The Summer Soldier (15 page)

Tuttle leaned back in his chair, resting his
chin in the angle of his thumb and smiling like a Cheshire cat, and
Guinness continued stirring with a straw the half inch or so of
lukewarm strawberry milkshake that was left at the bottom of his
paper cup. He seemed to be hunting for something just underneath
the surface.

“He defected,” Guinness said at last, his
tone precisely that of an adult forced to participate in some
singularly uninteresting children’s game.

It didn’t sound like the Vlasov they both
knew and loved, but he had, as a matter of fact, guessed right. He
could tell from the half surprised, half disappointed expression on
Tuttle’s face. Well, Tuttle didn’t need to look so astonished—he
was the kind of storyteller who telegraphed his punch lines.

The rest of the story, except for an ending
which hadn’t been played out yet, was at least in general outline
fairly obvious. All that needed filling in were the details.

“Well I’m sorry if I’ve been boring you.”
Tuttle seemed seriously annoyed, which was all right. This whole
clubby little trip he was on—espionage for the discriminating
connoisseur—was beginning to wear on Guinness’s nerves.

“No, go ahead. One likes to hear the gossip
about one’s friends.” Guinness smiled and dropped his fingers down
over the mouth of his whiskey glass. He didn’t drink, didn’t even
lift the glass from the table, but the gesture alone served to
confirm his willingness to be an attentive listener, a good fellow
who could dispassionately enjoy the finer points of the game.

It seemed to work. Tuttle leaned forward in
his chair, virtually crouching as his elbows came to rest on his
knees. The story began almost visibly to retake possession of him,
as if Misha Vlasov’s treason had worked some sorcery and thus made
anything possible, had cast a magic pattern into which Tuttle felt
himself irresistibly drawn.

“Anyway, that was when I met him. As a reward
for being a good boy and kissing all the proper asses in
Washington, I got posted to Zürich. I was supposed to have
something to do with coordinating American and Swiss pharmaceutical
research, but the cover couldn’t have been any more transparent if
I’d run it out of a Christian Science reading room.

“Have you ever done any work in Zürich? It’s
a great place if you feel like playing a little knuckle tag with
the opposition—so long as you don’t make a scene or do a number on
one of the locals, the police are more than happy not to notice.
Hell, they don’t want to get caught in any wringers.

“But you can go crazy there. You get so you
wish somebody would wire your toothbrush or put a tarantula in your
bedroom slippers, just so you’d have something to do. When there
isn’t a job on, the time seems to go mainly to padding out your
behind. Even the women are ugly, most of them, and the ones who
aren’t act like cataleptics in the sack. You have to go all the way
to Vienna to get a decent piece of ass.

“I was there, oh God, for years. That part of
the world was a territory I had pretty much to myself, unless trade
got very brisk. The breaking into file cabinets and stuff was left
to the CIA, and I was only brought in on what you might call a
consulting basis. If it was likely to get nasty enough, if it was a
question of riding shotgun on something they really didn’t want
ripped off, or of getting blood all over somebody’s shirt front,
then the matter was turned over to me. Otherwise, they didn’t even
want to be reminded of my existence. You know what that’s like.

“So then one day about ten months ago,
somebody in the local office has a personal little chat with
somebody from MI-6, all very high level and hush hush. It seems
that Comrade Vlasov has it in mind to do a deal and for reasons
best known to himself has decided to give the British the honor of
acting as his brokers.”

“The British?” Guinness leaned forward in his
chair, suddenly very interested. “Why the British? Why the hell
didn’t he simply contact you himself?” He didn’t like the sound of
it, not one little bit.

Tuttle turned the palms of his hands upward
and shrugged.

“Haven’t the faintest idea, pal. All we knew
was that he wanted to defect—to us. About that he was very
specific. And he wanted the full treatment. A new identity, asylum
in the U.S., a colonel’s pension, the works. To top it off, we’d
only been given six hours to make our minds, and if we liked the
idea we were to have a car with Norwegian plates waiting to pick
him up outside of Jelmoli department store before closing time. I
guess he was worried that his own people might catch on that he was
getting ready to rat; you can’t keep treason a secret very
long.

“Well. It’s not the sort of offer you get
every day, and sure as hell not from a boy like Vlasov. The man had
a reputation as a True Believer and as far as we could determine,
then or later, there was no trouble at home. Hell, they’d just
bumped him to full colonel a few months before.

“It was a problem. And to more than a few
untrusting souls it smelled for all the world like a setup. We
couldn’t even phone D.C. for instructions because Vlasov had
dropped word that our local communications man was one of his
plants.

“He was, too.

“Finally we decided to go ahead and grab him.
I was called in just in case things got bouncy and because Vlasov
was the man who planned a lot of Moscow’s thuggery for them and it
was thought I might be helpful in the initial phase of
interrogation.

“Also, although nobody came right out and
said so, I think they wanted somebody around who would know how to
drop the hammer on Comrade Misha if it turned out he wasn’t being
entirely candid with us.

“It was the middle of summer, which was nice
because at least we wouldn’t freeze to death—I’m from Maryland
myself, and I never have gotten used to that high altitude cold.
Anyway, we stole a car with the right kind of plates and took up a
position outside the main entrance of Jelmoli. We waited for two
hours, and we were beginning to think he had stood us up when, just
as the whole downtown started to jam up with the big closing time
mob of shoppers, Vlasov opens the back door of our car and climbs
in.

“‘What are you waiting for?’ he says,
whispering as if he was afraid the KGB would hear him all the way
to Moscow. ‘Drive off.’ Well, you can believe we got out of there.
We almost sideswiped some pudgy little middle aged broad who was
trying to get across the street so she could catch her trolley. I
looked back through the rear window to see if she’d actually fallen
down, and I don’t suppose I’ll live long enough to forget the
expression on her face.”

Deciding that the closeness of the tiny motel
room had managed to give him a headache, Guinness picked himself up
out of his chair and went to the door for a breath of air.

“You sure you want to do that?”

With his hand still on the knob, Guinness
turned to see Tuttle smiling wanly back at him from where he
remained sitting. Without bothering to answer, Guinness jerked the
door open, letting it swing wide around until the drag from the
carpet brought it coasting gently to a stop. He leaned up against
the frame, where he would be silhouetted against the light from
behind.

It was a warm evening and the air outside was
only a little cooler than the room, but at least there was a slight
breeze. Across the El Camino, in a distance he knew was filled
mostly with machine shops and factories that would have been closed
for hours, he could see the lights from the cars out on the
Bayshore Freeway.

If Vlasov was out there, and he probably was,
he would have a clear shot if he chose to take it. But he wouldn’t.
A man doesn’t turn his back on cause and country just to plug some
clown leaning up against a door frame. No, there would have to be
more to it than that.

Vlasov would want to say his piece before he
pulled the trigger, and that would mean that they would have to
come to terms. He would have to set it up so that Guinness would be
willing to accept the risks. Otherwise it would be right back
underground, and Vlasov didn’t have the time to go digging for
another seven years; not with the KGB breathing down his neck.

So there was no immediate worry. There was
plenty of time. Vlasov’s revenge was likely to be a leisurely
business.

The night air didn’t seem to help much, so
Guinness went back inside, into the bathroom, and prepared himself
a cold washcloth. It didn’t make his headache go away, but at least
his eyelids didn’t feel like they were glued shut anymore.

“So Vlasov defects,” he said, sitting down
again and tasting his Scotch. It was pretty nasty at room
temperature and he made a face—who could tell, though, it might
make his brains stop throbbing. “So then, how did he get from there
to putting an ice pick in my wife’s ear?”

Did Tuttle flinch, just a little? Yes, by
God, Guinness thought that perhaps he had. Maybe it was possible
for some people to make their living as government assassins and
still be squeamish about words, unlikely as it sounded. At any
rate, it would seem so.

“So we got him out of the country,” Tuttle
resumed after swallowing about half the contents of his
glass—apparently he had decided drinking was safe again. “We took
him out of Switzerland in the trunk of a car, and then from Germany
we used a military helicopter to fly him to Orly and put him on the
first plane to the States.

“That part was the hardest. The French were
as nervous as cats, which might have had something to do with the
fact that we wouldn’t tell them what we were coptering in. It gives
you some idea of the importance assigned to Vlasov’s defection that
it was felt worth nettling our touchy Gallic brothers over.

“Vlasov and I had gotten on pretty well, so
it was decided that I should stay on as his handler during the
interrogation phase. If he was horny, I got him a broad—but he was
never horny, that guy—if his teeth hurt, I got him a dentist. For
two and a half months I was never out of earshot.

“In all that time he never left the apartment
we rented for him, along with the ones on either side and directly
below and above—we weren’t about to give anyone a chance to get
near enough to give him a cold. The interrogators were brought to
him.

“You know, usually in a situation like that
you get to know a person pretty well. I mean, hell, it figures. A
guy who jumps the traces has got to feel that even his new
‘protectors’ think he’s a creep. They’re a chatty bunch, defectors,
very eager to have you understand what sterling types they are, how
they really didn’t have any choice but to fink on their own people.
Usually by the end of the first week they’ve told you everything,
every sordid little detail of domestic history. God, one time I had
one of them tell me how he used to like his mistress to whip him
with a clothes hanger.

“Besides, cooped up together like that for
weeks and weeks. . . it doesn’t matter if you hate each other like
poison. Eventually you start to talk, if it’s only for the sake of
a little noise.

“But not Vlasov, not him. No lurid
confessions from that quarter. I’ve never spent so much time with a
man and understood him less. I didn’t have the impression he gave
one fuck what anybody thought.

“One time, though, he came unstuck, just a
little. Just enough to remind you that he was human.

“Vlasov didn’t like television, couldn’t
stand the sound of one on in the apartment, so we spent a lot of
time in the evenings sitting around reading newspapers. It was one
of his permanent grievances against us that we couldn’t get him the
Paris edition of the Herald Tribune.

“So there we were one night, reading away.
And suddenly Vlasov folds up his paper and comes over and sits down
beside me on the sofa. The next thing you know he’s got his wallet
out and he pulls something from the card holder and hands it over
to me.

“‘Would you like to see a photograph of my
late wife?’ You can bet I was surprised; in nearly two months it
was the first time he’d ever said or done anything to indicate he
hadn’t been born in a KGB uniform. It was funny, but I felt kind of
honored.

“It was only a snapshot, of a blond woman in
a summer dress sitting in a lawn chair. I guess I said something to
the effect that she was pretty and handed it back to him. He put
the photo back into his wallet and the wallet back into his inside
coat pocket; and then he shook his head and smiled, his hand
resting on the bulge in his coat. ‘No, my friend,’ he said finally.
‘She was an angel.’ He never mentioned her again; it was as if the
whole thing had never happened.

“She didn’t look much like an angel to
me—just a pretty woman with short blonde hair, a little too
delicate for my taste. I was surprised she was as young as she was,
though; Vlasov is fifty-two, and in that picture his wife isn’t a
day over twenty-five. Maybe that was what made her an angel.

“Anyway, I finally figured out that Vlasov
must have had his reasons for showing it to me. I doubt if it was
just a spontaneous gesture—he wasn’t the type. No, he had his
reasons, and I’ll bet you could make a pretty good guess as to what
they were.”

Tuttle laughed, rather brutally, and Guinness
decided that the booze must be making him careless. Some men were
like that.

“But most of the time, oh Jesus, you should
have seen him, just as cool and out of reach as he could be. He
would sit in the front room all during an interview—away from the
window, even though the shades were drawn; he was a very careful
man—slouched down with his head back in an enormous overstuffed
chair, his elbows on the armrests and his knees crossed, holding a
cigarette between thumb and first finger and looking for all the
world like a character out of a Fitzgerald novel.”