The Favor by Nicholas Guild Read Free Book Online Page B

about twenty minutes after they opened the main doors, when
he could be reasonably sure no one would notice him, and slipped up
to his vacant office to wait. It would be over three hours before
Shevliskin would start thinking about lunch, but there were
preparations to be made and, besides, Guinness was simply too
nervous to be anywhere else. It was always that way.
    During a five hour stopover in Paris, he had
taken a taxi into town, to a department store on the Boulevard
Haussmann, where he bought, along with a couple of silk neckties
and a bottle of the foulest smelling aftershave lotion you could
imagine, a pair of thin leather driving gloves. The label indicated
they had been made in Poland, and they were two sizes too small. He
folded them neatly and laid them on the packing crate he had set up
in front of the window for a shooting stand, where they would be
found by the police.
    You had to be prepared for getting caught,
and policemen tended to be very big on clues; these would give them
something to feel uneasy about. The gloves he actually had on were
made of plastic and came in rolls of a hundred. There was a little
closet of a bathroom in this particular office, and when he was
ready to leave he would flush them down the toilet, one at a
time.
    The rifle was assembled and loaded, and the
scope was calibrated against the approximate width of the
square—Guinness had paced off the distance the afternoon before.
The window was open, only about seven inches because anything more
would be a dead giveaway, and there wasn’t a thing in the world
left to do. Every few minutes Guinness would take a quick look
outside to check the wind, but the leaves on the elm trees across
the street were perfectly still.
    The building had no air conditioning—or, if
it had, it had been turned off in the unoccupied office suites—so
by eleven thirty, while he sat on the floor glancing at his watch
two or three times a minute, he was uncomfortably warm.
    These things were always the same—you waited
through an eternity, it seemed, and then everything was over in an
instant. Shevliskin turned the corner, walked perhaps eight or nine
paces, stopped, took his stub of a cigar out of his mouth and
looked at it disdainfully, and put his hand into his jacket pocket
to retrieve his matches. The box was still in his hand when he
died; it went skittering into the street as his arms flailed out
like things trying to escape on their own and he collapsed
grotesquely to the sidewalk. For years afterward, probably for as
long as he could remember anything, Guinness would remember how
Shevliskin’s life had stopped, in a kind of nerveless, sinking
pirouette that seemed to go on forever but probably took no more
than three quarters of a second. For an instant he seemed to be
reaching, with both hands, for anything at all and in every
direction, and then he just fell down. There should have been blood
everywhere—a nine millimeter bullet is a cruel thing—but there
wasn’t. He just died, as if all the life had gone out of him at
once.
    Guinness didn’t hang around to gloat. He
hadn’t heard the shot—somehow you never did when it went home—but
that didn’t mean nobody else had. As soon as he saw Shevliskin
lying on the sidewalk, and was sure the thing was done, he set the
rifle down and got rid of his gloves in the toilet. Taking his
handkerchief out of his pocket to put over the door handle, he let
himself out into the corridor, where there wasn’t a soul, and
walked up the stairs to the Alitalia office, forcing himself not to
hurry. Ten minutes later, with a ticket for Rome in his inside coat
pocket, he left the building.
    Or, more accurately, he tried. They arrested
him at the door.
    . . . . .
    To be perfectly truthful, he didn’t even make
it that far. The column of police came through first, bursting in
so suddenly that they almost ran right over him. There were five of
them; the first one peeled off and backed him into a wall,