The Summer Soldier (21 page)

He hadn’t yet told her that it would be
necessary for them to leave England. It didn’t seem wise to impress
her with the possibility that he might have tracked some of his
dirt into their marriage. Of course, she was a smart woman; it
might already have occurred to her. You could never tell with
her—at least Guinness couldn’t, not anymore.

And then one day she was gone.

He had come back to the apartment after
having been out for the morning and had found a note printed in
dark blue Flair pen on a piece of binder paper. It was pinned with
a thumbtack to the bedroom door:

“I’m sorry. I just can’t live with you any
longer. It would be better if you didn’t try to find us.”

“Us.” She had taken his kid.

A kind of madness overtook him at the idea,
and he ran into the nursery, in his haste nearly wrecking the
little latticework barrier they had put in the doorway against the
time she would be old enough to start crawling. He tore the drawers
out of the baby’s tiny dresser and, as he discovered them to be
empty, threw them down on the floor.

In their own room, not much was gone—only
perhaps as many of Kathleen’s things as would fit into one hastily
packed suitcase. But her lute was missing; he couldn’t find it
anywhere.

So it was true. Kathleen had left him, and
she had taken the baby.

Should he find them? He could do that; it was
part of his work to find people, and he was good at his work. He
could track her down if she went to hide in the jungles of the
Amazon. He could hunt her and find her and make her come back.

No, he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t make her
come back. He could find her; that would be easy. He could even
kill her if he wanted to, but he couldn’t make her love him again.
She was lost to him, she and the child both. It was over.

When that simple fact had sunk in, he sat
down on the bed, buried his face in his hands, and wept like a
child.

. . . . .

The days following his wife’s disappearance
saw established a pattern of full retreat. Guinness packed his blue
and white canvas suitcase and moved out of the apartment, locking
the front door behind him. A week later he was strolling
purposelessly along an embankment near the Tate Gallery and
discovered the key in his pocket. He stared at it for a few
seconds, almost as if he didn’t recognize what it was, and then
threw it as far out into the Thames as he could.

He had by then rented a room, the attic of a
semidetached house in Holborn, not more than a ten minutes’ walk
from the British Museum. It was a dreary little hole, made even
smaller by the fact that the ceiling slanted until on one side of
the room it was only about four feet above the floor; and it had
only one small window, not much larger than a man’s
handkerchief.

But none of that mattered. Guinness was never
there except to sleep. The rest of the time was generally spent at
the museum, where he daily inspected the Elgin marbles and the
Egyptian mummies and the Viking jewelry from the grave ship at
Sutton Hoo. It was all totally familiar, of course. He had seen it
all so many times before that now he hardly noticed it. The images
registered on his optic nerve and he would pass on to something
else, but still it had the effect of keeping him minimally
distracted. Nothing more was either expected or desired.

When he was tired of the museum, he would
find something else. For 3/6 he purchased a paperback book that
described “250 places to visit in and around London,” and he would
pick one at random and visit that. The Imperial War Museum, Dr.
Johnson’s House, the Dulwich College Picture Gallery—it didn’t
matter. In Somerset House, he spent the better part of an hour
reading Milton’s last will and testament.

And malt does more than Milton can/ To
justify God’s ways to man.

In the evenings, after all the museums and
galleries and public buildings were closed, he would go to a pub
near Cavendish Square and drink stout; he would sit in a corner
booth, propped up behind an unread copy of the Times Literary
Supplement that he had been carrying around in his pocket for
weeks, overtip the barmaid, and get smashed. Then, at about ten
o’clock, just to prove that he could still do it, he would stagger
down to one of the penny arcades on Oxford Street and play eight or
ten brilliant games of pinball before going to bed.

That was the worst part. The absolute bottom
line was going to bed every night in that wretched little attic
room—not that the room made any difference.

Every night he would promise himself that the
next night he would really tie one on. The trick, however, as he
discovered fast enough, was to get just sufficiently tanked for
dreamless sleep. No self pity, no bad dreams, no memory. Nothing to
wake you in the middle of the night, to make you tremble and sweat
and wipe your face to see if it was really spattered with pale
blood.

He tried keeping a bottle of Irish whiskey
under his bed, but if you got too drunk the dreams were even worse
and the hard stuff gave him heartburn. No, you had to strike a
balance. You had to find that point of perfect equilibrium.

So he stayed in his corner booth and drank
stout and kept rereading the same review of a book on the Scottish
Chaucerians. And the barmaid would come with a full glass every now
and then and take away his empties and five bob for her
trouble.

But even with his overtipping, the barmaid
didn’t seem to care for him much. Fancy sitting around all night,
just drinking himself insensible like that. Every night, just
sitting there—as if he fooled anybody with his paper always open to
the same page. Still, he was polite enough for two and talked like
a gentleman; not that you could tell with these Yanks. Perhaps he
had his troubles, but then who didn’t?

And at the end of the evening, Guinness would
say his good night to the lady, leave a ten shilling note on the
table, and go home; never too late, because—you never knew—his
escort might be a married man.

Because there was always an escort. MI-6
doesn’t like it when one of its soldiers announces that he’s
quitting and then begins to come apart at the seams; it makes
everybody nervous. Men do desperate and foolish things when they’ve
reached the end of their tether, and they bear watching.

Poor bastard, that kind of duty couldn’t be
worth too many laughs. Guinness would have liked to have stood him
a drink sometime, but of course that was impossible.

Perhaps, if he got flaky enough, they would
call off his escort and do something really drastic. Perhaps one
night he would be hustled into a waiting car and disappear into a
peat bog in Northumbria. It wasn’t as if that sort of thing never
happened.

Curiously, the idea rather appealed to
him.

13

But of course they didn’t. Instead, they put
him on a plane to Rome, where he was supposed to proceed by train
to Florence and there do a number on a Russian string handler by
the name of Misha Fedorovich Vlasov. It looked like a pretty easy
hit, and perhaps they felt a little light work in a warm climate
would do him good; a kind of rest cure in the sunny South, with
just enough going down to keep his mind occupied.

Anyway, it happened one morning that Guinness
was having breakfast in a tiny pseudo Italian restaurant in
Bloomsbury—spaghetti and watered Lambrusco starting at around two
in the afternoon, kippers and tea served anytime—when he chanced to
look out of the window and to notice that there wasn’t anybody in
attendance.

Not many people in the Trade had any
illusions about being able to keep an unnoticed tail on a fellow
spook, certainly not for days at a time, and none of the people who
were following Guinness around had even tried. Usually, they just
waited on street corners, making themselves nice and conspicuous,
and Guinness had returned the courtesy by staying easy to shadow
and taking pains that every once in a while everyone had a shot at
the men’s room. It was, considering the circumstances, a very
gentlemanly arrangement all the way around.

Of course, they didn’t know who he was—nobody
had been that stupid—but they had eyes in their heads and this was
no shoe salesman from Lambeth. The rumor mills were very busy.

Hadn’t they all been ordered to carry I.D.
and leave the weapons at home? I.D., for the love of God! One
simply didn’t carry I.D. in this line of work. Ergo, this one was a
very heavy number, heavy enough to drop you in a dark alley, so, if
you please, sir, he should know you were a friendly and not put a
bullet in your shell-like ear.

The troops were justified in being a trifle
skittish, more justified than they could begin to imagine.

“You really ought to read it, dear boy,”
Byron had said, pushing a flat manila folder across the desk toward
him. “He seems to imagine that there’s something mildly grotesque
about you. But then he always was an old maid, our Dr.
Corrington.”

Guinness had just gotten back from his
training in Scotland, and Dr. Corrington, who had had him
interpreting ink blots and putting together wooden puzzles three
mornings a week, wasn’t very high on his list either. He didn’t
like people who asked him lewd questions about his dreams.

“If you think he’s such a turkey, why was he
allowed to use up so much of Her Majesty’s valuable time? My
firearms instructor was grumbling about writing you a rather
pointed note on the subject.”

Byron ignored the question and, when he saw
that Guinness wasn’t going to open the folder, slid it back to
where he was sitting and opened it himself. For a long moment he
seemed absorbed in its contents.

“‘Egocentric. Fundamentally unconstrained by
conventional standards of behavior. Tends to view society as
antagonistic to him. Capable of loyalty where he perceives support.
Capable of any action he perceives to be in his own interest. In
summary, a fairly classic example of the intelligent criminal type.
Should not be trusted beyond reasonable limits of security.’ My,
my, my, Raymond; it seems you are a very bad boy. Lucky for you we
found you when we did. Otherwise you might have ended up running
the Turkish heroin traffic. Either that or the president of General
Motors.”

He laughed and dropped the folder into the
wastepaper basket, where it hit bottom with a kind of muffled
clang. It wasn’t the sort of gesture Guinness entirely trusted.
Odds were that report was out of the trash and back in Byron’s
files within two minutes after he left the room.

“Pshaw. That’s why we keep the old badger. He
could have used the same words to describe half the human race, and
probably has. It might have been written about myself.”

He might have kept Corrington’s report, but
he never gave any indication that he believed it. Not Byron. Byron
wouldn’t have sicked all these goons on him just because he had
handed in his walking papers. But Byron was dead.

And now there wasn’t a soul out there.

They had obviously gotten the signal to
withdraw, and that could mean any number of things, most of them
reasonably ugly. Had someone at Whitehall decided he was just too
damn dangerous in his present state of mind and that it was time to
cut their losses? Well, if that was the way they felt about it, he
wasn’t going to go quietly. They could waste him if they had a mind
to—hell, there wasn’t anybody they couldn’t waste—but he was going
to see to it that they paid for the privilege.

Guinness settled his tab and took his
raincoat from where it had been hanging on a peg near the door. As
he put his arms through the sleeves, he could feel three or four
pounds of gunmetal bobbing against his left thigh, and he smiled a
grim little inward smile. It was only a dinky little Spanish
automatic, not the .357 which good procedure had demanded be wiped
clean and left at the scene of the late festivities, but there were
eight rounds in the clip and one in the chamber and the action was
fast enough to spray bullets like a fucking fire hose. It would
do.

Outside the restaurant, he flagged down a
taxi and, with his hand closed over the automatic in his raincoat
pocket—you never knew who might turn out to be driving—gave
instructions for the Tower.

It was a Sunday morning, well into the
tourist season, so the place was jammed. They would have a fine old
time trying to jump him there, but of course he didn’t really
expect them to try. They wouldn’t be in any particular hurry, and
he would have to go home sometime.

It was really more a question of testing
their intentions; if nothing happened by closing time, then
Guinness would know they were gunning for him. He chose a bench
overlooking the barge entrance to Traitor’s Gate and sat down to
await events.

A little before noon, he watched a tall reedy
looking man in a black wool overcoat and a bowler hat that came
down almost to his eyebrows buying a ticket to enter the grounds.
While he reached into an inside pocket for his 1/6, the handle of
his umbrella was hooked over his left forearm, something that at a
distance of close to a hundred yards Guinness couldn’t have hoped
to have noticed but through the eye of long acquaintance.

Some men used their furled umbrellas as
walking sticks, some carried them like bouquets, but McKendrick
always hooked his over the left forearm. A convenient place for it,
since arthritis resulting from an untended gunshot wound had frozen
the elbow at a ninety-degree angle. Before then, back during the
war and up until sometime in the middle fifties, McKendrick was
supposed to have been one of Byron Down’s most dependable boys; not
brilliant, perhaps, but proficient. Afterward, he became his chief
assistant and eventually his successor. Guinness didn’t much like
the son of a bitch.

Winter and summer, he wore the same damn
outfit, like a uniform: black wool overcoat, oversize bowler, and
his bloody umbrella. Always the same.