The Favor by Nicholas Guild Read Free Book Online

concrete floor within
inches of their highly polished shoes—why did cops always have such
an obsession with keeping their shoes shiny?—without even so much
as a briefcase for protective coloration. It was almost
indecent.
    But they weren’t the only ones around, so a
fellow could at least keep himself amused. Munich wasn’t much of a
town for spooks, but even here the half dozen or so major players
would all have someone who picked up a few extra Deutsche marks by
looking out for the bad guys. Sometimes even the same
someone—Guinness knew for a fact that the Americans’ man at Kloten
also skinned his eyes for the Israelis and God only knew who else.
It was a canon of professional life; by the time you got into the
big leagues, and they had your picture in the briefing files, you
stopped being invisible.
    Kätzner was right, of course. When you
stopped being invisible, you became a target. It was a law of
nature, like gravity.
    How long had he been back in the Trade? Two
years and a little, and most of that in the States; they had only
just posted him back in Europe. Well, it wouldn’t be very long
before somebody snapped his picture as he stepped out of a cab or
something, and then, when some other somebody did his homework and
came up with a dossier to fit the face, he would be cold meat for
the first hard guy who wanted to make himself look like a big man
by knocking over the Summer Soldier. And, after all, how far away
could that day be when a clown like Mehring could read him off the
way he had, like the writing on the back of an envelope
    But, of course, Mehring had had some
help—Mehring had had Kätzner. And Kätzner was a man with quite a
head start.
    . . . . .
    It had been one of those wet, muggy Augusts
you get sometimes in that part of Central Europe, where every so
often there would be gusts of rain that would soak you through to
your underwear. The weather was warm, so they weren’t anything more
than just a nuisance; an hour later the streets would be dry and
you could begin once again to think you were perfectly safe.
Somehow it seemed ridiculous to carry an umbrella.
    And then, out of nowhere, it would be like
someone had turned on a shower. Even if you happened through happy
accident to be wearing a raincoat, in the five or six seconds you
might take to reach a shop awning or the cover of a doorway you
would be drenched. Your trouser legs would be wrinkled and clinging
limply, and your shoes would squeak, and the collar of your
polyester sport jacket would cut the back of your neck like a band
saw. And there wouldn’t be a thing you could do about it.
    So, under the circumstances, tailing
Shevliskin hadn’t been a lot of fun. In fact, the whole business
had smelled bad, right from the start. There was just something
wrong.
    Guinness had been in Belgrade for three days,
mapping out his hit and wondering why he couldn’t seem to get over
the impression that he didn’t have the field entirely to himself.
After all, on the face of it, he couldn’t have asked for anything
easier. His mark was a man of the most regular habits, a perfect
pushover. Shevliskin ate all his bachelor meals in the same little
restaurant half a mile from his work at the State Security Office,
and he always took the same route—a brisk six minutes and twenty
seconds in each direction—and our boy Janik was a small, spruce,
heavyish man who seemed to think the walk back and forth kept him
in the pink of condition. It was almost too easy; he liked to smoke
a cigar as he strolled along, and he could never seem to keep the
thing lit. On all three afternoons he had stopped in the middle of
the same block to rekindle, conveniently across the square from a
building that advertised that it had office space to let. At a
distance of a hundred thirty to a hundred fifty feet, standing
perfectly still for probably close to a quarter of a minute, he was
easy. You could have done the job throwing a custard pie.
    And it wasn’t a custard