The Favor Read Online Free PDF

away.
    “Professor Guinness?” announced the Slob,
having finally made up his mind to risk those few dozen yards and
introduce himself. “I am Gustav Mehring—but of course you know
that.” He crinkled his eyes into a smile, the same eyes Guinness
had remembered from the Company’s album of family portraits. “May I
sit down?”
    Guinness didn’t smile back but made a short
little gesture toward the other chair, which creaked ominously
under Mehring’s weight. He didn’t speak; he would leave all that
sort of thing to the guardian of the public safety here.
    Mehring took out a small flat cardboard box
of cigarettes, presumably English, and lit one, looking calmly
around at the other tables and chairs, at the front of the
restaurant and the little painted flowerbox that stood next to the
door, at anything and everything, as if he didn’t have a thing on
his mind. It was a gambit Guinness had seen millions of times, in
real life and on the late late show, and he was already bored with
the discussion that must inevitably follow. He made a small bet
with himself as to the precise phrasing of the opening question
that was shaping itself in Mehring’s head, and he was actually a
little appalled at how close he had come.
    “Do you hear much from your friend Mr.
Bateman?”
    Mehring smiled again, the clever fellow, and
waited patiently for Guinness’s hands to start trembling
uncontrollably. He waited quite a respectable while, and when it
didn’t happen his disappointment registered itself in the deepening
of the lines around his mouth. Nowhere else, just there.
    “I don’t know you, Herr Mehring,” Guinness
answered finally, trying hard not to sound more annoyed than he
really was—after all, who did this clown think he was talking to,
Alice’s White Rabbit? “And I don’t have any friends named Bateman.
So why don’t you be a good boy and just push off—you’re blocking
the view.”
    Mehring laughed—yes, it was very funny—and
used the hand that held his cigarette to indicate his dismissal of
these preliminary maneuvers. It was a gesture very like the one
Bateman had made while he sat on the carpet in his hotel room,
bargaining about the terms upon which he would die, a little wave
that almost wasn’t any more than a spasm of the fingers.“Come now,
Professor Guinness. Your fame has preceded you. We know of your
government’s displeasure with Mr. Bateman, and we assume that you
were sent to our beautiful city expressly to—how shall I say it?—to
communicate that displeasure to him, in the strongest possible
terms.”
    The waiter came outside again, and Mehring
signaled to him and ordered a cup of coffee for himself. When it
was on the table in front of him, he stubbed out his cigarette in
the metal ashtray about halfway between his place and Guinness’s
and lifted the cup to his lips. He seemed to like it, which wasn’t
very surprising; it looked like it was under about an inch and a
half of whipped cream.
    “We have a witness who saw you leaving Mr.
Bateman’s hotel late last evening,” he went on, in a lowered voice
since the waiter hadn’t yet gone back inside. “And as it happens we
found Mr. Bateman—the late Mr. Bateman—early this morning. The
police surgeon estimates that he had been dead for approximately
nine hours, which means that his passing must have taken place at
very nearly the same moment you were seen in the lobby.”
    He was having such a wonderful time, was this
one; he pressed the palms of his hands together and smiled tightly,
apparently from sheer excess of smothered glee. It was funny that
somehow counterespionage never seemed to bring out the best in
people.
    “A lovely hotel, the Bayerischer Hof—don’t
you agree? They were so shocked at the size of the bill Mr. Bateman
was leaving unpaid, and by the fact that not so much as a ten mark
note was left in his wallet when the body was taken away—I rather
suspect that was something they had established for