Read Online The Favor by Nicholas Guild - Free Book Online Page A

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