Free The Favor by Nicholas Guild Page B

another half hour, so the chances that our friend
in the brown hat would simply pull a gun and start shooting were at
least diminished. You didn’t want to have him surprising you
between cars, where he could chuck your corpse out into the pitch
black at forty miles an hour and nobody would be the wiser, and for
the same reasons it might be just as well to stay away from easy
access to windows; but otherwise, if you could keep the game in
your own court, you were reasonably safe from murderous attack.
People didn’t do that sort of thing, not on a moving train, not if
they weren’t complete morons.
    The problem was getting away afterward. It
was only in the movies that you made a leap for freedom and went
rolling dramatically through the underbrush as the Orient Express
steamed off into the distance, and you sure as hell didn’t do it in
the middle of the fucking night; you might as well just take a head
first run at a brick wall.
    No, if you wanted to kill somebody, you
waited until two or three minutes before the next station, when
everybody was busy with their luggage, and then you slipped away
before anybody spotted your victim slumped to the floor. Otherwise,
you might find yourself walking right into the arms of the law.
After all, trains were equipped with radios. They could always call
ahead.So, assuming the worst case, that Brown Hat was a thug and
that whoever gave him his orders meant business, we were reasonably
safe for a while. There were limits, but the risks were manageable.
But we also had to do something about him pretty quick, because the
free pass wasn’t going to last forever. Twenty minutes, no more.
Brown Hat had to be in the bag in twenty minutes.
    Another thing Guinness had always admired
about the dining facilities on European trains was the wonderful
cutlery. They didn’t expect you to go after a piece of meat with a
butter spreader; you got a real knife, with a scalloped edge, and a
point that would go through something tougher than a potato skin.
Guinness had palmed it, slipping it up inside his shirtsleeve,
under his watchband to keep it from falling out, and he had left an
extra twenty marks with the tip so the waiter wouldn’t think to
come after him when he noticed it was missing—never in his life had
Guinness had any trouble with an overtipped waiter.
    Well, it wasn’t an act of thievery that would
rest very heavily on his conscience. He needed the damn thing a lot
worse than The Trans European Express did. It wasn’t considered
good form to carry a weapon when you were traveling—customs
officers were touchy about that sort of thing these days, and you
never knew who was likely to end up going through your pockets; it
just wasn’t worth the risk. But he didn’t particularly feel like
stepping into this particular dance contest without so much as a
darning needle. This guy could be anybody—somebody’s harmless
little gumshoe, Jack the Ripper, anybody—but taking chances wasn’t
the way to grow hoary with age in this business.
    The doors between carriages were pneumatic.
You pressed a little plate near the latch and it would slide open
of its own accord, with a very audible thud. So Guinness had no
trouble keeping track of the gentleman’s progress; he tried to
maintain a car’s length between them, and all he had to do was to
listen for the sound of the door. Brown Hat was making slow work of
it, but of course that was to be expected. He had to check all the
compartments along the way to make sure Guinness didn’t manage to
double back behind him.Almost the whole train was dark. Here and
there a few souls still had their reading lamps on, but for the
most part everyone was trying to get a little sleep, or at least to
rest their eyes—most of them, probably, were going at least as far
as Bonn, which was a good two hours away, so there wasn’t anything
to keep alert for. That was fine. Provided nobody had to go to the
can suddenly, he and Brown Hat would pretty much have