The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  “What happened to you?” she screamed when she came into the bedroom and found him with his trousers off and his left thigh all taped up. “You look white as a sheet. What the hell is going on?” It was the first time Guinness could remember that she had ever raised her voice.

  After a second or two, her eye caught the shiny little brass jacketed slug in the ashtray and she picked it up. She looked at him with the same questions, unspoken but in her face. Unfortunately, he wasn’t sure what kind of answers to give.

  12

  Well, it was no good pretending anymore that he was just a lowly courier, not with a bullet hole in his thigh. Even in the spy business they didn’t generally shoot you merely for delivering the mail. She would have to be told.

  “It gets sort of bouncy out there sometimes,” he said quietly. He had pulled himself up into a sitting position—it didn’t seem quite fair to discuss the matter from the supine—and he was resting his back against the headboard. “I’ve been relatively lucky, I suppose. This makes just the second time I’ve been clipped, and the other was nothing but a scratch.”

  Kathleen was sitting next to the bedroom door, in the room’s solitary chair. It was a bare little wooden thing and uncomfortable to begin with, but the way she sat in it—perched on the edge with both feet planted on the ground and her knees pressed together—made it look like an instrument of torture. Her hands were folded in her lap, one over the other, and her elbows were tight against her body; she gave the impression of wanting to occupy as little space as possible, of holding her breath in an effort not to stir.

  The mere fact that she was using a chair at all marked the solemnity of the occasion. Why couldn’t she just come over and plop down next to him on the bed? He wanted to touch her hair, to rest his hand in the crook of her arm and enjoy that reassurance of contact.

  “Do you kill people?” Except for the slightest trace of a quaver in her voice, you could have thought she was asking if he liked her lipstick. She wouldn’t look at him, though. Her eyes seemed to focus on the carpet under the window ledge. She wouldn’t look at him and she wouldn’t come near.

  “Sometimes.”

  “I see.” A long, ragged breath escaped her, like a soundless sigh, so maybe she had been holding it in. Perhaps his answer, for all the ugliness it implied, had even been something of a relief. Very slowly, as if to illustrate her tranquillity, she drew the tip of her middle finger across her right eyelid. “Did you this time?”

  “Yes. As it happened, I didn’t have much of a choice.”

  There was no immediate reaction, at least nothing to which you could attach a meaning. She merely continued to sit on the edge of the chair for a while, abstractedly stroking her left elbow, lost in some private consultation. She might have been trying to remember when next the laundry would be delivered, but Guinness didn’t really think so.

  Then suddenly she stood up.

  “You’ll probably want some tea,” she said, as if to herself, and left the room, closing the door behind her.

  Apparently she forgot about the tea, because she didn’t come back into the bedroom all the rest of that day, not even when it was time for bed. At long intervals he could hear her step as she moved from one room to another, but she didn’t come back.

  And that was that. Kathleen, it appeared, didn’t think too much of having an assassin for a husband. Guinness sat staring at his hands, wondering why in heaven’s name he felt so disappointed. Had he perhaps expected her to be impressed? That would have been dumb; she wasn’t precisely the bloodthirsty type.

  He should have known, of course. Kathleen hated anything like that, hated even to hear about it. All that winter the British papers had been full of this Manson business in California—running background pieces on the victims, and heaven knows what. They hadn’t had anything like it since the Christie case, and they seemed determined to milk it for all it was worth. One paper even printed a special number containing the lengthy confession of one of the women defendants.

  Kathleen had read the news after dinner every evening for at least as long as he had known her; it was a ritual of sorts. But the Tate killings had been too much for her.

  “I don’t know why people bother with such tripe,” she had said at the time, turning past page one and refolding the paper with a rich, angry crackle. Guinness, who was sitting at the other end of the sofa, looked up from behind a library copy of The Allegory of Love and smiled.

  “They didn’t just make it up, you know. It happened.”

  Kathleen uttered a contemptuous little sound and pushed her glasses back up off the fleshy part of her nose. “God, here it is again,” she hissed after a few seconds. A few seconds more and the whole paper was dumped in a wad on the coffee table.

  Finally she had canceled her subscription, so perhaps she did believe they were making it up. People had believed that the moon landing was a hoax. Everything like that—butchered starlets, gang killings, foreign service officers who got pushed under trains, all that stuff only happened in bad movies, not in the world. How could he possibly have expected her to accept it when it was just dumped in her lap like that?

  There wasn’t much doubt about it, he would have to quit if he was going to hang on to her. That was clear enough; he would have to break with it entirely. There was nothing unreasonable in that part of her attitude.

  And it was time, anyway. Your life expectancy wasn’t very long when people were sufficiently annoyed with you to think of setting up so intricate an ambush as the one at Oslo.

  But he could still get away clean. It was still okay; the KGB still didn’t have a make on him—they couldn’t even know his name yet, or what would have stopped them from ferrying someone over to London and having him taken care of there?

  It happened. You would simply go to the movies some night to see Steve McQueen’s latest and be found dead in your seat when the theater closed for the evening. The civilian authorities probably wouldn’t even notice the tiny needle mark at the base of your skull, just at the hairline. It happened all the time—nothing easier.

  But they hadn’t sent anyone to deal with him at home, where he would have been off his guard. Instead, they had launched a whole operation, complex and tricky, to flush him out into the open. And it hadn’t worked.

  So he still had his anonymity; he could still simply slip back into the mob and be lost from view. It wasn’t as if he had dumped anybody really important to them, and the KGB had their cost accountants too. They wouldn’t want him badly enough to start a manhunt that might very easily last for years.

  He would just drop out of sight, and they would lose interest fast enough. What doesn’t itch doesn’t get scratched.

  Still, it would be better if he could take Kathleen and the baby away from England. A nice circuitous route with a few changes of papers, and then home, just like Byron had mapped it out. They would all be safer back in the States. No one would ever find them there.

  Guinness covered his face with his hands, trying to make his mind a blank. Such speculations weren’t really very entertaining, and his leg was beginning to feel like it was on fire. It was getting dark in the bedroom, dark enough to leave visible only the outlines of things, but that didn’t make it much past the middle of the afternoon. The room’s only window faced into a tiny interior court, and they were only on the second floor—you had to stick your head out and twist almost the whole way around to see the sky.

  He took one of the morphine tablets the doctor had left him and wished to hell Kathleen would come back, if only just that he could look at her. He wished a lot of things. He wished he had accepted the gracious offer of the American government that time when he was broke and had allowed himself to be shipped home. He wished he had never heard of MI-6 or the KGB or the CIA or any of the rest of the hoodoos under cover of which otherwise perfectly sensible people went around making precisely calibrated little holes in other people’s skulls.

  Serving the cause.

  Of cours
e he had never been that stupid. He had never been guilty of that particular piece of folly, not him. No, he had done it for the money. Just the bread, sweetheart, and none of your bullshit about duty and the old school tie. Not for Ray Baby. Not for him.

  As he lay there on the bed, contemplating his lack of illusions and the moral sophistication it suggested, he had to blink hard several times to keep back the tears. He had been so fucking smart, as if any of that made any difference now.

  He was getting hungry, that was all. Visceral spasms converting themselves into agonies of the spirit. In truth, he hadn’t had a god damn thing since yesterday afternoon, since before the fireworks had started, and it was a rule in life that one’s personal arrangements always looked particularly bleak on an empty stomach. Nothing like a good meal to keep off the Dark Night of the Soul.

  That sounded like something Byron might have said. Poor old Byron. Yes, he probably had.

  Kathleen did finally come back in the morning. Of course, he couldn’t swear she hadn’t been in the room before then; after the morphine had taken hold, Guinness had slept straight on through. But he awoke still lying on the bedspread, and her side didn’t look as if it had been disturbed.

  She came only perhaps a foot over the threshold, and her hand never left the doorknob. Nothing could have been more tentative than the expression on her face.

  “Do you think you’d like some breakfast?”

  Guinness slapped the flat of his hand against his belly and grinned. “I suppose I might be able to choke down a mouthful, yeah.” God, that sounded corny.

  Glancing down at her shoes for a second, Kathleen’s only response seemed one of embarrassment. She looked drawn, as if the last several hours had worked on her like a vampire.

  “I’ll bring you in a tray then,” she said and stepped back out of the room, closing the door behind her again.

  Breakfast, when it came, consisted of two slices of lightly buttered toast, a poached egg, a small glass of orange juice, and a cup of clear tea. He wondered if perhaps Kathleen didn’t think that bullet holes were like the ’flu.

  She might have from the way she went around to the other side of the bed to set the tray down, where it would be within reach but she wouldn’t. Her retreat was a curious mingling of graciousness and panic, in which, once again, she didn’t speak before her hand closed over the safety of the bedroom doorknob.

  ‘‘I’m going out for a while. Will you be all right?”

  Again Guinness tried out his best boyish grin and again Kathleen only dropped her eyes, the way people do when they don’t want to commit themselves. “Sure. And don’t worry; I can hobble into the nursery if I hear Rocky fussing.” There was a nervous little pause during which her hand stole off the doorknob to close over the fingers of the other hand.

  “Not to bother,” she answered at last, smiling tensely. ‘‘I’m taking her with me. She can use the airing.”

  Her voice was just a little too smooth, just a shade too reassuring. What was she afraid of, that he would carve their infant daughter into stew meat in her absence? God damn her, it was his kid too; she didn’t have the right. He ought to do something, to put a stop to all this shit and reclaim his family. Once and for all.

  Instead, he returned her smile, hoping his own was more convincing than hers, and nodded.

  “Okay. Have a nice time.”

  The door closed again, and after a few minutes he could hear Kathleen leaving. She didn’t come back until late in the afternoon.

  That night she slept with him, or at least in the same bed. But she stayed with her back to him, as far over on her side as she could. Once he reached for her under the covers, resting his hand on her arm; she didn’t draw away, but there was no response and she was perfectly rigid, as if catatonic.

  Of course, there could be no thought of an embrace.

  The next morning Guinness got out of bed and started to walk the kinks out of his leg. After that, the normal pattern of their comings and goings resumed, but life together continued as a kind of charade. They almost never spoke, and they began taking elaborate care to stay out of each other’s way. Like a couple of bitter enemies condemned for some reason to share the same rooms and conscious of the futility of quarreling about it.

  What to do, what to do? If only they could have stopped being so maddeningly civilized about it; if only for a moment or two, things might have worked out differently. A good shouting, screaming, knock down, drag out battle and they might have been all right again. A little infuriated table pounding, some high pitched raging, a few tears, and they would have made the baby cry and perhaps reminded themselves that they were human beings and not abstractions of good and evil.

  But it hadn’t happened that way. Guinness could perceive easily enough that his wife was under growing inner tension, that they couldn’t possibly go on this way, but what to do?

  “I’ve quit, you know,” he said over one of their silent dinners. ‘‘I’m not going to do that kind of work anymore.”

  She just looked at him with large frightened eyes, as if his announcement had done nothing but remind her that her husband, the man with whom she had lived for three years and whose child she had borne, was covered in blood. Then, without a word, she put down her fork and left the room.

  He hadn’t yet told her that it would be necessary for them to leave England. It didn’t seem wise to impress her with the possibility that he might have tracked some of his dirt into their marriage. Of course, she was a smart woman; it might already have occurred to her. You could never tell with her—at least Guinness couldn’t, not anymore.

  And then one day she was gone.

  He had come back to the apartment after having been out for the morning and had found a note printed in dark blue Flair pen on a piece of binder paper. It was pinned with a thumbtack to the 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.”

  “Us.” She had taken his kid.

  A kind of madness overtook him at the idea, and he ran into the nursery, in his haste nearly wrecking the little latticework barrier they had put in the doorway against the time she would be old enough to start crawling. He tore the drawers out of the baby’s tiny dresser and, as he discovered them to be empty, threw them down on the floor.

  In their own room, not much was gone—only perhaps as many of Kathleen’s things as would fit into one hastily packed suitcase. But her lute was missing; he couldn’t find it anywhere.

  So it was true. Kathleen had left him, and she had taken the baby.

  Should he find them? He could do that; it was part of his work to find people, and he was good at his work. He could track her down if she went to hide in the jungles of the Amazon. He could hunt her and find her and make her come back.

  No, he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t make her come back. He could find her; that would be easy. He could even kill her if he wanted to, but he couldn’t make her love him again. She was lost to him, she and the child both. It was over.

  When that simple fact had sunk in, he sat down on the bed, buried his face in his hands, and wept like a child.

  . . . . .

  The days following his wife’s disappearance saw established a pattern of full retreat. Guinness packed his blue and white canvas suitcase and moved out of the apartment, locking the front door behind him. A week later he was strolling purposelessly along an embankment near the Tate Gallery and discovered the key in his pocket. He stared at it for a few seconds, almost as if he didn’t recognize what it was, and then threw it as far out into the Thames as he could.

  He had by then rented a room, the attic of a semidetached house in Holborn, not more than a ten minutes’ walk from the British Museum. It was a dreary little hole, made even smaller by the fact that the ceiling slanted until on one side of the room it was only about four feet above the floor; and it had only one small window, not much larger than a man’s handkerchief.

 
But none of that mattered. Guinness was never there except to sleep. The rest of the time was generally spent at the museum, where he daily inspected the Elgin marbles and the Egyptian mummies and the Viking jewelry from the grave ship at Sutton Hoo. It was all totally familiar, of course. He had seen it all so many times before that now he hardly noticed it. The images registered on his optic nerve and he would pass on to something else, but still it had the effect of keeping him minimally distracted. Nothing more was either expected or desired.

  When he was tired of the museum, he would find something else. For 3/6 he purchased a paperback book that described “250 places to visit in and around London,” and he would pick one at random and visit that. The Imperial War Museum, Dr. Johnson’s House, the Dulwich College Picture Gallery—it didn’t matter. In Somerset House, he spent the better part of an hour reading Milton’s last will and testament.

  And malt does more than Milton can/ To justify God’s ways to man.

  In the evenings, after all the museums and galleries and public buildings were closed, he would go to a pub near Cavendish Square and drink stout; he would sit in a corner booth, propped up behind an unread copy of the Times Literary Supplement that he had been carrying around in his pocket for weeks, overtip the barmaid, and get smashed. Then, at about ten o’clock, just to prove that he could still do it, he would stagger down to one of the penny arcades on Oxford Street and play eight or ten brilliant games of pinball before going to bed.

  That was the worst part. The absolute bottom line was going to bed every night in that wretched little attic room—not that the room made any difference.

  Every night he would promise himself that the next night he would really tie one on. The trick, however, as he discovered fast enough, was to get just sufficiently tanked for dreamless sleep. No self pity, no bad dreams, no memory. Nothing to wake you in the middle of the night, to make you tremble and sweat and wipe your face to see if it was really spattered with pale blood.

  He tried keeping a bottle of Irish whiskey under his bed, but if you got too drunk the dreams were even worse and the hard stuff gave him heartburn. No, you had to strike a balance. You had to find that point of perfect equilibrium.