The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  At a quarter to seven, Vlasov came out of the house through the front door and went around to the carport, where for a few seconds he disappeared from view. Then a dark blue sedan of some make Guinness had never seen before nosed onto the roadway and started on down the hill. Guinness stood up to follow the car with his eyes until it was swallowed up in the outskirts of Florence. Vlasov was on his way to work at an office which, according to the work sheet Guinness had read in London, occupied the third floor of a tiny building over the river, just two blocks or so down from the Ponte Vecchio. After a few minutes, Guinness started working his way down to the main road to catch a bus back into town.

  For three days, and at as great a remove as he could manage, Guinness kept track of Vlasov’s movements. He turned out to be a man of the most regular habits, driving to his office every day at the same time, working there until noon, eating lunch every day in the same restaurant off the Piazza della Repubblica, returning to his office at a quarter to one, staying there until he drove home again at five thirty-five. He never went out at night, although sometimes Guinness would catch a glimpse of him moving around in his garden. The lights went off in his bedroom every night at ten minutes to eleven.

  Clearly, the house was the best place for a touch. It was isolated and provided maximum freedom from interference, and it wouldn’t be crawling with cops within ten seconds of the first loud noise. The problems of trying to do it in the city, with its warren of little streets, were just too complex to bother with.

  And Vlasov’s area of maximum vulnerability in the house was clearly the carport. It was perfect, screened from view and yet accessible and out of doors; when he had a chance, Guinness always preferred to work out of doors.

  There were only two practical ways of doing it in the carport: he could just wait there for the guy and plug him, or he could wire the car. What with the hilltop winds, trying to pick anybody off at several hundred yards with a rifle was a pretty poor bet. And Guinness didn’t much relish the idea of hanging around in that carport for two or three hours with a pistol, so it would have to be the car. Besides, McKendrick had specified that he wanted something dramatic.

  That night Guinness broke into the supply shack of a construction site he had spotted near the railway station and stole two sticks of dynamite, some wire, and a couple of blasting caps.

  The fourth morning found Guinness again sitting under his oak tree, this time with a pair of field glasses he had picked up in a camera shop the afternoon before. He was nervous as hell about this one—perhaps he was cracking up at last, just coming apart at the seams; and when it was over, MI-6 would gather him up and stash him in a nice, restful loony bin somewhere up in the Orkney Islands, where he could wear out the rest of his life making paper dolls.

  Anyway, he didn’t want to miss anything; he wanted to make sure everything worked according to plan. Although he had gone through the usual training in explosives, it was the first time he had ever used any—somehow the idea of all that fuss and noise, the randomness of it, violated his aesthetic sense.

  Dynamite, though, was supposed to be pretty reliable, and presumably two sticks would do the job. They were taped right up under the driver’s seat cushion, with the wires running under the floor mats and the upholstery into the instrument panel. He hoped to hell everything was hooked up right.

  It was ten to seven before Vlasov came out through his front door, five minutes behind schedule—and, god dammit, he had someone with him! It was a woman, a fucking woman, and she was dressed up to go somewhere! Arm in arm, they walked to the garage and disappeared behind the trees that screened off the carport. It seemed like forever that they were in there.

  Then Vlasov came back out and started walking around the front of the car. Apparently he had opened the door for her on the driver’s side and was going around to let himself in.

  The whole thing was probably only taking a few seconds, but to Guinness it seemed like slow motion—there was plenty of time for him to figure out everything, for the whole ghastly business to unravel itself before him. It was terrible.

  Just as Vlasov got to the front of the car, the dynamite went up. With an appalling noise, appalling even from half a mile’s distance, the car turned itself into a ball of red and black fire. The two sticks had been plenty.

  Sitting in his office chair, in his house in California, Guinness could still remember every detail with a vividness that made his hands sweat. He could still remember the expression on Vlasov’s face as he had begun turning toward the car to see what had happened. He could remember the car’s hood, which had apparently been hinged from the front, popping up and off, doing a slow back flip until it slammed into Vlasov and knocked him down. The hood had probably saved Vlasov’s life, protecting him from the full force of the explosion.

  At the time Guinness had thought that they both must have been killed, though he didn’t wait around to make sure. He had simply hopped a plane out, the first plane he could manage, which had happened to be bound for Zürich. From there he hadn’t even returned to London but had put into effect the escape route he and Byron had so carefully devised. Screw it, the whole damn business; he never wanted to touch anything to do with it again, never again.

  But seven years had not been time enough to forget. He remembered the way Vlasov and his wife had looked on their little walk to the car, the way he had smiled at her and touched her hand as it rested on his arm. The poor woman. The poor god damned woman. Where had they been going? Shopping? To the dentist? She had started the car while her husband went around to let himself in on the other side, and she had been blown to smithereens. No wonder Vlasov had been waiting seven years for the chance to kill him. Everything made sense now—the murder of Louise, the nitrogen triiodide in his ignition, everything.

  Of all the jobs he had ever done, of all the people he had killed and all the despicable little treacheries he had committed, this was the one he remembered. In seven years there had hardly been two days together when he hadn’t thought of it. It came back to him in his dreams sometimes and woke him, cold and terrified, in the middle of the night. He should have known Vlasov would be alive. He should have expected him to come like this and demand his revenge.

  Guinness put his files back into their hiding place, put the carpet back down, and left his house through the rear door, just as he had entered it. It was close to dawn by then, and the sky was a pale gray.

  Out on the sidewalk he noticed a car parked about two blocks up the street, just out of pistol range. He could just make out a man’s shape behind the wheel, and then the glint of reflected light. It was Vlasov, of course, watching from a distance, just as Guinness had watched him all those years ago, watching to make sure that his challenge had been accepted. He couldn’t have said how he knew it was Vlasov, but he knew.

  Guinness fished around in the pocket of his coat until he found the postcard with the picture of the little girl on the merry go round. When he found it, he held it up at arm’s length over his head. The lights of the car flashed on and then off again, as if in answer. Then there was the sound of its starting, and it turned around in the street and drove away. In a few seconds it was gone.

  14

  Staying away from the main arteries of traffic, where he would have been taking a chance of getting picked up by the police, Guinness made his way on foot through residential Belmont. For a while he followed the perimeter of the old Ralston estate, after the robber baron’s time a lunatic asylum and now a Catholic convent school for the daughters of Bolivian silver czars—to all of which there was a pleasing continuity—and then he struck out over a low shoulder of land that in recent years had become a patchwork of housing developments, until he came back onto El Camino Real. He was almost on the border with San Mateo, the next town over, a fact indicated by a neon sign across the highway which, at a suitable hour, could be counted on to advise all interested parties that they were near the Bel-Mateo Motel.

  It was going to be a nice morning,
clear and cool, and Guinness was beginning to experience that rise of optimism that comes to those few who somehow contrive to be awake and out of doors just before a spring dawn.

  But it wasn’t only the morning. In spite of his unpromising circumstances—hell, there was at least an even chance he would be dead before the week was done—he felt almost immortal.

  Maybe during all of the last seven years he had rather missed the cut and run. He had been happy with Louise—in all likelihood, he would never be happy again—but maybe, for him, it wasn’t enough to be happy. Loneliness, fear, and at the end of it, tomorrow or next month or the year after next, nothing but a bullet in the back of the head and a porcelain slab in among the other John Does. These were all that could be left for him in life, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter.

  He was sorry about Louise, sorry she was dead and sorry that their life together was over. No part of him was glad to be free of her.

  But, if not that, he was glad to be free of all the rest of it: the lawn, the house, one safe day after another. And wasn’t she bound up in all of that? Whatever should happen now, whatever came to him, there would have been no place for Louise.

  So be it. Right that moment, with the skyline turning pink and the long grass by the roadway still slick from last night’s fog, if the angel Michael had appeared to him and announced, “Come, all’s forgiven; we’ll take away the flaming sword and you can go back to the life you’ve lived these seven years, and no one will ever bother you again,” Guinness would have smiled and shook his head and begged off. He was of the devil’s party, and he knew it.

  He stopped and bought a newspaper on the corner occupied by the Belmont Theater, paused for a break in the traffic, and crossed over to join the throng waiting for the arrival of the Greyhound local to San Francisco. Screened behind his newspaper, he was perfectly safe; the express bus turned off at Ralston Avenue, several blocks back, to join the Bayshore Freeway, and if Creon was having any of the buses watched, which wasn’t likely, it would be the express. That was the way his mind would work. He would expect Guinness to be panicked and in a hurry.

  The ride in, naturally, took forever, and it was close to 10:00 A.M. before they nosed in at the Ninth Avenue bus station. Guinness was hungry enough to buy himself a corndog and a paper cup full of carbonated orange drink, and he stood leaning up against the wall of the concession stand watching the ritual duel between an old lady, the temporary occupant of one of the station’s gray painted slat benches, and two or three of the contingent of pigeons that called the place home.

  She was a ferocious looking old witch, immaculately turned out in a nylon dress of small white polka dots against a background of the most severe blue, a white knitted sweater with sleeves reaching down almost to her knuckles, and a small square black hat carefully positioned on hair the color of pewter. Around her neck, from which the muscles stood out like the cords of a rope, she wore a thin black ribbon, and she carried a walking stick with a silver head and tip.

  Around her feet, within perhaps a three foot radius, she had sprinkled some bread crumbs, and when the pigeons would make a rush for them, she would strike out with the tip of her walking stick. She wasn’t trying to hit them really, just to keep them at bay. It made an odd spectacle, and Guinness wondered what moral the old gal must be drawing from it; for surely she would be the type to draw a moral.

  His corndog and his interest in kinky games both being exhausted, Guinness headed off for the Bayside Hotel to fetch Tuttle’s key. The round trip took him not quite three quarters of an hour, and the bus station locker into which the key fitted contained a red TWA flight bag, the contents of which would have to wait for some not so public place.

  In the meantime, he thought he had better find Doris Lincer.

  Doris was a bar girl whose vague aspirations for a better life had long kept her floating in and out of the state college system. She had begun to study half a dozen things—typing and real estate brokerage and dental technol¬ogy—but always left them off just in time to keep her transcript blank. Once her restlessness had manifested itself in a yen for literary culture and she had found herself in English 262, Introduction to Poetry, at Belmont State. Guinness had, of course, been the instructor; he was fresh out of the graduate program at UCLA, still working on his dissertation, and as yet unattached.

  He saw her throughout most of that year, although she quickly lost interest in the niceties of scansion. Even after his marriage she would phone him once in a while, but only once in a while. She wasn’t the clinging type. He hadn’t heard anything from her in almost three years.

  In those days she had worked in a place just a block down from Union Square called the Board Room, so perhaps she still did.

  She still did.

  It was an incredibly dark little room, long and narrow, with a bar and a tiny dimly lit stage along one wall. The stage was a little higher than the level of the bar, and on it, in a parody of dance, was a half-naked woman, possibly Latin, possibly not, with small breasts and arms that hung down limp at her sides as if someone had severed the nerves. Even in that vague light there glistened on her underbelly the stretch marks of many pregnancies.

  Presently, with the clumsy deliberation of an act performed underwater, she stepped out of her panties and hung them over a hook on the wall behind her. For perhaps half a minute Guinness watched her, wondering what had made the floor so sticky under his shoes.

  When his eyes had adjusted to the absence of light, he threaded his way through the maze of tiny circular tables and plastic chairs and sat down behind one in the corner furthest from the jukebox, which was deafening. There he waited.

  Doris was perched on a stool at the bar, talking to a customer, who, judging from the position of his hand on her thigh, was an intimate and trusted friend. It wasn’t very long before she disengaged herself, dropped down from her stool, and, carrying a small tray, began swinging her way toward him.

  Swinging was the word. Doris was a big girl, a good five feet ten, and generously built, a fact her working clothes did what they could to emphasize. She looked as if she had put on a little weight.

  “Hello, Ray,” she said, in a voice just loud enough to be heard in that din. “What are you drinking?” There was nothing in her manner to suggest whether or not she was pleased to see him as she took a small square napkin from her tray and set it down on the table in front of him. “Still beer?”

  Beer—that was what was crackling inaudibly under his sales. Beer that had been jostled over the edges of these tiny round tables, to spatter equally on the linoleum and the trouser legs of middle aged voyeurs. A more or less uniform film of it over the whole floor. He could smell it now, flat and faintly sickening as it mingled with the stale cigarette smoke and the odor of disinfectant.

  He smiled and nodded, and she took her tray and went back to the bar.

  She brought him back a glass and a seven ounce bottle of some brand he had never heard of and sat down across the table from him, with her back to the bar. Guinness ventured a quick glance at the man she had left to join him, who looked as if he were trying to decide whether or not he should lodge a protest. Apparently, he decided not, because after a few minutes he finished whatever it was he had been drinking and walked stiffly out, leaving a dollar bill on the stage for the dancer.

  “Aren’t you still teaching, Ray?” she asked after she had settled into her chair and poured his beer for him. “It’s the middle of the goddamn week.” She smiled, or at least the distance between the ends of her mouth lengthened, and Guinness knew that she had heard about his wife. She was baiting him, just a little—daring him to tell some lie about passion and memory and old time’s sake, and knowing that he wouldn’t bother. Perhaps she half wished he would.

  It was more with her eyes that she smiled, that she said she really was glad to see him and didn’t care why he had come. They mirrored a weary cynicism that had learned to compromise with the frailties of human nature.

  �
�The beer is going to cost you two seventy-five,” she said quietly, putting her hand over the back of his. Guinness let his breath catch in a tiny voiceless laugh and took her fingers between his palm and thumb.

  “I’m in a certain amount of trouble, Doris; and I could use some extralegal help.”

  “Sure.” She gave his hand a small squeeze, whether in sympathy for his trouble or in acceptance of his weakness as a man he couldn’t tell. “I kind of figured that. Just tell me what it is.”

  “I need to disappear for a while. I need someone to ferry me down to Los Angeles—not you, kid; I’m not a very safe person to know right at the moment.”

  Very gently, she disengaged her hand and patted him on the back of the wrist. “Don’t you worry. I wasn’t planning to volunteer.” It seemed a long time before she spoke again. “How soon will you need to go? Can it wait until tomorrow?”

  “Yes. It can wait that long.”

  “Good.” She nodded sharply and smiled a clever little smile. “Then you’ll need a place to stay the night. I get off work at seven—come back here then and I’ll have everything set up. You can buy me dinner.”

  Guinness rose from his chair, took a ten dollar bill from his wallet, and dropped it on Doris’s tray. “See you then,” he whispered, bending down to kiss her between the eyebrows. “Will you take care of Miss Birthday Suit for me?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he worked his way down the narrow track between rows of tables and was gone.

  The sun was hideously bright outside on the sidewalk, but that may have been nothing more than the effect of contrast. Guinness glanced at his watch and was a little surprised to find it was only eleven-thirty. There probably wasn’t a fugitive warrant out on him yet, but somehow it still didn’t seem like a hot idea to spend the next several hours walking the streets. Besides, he was tired. He hadn’t had much sleep, having been under only a few hours when Tuttle phoned, and it had been an exciting day.