The Summer Soldier (18 page)

He didn’t want simply to murder Guinness; God
knows he had had plenty of chances to do that. No, he wanted a
duel. Two gentlemen on the field of honor, or as close to that as a
couple of middle aged hatchet men could come.

Such had been the message of the nitrogen
triiodide in his ignition slot: You see, I could kill you anytime I
like, but that isn’t what I’m after. One of us will live and the
other will die, but it should have some meaning. More, at least,
than we have customarily attached to such matters. Each of us will
hunt the other, and this time the reasons will be personal. For
once, let us concede to our homicides something of moral
significance.

Only, of course, there wasn’t much moral
significance to putting an ice pick in a housewife’s ear, just
Raskolnikov and the moneylender all over again. But Vlasov was a
Russian, one must remember. And apparently he was more than a
little crazy.

Anyway, whatever it was—this inanimate
second, this bearer of the white glove—it had to be around
somewhere, and probably in plain view. Guinness started poking
around the bedroom with his flashlight, looking for something that
hadn’t been there on that Thursday two weeks before when he had
finished his lunch, promised his wife that when he returned from
work he would take a look at the washer hoses, and gone back to his
office to grade his way through a set of sophomore term papers.

He tried to imagine the problem from Vlasov’s
angle of vision. If you wanted to leave something in a man’s house,
somewhere where he would notice it and the police wouldn’t, where
would you put it? At the scene of the murder? No. Where you had
left the body? No; the police would turn both places over and sift
everything through fine wire. Even if they didn’t notice it,
whatever it was, they might lose it. And, besides, the bedroom
wouldn’t do in any case; the police were sure to have a field day
going through the victim’s private effects. Guinness’s study was
out for the same reason.

If you eliminated the dining area and the
bathrooms, where anything unusual would stick out like a sore
thumb, there wasn’t much left beyond the living room.

In the first week after their return from Las
Vegas, when they were looking around for a few nice things to
replace some of the junk from their apartment, Mr. and Mrs.
Guinness had happened onto a warehouse sale in a great barn of a
place on Mission Street in San Francisco. Most of the stuff was
terrible, right out of the Sears catalogue, but there was one
thing.

It was an octagonal table, low to the floor
and with a top made out of eight wedges of oak. The design, with
eight carved legs and the slatwork running between them at the
bottom, was very Spanish, and there was a rather striking pattern
to the grains. The finish, of course, was in awful shape—otherwise
they would never have been able to afford it—but with a little
sanding and a little fresh stain and a lot of hand waxing it would
look great in the living room.

In the center of the top was a circular hole,
about twenty inches across, into which fit an immensely heavy
wrought iron pan with handles at either end. Tonight the pan
contained two books of matches from a Chinese restaurant in Menlo
Park, the program notice for a college guitar recital, and a
picture postcard of a little blond haired girl, about seven years
old and in a blue dress, riding a carrousel. The postcard was the
only thing Guinness couldn’t remember ever having seen before.

He turned it over. Printed on the back, in
the bottom left-hand corner, was the location. Griffith Park, Los
Angeles, California.

Merry go rounds, for Christ’s sake. Vlasov
wanted them to tap it out on a god damned merry go round.

11

So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and
they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for
her.

What had Vlasov’s wife’s name been? Not
Rachel, surely. Guinness turned back to the beginning of the file
he was reading and ran his finger down the page of biographical
data until he came to it—Raya Natalia. They had been married in a
civil ceremony in Moscow on December 6, 1966. Vlasov would have
been about forty.

Funny. Guinness had to think, it was very
funny. He and Kathleen had tied the knot only five months before.
Seven years. Vlasov had been hunting him for seven years, and now
they were ready for the showdown. Like a Western movie. Perhaps
they’d climb on a couple of the horses at the Griffith Park merry
go round and blaze away at each other until somebody got dizzy and
dropped off.

No, it really wasn’t the least little bit
funny.

Guinness sat in the overstuffed chair in his
study. His reading and sleeping chair, the only chair in the house
in which he could be at his ease, with one leg thrown over the
armrest, without Louise starting to scream bloody murder. His
working notes on the Vlasov affair, pulled from the hole underneath
his desk, were resting on his knee and he was reading them by
flashlight. There wasn’t much they could tell him that he didn’t
already know, but going through them again, like counting the beads
of a rosary, set him free to think.

Nineteen seventy had been a lousy year all
around. Kathleen lost a husband—or, more accurately, had walked out
on one; both Vlasov and Guinness had lost their wives. And Raya
Natalia had lost everything.

Kathleen. Well, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t
been warned—not against Kathleen, of course, but against the whole
idea.

“People in this profession simply do not
marry,” Byron had said, “not if they have any sense. When I’m
feeling domestic, I go visit my sister’s children in Cardiff.”

Generally you couldn’t get Byron above a
stroll, but that day he had been just pounding along, his stick
jabbing at the walkway stones as if he wanted to impale each of
them in turn. And they were walking in London too, right out in the
open, along the embankment of the Thames. Guinness had simply
phoned him to let him know, and Byron had blown a gasket. They must
talk at once, and the very devil with security.

“What the blazes do you think you’re about,
lad? If you’re lonely, find yourself a nice, sympathetic little
dark eyed tart and take her to Bristol for a fortnight. For the
love of God, what conceivable need have you for a wife?” Staring
down in front of him, he rocked his head from side to side, too
exasperated to listen to the answer, had there been one. “And I
suppose you think you’re in love with the lady.”

“Yes,” Guinness answered after a moment. It
was odd how difficult the admission seemed, like confessing some
shameful and diminishing secret. “Yes, of course I’m in love with
her. Why would I take it into my head to marry her if I wasn’t in
love with her?”

Byron snapped around, throwing his stick
angrily to the sidewalk. “Well, if you love her so bloody much, get
rid of her,” he shouted, red faced and panting. “Send her packing
back off to Seattle, dammit.”

For a second or two Guinness wondered if the
old boy might not be teetering on the edge of a stroke; Byron was
given to fits of temper when people crossed him, but this was the
hottest on record. Then, as suddenly as it had come, his anger
seemed to flow out of him and his hands loosened and unclenched. He
leaned over heavily and retrieved his stick, smoothing down the
lapels of his overcoat as he straightened up. In one of those
moments of self collection with which he so frequently prefaced his
little asides on life, he stared pensively down at the stick’s
silver handle, as if inspecting it for damage.

“Give her up, Ray,” he said at last, his
voice gentle almost to the point of pleading. “Do the poor girl a
kindness and send her home.”

But, of course, Guinness hadn’t done that.
Not him—no, he had been too smart for that. He could handle it, he
could handle anything; wasn’t he the smartest, the toughest, the
most dangerous, most feared Lord High Executioner in Europe? Wasn’t
he just a holy terror? Wasn’t he, though. No, he didn’t intend to
give up anything.

Instead, like a man who hopes to juggle both
wife and mistress, he concocted a story to account for all those
sudden trips to the Continent he was always taking. One minute to
the next and he had to go. That needed accounting for.

Because, unlike Louise, Kathleen had been the
type to ask questions.

He stuck as close to the truth as he dared,
telling her that he was now and then employed by certain unnamed
and unnameable, highly sensitive, bureaus within the Foreign
Office, that he delivered messages of one kind or another to people
whom those bureaus employed but could not contact directly without
the most serious risks.

From the way he let it out, a little at a
time, you might have thought he was imparting the gravest
confidence instead of lying through his teeth, but what the hell.
He didn’t plan to stay in the assassination business forever, and
when he got out the lies wouldn’t matter anymore. God, what a fool
he must have been to have thought he could pull it off.

And the worst was that Kathleen had believed
him. But why shouldn’t she, not being the type to imagine that her
donnish schoolmaster of a husband could be anything worse than
advertised?

Kathleen. After all these years she was still
more of a sensation than a memory. A yearning that would still
creep over him from time to time. Probably he had never known her
very well.

All the way from the University of Washington
she had come, with her B.A. in philosophy and her Phi Beta Kappa
key and her Fulbright, to study Ordinary Language Philosophy at
Cambridge. In the vague way one associates with semanticists and
logicians, she was very bright.

She was also. . . Well, “beautiful” didn’t
seem to cover it, and “pretty” was well wide. But she was
something, with her tall willowy frame and her dark brown hair that
ran all the way down to the small of her back in a thick, faintly
waving mass. She was something fine.

The occasion of their first meeting had been
a seminar on aesthetic theory that someone at London had put him on
to, and that sounded arcane and richly pedantic enough to be almost
irresistible. Lady Winifred Ireton, who had just finished what
might turn out to be the book on Tolstoy, would conduct meetings
once a week in her rooms at Girton College. Cambridge was quite a
trip—over a hundred and ten miles, there and back—but the seminar
was being touted as an event of sorts. So Guinness sent off his
forms and paid his fees and enrolled.

Lady Winifred’s parlor turned out to be
small, dark, book lined, and, perhaps because most of the furniture
had been moved out to make room for several dozen collapsible
wooden chairs, oppressive. Also, in spite of the fact that it was
the beginning of the summer, the gas heater in the fireplace was
turned all the way up, making the room as airless as a crypt.

Precisely on time, Lady Winifred, a mannish,
middle aged woman who chopped off her hair above her collar and
wore a charcoal gray suit with a lace hanky pinned to the breast
pocket, took her place at the front of the room, in the only
comfortable chair, and began working her way through What Is Art?
Apparently the meetings were to be based on the premise that she
was the only one there who had mastered the knack of reading.

While Guinness was sitting on one of the
wooden chairs, thinking about how much his tail ached and if there
wasn’t some decent way he could slip off, he noticed this girl
sitting just to one side of the fireplace. Apparently
deliberately—there were a few unfilled seats—she had chosen the
floor, and a spot to which the Turkish carpet didn’t reach. Her
hands were in her lap, resting on a book with a green cover, and
she seemed never to move, or even to breathe, during the whole
three hours.

Finally it ended. Outside, on the front
walkway, Guinness tried to recall the times of the evening trains
back to London. The trip took about an hour and a half, but at ten
o’clock on a Friday night it didn’t seem to matter much; there
wouldn’t be a thing in the world to get him out of bed the next
morning.

Up and down the row of little grayish brick
houses that made you think of Dickens, the doors were shut and
bolted and the windows dark. The world where people lived and slept
had closed itself off, leaving a street as desolate as a stretch of
sand in the Gobi Desert. Guinness had been in Cambridge only twice
before, and never for more than a few hours. He didn’t even know
where to go at that hour for a beer.

He struck a kitchen match on the sole of his
shoe and lit a cigarette—he still smoked in those days; Louise
hadn’t talked him into giving them up. As he finished the
operation, he noticed that the girl from the seminar had appeared
beside him and was taking a pack from a pocket hidden somewhere in
the pattern of her long peasant skirt. Guinness held out the match
for her, cupping it between his hands, and she steadied it with her
own. He noticed the almost transparent whiteness of her fingers, as
long and tapering as you could wish.

“Did you enjoy that?” he asked quietly,
shaking the match out and pitching it into the street.

Her eyes smiled a warm, enigmatic smile and
she shook her head. It was as if they had known each other so long
and so intimately that she wondered why he would need to ask.

“Then let’s go get something to eat,”
Guinness ventured, raising his eyebrows. Her answer was to smile
again, perhaps only at the non sequitur, but a wonderful smile that
managed to say yes without implying maybe. “Well, this isn’t my
town; you’ll have to show me where.”

Then, without a word, she slipped her arm
through his and they began walking away between the pools of light
from the street lamps. It promised to be an interesting
evening.

And it was. In her tiny Spartan flat they
supped on bean salad and rose hip tea, which Guinness had never
tasted before. He didn’t get back to London until Monday morning,
just in time to miss his first class.