The Favor (5 page)

Mehring, you hypocritical bastard—Guinness
smiled to himself at the scorn with which Munich’s sworn protector
regarded foreign assassins. Apparently, selling your services to
the enemies of your country was quite another matter entirely.
Mehring the messenger boy, the Herr Colonel’s faithful dog.

It was him right enough, right on the button.
Guinness retraced his steps, not worrying a bit about the noise,
until the two of them were abreast, at opposite ends of the wall.
Guinness didn’t try to be cagey, didn’t pretend he was interested
in pictures; he just wanted to make sure that this was the right
one—after all, lots of men are short with thinning red hair, and it
had been a good fifteen years. But still, there was something. .
.

There hadn’t been any mistake. It was he. In
profile you could still see the same blunt, Slavic features—the
eyes were narrow, almost Oriental, as he studied the portrait of
the girl with the red flower—the same copper moustache, long and
thick and trimmed perfectly straight, even at the ends. Perhaps he
dyed the moustache; probably it wouldn’t have looked so imposing if
it had been allowed to go gray with the rest.Up until then he
hadn’t seemed to notice Guinness, but all at once he turned and
smiled, exactly the way he had smiled fifteen years ago, when that
smile had been something you needed if you wanted to think you
might have a chance to stay healthy. Guinness had never known his
name, but names hadn’t been terribly important—the little silver
symbols of rank on the shoulders of an officer’s jacket had told
you everything you needed to know about him. And anyway, this one
wasn’t anybody you were ever likely to forget.

He jerked his head a little to one side,
apparently inviting Guinness to follow him to some less exposed
location, and as Guinness came along beside him, and they began
walking together toward the doorway, he felt a small hand slip
inside his elbow, precisely as if they were accustomed to taking
little strolls like this every day of their lives.

“So, my young friend, I see you have grown
quite middle aged.” He laughed and made a gesture toward one of the
stairways leading to an apparently endless formal garden that
stretched out behind the Palace. “Let us go along the canal to the
King’s little hunting lodge. It is very lovely through there, and
very private, and when we have finished we can admire the silver
moldings on the ceiling of His Majesty’s rustic bedchamber—when I
was a student, you know, I used to come here and stare open
mouthed, for hours together. I had never seen anything like it; I
think that, more than anything, is what induced me to become a
Communist. Come, just through here.”

3

The train for Amsterdam left at a quarter to
six in the evening, so there wouldn’t be any time to sit down for
dinner. Guinness made just one quick stop at his hotel to pick up
his suitcase from the concierge and then took a taxi straight to
the station. Maybe he could grab a bite there.

On the drive back to town, Colonel Kätzner
had given him the ticket—“An impertinence,” he had said, smiling;
“of course, I could hardly be sure you would agree, but sometimes
it is more important to be prepared for success than for
failure”—and had apologized like crazy because he could only take
him as far as the Lenbach Platz. “Doubtless they are watching your
rooms, and it would not be well for either of us to be seen with
the other, but you will have no difficulty from here.”

And he hadn’t. The sign at the end of his
platform indicated another twenty-five minutes to departure time,
so he hunted up a phone booth and put through a collect call to a
certain number in Stuttgart.

“This is Soldier,” he announced crisply,
knowing from experience that nothing attracts attention like a
whisper. “I leave from track four in. . .” He checked his watch
against the huge clock over one of the ticket windows and
discovered that he was nearly two minutes fast. “ . . .In
twentyfour minutes. Tell Ernie to keep his shirt on—it’s purely a
personal matter. I’ll let you know when the smoke clears.”

He hung up, frowning at the receiver under
his hand and wondering whether Ernie would be a good boy and take
“no” for an answer. It didn’t seem likely. They wanted to own you,
those guys; it gave them hot flashes if you blew your nose without
permission. Well, they’d know where to find him if it came to that.
But would it come to that?

“It came to that a long time ago,” he had
told Kätzner, walking beside him down a meticulously maintained
pathway that ran parallel to one of the canals in the Nymphenburg
Gardens—not even a leaf had been allowed to settle on the flat,
mahogany ground. “You know how they are with field men.”

That had made Kätzner laugh. He had thrown
back his head and almost brayed, because, of course, he knew all
about how they were with field men. It amounted almost to a family
joke.

“I shouldn’t imagine they will give you very
much trouble—I shouldn’t imagine they would dare.” And that was
also, apparently, a family joke.

There were a pair of huge swans floating on
the green water, weightless, exactly as if they had been spun out
of the air. Kätzner stopped to look at them, and at the little
blond boy and his mother who were perhaps eight or ten yards ahead
of them along the pathway, just where the swans glided on their
canal. He glanced at Guinness and smiled, as if he expected
something interesting to happen.

The little boy couldn’t have been more than
two or three—Guinness was no judge of children’s ages—with the kind
of transparently fair skin that makes you imagine that if you
poured warm water over him he would probably dissolve. His mother,
if that was who she was, was a heavy, indolent looking young woman,
and she seemed not to be paying any attention when the boy ran down
to the water’s edge and bent forward at the waist, as if to pick up
something. But the swans noticed. They were very close, and the one
nearer the bank flared its wings in menace and darted its head this
way and that on its long, serpentine neck, hissing like an adder.
It was quite a spectacle—you tend to forget how huge they are—and
the little boy backed quickly away, too frightened even to cry.

“You see?” Kätzner gestured with his flat,
broad hand, evidently experiencing a certain satisfaction in the
way it had all gone off. “You are just such a one, my friend, an
object of terror. Your employers count on it; it is why they have
kept your old code name from your days with the British. Everyone
remembers the Soldier, and now he has come out of his long sleep to
hunt for the Americans. When your face is better known, this fear
will make it hard for you to stay alive, but for the moment they
are in possession of a great weapon. So they will not make too loud
a noise if occasionally you swerve from duty—I expect they are
probably frightened of you themselves.” And he laughed again. But
quietly, as if they were both dead men together and could afford to
be amused by the fears of the living.

Well, one was allowed to hope so. Guinness
stared out through the glass wall of the phone booth, watching the
porters dragging their carts of luggage back and forth and hoping
that Ernie wouldn’t throw a tantrum. He didn’t want to be dodging
Company hoods every step of the way. He would have enough problems
without that.

With fifteen minutes until train time, he
managed to scratch up a little stand where they were selling beer
and paper plates bearing a sausage and a hard roll and a dab of the
strongest mustard on God’s earth. You touched the sausage to the
mustard and took a bite, and then had a bite of the roll, and then
washed it all down quick with a swallow of beer—such was the drill.
It was better than nothing.

He stood with his right leg pressing lightly
against the side of his suitcase, eating furtively as his eyes
worked through the patternless, hectic crowd. It was just for the
practice, really, and the police spotters were so easy to pick out
it didn’t seem quite fair to reckon them into your final score.
They just stood around with their hands thrust deep into their
raincoat pockets, looking as if they’d come to collect the rent.
Five or six cigarette butts scattered on the concrete floor within
inches of their highly polished shoes—why did cops always have such
an obsession with keeping their shoes shiny?—without even so much
as a briefcase for protective coloration. It was almost
indecent.

But they weren’t the only ones around, so a
fellow could at least keep himself amused. Munich wasn’t much of a
town for spooks, but even here the half dozen or so major players
would all have someone who picked up a few extra Deutsche marks by
looking out for the bad guys. Sometimes even the same
someone—Guinness knew for a fact that the Americans’ man at Kloten
also skinned his eyes for the Israelis and God only knew who else.
It was a canon of professional life; by the time you got into the
big leagues, and they had your picture in the briefing files, you
stopped being invisible.

Kätzner was right, of course. When you
stopped being invisible, you became a target. It was a law of
nature, like gravity.

How long had he been back in the Trade? Two
years and a little, and most of that in the States; they had only
just posted him back in Europe. Well, it wouldn’t be very long
before somebody snapped his picture as he stepped out of a cab or
something, and then, when some other somebody did his homework and
came up with a dossier to fit the face, he would be cold meat for
the first hard guy who wanted to make himself look like a big man
by knocking over the Summer Soldier. And, after all, how far away
could that day be when a clown like Mehring could read him off the
way he had, like the writing on the back of an envelope

But, of course, Mehring had had some
help—Mehring had had Kätzner. And Kätzner was a man with quite a
head start.

. . . . .

It had been one of those wet, muggy Augusts
you get sometimes in that part of Central Europe, where every so
often there would be gusts of rain that would soak you through to
your underwear. The weather was warm, so they weren’t anything more
than just a nuisance; an hour later the streets would be dry and
you could begin once again to think you were perfectly safe.
Somehow it seemed ridiculous to carry an umbrella.

And then, out of nowhere, it would be like
someone had turned on a shower. Even if you happened through happy
accident to be wearing a raincoat, in the five or six seconds you
might take to reach a shop awning or the cover of a doorway you
would be drenched. Your trouser legs would be wrinkled and clinging
limply, and your shoes would squeak, and the collar of your
polyester sport jacket would cut the back of your neck like a band
saw. And there wouldn’t be a thing you could do about it.

So, under the circumstances, tailing
Shevliskin hadn’t been a lot of fun. In fact, the whole business
had smelled bad, right from the start. There was just something
wrong.

Guinness had been in Belgrade for three days,
mapping out his hit and wondering why he couldn’t seem to get over
the impression that he didn’t have the field entirely to himself.
After all, on the face of it, he couldn’t have asked for anything
easier. His mark was a man of the most regular habits, a perfect
pushover. Shevliskin ate all his bachelor meals in the same little
restaurant half a mile from his work at the State Security Office,
and he always took the same route—a brisk six minutes and twenty
seconds in each direction—and our boy Janik was a small, spruce,
heavyish man who seemed to think the walk back and forth kept him
in the pink of condition. It was almost too easy; he liked to smoke
a cigar as he strolled along, and he could never seem to keep the
thing lit. On all three afternoons he had stopped in the middle of
the same block to rekindle, conveniently across the square from a
building that advertised that it had office space to let. At a
distance of a hundred thirty to a hundred fifty feet, standing
perfectly still for probably close to a quarter of a minute, he was
easy. You could have done the job throwing a custard pie.

And it wasn’t a custard pie Guinness had
brought along with him. It was a beautiful thing, in its way—a
handmade, one of a kind, single shot nine millimeter rifle that
looked like just so many aluminum tubes when it was disassembled;
Guinness had smuggled it all the way across Europe in the side
pocket of his suitcase. It had a special five power hooded scope so
it wouldn’t glint in the sunlight, and at anything less than
seventy-five yards you could use it to punctuate a sentence.

Still, he found it hard to ignore the feeling
that all was not well.

For one thing, Shevliskin was scared. He kept
studying the reflections in shop windows, as if he could sense he
was being followed. He had been doing it from the first day—from
the first hour. He was a worried man.

Guinness was reasonably certain that he
hadn’t been spotted, so he didn’t think it was him. But there was
something that played on our boy’s nerves. He was like a man
conscious of being under sentence of death, simply waiting for the
thing to happen. He was waiting—that was it—and with a kind of
unfocused dread.

And then there were the police. There were
just too many of them. It wasn’t that they stood around in pairs on
every corner; there were plenty of uniforms in evidence, but that
was true everywhere east of Berlin. The guys in the olive drab
coats and the peaked caps were kind of reassuring, in fact—you
could spot them. But there were too many others, too many big men
lounging around under their hat brims.

Maybe they were the reason Shevliskin wasn’t
feeling very jolly; he seemed to be swimming through an atmosphere
of official surveillance.

Guinness had wanted just to forget the whole
thing and go back to London, but he had been a lot younger in those
days and a believer that orders were orders. MI-6 wanted this guy’s
ticket canceled, and the job was supposed to come first. Letting
your woman’s intuition get the better of you wasn’t considered very
good form.