.

“I know you don’t. Given half a chance,
you’ll take the son of a bitch’s skull apart, won’t you. I just
thought you’d like to know, if by some miracle you didn’t already,
that he was within reach.

“Now, you’ll need a contact—someone to run
your errands for you. We’ve got a good, reliable local agent in
place. You’ll love this. . .”

. . . . .

The last time Guinness had been in Holland
was in 1970. He and his first wife had come for the week, just to
get away from London for a while, and had spent most of their
little holiday taking bus tours to the cheese markets in Alkmaar
and the mile upon mile of tulip fields along the road to Leiden.
They had eaten raw herring and admired all the picturesque little
fishing villages, and had spent a whole day in Delft, where
Kathleen had purchased a set of dishes that somehow managed to get
itself lost in the mails. It had been happy week, one of the nicest
times he could remember, and, as a result, Guinness had never felt
the slightest inclination to return.

“Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky,” he said to the
taxi driver, an immensely fat man whom he found sleeping soundly,
his arms wrapped around the steering wheel, in a parking space in
front of the train station. He didn’t wake up until Guinness had
climbed into the back seat and slammed the door shut behind
him.

On the way in everything was dark—you had the
sense, however, that you weren’t being taken through precisely the
nicest parts of town, so perhaps it didn’t matter. Anyway, no one
was wasting any money on street lamps.

The hotel itself was a gaudy, modern
structure, right across the square from the floodlit facade of the
Royal Palace, which Guinness remembered vaguely—the tour buses used
to mass almost next door.

Somewhere, out of sight in the darkness, what
sounded like perhaps as many as ten or a dozen youthful voices were
singing popular songs, accompanying themselves on probably a nearly
equal number of guitars. After a moment, he realized they were
singing in English, although he couldn’t make out more than the
occasional word. They were pretty terrible.

A uniformed doorman came down the front steps
of the hotel and opened the taxi door for him and took his bag from
the front seat. He gave the impression he was glad of the
company.

“Doesn’t all that racket keep the Queen
awake?” Guinness asked, retrieving his suitcase from him and
holding out a tip. The man smiled and curled his hand quickly
around the money, as if it were something nasty he was trying to
keep out of sight.

“Oh, the Queen does not stay there,” he said.
“She lives somewhere else.”

“I’m not surprised.”Guinness had found the
hotel’s name in the phone book. He had never heard of it before and
didn’t care anything about it now, but the sight of the lobby
depressed him unutterably. You might as well have been checking
into a motel in Alpena, Michigan. He didn’t like it any better when
the desk clerk told him there weren’t any rooms.

“Look again,” he said, allowing the corner of
a twenty mark note to stick out between the middle and index
fingers of his right hand.

“A single room was what you wanted?” The desk
clerk was a suave creature with carefully combed black hair who
seemed just a size too small for his clothes. “Yes, it seems I was
mistaken—for a week, you said?”

The name on his passport was Charles W.
Reilly, and he signed the registration form as such and was handed
his key. A bellman took his suitcase and led him through the bar,
past the entrance to the dining room—which for some reason was
screened off—around a couple of corners to an elevator. They rode
up to the third floor with a hamper full of dirty laundry, and
Guinness was shown down a corridor to his room. He tipped the
bellman, who merely grunted, and threw the suitcase on the bed.

The room was very small, and unbelievably
hot. The walls were a pale green and the carpet green and yellow in
a bizarre pattern probably intended to suggest the ripples on the
surface of a fishpond. He stepped into the bathroom and rinsed off
his face, which made him feel a little less groggy, and then opened
his suitcase and hung up the extra sport jacket and pair of
trousers it contained and dumped the rest into a drawer.

The bed was more of a problem—he took off the
spread and pulled down the counterpane and tried to rumple the
sheets, putting in a few creases that he hoped might look somewhat
more convincing after a few hours of being pressed into place by
the blanket. Then he took off his shirt and went into the bathroom
for the luxury of a shave—there wasn’t any point in calling
attention to oneself with a day’s growth of beard, and who knew
when he would have a chance tomorrow to pick up another razor? When
he was finished, he checked his watch.

Four fifteen—plenty of time.

If anyone came nosing around before tomorrow
evening, they would have every reason to believe the room was
occupied. If he had been spotted, it would give them someplace to
stake out, someplace to come looking for him, a nice diversion upon
which they could waste their time. In the meanwhile, he would have
a chance to get himself good and lost.

He put his shirt back on, retied his tie,
picked up his jacket from the back of a chair, and felt around in
the inside pocket for the street map he had taken from a rack at
the front desk.

On the way up he had noticed there was a side
entrance—apparently the hotel wasn’t very worried about their
guests shooting the moon. At that hour, with some luck, he should
be able to get clear without anyone seeing him. After all, even if
someone was watching, they would hardly be so crass as to post a
guard.

He slipped his arms into the sleeves of his
jacket, took a last look around to make sure everything appeared
properly untidy, and stole out, closing the door behind himself as
quietly as possible. He had an appointment, it seemed.

6

You wondered how many innocent American
tourists, after unpacking their bags and filling out handfuls of
postcards for all the relatives back home in Sioux Falls, after a
nice heavy dinner in the hotel restaurant, after tasting for
perhaps the first time in their lives wine that hadn’t been bottled
in California, how many of these had taken the wife out for a
little evening stroll through all those interesting looking side
streets behind the Voorbrugwal Canal, which, perhaps, if they
happened to have been given a room in the rear, they had seen from
their window. Probably thousands of such happy couples had crossed
over the quaint wooden bridges and admired the beautiful,
efficient, peculiarly Dutch architecture, some of it dating quite
clearly from the boom years of the Seventeenth Century, when
Holland had controlled trade with the treasure laden East and her
navy had been the envy of Europe.

Many of the buildings, as it happened, had
large plate glass windows on the ground floor—presumably installed
sometime after the days of Rembrandt and De Ruyter—and behind any
one of these, seated on a bar stool, with her legs crossed
provocatively and her skirt hiked up past the tops of her nylons,
was a lady whose lewd smile the car salesman from Indiana would
feel all the way down to his elasticized socks.

But there were no errant husbands flitting
about at a quarter to five in the morning—all of those were safely
asleep long ago, having left the field clear for more hardened
lechers of which, even at this hour, there was no discernible
shortage. Like conspirators assembling to plan acts of desperate
terrorism, they slipped furtively in and out of the doorway to a
dark little basement from which issued the sound of pinball
machines and the dull thud of rock music, a sign on the outside
advising you in Dutch, English, and German that for five florins
were available within the widest selection of pornographic films in
the city, which apparently was saying something.

Guinness checked his map and tried to locate
a street number, and discovered himself under the eyes of a pretty
negress whose rouged nipples were clearly visible over the top of
her pink babydoll nightie. She had just taken up her position,
pushing aside the curtain that had covered the plate glass window
and climbing up on her stool, and she looked at him as if he had
come to answer her most impassioned yearnings.

But he had already been through that phase,
in San Francisco, after the death of his second wife, when he had
imagined himself to be wearing the mark of Cain and felt sometimes
he might die of loneliness. The whores chattering among themselves
in Vietnamese as you lay on a mattress in a tiny room, waiting. No,
he had discovered soon enough that that sort of thing wasn’t at all
to his taste, so he smiled and shook his head and moved away. In
any case, she wasn’t the one he was looking for.

On the front stoop, just about at eye level,
a little congregation of teenaged waifs, no more than children
really, were lounging back against their rolled up sleeping bags
and passing around a briar pipe that certainly was filled with
something besides shag. One of the girls stared at Guinness
vacantly as he walked past—her long blonde hair had gone so long
unwashed that it looked as if it had been coated with candle wax,
and she was wearing a thin cotton dress that stopped just short of
her bare feet, which even in the dark he could see were incredibly
dirty. It was a cool night for the time of year, but she didn’t
seem to notice. Guinness wondered how long it had been since she
had noticed anything.

Finally he found the street—really, not much
more than an alley; you could almost have stretched your arms out
and touched the buildings on either side—and kept going right on
past. He didn’t want to make his approach until he was a little
clearer about what he would come up against down there. After all,
he couldn’t even be sure he’d find anybody home. Another two
blocks, and he would double back and have a look from the other
side.

When he got that far, he discovered himself
in what, anywhere else, probably would have been called
“Chinatown,” except that the few yellowish brown faces in evidence
looked more Polynesian than Chinese—in all likelihood they were
Moluccans, political refugees from the Dutch surrender of the Spice
Islands. Guinness went into an open food shop occupying one corner
of his street; the walls in front and to the outside were simply
notched out, so he had an unobscured view.

He sat down at the tiny five chair counter
and ordered a plate of something, which turned out to be mainly
saffron rice with a few pieces of unidentifiable meat on top, and
pretended to listen to a couple of ancient gentlemen who were
arguing violently in a language that sounded like nothing he had
ever heard before. They paid no attention to him. Even the
proprietor seemed to be deliberately ignoring him. That was
fine.