The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  Where was he, exactly? Probably somewhere near Venice; he knew that if he looked behind him he would just be able to make out a smear of light from the cars on the San Diego Freeway.

  For a brief while in grad school he had kept company with a girl who lived in Venice. She had worked in the records department at city hall, sorting traffic tickets or something, but in her free time she had been very into ceramics and little theater—that sort of thing. After a couple of months she had decided that Guinness just didn’t have an artistic soul and they had split up.

  The luckiest break of her life, as it had turned out. Otherwise it would have been her body they found on his kitchen floor.

  And, merciful God, what about himself? Even if by some miracle Vlasov didn’t kill him tomorrow, that wouldn’t exactly turn him into a preferred risk. How long could he last? The KGB knew who he was, knew all about him—Vlasov had seen to that—and he would be a sitting duck any time they decided they wanted to balance the score.

  And then there was Tuttle to deal with.

  Tuttle would be after him to take up his old line again; that had almost been part of the deal. And Tuttle would have his ways of making it difficult if he tried to refuse. Guinness wasn’t even sure he wanted to refuse.

  A sitting duck, a goddamn sitting duck. He’d be lucky if he lasted out the year. Vlasov could almost save himself the trouble.

  Guinness unlocked his car door, having decided he needed to find himself a nice noisy crowd. He wasn’t the best company for himself tonight, and he needed distracting.

  The Baskin-Robbins in Westwood was like a fishbowl—brightly lit, with three walls almost entirely of glass—but so what? No one was dogging his trail, of that he had abundantly satisfied himself, and it was just the sort of place Vlasov would most wish to avoid. Hell, half the adult population of the world was out looking for him—so while he wanted to live, Vlasov would keep his head pulled in. And on a Saturday evening every sidewalk and store in the area was packed with Dionysian undergraduates from UCLA, which was within walking distance.

  Guinness knew, or at least had once known, precisely how far it was by shank’s mare from the English department offices to this part of the downtown, if you could talk about a place like Westwood as having a downtown. He had walked it, back and forth, almost every day during the year and a half he had lived in Los Angeles and spent his hours pouring over volumes of early Seventeenth Century meditative verse.

  It had been a strange period in his life, those eighteen months—or at least the first three or four—far worse than what he was going through now. This was a cakewalk; all he had to deal with was the probability, shading off into certainty, that he was for it. It was over—this week, or sometime. But it was over. If Vlasov didn’t get him, they, whoever they would be, were coming for him, and it would be his turn to be found one night in a seat at the movies, with a needle mark hidden by the hairline at the base of his skull. Big deal—nobody lives forever.

  But back then, Jesus. If he had dinner at the Tia Maria, he would spend ten minutes sifting through the chili, looking for the slivers of glass; walking down a city sidewalk, he would study the faces, wondering which one would be his man and where the bullet would hit.

  But that wasn’t the worst. Perhaps you will be more sensitive to it one day than another, but the feeling that you are a target never leaves. A person can get used to anything.

  It was the living over of every touch he had ever made, night after night, while he tried to sleep. Very specific memories—the precise geometry of Janik Shevliskiri’s fall, the patterns traced through the air by his arms and legs as an ounce and a half of copper-jacketed lead turned his brain into blackberry cobbler.

  Everything. The powder loads in the cartridges, the times of the trains, the room numbers of hotels in Munich and Amsterdam. Like a little boy who has mucked up his homework and has to stay after school to write it out a hundred times on the blackboard.

  Not guilt, exactly. Simply the burden of a past. The past is the one constant—it and the fact that its ghosts always find you out in the end.

  But this too passed away—everything does. Guinness learned how to sleep again, and the bogeymen didn’t come to get him after all. He knew that they would, but they didn’t. So he survived and took a degree in British literature and a job up north and, eventually, a wife. There had been plenty of time to lull him to sleep. And then Vlasov had come, who was enough of a bogeyman for anybody, and proved him right after all.

  Guinness sat at one of the little desk-seats Baskin-Robbins provides its customers with and slowly worked his way through the hot butterscotch sundae with French vanilla ice cream (no nuts and no cherry) he had purchased for ninety-five cents. All the other little desk-seats were filled along all three walls, filled with little clusters of two or three people identifiably together. It was an unpleasant shock to realize suddenly that he was the only one there alone, and the only one there over the age of twenty-three or so; all the rest were in some variation of the Student Uniform: jeans and polo shirt or jeans and nylon windbreaker or jeans and army fatigue jacket. All the boys—and they were mostly boys for some reason—sat bunched down with their legs thrust far out in front of them, as if their chairs were runaway soapbox racers and they were trying to brake them with their feet.

  The girls didn’t seem to have any feet at all; their legs were drawn up under them, giving them rather the appearance of nesting birds.

  Male and female, they all seemed engaged in the same vast, shapeless, intensely jocular debate, which would spill over from one little cluster to the other as people got up or sat down or left or came away from the counter with their arms full of various combinations of ice cream and heavy syrup and carbonated water. It was a familiar phenomenon, for which the appropriate metaphors were tribal rites and feeding time at the zoo.

  Behind his eyes, where he could be reasonably certain it wouldn’t show, Guinness frowned slightly and decided that perhaps he wasn’t being entirely fair. It was, of course, easy to be disdainful of what one of his colleagues—a man who had himself at around age sixty shed his tie and wife and tweed jacket for beads and a Pendleton shirt that never seemed to get buttoned above the navel—called “The Young.” It was especially easy if you weren’t a captive of the Mr. Chips Syndrome, and Guinness wasn’t.

  Of course, he had been once; or at least he had contrived to think that he was, which comes to the same thing. All along, their respect and regard, which probably he had never had, had been important to him, even at that upper crusty public school in London into which Byron had somehow managed to smuggle him.

  All those skinny, pimpled, pale faced adolescent boys in the upper forms, to whom he had solemnly assigned “research” papers designed to arrive at profound conclusions about Longinus and Romanesque art and the origins of the Punic Wars in three to five typewritten pages, due Monday. God, how he had worried over them and browbeaten them and invited them to tea on Thursday afternoons so they could talk about their plans for university and their terror of their parents and stare hopelessly at the curve of Kathleen’s thigh muscle under her long peasant dresses.

  Even for them he had experienced compassion and a certain contemptuous fondness, symptoms that grew more noticeable after Kathleen had been brought to fruition and had put him squarely in the parent racket himself. And something had survived and followed him to California and the corridors of Belmont State.

  But of course he had outgrown it.

  And even that was a lie. What he really felt at that moment, as he perfectly well knew, was envy. Again, envy.

  Across the room from him was a girl of perhaps twenty, dressed in a pair of skin tight elaborately faded denims and a yellow tee shirt that showed off her breasts to the best possible advantage. She had soft blond hair that perhaps hadn’t even come out of a tube, and she was laughing and talking with appropriately adorable gestures and now and then coyly closing her lips over the straw of her pineapple milkshake. The boy toward
whom all this was directed was also blond and ruggedly handsome in a solidly midwestern sort of way—he rather reminded Guinness of the kid who had been his roommate during his freshman year at Ohio State.

  The two of them had so much future ahead that it probably never occurred to either of them to think about it. They would never be old or afraid or intimate with pain and death; everything to come would be part of an unbroken series of triumphs. And tonight they would lie in each other’s arms, after making wonderful, prelapsarian love, and dream no dreams. So it had been destined from the first star swirls.

  19

  The park, which according to Guinness’s map had a circumference of several miles, was surrounded by a chain link fence. Thank God there weren’t the customary three angled strands of barbed wire at the top—the stuff that had made his life miserable all over Eastern Europe—so getting over wasn’t going to be a big problem. He figured the height at about ten feet.

  It was two-fifteen in the afternoon and a taxi had dropped him off on Los Feliz Boulevard, within walking distance of the southeastern corner of the park. On the other side of the fence was a stand of medium sized scrub oaks that seemed to go on up the rising ground forever, providing plenty of cover.

  Besides, who was going to notice? Why, after all, would anyone break into Griffith Park in the middle of the afternoon when he could just as easily drive through the main gate without even having to pay admission? Why indeed?

  Because for once in his life he might like not having his every move anticipated and observed by one Misha Fedorovich Vlasov, formerly of the KGB. That was why. It seemed like a good enough reason.

  He climbed over in the approved manner, first throwing his jacket up and over the top and then picking a spot where the chain was anchored to a post—it wouldn’t rattle so much that way, and it wasn’t as likely to buckle under the strain and make you lose your toehold—and then just crawling straight up, like a lizard up the face of a hot rock. The trick was to do it fast, so the thought of how the wire seemed as if it would cut your fingers straight through to the bone wouldn’t make you shift weight back to your feet. You couldn’t walk up a fence like a god damn flight of stairs; the purchase was lousy.

  He jumped down onto the other side, landing with his knees well bent and catching himself with his hands as the shock of impact tried to send him sprawling.

  Not too bad. Ray Guinness, former boy wonder of the cloak and dagger set, could still manage a ten foot fence without putting himself in the hospital. That, at least, was a start. He picked up his jacket, dusted it off, checked to make sure that the drug kit in the inside pocket had survived intact (perhaps it would have been better to have kept it with him, but all he needed was to slip and he would have stood a better than even chance of ending up with a butt full of curare soaked glass), and headed off into the trees. It was a long walk from there to the merry go round.

  He felt better this afternoon. But then that was the way it always happened—you got the jitters the night before every touch, regular as clockwork, and they translated themselves into self loathing and Weltschmerz. The more dangerous the job, the more you felt like slashing your wrists, or taking a vow of silence at the door of a Trappist monastery.

  Once in Liege, in 1964, he had spent the entire night, right on through from dusk to dawn, drafting and redrafting a letter to his mother, with whom he had held no contact in almost ten years.

  It had taken the form of an extended apology for his having been such a prick as a kid, for it seemed that Mamma, with her beer bottles and her doorknob sized knuckles, had actually been a poor thing. He should have understood, it became apparent in the harsh light of his desk lamp, that her indifference to him had grown out of the dead end quality of her own life. For those ten or so hours he had lived through every detail of her imagined history, and he realized what must have been the precise nature of her despair. But of course he hadn’t realized it at the time and, in consequence, of course, had failed her. Everything, it seemed—her misery and his own—was his fault.

  But such things pass, and the next morning, with a tight disapproving little smile at his own apparent flair for the melodramatic, he had burned all versions of the letter—there had been five, if he remembered correctly—one page at a time in the wastepaper basket of his hotel room, and that afternoon one Georg Kleutgen, himself an assassin noted in the trade for his flawless, if perhaps excessively brutal, methodology, was found in the basement garage of his apartment building, slumped over the steering wheel of his Citroen with a bullet hole about the diameter of a lead pencil in front of his left ear. The attendant hadn’t seen anybody leave or enter except his regular tenants, and Kleutgens employers were at a loss to explain how their man could have allowed himself to be polished off so neatly.

  By the time the body had been discovered, Guinness was already on a plane back to London. That night he slept like a baby.

  The afternoon sunlight flickered through the branches of the scrub oaks as they stirred in a faint breeze that must ultimately have come from the ocean. Guinness walked slowly, enjoying the coolness of the mottled shade and the sound of the leaves crackling under the sales of his shoes. There was no hurry.

  After all, what difference did it make? Raymond Guinness and Misha Fedorovich Vlasov, both former government employees and widowers, and both, if judged by any reasonable standard of conduct, evil men. Ray and Misha, the Katzenjammer Kids, Tweedledum and Tweedledee—as alike as clones. One of them would die and then, eventually, the other would die under circumstances that were predictable but ultimately beside the point; they were the twin horsemen of their own private apocalypse. Ray and Misha, the Katzenjammer Kids, Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

  And where was Tweedledee this bright afternoon—oiling his dueling pistol? Making peace with his Marxist god, or grieving over the long dead Raya Natalia?

  It would be nice to indulge the luxury of remorse, but it was something Guinness was painfully aware that he simply could not afford. In that respect, Vlasov had been lucky.

  Or perhaps it was simply that Guinness had been able to set private feelings aside in order to be about the business of surviving, and perhaps Vlasov had not. Perhaps that made Vlasov better—having that capacity for surrendering even his life to the act of mourning.

  In his advance, Guinness startled a chipmunk, who ran hurriedly up the trunk of an oak tree, and Guinness smiled and noticed how much the bark of oak trees looks like the fractured surface of dried mud and wondered, quite dispassionately, whether or not he would be alive the next day, the day on which he had contracted to return his rented car to the Avis office in downtown Los Angeles. Well, perhaps if he asked him nicely enough, Vlasov would do it for him.

  Maybe it was simply part of his technique—Guinness had never really bothered sorting it all out—but somewhere along the line, somehow every hit finally ended up looking like a particularly kinky kind of suicide attempt. You study a man, you study his routines and his preferences and his patterns of thought, you get so far inside his head that you sit down in a restaurant and, as you run your eyes over the items on the menu, catch yourself thinking, “No, I can’t have that; he probably doesn’t care for it.”

  His image and your own become so blurred together in your mind that it no longer seems possible, or particularly worthwhile, to try separating them. Perhaps that, and not the fear of death, is what gets to you the night before you’re supposed to drop the hammer. Or perhaps it’s more complicated than that.

  Or perhaps it really doesn’t matter, because by the next morning the success or failure of the thing, the question of who is going to live and who die, has begun to appear perfectly academic. Am I the same person I was yesterday? And if I’m not, did I kill that other person in order to become me?

  Of course, Vlasov had killed Louise out of motives that were purely personal; it wasn’t as if the Communists had put a contract out on her. Vlasov had put himself outside of all law, had turned his back on everything and gone out
entirely, irrevocably, on his own. That did seem to constitute a real moral difference between them.

  Oh hell, who did he think he was kidding? Hadn’t he gone out to nail Vlasov because of Kathleen? Vlasov had created a few marital problems for him, so he had gotten all huffy about it and trotted off to Florence to try barbecuing the guy in his garage. And the fact that, like a good little soldier, he had done it with the encouragement and in the name of the British Foreign Office did not, after all, constitute much of a defense. Some jobs should be left to other hands.

  They had both of them violated the one absolute commandment of a profession not noted for honoring ethical mandates: thou shalt not go around snuffing people just because they happen to have pissed you off.

  Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

  Jesus, to throw it all away like that, to kiss a lifetime of service to the Party goodbye just for the exquisite pleasure of doing a number on the man who inadvertently had killed your better half. Vlasov had to be off the wall; it was the act of a lunatic.

  And yet, somehow, rather grand. Confronted with that kind of passion, Guinness suddenly couldn’t help feeling rather paltry. It was so outside the range of his simple Anglo-Saxon soul; perhaps you had to be a Russian.

  According to the map he had picked up at a gas station in Santa Monica, it was, as the crow flies, probably a good three miles from where he had climbed the fence into the park to the little picnic area near the main entrance. Guinness was sure that was the spot Vlasov meant; they don’t move merry go rounds around much, and he thought he remembered the thing from a time he and a friend from grad school and a couple of girls from the College of Nursing at USC had gone there to lie on the grass and drink beer.

  And, since he wasn’t a crow, it wasn’t an easy three miles, either. Overland all the way, because he couldn’t risk using the roads. All he could do was to keep the sun over his left shoulder and plod on.