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

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 A nice out of date issue of U.S. News &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?
    Outside, the black landscape slipped past
them. You couldn’t see anything, nothing except a sense of movement
in the darkness. Once, he thought, he saw a glimmer, a kind of
murky sparkle. A river, maybe. Or maybe just a little cow pond
magnified into something larger by its own vagueness.
    After Mainz, they would be traveling along
the Rhine, which they wouldn’t be able to see either. Maybe that
was to be part of his punishment—the runaway husband doesn’t get to
see the Rhine.
    Had Bateman? Perhaps it hadn’t been on his
itinerary; perhaps he’d only been interested in brown dumplings and
the ladies. Had Kätzner?
    Of course, his flight from the nest had been
back in the early sixties, and there had been plenty of time since
if he had been so inclined. And perhaps you got a break if you
could plead extenuating circumstances.
    “It was a question of freedom versus
extinction, you see,” he had explained, smiling the way one does
when called upon to apologize for some breach of etiquette. “I was
sufficiently compromised that the Dutch police were within a few
hours of arresting me—it was the accumulation of all the tiny
mistakes one commits over so many years—and so it