The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  So he stayed in his corner booth and drank stout and kept rereading the same review of a book on the Scottish Chaucerians. And the barmaid would come with a full glass every now and then and take away his empties and five bob for her trouble.

  But even with his overtipping, the barmaid didn’t seem to care for him much. Fancy sitting around all night, just drinking himself insensible like that. Every night, just sitting there—as if he fooled anybody with his paper always open to the same page. Still, he was polite enough for two and talked like a gentleman; not that you could tell with these Yanks. Perhaps he had his troubles, but then who didn’t?

  And at the end of the evening, Guinness would say his good night to the lady, leave a ten shilling note on the table, and go home; never too late, because—you never knew—his escort might be a married man.

  Because there was always an escort. MI-6 doesn’t like it when one of its soldiers announces that he’s quitting and then begins to come apart at the seams; it makes everybody nervous. Men do desperate and foolish things when they’ve reached the end of their tether, and they bear watching.

  Poor bastard, that kind of duty couldn’t be worth too many laughs. Guinness would have liked to have stood him a drink sometime, but of course that was impossible.

  Perhaps, if he got flaky enough, they would call off his escort and do something really drastic. Perhaps one night he would be hustled into a waiting car and disappear into a peat bog in Northumbria. It wasn’t as if that sort of thing never happened.

  Curiously, the idea rather appealed to him.

  13

  But of course they didn’t. Instead, they put him on a plane to Rome, where he was supposed to proceed by train to Florence and there do a number on a Russian string handler by the name of Misha Fedorovich Vlasov. It looked like a pretty easy hit, and perhaps they felt a little light work in a warm climate would do him good; a kind of rest cure in the sunny South, with just enough going down to keep his mind occupied.

  Anyway, it happened one morning that Guinness was having breakfast in a tiny pseudo Italian restaurant in Bloomsbury—spaghetti and watered Lambrusco starting at around two in the afternoon, kippers and tea served anytime—when he chanced to look out of the window and to notice that there wasn’t anybody in attendance.

  Not many people in the Trade had any illusions about being able to keep an unnoticed tail on a fellow spook, certainly not for days at a time, and none of the people who were following Guinness around had even tried. Usually, they just waited on street corners, making themselves nice and conspicuous, and Guinness had returned the courtesy by staying easy to shadow and taking pains that every once in a while everyone had a shot at the men’s room. It was, considering the circumstances, a very gentlemanly arrangement all the way around.

  Of course, they didn’t know who he was—nobody had been that stupid—but they had eyes in their heads and this was no shoe salesman from Lambeth. The rumor mills were very busy.

  Hadn’t they all been ordered to carry I.D. and leave the weapons at home? I.D., for the love of God! One simply didn’t carry I.D. in this line of work. Ergo, this one was a very heavy number, heavy enough to drop you in a dark alley, so, if you please, sir, he should know you were a friendly and not put a bullet in your shell-like ear.

  The troops were justified in being a trifle skittish, more justified than they could begin to imagine.

  “You really ought to read it, dear boy,” Byron had said, pushing a flat manila folder across the desk toward him. “He seems to imagine that there’s something mildly grotesque about you. But then he always was an old maid, our Dr. Corrington.”

  Guinness had just gotten back from his training in Scotland, and Dr. Corrington, who had had him interpreting ink blots and putting together wooden puzzles three mornings a week, wasn’t very high on his list either. He didn’t like people who asked him lewd questions about his dreams.

  “If you think he’s such a turkey, why was he allowed to use up so much of Her Majesty’s valuable time? My firearms instructor was grumbling about writing you a rather pointed note on the subject.”

  Byron ignored the question and, when he saw that Guinness wasn’t going to open the folder, slid it back to where he was sitting and opened it himself. For a long moment he seemed absorbed in its contents.

  “‘Egocentric. Fundamentally unconstrained by conventional standards of behavior. Tends to view society as antagonistic to him. Capable of loyalty where he perceives support. Capable of any action he perceives to be in his own interest. In summary, a fairly classic example of the intelligent criminal type. Should not be trusted beyond reasonable limits of security.’ My, my, my, Raymond; it seems you are a very bad boy. Lucky for you we found you when we did. Otherwise you might have ended up running the Turkish heroin traffic. Either that or the president of General Motors.”

  He laughed and dropped the folder into the wastepaper basket, where it hit bottom with a kind of muffled clang. It wasn’t the sort of gesture Guinness entirely trusted. Odds were that report was out of the trash and back in Byron’s files within two minutes after he left the room.

  “Pshaw. That’s why we keep the old badger. He could have used the same words to describe half the human race, and probably has. It might have been written about myself.”

  He might have kept Corrington’s report, but he never gave any indication that he believed it. Not Byron. Byron wouldn’t have sicked all these goons on him just because he had handed in his walking papers. But Byron was dead.

  And now there wasn’t a soul out there.

  They had obviously gotten the signal to withdraw, and that could mean any number of things, most of them reasonably ugly. Had someone at Whitehall decided he was just too damn dangerous in his present state of mind and that it was time to cut their losses? Well, if that was the way they felt about it, he wasn’t going to go quietly. They could waste him if they had a mind to—hell, there wasn’t anybody they couldn’t waste—but he was going to see to it that they paid for the privilege.

  Guinness settled his tab and took his raincoat from where it had been hanging on a peg near the door. As he put his arms through the sleeves, he could feel three or four pounds of gunmetal bobbing against his left thigh, and he smiled a grim little inward smile. It was only a dinky little Spanish automatic, not the .357 which good procedure had demanded be wiped clean and left at the scene of the late festivities, but there were eight rounds in the clip and one in the chamber and the action was fast enough to spray bullets like a fucking fire hose. It would do.

  Outside the restaurant, he flagged down a taxi and, with his hand closed over the automatic in his raincoat pocket—you never knew who might turn out to be driving—gave instructions for the Tower.

  It was a Sunday morning, well into the tourist season, so the place was jammed. They would have a fine old time trying to jump him there, but of course he didn’t really expect them to try. They wouldn’t be in any particular hurry, and he would have to go home sometime.

  It was really more a question of testing their intentions; if nothing happened by closing time, then Guinness would know they were gunning for him. He chose a bench overlooking the barge entrance to Traitor’s Gate and sat down to await events.

  A little before noon, he watched a tall reedy looking man in a black wool overcoat and a bowler hat that came down almost to his eyebrows buying a ticket to enter the grounds. While he reached into an inside pocket for his 1/6, the handle of his umbrella was hooked over his left forearm, something that at a distance of close to a hundred yards Guinness couldn’t have hoped to have noticed but through the eye of long acquaintance.

  Some men used their furled umbrellas as walking sticks, some carried them like bouquets, but McKendrick always hooked his over the left forearm. A convenient place for it, since arthritis resulting from an untended gunshot wound had frozen the elbow at a ninety-degree angle. Before then, back during the war and up until sometime in the middle fifties, McKendrick was supposed to have be
en one of Byron Down’s most dependable boys; not brilliant, perhaps, but proficient. Afterward, he became his chief assistant and eventually his successor. Guinness didn’t much like the son of a bitch.

  Winter and summer, he wore the same damn outfit, like a uniform: black wool overcoat, oversize bowler, and his bloody umbrella. Always the same.

  McKendrick minced his way through the crowd and sat down on Guinness’s bench. The two men didn’t exchange so much as a glance for perhaps forty-five seconds, while the older man took off his bowler, set it carefully down beside him on the bench, and began smoothing back with his palm the thin, mouse gray hair on either side of his head.

  “Well, if you’ve finished pouting,” he said finally, in the clipped accents of urban Yorkshire, “we have a piece of work for you to do.”

  He had unhooked the umbrella from his arm, and as he spoke he stabbed vaguely with the tip at the gravel in front of him. Nearby, a couple of squealing, plumply blond five year old boys were straddling one of the Tower’s cannons, green with age and disuse; the bigger of the two was peering over into the muzzle. Twenty feet below them an emerald green beer bottle, almost totally submerged, was making a clinking sound as the lapping of the Thames kept nudging it against the ancient stones of the embankment.

  “Piss off.”

  They sat together in silence for perhaps another minute as McKendrick considered this response. He continued to stab at the gravel with his umbrella while Guinness watched the ponderous movements of the giant unloading cranes at work on the other side of the river; they looked like elephants, come down to the water’s edge to bathe.

  “You know, you ought to go inside sometime.” McKendrick jerked his head back slightly, the way some men do when they wink coyly and tell you to, hey, check out the redhead at the next table. Only McKendrick wasn’t winking; on his face was a cruel, wintery smile that had nothing to do with the contemplation of pretty girls. “You ought to visit the Bloody Tower,” he went on. “They have the ax in there they used to cut off Sir Walter Raleigh’s head.”

  “No they don’t. The ax in the Bloody Tower is from a later period. So is the block.” Guinness took a deep breath and let it out again, removing his hand from his raincoat pocket, where it had been resting lightly on the handle of his automatic, and folding it over the other hand in his lap. Nobody was going to shoot anybody. “And don’t threaten me, McKendrick. I don’t like it.”

  The two men turned slightly, just enough to catch each other’s eye. Neither of them smiled and both were wondering just how much the other one was bluffing.

  Suddenly Guinness’s face split into an irritating grin.

  “Besides,” he said lightly, “I’ve retired, remember? We’re all supposed to fall in the line of duty, I know; but then I’m not even putting in for a pension.” The grin died, and the voice went low and icy. “If you want to send one of your goon squads after me, feel free. But make it your best effort, old man; anything less and I’ll smear them and you all over London. Recent history would suggest I’m not all that easy to kill.”

  McKendrick, whatever his limitations, was not a fool. Guinness, he realized, wasn’t bluffing. You can tell when a man is bluffiing, when he’s afraid and playing it for effect, and Guinness wasn’t bluffing. He seemed almost to wish they would put out a contract on him so he could go down in a blaze of lethal glory.

  It wouldn’t do, however. The Foreign Office would have a perfect fantod.

  “Would it make any difference if I told you that the man we want terminated is the one who set up the Oslo hit on you? Are you the vengeful type, Guinness?”

  Guinness considered it. Oslo hadn’t been the first time somebody had tried to kill him, but what the hell—business was business and nothing personal. If you made a hobby of collecting grudges, you wouldn’t have much time for anything else.

  Yet it did make a difference. It was childish, of course, but Oslo had indirectly cost him Kathleen. Since Oslo, his life hadn’t been worth a tinker’s belch to him, which of course was nobody’s fault but his own. After all, the poor son of a bitch hadn’t specifically been trying to ruin his marriage, merely to kill him. Still. . .

  Yes, he supposed that finally it did make a difference.

  . . . . .

  On the train from Rome to Florence, Guinness watched the Tuscan countryside slipping by and pondered that final conversation with McKendrick. The further he got from London, the less sense his own reasons for doing this last little thing made to him. Who really cared, anyway?

  McKendrick did, of course. Jesus, did McKendrick care. Guinness remembered his instructions with distaste.

  “We want this man mashed like an insect. We want him to die messily, and in a way that will leave no doubt that he has been the object of someone’s special consideration. We want the Russians to know that they cannot order hits on our people and get away with it. Teach them a lesson, Guinness—one they won’t so soon forget.”

  While he had said it, his eyelids had fluttered angrily several times and once or twice his Adam’s apple had pumped up and down inside his gaunt throat. He really hated this guy Vlasov, whom he had probably never seen in the flesh and whose only offense was that he had been doing quality work for his own side. McKendrick was jealous, and like a fool he had allowed the issue to become personal. It was such a god damned waste of time.

  Guinness stared out of the window at the fields of sunflowers and the pale pastel farmhouses that seemed to have taken on the color of the sunlight. He tried to keep track of the number of olive trees they passed, but after a while he lost count and began eavesdropping on a conversation between the two pudgy, flaxen, middle aged German women with whom he happened to be sharing the compartment. Evidently, they were on their way home from a combination religious pilgrimage and holiday in Rome, and their talk centered on the souvenirs they were bringing their grandchildren. They spoke in a heavy southern dialect he found rather tough sledding.

  Finally one of them departed to visit the w.c., and Guinness, left without distraction, took up again the thread of his not very inspiring self appraisal.

  It always came back down to the same question, more an inquiry into character than motive: what the fuck was he doing on this stupid train? He had been out of that line of work, 100 percent out; he didn’t have a thing in the world against anybody named Vlasov and not the faintest interest in bumping him off.

  Vlasov, it was true, had sort of loused things up for him with Kathleen—or, rather, had been the means of effecting a crisis that Guinness’s own blindness and stupidity had made inevitable. He had been, in Aristotelian terms, merely the efficient cause, and even that, if under the circumstances the word was not wholly out of place, innocently. What sort of person, under the circumstances, would want to do a number on poor little innocent Vlasov? Who else but a total, irredeemable shit?

  So why not just pack up and go home? There would be a train back to Rome in the morning, so why the hell not?

  No, he couldn’t do that; he had taken the job, and now he had to see that it got done. It was perhaps only a point of professional pride, and at the moment that was the only kind of pride he seemed capable of summoning up. It would just have to do.

  The train didn’t reach Florence until the middle of the afternoon, so Vlasov and his outrageous insult to the integrity of British espionage would just have to wait until the following day. Guinness caught a bus to his hotel—the Astoria, if you can believe it—and, having tipped the bellman to take his suitcase up to his room, went into the tiny dining room for dinner.

  Except for the necessity of evading the waiter’s persistent attempts to sell him, at a ridiculous figure, an incredibly vulgar set of brass and enamel salt and pepper shakers, it would have been a pleasant meal. He had a table near the door to the patio, and after a couple of glasses of wine he was ready for bed.

  He left an early wake up call, and by five the next morning was dressed and tapping cautiously on the windshield of the only taxi he coul
d find parked anywhere near the entrance of the hotel. The driver, a man of heroic paunch and mustaches, was asleep behind his wheel, and Guinness would have preferred to awaken him into a good mood.

  But, alas, it was not fated to be. When finally the man opened one eye, he yawned widely, scratched himself on the breastbone, and with his thumb made a brusque movement in the direction of the rear seat. Guinness handed him a slip of paper upon which he had written out an address, and they were off.

  The address was for a house which, as it turned out, did actually exist. The street was in a fairly expensive but sparsely developed part of a suburb called Fiesole, but Guinness had picked the number at random. Fiesole went up the side of a hill that overlooked the city, and from the top Florence looked like a relief map of itself. You could see the Arno winding through town, with the grim tower of the Palazzo Vecchio and the great dome of the cathedral, its bricky redness obscured in the pale gray of predawn, dominating everything. It was quite a view.

  Vlasov lived in Fiesole, about a third of the way down the eastern slope of the hill.

  Picking a spot well away from the main road, in a field of dried grass, Guinness sat down under a huge oak, the shade of which would provide ideal cover, to wait. Vlasov’s house was close to half a mile away but perfectly visible, and he wanted to begin clocking the man’s routine.

  If someone did the same thing at the same time three days running, chances were he would do it again on the fourth—and that was when you could hit him. The pattern was important, because if he varied it, and you screwed up as a result, he’d know he was being hunted. You had to know what the bastard was going to do. You had to know so you could be ready for him.

  As he sat with his back resting against the tree trunk, looking at Vlasov’s house, Guinness could scarcely credit his luck. The place was perfect; he couldn’t have asked for more. A good two hundred yards from its nearest neighbor, it was a two story affair with most of the windows facing off the second floor, so there wouldn’t be much difficulty about approaching it unseen. There was a small L-shaped garden behind and on the far side, and, on the near side, screened from view by a row of low trees, an open carport. The carport was really intriguing.