It had been an hour since the departure of Kathleen, and he had had time to cool off. Now he was merely sullen. He no longer hoped she would end up having to be cut out of the twisted wreckage of her station wagon; he was prepared to concede her every virtue except justice. Certainly her protective attitude toward Rocky was something to be respected, especially in contrast to his only other experience of the mother-child relationship. But it didn’t make him any happier.
After all, wasn’t it almost inevitable that she should think he was the one behind the whispered phone calls and the gruesomely suggestive photograph? How many monsters could there be in the world?
He looked sourly at the inch and a half of pale liquid at the bottom of his beer glass and then checked the wall clock over the bartender’s head. It was 12:36. In another six or seven minutes the last screening at the movie house across the street would be over, and then he could go back to his motel room and go to sleep. He wondered whether he could get away with not ordering another beer in that time and decided yes, he could.
What the hell. He was sick of beer and he wasn’t about to be browbeaten into another one if he didn’t want it. If they felt so inclined, they could fight him for his seat at the bar; he didn’t care whether every man jack of them was armed to the teeth, and probably half of them were. He wished someone would insult him or spill a drink over his trousers, just so he would have an excuse to beat some son of a bitch’s brains out.
It had been that kind of a day.
He couldn’t help it. Like a little boy with a scab on his elbow, he just couldn’t help picking at it. Over and over again, Kathleen another man’s wife. Fixing his dinner at night (Guinness looked down at the slice of pizza in front of him, reminiscent of a ragged, infected wound; Duelle probably didn’t have to eat pizza from one year to the next), playing hostess to his friends, keeping his house. Sleeping in his bed.
Of course, she was sleeping in it alone tonight. He thought of Kathleen, lying awake in her dark bedroom, listening to the wall beams creak as she waited for some anonymous thug to break in through one of the downstairs windows. Would she sleep at all tonight? At least when she had thought it was Guinness, the monster had had a face.
Kathleen, alone and frightened in her new husband’s house. Guinness made a try at getting some mileage out of the idea (after all, didn’t she have it coming?), but all he succeeded in feeling was anger—not even at Kathleen, as he would have liked, but at that corn pone she’d married. What the hell business did he have to leave her alone, to make her tough out a thing like this by herself, even for one night? The greasy little slug, where the hell did he get off?
Of course the blame spread itself a little wider than just poor old Duelle. If Guinness hadn’t settled on quite so exotic a method of paying his way through the University of London’s graduate program in literature, then probably Kathleen would still be sleeping in his bed, where she belonged, without a thing in the world to trouble her dreams. After all, how often does an English teacher have anything or know anything that would bring him to the attention of someone like Flycatcher?
His name for it was “the slide show,” and it was something he had learned a long time ago he would just have to put up with; it was one of the minor psychological hazards that went along with the way he earned his living. At certain moments, when he was alone in a crowded room, or waiting for sleep—or just waiting, for something to happen or maybe just for the world to end—for no particular reason except that his mind was at liberty for a little self torment, it would begin.
Behind his eyes he would begin seeing them, images of all the people whose lives he was responsible for having ended. One after the other, at intervals of what seemed like a few seconds but were probably not even that, as if they were projected on a screen. Most of them were like the photographs police take at the scene of a murder, a single, still frame of somebody with his brains spilled all over a checkered tablecloth. But some of the pictures moved. A man who had fallen down dead on a sidewalk in Belgrade one afternoon back in the middle ‘60s, his arms swinging loose and wild as he collapsed like a puppet after someone had let go of the strings—that was like a little clip out of a home movie; he could watch it happen and study the twisting geometry of extinction.
The show always ended the same way, with Louise. She was the only one he could ever seem to remember as anything except dead, but then he hadn’t been there for the kill. Someone else had taken care of that detail, someone who had imagined himself as having a grievance, but the responsibility had still been Guinness’s. After all, he had married the lady, and if he hadn’t done her that kindness Misha Fedorovich Vlasov would never have imagined that there could be any satisfaction in putting an ice pick in her ear. She would probably still be alive somewhere, worrying about some other man’s cholesterol levels.
Of course she might have been run over by a truck.
Guinness had tried believing that on a few occasions, but he could never quite manage it. He didn’t really believe people ever died until they were murdered.
I have laid my head on satin pillows,
And I’ve drunk the sweet wine of sorrow.
I have lived each day
In the same sad way,
With a mortgage upon Tomorrow. . .
The music from the juke box, speakers for which seemed to be everywhere, was made tolerable only by virtue of the fact that it was almost completely drowned out by the happy buzz of the young patrons and the clink and thud of beer mugs—that, and the fact that the air was too thick with humidity and the warm smell of bodies to carry any sound except as a blurred murmur.
If you looked outside you could see the insects in their thousands, bobbing against the big plate glass windows; some of them were so huge that if the room had been quiet you could have heard the tap-tap-tapping sound they made as over and over as they threw themselves against the glass, and some were so small as to be almost invisible. It had taken Guinness only about fifteen minutes on his first night in town to realize that if you left your motel room window open to catch the night breezes, and depended only on the screen, you would be eaten alive.
Tap-tap-tap against the glass, like the spirits of the damned, begging to be admitted into the warmth and light.
From where he was sitting, Guinness could look out at the darkened storefronts on the other side of College Avenue. Only the movie house was still lit up, and even there the ticket booth was closed and the curtains were drawn; the doors would stay shut until the film ended and the crowd pushed them open from the inside and started filing back in twos and threes to the dorms and, in a few cases, to the tiny little apartments where they would lay down their undergraduate heads.
Guinness checked the wall clock again: 12:40. In two, maybe three minutes he would know. Then he could go to bed himself.
It was just a hunch, of course; the kind of thing he felt just a little foolish even bothering to follow up. Still, you learned to listen to that little voice, and right now it was saying that Professor Holman Duelle was right up to his eyebrows in something that really smelled bad.
Zingo, within twenty minutes of leaving the good doctor’s campus office, Guinness discovered that he had acquired a shadow named Willie Trowbridge. It hadn’t been there before, and while Duelle was making him cool his heels in the lobby he could have whistled up the troops, nothing easier. He had kept Guinness with him for close to an hour, plenty of time for even the likes of Willie Trowbridge to put himself into position.
And then there was his whole attitude—and Kathleen’s.
The man was simply not one hundred percent; Guinness had felt it even before their little talk, and he would be willing to bet that Kathleen had felt it too. Guinness might be willing to write his own feelings off as just so much jealous prejudice, but Kathleen wouldn’t have that motive to think ill of her own husband, and she would know the man.
The windows of
My soul shine out
On the dry, dusty streets
of despair. . .
And if he were dirty, friend Duelle would probably be feeling the need of a little spiritual comfort right now. He didn’t strike Guinness as the strong, silent type; hadn’t he sicked a tail on him? A nice friendly federal agent, and he goes and does a thing like that. It suggested weak nerves. Hell, what Peter McAffee knows, he knows; and digging around in his suitcases, even if you found something, wouldn’t do much more than jack up your anxiety levels. There wouldn’t be much you could do about it. You needed to be something of a fatalist if you wanted to play these games and stay sane, and hanging tough didn’t seem to be Duelle’s style.
No, Duelle was a marshmallow; as soon as he began feeling the heat—and just what had he expected after filing a harassment report, a postcard in the mail with a gold star on it?—he would be the type to go running to mamma for reassurance and advice. He wouldn’t be able to help himself.
Guinness finished his slice of pizza, all except for the crust, and began carefully wiping his fingers with a paper napkin. Across the street, the first avalanche of students started to spill out onto the sidewalk through the movie house doors, hooting and shouting at one another for a brief moment and then disappearing from Guinness’s field of vision. They appeared in clots, rhythmically, like spurts of blood from a severed artery; then finally the stream seemed almost to have exhausted itself and only a few stragglers came through the theater doors, stood for a moment in the pool of light around the ticket booth, and then disappeared. They all seemed to be alone, these last few who were closing the place up. As if, having come alone, they were reluctant to leave.
Duelle was one of these.
He paused on the sidewalk, lit a cigarette, cupping his hands around the match, and then threw the match out into the street. He was gone in an instant.
Guinness gave him another few minutes to get away—he didn’t very much want to run into the guy on his way back to the car—and then left his post at the Study Hall Bar to go back to his room for a little sleep, hoping to put off until the morning having to decide what he should do.
7
There was an oak leaf floating in the swimming pool, brown and curled in upon itself like a claw. Guinness couldn’t imagine how it had gotten out there; there wasn’t a tree, any kind of a tree, inside the large, hollow square made by the four wings of the motel. There hadn’t been any wind to speak of, at least not while Guinness had been awake to hear it, and yet there the leaf was, floating on the surface of the thick blue water like the corpse of some small drowned animal.
At a few minutes after six, Guinness seemed to be the only one awake to ponder this mystery. He had the cool of the morning quite to himself. The only sound was the unnecessary hum of the air conditioning units under people’s windows. It was possible that the restaurant wasn’t even open for breakfast yet.
He sat down on one of the deck chairs scattered along the cement apron around the pool, wondering for a moment whether or not the plastic webbing in the seat might not tear under his weight. It didn’t, but Guinness continued to balance himself delicately in the chair, bracing himself on the armrests as if he were ready any second to spring for cover.
He still hadn’t decided what he was going to do about Duelle.
Or rather, more accurately, the problem was Kathleen.
He wanted to find out just exactly how much she might know about her husband’s involvement, and it was going to be an inquiry that would require a certain amount of tact. Would it be so surprising if she suspected his motives? At certain moments, he suspected his motives himself.
Not that he suspected Kathleen. Unless she had changed a hell of a lot in eight years, criminal conspiracy just wasn’t in her range. She would not be involved in whatever game Duelle was playing; it was a question of how much she might have guessed.
The moment could very well come when it would be necessary to put her and Rocky on a plane and send them somewhere where they would be out of danger, and Guinness kept wondering how much persuasion that would take. He would hate like anything to have to do it by force, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t if he had to.
She was a good woman. If she believed in her husband and loved him (loved him—Guinness shuddered inside at the idea), then she might easily go all tiresome and noble and decide that her place was with her man. If he could persuade her the clown was dirty, however—or if she knew it already—that would be something else again. After all, Duelle wouldn’t be the first husband she’d have left to save herself and her baby from contamination.
Poor Kathleen. Guinness always seemed to be planning to ship her off and out of harm’s way; he wondered if she might not beat him to the punch again this time, as she had finally back in England.
He could still remember the wording of the note she had left pinned with a thumbtack to their bedroom door: “I’m sorry. I just can’t live with you any longer. It would be better if you didn’t try to find us.” It had only been a few weeks since she had learned the awful truth about him, since the afternoon she had come home to find him lying on the bed with a patched up bullet hole through his thigh and he had made a clean breast of it—or as clean a breast of it as he would ever be prepared to make to anybody. You might, if you had to, admit that once in a while you were forced to kill a man in the line of your official duties, but you didn’t ever say that that was what your official line of duty was. Not ever. Not to anybody.
And apparently the awful truth, even in a somewhat laundered form, had been just too much to handle.
It had been a tight time, with the opposition breathing down his neck and ready to do all manner of unpleasant things to him the moment they found out who the hell he was. He had figured it was time to fold his tent and take his family and himself out of harm’s way. Back to the States, along a deliberately circuitous route, with a few changes of identity between here and there, where they could take up the thread of their life together and be just like everybody else. Faceless, of no interest whatsoever to the men in charge of settling scores for the nations of the Warsaw Pact.
But Kathleen had beat him to it, doing a flit on her own and taking their baby daughter with her. Guinness had conceded the logic of the thing and had never made any effort to find her again. Let her have her quiet life and her clean conscience, if that was what she wanted.
And then, eight years later, because three or four of the Company big shots had decided that Professor Holman Duelle’s little problem was a good chance to see if the fine tuning would work right on a weapon named Raymond M. Guinness, up turns the bad penny.
And it was just as well, because the quiet life and the clean conscience turned out to be more elusive than she had imagined.
Guinness slipped his left hand in under his coat, to where his fingers could rest on the hammerless .38 that was jammed, butt forward, into the waistband of his trousers, just a little to the front of his right side. That was his talisman, as much the symbol of his trade as the striped pole was the barber’s. And he frowned and wondered again, as it seemed like he had every day of his adult life, how it was that he had come to this, to be a killer of men.
By invitation. Because the British had needed some amateur cannon fodder, and Guinness had needed the money. Only things hadn’t worked out quite as planned, or at least not as the British had planned. Guinness had had it in mind right from the start that he was going to survive, and MI-6 had found itself in possession of a young man with possibilities. Just the gratuitous coming together of circumstances, an accident.
Or, maybe not. Maybe he had been born to it. Maybe it had been his destiny all along, fulfilling itself by the side of a road in central England on that night when he had strangled a man named Hornbeck, not knowing that Hornbeck was an iceman for the communists and considered very dangerous. Maybe if it hadn’t been Hornbeck it would have been someone else, and if not the British then someone else. Perhaps it had been, from the first, something impossible to evade.
And it didn’t matter now. Someday there wo
uld come the settling up, as there had for Hornbeck, and it would be his turn to die alone, at the hands of some stranger, and that wouldn’t matter either. Right then there was his ex-wife and their child, strangers—or very nearly—in the land of the quick and the dead.
. . . . .
He didn’t really have any way of telling what time they began the fifth grade in Clemson. His waitress, who happened this morning not to be the hometown girl of lunch the day before yesterday, came from a different county and didn’t have the faintest idea, and he couldn’t very well ring up the school and ask; that would create no end of a funny impression.
He thought he remembered that it had been eight o’clock when he was a boy, but he wasn’t sure. That had been a long time ago and in Ohio. Still, it wasn’t likely to be earlier. At ten to, then, he parked his car across the street from the Morrison School, and as far as he could tell none of the teachers or children had arrived yet.
Kathleen, he figured, would be waiting until the last possible second before the bell rang, and if she drove up the same way she had last time they would be facing each other as they sat in their cars. She couldn’t miss him.
It only remained to see if she would get the message and behave herself, or whether he would have to follow her home and break down the front door. She wouldn’t like that, and she might have some lingering idea that he could be gotten rid of if simply ignored firmly enough—people outside the business had all kinds of funny ideas about things like that.
But in the end it wouldn’t matter. He would, on the whole, prefer to meet her in some neutral corner—he couldn’t imagine she would be just wild about having him show up at her house too many times; what would the neighbors think?—but the two of them were going to get a few things straight between them, whether she liked it or not.
Maybe if he had done that eight years ago, just sat her down and made her listen, then maybe she wouldn’t have run off. And then, maybe she would have. It wasn’t necessarily a stupid decision to put some distance between yourself and a lightning rod, not just because the lightning rod didn’t find it terribly congenial to his own private wants and needs. People did it all the time; it was called “self-protection.” Nobody could fault you for it
Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2) Page 9