The Favor (15 page)

But the waiter, who wore a loose red and
black patterned turban and a white mess jacket, would come along
every once in a while and gather up the empty dishes, sweeping away
the debris. He spoke neither English nor German, and precious
little Dutch, but he seemed to know through some special sympathy
just exactly what you wanted and so it didn’t matter. If he had a
fault, it appeared to be an absolute intolerance for empty beer
glasses; he kept refilling them when you weren’t looking, and
Guinness discovered that he had put away three bottles before he
caught on in time to wave the fourth one away.

“The food is very hot, yes?” She leaned
across the table toward him, just as if she were explaining a local
joke. “And besides, in Holland the men drink much more beer—do not
be angry with him.”

“I’m not angry; I’m just afraid I could
drown, is all. Why? Do I look angry?”

“No.”

“Is Janine your real name, or did Ernie dream
it up for you?”

“No, it is my name. My mother wished me to be
an actress and imagined that a French name would help somehow.”

“Did it work?”

She smiled, and all at once Guinness felt
like a monster, as if he had made a coarse joke.

“No, I was never an actress—no more than my
profession demands.”

“I’m sorry.”

Fortunately, the waiter chose that moment to
bring them a couple of steaming, jasmine scented towels on a wicker
tray, and Guinness made himself very busy wiping off the tips of
his fingers, feeling profoundly uncomfortable in the silence.

When he felt there was a chance the wretched
moment might have passed away and risked a glance at her, he was
astonished to discover that the expression playing over her face
was one of amusement, as if it were his sensibilities that were at
issue.

“You are an unaccountable man,” she said,
smiling again. “You are nothing like what I would have
expected.”

“What did you expect?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“One would not have imagined the Soldier—or
very many men—to experience much delicacy about the feelings of a
whore.” And she shrugged her shoulders again, dismissing, it
seemed, any” delicacy” about the simple truth of her
self-description. She wasn’t asking for displays of chivalry; she
was just stating a neutral fact. And he liked her enormously for
that, so he frowned.

“Don’t kid yourself—the Soldier’s a real son
of a bitch during business hours. I’m just off duty right now.”

“And so am I,” she said.

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

. . . . .

It was a warm evening, and Janine wanted to
walk back.

Her apartment wasn’t more than three quarters
of a mile from the restaurant and, with the streets clogged with
tourists, Guinness didn’t object. What the hell, he could risk it;
if they were tailing him—and there wasn’t a reason in the world to
imagine they were—they wouldn’t be likely to risk a massacre. That
sort of thing was bad for trade.

So they would have a stroll. They would give
dinner a chance to digest and they would hold hands and talk about
whether his name was really Charles Reilly.

“Is it? I am sorry, but last night I saw your
passport in your wallet. Is that your name?”

“No.”

“Then what shall I call you? I cannot call
you Soldier, can I? It would sound so odd to go on calling a man
that.”

“Then call me Charlie. I’ve always wanted to
be a Charlie, and now I have my big chance.”

She laughed at that and stopped for a moment,
pressing her hands against the front of his jacket as she enjoyed
the joke. And all the time her eyes searched the crowd behind them,
even while her fingers pressed against his ribcage and her tongue
moistened her lips. He leaned down and kissed her, just touching
her lightly.

“Do you see any familiar faces?”

She smiled and laughed again and shook her
head, almost imperceptibly. She was very good.

“No—but how could they know you were even
here?”

She took his arm and they continued on,
passing the outdoor cafe where Guinness had waited for Amalia
Brouwer to come back from her lunch break. The street was narrow
there and they were squeezed by the crowds, as if somehow they had
happened into the midway of a carnival.

“They know. I’ve felt it ever since I
arrived—you get a tightness in the back of your scalp, like you can
feel the eyes. They may not have caught up with me yet, but they
know I’m here. Flycatcher’s too smart to let me just walk up and
tap him on the shoulder.”

“Yes? And is he so formidable?”

He glanced down at her, just to see if she
wasn’t making fun of him, and, sure enough, she was. You could see
the amusement tugging at the corners of her mouth.

“If you’re asking whether I’m afraid of him,
the answer is yes. I’m not an idiot.”

“I thought it was rather he who is afraid of
you—at least, that is the gossip, that he dreads you more than
death itself.”

They stopped for a moment at the foot of one
of the larger canal bridges where, for some reason, there was
almost not another soul in sight. You could hear the waves lapping
against the stone embankments and, from underneath the bridge
itself, the clucking of the pigeons who apparently built their
nests in behind the pillars. Guinness listened, not so much to them
as to the pulse of things around him, trying to pick out some
discordant rhythm in the sounds of a warm evening in a picturesque
little city where people came to admire the tulip gardens and the
paintings of Vermeer, but there was nothing. He and Janine might
have been anybody as they stood looking down at the lifeless,
opaque water, but they weren’t. They carried their taint with
them.

“I’ve rubbed up against him three times in
the last couple of years—the last time I nearly killed him. I
thought I had killed him. We can’t go on like this forever. He
knows that and so do I, so one of us will have to go and there
aren’t any guarantees involved. I’ll get him if I can, this time or
the next, or the time after that, and if I don’t it’ll probably be
because he got me first.”

He let his eyes roam back the way they had
come and, when he was satisfied, put his arm over her shoulders.
She seemed to melt into him; he could feel her cheek against the
corner of his chest.

“It’s like a bad dream, isn’t it.” She nodded
slowly and he bent down and kissed her hair. “Then let’s forget it
for now—come on, I’ll take you home.”

. . . . .

Janine slept in the proverbial big brass bed,
a spectacular, old fashioned arrangement that creaked like a
bullfrog under them while they made love. But Guinness couldn’t
hear it most of the time, not over the passionate, breathy,
pleading nonsense that she whispered, almost gasped into his ear
while she wrapped her legs with a kind of desperate force around
his waist.

Of course, an intelligent whore is always the
mistress of illusion.

Or perhaps it was that something else he had
encountered more than once in women whom the practice of his
profession had thrown in his way. Some of them simply wanted to be
near something menacing. Like the groupies who hung around rock
stars, they were fascinated by the aura; that was how they got
their kicks, by feeling a murderer between their thighs. It always
made Guinness angry, and perhaps a little brutal in his lovemaking,
which was perhaps just exactly what they wanted. If they wanted to
be used and tossed aside—well, that was their business. But he had
never liked it. He had never cared for the trouble of living up to
a fantasy.

Was that what it was with Janine? Certainly
she had been interested enough in that side of things—
“Everyone
has heard of the Soldier.”

Certainly there had been no sweet reluctant
amorous delay when they returned to her apartment—she simply turned
to him and reached behind her back to pull her zipper down, letting
him push the dress from her shoulders with his hands, like
something to be brushed aside. It was an unaffected yielding, a
submission automatic enough to make her seem to stand outside the
thing, trusting or perhaps merely indifferent.

And when it was over, and she clung to him
while they lay there together, as if she were afraid he might leave
her more abruptly than she could bear, he could feel the wetness of
her tears along the inside of his arm and wondered if she always
cried, if that too was part of the performance—or if, somehow, he
had wronged her. If, perhaps, she didn’t like being treated like a
technical problem to be solved and dismissed. Perhaps it was both.
Or perhaps, somewhere along the line, her own expectations had
collided and the business had gotten out of hand. It was one of
those things you were never going to know; probably she didn’t even
know herself.

Or perhaps she did. Perhaps she was smarter
about such matters than he was—after all, how much would it
take?

And so, because neither of them knew what to
say, they said nothing. He brought his hand up to touch the side of
her face and wished that somehow it might be possible not to have
to live one’s life this way, in little discontinuous fragments, as
a succession of terminal moments. It would be nice if there could
be a few tomorrows, but of course that was impossible.

“You cannot stay the night,” she whispered
finally—it wasn’t a statement of the house rules, but a kind of
apology. “I have to be a very good girl or my landlady will think
the worst and evict me. I have always been the best of tenants, but
she does not much care for having a whore under her roof. Do you
see, yes? I am sorry. Soldier, I am sorry.”

He laughed and kissed her, perhaps a little
carelessly. None of it meant anything. “I thought we’d settled that
I was going to be Charlie. What happened to that?”

“Nothing happened to that. You are the
Soldier, and I am a whore named Janine.”

“Are you angry?”

“No.”

“Do I have to leave now?”

“No, not if you do not wish to. As a rule,
they cannot leave fast enough.”

“I thought we were off duty now. Do you want
me to leave?”

“No. No—I do not want you to leave.”

She rolled a little away from him, perhaps so
as not to seem to commit herself to anything, and he reached across
himself to touch her arm, resting his thumb in the cleft it made
against her body, surprised at her smallness all over again.

“I don’t like my line of work either, so
can’t we just forget it?”

“Can we?”

“We can try. At least, we don’t have to give
ourselves a hard time about it.”

“All right.”

“Fine.”

. . . . .

The glass doors out to the veranda were open,
allowing the gauze curtains to stir uneasily in the tentative,
inconstant breeze. He wanted to get out of bed and check that there
was no one standing behind them—except that that would have been
ridiculous and, besides, Janine’s bed was warm and the pressure of
her body against his own was enough of a pleasure by itself to make
him reluctant to move. So Guinness lay there, listening to her
breathing and wondering if she had fallen asleep, and watched the
ghostly presence as it quickened and died away, lit from behind by
the pale glow from a distant and heedless night sky.

“Does it disturb you?” she whispered,
twisting around to bring her face close to his. “The wind—are you
cold? In the summer I like to leave them open to the outside; it
makes me feel less alone. But if you are cold I can close
them.”

“No. I’m not cold.”

She smiled at him—it was almost too dark to
see her face at all, but he was sure she was smiling—and her lips
searched over his chin and jaw.

“You were just so alert. I could feel it
pointing to the balcony—a tension. You do not relax, do you.”

“I try not to. It’s a bad habit. I’m
sorry.”

She kissed him hard, her arms snaking around
his neck and along the curve of his back.

“You must not be sorry,” she said. “We must
neither of us be sorry.”

“No.”

The curtains smoothed down again, as if they
had suddenly become vastly heavy, and at once there was a pressure
of quietness in the room. Janine rose up, swinging her legs over
the side of the bed, making the sheets whisper, and he watched her
hunch in concentration as she felt for her slippers. The digital
clock radio on her night table said one twenty-seven. It was almost
time for him to go.

“Would you like a cup of tea?”

In the doorway, on her way into the kitchen,
she was dimly framed for just a second in the gray light, a slim,
almost boyish figure. You expected her to vanish, to dissolve in
the dark air.

And when she came back, the cups of smoking
tea she carried in either hand seemed more solid than she.

They sat together in bed, and Guinness tried
not to hurry. There was nothing waiting for him in Aimé’s
apartment, nothing he wanted—nothing that couldn’t wait. He tried
not to think any further than the next few moments, but, of course,
the effort by itself was a reminder that little periods of refuge
end and are not what make the difference. So he waited for his tea
to cool and then drank it off. First one thing, and then the
next.

“I want you to check on that phone number
tomorrow.”

He put his hand on her bare thigh, just
allowing it to rest there lightly, and smiled; it struck him almost
as an act of betrayal. “And tag along with our little friend; find
out what she does with those long lunch hours, would you? I’ll make
a few inquiries of my own, and we’ll see what we find—okay?”

And she smiled and made agreeing sounds, and
he knew he had to get out of there. So he rose out of bed, putting
his empty cup down on the glass top of her dressing table, and
started sorting out his clothes from the pile on the chair.