The Favor (25 page)

Guinness walked down between the rows of
houses, trying to pretend to himself that he lived there. He
stopped once or twice to examine the dandelions on people’s lawns
and noticed that, here and there, the sidewalk was in need of
repair—it was probably one of his more convincing imitations.

What, after all, was to be gained by making a
big production out of sneaking up on the place? All Renal had to do
was to look out the window and he would see whoever was outside.
And if he saw him, he saw him—so what? Renal had, so far as he was
aware, no reason to know what a Raymond Guinness was. He probably
wasn’t a frequent enough visitor to have much of an idea who
belonged in the neighborhood and who didn’t; the more you looked
like part of the furniture, the better.

That window was right there on the second
floor—Guinness tried not to look up when he turned toward the front
entrance. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out Janine’s
car keys, just as if he planned to use them to let himself in.
There was, in fact, a main door, but the lock was old fashioned and
childishly simple and Guinness could pick it so fast that a casual
observer might have supposed he was actually using a key.

The inside stairway was carpeted and, in the
tiny foyer, there was a small wicker table supporting a vase full
of dried flowers. An intensely domestic atmosphere enveloped you
the instant you closed the door behind yourself; it hardly seemed a
place for breaking down doors and threats and violence and death.
It was difficult to believe that such things could encroach on this
tidy privacy. Guinness took out his small, nickel plated automatic,
snicked off the safety catch, and tucked it back into the waistline
of his trousers.

Fortunately, the stairway seemed to be cement
under the carpeting; the steps didn’t creak and it was possible to
proceed as quietly as a shadow. When he reached the second floor,
he took out his automatic again. It looked as if he might need
it—Amalia Brouwer’s front door was standing open about three
inches.

. . . . .

Well, he could have spared himself any
anxiety about the stealthiness of his approach. He could have come
galumphing up the stairwell at the head of the brass section of the
Concertgebouw—Renal wouldn’t have minded. For all the startled
expression on his face as he sat on the floor, his back resting in
the angle between the wall and the end of Amalia Brouwer’s much
loved bed, Renal was well beyond any such considerations.

But he did look surprised. I wasn’t expecting
you, he seemed to be saying. Although what he probably hadn’t been
expecting wasn’t Guinness but the rather garish bullet hole in his
left cheekbone, just under the eye.

Somebody hadn’t been kidding around—a fair
share of the back of Renal’s head was decorating the room. There
was blood everywhere, all over the bedspread and the carpet and in
a long ugly smear down the wall, running into where the major lay
crumpled like a discarded doll. A fair quantity had even run out
through the bullet hole and down over his nose and mouth to collect
in a pool on his shirtfront. It was like a slaughterhouse; you
could smell it in every room in the apartment.

One assumed something on the order of a nine
millimeter. That kind of damage hadn’t been achieved with a
.22.

Guinness squatted down and peered into
Renal’s dead eyes. They were pretty badly blackened from the impact
of the bullet—there weren’t any pretty gunshot victims—but the
pupils were just beginning to cloud over. He probably hadn’t been
dead for much more than half an hour.

It figured. At that time of the day, almost
everyone would be at work or out amusing themselves in the warm
summer sunshine. The building was probably deserted; no one would
have heard the shot, and if they had they wouldn’t have bothered to
investigate a single sharp puff of sound.

And then the killer would have slipped out,
leaving the door slightly ajar so that it wouldn’t take five or six
days for them to discover the body. Probably as early as this
evening someone in the house would realize that something was
wrong—people just didn’t leave their doors open in Europe, and in
the middle of the summer a corpse ripens fairly fast.

It wasn’t a very pleasant task, but Guinness
set himself to looking through the dead man’s pockets. You never
knew—it might be worth something to know what they wanted found on
the poor son of a bitch.

There wasn’t much. Some change in the right
hand jacket pocket, a handkerchief, a black plastic comb, a slender
gold filled ballpoint pen in the pocket of his shirt.

His wallet was lying in plain sight on top of
the chest of drawers, and Guinness went through that as well. It
contained a passport, a driver’s license, a few credit cards, a
receipt for a couple of shirts bought in a department store in
Brussels the week before, and close to fifteen thousand francs in
large bills. Obviously, the murderer hadn’t been interested in
robbery.

It was painfully apparent that little Amalia
was being set up to take the fall for this—God knows, she hadn’t
killed Renal; she had been out of the building for hours, and Renal
was still very fresh meat. But she was going to take the fall. Her
dead lover, in her apartment—his picture still stood on the night
table—and doubtless she herself was slated for a precipitous
disappearance. It wouldn’t matter to her, of course, because
Flycatcher was going to arrange things so she wouldn’t be alive to
be embarrassed by the police inquiries, but this particular
homicide was going to be laid right at her pretty little feet.

One wondered why, though. Probably Flycatcher
had set it up this way from the beginning—we run a snitch through
an inexperienced girl so we can blow him away in her apartment and
hang it on her—but what the hell for? Why do we want to draw so
much attention to the disappearance and death of Major Jean Renal?
Why don’t we just snatch him off the sidewalk some dark night and
drop him in the Atlantic with enough scrap iron tied around his
neck so that he’ll stay down and never bother anybody again?

“Why didn’t they do that, hey, Renal?” he
murmured, crouched down once again to look into the dead man’s
face. “What are you doing here, pal? Hmmmm?”

But Renal didn’t have any answers; he merely
continued to stare straight ahead, his face a mask of astonishment.
Isn’t it amazing. I’m dead, the last thing in the world I
expected.

And all that money—they wanted to be sure
that the investigating authorities knew Renal was doing a flit and
wasn’t just up for a weekend of pussy. You didn’t leave fifteen
thousand francs behind unless you meant to, and they meant to make
the major look just as guilty as they could manage. It was
certainly an odd way to treat your employees, but then working for
Flycatcher wasn’t like being in the Civil Service.

Guinness rose and went into the bathroom to
wash his hands. He hadn’t been in the apartment more than two or
three minutes and he didn’t like to stay any longer than
necessary—he wouldn’t care to have someone walk in and find him
there and, after all, how long would it be before whoever killed
Renal would pay a little visit to the bookstore and invite Amalia
out for a drive in the country?—but handling corpses wasn’t the
sort of thing he really much enjoyed and he thought he could
possibly spare the few seconds it would take to wash the blood from
his fingers.

He took Renal’s passport and all but about
four hundred francs of the money with him, stuffing them into his
coat pocket.

He stopped in the corridor for a moment and
looked around. It was a pokey little place, very much like the
apartment in which his second wife had been living when he had
leaned over the counter in the typing pool that first afternoon and
asked her for a date. They had gone to a movie and then come back
to the walk up over a jewelry store she called home to crease the
sheets a little and spend the hours between one and two in the
morning polishing off about four boxes of frozen waffles.

Louise had grown tired of clerking in an
insurance company and had gone back to school for an MA—she had
some vague idea about teaching Jane Austen in some rustic junior
college—and Guinness, who was in that long hiatus between employers
when he thought maybe he would be able to stay out of the
headhunter business, was a brand spanking new assistant professor
of English literature. They managed to hold it together for about
five years before the inevitable happened and somebody with a
grudge from the old days had looked Guinness up and, not finding
him in, had left Louise on her kitchen floor with an ice pick
sticking out of her ear. So much for happy times and the illusion
of safety.

How old had she been when Guinness had come
along to invite her to come out to dinner with him and attach a
time fuse to her life? Twenty-six or seven, certainly no more. And
Amalia Brouwer, what was she? Even younger—perhaps twenty-three. He
went into the bathroom and, after a little hunting, found a thin
wafer of soap perfectly camouflaged against one of the white
porcelain corners of the famous bathtub. He ran a thin stream of
warm water into the basin and, when he had rinsed off the soap
film, dried his hands very carefully on a small towel that was
draped over a ring next to the mirror.

Amalia Brouwer’s nightie was hanging from a
hook on the inside of the bathroom door; it was a little yellow
cotton thing with a bit of fake lace trim around the hem, the sort
of item you could pick up for ten dollars in any department store
in the civilized world. Guinness was still holding the towel when
he happened to turn around and see it there, and its effect on him
would have been difficult for him to explain.

“My God—they’re going to kill that girl,” he
found himself whispering, startled that something he had known from
the beginning should suddenly strike him with the force of a
revelation.

That was what they were going to do, and they
probably weren’t going to wait around about it much longer. It was
the obvious play, to deal with Renal and his girlfriend
separately—they would hardly wish to drag her screaming from her
apartment after they had shot him in front of her eyes—but there
would be no reason for them to linger now.

Renal was dead, but not for more than a few
minutes. So what was Raymond Guinness, champion of the innocent,
protector of damsels in distress, doing standing around drying his
hands? Quite obviously, there just wasn’t any more time to waste
with sentimental gestures.

He threw the towel into the bathtub and
within a few minutes was closing the apartment door behind him. He
twisted the handle gently to make sure it had locked—there wasn’t
any point in drawing attention to the fact that there was a dead
man in Amalia Brouwer’s bedroom; she would have quite enough on her
plate for the next several hours without having to fret about the
police.

When he reached the street, he tried to walk
as fast as he could without giving the impression, should anyone
happen to be watching, that he was in a hurry. His car driving away
was the only sound in the quiet neighborhood.

14

The street on which the bookstore was located
was closed to automobile traffic—it was too narrow, for one thing,
and probably the city fathers worried about what the vibration from
all those cars would do to their four hundred year old footbridge,
which was only half a block away. So that particular little stretch
of cobblestone was a pedestrian mall; a fine idea if you leave out
of consideration the needs of cloak and dagger types, who might
feel a little nervy about trying to make a quick getaway on nothing
but their shoe leather.

But there were other streets, and one of
them, the next over, faced onto an alley that led back to an open
courtyard not more than thirty feet square where the bookstore had
its rear entrance. After all, you could hardly expect the delivery
men to carry in crates balanced on their heads.

Guinness parked his car at the mouth of the
alley. He might get a traffic ticket, but at least no one would be
able to block off the entrance. The alley and the courtyard were
too open to permit an ambush, so his escape, at least as far as the
car, would be reasonably safe. That was as much as you could ask
for.

He didn’t even try the back door but walked
around the block to the front. It was an enormous relief to look in
through the main window and see Amalia Brouwer quietly reading a
magazine as she sat behind the cash register. At least Flycatcher
wasn’t making a big hurry hurry production out of it—apparently he
still thought he had the wind at his back.

It was clear from the way she looked up,
smiled, and then went back to her magazine that the man coming
through the door didn’t mean anything special to her—he was just
another customer who would poke around through the shelves for a
while, buy something, grunt when she gave him his change and said
thank you, and then leave. Her face had registered nothing but the
indifference of a shop girl’s greeting, and he doubted she was so
consummate an actress that she could have concealed it from him if
she had recognized him as anyone significant.

And that was fine. He had been giving her a
wide berth ever since his arrival in Amsterdam, for the simple
reason that, when this moment came, he wanted to catch her flat
footed, off her guard, without any preset response that could get
in the way. He wanted just to scoop her up, so she wouldn’t have
time to think beyond the basic facts. She had been set up, and he
was there to get her out of the line of fire—that would be enough
for her to have to deal with; he didn’t want to afford her the
liberty for resentment or resistance or any other funny feminine
motives for not doing precisely what she was told.