The Favor Read Free Page A

just weren’t
his cup of tea.
    “Find out who he tumbled for,” Ernie had
said. “We’d have more than a passing interest in knowing who
corrupts our poor, innocent little file clerks with visions of pink
champagne and friendly ladies in black lace underwear—the word is
Bateman’s having himself quite a time over there. See about that,
would you? And we won’t mind if there are a few bruises on the
body.” He had smiled that ratty little smile of his, the smile of
the ex-field man suffering through an attack of nostalgia. “You see
to it that the little runt comes clean before you tuck him in.”
    Ernie wasn’t such a bad guy by the standards
of the profession, but Guinness just thought that maybe next time
he wanted all these kinds of embellishments he could damn well
crawl out of his windowless office on G Street and see to them
himself.Guinness looked at the specimen in front of him, wondering
about his probable tolerance for pain. Because that was what Ernie
had had in mind, unimaginative clod that he was, what the Trade
called “knuckle dusting.”
    Not that you were likely to get anywhere just
tying somebody down to his chair and slapping him around some—that
sort of thing only worked in Shirley Temple movies. You never get
anything out of anybody that way, especially when he knows that the
minute you stop hammering at him you’re going to scatter the
contents of his head all over the room. Torture, to be effective,
has to be made to seem worse than death. If possible, much
worse.
    The mind, and not simply the nerve endings,
is what you have to work on, and with the general run of humanity
it wasn’t too difficult to get the results you wanted, even when
you had only a little time and were stuck in a hotel room with
cardboard walls, where any amount of screaming would probably wake
up the whole corridor. A couple of pieces of tape over the mouth
and the eyes—they’re able to concentrate so much better when they
don’t have as many distractions—and then you start crushing the
joints of their fingers, one at a time, with a pair of pliers,
telling them all about it while it’s going on, keeping them
reminded that we’re not likely to run out of finger joints any time
soon.
    Usually, by the time you’ve started to work
on the second finger, they’re ready to tell you whatever you want
to know. Their brains have turned to jelly, and all they want in
the world is for you to stop. On the average, it’s about that
simple.
    Bateman, however, could just turn out to be a
special case. Oh, he’d talk all right—Guinness didn’t have any
anxieties about that. He probably wasn’t any more the high
principled, heroic type than the rest of us, and that was fine.
Guinness didn’t have much use for heroes.
    So you might get him to talk—so what? There
wasn’t any guarantee that what he would have to say would be the
truth.
    You break a man down, really break him down,
and he won’t lie to you. You become God for him, the only god there
is. The only one that counts. You have eyes that can see into the
soul, and if he lies you’ll know and there will be no release. So
he won’t lie—he won’t dare.
    But Bateman might dare. He might just
remember that a pair of pliers doesn’t make anybody God, and it
might give him a kick to have that final little laugh on you just
before you send him off to hell. Just for spite, the son of a
bitch, he’d probably cook up some whopper that would cause no end
of grief. What should stop him? He knew he was cold meat.
    And knowing that, and that Guinness was only
another fellow mortal, the same flesh as himself, he only smiled,
flicking another ash to the carpet with that careless little twitch
of his hand.
    “You want me to play kiss and tell, I’ll
bet,” he said, with the quiet voice of one who is in on the gag.
“You’re going to tell me how they set me up, those bad men who
lured me away from the paths of virtue, how they knew it would come
to this, how