The Favor (9 page)

Car after car, Guinness trailed him along. At
each of the carriage doors, he would wait, straining his ears as he
listened for the door at the other end to wheeze open behind him,
keeping a rough check on what kind of progress his tail was making.
And the poor slob was speeding up. A healthy sign. He was getting
restless. Well, good for him.

Finally, when he wasn’t more than three cars
from the end, Guinness decided to set his trap. He waited, just
inside the door, just beyond where the corridor turned a sharp
little angle, as if elbowed aside by the compartments. He waited
and he listened, and when Brown Hat came through, in the second or
two after the door opened and he stepped inside, while he was still
in that blind corner, while the noise of the door closing behind
him blotted out everything else, then Guinness would rush him and
try to take him down before he had any idea what had happened.

He fished the dinner knife out of his sleeve,
wiping it off on his handkerchief. For just a moment he allowed
himself to weigh the thing in his hand, and then he put it out of
sight in his jacket pocket.

There would be plenty of time if it came to
that, but there wasn’t any point in killing someone just because he
was tailing you. The point was to find out what he wanted, and
whose side he was on. There wasn’t anything to be gained by being
hasty.

Guinness could hear his heart pounding Loud
enough, it seemed, to render it a little astonishing that the whole
corridor wasn’t out to see where all the racket was coming
from.

Why didn’t the guy hurry up? He seemed to be
taking forever.

And then, in the car ahead, there was the
sound of a door sliding open. It closed, and the next door opened
almost immediately. Guinness held his breath. . . one, two. . . he
wanted to meet him just at the corner, maintaining his forward
momentum. Three, four. . . As the second door slid closed, Guinness
started to move, keeping his eyes on the thickening shadow that was
pressing toward him from around the corner.

At the moment of impact, he wasn’t aware of
anything except the texture of the camel hair coat under his hand;
Brown Hat might have been a roll of carpet as he stumbled back
against the wall, and, without looking up into the face in which
nothing seemed to register except astonishment, Guinness drove the
points of his fingers, pressed together and held rigid, into the
soft spot under the breastbone. Brown Hat let out a sudden gasp and
doubled forward, to get caught on the side of the face by
Guinness’s knee.

After that it was easy—some of it. There was
no fight left in the nearly unconscious body Guinness dragged back
to the narrow space between the two carriage doors, where there was
hardly room for both of them to stand. The games were over;
Guinness undid the man’s coat and took the dinner knife out of his
own jacket pocket. He wrapped his handkerchief around the blade, so
that only about an inch and a half of the point was showing, and
clutched it tightly in his hand to keep it from slipping.

Then he allowed himself a deep breath—this
part of it was never easy—and plunged the knifepoint through the
exposed shirt front, just a thumb’s width under the ribcage.

Brown Hat hadn’t seemed to realize that he
was even alive, but the impact opened his eyes with a snap. He
didn’t move. He didn’t cry out. He didn’t even look down. He merely
stared into Guinness’s face with an expression of pathetic
terror.

“Don’t worry, pal,” Guinness murmured—he even
smiled, as if they were intimate friends. “It’s only a little
blade. But you’d better make the right noises, or I’m going to pull
it straight across, from one side to the other, and suddenly you’ll
find your guts hanging down around your knees.”

5

“My God! Mr. Guinness—I never. . . please,
I’m just a courier. Mr. Tuttle said. . . Please take that thing. .
.”Guinness could feel the blood beginning to trickle down over his
fingers. It wasn’t a bad wound, hardly deep enough to pierce the
abdominal wall; a couple of stitches and everything would be good
as new. This guy wasn’t much of a hard case—he could hardly talk he
was panting so fast.

“What did Ernie say? Let me know quick,
before I start to lean on this thing and push it right through to
your kidney.”“Mr. Tuttle said. . .” He seemed to forget, for a few
seconds, what, exactly, Mr. Tuttle had said; he swallowed hard,
with a kind of gasp, as if the effort had brought him close to
strangling.

“Mr. Tuttle said to ask if the ‘personal
matter’ could have to do with the gentleman you knew from South
Carolina, if you thought you’d have better luck than in Mexico. He
said you’d understand.”Guinness understood, just fine. Slowly,
being sure not to let anything tear, he pulled the knife blade
free. The courier’s hand stole down and held Guinness’s
handkerchief, which by then was almost soaked through, against that
side of his belly. He looked down, probably unable to see a thing,
and by then the terror was beginning to subside. His lips pursed in
what was probably astonishment, and perhaps the beginnings of
resentment—that always seemed to come next.

“Shit,” he whispered, drawing out the
syllable. Apparently the novelty of the experience was still what
impressed him most.

“Tell me about Flycatcher. . . Stop it,
you’re not likely to die any time soon—tell me about the gentleman
from South Carolina.”Guinness’s voice took on a feverish
insistence, but he had to grasp Ernie Tuttle’s messenger boy by the
coat collar and shake him for two or three seconds before he
managed to dislodge his attention from the fact that his intestines
weren’t squirting out like tomato paste.

And then, slowly, the courier raised his eyes
and began studying Guinness’s face, clearly appalled, as if some
terrible secret had been revealed to him.

“I was only. . . Jesus, you must be. .
.”“Worse even than that, pal—now tell me about Flycatcher. Where is
he?”“I don’t know. I don’t even know who this Flycatcher is; all I
was told was that you were to phone when you arrived. Mr. Tuttle
will be waiting for your call.”

He shook his head, apparently wishing very
badly to make it understood that this was as far as anyone had
taken him into their confidence.

“You’re sure? That was it?”

“Yes—just that you were to phone.”It was just
bone headed enough to be true. It was just like Ernie to go to all
the trouble to find out what train left Munich at that particular
time, and then to get a man on board just to tell one of his errant
shooters not to lose touch with home. It was Ernie’s style, right
down the line, even to the teasing allusion to the unfinished
business with friend Flycatcher. Ernie was a romantic; he loved the
cloak and dagger stuff.

Without releasing his hold on the man’s
collar, Guinness opened the window behind them, threw the dinner
knife out into the darkness, and closed the window again.

“We’ll be in Mainz in about ten minutes,” he
said. “You get off there. Tell Ernie to keep his people out from
under foot. Tell him I’m not on anybody’s caper, but the rules
aren’t any different. I’m not going to waste any more time trying
to pick out the good guys from the heavies, and it’ll just be a
little hard on the next poor soul who gets in the way.”

“I didn’t notice you were so easy on me.”

There was an edge in his voice, as if—silly
boy—he expected Guinness to feel guilty, or maybe even to ask his
pardon. It made you wonder what he thought the world was like.

“You’re alive, aren’t you?” Guinness let go
of him with contemptuous roughness, a little surprised at his own
anger. “You’ll find yourself a doctor and have a few stitches put
in—a jolt of penicillin if you want to make a big deal out of it.
You’ll live. It’ll give you a scar to show to the doxies; you can
make up all sorts of dramatic lies about how you got it. Just get
off in Mainz. And don’t forget to deliver my message.”

. . . . .

They were still standing together in the
connecting passage when the train drew to a stop. There weren’t
many people out on the platform—it was after ten thirty at night,
so you couldn’t blame them—and nobody paid any attention when
Guinness unlatched the door and the messenger, whose face he was
only now to see out of shadow, disembarked and, after an oddly
questioning backward look, disappeared.

There was an overhead lamp outside; it threw
a slanting beam of light across Guinness’s lower body, and he
glanced down to see that there was a wide smear of blood across his
thumb and the back of his hand. It was already nearly dry; he made
a fist and a few flakes popped off and fell twinkling to the floor,
like the crushed fragments of a Christmas tree ornament.

There was a lavatory in the next carriage. He
washed his hands and checked his cuffs and trouser legs for stains
and, finding nothing, patted a little water against his cheeks and
forehead and pulled a couple of paper towels out of the wall
dispenser with which to dry himself off.

The face that watched him so speculatively
from the mirror didn’t look at all happy. He was beginning to
acquire a network of lines around the corners of his eyes,
emphasizing their cruelty, and his hair was beginning to go
gray—just in threads so far, but the future was clear. Age had
deepened the hollows, sharpened the ridges. He was beginning to
look like one of those carved stone faces on Easter Island. No
wonder people thought he was a monster.

Come to think of it, he had been a trifle
casual about sticking that blade into Ernie’s courier. It happened
to people in his line of work—they lost all sense of their own
humanity, as if they had gradually evolved into some separate life
form. Only their own survival mattered. Only their own survival had
any reality, as their victims flattened out into the two
dimensional characters in a badly cast melodrama, just images
flickering on a screen. You might as well be dead as feel like
that. You were dead.

Well, perhaps it hadn’t quite come to that
yet. He wasn’t the blue eyed, auburn haired boy he’d been at
twenty-three, but at twenty-three he had stepped into this business
with his eyes wide open, had fulfilled a contract on one Peter W.
Hornbeck in return for one thousand pounds sterling and the
everlasting gratitude of Her Majesty’s Government. So perhaps he
hadn’t been such a model citizen, even then.

And once in, you don’t get out. You lose
volition—it’s like throwing yourself over a cliff. He had tried to
get out once. A new life—he had made it work for seven years and
then, suddenly, it hadn’t worked at all. So now he no longer tried.
He had surrendered the idea that there would ever be anything more
than hotel rooms and train rides, and the work itself. How many
more Batemans would there be before his own retribution? Eventually
he would begin to slow down, or he would make a mistake, and
someone would kill him. They had tried often enough, and Guinness
didn’t have any illusions about being immortal. One of these days
they would make it good. And there would be precious little point
in claiming a foul.

He pushed the idea from his mind—that sort of
thing wasn’t going to help—and checked his watch to give himself
something else to think about. It was quarter to eleven. The train
would reach Amsterdam in another four and a half hours. Starting
then, there would be plenty of other things to think about besides
the state of his soul.

The two men in his compartment turned out to
be a couple of vacationing high school teachers from Portland,
Oregon. They were both in their thirties, and this was apparently
their first trip away from home. Like Guinness, they were on their
way to Amsterdam; the shorter of the two, an individual of placid
appearance, with dreamy blue eyes and a rather tangled looking
reddish beard, asked if he had ever been there before and if he
knew anything about the prices, which were rumored to be among the
highest in Europe.

“Not in nearly eleven years—things were cheap
enough then, but that was before everybody went so crazy.”They
talked about traveling, and, when Guinness mentioned that he was an
English professor, the three of them started trading horror stories
about the appalling ignorance and stupidity of their students.

. . . . .

They had a long hike into the depot, most of
the length of the train, and then down in a steel elevator about
the size of someone’s living room to a dank underground passage
that smelled strongly of excrement. Guinness carried his own bag,
much to the vexation of the porter, a diminutive, gray skinned lad
whose dishwater blond hair was all the way down to his thin
shoulders and who moved with dreamlike slowness and didn’t look
like he could pick up a dime.

The two history teachers stayed with him most
of the way—they only had their backpacks, so the porter didn’t much
like them either—and even asked if he’d be interested in splitting
a cab into town with them. They seemed like nice guys, but Guinness
smiled and lied and shook his head.

“Sorry. I’ve got a friend who’s driving in to
pick me up.”

He waited until they were safely off and then
found himself a phone.

“I got your message, tough guy.”Ernie
Tuttle’s voice, even over the thousands of miles of cable from his
office on G Street, sounded familiar and pleasant at three-twenty
in the morning. It amused him, apparently, that his messenger boy
had had the scare of his young life.

Tuttle was the closest thing in the world
Raymond Guinness had to a friend—it wasn’t a relationship upon
which he would be prepared to stake a great deal, but in their line
of work you couldn’t be choosy. Another time they could laugh about
the clown with the hole in his side, but not now. He didn’t want to
get sucked into all that now.

“Where’s Flycatcher? Tell me about that,
Ernie.”At the other end of the line, there was what novelists
describe as a pregnant pause. Guinness waited, looking around the
depot, which was by then virtually deserted, assuring himself for
perhaps the fortieth time that there was no good reason on earth to
assume that anyone had spotted him yet—it was just a feeling he
couldn’t seem to shake. . .