The Favor (4 page)

So here was this guy with his hands in his
pockets, bold as brass. Guinness put him in his late forties—hair
already beginning to turn a purplish gray and parted a little too
close to the center to be quite fashionable, a heavy face with deep
lines around the mouth. Weary, unintelligent eyes behind a pair of
gold framed glasses—something Guinness remembered from among the
twenty some odd photographs he had been shown during his final
afternoon of briefings; at this distance, of course, he couldn’t
even be sure that the eyes weren’t simply painted on with
watercolors. He couldn’t be sure of a damn thing.

Guinness wondered if his onlooker was as
heavy as he looked in the crumpled brown suit he was wearing. What
a slob, you thought to yourself; the type who could be counted on
to fall over dead from a coronary occlusion in another eight or ten
years–too much goose liver and brown dumplings, too many happy
hours at the
Bierstube
. But that, quite probably, was one of
those carefully cultivated illusions that people in their line of
work tended to foster about themselves. It was always a good idea
to allow people to underestimate you, and the German Federal Police
doubtless made their people stay in reasonably decent shape, even
up to the level of major.

What was he waiting for, the son of a bitch?
Why didn’t he just trot right over and state his business, instead
of being so insistently cutesy and conspiratorial about it? Perhaps
he expected Guinness to go all sweaty with apprehension under that
steely gaze, or perhaps he thought that the hint would be taken and
the two of them could go off together to conduct their interview in
greater privacy. Well, in that case he would have himself a long
wait, because Guinness wasn’t visiting any dark corners with
anybody, not even with the third ranking counterintelligence
officer assigned to Munich—perhaps most especially not with
him.

Fuck the bastard. He could stand there until
his pension was due; if he wanted to chat he could come over and do
it right here, right in the Marienplatz, right in front of God and
everybody.

Guinness took a sip of his coffee—for form’s
sake more than anything, since it was stone cold. It was also
pretty nasty, and he made a face as he set the cup back down. Hell,
enough of that; it wasn’t worth poisoning himself just to look
properly nonchalant. After a while, the wasp lost interest in the
pineapple turnover and flew away.

“Professor Guinness?” announced the Slob,
having finally made up his mind to risk those few dozen yards and
introduce himself. “I am Gustav Mehring—but of course you know
that.” He crinkled his eyes into a smile, the same eyes Guinness
had remembered from the Company’s album of family portraits. “May I
sit down?”

Guinness didn’t smile back but made a short
little gesture toward the other chair, which creaked ominously
under Mehring’s weight. He didn’t speak; he would leave all that
sort of thing to the guardian of the public safety here.

Mehring took out a small flat cardboard box
of cigarettes, presumably English, and lit one, looking calmly
around at the other tables and chairs, at the front of the
restaurant and the little painted flowerbox that stood next to the
door, at anything and everything, as if he didn’t have a thing on
his mind. It was a gambit Guinness had seen millions of times, in
real life and on the late late show, and he was already bored with
the discussion that must inevitably follow. He made a small bet
with himself as to the precise phrasing of the opening question
that was shaping itself in Mehring’s head, and he was actually a
little appalled at how close he had come.

“Do you hear much from your friend Mr.
Bateman?”

Mehring smiled again, the clever fellow, and
waited patiently for Guinness’s hands to start trembling
uncontrollably. He waited quite a respectable while, and when it
didn’t happen his disappointment registered itself in the deepening
of the lines around his mouth. Nowhere else, just there.

“I don’t know you, Herr Mehring,” Guinness
answered finally, trying hard not to sound more annoyed than he
really was—after all, who did this clown think he was talking to,
Alice’s White Rabbit? “And I don’t have any friends named Bateman.
So why don’t you be a good boy and just push off—you’re blocking
the view.”

Mehring laughed—yes, it was very funny—and
used the hand that held his cigarette to indicate his dismissal of
these preliminary maneuvers. It was a gesture very like the one
Bateman had made while he sat on the carpet in his hotel room,
bargaining about the terms upon which he would die, a little wave
that almost wasn’t any more than a spasm of the fingers.“Come now,
Professor Guinness. Your fame has preceded you. We know of your
government’s displeasure with Mr. Bateman, and we assume that you
were sent to our beautiful city expressly to—how shall I say it?—to
communicate that displeasure to him, in the strongest possible
terms.”

The waiter came outside again, and Mehring
signaled to him and ordered a cup of coffee for himself. When it
was on the table in front of him, he stubbed out his cigarette in
the metal ashtray about halfway between his place and Guinness’s
and lifted the cup to his lips. He seemed to like it, which wasn’t
very surprising; it looked like it was under about an inch and a
half of whipped cream.

“We have a witness who saw you leaving Mr.
Bateman’s hotel late last evening,” he went on, in a lowered voice
since the waiter hadn’t yet gone back inside. “And as it happens we
found Mr. Bateman—the late Mr. Bateman—early this morning. The
police surgeon estimates that he had been dead for approximately
nine hours, which means that his passing must have taken place at
very nearly the same moment you were seen in the lobby.”

He was having such a wonderful time, was this
one; he pressed the palms of his hands together and smiled tightly,
apparently from sheer excess of smothered glee. It was funny that
somehow counterespionage never seemed to bring out the best in
people.

“A lovely hotel, the Bayerischer Hof—don’t
you agree? They were so shocked at the size of the bill Mr. Bateman
was leaving unpaid, and by the fact that not so much as a ten mark
note was left in his wallet when the body was taken away—I rather
suspect that was something they had established for themselves
while they were waiting for us to arrive—so shocked, in fact, that
we thought it best not to communicate to them any of our
suspicions.”

For a moment Herr Mehring fell perfectly
silent; he stared down at his coffee cup as if he had lost the
thread of what he was saying and was waiting until it came back to
him. Then all at once he looked up reproachfully at Guinness,
pushing his eyebrows together as he frowned.

“And I ask you, Professor Guinness—this man
is found dead and an assassin of your reputation is directly on the
premises. What were we to think?”

Guinness in his turn frowned, wondering why
it was that the only time anyone ever seemed to call him
“professor” was when they wanted to needle him.

“How did he die?”

It seemed an obvious enough question,
considering the circumstances. But Mehring looked as if he had just
been asked to guess the exact weight in grams of the entire
Bundesrepublik, Volkswagens and all. For perhaps as long as five
seconds the coffee cup, which he had been raising to his lips, hung
perfectly motionless in the air.

“Come on, Mehring—did somebody shoot him, was
he struck by a bolt of lightning? How did he die?”

Separately, and with elaborate care, Guinness
repronounced each of the four syllables of his question. It didn’t
seem to help, however; all he got was the same puzzled stare, as if
Mehring couldn’t understand why anyone would be interested in the
sordid details, as if his policeman’s brains were being turned into
vanilla pudding by the effort of trying. It was then that Guinness
himself understood that nobody could care less about Mr. Bateman,
dead or alive, that the corpse over which some chambermaid had
stumbled in the small hours of the morning was nothing more than a
pretext.

The clock on the Rathaus tower said twenty
minutes to one. In all likelihood they hadn’t even done the
preliminary autopsy yet, and, even if they knew what they were
looking for—which, unless the people in Guinness’s shop who
provided him with these gizmos didn’t know what they were talking
about, they didn’t—it would take them days and days of spinning
down emulsified tissue samples before they found anything
inconsistent with the theory that Bateman had died of cardiac
arrest. So the police didn’t have any hard evidence that there had
even been a crime committed, let alone a case against Guinness. And
God knows they wouldn’t have come within shouting distance of him
without at least that much, not if they meant business.Guinness
could feel himself beginning to relax—Mehring at least wasn’t going
to try anything as vulgar as arresting him. No, he was here on
other business. Bateman simply provided him with a context, a
plausible excuse for walking up to a known American agent, bold as
brass, and sitting down for a spot of coffee and a little chin wag,
something that might otherwise have raised a few eyebrows among the
cognoscenti
.

Fine. Wonderful. So what did he want?

Mehring allowed his cup to sink back into its
saucer, and the lines grew deep again around his mouth. He wasn’t
ready to say yet, it was clear; he wasn’t finished playing Dick
Tracy.

“Doubtless you and others like you feel quite
free to come here and murder one another at your leisure. The
natives, of course, would not dare to object.”

Possibly only the reappearance of the waiter
at that moment kept Mehring from losing his temper; the force with
which he pressed his flattened hand against the tabletop, as if
this action somehow held him down as well, was enough to suggest
how close they had come to something ugly.

Guinness signed to have his place cleared and
took a twenty mark note from his billfold, and the waiter, picking
up the plate that held the two nearly untouched turnovers, frowned
and inquired whether everything had been satisfactory. By the time
he returned with Guinness’s change on a little metal salver,
everything seemed to have smoothed itself out.

“I keep telling you, I don’t know any
Batemans,” Guinness said quietly, not even bothering to look up
from counting out the tip he would leave behind; he wanted to see
how far he could push Mehring. It wasn’t purely malicious—it would
be worth something to find out how badly everyone wanted to stay on
their best behavior. When he knew that, he would be a good deal
closer to knowing where he stood.

A woman walked by, carrying a tiny pearl gray
poodle under her arm like a handbag. She was a knockout—about
thirty and wearing a knitted dress that stretched itself pleasingly
over her can, which Mehring watched recede down the pedestrian mall
exactly as if he didn’t have another thing in the round world to
hold his attention. Maybe he didn’t.

“Yes, of course,” he said finally, tearing
himself away from that retreating vision. “But you have so many
friends in Munich that we needn’t talk about Mr. Bateman if the
subject distresses you.”He got up out of his chair, looking as
bulky and soft as an animated sleeping bag, and dropped a .couple
of silver coins on the table. The visit was apparently drawing to
its conclusion.

“In fact, you have a friend who wishes to see
you very much.” The tight little smile returned to his face, but
this time it registered a peculiar urgency, the urgency of a
whispered entreaty. “It is not a trap of any kind—I am not stupid
enough for that.”

. . . . .

But Guinness wasn’t taking any chances. He
went back to his room and left a coded message where it would be
found by certain interested parties if he didn’t phone in within a
day or so, just to prove he was alive. He wanted people to know, if
he didn’t happen to get back, just where he had gone, and at whose
invitation. Mehring understood all this and, like a sensible man,
wasn’t interested in bringing down the wrath of God upon himself.
It was such little arrangements and understandings that kept you
alive in this business.

He turned away from the picture of the girl
in the Turkish jacket, wondering if, after all, coming here hadn’t
been rather stupid. After all, he wasn’t paid to respond to
mysterious invitations from German policemen. All he was doing,
really, was satisfying his curiosity, and the United States
government didn’t pay him to be curious. Uncovering secrets was
what they had the CIA for—if, indeed, they had it for anything.

One minute to two—no, forty-five seconds. To
hell with it, he would give whoever it was another five minutes and
then he was clearing out.

There was a fireplace in the gallery, made of
rust colored marble flecked here and there with green. It was quite
a production, with a fancy screen and andirons decorated with gold
statuettes of the Sphinx. On the mantle was a gold clock with glass
sides so you could watch the movement, except that the thing wasn’t
running. Probably nobody had bothered to wind it since the end of
the last century.

As he walked back and forth on the hardwood
floor, Guinness imagined that the sound of his footsteps could have
awakened the dead.

When he turned around he noticed that there
was someone else in the room. He was standing with his back turned,
apparently admiring the portrait of a woman in a severe black dress
and wearing a red flower over her ear. He was holding his hat in
his left hand and he had lost most of his hair; what was left had
obviously once been red but had grown sandy. Guinness couldn’t
imagine he was more than an inch or two over five feet—and he also
couldn’t imagine how he had gotten so far inside the door without
being heard.