The Favor (3 page)

He let it rest at that for the moment. You
can overplay these things, and he wanted Bateman to have time to
think. He wanted him to imagine how his dead body would look lying
on the carpet in a pool of curdled blood, with his eyes still open
and a hole in the side of his head the size of your foot. He wanted
Bateman to think about the wife and the teenage children back in
Nebraska, whom he had wronged.

“On the other hand, if we could manage a nice
heart attack. . .”

The ash on Bateman’s cigarette was nearly an
inch long. He seemed to have forgotten all about it, although he
appeared to be looking right at it as he studied both his hands
very carefully as they lay in his lap. You could hear his
breathing, fast and shallow, and suddenly he swallowed painfully
hard. There wasn’t any mystery about it; he was suffering through
that purely physical fear of death that doesn’t give a damn about
how there isn’t anything left to live for, that just wants to
live.

Then he looked up again, straight into
Guinness’s face, and the inner struggle seemed to be largely
over.

“You can arrange that?” It almost wasn’t a
question at all. It was almost nothing more than a statement of
fact, something to be borne with whatever limited stores of nerve a
man might have left.

Guinness nodded, hating himself—hating
Bateman for having brought it all down to this. “I have something
right here in my pocket. It leaves no trace, and I’m told it
doesn’t even hurt. Fifteen, twenty seconds, and it’s all over.

“But it’s going to cost you.”

. . . . .

When the thing was finished, Guinness stepped
out into the empty corridor and closed the hotel room door quietly
behind himself. No one would see him leave; no one would know what
had happened. The whole thing would be nothing more than another
shadow cast across the screen of memory, and, eventually, not even
that.

“I can’t tell you his name,” Bateman had
said. “I never heard it. I only met him the one time, but I don’t
imagine I’ll forget him.” He flicked the long ash from his
cigarette, smiling at the absurdity of what, without really
thinking, he had seemed to imply. As if he would have time now to
forget anything.

“He was tall. Six two, six three, something
like that. About my age, but he gave the impression that he took
care of himself, and he looked a lot younger. Very thin, very
tan—you know the type. A snazzy dresser. Short hair, almost
white.

“It’s not much, but it’s all there is.”
Bateman lifted his palms from his thighs and turned them over, as
if to show that they were empty. “I hope it’s enough. Do you know
who he is?”

Guinness’s eyes narrowed as he remembered a
man he had seen once in the lobby of a hotel in South Carolina. A
tall, thin man with hair the color of bone. He remembered the
photograph of a little girl, with a pattern like the cross hairs of
a rifle sight traced around her head. He thought about the men he
had had to kill to keep that little girl alive, about how one of
them had looked with the back of his head shot away. He already had
reasons enough of his own for wanting to close the file on this
particular skinny, white haired bastard, and now Bateman, who was
shortly to join the other ghosts who haunted whatever little scraps
of free time Guinness could spare for the consideration of his
sins, now Bateman had given him one more.

“I don’t know his name either,” he almost
whispered. Somehow he couldn’t seem to bring himself to look
Bateman in the face, so he looked at the carpet instead. “I’m not
even sure he’s got a regular name, but in his file they call him
‘Flycatcher’.”

And so it was done. Bateman was dead, having
settled his bill in the only way remaining to him, and Guinness
left him behind in his room and took the stairs down to the main
lobby. As he walked along he touched an envelope in the breast
pocket of his coat; it was thick with hundred dollar bills.
Tomorrow he would wrap them in a couple of sheets of stationery, so
that larcenous postal clerks wouldn’t be able to tell what the
envelope contained, and drop it in the mail.Within the week
thirty-five hundred dollars, along with a little note of apology
Bateman had somehow felt called upon to write, would arrive in
Nebraska. That had been part of the deal, and Guinness was disposed
to keep his word.

He checked his watch. The dining room was
still open, but the appetite was gone. He thought perhaps he would
simply go back to his own hotel and go to bed.

2

In the Nymphenburg Palace there was a gallery
hung with the portraits of beautiful women—beautiful, at least, by
the standards of the 1840s, by the standards, apparently, of Ludwig
I, who had had an affair with Lola Montez and whose judgment in
such matters ought therefore to carry some weight. Chubby pink
faces with long noses, milk white shoulders, hair done up in loose
romantic clusters of curls, that sort of thing. There was one
dressed in a Turkish jacket of cloth of gold, wearing a red fez
with a long black tassel that reached all the way down to her
bosom. She looked uncomfortable, and her half closed eyes seemed to
register a peculiar mingling of boredom and something that might,
had she been only a few years older, have been interpreted as
regret.

Guinness frowned at her, not really seeing
anything, wondering what the hell he thought he was up to, stalking
around from one room full of gaudy antique furniture to the next,
like a goddamned tourist. He had already missed his flight out to
Rome, where he was supposed to hole up and live the life of the
quiet, unobtrusive, virtually invisible vacationing academician
that was his cover, until the clever lads back home found him
another mess to clean up. He didn’t like hanging around like this
after a job. It made him nervous.And he didn’t like palaces—big
rooms gave him the creeps.

“Two this afternoon,” Mehring had said.
“There will be no difficulty with the identification—you will know
him at once.”

Guinness disliked Mehring, as much as it was
possible to dislike someone who was virtually a stranger. In
Mehring’s case, that turned out to be a great deal. Quite enough,
in fact, for present purposes.

Aside from the enormous social disadvantage
of being a policeman, Mehring was one of those people who try to
create the impression that, really, they know everything there is
to know about you, that of course it’s perfectly pointless to
imagine you could have any secrets from them. It was a bad habit,
very annoying to other people and likely to bring one to grief.

Two o’clock. Guinness checked his watch and
confirmed that he still had about ten minutes to wait. When he was
finished here he would drive back to town and have his lunch; he
had slept late that morning and breakfast, such as it was, had been
around noon, so he wasn’t particularly hungry. Lunch could wait a
little longer.

And then, no later than this evening, it
would have to be on to Rome. It wouldn’t do to hang around for
another day, for all that Mehring had practically given him a free
pass.

Guinness would be sorry to leave; he liked
Munich. This had been the first trip in nearly eleven years, and
then only for four days. He liked the cooking, and particularly the
desserts. You couldn’t touch the Germans when it came to junk
food.

In one corner of the Marienplatz, all the way
across the square from the Town Hall so you had an unobstructed
view of the revolving figures in the clock tower, there was a tiny
restaurant that provided outdoor service when the weather permitted
and seemed to specialize in desserts. You could sit at a little
circular iron table, in a chair backed with colored plastic tubing,
and watch the world go by as you drank your morning coffee and
nibbled at pillow shaped, brittle pastries, glazed with honey until
they were brown as mahogany and filled to bursting with lemon curd
the consistency of library paste, or sweetened raspberries.
Guinness had remembered the place from the days when he
criss-crossed Europe in the service of MI-6, always stopping off in
Munich for a day if he had the chance; the restaurant was still
there, after all these years. Even the menu was the same.

It had rained early in the morning, and the
streets were still wet when Guinness left his hotel. The awnings
over the shop windows ran like rivers and forced him to step off
the sidewalk to keep from getting wet; so, for all that the sun was
out in force and already making the air gray with humidity, he was
afraid he would have to eat inside. He needn’t have worried—as he
approached he could see one of the waiters, a fat blond walrus of a
man in a white apron that reached almost to the tops of his shoes,
wiping off the last of the chairs with a towel. He smiled when he
saw Guinness, who was a big tipper and with whom he carried on
short conversations in an almost unintelligible mixture of
languages, and gave the chair one final flick with his towel as he
pantomimed an invitation to sit down in it.

“Wvat vill you like
zu essen heute Morgen,
mein Herr
?” he asked, showing his teeth, two of which were
covered with gleaming gold crowns, in a ferocious grin. “
Etwas
Kaffee, nicht wahr
?
Und
you vill like for to look
an
dem Tablett mit Gebäck
?”

He held out his arms, as if supporting a
monstrous pastry tray, and the grin grew positively
wolfish.Guinness ordered a cup of coffee and took two plump
turnovers from a huge plate covered with a paper doily.

“You vill like ein
Herald Tribune
?
Über Amerikanischen Fussball zu lesen
!” The waiter pressed
the tips of his plump fingers together and his eyebrows shot up
almost into his hairline, but they didn’t play football in the
middle of June and, besides, Guinness wasn’t a fan. He shook his
head and smiled.

“
Nein, eh
?” You could feel the man’s
disappointment as he readjusted the carefully starched and folded
napkin that was draped over his forearm and sauntered back inside
the restaurant. Guinness’s indifference to “
Amerikanischen
Fussball
” was an unchanging mystery to him and seemed to rank
as one of the major misfortunes of his professional life.

Guinness fished a paperback edition of
Mansfield Park
out of the pocket of his raincoat, but he
didn’t attempt to read it. Instead, he set it down next to the
delicate white plate upon which his turnovers lay and watched the
midday crowds beginning to form across the square in front of the
Rathaus. They were very patient and would wait quietly until the
clock in the tower struck noon and the mechanical figures began to
move around and around through an elaborate double tiered opening,
almost like one theatrical proscenium on top of another, at about
the roofline.

Guinness had seen the spectacle every day for
the past three. It had seemed to hold some inexplicable charm for
Harry Bateman, and so the two of them had witnessed it together,
dozens of yards apart in that silent crush of people, every
day.

But Guinness didn’t want to think about Harry
Bateman, and so he didn’t. He had slept fine last night and he felt
just wonderful this morning. The thing was done and he had a little
stretch of free time in front of him, to be spent in the Eternal
City, where he could walk around the Forum counting the pull tabs
from the Coca-Cola cans until his masters found something else for
him to do, and so he pushed Harry Bateman from his mind.

An old woman shuffled by, stout as a beer
barrel in her heavy cloth coat, carrying a net shopping bag that
seemed to contain nothing except oranges. A couple of blond
schoolgirls in their uniforms—skin like butter! A kid about twenty
with a long, dark brown beard, of the sort you would have called a
hippie ten years ago but who went unnoticed today. Some clown of
about fifty in a pair of Lederhosen and a green felt hunting cap
with a brush in the band. Several Japanese tourists, all of
approximately uniform height. The waiter stood by the entrance of
his restaurant, pulling at the fringe of his moustache, his eyes
vacant and dreamy.

Guinness picked up one of his turnovers and
tasted it, discovering that it was pineapple. When he had lived in
California with his late second wife, pineapples had been a dime a
dozen, but in Europe, so he understood, they were considered
distinctly luxurious and had to be imported from Africa. The
turnover, therefore, qualified as something of a lucky hit. He took
another bite, chewing it slowly and thinking about California and
about how long ago all that seemed now. He discovered that his
coffee had grown cold and signaled to the waiter to bring him
another cup. It was five minutes until noon.

By the time the chimes in the clock tower had
finished ringing, the second cup of coffee was already probably no
more than lukewarm and still untasted. There was a wasp showing a
marked interest in the half eaten pineapple turnover, and Guinness
kept perfectly still as it wavered about in the air and finally
came to settle on his plate, allowing it to proceed unmolested with
its agile reconnaissance of the pulpy, whitish yellow filling. He
had lost all appetite for breakfast himself and couldn’t see much
reason for begrudging the wasp.

A couple of dozen yards away, leaning against
the stone fence around the memorial column to the Virgin that
occupied the center of the square, a man was watching him. He
didn’t make any bones about it; he obviously didn’t mind a bit if
Guinness noticed. He was simply watching, with his hands shoved
down into the pockets of his trousers.

There had been no tail that morning. There
had been no tail at all, not since he had arrived from the States
three days before; Guinness didn’t have a doubt in the world about
that. You were very careful about such things if you wanted to stay
alive, and Guinness was a very careful fellow. They would have
known he was in town, of course–the “they” encompassing a whole
range of people with all sorts of unpleasant motives—you simply
assumed that. They weren’t stupid, and airport and train terminals
were regularly watched. Probably the police had some sort of
arrangement with the hotels, and probably they weren’t the only
ones. After a couple of years, you gradually abandoned the
comforting illusion that somehow you were invisible. But nobody had
been wandering around in Guinness’s shadow while he had escorted
friend Bateman on their tour of the city. Guinness had eyes in the
back of his head for stuff like that, and there hadn’t been a
soul.