The Favor by Nicholas Guild Page B

he wanted to see someone from
his embassy, he didn’t know anything about any damn gloves. Over
and over and over. And now they wanted him to sit in his cell and
conjure up all the terrible things they were going to do to him if
he didn’t break down in big salty tears and confess everything. To
hell with them.
    After a couple of minutes, the light went
out. Well, that was about par—they would let him go to sleep now so
they could wake him up in three or four hours and drag him back,
groggy and startled, for another round. Fine. He wouldn’t
disappoint them for the world. He rolled over on his left side,
cradling his head on his elbow, and closed his eyes.
    . . . . .
    As they hauled him down the corridor, a man
on either side holding him up by the arms, he almost had to laugh.
It was like a parody—these guys had been watching too many World
War II movies. What was next, electric cattle prods and the Death
of a Thousand Cuts? Strong lights? Rubber hoses and bamboo slivers
under the fingernails? It was all too incredibly corny for
words.
    But it wasn’t like that at all. They just sat
him down and questioned him. This time there was no table, merely a
couple of chairs, and his interrogators—there were three of them
this time—took turns. The questions were the same—always the
same—but the three of them would take turns sitting in the other
chair to ask them.
    “Why were you in that building?”
    “To get a plane ticket, to go to Rome—haven’t
you noticed? Belgrade isn’t very lively.”
    “Why were you in that building?”
    “To get a ticket.”
    “Why did you leave the gloves behind?”
    “It’s August. What would I be doing with
gloves?”
    That was how it went, for three days. Every
few hours they would bring him back, and the questions would start
all over again. In between he would sleep or eat his meals—the
purple stew, which he discovered himself just able to tolerate,
although he never could figure out what it was made of—or try to
keep his mind under control.
    They were doing their best to screw him up,
and it was working. Sometimes, when he was returned to his cell,
the light would be on; sometimes it wouldn’t, and he would have to
find his bed in the dark. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, they
would turn it on while he was sleeping, let it burn for a while—for
half an hour, or for five minutes, or until they came to fetch him
again—and then let the room sink back into darkness. They would
bring him something to eat and then wait until he fell asleep again
and wake him to eat something else. A few times they didn’t give
him anything for what seemed like weeks. They just wanted to turn
him around.
    And it was working. He got so he was afraid
of closing his eyes—he didn’t want to lose track of the time. He
began to think he had been under arrest forever. And he was
beginning to become seriously frightened.
    How the hell long were they going to keep
this shit up? At one point, the famous gloves were brought in, and
Guinness was told to put them on. He couldn’t—they were too small.
He peeled them from his fingers and threw them on the floor,
grinning wolfishly.
    “They aren’t mine,” he said. “They must
belong to somebody else.”
    So he was staying even, at least. They
weren’t getting anything. He would lie on the plank bed and think
to himself, they haven’t got anything. Not a thing, not a fucking
thing. And then he would be seized with fear, wondering whether he
had been talking out loud.
    And then one day—or night, or whatever—there
had been somebody new to play Twenty Questions. A new face,
somebody different. Well, that would be fun. Except that he was
tired—dead sick of this. And his brains felt like bruised
taffy.
    Except that the colonel wasn’t playing. He
simply stood with his back against the wall, watching Guinness over
the interrogator’s head.
    The uniform declared he was an East German, a
colonel in the military police—but that could mean