The Favor Read Free

millions of dollars. You couldn’t begrudge
them their profits. It couldn’t be an easy thing to do, probably
like reconstructing a wedding cake out of the crumbs stolen by
field mice.“I don’t suppose there’s any chance you and I could cut
a deal?”
    Bateman looked embarrassed, but he needn’t
have been. Guinness wasn’t offended by the suggestion. Hell, why
should he be offended? If a man has thirty-five hundred dollars,
what should stop him from trying to buy his life with it? But he
frowned anyway, shaking his head. He was sorry for Bateman, but
that was the way things were.
    “Then they’d be after two of us. You wouldn’t
last another week, and I’m not going to spend the rest of my life
hiding from everybody, not for that kind of money. It just wouldn’t
be worth it. Sorry.”
    And that seemed to be that. It was
astonishing how little Bateman seemed to mind; you might almost
have thought he was relieved.
    His cigarette was nearly finished now. He
hadn’t really paid much attention to it, just taking a shallow puff
now and then and, for the rest, shaking the ashes off with an
absentminded spasm of his hand; but now it was almost down to the
filter, and he pinched off the mouthpiece between first finger and
thumb and started casting around with his eyes for something to do
with it.
    There was a small triangular ashtray made of
white porcelain on the table at Guinness’s elbow—a light little
thing, thin as a sea shell and perfectly harmless—that he picked up
and tossed onto Bateman’s lap. Bateman nodded thanks, ground out
the smoldering filter, set the ashtray down on the floor beside his
right knee, and lit another cigarette. This time he took a deep
drag, filling his lungs and then blowing smoke up at the ceiling.
He laughed as he watched the white plumes curling in upon
themselves as they rose through the stale, still, hotel room
air.
    “At least this way I won’t live to regret
it,” he said, and laughed all over again. He seemed to think the
whole thing was exquisitely funny.
    Guinness, however, didn’t laugh. He had seen
all this business too many times before to think it was funny. The
joke had worn thin for him.
    Because, of course, Bateman wasn’t really
such an isolated case. The poor little slob at the end of his
tether, schooled to resignation by a life lived in a tract house
with an overweight wife suffering from varicose veins. The job that
meant nothing, that seemed, over the years, to be gradually
replacing the marrow in your bones with compressed air; the loud,
hostile, sneering children, partaking of your substance but living
a life as alien and incomprehensible as anything you could imagine
on the planet Mars. The present and the future, a blind wall
stretching into infinity.
    And so Bateman had taken his chance, had
jumped at it, seizing it in both hands. A month of pleasure and
freedom, and what came after didn’t matter worth a tinker’s damn.
Prison, poverty, exile, death—anything but going back. And now we
sit on the floor and crack jokes with our murderer, becoming almost
his accomplice, in a crime almost without a victim. We are washed
in the blood of the lamb, oh Lord. Our sins are many, and we hope
for nothing. Prison, poverty, exile, death. It’s all the same.
    “I can offer you one kind of a deal,”
Guinness murmured, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. “Not your
life, but perhaps something else.”
    He didn’t like this sort of thing. There was
something distasteful and—yes—slightly vulgar about dickering with
a man over the terms on which you would send him to the embalmers.
If the boys back in Washington just wanted somebody snuffed, then
fine; Guinness was their man for it. It was the work he had been
doing for, it seemed, as long as he could remember, and he didn’t
mind it at all. He was good at it, maybe the best in the business;
he even took a kind of pleasure in it. But all the qualified
instructions that went with a job like this one—they