The Favor (26 page)

Survival was going to be the issue.
Cleverness would probably accomplish nothing more than getting her
killed.

He went over to the wall with all the Penguin
paperbacks and started looking through them, keeping his back to
her and listening to make sure they were absolutely alone. The old
lady usually left by around eleven fifteen—he had seen her leave
that first morning with what he presumed were the previous day’s
receipts in a brown canvas bank bag, and Janine had since confirmed
it as part of the routine—but he wanted to be sure. He let his hand
rest against the bookcase, as if that would help him to hear into
the stockroom that could reasonably be assumed to be behind the
heavy green curtains that covered a doorway cut through the wall at
right angles to Amalia Brouwer’s cash register. There were no
sounds of boxes being moved around, no scraping of chairs, not even
the tinkling of a radio. Nothing. If anyone was back there, they
were either holding their breath or dead, and after a while the one
amounted to the other, so there was no problem.

The Penguins didn’t seem to be arranged in
any particular order—in with a prose translation of the Anglo-Saxon
elegies,
The Eustace Diamonds
, and volumes one and four of a
collection of ghost stories was a copy of Conrad’s
Under Western
Eyes
. Guinness had tried to assign it for a course once, only
to discover that it seemed to be completely out of print. He picked
it off the shelf and turned around to look at Amalia, who was
separated from him by a display stand full of French novels and who
paid no attention to him whatsoever.

But that meant nothing. That was part of the
decorum of bookstores the world over—nobody bothered you while you
were browsing; you didn’t exist unless you tried to steal something
or had presented yourself to the counter and were ready to
leave.

He allowed himself a nice leisurely stare—it
didn’t matter anymore whether she noticed or not, since in a few
seconds he would become, for a while, the most important person in
her life; and he felt the need to size her up, to settle on some
mode of approach that might make all the difference as he tried to
persuade her that the gray Opel parked at the mouth of the alley
behind this building was her only vehicle to salvation.

And suddenly it occurred to Guinness that he
felt sorry for her. She had been something of an abstraction up
until that moment, but all at once she was quite real, a pretty
girl sitting behind a counter while she read a magazine. He had
seen a hundred girls just like her in his lifetime; they would come
into his classes when he had been a college professor back in
California and lean their tennis rackets against the legs of their
chairs while they scribbled down in their spiral notebooks the
facts of the English sonnet tradition or, more likely, wrote long
letters to their boyfriends back home in Fresno.

Amalia Brouwer wasn’t so very much older,
only two or three years, and she had that wonderful look of
suppleness that seems to go with tanned skin and shoulder length
brown hair. She was up to her neck in trouble, the kind of trouble
that could end her young life, although she hardly suspected it,
and she wasn’t really any more than a child. So far, for her, it
had all been slogans and rushing around to cell meetings and heavy
breathing in the name of the oppressed proletariat. There had been
no chance for anything else; there hadn’t been time.

He went up to the cash register, and, at
last, she raised her eyes to him and smiled. It was a nice smile,
although of course it didn’t mean a thing, and he could see that
her eyes were a moist brown and had the same oddly humorous quality
as her father’s, as if any moment she would break out into a laugh.
He set the book down on the counter, and she turned it around to
look at the price, and he reached inside his jacket to take out his
billfold; he was already holding out a ten florin note when she
asked, in English, was there anything else?

“Yes. I wonder if you would have a copy of
Maarten Huygen’s
Counterespionage in the Netherlands
—I’ d
like the German edition.”

You could watch the color drain away under
the tan as her face hardened into a rigid mask. The cash drawer was
already open, and she gripped its edge until her knuckles were
white. It was nice to have caught someone so completely unprepared;
it meant you had, for the moment, the home court advantage.

“Are you a policeman?” she asked, the words a
quick jumble, as if forced out under pressure. She was really
frightened, and her slender breast kept tightening the front of her
cotton dress as she tried to catch her breath. You almost had the
impression that this was the first time it had occurred to her that
people went to jail for the sort of thing she had been up to.

Guinness smiled at her, but not in a way
calculated to make anyone feel more at ease—it was a cruel smile, a
display of malice and teeth.

“No, sweetheart, I’m not a policeman. I’m
your guardian angel, come to save your goddamned silly little neck
for you. You have a choice—you can come with me now, or you can go
off with your friend with the white hair and end the evening buried
face down in a sandpit somewhere.”

She simply glared at him. Her brown eyes had
lost their look of amusement and now reflected nothing but the
defiance of a hunted animal, cornered and hard pressed, but
certain, at least, against whom she had to defend herself.

Well, Guinness hadn’t really expected to be
believed.

He put the ten florin note back into his
billfold and returned it to his inside jacket pocket, as if he had
nothing else on his mind.

“By the way,” he went on, “they got your
boyfriend. Renal is lying on the floor in your bedroom with the
back of his head shot away. There’s blood all over the place—I’m
afraid your landlady’s going to be furious.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What do you mean, what am I talking about?
He’s dead. They went up to your apartment about forty-five minutes
ago and blew him away. You don’t believe me? Where do you think I
picked up these?”

The passport and the fourteen some odd
thousand francs were still in his left coat pocket. He took them
out and dumped them on the counter, and Amalia Brouwer started,
actually started, when she saw them. And then, very tentatively,
with just the tip of her finger, she turned back the cover of the
passport to look at the photograph on the inside of the second
page. It was Renal’s right enough, with the seal of the Belgian
Foreign Office embossed across the lower right hand corner. It
wasn’t the sort of document a practical joker could pick up at your
local novelty store.

“Then he is dead,” she said, quite calmly—it
was impossible not to feel a certain grudging respect for the way
she was handling herself. “Either that, or he is under arrest. In
any case, you could have been the one to kill him—I think, on the
whole, that is the likelier explanation.”

“Don’t be an idiot. If I’d had him arrested,
I’d arrest you too, and I’m manifestly not interested in doing
that. And, if I’m not the police, why should I care about Jean
Renal enough to kill him? I didn’t come all this way to fool with
him.”

“Then why did you come?”

He glanced at the front window. The lunchtime
crowds were beginning to surge by, and Guinness studied their
movements for a few seconds, trying to pick out any familiar faces.
There weren’t any, but how long could it take? Someone would be by
soon enough, and all he would have to do was look in to see that
Miss Brouwer was not alone, that she was keeping most
unsatisfactory company and that steps would have to be taken.
Guinness didn’t want any steps taken—not now, not while it could
still matter.

“Not here,” he said, and took Amalia by the
arm and began pulling her toward the green curtained entrance to
the back room. For a moment she resisted; she pulled away from him
as if he were a common masher, some stranger taking a liberty. But
Guinness discovered he had very little patience with balky young
girls—he simply couldn’t be bothered—so he dug his fingers into the
soft flesh just above the inside of her elbow, where the median
nerve rested against the bone, and when her eyes began to grow
large with the pain he more or less dragged her along. She was no
trouble at all.

The stockroom was cooler than the store.
There were crates of books everywhere on the floor and two long
workbenches on either side of the entrance, on which various
posters and promotional mail were scattered. It was untidy and
private, and you could probably scream your head off without being
heard by anybody who wasn’t immediately in the next room. Guinness
pushed Amalia Brouwer over toward one of the two high stools that
stood in front of either of the workbenches. When she was perched,
she started rubbing her arm where he had held it, as if she wanted
to make him feel ashamed of being such a brute, peering out at him
suspiciously from underneath her scant eyebrows.

“Why did you come?”

Guinness grinned at her and sat down on the
other stool, wondering why they all thought their precious dignity
was so inviolate.

And then he told her—at least, he told her
some of it. He rehearsed Flycatcher’s record for her, the
particular kind of bestiality with which he had made a name for
himself, the fact that—her impressions to the contrary—the man had
no allegiance to anything except money, and that there was hard
evidence that she had been elected to take the fall on this
particular occasion.

“Figure it for yourself. Renal is dead. He’s
lying in your bedroom and you’re scheduled to disappear today, to
run off with Lover Boy to a life of indescribable happiness in the
Workers’ Paradise—that was the idea, wasn’t it? And today was to be
the big day?”

He knew he was right, had been right all
along, from the way her eyes kept glancing off his face, as if she
couldn’t bear to look at him. He only wondered why he wasn’t
feeling more satisfaction with his victory.

“What do you imagine the police will make of
it? A corpse in your boudoir and you’ve skipped out—what would you
make of it? You’re being set up, so why should they take the risk
of leaving you alive?”

She could see the logic of it; that was
obvious. She was smart enough for that. Her hands were curled in
her lap and she was watching them closely, as if imagining that
they too might somehow be brought to betray her. But the dream dies
hard.“I have nothing but your unsupported word that Jean is dead. A
passport could be manufactured to order, I imagine—it proves
nothing.” She didn’t even believe it herself.

“Then we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t
we. What time are they supposed to come and fetch you?”

She wouldn’t answer, of course; she merely
shook her head and frowned.

“By the way—what name did he use with you?
You needn’t worry that you’ll be betraying anything; it won’t have
been his real one. I shouldn’t be surprised if it’s been so long
since he used that that he’s forgotten it himself.”

The question seemed to surprise her, making
her look up from her hands and stare at him as if she were seeing
him for the first time.

“Günner—Günner Borlund. He is Swedish.”

“It may even be true.”

For a long time they said very little to each
other. They kept to their two stools, on opposite sides of the
doorway, and Guinness occupied himself with a month old copy of
Newsweek
that someone had left lying open on a stack of
mailing envelopes. There was an article on the San Francisco Bay
Area, where he had once lived, and he read it and looked at the
color photographs and experienced something like a twinge of
homesickness.

He had liked it in California—aside from
England, it was the only place he could imagine thinking of as
home. Certainly Ohio wouldn’t have qualified; he had been born
there and was twenty-one before he ever got over the state line,
but he remembered Columbus as a barren, forbidding, unhappy place
and had never been back. In this life, if you were smart, you
picked your hometowns for yourself.

Amalia Brouwer remained perfectly quiet.
Guinness had taken Janine’s shiny little automatic out of his belt
and placed it on the counter next to him. He never even looked at
it and hardly looked at her, but its mere presence seemed to be
enough to keep her anchored in her place.

“He will telephone first,” she said suddenly.
“He will not come himself and he always telephones when he sends
someone for me, so that I will know it is not a trap of some sort.
I thought perhaps I should tell you. I should hate for you to
imagine anything sinister.”

Her face was composed, but the faint timbre
of contempt was unmistakable in her voice. Well, to hell with
her.

“I promise not to jump out of my skin.” He
smiled, again not very nicely. “But before you go feeding him any
little code words or otherwise indicating your distress, you might
think to ask about Renal. Just a piece of friendly advice—you do
whatever you feel like.”

And then he went back to his magazine. And
again it was several minutes before either of them spoke.

“Why did you come?”She looked at him with
moist, unhappy eyes, almost writhing on her stool. And again, as in
the instant before he first spoke to her, she managed to draw from
him a brief spasm of pity—was there anything so terrible as doubt?
When she knew for certain that she was betrayed, even then, she
would be happier than she was at that moment, when she didn’t know
what she could trust herself to believe.

“Why have you come? Who are you that you
should care, if you are not the police? Why could you not have left
me alone?”

Well, yes. He supposed she would insist upon
knowing. And, really, he couldn’t think of any reason why she
shouldn’t know, except that it was the sort of disclosure Guinness
couldn’t help but shrink from making. It seemed almost a violation
of privacy, but he supposed Amalia Brouwer had a right to so much
of the truth as her own limitations could allow her to
understand.