The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  And, of course, there had been the rubble left over from the war. Here and there in England, even as late as the first few years Guinness had lived abroad, where the money to rebuild was slow in coming; and all over Germany, protected from the Wirtschaftswunder lest their envious conquerors forget how they had been made to suffer, poor babies.

  But this was different. Not a scar, or a memory—but annihilation. There wasn’t a sign of life on any of the downtown streets. Not a neon sign, not even a parked car.

  Could anything ever have lived here? Twice, three times a week, for five years he had driven up and down in front of these shop windows, had bought his clothes and had his hair cut, all right here. Could this have been the scene of his daily life?

  No, impossible. That was someone else’s life he was remembering—lived before the Armageddon was announced.

  Guinness turned off into the Alameda, into a residential area of small homes where here and there a forgotten hall light could be seen still casting an oblique orangeish flash, as if from the inner facets of some dark jewel, through an outside window.

  In a few minutes he was back in his own neighborhood. Leaving the Mazda in a side street a couple of blocks away, he walked the rest of the distance.

  Across the street from his house was a tiny white bungalow with an enormous picture window. The curtains were drawn now and the window was as gray and opaque as a sheet of slate, but the evening Louise had died he had seen the neighbor lady who lived there, whom after five years he still did not know even by name, peering out at all the excitement on his front lawn. He had seen her a number of times before, as she poked around among the flowers growing on either side of her door. She was a small withered creature of sixty-five or so, with glasses that could have been an inch and a half thick. She would always turn to watch you as you left, whoever you were, baring her upper teeth slightly as she tilted back her head for a better view.

  That night she had been only a dim shape framed by the picture window, the only sign that she was alive being a flash from her glasses if she happened to move slightly. How long had she been there, he had wondered at the time. Hours, probably—from the arrival of the first fire truck. Just taking it all in, as a kind of alternative to the “Mike Douglas Show.”

  His own house looked pretty much the same as it had that last night. Of course, nobody had watered or cut the lawn in nearly two weeks and it was beginning to look like a wheat field. Someone had replaced the broken pane of glass in the dining room window with a piece of cardboard, but otherwise there was no evidence of the fire. There was still a padlock on the front door.

  The back door didn’t have a padlock, but the bolt, which didn’t work off a key, had been thrown from inside. So Guinness got a hammer and screwdriver out of his tool shed and took the whole thing off its hinges. He did it carefully because it wouldn’t do to wake up the neighbors and because the door’s upper half was made up of a latticework of little diamond shaped panes of amber glass. He didn’t want to break one; they were held in with woodwork rather than putty (another plot against the American homeowner), and breaking a pane would mean having to replace the whole god damned thing, and we couldn’t have that. One new door in the lifetime of a rear entrance was enough.

  “The kitchen ’ll be so much airier if we can let some more light in,” Louise had said while they were making the rounds of the building supply places. “That old door is just awful, just two sheets of plywood on a little frame, and we can afford to replace it with anything we want if we can hang it ourselves.” She had been cruelly disappointed when they couldn’t find a pattern with more than one color in it, but the amber was better than nothing. In the late afternoon it would throw little patches of gold all over everything.

  He leaned the door very carefully against the side of the house and went into the kitchen, which didn’t seem to have been touched since the fire. The walls were blackened and smeared and the linoleum was discolored from water that had simply been left to dry on its own.

  Huddled in front of the stove—an arabesque in thick lines of black grease pencil—was the rather schematic outline of a human form. It appeared as if Louise had been left lying on her right side, with her right leg drawn up and both arms thrown out in front of her.

  Guinness stared down at the outline on the floor, trying to read it for some identification of what had happened there, but all he could perceive was the sound of his own breathing and of the blood pounding in his ears. He snicked off the light and passed on into the interior of the house.

  On two of the steps leading up to the second story were thick-rimmed white circles of what felt like ground blackboard chalk, and in the center of each circle, like a bullseye, was a dark bloodstain. There was another, larger circle in the bedroom, and at its center was another stain, perhaps five inches wide. It had made the carpet matted and stiff and it still had that peculiar texture, at once brittle and oily, that dried blood loses only very slowly.

  Guinness stepped into the bathroom and, without turning on the light, ran some water in the sink and began to wash his hands. He raised a double handful of cold water to his face, shook his fingers dry, and groped for the towel that always hung from a bar on the shower door. The towel smelled as musty as a length of shroud linen and almost made him gag.

  It had been a mistake to come back here; he didn’t need this. Dammit, he didn’t want to feel anything. Hadn’t he tried, all along, from the beginning, to look at it with cold eyes, the way he had looked at everything in the old days when he had been the best there was? Better to think of it as if it had been someone else’s wife who had ended up a sketch in grease pencil on the kitchen floor; better to have left the whole thing in the abstract, where he could have puzzled it out like a problem in the calculus. Feelings would only get in the way.

  But perhaps that was what Vlasov was counting on.

  Guinness finished drying his face and went back into the bedroom. After drawing down the shades of both windows, he turned on the night table lamp.

  The chair in front of Louise’s vanity had been knocked over, but there were no other signs of a struggle. Vlasov must have caught her completely by surprise.

  There was a flashlight in the drawer of the night table; Guinness took it out, stuffing it in his back pocket, and turned off the lamp. He hadn’t dared to leave any light on for more than a few seconds, just enough time to notice whether anything had been disturbed, but the darkness created no hindrance to his easy movement from room to room.

  Perhaps it was a hangover from college, but he usually couldn’t sleep more than five or six hours a night. So he had often stayed up to read long after Louise went to bed. It was impossible for her even to close her eyes if there was a light on outside her door and thus, as a matter of domestic necessity, he had gotten so he could move around the house blindfolded.

  Sometimes he would close his book and simply listen to the quiet that was almost a presence, almost a personal possession. He liked it, the feeling of stealth and privacy, of having the world to himself. Every tiny sound was assignable—the crack of a ceiling beam as it adjusted to the change in temperature, the neighbor’s cat in a faraway transport of sexual passion, the wind in the telephone wires.

  The kitchen was on the other side of the house from his study, but in his stocking feet, and being careful not to step where he would make a floorboard creak, he could make it there and back as noiseless as a ghost. It was a kind of game—Louise didn’t approve of late night snacks. He had even perfected a technique for unscrewing the lid from a jar of peanut butter in absolute silence.

  Not that it had made any difference. You could have fired a gun in the front room without waking Louise.

  She was always asleep when he came to bed, so he would undress in the dark and come under the covers as quietly as he possibly could, and, without waking, she would always roll over toward him, putting her arm across his chest and burying her head in his shoulder. Sometimes her hand would creep up until the tips of h
er fingers rested against his lips; he would kiss them and her hand would settle back down on his chest and she wouldn’t stir again. He would go to sleep finally, aware of nothing except the slow breath of her nostrils on his arm.

  Now, in the darkness, he sat on the edge of the bed, trying to conjure up some physical sense of her. But the house, and their bed, had been empty a long time, and the room was like one of those rooms you see in museums—something from the past, roped off and containing nothing except the furniture. It was a lonely place now. One had the sense that no one would ever live here again.

  Well, he hadn’t come back to stroll down memory lane. He had come to find what the police had missed, what they wouldn’t have recognized as being important even if they had seen it. It was his house, and he would be the only one to know what had a place there and what hadn’t.

  And Vlasov would leave something. He wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of so ostentatiously murdering Louise, of issuing his formal challenge, without giving instructions as to time and place, or at least as to place.

  He didn’t want simply to murder Guinness; God knows he had had plenty of chances to do that. No, he wanted a duel. Two gentlemen on the field of honor, or as close to that as a couple of middle aged hatchet men could come.

  Such had been the message of the nitrogen triiodide in his ignition slot: You see, I could kill you anytime I like, but that isn’t what I’m after. One of us will live and the other will die, but it should have some meaning. More, at least, than we have customarily attached to such matters. Each of us will hunt the other, and this time the reasons will be personal. For once, let us concede to our homicides something of moral significance.

  Only, of course, there wasn’t much moral significance to putting an ice pick in a housewife’s ear, just Raskolnikov and the moneylender all over again. But Vlasov was a Russian, one must remember. And apparently he was more than a little crazy.

  Anyway, whatever it was—this inanimate second, this bearer of the white glove—it had to be around somewhere, and probably in plain view. Guinness started poking around the bedroom with his flashlight, looking for something that hadn’t been there on that Thursday two weeks before when he had finished his lunch, promised his wife that when he returned from work he would take a look at the washer hoses, and gone back to his office to grade his way through a set of sophomore term papers.

  He tried to imagine the problem from Vlasov’s angle of vision. If you wanted to leave something in a man’s house, somewhere where he would notice it and the police wouldn’t, where would you put it? At the scene of the murder? No. Where you had left the body? No; the police would turn both places over and sift everything through fine wire. Even if they didn’t notice it, whatever it was, they might lose it. And, besides, the bedroom wouldn’t do in any case; the police were sure to have a field day going through the victim’s private effects. Guinness’s study was out for the same reason.

  If you eliminated the dining area and the bathrooms, where anything unusual would stick out like a sore thumb, there wasn’t much left beyond the living room.

  In the first week after their return from Las Vegas, when they were looking around for a few nice things to replace some of the junk from their apartment, Mr. and Mrs. Guinness had happened onto a warehouse sale in a great barn of a place on Mission Street in San Francisco. Most of the stuff was terrible, right out of the Sears catalogue, but there was one thing.

  It was an octagonal table, low to the floor and with a top made out of eight wedges of oak. The design, with eight carved legs and the slatwork running between them at the bottom, was very Spanish, and there was a rather striking pattern to the grains. The finish, of course, was in awful shape—otherwise they would never have been able to afford it—but with a little sanding and a little fresh stain and a lot of hand waxing it would look great in the living room.

  In the center of the top was a circular hole, about twenty inches across, into which fit an immensely heavy wrought iron pan with handles at either end. Tonight the pan contained two books of matches from a Chinese restaurant in Menlo Park, the program notice for a college guitar recital, and a picture postcard of a little blond haired girl, about seven years old and in a blue dress, riding a carrousel. The postcard was the only thing Guinness couldn’t remember ever having seen before.

  He turned it over. Printed on the back, in the bottom left-hand corner, was the location. Griffith Park, Los Angeles, California.

  Merry go rounds, for Christ’s sake. Vlasov wanted them to tap it out on a god damned merry go round.

  11

  So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.

  What had Vlasov’s wife’s name been? Not Rachel, surely. Guinness turned back to the beginning of the file he was reading and ran his finger down the page of biographical data until he came to it—Raya Natalia. They had been married in a civil ceremony in Moscow on December 6, 1966. Vlasov would have been about forty.

  Funny. Guinness had to think, it was very funny. He and Kathleen had tied the knot only five months before. Seven years. Vlasov had been hunting him for seven years, and now they were ready for the showdown. Like a Western movie. Perhaps they’d climb on a couple of the horses at the Griffith Park merry go round and blaze away at each other until somebody got dizzy and dropped off.

  No, it really wasn’t the least little bit funny.

  Guinness sat in the overstuffed chair in his study. His reading and sleeping chair, the only chair in the house in which he could be at his ease, with one leg thrown over the armrest, without Louise starting to scream bloody murder. His working notes on the Vlasov affair, pulled from the hole underneath his desk, were resting on his knee and he was reading them by flashlight. There wasn’t much they could tell him that he didn’t already know, but going through them again, like counting the beads of a rosary, set him free to think.

  Nineteen seventy had been a lousy year all around. Kathleen lost a husband—or, more accurately, had walked out on one; both Vlasov and Guinness had lost their wives. And Raya Natalia had lost everything.

  Kathleen. Well, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been warned—not against Kathleen, of course, but against the whole idea.

  “People in this profession simply do not marry,” Byron had said, “not if they have any sense. When I’m feeling domestic, I go visit my sister’s children in Cardiff.”

  Generally you couldn’t get Byron above a stroll, but that day he had been just pounding along, his stick jabbing at the walkway stones as if he wanted to impale each of them in turn. And they were walking in London too, right out in the open, along the embankment of the Thames. Guinness had simply phoned him to let him know, and Byron had blown a gasket. They must talk at once, and the very devil with security.

  “What the blazes do you think you’re about, lad? If you’re lonely, find yourself a nice, sympathetic little dark eyed tart and take her to Bristol for a fortnight. For the love of God, what conceivable need have you for a wife?” Staring down in front of him, he rocked his head from side to side, too exasperated to listen to the answer, had there been one. “And I suppose you think you’re in love with the lady.”

  “Yes,” Guinness answered after a moment. It was odd how difficult the admission seemed, like confessing some shameful and diminishing secret. “Yes, of course I’m in love with her. Why would I take it into my head to marry her if I wasn’t in love with her?”

  Byron snapped around, throwing his stick angrily to the sidewalk. “Well, if you love her so bloody much, get rid of her,” he shouted, red faced and panting. “Send her packing back off to Seattle, dammit.”

  For a second or two Guinness wondered if the old boy might not be teetering on the edge of a stroke; Byron was given to fits of temper when people crossed him, but this was the hottest on record. Then, as suddenly as it had come, his anger seemed to flow out of him and his hands loosened and unclenched. He leaned over heavily and retrieved his sti
ck, smoothing down the lapels of his overcoat as he straightened up. In one of those moments of self collection with which he so frequently prefaced his little asides on life, he stared pensively down at the stick’s silver handle, as if inspecting it for damage.

  “Give her up, Ray,” he said at last, his voice gentle almost to the point of pleading. “Do the poor girl a kindness and send her home.”

  But, of course, Guinness hadn’t done that. Not him—no, he had been too smart for that. He could handle it, he could handle anything; wasn’t he the smartest, the toughest, the most dangerous, most feared Lord High Executioner in Europe? Wasn’t he just a holy terror? Wasn’t he, though. No, he didn’t intend to give up anything.

  Instead, like a man who hopes to juggle both wife and mistress, he concocted a story to account for all those sudden trips to the Continent he was always taking. One minute to the next and he had to go. That needed accounting for.

  Because, unlike Louise, Kathleen had been the type to ask questions.

  He stuck as close to the truth as he dared, telling her that he was now and then employed by certain unnamed and unnameable, highly sensitive, bureaus within the Foreign Office, that he delivered messages of one kind or another to people whom those bureaus employed but could not contact directly without the most serious risks.

  From the way he let it out, a little at a time, you might have thought he was imparting the gravest confidence instead of lying through his teeth, but what the hell. He didn’t plan to stay in the assassination business forever, and when he got out the lies wouldn’t matter anymore. God, what a fool he must have been to have thought he could pull it off.