The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  And the worst was that Kathleen had believed him. But why shouldn’t she, not being the type to imagine that her donnish schoolmaster of a husband could be anything worse than advertised?

  Kathleen. After all these years she was still more of a sensation than a memory. A yearning that would still creep over him from time to time. Probably he had never known her very well.

  All the way from the University of Washington she had come, with her B.A. in philosophy and her Phi Beta Kappa key and her Fulbright, to study Ordinary Language Philosophy at Cambridge. In the vague way one associates with semanticists and logicians, she was very bright.

  She was also. . . Well, “beautiful” didn’t seem to cover it, and “pretty” was well wide. But she was something, with her tall willowy frame and her dark brown hair that ran all the way down to the small of her back in a thick, faintly waving mass. She was something fine.

  The occasion of their first meeting had been a seminar on aesthetic theory that someone at London had put him on to, and that sounded arcane and richly pedantic enough to be almost irresistible. Lady Winifred Ireton, who had just finished what might turn out to be the book on Tolstoy, would conduct meetings once a week in her rooms at Girton College. Cambridge was quite a trip—over a hundred and ten miles, there and back—but the seminar was being touted as an event of sorts. So Guinness sent off his forms and paid his fees and enrolled.

  Lady Winifred’s parlor turned out to be small, dark, book lined, and, perhaps because most of the furniture had been moved out to make room for several dozen collapsible wooden chairs, oppressive. Also, in spite of the fact that it was the beginning of the summer, the gas heater in the fireplace was turned all the way up, making the room as airless as a crypt.

  Precisely on time, Lady Winifred, a mannish, middle aged woman who chopped off her hair above her collar and wore a charcoal gray suit with a lace hanky pinned to the breast pocket, took her place at the front of the room, in the only comfortable chair, and began working her way through What Is Art? Apparently the meetings were to be based on the premise that she was the only one there who had mastered the knack of reading.

  While Guinness was sitting on one of the wooden chairs, thinking about how much his tail ached and if there wasn’t some decent way he could slip off, he noticed this girl sitting just to one side of the fireplace. Apparently deliberately—there were a few unfilled seats—she had chosen the floor, and a spot to which the Turkish carpet didn’t reach. Her hands were in her lap, resting on a book with a green cover, and she seemed never to move, or even to breathe, during the whole three hours.

  Finally it ended. Outside, on the front walkway, Guinness tried to recall the times of the evening trains back to London. The trip took about an hour and a half, but at ten o’clock on a Friday night it didn’t seem to matter much; there wouldn’t be a thing in the world to get him out of bed the next morning.

  Up and down the row of little grayish brick houses that made you think of Dickens, the doors were shut and bolted and the windows dark. The world where people lived and slept had closed itself off, leaving a street as desolate as a stretch of sand in the Gobi Desert. Guinness had been in Cambridge only twice before, and never for more than a few hours. He didn’t even know where to go at that hour for a beer.

  He struck a kitchen match on the sole of his shoe and lit a cigarette—he still smoked in those days; Louise hadn’t talked him into giving them up. As he finished the operation, he noticed that the girl from the seminar had appeared beside him and was taking a pack from a pocket hidden somewhere in the pattern of her long peasant skirt. Guinness held out the match for her, cupping it between his hands, and she steadied it with her own. He noticed the almost transparent whiteness of her fingers, as long and tapering as you could wish.

  “Did you enjoy that?” he asked quietly, shaking the match out and pitching it into the street.

  Her eyes smiled a warm, enigmatic smile and she shook her head. It was as if they had known each other so long and so intimately that she wondered why he would need to ask.

  “Then let’s go get something to eat,” Guinness ventured, raising his eyebrows. Her answer was to smile again, perhaps only at the non sequitur, but a wonderful smile that managed to say yes without implying maybe. “Well, this isn’t my town; you’ll have to show me where.”

  Then, without a word, she slipped her arm through his and they began walking away between the pools of light from the street lamps. It promised to be an interesting evening.

  And it was. In her tiny Spartan flat they supped on bean salad and rose hip tea, which Guinness had never tasted before. He didn’t get back to London until Monday morning, just in time to miss his first class.

  For the month that followed he spent every minute he decently could in Cambridge, and by month’s end he had decided. If he didn’t marry Kathleen, then he couldn’t imagine whom he ever would marry. If she would have him he wanted to marry her, and she would have him.

  Of course, it never occurred to him that the collision between his marriage and what he did for a living—not the school teaching, for which she rather admired him, but what he really did—was inevitable. It never occurred to him that he would have to choose, and that by deliberately not choosing he was preparing a disaster.

  But how much of that was Kathleen? Now and then, in the years following that disaster, he would wonder how much his hideous error had been simply his misunderstanding of who she really was. Perhaps he had never known her at all.

  “These people,” she had asked, after patiently listening to his lies about what he did on those trips to the Continent he would sometimes suddenly have to take, “are they spies?” Her tone was one of simple surprise, not the outrage and shock he had half expected.

  “Yes, I suppose so; I don’t ask.” As he sipped his tea he watched her for a reaction, but there didn’t seem to be one. She simply continued to sit in the precise center of his living room carpet, her feet drawn up under her and completely hidden in the folds of her dress and her hands lying open and palms up in her lap. Finally, she looked up from them and fixed a perplexed gaze on him.

  “There really are spies?”

  “Yes, of course. The British are very big on that kind of thing; except for maybe the Israelis, they have the best espionage network in the world.”

  She nodded—slowly, as if not quite sure whether she understood or not— and then asked if there was any danger in what he was doing. He told her no and then she allowed him to change the subject. They never discussed it again.

  But how could he have possibly expected her to deal even with his lie? The British didn’t have spies, not her British. Her British were Gertrude Anscombe, the Cambridge Platonists and the guards at the National Gallery. Everything he had told her was simply unreal.

  Sometimes he wondered whether anything was real to her except making love and the subtleties of the Tractatus. In their purest forms, the life of the body and the life of the mind—that was it. Perhaps she accepted Guinness’s confession simply because she didn’t know what he was talking about, any more than if he had been speaking in Mandarin. Apparently, it posed no palpable threat, so she simply dismissed it. It was like explaining something to a child.

  Only Guinness really didn’t want her to understand. It would be easier as it was.

  So they set up housekeeping. They took an apartment together in London, whither Guinness had persuaded Kathleen to transfer, and furnished it out in a compromise between his love of creature comforts and her indifference to them, as domestic as you could wish.

  And in time Kathleen arrived at her fruition. Big bellied and pregnant, she began the process of turning them into a family, and as if in sympathy, Guinness began to hang a few extra pounds on his normally spare frame. It was a nice marriage, for both of them, and they were happy. More than once in the years after, it occurred to Guinness that had he been run over by a truck the day after his daughter was born, had no subsequent history been allowed to touch him, hi
s life would have been an enviable thing.

  But of course it didn’t work that way. It’s only in the movies that you get to ride off into the sunset; the real world doesn’t allow things to be rounded off so nicely.

  Byron had been right. Byron had always been right. “You’re not likely to get away with it forever, sport. It’s all very nice, the pipe and the slippers and the little lady at home in the flowered apron, but it just will not square. You’ve been playing at cowboys and Indians too long.”

  Guinness noticed the tired pouches under his eyes, but then Byron had never been one for the Regular Life; probably he had a new lady friend who was keeping him up nights. A week later the old boy had his coronary.

  In violation of every conceivable rule, Guinness went to the funeral. There weren’t more than eight or nine people present, and very likely half of them were there taking notes for the Warsaw Pact nations. It wasn’t much of a send off.

  And, of course, Guinness had finally been forced to concede, his own disasters were no one’s doing but his own. Everything that had happened was simply the sum of decisions he had made for himself, a karma rather than a destiny.

  So on we worked and waited for the light, and one sunny April afternoon Guinness found an envelope in the post office box he kept under a false name. It didn’t carry a stamp, just an address: Mr. Raymond W. St. Mary, London NW9. Inside was a blank sheet of paper, folded into thirds.

  He went back to the apartment and took down from his bookshelf a little blue and white paperback street atlas of London. The code initial indicated Wanstead, and there was a St. Mary’s Avenue only a block down from the underground; presumably it would have a number 9. The kitchen clock told him he would have to hustle if he was going to make it by three.

  They had used his first name. They only did that when it was a rush call, so he left a note threaded through the strings of Kathleen’s lute: “Duty calls. Expect me when you see me.”

  A routine matter, as it turned out. Just a Polish colonel of intelligence who had decided to sell his country’s secrets in exchange for a life of grouse hunting in Scotland. It seemed his greatest ambition was to mix with the British country aristocracy. Everyone in MI-6, it was reported, found that highly diverting.

  He was frightened, though, and wanted the very best protection in transit, or no deal. Guinness was supposed to meet him in a forest outside of Oslo, where he was stationed at the embassy, and to shepherd him home.

  It was raining in Oslo, enormous soft drops that spattered on your windshield in slow motion. Hell, it was always raining in Oslo.

  Guinness had rented a Volvo, as he had been instructed, and had driven into the boondocks. The car was parked by the side of a certain specified dirt road, with the right taillight left flashing, all according to prearrangement. Guinness wasn’t inside, however; he wasn’t prepared to be all that good a boy.

  McKendrick had told him that he was supposed to wait in the passenger’s seat, that that was part of the recognition signal, but this whole deal smelled just a little off. If it had been Byron giving the orders, Guinness would have followed them to the letter, but Byron was a year in his grave, and Guinness just didn’t know about this guy McKendrick. Byron would never have told him to do anything as dumb as that. The whole business had the faint odor of a setup.

  So Guinness was off wandering between the trees. He kept moving, weaving silently over the spongy, grass choked earth. He wanted to see who would approach the car, and how. And it was just fine with him if maybe they didn’t know right where he was at any given moment.

  After about twenty minutes, another car pulled up behind the Volvo. A heavier car, perhaps a Mercedes—yes, a Mercedes. Guinness could just make out the hood ornament. Black, or maybe dark blue or something; it was impossible to tell in the bands of diagonal light that seemed here and there to lean unsteadily against the trees.

  A man got out from behind the wheel and stood with his hands thrust into the pockets of a tan raincoat. He wasn’t wearing a hat and his hair was thickly blond and cut a little on the longish side; he really didn’t look old enough to have made colonel. Guinness was across the road from him and the cars were between them, but he could see that the man in the raincoat hadn’t closed his car door and that the window on the other side, on Guinness’s side, was rolled down. He wished the son of a bitch would take his hands out of his pockets.

  Guinness drew his revolver out of his belt, where it had been sawing his backbone in half. He liked big guns when he had a choice, and this one was a .357 with a seven-inch barrel and enough weight to absorb the shock so you could keep your pattern fairly tight on the target. It would punch a hole through the bodywork of a car and still make a terrible mess of anybody unlucky enough to be caught inside. He stepped to the edge of the road and pointed it at Raincoat, holding it steady with both hands. The two men were perhaps twenty-five feet apart.

  “Just one chance. Bring your hands out where I can see them.”

  The man said something in a foreign language, Russian or Polish or something Slavic. He seemed to be asking a question, but one had the sense that it wasn’t addressed solely to Guinness—perhaps it was the way his eyes twitched toward the Mercedes.

  And he hadn’t taken his hands from his pockets, so Guinness shot him through the neck. His head seemed to come unmoored, pitching violently over to one side, and he dropped forward fast enough to make you think for a second that he was being jerked down from below.

  Then the dude in the car rose up from where he must have been crouched down on the front seat, bringing something to his shoulder that looked like a stubby rifle. At the same instant Guinness turned slightly to face him and emptied his revolver into the door and open window. In the blur of noise he couldn’t tell if the other man had gotten off a shot, not until the shooting had stopped and he tried to take a step forward and toppled over on his face.

  One bullet, right through the thigh.

  But it could have been worse. It had missed the bone and the major arteries: it would hurt like hell for a while, but he wasn’t going to bleed to death. It could wait until he got back to London—it would have to wait.

  Guinness picked himself up out of the muddy earth and checked the Mercedes. The man inside wasn’t very pretty to look at.

  He had fallen off the seat onto the floor and was lying on his side, his head twisted up at a grotesque angle and his eyes wide open. There were two dark bloodstains on his shirt front, and a third slug had entered through the right cheekbone. From the mess in the car, it must have taken a fair share of the back of his head with it when it exited; there was even a spatter of blood on the windshield.

  The other man, with about half his neck gone and his left shoulder soaked in blood, wasn’t very appetizing either. His hands were still thrust deep into his pockets, even as he lay dead on the ground. Sometimes they die like that, without so much as a twitch.

  No, Guinness decided, his own wound would just have to wait until he got home. He wouldn’t care to take a bullet hole to a local doctor, not when the police would probably be finding this within a few hours.

  Raincoat, or what was left of him, was the less chewed up of the two, so Guinness swallowed hard and set about patting him down. In his right coat pocket was a small lugerlike automatic, probably a 7 mm, and inside his jacket was the red passport carried by members of the KGB. The stupid bastard—he might have made it if he had just answered in English. London would never have sent someone on a job where the contact spoke no English, not without special instructions. London had said nothing, so Raincoat couldn’t have been their precious Pole. If he had ever existed.

  A setup. What the hell had they wanted, to take Guinness alive or to kill him? He didn’t know any state secrets, except for a few the KGB probably knew even better, so why would they want to rip him off?

  Jesus, were they that mad at him that they would organize a special hit, just for him?

  Maybe they had been willing simply to settle for pot l
uck. Well, he wasn’t ever likely to find out now.

  His mind kept going back to the Hornbeck job, his maiden voyage. Maybe it was like that; maybe they were that mad at him, as mad as the British had been at Hornbeck. As ye sow, so shall ye reap. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  Byron would never have sent him off into a thing like this. No one could have suckered Byron this way, not even the KGB.

  Guinness kept the automatic, replacing it in Raincoat’s pocket with his own gun. The police could make whatever they wanted out of the mess they would find, but there would be nothing to tie him in. One had to remember that in the real world this sort of thing was technically considered murder.

  He bound off his leg with his necktie, just to keep it from leaking all over everything, and attempted to clean himself off a little. In a way the road mud all over him was a good disguise; he could change in his hotel room.

  The sooner he was on his way, the better.

  There were no real problems getting away. The elevator operator in his hotel gave him a funny look, but Guinness just lurched around a little and smiled fatuously. “Fell down,” he said, laughing, making it all a tipsy slur. The operator just cast his eyes down to the floor and frowned. That solved everything; people are never much surprised at a muddy drunk.

  On the plane he thought a few times that he might pass out; but you almost never really do pass out, not just because your leg hurts.

  He was back in his apartment by the early afternoon. For a while all he could think about. was lying down, that and how freely he was sweating. Eventually he got around to phoning a certain “safe” doctor, and within twenty minutes he was having the slug taken out of his leg.

  “You’ll be all right,” the doctor said. He was somewhere in his middle fifties, fat and seedy looking; you wondered where Services picked them up. He dropped the slug in an ashtray and smiled. “Keep it as a souvenir and stay off your feet for a couple of days.” Guinness was glad when he had gone.

  The problem, of course, was with Kathleen.