The Favor (30 page)

“Remember, twenty minutes. And for Christ’s
sake don’t be noisy on the stairs.”

She nodded, and Guinness took her big brown
leather pocketbook and dropped the car keys inside before giving it
back to her.

“You’d better know now, if anything happens,
and you end up making this trip by yourself, the man you want in
Düsseldorf is Teddy MacKaye. He’s a God only knows what in the
American consulate there, and you don’t want to talk to anybody
else. He’s been briefed, so he knows you’re coming. Tell him the
Soldier sends his regrets but he was detained by other business. I
hope to God you know how to drive.”

She nodded, very serious about it all, and
pulled the pocketbook up close against her side.

“Will I be going by myself?” she asked.
Guinness could only shrug his shoulders, as if the question were of
no particular importance.

“Could be. If somebody else opens the door,
you just run. Don’t be sentimental; don’t wait around to see how
things work out. These goons know what you look like and they’re
the worst enemies you’ve got in the world. You just run like blue
blazes.”

So they put their little plan into operation.
Separating at the car, they converged on the front entrance of
Janine’s apartment building from opposite ends of the block—to the
casual eye they were strangers, just a man inquiring the time from
a woman he had never seen before—and that was how they began their
countdown. Twenty minutes to go. No more, no less.

Guinness turned into the next doorway. He
tried to keep from running up the stairwell, hoping all the time he
wouldn’t bump into anyone. He didn’t want to be noticed—he had less
than twenty minutes, now, and if a suspicious janitor or someone
had tried to detain him it would have been hard cheese for them. He
just couldn’t have afforded the time it takes to explain anything
to anyone, so he tried to act like he belonged there and not to
make either more or less noise than one might expect from, say, the
Fuller Brush Man.

Predictably, the door to the roof was locked.
The stairwell was an open affair, so if the residents of either of
the two apartments on the fifth floor had opened their doors and
looked out to see who was there they would have been able to catch
a glimpse of his legs, from about the knees down, through the
painted metal balustrade. Guinness tried to pick the lock as fast
as he could—he didn’t relish the prospect of shooting any
inquisitive Dutch grandmothers, but tying people up with the
drapery cords just takes too long.

Voila! He was a genius, a credit to his
profession. Twentythree seconds and the latch tongue clicked back
and the door yielded stiffly under his hand. A new world’s record.
Three minutes and fifty-seven seconds and he was on the roof.

The two buildings were flush up against each
other—you couldn’t have slipped a knife blade in between: all that
separated them was a low retaining wall. The roof on both sides was
composition, just gravel and tar.

Guinness sat down on the wall and took off
his shoes. Walking around on that junk in his stocking feet wasn’t
going to be much of a thrill, but Janine’s apartment was directly
underneath now and he didn’t want the bad guys to hear him through
the ceiling. His shoes were the great thick soled clodhoppers that
she had found so frightfully amusing, and he wasn’t sure quite what
to do with them—he could hardly stuff them into his jacket pockets:
they’d be no end of in the way. Finally he decided to leave them
behind. If he was still alive in half an hour he could always come
up and get them, and if he wasn’t he wouldn’t care how silly his
corpse might look in stocking feet.

The roof was hot from the afternoon sun: it
was like walking across a pancake griddle, except that a pancake
griddle would at least have been smooth. Guinness had the pleasure
of the gravel as well. He kept to the edge on the theory that it
would be quieter than going directly across the center. The tar was
sticky and clinging to his socks for dear life as he made his
cautious way.

All in all, it wasn’t turning out to be a
very pleasant experience.

When he had made it to the rear of the
building and could look out over the edge to Janine’s balcony, he
thought for a couple of seconds that he might just faint dead
away.

Even just to the top of the parapet, which,
praise be, was a nice, solid, flat, cement structure, was at least
an eight foot drop, without a thing in the world to hang onto
except the top of the retaining wall. Guinness was just under six
foot two, and he had to get down there without making a sound and
if he screwed up, or if the wind blew just the wrong way at the
wrong moment, there was an unobstructed plunge of probably fifty
feet to the sidewalk below. He didn’t have any very clear idea of
the chances of surviving a fifty foot fall, but he didn’t imagine
they were spectacular. And it had looked so easy from the
ground.

He checked his watch and, with a few seconds
thrown in for heart failure, he had been on the roof for a shade
over four minutes. He had twelve minutes left, and he had to think.
God, the idea of falling scared the shit out of him—it always had;
he hated high places. He wished to hell he hadn’t struck on a line
of work that was forever requiring him to play the human fly. It
was very little to his taste.

The balcony was only three or four feet wider
than the glass doors through which it was entered—if somebody was
in Janine’s bedroom, and if they happened to be standing anywhere
near the middle, it wouldn’t be much of a trick for them to catch
sight of him. Probably he couldn’t figure on more than about a foot
of concealment. If they saw him he was dead meat.

There wasn’t anywhere to go; there wouldn’t
be any hiding places.

So he would have to stay as close to the edge
as he could manage, coming down as noiselessly as possible on the
parapet and clinging to the wall for dear life until he could lower
himself to the balcony.

He reached down and tried to coat his hands a
little with the roof tar, just enough to let him hold on a trifle
better. God, what he wouldn’t have given for seven or eight feet of
rope—there was even a drainage pipe he could have tied it to,
making everything easy—and all he had in that line was a silk
necktie.

He let his legs dangle out over the edge,
hoping no one would look up from the street and decide to report
him as an attempted suicide (maybe that was actually what he was!),
and then twisted around so that the top of the retaining wall was
against his stomach. Then slowly, very slowly, he let himself down,
feeling with his toes against the brickwork, hoping that some
miracle would make the parapet a few inches higher for him. He was
all the way over, with just his fingers hooked over the top of the
wall, when, with the big toe of his left foot, he felt a flat,
horizontal surface.

Once, twice, three times he touched it,
feeling for the outer edge—everything depended on not coming down
on that edge and turning an ankle—and then, taking a gulp of air
and holding it, he let himself fall.

Even with the top of the parapet under his
feet, the sense that he would go right over and down to the
sidewalk surged through him in great waves of panic, and he pressed
himself to the wall, not daring to open his eyes.

And then he stepped down to the balcony, and
it was over. He could hardly believe it. He felt like he hadn’t
drawn a breath in half an hour.

Janine’ s little automatic was in his back
pocket. He took it out and snicked off the safety, holding it
straight up and close to his body. He hadn’t looked in through the
curtains yet; he just kept his back to the wall, where he couldn’t
be seen from inside, trying to take up as little space as possible,
and listened.

There were cars down on the street—he could
hear them plain enough—and the wind at five floors up made a dull
hissing sound, but there was nothing from inside. He pushed back
the sleeve of his jacket to look at his watch; he had seven minutes
left before Amalia Brouwer started to pound on the front door.

There was no point in being subtle about it;
if there was somebody in the bedroom, and he was looking in the
right direction, he could see you just as easily even if you rose
up out of the ground in a puff of smoke. So Guinness simply stepped
out in front of the glass doors, crowded as far back against the
parapet as he could to be out of the way of flying glass in case he
should have to shoot.

Except for the body on the bed, there was
nobody there. You can expect a thing, you can tell yourself it’s
going to happen, and it can still manage to stop your heart.
Guinness knew the rules, knew that in his profession people didn’t
bother about tying up their prisoners in neat little packages, all
trussed and gagged so they could kick themselves loose in half an
hour. In his league it was no longer a game, and the sanctity of
human life wasn’t very high on anybody’s list of abstract moral
values—he wasn’t drawing any fine distinctions; he might well have
done the same himself.

Still, somehow it hit him hard that they
should have killed Janine,

Her face was turned slightly away from him,
and the bed was on the other side of the unlit room, but even
through the gauze curtains he could see that it was Janine and that
she was dead. She had that abandoned look that the dead always seem
to have, and Guinness felt the reproach.

Alone in her bedroom, her slender little life
gone, the victim of strangers—he should have found a way to have
spared her this final indignity. He couldn’t even tell her he was
sorry.

The two glass doors were held together with a
little latch; Guinness slipped one of his long, thin lock picks
between them and pushed it up until it popped loose from its slot.
He entered the room without so much as a hinge squeaking.

The first thing that assaulted him was the
smell. He couldn’t remember anything like it, a peculiar compound
of sweat and fear and something else he couldn’t place, a kind of
acrid stain in the air, something you could almost see.

And then, of course, he understood.

Janine’s sweater was half torn away and her
skirt was bunched up around her waist, but somehow that was to be
expected. Her mouth showed traces of blood at the corners, where
she had fought against the gag. They had tied her to her bed—her
feet were sticking out between the brass rails of the footboard,
and on her face was an expression of agony such as even the dead
are usually spared. She had suffered before they had finally gotten
bored and one of them had pressed the muzzle of a small bore pistol
against her temple and put her out of her misery, and what she had
suffered had had little enough to do with whatever sexual
indignities she might have endured.

It was still lying on the floor, a small
electric iron of the kind you could zip into its cloth traveling
bag and take along in your suitcase. A homely little domestic item
with which they had gone over the soles of her feet.

From the look of them, they had worked on her
for a long time—God, it was a miracle they had even found it
necessary to shoot her; it was a miracle, a grotesque joke, that
anyone could go through all that and not have the good fortune to
die of it. Guinness felt his heart beating against his ribs like a
captured animal throwing itself wildly against the bars of its
cage. She couldn’t have been dead more than an hour.

Her eyes were still open. She seemed to be
looking at nothing but her own despair. I tried, she seemed to be
saying to the wall. I tried, but I couldn’t stand it anymore.
Guinness brought down the lids with the first finger and the thumb
of his right hand.And then, quite suddenly, he no longer cared
anything about his precious battle plan. In something like four
minutes Amalia Brouwer was supposed to stand out in the hallway and
knock, and that was supposed to provide the necessary moment of
distraction that might give him a jump on whoever was waiting out
there beyond Janine’s bedroom door—oh yes, they had closed the
bedroom door; possibly the smell bothered them.

But none of that seemed to matter anymore.
Four minutes was simply too long to have to wait, and Guinness
didn’t care how many of Flycatcher’s troops were sitting around in
the kitchen drinking tea. He didn’t care about having an edge; he
just wanted to kill as many of them as possible before they could
bring him down. To hell with Amalia Brouwer and her goddamned
distraction. Somehow it simply wasn’t going to wait any longer.

Just to redefine for himself the way it was
supposed to feel in his hand, Guinness flexed his fingers around
the butt of Janine’s automatic—her silly little nickel plated toy,
which he had yet even to fire, so at least she would be getting
that much of her own back. And then, with an angry, wordless, half
smothered challenge on his lips, he kicked open the bedroom
door.

The man sitting at the breakfast table waited
just an instant too long to reach for the Luger that was lying
beside his coffee cup. He wasn’t going to make it; he probably knew
that, but he didn’t have the presence of mind not to try. Guinness
smiled at him as he pulled the trigger—he wouldn’t have had it any
other way. He shot him twice, not even hearing the report, only
feeling the automatic twitch in his hand as two small red stains
sprang up on the man’s shirtfront.

He recognized him now—it was one of the men
from the train. One of the Oregon schoolteachers, the tall one who
had never had much to say for himself.

So that was how they had known.

The schoolteacher was thrown back against his
chair, pitching over onto the floor and leaving the Luger still
lying on the table.

Guinness had stopped paying attention as soon
as he had fired, twisting around in a sharp, quick ducking motion
as he turned to cover the rest of the room.