Free The Favor by Nicholas Guild

was necessary for
me to disappear. On my side of the wall, one’s masters tend to
assume the worst if you have allowed yourself to fall into enemy
hands. I didn’t even pack a bag. I simply hired a car and drove
over the border into Germany. Within twelve hours I was back in
uniform, making my report in East Berlin. So, you see, the question
of desertion hardly comes up—I could scarcely have taken them with
me.”
    He was right, of course. He could scarcely
have done that.
    Guinness was a specialist, a technician. He
killed people; he didn’t break into security installations and
rifle the safe—intelligence gathering was out of his line. So he
had never had to think in terms of maintaining a cover for years at
a time, while of necessity the face grows to fit the mask. It
struck him as an unnatural proceeding, and apparently he wasn’t
alone. Apparently it had struck Kätzner the same way.
    “You have no concept of the strain,” he had
said, the memory of it pulling at the corners of his mouth as they
walked back toward the car. “I was in Amsterdam for six years—one
either comes to believe in the role or, eventually, one begins to
crack around the edges.”
    He looked up at Guinness and smiled, as if to
recognize that the joke was entirely on himself.
    “And, I suppose, I began to feel very Dutch.
I suppose I thought I would stay on there forever, and so it seemed
safe enough to marry. It was madness, of course—I told myself it
would enhance the cover, if you can imagine. But Margot was a sweet
woman, and we all tell ourselves lies. So I did it. I married, and
pretty soon we had the child. Somehow I never really supposed I
would have to go, never have to leave them, but, as you see, it
became necessary.”
    And Guinness had understood perfectly. He had
made the same mistake himself, twice. You imagined you could live
like everyone else, that the Little Woman would never find out and
you could have it both ways. But the first Mrs. Guinness had left
him, precisely because she had found out, and the second had ended
up dead on his kitchen floor because she hadn’t. And Guinness too
had a daughter who was growing up somewhere without a father, whom
he had only seen a single time since infancy. Kathleen had been
right to pack her traps and disappear, because there was too much
blood on his hands and because, if she hadn’t, it would have been
her name on the little steel plate in the mausoleum at Colma. So
Guinness understood, both the desire for something like normal
happiness and the magnitude of its folly.
    The dining car was nearly empty, and the
waiter, who was sitting at a table near the galley smoking a
cigarette and sharing a pot of coffee with the cook, appeared less
than pleased when Guinness came in and looked like he expected to
be fed.
    He was directed to a table very near the end
of the car, as if they wanted him as far away from them as they
could manage, and the waiter brought him a menu and then told him
they were out of nearly everything.
    “Then, whatever you do have—I leave it to
you.”For some reason, that seemed to have shifted the balance in
his favor. The waiter smiled, apparently having forgiven him for
prolonging his workday, and they talked for several minutes about
all the wonderful things that could be done with what was left
around in the pantry. It didn’t look like anyone was going to
starve.
    Would he care for a bottle of wine? Sure, why
not? It would be six hours or so before they reached Amsterdam, and
he would need his wits about him then, but six hours was six hours.
He could go back to his compartment and sleep—he would do that
anyway—so it didn’t make any difference.
    The waiter retired to his galley, walking
with that peculiar splay footed gait that reminded you so
forcefully of a duck but that was, on a moving train, the absolute
precondition of maintaining one’s balance.
    The tablecloth was white and heavily
starched, and, on its own little plate, with a pat