The Summer Soldier (19 page)

For the month that followed he spent every
minute he decently could in Cambridge, and by month’s end he had
decided. If he didn’t marry Kathleen, then he couldn’t imagine whom
he ever would marry. If she would have him he wanted to marry her,
and she would have him.

Of course, it never occurred to him that the
collision between his marriage and what he did for a living—not the
school teaching, for which she rather admired him, but what he
really did—was inevitable. It never occurred to him that he would
have to choose, and that by deliberately not choosing he was
preparing a disaster.

But how much of that was Kathleen? Now and
then, in the years following that disaster, he would wonder how
much his hideous error had been simply his misunderstanding of who
she really was. Perhaps he had never known her at all.

“These people,” she had asked, after
patiently listening to his lies about what he did on those trips to
the Continent he would sometimes suddenly have to take, “are they
spies?” Her tone was one of simple surprise, not the outrage and
shock he had half expected.

“Yes, I suppose so; I don’t ask.” As he
sipped his tea he watched her for a reaction, but there didn’t seem
to be one. She simply continued to sit in the precise center of his
living room carpet, her feet drawn up under her and completely
hidden in the folds of her dress and her hands lying open and palms
up in her lap. Finally, she looked up from them and fixed a
perplexed gaze on him.

“There really are spies?”

“Yes, of course. The British are very big on
that kind of thing; except for maybe the Israelis, they have the
best espionage network in the world.”

She nodded—slowly, as if not quite sure
whether she understood or not— and then asked if there was any
danger in what he was doing. He told her no and then she allowed
him to change the subject. They never discussed it again.

But how could he have possibly expected her
to deal even with his lie? The British didn’t have spies, not her
British. Her British were Gertrude Anscombe, the Cambridge
Platonists and the guards at the National Gallery. Everything he
had told her was simply unreal.

Sometimes he wondered whether anything was
real to her except making love and the subtleties of the Tractatus.
In their purest forms, the life of the body and the life of the
mind—that was it. Perhaps she accepted Guinness’s confession simply
because she didn’t know what he was talking about, any more than if
he had been speaking in Mandarin. Apparently, it posed no palpable
threat, so she simply dismissed it. It was like explaining
something to a child.

Only Guinness really didn’t want her to
understand. It would be easier as it was.

So they set up housekeeping. They took an
apartment together in London, whither Guinness had persuaded
Kathleen to transfer, and furnished it out in a compromise between
his love of creature comforts and her indifference to them, as
domestic as you could wish.

And in time Kathleen arrived at her fruition.
Big bellied and pregnant, she began the process of turning them
into a family, and as if in sympathy, Guinness began to hang a few
extra pounds on his normally spare frame. It was a nice marriage,
for both of them, and they were happy. More than once in the years
after, it occurred to Guinness that had he been run over by a truck
the day after his daughter was born, had no subsequent history been
allowed to touch him, his life would have been an enviable
thing.

But of course it didn’t work that way. It’s
only in the movies that you get to ride off into the sunset; the
real world doesn’t allow things to be rounded off so nicely.

Byron had been right. Byron had always been
right. “You’re not likely to get away with it forever, sport. It’s
all very nice, the pipe and the slippers and the little lady at
home in the flowered apron, but it just will not square. You’ve
been playing at cowboys and Indians too long.”

Guinness noticed the tired pouches under his
eyes, but then Byron had never been one for the Regular Life;
probably he had a new lady friend who was keeping him up nights. A
week later the old boy had his coronary.

In violation of every conceivable rule,
Guinness went to the funeral. There weren’t more than eight or nine
people present, and very likely half of them were there taking
notes for the Warsaw Pact nations. It wasn’t much of a send
off.

And, of course, Guinness had finally been
forced to concede, his own disasters were no one’s doing but his
own. Everything that had happened was simply the sum of decisions
he had made for himself, a karma rather than a destiny.

So on we worked and waited for the light, and
one sunny April afternoon Guinness found an envelope in the post
office box he kept under a false name. It didn’t carry a stamp,
just an address: Mr. Raymond W. St. Mary, London NW9. Inside was a
blank sheet of paper, folded into thirds.

He went back to the apartment and took down
from his bookshelf a little blue and white paperback street atlas
of London. The code initial indicated Wanstead, and there was a St.
Mary’s Avenue only a block down from the underground; presumably it
would have a number 9. The kitchen clock told him he would have to
hustle if he was going to make it by three.

They had used his first name. They only did
that when it was a rush call, so he left a note threaded through
the strings of Kathleen’s lute: “Duty calls. Expect me when you see
me.”

A routine matter, as it turned out. Just a
Polish colonel of intelligence who had decided to sell his
country’s secrets in exchange for a life of grouse hunting in
Scotland. It seemed his greatest ambition was to mix with the
British country aristocracy. Everyone in MI-6, it was reported,
found that highly diverting.

He was frightened, though, and wanted the
very best protection in transit, or no deal. Guinness was supposed
to meet him in a forest outside of Oslo, where he was stationed at
the embassy, and to shepherd him home.

It was raining in Oslo, enormous soft drops
that spattered on your windshield in slow motion. Hell, it was
always raining in Oslo.

Guinness had rented a Volvo, as he had been
instructed, and had driven into the boondocks. The car was parked
by the side of a certain specified dirt road, with the right
taillight left flashing, all according to prearrangement. Guinness
wasn’t inside, however; he wasn’t prepared to be all that good a
boy.

McKendrick had told him that he was supposed
to wait in the passenger’s seat, that that was part of the
recognition signal, but this whole deal smelled just a little off.
If it had been Byron giving the orders, Guinness would have
followed them to the letter, but Byron was a year in his grave, and
Guinness just didn’t know about this guy McKendrick. Byron would
never have told him to do anything as dumb as that. The whole
business had the faint odor of a setup.

So Guinness was off wandering between the
trees. He kept moving, weaving silently over the spongy, grass
choked earth. He wanted to see who would approach the car, and how.
And it was just fine with him if maybe they didn’t know right where
he was at any given moment.

After about twenty minutes, another car
pulled up behind the Volvo. A heavier car, perhaps a Mercedes—yes,
a Mercedes. Guinness could just make out the hood ornament. Black,
or maybe dark blue or something; it was impossible to tell in the
bands of diagonal light that seemed here and there to lean
unsteadily against the trees.

A man got out from behind the wheel and stood
with his hands thrust into the pockets of a tan raincoat. He wasn’t
wearing a hat and his hair was thickly blond and cut a little on
the longish side; he really didn’t look old enough to have made
colonel. Guinness was across the road from him and the cars were
between them, but he could see that the man in the raincoat hadn’t
closed his car door and that the window on the other side, on
Guinness’s side, was rolled down. He wished the son of a bitch
would take his hands out of his pockets.

Guinness drew his revolver out of his belt,
where it had been sawing his backbone in half. He liked big guns
when he had a choice, and this one was a .357 with a seven-inch
barrel and enough weight to absorb the shock so you could keep your
pattern fairly tight on the target. It would punch a hole through
the bodywork of a car and still make a terrible mess of anybody
unlucky enough to be caught inside. He stepped to the edge of the
road and pointed it at Raincoat, holding it steady with both hands.
The two men were perhaps twenty-five feet apart.

“Just one chance. Bring your hands out where
I can see them.”

The man said something in a foreign language,
Russian or Polish or something Slavic. He seemed to be asking a
question, but one had the sense that it wasn’t addressed solely to
Guinness—perhaps it was the way his eyes twitched toward the
Mercedes.

And he hadn’t taken his hands from his
pockets, so Guinness shot him through the neck. His head seemed to
come unmoored, pitching violently over to one side, and he dropped
forward fast enough to make you think for a second that he was
being jerked down from below.

Then the dude in the car rose up from where
he must have been crouched down on the front seat, bringing
something to his shoulder that looked like a stubby rifle. At the
same instant Guinness turned slightly to face him and emptied his
revolver into the door and open window. In the blur of noise he
couldn’t tell if the other man had gotten off a shot, not until the
shooting had stopped and he tried to take a step forward and
toppled over on his face.

One bullet, right through the thigh.

But it could have been worse. It had missed
the bone and the major arteries: it would hurt like hell for a
while, but he wasn’t going to bleed to death. It could wait until
he got back to London—it would have to wait.

Guinness picked himself up out of the muddy
earth and checked the Mercedes. The man inside wasn’t very pretty
to look at.

He had fallen off the seat onto the floor and
was lying on his side, his head twisted up at a grotesque angle and
his eyes wide open. There were two dark bloodstains on his shirt
front, and a third slug had entered through the right cheekbone.
From the mess in the car, it must have taken a fair share of the
back of his head with it when it exited; there was even a spatter
of blood on the windshield.

The other man, with about half his neck gone
and his left shoulder soaked in blood, wasn’t very appetizing
either. His hands were still thrust deep into his pockets, even as
he lay dead on the ground. Sometimes they die like that, without so
much as a twitch.

No, Guinness decided, his own wound would
just have to wait until he got home. He wouldn’t care to take a
bullet hole to a local doctor, not when the police would probably
be finding this within a few hours.

Raincoat, or what was left of him, was the
less chewed up of the two, so Guinness swallowed hard and set about
patting him down. In his right coat pocket was a small lugerlike
automatic, probably a 7 mm, and inside his jacket was the red
passport carried by members of the KGB. The stupid bastard—he might
have made it if he had just answered in English. London would never
have sent someone on a job where the contact spoke no English, not
without special instructions. London had said nothing, so Raincoat
couldn’t have been their precious Pole. If he had ever existed.

A setup. What the hell had they wanted, to
take Guinness alive or to kill him? He didn’t know any state
secrets, except for a few the KGB probably knew even better, so why
would they want to rip him off?

Jesus, were they that mad at him that they
would organize a special hit, just for him?

Maybe they had been willing simply to settle
for pot luck. Well, he wasn’t ever likely to find out now.

His mind kept going back to the Hornbeck job,
his maiden voyage. Maybe it was like that; maybe they were that mad
at him, as mad as the British had been at Hornbeck. As ye sow, so
shall ye reap. It didn’t bear thinking about.

Byron would never have sent him off into a
thing like this. No one could have suckered Byron this way, not
even the KGB.

Guinness kept the automatic, replacing it in
Raincoat’s pocket with his own gun. The police could make whatever
they wanted out of the mess they would find, but there would be
nothing to tie him in. One had to remember that in the real world
this sort of thing was technically considered murder.

He bound off his leg with his necktie, just
to keep it from leaking all over everything, and attempted to clean
himself off a little. In a way the road mud all over him was a good
disguise; he could change in his hotel room.

The sooner he was on his way, the better.

There were no real problems getting away. The
elevator operator in his hotel gave him a funny look, but Guinness
just lurched around a little and smiled fatuously. “Fell down,” he
said, laughing, making it all a tipsy slur. The operator just cast
his eyes down to the floor and frowned. That solved everything;
people are never much surprised at a muddy drunk.

On the plane he thought a few times that he
might pass out; but you almost never really do pass out, not just
because your leg hurts.

He was back in his apartment by the early
afternoon. For a while all he could think about. was lying down,
that and how freely he was sweating. Eventually he got around to
phoning a certain “safe” doctor, and within twenty minutes he was
having the slug taken out of his leg.

“You’ll be all right,” the doctor said. He
was somewhere in his middle fifties, fat and seedy looking; you
wondered where Services picked them up. He dropped the slug in an
ashtray and smiled. “Keep it as a souvenir and stay off your feet
for a couple of days.” Guinness was glad when he had gone.