The Favor (7 page)

After a couple of minutes, the light went
out. Well, that was about par—they would let him go to sleep now so
they could wake him up in three or four hours and drag him back,
groggy and startled, for another round. Fine. He wouldn’t
disappoint them for the world. He rolled over on his left side,
cradling his head on his elbow, and closed his eyes.

. . . . .

As they hauled him down the corridor, a man
on either side holding him up by the arms, he almost had to laugh.
It was like a parody—these guys had been watching too many World
War II movies. What was next, electric cattle prods and the Death
of a Thousand Cuts? Strong lights? Rubber hoses and bamboo slivers
under the fingernails? It was all too incredibly corny for
words.

But it wasn’t like that at all. They just sat
him down and questioned him. This time there was no table, merely a
couple of chairs, and his interrogators—there were three of them
this time—took turns. The questions were the same—always the
same—but the three of them would take turns sitting in the other
chair to ask them.

“Why were you in that building?”

“To get a plane ticket, to go to Rome—haven’t
you noticed? Belgrade isn’t very lively.”

“Why were you in that building?”

“To get a ticket.”

“Why did you leave the gloves behind?”

“It’s August. What would I be doing with
gloves?”

That was how it went, for three days. Every
few hours they would bring him back, and the questions would start
all over again. In between he would sleep or eat his meals—the
purple stew, which he discovered himself just able to tolerate,
although he never could figure out what it was made of—or try to
keep his mind under control.

They were doing their best to screw him up,
and it was working. Sometimes, when he was returned to his cell,
the light would be on; sometimes it wouldn’t, and he would have to
find his bed in the dark. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, they
would turn it on while he was sleeping, let it burn for a while—for
half an hour, or for five minutes, or until they came to fetch him
again—and then let the room sink back into darkness. They would
bring him something to eat and then wait until he fell asleep again
and wake him to eat something else. A few times they didn’t give
him anything for what seemed like weeks. They just wanted to turn
him around.

And it was working. He got so he was afraid
of closing his eyes—he didn’t want to lose track of the time. He
began to think he had been under arrest forever. And he was
beginning to become seriously frightened.

How the hell long were they going to keep
this shit up? At one point, the famous gloves were brought in, and
Guinness was told to put them on. He couldn’t—they were too small.
He peeled them from his fingers and threw them on the floor,
grinning wolfishly.

“They aren’t mine,” he said. “They must
belong to somebody else.”

So he was staying even, at least. They
weren’t getting anything. He would lie on the plank bed and think
to himself, they haven’t got anything. Not a thing, not a fucking
thing. And then he would be seized with fear, wondering whether he
had been talking out loud.

And then one day—or night, or whatever—there
had been somebody new to play Twenty Questions. A new face,
somebody different. Well, that would be fun. Except that he was
tired—dead sick of this. And his brains felt like bruised
taffy.

Except that the colonel wasn’t playing. He
simply stood with his back against the wall, watching Guinness over
the interrogator’s head.

The uniform declared he was an East German, a
colonel in the military police—but that could mean anything. What
was he doing there? What would he care about who got knocked off in
Yugoslavia?

And the rules had changed. The man sitting in
the other chair–the first one who had questioned him, on the very
first day—leaned forward, his hands resting on his knees, the
eyebrows in his neat little face raised up almost into his patent
leather hair.

“We wish to question you concerning the
death—the assassination—of one Janik Shevliskin, an employee of the
People’s Government. We wish you to confess. Now, without further
delay. We have all the evidence we require to convict you in the
People’s Courts, and you will be sentenced to death.”

Guinness was listening, but his eyes were on
the colonel, whose upper lip was covered by a pair of perfectly
straight, coppery moustaches. He was a small man, perhaps only an
inch or two over five feet, and as the interrogator spoke, issuing
his demand for an immediate confession, the colonel smiled and,
almost imperceptibly, shook his head. It was a sign meant for him
alone.

“I haven’t killed a soul,” Guinness heard
himself saying. “I never heard of this guy, and I insist upon
seeing somebody from my embassy.”

4

“Why? You must have had a reason—what was
it?”

They were standing next to the fountain
behind the Nymphenburg Palace, listening to the water splash, with
only a couple of pale, languid goldfish, about the size of small
trout, drifting here and there beneath the cloudy strands of algae,
to keep them company. Guinness had his foot up on the rim of the
pool and was retying his shoelace, frowning with concentration.“I
suppose you must know I’ve always wondered. What made you do
it?”

Kätzner’s hands were in his trouser pockets,
which pushed his shoulders up and accented the faintly military cut
of his tweed jacket. He shrugged, somehow managing to confine the
gesture to his eyebrows.

“Are you really curious about such things? Is
that part of your price?”

When Guinness didn’t answer, even after the
shoelace had relinquished its hold upon his attention and he had
straightened up and was smoothing down his trouser leg, then
Kätzner too began peering down at the fish as they hung, almost
immobile, in the gloomy water.

“I was about to arrest Shevliskin—that was
why I was there. That was why we were able to arrest you so
quickly. The British must have known; that must have been why they
sent you. He was one of theirs, and doubtless they didn’t wish him
to fall into unsympathetic hands.” He smiled then, but not at
Guinness. At some reflection of his own, perhaps—in the water or
elsewhere. Or perhaps at nothing so specific. Under any
circumstances, he did smile. “I shouldn’t have liked to appear a
poor loser.”

Obviously, he didn’t even expect Guinness to
believe him—oh, about the arrest, yes. But not about the motive. At
least, not entirely.

“And then. . . Well, a distaste for amateur
productions, probably. Those fools were never going to get anything
from you—they even seemed to be laboring under the childish
delusion that you might actually have been innocent.”

“And, of course, you never. . .”

“No.”

It wouldn’t have occurred to Guinness not to
believe him. It seemed so self evident, but apparently Kätzner felt
some need to explain. He pointed to the crowd of people who were
coming down the palace stairway into the gardens; there were
probably fifteen of them, and they were obviously part of a
tour—the women were in front, listening to the guide, while the men
all seemed to be loitering behind, apparently bored by furniture
and plasterwork and the Baroque formality of trimmed hedges and
gray gravel walkways. It was to them that Kätzner was pointing.

“You see those safe citizens?” he said, and
took his hand down as if he were dismissing the whole group from
existence. “A few of them look old enough to have been in the
War—perhaps they were very brave. Let us hope so. I doubt if any
have ever come into a foreign city, quite alone, and killed a man
to whom they had never spoken a word. So let us hope that they are
innocent as well as brave, and carry that armor on their souls.

“I have interrogated scores of innocent men,
my friend, and they are always afraid; they can’t help themselves,
because they discover that being brave has nothing whatsoever to do
with it. Courage, they find, is nothing but an encumbering
respectability, so many of them confess because they cannot
tolerate the moral solitude. Prison or ruin or even death—they are
not afraid of these things, perhaps. But the other terrifies
them.”

He glanced at his watch, and his face
registered something like faint surprise, and they began walking
back, toward the archways that led to the front of the palace and
the parking lot.

Kätzner once again slipped his hand inside
his companion’s elbow.

“The man who used that astonishing rifle to
snuff out the life of Janik Shevliskin would not have been
frightened in that way. Perhaps he is no braver than other men, but
he is unlikely to have been dismayed by solitude. Fear of
oneself—that is what he would lack. That is how you betrayed
yourself, my friend. You had no such fear.”

. . . . .

Hadn’t he? He seemed somehow to recall a
certain sensation of paralyzed relief when, finally, they had let
him go. They had returned his passport and his money—had even
reimbursed him for the flight ticket they had prevented him from
using, making something of a production of it, as if they were
doing him the greatest kindness in the world—and had given him
exactly twenty-four hours to get the hell out of their country.

He remembered the sunshine, too—as a stab of
real physical pain, like a pair of fingers trying to see how far
back into his head they could push his eyeballs, when he passed
through the open front doors of the police station. Actually, it
had been rather overcast, but how much did that mean when you
hadn’t seen anything stronger than a lightbulb for better than
three days? It had been enough to make him feel slightly sick, and
only the sheerest exercise of will had kept him on his feet until
he felt himself far enough out of official reach to find somewhere
to sit down.

A cup of hot soup in a little outdoor cafe, a
quick stop to pick up his suitcase from his bewildered landlady,
and then on to the airport for the first flight out—to anywhere; he
didn’t give a damn, so long as the direction was more or less west.
On the plane, he had to sit with his raincoat wrapped around his
hands, they were shaking so badly.

Anywhere turned out to be Zurich, where he
checked into the first hotel he could find and ordered breakfast—it
was ten o’clock at night, but that wasn’t going to be allowed to
make any difference. He huddled on the floor in the middle of the
room, as far away from the walls as he could manage, and ate the
whole basket of rolls and drank every drop of the tea, and then
wrapped the big fluffy feather comforter around himself and went
promptly to sleep. On the floor, in the middle of the room.
Granted, he might have been a trifle overanxious, but at least that
way he could sleep.

Two days later, when he had the impression he
might have put himself back together enough to risk it, he returned
to London to make his report. Yugoslavia was definitely off his
list, he said; Belgrade didn’t agree with him. They didn’t argue
about it and they didn’t ask him why he was overdue, and he didn’t
volunteer any explanations—he didn’t mind admitting to himself that
his nerves weren’t made of piano wire, but he didn’t see much point
in confiding the secret to MI-6.

No fear? That wasn’t the way he remembered
it, but perhaps Kätzner had had something else in mind besides
simple garden variety survival anguish. Kätzner was a subtle
creature who saw further into these matters than the rest of us,
and Guinness was prepared to take his word.

. . . . .

Stuffing the greasy and mustard stained paper
plate into a trash barrel, Guinness picked up his suitcase,
balancing himself against the weight, and headed for the platform.
By the time he was settled into his seat, the last stragglers were
already rushing past his window, as if they expected that any time
now the train would slip away from them forever.

The little tug that meant they were on their
way reminded him that he hadn’t thought to pick himself up anything
to read. There was, of course, the copy of
Mansfield Park
he
had been dragging around with him for the last week and a half, but
that was in among the dirty shirts in his suitcase and, besides, he
found it impossible to manage anything that required serious
attention while he was traveling—there was just something about all
the jiggling around. A nice out of date issue of
U.S. News &
World Report
, or any one of those interchangeable German
magazines with a picture of a naked girl on the cover and articles
inside about the idyllic marriages of rock stars and cheap family
vacations in Portugal.

But, of course, he had forgotten.

The only other people in the compartment were
an elderly Swiss couple, who talked only in whispers and only to
each other, looking at him, if at all, with furtive hostility. The
woman, who was seventy if she was a second, kept readjusting the
raincoat she held on her lap, as if harboring some suspicion that
Guinness might want to peek up her dress.Guinness crossed his arms,
sliding down in his seat and closing his eyes, and pretended to
nap; it amused him to listen to those two talking about him—in
their native dialect, which, probably, they imagined would be as
impenetrable to this “
Usländer
” as Linear B.

He awoke with a start when the train pulled
into Wiirzburg—the name was on a large sign attached to the station
wall. He looked at his watch, discovered that there were only a few
seconds lacking from eight thirty, and concluded he was hungry. The
sausage and roll hadn’t done the trick after all, it seemed.

“Is the dining car open?”

The conductor, who was young and swarthy and
whose face was badly scarred by acne, simply smiled and looked
perplexed; so Guinness asked his question again, this time in
German, and received an affirmative nod. Five cars ahead, he was
told—they would be serving until nine.Looking back through the
glass door into his compartment, he wondered whether the old couple
would be tempted to go through his luggage while he was gone. The
suitcase wasn’t even locked, and they were welcome. They seemed to
be under the impression that he was a runaway husband—either that
or a drug trafficker. Why else would anyone be wearing ready-made
American clothes and traveling through the middle of Europe by
himself? Why, indeed?