The Favor Read Online Free PDF Page B

themselves
while they were waiting for us to arrive—so shocked, in fact, that
we thought it best not to communicate to them any of our
suspicions.”
    For a moment Herr Mehring fell perfectly
silent; he stared down at his coffee cup as if he had lost the
thread of what he was saying and was waiting until it came back to
him. Then all at once he looked up reproachfully at Guinness,
pushing his eyebrows together as he frowned.
    “And I ask you, Professor Guinness—this man
is found dead and an assassin of your reputation is directly on the
premises. What were we to think?”
    Guinness in his turn frowned, wondering why
it was that the only time anyone ever seemed to call him
“professor” was when they wanted to needle him.
    “How did he die?”
    It seemed an obvious enough question,
considering the circumstances. But Mehring looked as if he had just
been asked to guess the exact weight in grams of the entire
Bundesrepublik, Volkswagens and all. For perhaps as long as five
seconds the coffee cup, which he had been raising to his lips, hung
perfectly motionless in the air.
    “Come on, Mehring—did somebody shoot him, was
he struck by a bolt of lightning? How did he die?”
    Separately, and with elaborate care, Guinness
repronounced each of the four syllables of his question. It didn’t
seem to help, however; all he got was the same puzzled stare, as if
Mehring couldn’t understand why anyone would be interested in the
sordid details, as if his policeman’s brains were being turned into
vanilla pudding by the effort of trying. It was then that Guinness
himself understood that nobody could care less about Mr. Bateman,
dead or alive, that the corpse over which some chambermaid had
stumbled in the small hours of the morning was nothing more than a
pretext.
    The clock on the Rathaus tower said twenty
minutes to one. In all likelihood they hadn’t even done the
preliminary autopsy yet, and, even if they knew what they were
looking for—which, unless the people in Guinness’s shop who
provided him with these gizmos didn’t know what they were talking
about, they didn’t—it would take them days and days of spinning
down emulsified tissue samples before they found anything
inconsistent with the theory that Bateman had died of cardiac
arrest. So the police didn’t have any hard evidence that there had
even been a crime committed, let alone a case against Guinness. And
God knows they wouldn’t have come within shouting distance of him
without at least that much, not if they meant business.Guinness
could feel himself beginning to relax—Mehring at least wasn’t going
to try anything as vulgar as arresting him. No, he was here on
other business. Bateman simply provided him with a context, a
plausible excuse for walking up to a known American agent, bold as
brass, and sitting down for a spot of coffee and a little chin wag,
something that might otherwise have raised a few eyebrows among the cognoscenti .
    Fine. Wonderful. So what did he want?
    Mehring allowed his cup to sink back into its
saucer, and the lines grew deep again around his mouth. He wasn’t
ready to say yet, it was clear; he wasn’t finished playing Dick
Tracy.
    “Doubtless you and others like you feel quite
free to come here and murder one another at your leisure. The
natives, of course, would not dare to object.”
    Possibly only the reappearance of the waiter
at that moment kept Mehring from losing his temper; the force with
which he pressed his flattened hand against the tabletop, as if
this action somehow held him down as well, was enough to suggest
how close they had come to something ugly.
    Guinness signed to have his place cleared and
took a twenty mark note from his billfold, and the waiter, picking
up the plate that held the two nearly untouched turnovers, frowned
and inquired whether everything had been satisfactory. By the time
he returned with Guinness’s change on a little metal salver,
everything seemed to have smoothed itself out.
    “I