The Summer Soldier (16 page)

It was an odd description, and no doubt would
have been deeply shocking to a man of Vlasov’s earnest
communism—certainly he wasn’t the sort you would expect to see
lounging around the bar of the Ritz—but it made a kind of sense.
The man Guinness remembered had been small and slightly built, with
a finely molded, rather ascetic face. A hard little mouth under a
curved, well defined nose, and rimless glasses. Longish hair,
astonishingly black and pulled straight back as if to emphasize the
width of his brow.

Vlasov looked like what he was: an
intellectual and a man of fanatic integrity, someone for whom it
would seem perfectly natural to risk everything for something or
someone he had given his life to. In a way, perhaps he was a kind
of socialist Gatsby, if that didn’t amount to a contradiction in
terms.

But then he had defected, so perhaps he had
never been what Guinness had thought him. After all, they had never
met face to face, and having tried to murder a man doesn’t really
establish much of an intimacy.

“He gave us almost more information than we
could handle,” Tuttle went on, “but as much of it as we were in a
position to check turned out good as gold. So when we were finished
with him we kept our part of the bargain and started building him a
new life.

“He said he wanted to live in Oregon, which
was okay with us. We got him a new passport and constructed him a
past, complete with records, and arranged for him to purchase a
small nursery supply store. He said he wanted to be around living
things, that that was what he had missed most in his old line of
work. Isn’t that droll? That was about seven months ago.

“For three or four months after that, we kept
a loose check on him, just to be on the safe side, but everything
seemed to be going ginger peachy. He was living his new identity to
the hilt. He’d even become a registered Republican.

“Then a month ago he disappeared, just
disappeared without leaving a trace. We went over his shop and
apartment like we were doing an inventory of the dust particles,
but we didn’t find anything to suggest where he had taken himself
off to, let alone why. Nothing.

“Then four days ago I got a special delivery
package—it was mailed care of a drop address in Baltimore that we
didn’t think even the CIA knew about. Inside was a letter from
Vlasov: ‘Tell Raymond Guinness that he is a dead man. But first,
before the end, he must die as I have died.’ That was all there was
to it, except for your address and one page torn from the KGB
Bluebook, listing what they had against you. Where the hell he had
kept that hidden during all the time we had him, I’ll never figure
out.

“A quick check of your movements during the
sixties was enough to convince us that Vlasov knew what he was
talking about and that you were the gentleman on whom we’d kept an
open file all those years.

“Suddenly everything made perfect sense. It
had been you the British had sent to kill Vlasov in seventy. Only
you had fucked up for once and killed his wife instead.

“All those years he had spent tracking you
down, running to ground one lead after another until he came up
with the right name—Raymond Guinness. His own private little
research project within the archives of the KGB, and they probably
never even guessed.

“Then, when he finds you, he defects so that
we can practically deliver him to your doorstep. He throws away
everything, all those years of faithful service to the Party and
the Cause, just for the chance to turn your lights out. You should
feel flattered.”

Tuttle raised his eyebrows and smiled. He
looked like one of Guinness’s students, waiting to be patted on the
head after his conclusive demonstration that Beowulf had to be a
faggot.

“So when we figured out what was going on, I
caught a plane out here. We kind of thought we might have interests
in common.”

“You said a package. Nobody sends a package
with just a letter in it. What else was there?” Guinness waited,
but his question elicited nothing beyond a tense silence. “Come on,
Tuttle—you know you’re dying to tell me. You’ve been building
toward it all evening. What else was there in the package?”

With the air of making a concession—remember,
baby, you asked for it—Tuttle lifted one hand to about shoulder
level and inhaled deeply through his nose. It was more than just a
little theatrical, giving the impression that he regarded himself
as taking a risk.

“The weapon he used on your wife.”

“Show me.”

Tuttle got up out of his chair and went to
the chest of drawers. Taped to the back of the bottom drawer was a
plastic bag, the kind you see advertised on television as having a
“zip-lock top.” Inside, with the tip stuck into a small cork, was
an ice pick with about a three-inch point; the blond wood of its
handle, as well as the inside of the bag, were melodramatically
smeared with blood that had dried flaky and almost black. It was a
color you read about a lot in Aeschylus.

Tuttle set the bag down on the table between
them and sat down again. It was a horrible thing, the most horrible
thing Guinness could ever remember having seen, and yet he couldn’t
take his eyes from it. In a way nothing else had, it made the issue
between himself and Vlasov personal—which no doubt was what Vlasov
had intended.

“There is a very clear set of prints in
there,” Tuttle said quietly. “Part of a thumb on the metal collar
of the weapon itself and three fingers in the blood on the inside
of the bag. There’s no disputing it’s from Vlasov.”

“What do you want from me?” Even to himself,
Guinness’s voice sounded hollow and far away.

“What do you think we want?” Tuttle, it was
clear, was embarrassed. “We want you to kill Vlasov for us. He
defected to us, and now he’s defected from us—it makes us look
bad.

“What are we supposed to do, launch a
national manhunt? Put him on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list? This
is not a stupid man we’re talking about, and that’s what we’d have
to do to get him back, alive or dead. Quite frankly, we can’t
afford the publicity, not the way the intelligence community is on
everybody’s shit list these days. And we don’t want the Russians to
get wind of it either; nobody in Washington much relishes the
thought of them laughing up their sleeves at how we got suckered.
We can’t go after him and we can’t afford to leave him running
around loose either.

“So you see, you’re the only answer. He’ll
come to you. He wants to kill you so bad he can taste it, and that
gives you the only chance there is of nailing him.”

“And if he comes, and if I get him first,
what then?”

“Then we want him to disappear.” By way of
emphasis, Tuttle noiselessly snapped his fingers. “We want him
dropped down a hole, a very deep hole, so that neither the Russians
nor anybody else will ever be sure what happened to him, so that
for all the Kremlin knows he could be happily climbing up the
corporate ladder at IT&T. We’ll even provide the hole if you’ll
just take care of him in some nice anonymous way.

“And if you do that for us, then we’ll get
the police off your ass. They will be told, quietly but firmly,
that their suspicions are groundless, that the real killer is dead,
that you are just the nicest, most nonviolent person who ever drew
a breath, and that their government would much appreciate their
simply dropping the whole matter. We’ll even show them the ice pick
and the fingerprints we took from it, although they won’t be told
whose they are. And you will be one hundred percent clear of all
this.”

Guinness smiled weakly; he had the distinct
sense that his viscera were gradually hardening into ice. “And
after that you’ll own me, is that about right?” Tuttle smiled back,
nodding.

“We might want you to do a job for us from
time to time. Men of your caliber are hard to find.”

Rising from his chair, Guinness thought about
his own hotel room with a certain nostalgia. He wanted to be there
right now; he wanted to be alone. He wanted to get himself his own
bottle of firewater and to drink himself into a coma. He wanted to
get away from Vlasov and Tuttle and the whole show—but of course
that was impossible. You never get away. He had tried to once
already this lifetime, and it hadn’t worked out.

“By the way,” Tuttle said suddenly, as if
some vital final point had almost slipped past him, “how much did
the British pay you? How much did you command a job?”

Guinness turned around from the door, slowly.
“Two thousand pounds.”

“What does that work out to in dollars?”
Tuttle asked, smiling contemptuously. “About five grand? You’d be
worth at least seven-five, maybe even ten, to us. Tell you what,
you take care of Vlasov for us, and on top of that little assist
with your legal problems we’ll throw in ten grand, just as a
gesture of good will. If you prefer, look on it as a retainer.”

Guinness didn’t smile back. Instead, his eyes
rested on the small plastic bag on the motel room table.

“Keep your money, Tuttle. This one’s on the
house.”

10

The room was pitch black and Guinness lay on
his stomach in bed, trying to figure out why he was awake. He had
the impression he had been asleep only a second or two before.
Certainly he must have been asleep; his eyes were still closed.

Opening one of them cautiously, he saw the
illuminated dial of his portable alarm clock, which read seventeen
minutes after three-presumably in the morning. Guinness hadn’t been
awake at 3:17 A.M. since the day he went straight.

Then the phone rang.

Yes, well of course; the goddamn phone. What
else in the middle of the goddamn night? Whoever was calling had
better be prepared to announce that the hotel was on fire. He
clawed the receiver off its hook and dragged it under the covers
with him.

“Yeah?” The word came out as a kind of sleepy
gasp, like something he had swallowed and that hadn’t quite settled
into place right. “What’s the trouble?”

“Oh, not much.” It was Ernie Tuttle,
naturally. Cheery enough to set your teeth on edge. “Your pal Creon
plans to bust you sometime this morning. A little bird told me he
thinks he’s got enough to pull you down for Murder One.”

Guinness was wide awake, now, and his feet
swung out over the edge of the bed and began feeling after his
slippers.

“How much of a head start have I got?”

Tuttle laughed. “Look, you’ll just have to
ask him. His own people didn’t know this was coming down until five
minutes ago. I shouldn’t think you’ve got too long, though—you’d
better go get yourself lost.”

As he listened to the silent phone line,
Guinness began absentmindedly working loose the three buttons of
his pajama top. His memory was walking over every foot of the
hotel. The elevators, the stairwells, the exits, all the hiding
places, all the ways in and no ways out. He had known that finally
it might come down to this, and he had made certain tentative
plans.

“Guinness? You still there, man?”

“Sure.”

“Well, listen. On your way to wherever you’re
headed, stop by the message desk at the Bayside Hotel on Mission
Street in the city. The man there will give you an envelope
containing a key to a locker at the Greyhound bus station—You see?
We’ll play it in reverse this time. Inside the locker will be a TW
A flight bag with a few little items you may find useful.

“You know, of course, that this is going to
force Vlasov’s hand. He’ll have to go for you pretty soon, or the
police are going to be putting you out of his reach.”

“Yeah, I know. Tuttle?”

“Yeah, what?”

“Just to satisfy my morbid curiosity, who’ve
you got a handle on in Creon’s office?” For a few seconds, perhaps
as many as five, you could almost hear the wheels go round.

“A kid named Peterson,” Tuttle said at last.
“He’s ambitious and he doesn’t like his boss much. He wants to
break this one all by himself, and I’m afraid I led him to believe
I could help him do that. Why, you know him?”

Without answering, Guinness set the receiver
back in its cradle.

He sat in the dark for a moment, wondering if
perhaps he shouldn’t simply go back to bed. He could just go back
to sleep and not wake up until Creon tickled his ear with the
business end of a .38 police special. Why the hell not? To go
scampering off into the night would only put him out where Comrade
Vlasov could take potshots at him.

But so what? Being in the can would simply
delay matters. Vlasov would come for him if he had to burrow into
the death house with a pair of chopsticks. Some things you just
don’t get to run away from.

So. How do we get out of this dump?

Not right away, though. There has to be a
limit to just how spooked you can allow yourself to get. Especially
by a meatball like Creon. No, you take your time. First a shave and
shower; then you get dressed and split. No snickering down the fire
escape in your jam jams.

Out in the hall there was, of course, a man
standing next to the elevator. There would have to be; Creon would
not relax his guard just because it was outside of normal working
hours. He was dumb, but he wasn’t that dumb.

Guinness had never seen this one before, but,
just like all the others, he had “cop” written right across his
nose. Probably a hotel dick—his shoes were too shiny to have seen
much street use, and his hair was all slicked back like patent
leather. And he had that respectful constable on patrol look that
makes all the rich widows feel so secure.

He was a cop though, even if he did comb his
hair. He had that cop way of standing, with his feet wide apart and
his knees locked and his hands clasped behind his back.

And he never looked at Guinness.

Hell, at three forty-five in the morning
anybody would look to see who was getting on the elevator with him.
Cops are always too damn blasé to be real.