The Favor by Nicholas Guild

pushing
at him with the heel of his hand, and the others bulled up the
stairwell—left, right, left, right—in step, by God.
    “Hey, man—Jesus!”
    What did the innocent traveling public sound
like when all of a sudden they found themselves being muscled
around by some uniformed goon with a nightstick the length of a
fence pole? He tried to make it come out convincing, to give it the
proper mixture of fear and startled indignation, and the fear, at
least, was no problem. This one looked for all the world like a
gorilla, grabbing him by the shoulder and spinning him around so
that he had to catch the wall with both hands to keep from cracking
his forehead.
    “Now look, fella. . .”
    It was a calculated move, part of the
impersonation of harmless American outrage, but he knew what the
result would be when he tried to turn around and confront this. . .
hell, he could have been anybody, a bus driver, for all Raymond
Guinness, who was an inoffensive tourist—who, after all, had
rights—had any idea. The trick was not to look like you saw it
coming when, just to teach you the customs of the country, our
friend brought the handle of his baton down across your cheekbone
in the manner of someone striking a gong.
    From then on everything was easy. You just
curled up on the floor, like a good boy, trying to hold your eyes
in until somebody turned down the voltage enough so that you could
breathe again.
    Three hours later, while he waited with
eleven other detainees in a white tiled containment cell with only
a single plank bed upon which to sit, his face still hurt. If he
forgot and happened to touch the welt that extended from his right
temple down to about the middle of his chin, he would experience a
wave of nausea that almost wouldn’t allow him to stay upright. He
would have liked to pound on the door and holler in a loud voice,
demanding to see someone from his embassy—it was the sort of
gesture you imagined they would expect—but the sound of his own
voice at anything louder than a whisper, or just about any sound at
all, made his whole body throb. The guy who hit him had known what
he was doing.
    Guinness sat on the far left side of the bare
plank bed, where he was able to lean against the chain that ran
diagonally down from the wall behind him and attached itself to his
corner with a heavy iron plate. The cell was so narrow you couldn’t
have lain down widthwise on the floor, and you wouldn’t have wanted
to in any case because it was covered with cigarette butts and
streaks of mud and suspicious looking stains. There was a toilet
bowl, the seat of which had been removed for some reason, and it
was occupied on a more or less permanent basis by a scrawny, stone
hard, elderly peasant with yellowish white hair and terrible
diarrhea; the old man crouched there with his trousers down around
his ankles and his head in his hands, the nails of which were
blackened and claw like, in a perfection of physical misery that
left no room for shame.
    There were four others besides Guinness on
the bed, and the rest stood around, leaning against the walls and
looking at nothing. No one spoke except for a small, balding man in
a dirty blue shirt and coveralls who seemed to know about four
different languages, including English, and who was so obviously a
police spy that everyone ignored him until he too fell silent.
    Guinness had never been in jail before and
was astonished at how quickly he was getting used to it. Of course,
for most of the first afternoon his face bothered him too much to
allow him any great leisure to consider anything else. They hadn’t
killed him, or even questioned him yet, and at least three of the
other men in the cell had been picked up in the same sweep of the
area in which he had been arrested, so perhaps he wasn’t the only
suspect. Perhaps he wasn’t a suspect at all—maybe they just wanted
to question him to find out if he had seen anything. At any rate,
the next move was theirs and he could wait.