The Summer Soldier (10 page)

He knew when he went home tonight he would
expect to find her in the kitchen, making dinner. But he wasn’t
even going home tonight. His home was under police seal, and his
kitchen was burnt out.

His wife was dead, and his life was a
shambles, and he couldn’t bring himself to believe any of it. What
the hell was going on? Who was doing this to him?

The faculty garage was on three levels. That
was all there was to it, the three levels and the cement pillars
that held them up. There was only one entrance for cars, but the
thing was open on all four sides; anyone could walk right in from
any direction without attracting attention. It was something worth
worrying about.

There was a little booth at the entrance,
where a student would sit all during the day and keep the other
students out. For this minor treachery the administration paid him
one dollar and seventy-five cents an hour.

Today the booth was occupied by Jerry
Freytag, a large amiable redheaded boy whom Guinness had nursed
through English 100 and finally, on the basis of his conviction
that the poor bastard had really tried, had awarded one of his
conditional Ds: I give you this grade on the understanding that you
will never become an English major. Jerry had been properly
grateful and always smiled and waved greetings whenever they came
within fifty feet of one another. He seemed a nice kid and probably
meant it.

“Hi, Dr. Guinness,” Jerry bawled
enthusiastically as he saw Guinness approaching. He was wearing the
summer uniform, a colored tee shirt and a pair of khaki Bermuda
shorts; his feet were stuck into rundown blue sneakers, and a green
baseball cap was perched backward on his wiry red hair. He was
sitting—if you could call such a posture sitting—on a bar stool,
with his legs and back propped against opposite walls of the tiny
booth. Resting between his thighs was a paperback edition of Jaws.
“Read this one yet?” he said, picking up the book and displaying
the cover with an enthusiasm he had never manifested for Pride and
Prejudice.

“Jerry,” Guinness began, ignoring the
question, “you know what my car looks like, don’t you? Has anyone
been near it today?”

“Sure. A couple of cops showed up a little
before lunchtime. They musta been pokin’ around over there for
close to an hour.” Jerry’s thumb was tapping unconsciously against
the spine of his book; you could tell he was dying to inquire why
the fuzz would bother to shake down his old English prof’s
wheels.

“Thanks, Jerry.”

Guinness passed on into the gloom of the
first level and opened the door to the central staircase. What
could he have told the kid, that the police were curious to know
where he’d hidden the ice pick he had used to poke holes in his
wife?

It was reassuring, though, in a way. If the
cops had done a halfway decent job, they would have uncovered any
little surprises left behind by the real murderer. Probably there
wouldn’t be any cobras in the seat cushions or sticks of dynamite
wired to the starter.

The car was a metallic gray Fiat. Guinness
had his key in his hand before he was out of the stairwell, and as
he settled in behind the wheel he slipped it into the ignition.

Instantly his hand and half his forearm were
engulfed in flame.

And then nothing. The fire disappeared as
suddenly as it had appeared, having barely singed the hair on
Guinness’s knuckles. Except for the black smudge on the metal
ignition disk and the heavy odor in the air of something like burnt
gunpowder, he might have thought he had imagined the whole
thing.

Nitrogen triiodide. In his college days it
had been the staple of one of the favored parlor tricks among the
chem majors. The substance was so volatile that you had to keep it
stored underwater. While it was still wet you packed it into the
lock of your best friend’s dorm door, where it would dry in a few
hours. Then, when your best friend came home, probably a little the
worse for half a dozen beers, and put his key in the lock—BAM! The
Fourth of July. Lots of smoke, lots of fire, lots of fun, and
nobody gets hurt. The friction of the key over the tumblers will
set it off, and there isn’t enough to do any damage.

Of course you scare hell out of the poor son
of a bitch. Guinness fell back against his seat, sweating and
listening to his heart pound. It took him perhaps as long as
fifteen seconds to fully convince himself that he hadn’t been
spattered all over the rear window. Jesus.

It was a little demonstration, obviously.
Somebody was making his little point—proving, lest any should
doubt, that Louise’s murder hadn’t been the work of any junkie
burglar caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Somebody wanted Ray
Guinness to know that he had an enemy in the world, and that Ray
Guinness had better start being afraid.

Message received and understood.

6

So what had we got? A crazy, that much it
seemed safe to hazard. Who else but a crazy would go to all the
trouble of setting your wife on fire and then booby trapping your
car just to let you know he doesn’t love you?

What’s to stop him from simply sending a
letter?—that would have been a hell of a lot safer. Or what about
the phone—whatever happened to that old standby, the whispered
menace that wakes you from a profound and beautiful sleep at four
in the morning?

Ray, old lad, I was planning to bump you off
sometime in the next several weeks and decided it would be ever so
much more sporting as the grand prize in a guessing game, so I
thought I’d call. Good luck, and keep on your toes.

Or why go through all the elaborate
preliminaries? Potential victims get very dangerous when they begin
to realize that that is what they are; a sensible man would just
walk up behind the mark of his choice and put a blade in his liver.
Either that or, having gone to the trouble of tampering with his
wheels, how much extra was involved in wiring a few sticks of
dynamite to the ignition and thus producing a bang worthy of your
efforts?

Guinness had seen a couple of people go up
like that one time, and it still gave him bad dreams.

Well, what the hell; one mustn’t complain. It
was that kind of a world, and if attempts were going to be made
against his life, Guinness would, on the whole, prefer them to be
made by crazies. Crazies always want to talk, to explain everything
and impress you with how devilishly clever they’ve been. This guy,
whoever he might ultimately turn out to be, was going to a lot of
bother, and before he pulled the trigger he would be sure to want
Guinness to understand just what had made him worthy of so much
attention. You could stake your stick on it.

And a crazy is almost always playing some
sort of a game, and games, unlike real life, have rules.

That had been the other part of the message
conveyed via the nitrogen triiodide in his ignition switch: Don’t
worry, pal. I’m not going to kill you while you’re not looking.

A necessary precondition, because what else
would prevent Guinness from simply taking off again? He was good at
hide and seek; it wouldn’t take him very long to dust a tail, no
matter if it was Sherlock Holmes following him around, to bury
every trace of himself and pick up anew as a toaster salesman in
Paraguay. Whoever He Was would have the devil’s own time ever
finding him again, and he would know it.

So we play by the rules. If Whoever He Was
was going to have his way, if he was going to get to speak his
piece before push came to shove, he would have to take his chance.
Things would have to be so arranged that Guinness wouldn’t be
simply offering himself up for execution. Something had to keep him
from simply disappearing down a hole.

Not that Guinness had the least intention of
disappearing, not yet. It was all very nice that his nameless
antagonist was being such a gentleman about it—that way there would
be a little breathing time; perhaps enough to figure out an
angle—but no matter what, if the guy came tomorrow with flame and
sword, Guinness was sticking around until one or the other of them
was finished.

He had made himself a little promise, had
promised Louise, that she would have her revenge or he would die in
the effort. It was a stupid business, he knew that—after all,
nobody but he would be keeping score—but it seemed to him a hell of
a lot more important than merely staying alive.

So, where were we? Guinness didn’t know who
was after him, which gave Whoever He Was the initiative. But
Whoever He Was was clearly just a shade on the flaky side, and
flakes tend to get in their own way a lot. The two canceled each
other out, which made Guinness’s chances of survival about even
money. A man could do worse.

. . . . .

It was the day of his wife’s funeral. He
adjusted the knot of his tie and, holding up in one hand the coat
of his dark green, three piece suit, picked a tiny fragment of lint
from the lapel. It was the suit in which he had been married and
was the closest thing he owned to mourning.

As he dressed, he worked out in his mind the
ponderous calculus of his dilemma, his lips moving silently from
time to time, as if he were rehearsing the speeches of a play.

In five minutes he would walk down the hotel
corridor and knock at the door of another room precisely like his
own. There, with any luck, he would find his father in law dressed
and ready to leave, although there was no certainty about it. The
old boy might just as easily still be sitting in his underwear on
the edge of the bed, weeping as much from the exhaustion of grief
as from grief itself. Murray Harrison was taking the death of his
child very much to heart.

Had Louise been alive to arrange her own
funeral, she probably would have hit upon some excuse for not
inviting her father at all. One could not have said, at least not
with any kind of accuracy, that she hated him. She didn’t hate
him—there was nothing so grandly tragic about their
relationship—she merely avoided him with all the dexterity at her
command.

In the five years of his married life,
Guinness had seen him on only one other occasion. About a month
after their nuptial trip to Las Vegas, they had been invited down
for a visit to his house in a retirement village outside of Los
Angeles.

“Do you really want to go?” she had asked. At
the time they were still moving into their new house, and the
floors were awash with sheets of crumpled newspaper and cardboard
boxes; it didn’t seem that they would ever get everything sorted
out. She had pulled the letter out of a back pocket of her jeans as
they sat on a packing crate in the living room, sharing dinner out
of a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken. He remembered the way her face
had puckered as she spoke.

“Sure, why not?” Guinness looked at the
postmark and noticed a date of four days previous; she must have
been keeping it to herself for a while. “He has a kind of right,
doesn’t he?”

“Aaaaaall right, but don’t say I didn’t warn
you.”

In any case, she was careful, without making
a point of being careful, to arrange things for just before the
beginning of the autumn term, so they couldn’t under any
circumstances stay longer than two or three days.

In the vague sort of way peculiar to people
without families of their own—and for all practical purposes
Guinness was alone in the world—he had rather looked forward to
being possessed of in laws. During his brief first marriage his
wife’s parents had been content to stay put in Washington State, so
he had never met them.

Louise’s attitude amounted almost to a
grievance, as if she were trying to withhold something.

It was a strange experience, their visit.
Sitting on the sofa in Mr. Harrison’s front parlor (“My God,”
Louise had whispered to him the first moment they were alone, “this
place, it’s like a time capsule out of the Truman era”), his knees
captives to a squat little blond coffee table covered with a
succession of doilies, Guinness found himself being guided through
a scrapbook tour of Louise’s early life, of the life they had all
lived—Louise, her father, and her long dead, apparently much loved
mother—before the family had crumbled away and Mr. Harrison had
retired from his stationery business in Chico and moved down to
Southern California to cultivate a tan and a heart condition.

Guinness maintained a kind of bored,
deferential attention, asking a question just often enough to keep
his father in law’s monologue going smoothly—he wanted the old boy
to like him—but Louise was in agony. Occupying a chair in the
opposite corner, next to a portable record player that rested on a
brass stand, she was working her way through a pack of cigarettes
she had purchased from a service station machine in Santa Barbara
(Guinness couldn’t remember ever having seen her smoke before),
drumming her fingers and frowning. Her father didn’t seem to
notice.

It was out of character for her, but not
inexplicable. She had a new husband and a father who was something
of an embarrassment, and probably still some feeling that she was
out on approval, so it couldn’t have been a very pleasant afternoon
for her.

After that she was better. She made dinner
that night and the three of them played canasta until nearly ten
o’clock. They went back to Belmont on the morning of the fourth
day, and so that was that. There was a meager exchange of letters,
perhaps two a year, and father and daughter never saw one another
again.

Then, the day after Louise’s murder, about
three hours after he had inserted the key in the ignition of his
car and received its gaudy warning, Guinness phoned Mr. Harrison
and delivered the news.

The next morning they met at the San
Francisco Airport and drove directly to Sergeant Creon’s office on
the second floor of the Belmont City Hall. Guinness had already
decided he would prefer not to be present and waited in the car. He
had seen the performance before.