The Favor (2 page)

Neither man spoke. For a long time they were
like that, one of them sitting in a chair, the other on the floor,
as they studied each other in the pale, pitiless light from the one
lamp. Bateman didn’t seem afraid anymore—but perhaps he had never
been afraid. Perhaps it had only been the surprise. After all,
Guinness didn’t feel under any obligation to think badly of the
man.

“What were you going to do?” he asked
finally. “I mean, when the money ran out. What was supposed to
happen then?”

Bateman didn’t say anything, but after a
moment he smiled thinly and shrugged his shoulders. And then the
smile died and he was still again.

“Don’t you know? Didn’t you think about
it?”

It was only a question—or, rather, two
questions. There wasn’t any tone of outrage or incredulity in
Guinness’s voice; he was just curious. More curious, apparently,
than Bateman, who only smiled again and shook his head.

“I guess not. I guess that means I didn’t
care.” He looked around the room for a few seconds, the way a man
might trace the vagrant journey of a housefly, and then he looked
down at his hands again, and then he looked into Guinness’s face,
squinting, as if he were having trouble pulling him into focus.
There was a pair of glasses in the breast pocket of his jacket, but
he made no attempt to reach for them. “Can I have a cigarette?”

“Where are they?”

“In the pocket of my shirt. I’ve got the
matches there too.”

“Then draw the lapel of your coat back with
the tips of your fingers. Don’t do anything except very, very
slowly.”

You might almost have thought he wasn’t
moving at all. It probably took him forty-five seconds to open his
coat, to extract the pack of cigarettes from his pocket and set
them down on his thigh, and then to shake one out and light it.
When he had the thing going, he blew out the match with his first
puff of smoke and then casually dropped it on the carpet beside
him. The same with the ashes; as the cigarette burned its way down
to the end, he would flick them off onto the floor. What the hell,
he wasn’t the one who was going to have to clean up.

“The money—how much of it have you got
left?”

“About thirty-five hundred.” Bateman seemed
to consider that fact for a moment, terminating his reverie with a
syllable of voiceless, ironic laughter. “I was going to pack off to
Spain in a couple of days, in search of a better exchange
rate.”

Guinness only nodded. Thirty-five hundred
left—that sounded about right. Bateman’s wife had reported him
missing a little under four weeks ago, and the way he had been
living—reckoning in the women—would probably account for about two
hundred fifty dollars a day. Figuring another few thousand for
transportation and counterfeit papers, that would bring it up to
about fifteen thousand dollars. Fifteen thousand was probably
pretty close to current market value for the kind of intermediate
level classified material to which someone like Bateman would have
had access—allowing, of course, for a substantial markup further
along the line.Bateman, after all, was just a wholesaler; the real
money was all made by that handful of merchant princes, the
entrepreneurs of the snatch and grab business who could put all the
little pieces together into coherent wholes worth hundreds of
thousands, sometimes millions of dollars. You couldn’t begrudge
them their profits. It couldn’t be an easy thing to do, probably
like reconstructing a wedding cake out of the crumbs stolen by
field mice.“I don’t suppose there’s any chance you and I could cut
a deal?”

Bateman looked embarrassed, but he needn’t
have been. Guinness wasn’t offended by the suggestion. Hell, why
should he be offended? If a man has thirty-five hundred dollars,
what should stop him from trying to buy his life with it? But he
frowned anyway, shaking his head. He was sorry for Bateman, but
that was the way things were.

“Then they’d be after two of us. You wouldn’t
last another week, and I’m not going to spend the rest of my life
hiding from everybody, not for that kind of money. It just wouldn’t
be worth it. Sorry.”

And that seemed to be that. It was
astonishing how little Bateman seemed to mind; you might almost
have thought he was relieved.

His cigarette was nearly finished now. He
hadn’t really paid much attention to it, just taking a shallow puff
now and then and, for the rest, shaking the ashes off with an
absentminded spasm of his hand; but now it was almost down to the
filter, and he pinched off the mouthpiece between first finger and
thumb and started casting around with his eyes for something to do
with it.

There was a small triangular ashtray made of
white porcelain on the table at Guinness’s elbow—a light little
thing, thin as a sea shell and perfectly harmless—that he picked up
and tossed onto Bateman’s lap. Bateman nodded thanks, ground out
the smoldering filter, set the ashtray down on the floor beside his
right knee, and lit another cigarette. This time he took a deep
drag, filling his lungs and then blowing smoke up at the ceiling.
He laughed as he watched the white plumes curling in upon
themselves as they rose through the stale, still, hotel room
air.

“At least this way I won’t live to regret
it,” he said, and laughed all over again. He seemed to think the
whole thing was exquisitely funny.

Guinness, however, didn’t laugh. He had seen
all this business too many times before to think it was funny. The
joke had worn thin for him.

Because, of course, Bateman wasn’t really
such an isolated case. The poor little slob at the end of his
tether, schooled to resignation by a life lived in a tract house
with an overweight wife suffering from varicose veins. The job that
meant nothing, that seemed, over the years, to be gradually
replacing the marrow in your bones with compressed air; the loud,
hostile, sneering children, partaking of your substance but living
a life as alien and incomprehensible as anything you could imagine
on the planet Mars. The present and the future, a blind wall
stretching into infinity.

And so Bateman had taken his chance, had
jumped at it, seizing it in both hands. A month of pleasure and
freedom, and what came after didn’t matter worth a tinker’s damn.
Prison, poverty, exile, death—anything but going back. And now we
sit on the floor and crack jokes with our murderer, becoming almost
his accomplice, in a crime almost without a victim. We are washed
in the blood of the lamb, oh Lord. Our sins are many, and we hope
for nothing. Prison, poverty, exile, death. It’s all the same.

“I can offer you one kind of a deal,”
Guinness murmured, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. “Not your
life, but perhaps something else.”

He didn’t like this sort of thing. There was
something distasteful and—yes—slightly vulgar about dickering with
a man over the terms on which you would send him to the embalmers.
If the boys back in Washington just wanted somebody snuffed, then
fine; Guinness was their man for it. It was the work he had been
doing for, it seemed, as long as he could remember, and he didn’t
mind it at all. He was good at it, maybe the best in the business;
he even took a kind of pleasure in it. But all the qualified
instructions that went with a job like this one—they just weren’t
his cup of tea.

“Find out who he tumbled for,” Ernie had
said. “We’d have more than a passing interest in knowing who
corrupts our poor, innocent little file clerks with visions of pink
champagne and friendly ladies in black lace underwear—the word is
Bateman’s having himself quite a time over there. See about that,
would you? And we won’t mind if there are a few bruises on the
body.” He had smiled that ratty little smile of his, the smile of
the ex-field man suffering through an attack of nostalgia. “You see
to it that the little runt comes clean before you tuck him in.”

Ernie wasn’t such a bad guy by the standards
of the profession, but Guinness just thought that maybe next time
he wanted all these kinds of embellishments he could damn well
crawl out of his windowless office on G Street and see to them
himself.Guinness looked at the specimen in front of him, wondering
about his probable tolerance for pain. Because that was what Ernie
had had in mind, unimaginative clod that he was, what the Trade
called “knuckle dusting.”

Not that you were likely to get anywhere just
tying somebody down to his chair and slapping him around some—that
sort of thing only worked in Shirley Temple movies. You never get
anything out of anybody that way, especially when he knows that the
minute you stop hammering at him you’re going to scatter the
contents of his head all over the room. Torture, to be effective,
has to be made to seem worse than death. If possible, much
worse.

The mind, and not simply the nerve endings,
is what you have to work on, and with the general run of humanity
it wasn’t too difficult to get the results you wanted, even when
you had only a little time and were stuck in a hotel room with
cardboard walls, where any amount of screaming would probably wake
up the whole corridor. A couple of pieces of tape over the mouth
and the eyes—they’re able to concentrate so much better when they
don’t have as many distractions—and then you start crushing the
joints of their fingers, one at a time, with a pair of pliers,
telling them all about it while it’s going on, keeping them
reminded that we’re not likely to run out of finger joints any time
soon.

Usually, by the time you’ve started to work
on the second finger, they’re ready to tell you whatever you want
to know. Their brains have turned to jelly, and all they want in
the world is for you to stop. On the average, it’s about that
simple.

Bateman, however, could just turn out to be a
special case. Oh, he’d talk all right—Guinness didn’t have any
anxieties about that. He probably wasn’t any more the high
principled, heroic type than the rest of us, and that was fine.
Guinness didn’t have much use for heroes.

So you might get him to talk—so what? There
wasn’t any guarantee that what he would have to say would be the
truth.

You break a man down, really break him down,
and he won’t lie to you. You become God for him, the only god there
is. The only one that counts. You have eyes that can see into the
soul, and if he lies you’ll know and there will be no release. So
he won’t lie—he won’t dare.

But Bateman might dare. He might just
remember that a pair of pliers doesn’t make anybody God, and it
might give him a kick to have that final little laugh on you just
before you send him off to hell. Just for spite, the son of a
bitch, he’d probably cook up some whopper that would cause no end
of grief. What should stop him? He knew he was cold meat.

And knowing that, and that Guinness was only
another fellow mortal, the same flesh as himself, he only smiled,
flicking another ash to the carpet with that careless little twitch
of his hand.

“You want me to play kiss and tell, I’ll
bet,” he said, with the quiet voice of one who is in on the gag.
“You’re going to tell me how they set me up, those bad men who
lured me away from the paths of virtue, how they knew it would come
to this, how they’re the ones who made all the real money while I
took all the chances, how they’re laughing their asses off at what
a chump I was. You don’t want me to let them get away with it; am I
right?”

He took another slow, steady drag on his
cigarette and watched the smoke drift upward. When it was gone he
made a little flourish in the air with his hand, dismissing all
such final vanities.

“You want me to die knowing that I’ll be
avenged. Was that the way it was going to go?”

Guinness refrained from congratulating
himself on his shrewd insight into human nature. It could be that
he liked Bateman that much better for not being the sort who would
fall for all that guff, but liking Bateman wasn’t going to make
anything any easier.

“Something like that.” Guinness spoke almost
in a whisper, looking straight into the face of this man he was
shortly going to have to kill. He wanted to be believed, so he was
telling the truth. He wanted them to trust each other; it was
necessary that they trust each other. And the only way they could
do that was for Guinness to offer such terms as he was prepared to
keep. “And perhaps there were one or two other things, but I don’t
suppose you’d be interested.”

He leaned forward in his chair until his
elbows rested on his knees. The gun in his hand pointed at the
wall, at nothing that mattered. It wasn’t a time for making
threats.

“Tell me, Bateman—isn’t there anything now
that you’ve lived long enough to regret?”

“I’d do it again.” His voice was a trifle
louder than it needed to be, and it wasn’t really that Guinness
didn’t believe him. It was just that the flicker in his eyes gave
him away.

“Come on, Bateman. That isn’t precisely the
same thing.”

Bateman didn’t answer—he didn’t have to. It
was written all over him, in the way he held his hands together, in
his very silence. He was a man like other men, of the same flesh.
And Guinness, who had a daughter and a pair of wives in his own
past, understood perfectly.

“If you make it come down that way, tomorrow
morning, when they find you, the weapon will be in your own
hand.”

Guinness leaned back into the padded chair.
“Suicide. Nothing more reasonable than for a man in your position
to blow his brains out—a man on the run, a man with no money left
and nowhere to go.

“And think how pleased everyone will be. My
employers will be satisfied because you’ll be dead. And the
police—well, it’s always so much less trouble for them when there’s
nothing left to investigate. So it’ll be written off as suicide,
and that’ll make the insurance companies happy because they don’t
have to pay off. By the time your family finishes shelling out to
have you put underground they won’t have two cents to rub together,
and won’t they be just tickled about that. Won’t they just love
your putrefying guts, and won’t they be right.”