The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  Once, he made a vast detour to avoid disturbing a couple who had parked their Volkswagen off the road and were stretched out on an army blanket, apparently just getting ready to make love. Or perhaps they had finished already; it was impossible to tell. Guinness only just caught sight of the girl, who was just facing away from him, sitting up with her hands behind her back either to hook or to unhook her brassiere. As soon as he saw her, he dropped down to a crouch, where he waited perhaps ten or twenty seconds, just to make sure she hadn’t noticed him, before starting back the way he had come. It would have seemed monstrous to have wrecked their little moment, and what woman wouldn’t have been deeply unsettled at being discovered three quarters of the way out of her clothes? It was a tough life, but one tried to keep civilians away from the combat zone. He came away as quietly as he could.

  It was close to four o’clock when he saw the Golden Gate Freeway in the distance. He saw it first, even though it was furthest away, and then the main gate and finally the picnic area. He made a wide arc to the left, traveling on rising ground for perhaps half an hour, before he had a clear view of the merry go round.

  He was just below the crest of a hill. A good spot, he decided, well concealed but with plenty of visibility. And there were plenty of underbrush and dry leaves; if he kept his ears open, nobody was likely to be able to sneak up on him. So he sat down, with his back against the trunk of one of the larger scrub oaks, and began to wait.

  The cars started heading out through the main gate by about five-thirty. At a quarter to six a blue Volkswagen, indistinguishable from the one belonging to his pastoral lovers, wound around the bottom of the hill and was gone. Perhaps it was them. Perhaps they were students anxious not to miss dinner at their college union. They seemed about the right age, and students can be poor enough to want to save a few bucks on the price of a motel room. God, didn’t Guinness know that.

  Perhaps it was somebody else—completely different people. And what difference did it make anyway?

  The picnic grounds weren’t completely empty until close to seven, by which time the sun was almost directly at Guinness’s back. Finally, at a little before seven-thirty, a truck drove through and parked just beyond the gates and someone climbed out to swing them shut and stitch them together with a padlock and a length of chain. After that, it was perfectly quiet, and before long the only light was from the cars out on the freeway. Guinness wondered how long it would be before Vlasov decided it was time to begin.

  It was after ten before he got his answer.

  Almost on a line between where Guinness was sitting and the merry go round, there was a narrow little dirt path of perhaps a hundred yards in length. On the left was a grassy shoulder that sloped down to the picnic area and on the right a stand of eucalyptus trees that stretched on out past the clearing occupied by the merry go round and covered altogether perhaps as much as three quarters of a mile square. The path ran from the asphalt roadway that skirted the bottom of Guinness’s hill to the merry go round. Probably, from the air it looked like the stick of a lollipop.

  At the far end, on the left, was a little unpainted shed, from which, presumably, the merry go round was controlled and powered. At seven minutes after ten an electric light over the shed’s one and only doorway popped on.

  Well, it would have been something like that. Vlasov was no kind of an idiot; he wouldn’t have been expecting Guinness to just drive right up to the front gate. No, he would know that his man would sneak in hours ahead of time and find himself a nice safe place from which to watch developments. Neither of them was going to walk blindly into anything, and it wouldn’t have been good form to expect it.

  Vlasov had just issued his invitation to the dance. Guinness began working his way down the hill—not straight down, but at an angle. He didn’t have any illusions about Vlasov not having guessed his approximate location, and he didn’t particularly want to walk into his arms; so he took it careful, changing his direction every two or three dozen yards and stopping every few minutes to listen. That sort of thing takes time.

  He made it to the roadway without anything ugly happening, so he took his jacket off, with the drug kit still in the inside pocket, folded it carefully, and jammed it in behind a fallen log. Then he waited a few seconds before running like hell for the eucalyptus grove on the other side, staying low and rolling for cover when he made it across.

  Nobody shot at him.

  Okay, so apparently Vlasov had decided to be a sport and play by gentlemen’s rules. Wonderful. So here he was, Raymond Guinness, in the middle of the Great Outdoors, all set to take on an experienced and clever, if slightly daft, Russian agent—and without so much as a fucking tailor’s needle for protection.

  Oh yes, he had left his gun back at his motel room. And on purpose, no less.

  The plan was, you see, that he was going to psych friend Vlasov out. Vlasov, so the theory goes, had to be hanging onto his self possession by a thread, so what would it do to him to realize that the man he had centered his life around destroying wasn’t even frightened enough to bother about coming armed? Anyway, that was the plan.

  Besides, it was impossible to believe that the issues between them could be resolved on so crude a basis as their relative firepower. You do not aim guns at mirror images of yourself. Whatever Vlasov might think, they would have to fight it out on some other level than that. One suspected, one hoped, that the upper hand would be a state of mind.

  The drug kit—well, that was for later. When the time came for shooting hypos full of curare into people’s veins—if it ever did—there would be all the time in the world.

  A quick search turned up a sizable eucalyptus branch, about eight feet long and reasonably sound, lying on the ground. If you plan to strike a gong, you need a mallet. Guinness took the branch in both hands, like a baseball bat, squared off against the biggest tree he could find, and cut loose. Branch broke across trunk with a satisfying whack, loud as a pistol shot, that after bouncing around through the eucalyptus grove for a while would sound from a distance as if it might have come from anywhere.

  R.S.V.P. Now the next move was up to Vlasov.

  After several minutes—he would need plenty of time to make up his mind; this wasn’t precisely charades they were playing—the merry go round light went on. Guinness took a cautious survey and through the trees was finally able to make out a human form sitting on the turntable, just at the foot of the path. Perhaps if he had brought a gun. . .

  But no. Vlasov was well out of range, and there was no way he was going to sit there like a good boy until Guinness could get close enough to draw a bead. It was because they both understood things like that that Guinness had left the damn thing behind.

  He stepped out into the middle of the path, and the figure on the merry go round turntable never moved. Guinness could see him quite clearly now; it was Vlasov all right, little changed in seven years.

  “You should have seen him, cool and unreachable, slouched down in a chair with his head back, his elbows on the armrests and his knees crossed, holding a Turkish cigarette between thumb and first finger and looking for all the world like a character out of a Fitzgerald novel.” That was how Tuttle had described him, and there he was, to the life, his back against one of the brass merry-go-round poles, smoking a cigarette.

  One step at a time, very slowly, Guinness started down the path toward him. Each step constituted an individual act of will.

  Vlasov, of course, didn’t even seem to notice. He just sat there, occasionally taking the cigarette from between his lips and exhaling a feathery plume of white smoke that would rise through the night air to swarm around the overhead light like a cloud of angry bees. There was a pistol lying beside him on the turntable, but he never looked at it. Why should he? He knew it was there.

  Finally, when Guinness had stopped at a point just outside the sixty foot distance beyond which not many men in the world can be expected to hit a moving target, Vlasov brought down his gaze and smiled. The li
ght caught his rimless glasses at a peculiar angle, etching two dark smears of shadow down his cheekbones.

  “Good evening, Mr. Guinness. It was gracious of you to come.”

  20

  It was a warm night and the crickets were busy. The air was heavy with the competing odors of eucalyptus oil and smog, and in the extreme distance, really only as a gray suggestion of sound, was the muffled throbbing of traffic.

  They were quite alone. Possibly nowhere else in Greater Los Angeles could they have contrived to be quite so alone. Somehow it really wasn’t a very encouraging thought.

  Guinness tried hard to remember what it had been like the only other time in his life he had been genuinely afraid, afraid with no compensating alloy of excitement, no surging of adrenaline and heroic passion. What he wanted was to recall the texture of that fear, to see if he could bring back how it had felt.

  That had been Hornbeck, of course. The first man he had ever killed for money. The first man he had ever killed, period. Climbing out onto the shoulder of that lonely stretch of English roadway, and smiling and saying, “Can I give you a hand?” It had been the bravest thing he had ever done in his life, and he had been scared to death.

  But it didn’t compare with this. There could never have been anything like this.

  Vlasov. The way the light from overhead turned his rimless glasses into shining impenetrable disks behind which it was impossible to imagine there could be eyes. Then he would move and the face would become human again.

  He had lost weight, it looked like. In seven years he had lost quite a lot of weight. Guinness could remember, seven years before, thinking how slender, how ascetic he had looked; but now there were hollows in his temples and the skin over his jawbone seemed as thin as paper.

  He looked like a death’s head, like Dr. Donne in his shroud. The man reeked of death; it seemed to surround him like a private atmosphere. Surely, anyone who touched him or spoke to him or even breathed the same air would have to die.

  Come on, Guinness, you’re letting him get to you. Stay loose, man. Stay loose and don’t let him psych you—that was going to be your gambit, remember? What the hell, he’s just a man, not a visitation.

  Guinness hooked one thumb through the front belt loop of his trousers and forced himself to grin. He tried to make it a good grin, full of easygoing contempt, but it didn’t seem likely that he was fooling anybody.

  “It was good of you to ask me. I take it that we’re alone here?” The question was purely rhetorical. If there had been anything else alive there, any living thing at all, Guinness would have known about it. It was a sense that you developed in The Business, if you lived, or perhaps you were born with it. A kind of private radar.

  The cigarette dropped from between Vlasov’s fingers onto the asphalt walkway, and his shoe pivoted slightly on its heel to cover the spot where it had landed. With the thumb and first finger of his left hand, he reached into his shirt pocket and extracted a nearly empty pack. His right hand never moved from where it was resting lightly on the side of his thigh—just a spasm of movement away from the pistol, the make of which Guinness couldn’t seem to place but which looked to be small, no more than 7 mm.

  For some reason, it seemed worth noticing that the cigarettes were Camels, the kind without the filters.

  Vlasov shook one out and placed it between his lips. He crumpled the pack and dropped it on the turntable beside him before going back to his shirt pocket for a lighter. The shadows down from his cheekbones disappeared as he clicked on the tiny point of flame.

  “We are,” he said quietly, drawing on the cigarette. “Now. There was a watchman, as it turned out, but. . .” The meaning was completed in a tiny shrug as the lighter flame went out with a snap. “He is in the shed.”

  Guinness didn’t find it necessary to inquire what had happened to the watchman. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other, but the grin never wavered.

  “Okay, so be it. Now that there’s only the two of us, what exactly did you have in mind?”

  Just like Eric Von Stroheim on “The Late Show,” Vlasov took the cigarette out of his mouth, pinched backward between first finger and thumb. He waved it around in a languid faintly theatrical circle that made you wonder if he wasn’t deliberately trying to distract your attention away from the other hand, the one that sooner or later was going to make a dive for that gun.

  “Eventually, of course, I have it in mind to kill you.”

  There was nothing particularly remarkable about the way he said it, except that when he said it he moved his head slightly and his eyeglasses lost the glare from the overhead light. For just a second, then, you could see his eyes, and his eyes were as eloquent as you could want.

  This, Raymond M. Guinness, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a man who hates the insides of your bones.

  Well, that was his problem.

  “But there is, after all, no great need for haste.” Vlasov readjusted himself, and once again his eyes were lost behind their blank disks of yellow light. “We have time to talk.”

  “Maybe I don’t feel like talking.”

  Vlasov only smiled his weird death’s head smile and turned his hand slightly on the end of his wrist. It was a gesture that conveyed his indifference to what Guinness maybe didn’t feel like—that and a profound confidence that he could afford to be just as indifferent as might please him.

  “Well, something would have to be done about that, the son of a bitch.

  And that was the great thing at this moment—to break his confidence, somehow to put him off his stride. At the moment the initiative was Vlasov’s,

  “Oh come now, Mr. Guinness. A man must surely be interested in the reasons why he is about to die. So much curiosity is only natural.”

  Somewhere high up in the eucalyptus trees a night bird was singing a peculiar, restless, tumbling sort of song. Perhaps there were two of them and they were having an argument—the air was too hot and windless to allow you to tell. Guinness laughed softly, but not too softly to be heard.

  “If I remember, you’ve tried to kill me once already. Just what possesses you to think I’m going to let you do any better this time?”

  “I take it you are referring to Oslo?” Vlasov shrugged slightly and might even have been smiling behind his clouds of cigarette smoke. “Yes, that was a sadly mismanaged affair.”

  He seemed for a second to have lost himself, to have surrendered entirely to the thought of just how sadly mismanaged it had been. If it had worked, after all. . .

  But he was back an instant later, and with his cigarette he made a slight pointing gesture in Guinness’s direction. He made it once, and then, as if driving some conclusion home, twice more.

  “But, you see, you were the difficulty. You were nothing more to us than a code name on the index tab of a dossier filled with dates and speculation, and it is less than simple to assassinate a ghost.

  “And then there was the problem of subordinates; no plan is better than the people one chooses to carry it out. Those two, I knew they were not ‘up’ to it, as you Americans say. ‘Up to it’—such a curious idiom.” Again the cigarette made its slow circle, and again the death’s head smiled.

  “But you are no longer a ghost, Mr. Guinness, and, as you see, this time I have taken the task upon myself. Perhaps before I simply did not want you badly enough.”

  “And you want me badly enough now, you think?”

  “Oh yes, Mr. Guinness,” Vlasov half whispered. And then he laughed. It was an ugly sound. “Yes, I want you very badly now. Now, you understand, the matter is personal. I should imagine that it is now for the both of us.”

  Without moving his eyes, Guinness began to study the ground fall to his right. The eucalyptus was particularly thick just there and, away from the overhead lighting around the carrousel, it was dark as the inside of a bat’s ass hole.

  Very slowly, he brought his left hand up to the side of his face and scratched the bottom edge of his sideburn with the nail of
his little finger. It was a gesture he had seen Byron Down make perhaps a hundred times, and with Byron it always suggested the same refusal to be intimidated, to grant something too much importance.

  “You refer to the ladies? Vlasov, you shouldn’t be so sentimental—it impairs the judgment.”

  “Let us say, rather, that it provides a motive.” Again Vlasov let his cigarette drop to the asphalt and stamped it out. His hand felt at his breast pocket for a moment and then dropped to his lap when, apparently, he remembered that the pack had been empty and he had thrown it away. “We have each suffered an injury that demands retribution. For each of us, then, revenge is a duty we owe to the dead and to ourselves. It is a categorical imperative.”

  From the tone it was impossible to tell whether he was serious or joking. Another man would have been joking—would have had to have been. The whole idea was so unreal. People in their line of work simply didn’t steer by those kinds of coordinates. A categorical imperative, Jesus. It took a few seconds before Guinness could even remember what a categorical imperative was.

  Yet it never crossed his mind that Vlasov could be anything except serious, and in that seriousness Guinness saw his chance.

  He let his hand drop back down to his side. Vlasov didn’t start, which was a good sign. Apparently there were some things he was concentrating on harder than he was on staying alive.

  “Well, if you feel that way, it seems like you’ve caused everybody a lot of unnecessary trouble. Why couldn’t you have just stayed home in Moscow and blown your brains out there without inconveniencing anybody?”

  Vlasov didn’t reply. In fact, for a long moment he didn’t do anything, didn’t even move. Which, by itself, was reply enough. Guinness was pretty sure he had hit a nerve.

  “That’s right, isn’t it, Vlasov? I wasn’t sure before, not dead sure, but I am now—all this about how bad you want to do a number on me is just so much self hypnotizing horseshit, isn’t it? Hell, you’ve had a dozen chances at me, but I’m not what you’re really after, not really. I’m just part of the mechanism. You go through the motions, but what you really want is for me, or somebody—anybody, really—to cancel your ticket for you and take away all the pain. Isn’t that right, pal?”