The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  Tuttle laughed, rather brutally, and Guinness decided that the booze must be making him careless. Some men were like that.

  “But most of the time, oh Jesus, you should have seen him, just as cool and out of reach as he could be. He would sit in the front room all during an interview—away from the window, even though the shades were drawn; he was a very careful man—slouched down with his head back in an enormous overstuffed chair, his elbows on the armrests and his knees crossed, holding a cigarette between thumb and first finger and looking for all the world like a character out of a Fitzgerald novel.”

  It was an odd description, and no doubt would have been deeply shocking to a man of Vlasov’s earnest communism—certainly he wasn’t the sort you would expect to see lounging around the bar of the Ritz—but it made a kind of sense. The man Guinness remembered had been small and slightly built, with a finely molded, rather ascetic face. A hard little mouth under a curved, well defined nose, and rimless glasses. Longish hair, astonishingly black and pulled straight back as if to emphasize the width of his brow.

  Vlasov looked like what he was: an intellectual and a man of fanatic integrity, someone for whom it would seem perfectly natural to risk everything for something or someone he had given his life to. In a way, perhaps he was a kind of socialist Gatsby, if that didn’t amount to a contradiction in terms.

  But then he had defected, so perhaps he had never been what Guinness had thought him. After all, they had never met face to face, and having tried to murder a man doesn’t really establish much of an intimacy.

  “He gave us almost more information than we could handle,” Tuttle went on, “but as much of it as we were in a position to check turned out good as gold. So when we were finished with him we kept our part of the bargain and started building him a new life.

  “He said he wanted to live in Oregon, which was okay with us. We got him a new passport and constructed him a past, complete with records, and arranged for him to purchase a small nursery supply store. He said he wanted to be around living things, that that was what he had missed most in his old line of work. Isn’t that droll? That was about seven months ago.

  “For three or four months after that, we kept a loose check on him, just to be on the safe side, but everything seemed to be going ginger peachy. He was living his new identity to the hilt. He’d even become a registered Republican.

  “Then a month ago he disappeared, just disappeared without leaving a trace. We went over his shop and apartment like we were doing an inventory of the dust particles, but we didn’t find anything to suggest where he had taken himself off to, let alone why. Nothing.

  “Then four days ago I got a special delivery package—it was mailed care of a drop address in Baltimore that we didn’t think even the CIA knew about. Inside was a letter from Vlasov: ‘Tell Raymond Guinness that he is a dead man. But first, before the end, he must die as I have died.’ That was all there was to it, except for your address and one page torn from the KGB Bluebook, listing what they had against you. Where the hell he had kept that hidden during all the time we had him, I’ll never figure out.

  “A quick check of your movements during the sixties was enough to convince us that Vlasov knew what he was talking about and that you were the gentleman on whom we’d kept an open file all those years.

  “Suddenly everything made perfect sense. It had been you the British had sent to kill Vlasov in seventy. Only you had fucked up for once and killed his wife instead.

  “All those years he had spent tracking you down, running to ground one lead after another until he came up with the right name—Raymond Guinness. His own private little research project within the archives of the KGB, and they probably never even guessed.

  “Then, when he finds you, he defects so that we can practically deliver him to your doorstep. He throws away everything, all those years of faithful service to the Party and the Cause, just for the chance to turn your lights out. You should feel flattered.”

  Tuttle raised his eyebrows and smiled. He looked like one of Guinness’s students, waiting to be patted on the head after his conclusive demonstration that Beowulf had to be a faggot.

  “So when we figured out what was going on, I caught a plane out here. We kind of thought we might have interests in common.”

  “You said a package. Nobody sends a package with just a letter in it. What else was there?” Guinness waited, but his question elicited nothing beyond a tense silence. “Come on, Tuttle—you know you’re dying to tell me. You’ve been building toward it all evening. What else was there in the package?”

  With the air of making a concession—remember, baby, you asked for it—Tuttle lifted one hand to about shoulder level and inhaled deeply through his nose. It was more than just a little theatrical, giving the impression that he regarded himself as taking a risk.

  “The weapon he used on your wife.”

  “Show me.”

  Tuttle got up out of his chair and went to the chest of drawers. Taped to the back of the bottom drawer was a plastic bag, the kind you see advertised on television as having a “zip-lock top.” Inside, with the tip stuck into a small cork, was an ice pick with about a three-inch point; the blond wood of its handle, as well as the inside of the bag, were melodramatically smeared with blood that had dried flaky and almost black. It was a color you read about a lot in Aeschylus.

  Tuttle set the bag down on the table between them and sat down again. It was a horrible thing, the most horrible thing Guinness could ever remember having seen, and yet he couldn’t take his eyes from it. In a way nothing else had, it made the issue between himself and Vlasov personal—which no doubt was what Vlasov had intended.

  “There is a very clear set of prints in there,” Tuttle said quietly. “Part of a thumb on the metal collar of the weapon itself and three fingers in the blood on the inside of the bag. There’s no disputing it’s from Vlasov.”

  “What do you want from me?” Even to himself, Guinness’s voice sounded hollow and far away.

  “What do you think we want?” Tuttle, it was clear, was embarrassed. “We want you to kill Vlasov for us. He defected to us, and now he’s defected from us—it makes us look bad.

  “What are we supposed to do, launch a national manhunt? Put him on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list? This is not a stupid man we’re talking about, and that’s what we’d have to do to get him back, alive or dead. Quite frankly, we can’t afford the publicity, not the way the intelligence community is on everybody’s shit list these days. And we don’t want the Russians to get wind of it either; nobody in Washington much relishes the thought of them laughing up their sleeves at how we got suckered. We can’t go after him and we can’t afford to leave him running around loose either.

  “So you see, you’re the only answer. He’ll come to you. He wants to kill you so bad he can taste it, and that gives you the only chance there is of nailing him.”

  “And if he comes, and if I get him first, what then?”

  “Then we want him to disappear.” By way of emphasis, Tuttle noiselessly snapped his fingers. “We want him dropped down a hole, a very deep hole, so that neither the Russians nor anybody else will ever be sure what happened to him, so that for all the Kremlin knows he could be happily climbing up the corporate ladder at IT&T. We’ll even provide the hole if you’ll just take care of him in some nice anonymous way.

  “And if you do that for us, then we’ll get the police off your ass. They will be told, quietly but firmly, that their suspicions are groundless, that the real killer is dead, that you are just the nicest, most nonviolent person who ever drew a breath, and that their government would much appreciate their simply dropping the whole matter. We’ll even show them the ice pick and the fingerprints we took from it, although they won’t be told whose they are. And you will be one hundred percent clear of all this.”

  Guinness smiled weakly; he had the distinct sense that his viscera were gradually hardening into ice. “And after that you’ll own me, is that about ri
ght?” Tuttle smiled back, nodding.

  “We might want you to do a job for us from time to time. Men of your caliber are hard to find.”

  Rising from his chair, Guinness thought about his own hotel room with a certain nostalgia. He wanted to be there right now; he wanted to be alone. He wanted to get himself his own bottle of firewater and to drink himself into a coma. He wanted to get away from Vlasov and Tuttle and the whole show—but of course that was impossible. You never get away. He had tried to once already this lifetime, and it hadn’t worked out.

  “By the way,” Tuttle said suddenly, as if some vital final point had almost slipped past him, “how much did the British pay you? How much did you command a job?”

  Guinness turned around from the door, slowly. “Two thousand pounds.”

  “What does that work out to in dollars?” Tuttle asked, smiling contemptuously. “About five grand? You’d be worth at least seven-five, maybe even ten, to us. Tell you what, you take care of Vlasov for us, and on top of that little assist with your legal problems we’ll throw in ten grand, just as a gesture of good will. If you prefer, look on it as a retainer.”

  Guinness didn’t smile back. Instead, his eyes rested on the small plastic bag on the motel room table.

  “Keep your money, Tuttle. This one’s on the house.”

  10

  The room was pitch black and Guinness lay on his stomach in bed, trying to figure out why he was awake. He had the impression he had been asleep only a second or two before. Certainly he must have been asleep; his eyes were still closed.

  Opening one of them cautiously, he saw the illuminated dial of his portable alarm clock, which read seventeen minutes after three-presumably in the morning. Guinness hadn’t been awake at 3:17 A.M. since the day he went straight.

  Then the phone rang.

  Yes, well of course; the goddamn phone. What else in the middle of the goddamn night? Whoever was calling had better be prepared to announce that the hotel was on fire. He clawed the receiver off its hook and dragged it under the covers with him.

  “Yeah?” The word came out as a kind of sleepy gasp, like something he had swallowed and that hadn’t quite settled into place right. “What’s the trouble?”

  “Oh, not much.” It was Ernie Tuttle, naturally. Cheery enough to set your teeth on edge. “Your pal Creon plans to bust you sometime this morning. A little bird told me he thinks he’s got enough to pull you down for Murder One.”

  Guinness was wide awake, now, and his feet swung out over the edge of the bed and began feeling after his slippers.

  “How much of a head start have I got?”

  Tuttle laughed. “Look, you’ll just have to ask him. His own people didn’t know this was coming down until five minutes ago. I shouldn’t think you’ve got too long, though—you’d better go get yourself lost.”

  As he listened to the silent phone line, Guinness began absentmindedly working loose the three buttons of his pajama top. His memory was walking over every foot of the hotel. The elevators, the stairwells, the exits, all the hiding places, all the ways in and no ways out. He had known that finally it might come down to this, and he had made certain tentative plans.

  “Guinness? You still there, man?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, listen. On your way to wherever you’re headed, stop by the message desk at the Bayside Hotel on Mission Street in the city. The man there will give you an envelope containing a key to a locker at the Greyhound bus station—You see? We’ll play it in reverse this time. Inside the locker will be a TW A flight bag with a few little items you may find useful.

  “You know, of course, that this is going to force Vlasov’s hand. He’ll have to go for you pretty soon, or the police are going to be putting you out of his reach.”

  “Yeah, I know. Tuttle?”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Just to satisfy my morbid curiosity, who’ve you got a handle on in Creon’s office?” For a few seconds, perhaps as many as five, you could almost hear the wheels go round.

  “A kid named Peterson,” Tuttle said at last. “He’s ambitious and he doesn’t like his boss much. He wants to break this one all by himself, and I’m afraid I led him to believe I could help him do that. Why, you know him?”

  Without answering, Guinness set the receiver back in its cradle.

  He sat in the dark for a moment, wondering if perhaps he shouldn’t simply go back to bed. He could just go back to sleep and not wake up until Creon tickled his ear with the business end of a .38 police special. Why the hell not? To go scampering off into the night would only put him out where Comrade Vlasov could take potshots at him.

  But so what? Being in the can would simply delay matters. Vlasov would come for him if he had to burrow into the death house with a pair of chopsticks. Some things you just don’t get to run away from.

  So. How do we get out of this dump?

  Not right away, though. There has to be a limit to just how spooked you can allow yourself to get. Especially by a meatball like Creon. No, you take your time. First a shave and shower; then you get dressed and split. No snickering down the fire escape in your jam jams.

  Out in the hall there was, of course, a man standing next to the elevator. There would have to be; Creon would not relax his guard just because it was outside of normal working hours. He was dumb, but he wasn’t that dumb.

  Guinness had never seen this one before, but, just like all the others, he had “cop” written right across his nose. Probably a hotel dick—his shoes were too shiny to have seen much street use, and his hair was all slicked back like patent leather. And he had that respectful constable on patrol look that makes all the rich widows feel so secure.

  He was a cop though, even if he did comb his hair. He had that cop way of standing, with his feet wide apart and his knees locked and his hands clasped behind his back.

  And he never looked at Guinness.

  Hell, at three forty-five in the morning anybody would look to see who was getting on the elevator with him. Cops are always too damn blasé to be real.

  Why was it, in God’s name, that every cop he saw lately was all tricked out in a checkered sport coat?

  Well anyway, they were on the eighth floor. Plenty of time.

  The elevator door opened and Guinness stepped inside, positioning himself directly in front of the control buttons. The other man followed, coming to stand behind him.

  “First floor?” Guinness asked, turning around and smiling. The other man only nodded. Guinness touched the button marked “lobby” and folded his arms across his chest, dropping his chin the way a man does while he waits for the elevator to begin moving down.

  Just as the little green 4 lit up on the indicator panel over the sliding double doors, Guinness touched the button for the fourth floor and shuffled around a quarter turn, as though making room in that tiny space for the man behind him to get past.

  “Your stop, I think,” he said quietly as the doors began to spring apart.

  In the next instant, before there could be any possible reply, he raised his knee as if to step over something and brought it down again, scraping the outside edge of his shoe along the man’s shinbone and driving his heel into the top of the instep, with perfectly predictable results.

  Soundless except for a sharp gasp, the man went down on one knee, wrapping his arms around his injured leg as he fell. Using his fist like a hammer, Guinness clipped him on the back of the neck and he slipped unconscious to the elevator floor, his head and shoulders out over the threshold.

  He was a big slob and it took several seconds to drag him out into the fourth-floor corridor, where Guinness rolled him over on his back and patted him down, finding a snub-nose .38 revolver in a holster clipped to his belt over the right hip. In his jacket pocket was a small leather folder containing a badge and an Oakland Police Department identity card for Sergeant of Detectives Herbert L. Ganjemi; the word “Retired” was stamped in red across its face. Guinness returned the folder to its p
lace but decided to keep the .38. It might come in handy sometime during the next several hours.

  So, what does one do with unconscious former sergeants of detectives? It would be agreeable to have a little lead time before anyone turned in an alarm—so where could our friend Herb be stashed where he would stay out of mischief for, say, twenty minutes? Killing the poor bastard would accomplish that, but under the circumstances it seemed a trifle extreme.

  There was a linen closet down the hall that looked like it would open up at a few hard words, so Guinness set about picking the lock. Inside was a big rolling hamper about a third full of dirty bed sheets—a nice padded environment into which to drop an unwanted house dick if he were suitably trussed up and gagged. Behind the relocked closet door he could kick and bellow indefinitely before anybody heard him. He might very well stay put until the chambermaids came back on duty at eight the next morning, over four hours from now. Yes, that would do nicely.

  With Herbert taken care of, Guinness got back on the elevator and rode down to the lobby. The night clerk was not behind his desk—he rarely was past about 2: 00 A.M.—so there was no one present to notice him leave.

  At that hour the parking complex was also deserted, making it perfectly safe to hot wire a car.

  Under the circumstances, he didn’t much feel like taking his own; after all, if Tuttle had his little sources of information, why shouldn’t Vlasov? There probably wasn’t much he didn’t know—or anticipate—and he might just have gotten the idea to rig the ignition again, only this time with something a trifle more interesting than a gram or two of nitrogen triiodide.

  After trying the doors of several cars, he finally found a Mazda that had carelessly been left unlocked, and he was on his way.

  If you want to know what the end of the world will look like, take a drive at 4:00 A.M. through the business district of any small American township.

  In Europe you were used to mummified cities, scooped out of the ashes of some antique disaster and lovingly preserved. But they were simply old—purple flowers grew between the stones of the Temple of Vesta, suggesting the continuity of life. And a hundred yards away, their hair covered by silk scarves, the laughing girls rode bicycles to mass.