Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  So Guinness would simply go on as planned, as if nothing at all had happened, hoping that somewhere in this godforsaken little hole he would turn over the right rock.

  If there was a right rock. If Flycatcher hadn’t really gone to ground.

  Lunch had been less than an hour ago. And it had been a pretty large lunch; it was as much as you normally got for dinner, with a slab of fish, deep fried to the color of cooked carrots, and with new potatoes and a huge salad he had put together himself from a table set up against one wall, where they had big bowls of lettuce and plates of Bermuda onion rings and cherry tomatoes and corn relish and little cubes of Jell-O. There was also crumbled bacon and croutons, plus a tub of blue cheese dressing with chunks of cheese the size of your thumb you could scoop up from the bottom. The salad would have been a meal in itself. And there had been that candy bar, not fifteen minutes ago.

  Guinness, however, still felt hungry. It was always that way when he was working; he just couldn’t seem to get enough.

  Inside the Winn-Dixie he bought a bag of cinnamon doughnuts at the bakery, peculiar, eight sided productions, a box of Hi Ho crackers, and a quarter pound of cheddar cheese. Things frequently worked out that by dinnertime he was off somewhere a million miles from nothing, and he liked to keep some food in the car. At the last possible moment, while he was checking out, he picked up a couple of little cardboard boxes of licorice at a dime apiece and a long bar of Turkish taffy wrapped in yellow paper.

  The supermarket was larger on the inside than he had expected, seeing it from the road. Large enough not to have been contemptible in one of those elbow to elbow suburbs up north; so perhaps there was more to Clemson. Perhaps hidden away among the pine trees there were housewives and neat little tract homes in their uncountable thousands. And then again, perhaps not. He hadn’t noticed more than a dozen or so other patrons, so perhaps someone high in some distant corporate structure had simply made some ghastly mistake. Or it was possible that the early part of Monday afternoon just wasn’t prime time in the grocery business. Guinness dropped his little brown paper bag of provisions in the leg space on the passenger side of the front seat, wondering why he pestered himself with these kinds of speculations.

  The Morrison School was, as advertised, right past the Dairy Queen on the frontage road alongside 123. Guinness drove past it until he found the little bridge crossing the freeway that was indicated on his map. He went over to the other side, and it wasn’t very long before he had found himself a spot from which he could look back across. He had a clear view of where the orange school buses were already marshaling to take their little charges back to pet frogs and sibling rivalries and baseball card collections, back to the real business of their young lives. He took one of the cinnamon doughnuts out of its pink box, delicately tore it in half, put back the smaller fragment, and took a bite. It wouldn’t be long now.

  His binoculars, not much bigger than a pair of opera glasses but adequate, were in the glove compartment. He took them out and set them on the seat beside him. Then he took the photograph from his inside coat pocket and propped it up on the dashboard, over the steering wheel, so that its upper edge rested against the windshield. It was a color shot, taken with a good camera, of a nine year old girl with long, reddish blond hair and spindly legs, a little girl who might grow up to be rather beautiful—there was a suggestion of that—if she ever had the chance. Of course, that was precisely the point at issue.

  Someone had used a ballpoint pen to draw a circle around the head, with a line at each of the four quarters coming in about halfway to the center; the idea was to suggest what that someone might have seen if he had been looking through the telescopic sight of a rifle. The photograph might have been taken with a telephoto lens from just about where Guinness was parked. The distance wasn’t more than about three hundred yards, and there weren’t any obstructions. At the same distance, on a windless day, a good man using the right ammunition could take your head off just as neat as you please, and he would probably kill whoever might be standing behind you as well.

  It wasn’t a very pleasant thought. And if the picture’s recipients, in this case the little girl’s parents, should, by some miracle, have missed the point, it was all made plain to them in a little note printed out by hand on the back: “If we can shoot her with a camera, we can shoot her with anything. Think about what your little girl would look like with her brains scattered all over the grass.”

  Of its genre, it wasn’t badly phrased. The sort of thing Raymond M. Guinness, onetime associate professor of English literature, could grudgingly bring himself to appreciate. It must have done its job. It must have scared the living hell out of Mrs. Duelle. One could imagine.

  The photograph had been delivered by regular mail. Just an envelope containing a few sheets of blank paper folded into thirds and then the photograph inside, nothing else.

  An hour later there had been a telephone call. The usual thing, just a few seconds of a muffled voice explaining that Professor Duelle would do well to quit his job and move away, the sooner the better. Something was mentioned about a five day deadline and, needless to say, something else about the inadvisability of discussing the matter with anyone, particularly the police.

  For practical purposes, Guinness was childless, but he could imagine what it must have been like in the Duelle household for the rest of that day. Fear generally brings out the uglier side of people’s natures, and a threat to one’s child is a pretty elemental affair. Doubtless the first thing the poor woman had done was to rush off to the school and to gather up her child, to keep the kid safe in her own bedroom with the curtains drawn, exactly as if she had contracted some feverish illness. Then there would have been the phone call to the husband that he should come home right now, yes, right this instant. And then the long series of strained, accusing conferences, the tears, the whispered shouting, the looks back and forth between them of something like real hatred. There might have been individual variations—after all, people were not carbon copies of each other—but the general pattern would be more or less the same. Guinness seemed to remember something in Bacon’s essays about hostages to fortune, and it seemed to apply.

  And the Duelles might not have been the only family threatened; in the past four months three other men, colleagues of the learned doctor on a federal research project—precise nature left ostentatiously unspecified—had abruptly quit their jobs and moved away. This was the first inkling of any organized conspiracy. The other three had all given perfectly plausible explanations—heart conditions or the pressures of domestic strife—but it didn’t seem unreasonable to assume that perhaps the Duelles were not the only family to receive such a photograph.

  Guinness looked at the little girl’s smiling face and frowned. He had no theoretical or moral objections to the use of terror. Plane hijackings, that sort of thing, were not wrong so much as stupid; they turned public opinion against you, and a certain minimum of public tolerance was necessary before any covert organization, whether it was Al Fatah or the Central Intelligence Agency, could function.

  But was he not himself an instrument of terror? True, he did not issue threats. There were no elaborate warnings; he simply killed people, people who might not think they had a thing in the world to worry about, right up until the moment before they died. Sometimes not even then. But wasn’t he himself the ultimate threat? Wasn’t he, Raymond M. Guinness, what happened to bad little boys and girls when they annoyed the wrong set of Washington bureaucrats? Wasn’t that why he was here, not to worry about the health and well being of Dr. and Mrs. Duelle’s little girl, but to swat a Flycatcher? Terminate with extreme prejudice, that was the phrase. Or, at least, it had been before the novelists and the scriptwriters took it up. So far as he knew, no one had yet invented a new euphemism to replace it; doubtless there was a committee on the problem.

  No, there wasn’t any question of scruples that made the lines deepen around Guinness’s mouth—in any case, his moral sensibilities we
re something he found it convenient to shelve when he was working. What was bothering him was Professor Duelle, the little girl’s father.

  She was a pretty little thing—in the way of solitary men who live mostly in motel rooms, for whom even the idea of a family has come to sound as remote and romantic as vast wealth or a career as a film star, Guinness liked children, and this one looked like a charmer. Three other men, apparently, had pulled up stakes, abandoned their jobs and moved away, rather than have their kids subjected to danger. And the danger was real; two years before, in California, a little boy, aged seven, had had his throat cut. Later, rather indirect evidence had suggested that Flycatcher had had a hand in the matter; hence Guinness’s presence in South Carolina.

  But not our friend Duelle. Good citizen that he was, he had turned the matter over to his superiors, who had, in turn, contacted the FBI, and somehow the Company had gotten its oar in. Duelle had notified the proper authorities and trusted in them, just like you were supposed to.

  The man in California, whose son had ended up like a kosher steer, had only agreed to cooperate after all manner of promises that his family would receive constant protection for as long as it took, until all the bad guys were safely tucked away.

  For as long as it took, what a laugh. As soon as their investigation had gone stale, the FBI had pulled its troops back and left the poor bastard naked. (Nothing to worry about; doubtless they’ve all seen the game is up and have gone back underground—and, besides, one must consider the costs, the man hours.) Three weeks later, the boy was found in a vacant lot with a piece of surgical tape over his mouth and his wrists tied behind his back, smiling gorily from under his jawbone. It wasn’t very long before his father ended up on the floor of a motel bathroom, full of Valium and booze; he supposedly was still alive in some rest home, if you could call it being alive.

  But nobody had been twisting Duelle’s arm. Guinness had read the transcripts of his interview with the project security officer, and he practically volunteered his kid as bait. One had the sense that, more than anything, he was interested in displaying his loyalty, his team spirit. It was weird.

  The little Duelle girl smiled back at Guinness from behind the glossy surface of Flycatcher’s photograph, as if amused that he should think anything amiss. He picked it up again from the dashboard, at the same time using his free hand to feel around in the pink box for the other half of his doughnut. Even if you looked closely, it didn’t seem the face of an unloved child. But then people probably tend to overestimate the insight of the young—as long as daddy talks to her at dinner and doesn’t forget her birthday, she might remain perfectly unaware that he could be capable of selling her out to avoid risking his precious career.

  Not that Guinness was casting any stones, you understand. His own cultivations of the domestic virtues had hardly met with unparalleled success. Still, he didn’t think he would have reacted after the pattern of Professor Duelle, but that was the sort of thing you never really knew about until the moment was at hand. It was easy to be contemptuous in the abstract.

  The car was beginning to get a trifle stuffy, so Guinness rolled down his window a crack, just enough to catch the breeze. Outside he could hear the sounds of the traffic on 123 and, somewhere in the distance behind him, the casual, disinterested barking of a dog.

  Children were beginning to spill out of the front entrance of the school building, coming in thick little knots, each a focus of brittle, high pitched laughter as, apparently, one class after the other was dismissed. Guinness checked his watch—it was precisely 3:00—and picked up his binoculars. He scanned each group, as well as he could, as they formed themselves into lines to enter the buses.

  There were plenty of little girls with hair the right length and approximate color (how definite could you be about a thing like that when all you had to go on was a telescopic photo?), but somehow none seemed quite right for the part. He could have missed her, though; it was astonishing how children of a certain age all seemed to look alike.

  Probably grouping themselves by neighborhoods, they would line up under the watching eye of one or another forbidding looking matron, then the bus would pull up in front of them, blocking Guinness’s view, and then it would pull away and the children would have disappeared. One, two, three, four, five, six. Six lines of children disappearing into six buses that each squealed with exhaustion as it came to a stop. It was exactly like watching the children of the village being sacrificed to a series of greedy, middle aged demons.

  And then, finally, all the buses were gone, and there were no more children, and the schoolteachers, like officiating priestesses whose work was done, filed back inside the school building, leaving the grass and the concrete walkway surprisingly bare. Two flags, one the Stars and Stripes and the other presumably the state flag (it had something on it that looked for all the world like a runty little palm tree, but that would have been ridiculous), fluttered weakly in the afternoon wind. One became aware of the stillness in a way that would have been impossible even twenty minutes before. The world seemed deserted.

  Guinness was beginning to get fidgety, wondering what he thought he was trying to prove by sitting parked on a hill watching the exodus of a bunch of schoolchildren, and wondering if he had proved it—after all, he hadn’t, so far as he knew, seen the little Duelle girl, so maybe her parents had been worried enough to keep her at home; or maybe her old man had some sort of con going and was keeping her home for effect; or maybe he had just missed her in the crowd; or maybe, even if he had seen her, it wouldn’t have meant anything one way or the other—when a car, a small brown station wagon, pulled up precisely in front of the walkway to the main entrance, stopping precisely on the spot from which the last bus had left, perhaps seven or eight minutes before.

  The door opened, and a woman in an emerald green cloth coat got out. Her hair was a few shades darker than her daughter’s. She kept her back to him, looking neither right nor left, so that, in addition to the color of her coat, that was about all Guinness could tell about her, but it was Mrs. Duelle all right; he knew that much from the license plate. She walked stiffly up the concrete path, her hands thrust deep into her pockets, as if she felt a chill in the air to which the rest of humanity was insensible, and she disappeared into the school building.

  If it concerns an event, and if you have a flair for melodrama, you can call it “second sight.” You have a name for it then, the intuition that some one particular thing is about to happen, the moment that defines itself in advance. The question, of course, is what do you call it when “it” isn’t a moment, but a person.

  Guinness had the uncomfortable feeling he knew all about Mrs. Duelle. He didn’t even know her first name—an odd omission that, since it was the sort of information you would expect to be automatically included in the work sheets on an assignment like this one—but it was as if he suddenly found himself in possession of a private insight into her soul, as if she had been in the habit of confiding in him for as long as he could remember. He couldn’t have said what it was about her, what quality perceived at a distance of several hundred yards, that could have stirred in him so peculiar a sense of intimacy.

  And he didn’t like it. Things he knew he wasn’t being told, being told too many things he didn’t have any reason to care about. And now this—something, or someone, he knew without needing to be told. It was as if he were one of the pieces in some particularly clever, particularly silly game. Just a token, like the little lead top hat you move around the board in a Monopoly game. It made him feel very uncomfortable.

  It didn’t take him more than a few seconds to decide that he had been mistaken, at least about the precise quality of the thing he was sensing. It wasn’t the future that had been revealed to him, but the past. Something about her, some gesture probably—the way she walked, or the way she had closed the door of her car with a little push of her hand from behind her back, as if it were the gate of a picket fence, something like that—something had connect
ed with some memory so submerged that it was almost invisible. He might stare down into the water for the rest of his life without ever even discovering its shape. He only knew it was there, just too deep for the light to reach it.

  Guinness shifted in his seat, resting his forearms heavily against the steering wheel. He wondered what could be keeping the damn woman, although she had only been inside for a few seconds; it was as if this new and intangible anxiety had sped up his internal clock, making the seconds seem hours.

  Then she came out. The little girl who was with her, upon whose shoulder she kept one of her hands, as if to draw the child as close to her as possible, was obviously the little girl in the photograph. Guinness knew this even before he picked up his binoculars again, even while the two of them were just one vague pattern of movement in the distance.

  When he did pick them up, he looked at the mother first, but that was only to confirm what he already knew. Then he looked at the daughter—the tiny face, no longer smiling, framed in long, faintly reddish, blond hair. No, he couldn’t say that he recognized her; the flesh apparently was without memory.

  Of course he recognized the mother now, which was hardly surprising, since once, in what suddenly seemed the very distant past, her name, whatever it was now, had been Mrs. Kathleen Guinness.

  3

  Guinness was no different from anybody else. For all of us there is always one time or another in our lives the recollection of which we would like to drop off somewhere as excess baggage, not because the time was painful—quite the contrary—but because the recollection is. Guinness had more than his share of ugly memories, but he could live with them. He had grown quite expert at that, having learned that you can face down any horror in the world if you work at it, that even the darkest monsters can come to seem tame and even rather boring if you can just train yourself not to blink while you watch them snarling at you.