The Favor (40 page)
“Not a clue, Ernie.”
Not a clue—except that this last action of
Emil Kätzner’s life had all the resolute clarity of a stage drama.
It was classical tragedy, Oedipus gouging out his eyes in self
inflicted retribution. It had that kind of grand and pitiless
logic. The poor bastard.
“
We must bear the consequences of the ways
we have chosen for ourselves,”
he had said.
There is very
little point in pretending to be the victims of circumstance,
because what is that but the sum of what we have done with our
lives?”
The poor bastard.
Had he been meant to see that sheet of paper
with his child’s name on it? Had they hoodwinked him into betraying
the loyalty of a lifetime, into taking his own life because he
couldn’t support the tension between his duty to the child of his
middle age and to the cause of his passionate and romantic youth?
Or had he known what they were doing, and had his suicide been
simply a gesture of defiance, a refusal to be robbed of his
integrity?
To know when to play the fool and when to
laugh.
Well, those were his secrets, not Guinness’s.
They would remain his secrets. They were no one else’s. Guinness
had played his part, had stood in the lobby of the American
consulate and watched the sole survivor leave for the 6:04 flight
to New York on her way to the beaches of the California coast line,
that last perimeter of the Western world. Let her lose herself in
some harmless oblivion where mortal gestures are as
incomprehensible as the language of a vanished race.
He waited until the door had clicked shut
behind her, and then he turned on his heel and retreated back to
Teddy MacKaye’s office. He would be leaving himself tomorrow
afternoon, and Teddy had said something about making the rounds
together before Guinness pushed off. Teddy wasn’t a bad sort.
Middlemarch
could wait a little longer.
NICHOLAS GUILD
was born in 1944 in Belmont, California. He received a B.A. degree
in English from Occidental College in Los Angeles and an M.A. in
Comparative Literature and a Ph.D. in English from the University
of California at Berkeley. Since then he has divided his time
between teaching and writing. He is the author of critical articles
on 17
th
Century poetry and 20
th
Century
fiction, along with twelve novels, several of which have been
international best sellers and which have been translated into
German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Greek and Czech.
Presently he lives in Frederick, MD
Visit his website:
http://www.nicholasguild.com/
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Guild at Smashwords.com:
