The Summer Soldier (17 page)

Why was it, in God’s name, that every cop he
saw lately was all tricked out in a checkered sport coat?

Well anyway, they were on the eighth floor.
Plenty of time.

The elevator door opened and Guinness stepped
inside, positioning himself directly in front of the control
buttons. The other man followed, coming to stand behind him.

“First floor?” Guinness asked, turning around
and smiling. The other man only nodded. Guinness touched the button
marked “lobby” and folded his arms across his chest, dropping his
chin the way a man does while he waits for the elevator to begin
moving down.

Just as the little green 4 lit up on the
indicator panel over the sliding double doors, Guinness touched the
button for the fourth floor and shuffled around a quarter turn, as
though making room in that tiny space for the man behind him to get
past.

“Your stop, I think,” he said quietly as the
doors began to spring apart.

In the next instant, before there could be
any possible reply, he raised his knee as if to step over something
and brought it down again, scraping the outside edge of his shoe
along the man’s shinbone and driving his heel into the top of the
instep, with perfectly predictable results.

Soundless except for a sharp gasp, the man
went down on one knee, wrapping his arms around his injured leg as
he fell. Using his fist like a hammer, Guinness clipped him on the
back of the neck and he slipped unconscious to the elevator floor,
his head and shoulders out over the threshold.

He was a big slob and it took several seconds
to drag him out into the fourth-floor corridor, where Guinness
rolled him over on his back and patted him down, finding a
snub-nose .38 revolver in a holster clipped to his belt over the
right hip. In his jacket pocket was a small leather folder
containing a badge and an Oakland Police Department identity card
for Sergeant of Detectives Herbert L. Ganjemi; the word “Retired”
was stamped in red across its face. Guinness returned the folder to
its place but decided to keep the .38. It might come in handy
sometime during the next several hours.

So, what does one do with unconscious former
sergeants of detectives? It would be agreeable to have a little
lead time before anyone turned in an alarm—so where could our
friend Herb be stashed where he would stay out of mischief for,
say, twenty minutes? Killing the poor bastard would accomplish
that, but under the circumstances it seemed a trifle extreme.

There was a linen closet down the hall that
looked like it would open up at a few hard words, so Guinness set
about picking the lock. Inside was a big rolling hamper about a
third full of dirty bed sheets—a nice padded environment into which
to drop an unwanted house dick if he were suitably trussed up and
gagged. Behind the relocked closet door he could kick and bellow
indefinitely before anybody heard him. He might very well stay put
until the chambermaids came back on duty at eight the next morning,
over four hours from now. Yes, that would do nicely.

With Herbert taken care of, Guinness got back
on the elevator and rode down to the lobby. The night clerk was not
behind his desk—he rarely was past about 2: 00 A.M.—so there was no
one present to notice him leave.

At that hour the parking complex was also
deserted, making it perfectly safe to hot wire a car.

Under the circumstances, he didn’t much feel
like taking his own; after all, if Tuttle had his little sources of
information, why shouldn’t Vlasov? There probably wasn’t much he
didn’t know—or anticipate—and he might just have gotten the idea to
rig the ignition again, only this time with something a trifle more
interesting than a gram or two of nitrogen triiodide.

After trying the doors of several cars, he
finally found a Mazda that had carelessly been left unlocked, and
he was on his way.

If you want to know what the end of the world
will look like, take a drive at 4:00 A.M. through the business
district of any small American township.

In Europe you were used to mummified cities,
scooped out of the ashes of some antique disaster and lovingly
preserved. But they were simply old—purple flowers grew between the
stones of the Temple of Vesta, suggesting the continuity of life.
And a hundred yards away, their hair covered by silk scarves, the
laughing girls rode bicycles to mass.

And, of course, there had been the rubble
left over from the war. Here and there in England, even as late as
the first few years Guinness had lived abroad, where the money to
rebuild was slow in coming; and all over Germany, protected from
the Wirtschaftswunder lest their envious conquerors forget how they
had been made to suffer, poor babies.

But this was different. Not a scar, or a
memory—but annihilation. There wasn’t a sign of life on any of the
downtown streets. Not a neon sign, not even a parked car.

Could anything ever have lived here? Twice,
three times a week, for five years he had driven up and down in
front of these shop windows, had bought his clothes and had his
hair cut, all right here. Could this have been the scene of his
daily life?

No, impossible. That was someone else’s life
he was remembering—lived before the Armageddon was announced.

Guinness turned off into the Alameda, into a
residential area of small homes where here and there a forgotten
hall light could be seen still casting an oblique orangeish flash,
as if from the inner facets of some dark jewel, through an outside
window.

In a few minutes he was back in his own
neighborhood. Leaving the Mazda in a side street a couple of blocks
away, he walked the rest of the distance.

Across the street from his house was a tiny
white bungalow with an enormous picture window. The curtains were
drawn now and the window was as gray and opaque as a sheet of
slate, but the evening Louise had died he had seen the neighbor
lady who lived there, whom after five years he still did not know
even by name, peering out at all the excitement on his front lawn.
He had seen her a number of times before, as she poked around among
the flowers growing on either side of her door. She was a small
withered creature of sixty-five or so, with glasses that could have
been an inch and a half thick. She would always turn to watch you
as you left, whoever you were, baring her upper teeth slightly as
she tilted back her head for a better view.

That night she had been only a dim shape
framed by the picture window, the only sign that she was alive
being a flash from her glasses if she happened to move slightly.
How long had she been there, he had wondered at the time. Hours,
probably—from the arrival of the first fire truck. Just taking it
all in, as a kind of alternative to the “Mike Douglas Show.”

His own house looked pretty much the same as
it had that last night. Of course, nobody had watered or cut the
lawn in nearly two weeks and it was beginning to look like a wheat
field. Someone had replaced the broken pane of glass in the dining
room window with a piece of cardboard, but otherwise there was no
evidence of the fire. There was still a padlock on the front
door.

The back door didn’t have a padlock, but the
bolt, which didn’t work off a key, had been thrown from inside. So
Guinness got a hammer and screwdriver out of his tool shed and took
the whole thing off its hinges. He did it carefully because it
wouldn’t do to wake up the neighbors and because the door’s upper
half was made up of a latticework of little diamond shaped panes of
amber glass. He didn’t want to break one; they were held in with
woodwork rather than putty (another plot against the American
homeowner), and breaking a pane would mean having to replace the
whole god damned thing, and we couldn’t have that. One new door in
the lifetime of a rear entrance was enough.

“The kitchen ’ll be so much airier if we can
let some more light in,” Louise had said while they were making the
rounds of the building supply places. “That old door is just awful,
just two sheets of plywood on a little frame, and we can afford to
replace it with anything we want if we can hang it ourselves.” She
had been cruelly disappointed when they couldn’t find a pattern
with more than one color in it, but the amber was better than
nothing. In the late afternoon it would throw little patches of
gold all over everything.

He leaned the door very carefully against the
side of the house and went into the kitchen, which didn’t seem to
have been touched since the fire. The walls were blackened and
smeared and the linoleum was discolored from water that had simply
been left to dry on its own.

Huddled in front of the stove—an arabesque in
thick lines of black grease pencil—was the rather schematic outline
of a human form. It appeared as if Louise had been left lying on
her right side, with her right leg drawn up and both arms thrown
out in front of her.

Guinness stared down at the outline on the
floor, trying to read it for some identification of what had
happened there, but all he could perceive was the sound of his own
breathing and of the blood pounding in his ears. He snicked off the
light and passed on into the interior of the house.

On two of the steps leading up to the second
story were thick-rimmed white circles of what felt like ground
blackboard chalk, and in the center of each circle, like a
bullseye, was a dark bloodstain. There was another, larger circle
in the bedroom, and at its center was another stain, perhaps five
inches wide. It had made the carpet matted and stiff and it still
had that peculiar texture, at once brittle and oily, that dried
blood loses only very slowly.

Guinness stepped into the bathroom and,
without turning on the light, ran some water in the sink and began
to wash his hands. He raised a double handful of cold water to his
face, shook his fingers dry, and groped for the towel that always
hung from a bar on the shower door. The towel smelled as musty as a
length of shroud linen and almost made him gag.

It had been a mistake to come back here; he
didn’t need this. Dammit, he didn’t want to feel anything. Hadn’t
he tried, all along, from the beginning, to look at it with cold
eyes, the way he had looked at everything in the old days when he
had been the best there was? Better to think of it as if it had
been someone else’s wife who had ended up a sketch in grease pencil
on the kitchen floor; better to have left the whole thing in the
abstract, where he could have puzzled it out like a problem in the
calculus. Feelings would only get in the way.

But perhaps that was what Vlasov was counting
on.

Guinness finished drying his face and went
back into the bedroom. After drawing down the shades of both
windows, he turned on the night table lamp.

The chair in front of Louise’s vanity had
been knocked over, but there were no other signs of a struggle.
Vlasov must have caught her completely by surprise.

There was a flashlight in the drawer of the
night table; Guinness took it out, stuffing it in his back pocket,
and turned off the lamp. He hadn’t dared to leave any light on for
more than a few seconds, just enough time to notice whether
anything had been disturbed, but the darkness created no hindrance
to his easy movement from room to room.

Perhaps it was a hangover from college, but
he usually couldn’t sleep more than five or six hours a night. So
he had often stayed up to read long after Louise went to bed. It
was impossible for her even to close her eyes if there was a light
on outside her door and thus, as a matter of domestic necessity, he
had gotten so he could move around the house blindfolded.

Sometimes he would close his book and simply
listen to the quiet that was almost a presence, almost a personal
possession. He liked it, the feeling of stealth and privacy, of
having the world to himself. Every tiny sound was assignable—the
crack of a ceiling beam as it adjusted to the change in
temperature, the neighbor’s cat in a faraway transport of sexual
passion, the wind in the telephone wires.

The kitchen was on the other side of the
house from his study, but in his stocking feet, and being careful
not to step where he would make a floorboard creak, he could make
it there and back as noiseless as a ghost. It was a kind of
game—Louise didn’t approve of late night snacks. He had even
perfected a technique for unscrewing the lid from a jar of peanut
butter in absolute silence.

Not that it had made any difference. You
could have fired a gun in the front room without waking Louise.

She was always asleep when he came to bed, so
he would undress in the dark and come under the covers as quietly
as he possibly could, and, without waking, she would always roll
over toward him, putting her arm across his chest and burying her
head in his shoulder. Sometimes her hand would creep up until the
tips of her fingers rested against his lips; he would kiss them and
her hand would settle back down on his chest and she wouldn’t stir
again. He would go to sleep finally, aware of nothing except the
slow breath of her nostrils on his arm.

Now, in the darkness, he sat on the edge of
the bed, trying to conjure up some physical sense of her. But the
house, and their bed, had been empty a long time, and the room was
like one of those rooms you see in museums—something from the past,
roped off and containing nothing except the furniture. It was a
lonely place now. One had the sense that no one would ever live
here again.

Well, he hadn’t come back to stroll down
memory lane. He had come to find what the police had missed, what
they wouldn’t have recognized as being important even if they had
seen it. It was his house, and he would be the only one to know
what had a place there and what hadn’t.

And Vlasov would leave something. He wouldn’t
have gone to all the trouble of so ostentatiously murdering Louise,
of issuing his formal challenge, without giving instructions as to
time and place, or at least as to place.