The Summer Soldier (23 page)

It was ten to seven before Vlasov came out
through his front door, five minutes behind schedule—and, god
dammit, he had someone with him! It was a woman, a fucking woman,
and she was dressed up to go somewhere! Arm in arm, they walked to
the garage and disappeared behind the trees that screened off the
carport. It seemed like forever that they were in there.

Then Vlasov came back out and started walking
around the front of the car. Apparently he had opened the door for
her on the driver’s side and was going around to let himself
in.

The whole thing was probably only taking a
few seconds, but to Guinness it seemed like slow motion—there was
plenty of time for him to figure out everything, for the whole
ghastly business to unravel itself before him. It was terrible.

Just as Vlasov got to the front of the car,
the dynamite went up. With an appalling noise, appalling even from
half a mile’s distance, the car turned itself into a ball of red
and black fire. The two sticks had been plenty.

Sitting in his office chair, in his house in
California, Guinness could still remember every detail with a
vividness that made his hands sweat. He could still remember the
expression on Vlasov’s face as he had begun turning toward the car
to see what had happened. He could remember the car’s hood, which
had apparently been hinged from the front, popping up and off,
doing a slow back flip until it slammed into Vlasov and knocked him
down. The hood had probably saved Vlasov’s life, protecting him
from the full force of the explosion.

At the time Guinness had thought that they
both must have been killed, though he didn’t wait around to make
sure. He had simply hopped a plane out, the first plane he could
manage, which had happened to be bound for Zürich. From there he
hadn’t even returned to London but had put into effect the escape
route he and Byron had so carefully devised. Screw it, the whole
damn business; he never wanted to touch anything to do with it
again, never again.

But seven years had not been time enough to
forget. He remembered the way Vlasov and his wife had looked on
their little walk to the car, the way he had smiled at her and
touched her hand as it rested on his arm. The poor woman. The poor
god damned woman. Where had they been going? Shopping? To the
dentist? She had started the car while her husband went around to
let himself in on the other side, and she had been blown to
smithereens. No wonder Vlasov had been waiting seven years for the
chance to kill him. Everything made sense now—the murder of Louise,
the nitrogen triiodide in his ignition, everything.

Of all the jobs he had ever done, of all the
people he had killed and all the despicable little treacheries he
had committed, this was the one he remembered. In seven years there
had hardly been two days together when he hadn’t thought of it. It
came back to him in his dreams sometimes and woke him, cold and
terrified, in the middle of the night. He should have known Vlasov
would be alive. He should have expected him to come like this and
demand his revenge.

Guinness put his files back into their hiding
place, put the carpet back down, and left his house through the
rear door, just as he had entered it. It was close to dawn by then,
and the sky was a pale gray.

Out on the sidewalk he noticed a car parked
about two blocks up the street, just out of pistol range. He could
just make out a man’s shape behind the wheel, and then the glint of
reflected light. It was Vlasov, of course, watching from a
distance, just as Guinness had watched him all those years ago,
watching to make sure that his challenge had been accepted. He
couldn’t have said how he knew it was Vlasov, but he knew.

Guinness fished around in the pocket of his
coat until he found the postcard with the picture of the little
girl on the merry go round. When he found it, he held it up at
arm’s length over his head. The lights of the car flashed on and
then off again, as if in answer. Then there was the sound of its
starting, and it turned around in the street and drove away. In a
few seconds it was gone.

14

Staying away from the main arteries of
traffic, where he would have been taking a chance of getting picked
up by the police, Guinness made his way on foot through residential
Belmont. For a while he followed the perimeter of the old Ralston
estate, after the robber baron’s time a lunatic asylum and now a
Catholic convent school for the daughters of Bolivian silver
czars—to all of which there was a pleasing continuity—and then he
struck out over a low shoulder of land that in recent years had
become a patchwork of housing developments, until he came back onto
El Camino Real. He was almost on the border with San Mateo, the
next town over, a fact indicated by a neon sign across the highway
which, at a suitable hour, could be counted on to advise all
interested parties that they were near the Bel-Mateo Motel.

It was going to be a nice morning, clear and
cool, and Guinness was beginning to experience that rise of
optimism that comes to those few who somehow contrive to be awake
and out of doors just before a spring dawn.

But it wasn’t only the morning. In spite of
his unpromising circumstances—hell, there was at least an even
chance he would be dead before the week was done—he felt almost
immortal.

Maybe during all of the last seven years he
had rather missed the cut and run. He had been happy with Louise—in
all likelihood, he would never be happy again—but maybe, for him,
it wasn’t enough to be happy. Loneliness, fear, and at the end of
it, tomorrow or next month or the year after next, nothing but a
bullet in the back of the head and a porcelain slab in among the
other John Does. These were all that could be left for him in life,
but somehow it didn’t seem to matter.

He was sorry about Louise, sorry she was dead
and sorry that their life together was over. No part of him was
glad to be free of her.

But, if not that, he was glad to be free of
all the rest of it: the lawn, the house, one safe day after
another. And wasn’t she bound up in all of that? Whatever should
happen now, whatever came to him, there would have been no place
for Louise.

So be it. Right that moment, with the skyline
turning pink and the long grass by the roadway still slick from
last night’s fog, if the angel Michael had appeared to him and
announced, “Come, all’s forgiven; we’ll take away the flaming sword
and you can go back to the life you’ve lived these seven years, and
no one will ever bother you again,” Guinness would have smiled and
shook his head and begged off. He was of the devil’s party, and he
knew it.

He stopped and bought a newspaper on the
corner occupied by the Belmont Theater, paused for a break in the
traffic, and crossed over to join the throng waiting for the
arrival of the Greyhound local to San Francisco. Screened behind
his newspaper, he was perfectly safe; the express bus turned off at
Ralston Avenue, several blocks back, to join the Bayshore Freeway,
and if Creon was having any of the buses watched, which wasn’t
likely, it would be the express. That was the way his mind would
work. He would expect Guinness to be panicked and in a hurry.

The ride in, naturally, took forever, and it
was close to 10:00 A.M. before they nosed in at the Ninth Avenue
bus station. Guinness was hungry enough to buy himself a corndog
and a paper cup full of carbonated orange drink, and he stood
leaning up against the wall of the concession stand watching the
ritual duel between an old lady, the temporary occupant of one of
the station’s gray painted slat benches, and two or three of the
contingent of pigeons that called the place home.

She was a ferocious looking old witch,
immaculately turned out in a nylon dress of small white polka dots
against a background of the most severe blue, a white knitted
sweater with sleeves reaching down almost to her knuckles, and a
small square black hat carefully positioned on hair the color of
pewter. Around her neck, from which the muscles stood out like the
cords of a rope, she wore a thin black ribbon, and she carried a
walking stick with a silver head and tip.

Around her feet, within perhaps a three foot
radius, she had sprinkled some bread crumbs, and when the pigeons
would make a rush for them, she would strike out with the tip of
her walking stick. She wasn’t trying to hit them really, just to
keep them at bay. It made an odd spectacle, and Guinness wondered
what moral the old gal must be drawing from it; for surely she
would be the type to draw a moral.

His corndog and his interest in kinky games
both being exhausted, Guinness headed off for the Bayside Hotel to
fetch Tuttle’s key. The round trip took him not quite three
quarters of an hour, and the bus station locker into which the key
fitted contained a red TWA flight bag, the contents of which would
have to wait for some not so public place.

In the meantime, he thought he had better
find Doris Lincer.

Doris was a bar girl whose vague aspirations
for a better life had long kept her floating in and out of the
state college system. She had begun to study half a dozen
things—typing and real estate brokerage and dental technol¬ogy—but
always left them off just in time to keep her transcript blank.
Once her restlessness had manifested itself in a yen for literary
culture and she had found herself in English 262, Introduction to
Poetry, at Belmont State. Guinness had, of course, been the
instructor; he was fresh out of the graduate program at UCLA, still
working on his dissertation, and as yet unattached.

He saw her throughout most of that year,
although she quickly lost interest in the niceties of scansion.
Even after his marriage she would phone him once in a while, but
only once in a while. She wasn’t the clinging type. He hadn’t heard
anything from her in almost three years.

In those days she had worked in a place just
a block down from Union Square called the Board Room, so perhaps
she still did.

She still did.

It was an incredibly dark little room, long
and narrow, with a bar and a tiny dimly lit stage along one wall.
The stage was a little higher than the level of the bar, and on it,
in a parody of dance, was a half-naked woman, possibly Latin,
possibly not, with small breasts and arms that hung down limp at
her sides as if someone had severed the nerves. Even in that vague
light there glistened on her underbelly the stretch marks of many
pregnancies.

Presently, with the clumsy deliberation of an
act performed underwater, she stepped out of her panties and hung
them over a hook on the wall behind her. For perhaps half a minute
Guinness watched her, wondering what had made the floor so sticky
under his shoes.

When his eyes had adjusted to the absence of
light, he threaded his way through the maze of tiny circular tables
and plastic chairs and sat down behind one in the corner furthest
from the jukebox, which was deafening. There he waited.

Doris was perched on a stool at the bar,
talking to a customer, who, judging from the position of his hand
on her thigh, was an intimate and trusted friend. It wasn’t very
long before she disengaged herself, dropped down from her stool,
and, carrying a small tray, began swinging her way toward him.

Swinging was the word. Doris was a big girl,
a good five feet ten, and generously built, a fact her working
clothes did what they could to emphasize. She looked as if she had
put on a little weight.

“Hello, Ray,” she said, in a voice just loud
enough to be heard in that din. “What are you drinking?” There was
nothing in her manner to suggest whether or not she was pleased to
see him as she took a small square napkin from her tray and set it
down on the table in front of him. “Still beer?”

Beer—that was what was crackling inaudibly
under his sales. Beer that had been jostled over the edges of these
tiny round tables, to spatter equally on the linoleum and the
trouser legs of middle aged voyeurs. A more or less uniform film of
it over the whole floor. He could smell it now, flat and faintly
sickening as it mingled with the stale cigarette smoke and the odor
of disinfectant.

He smiled and nodded, and she took her tray
and went back to the bar.

She brought him back a glass and a seven
ounce bottle of some brand he had never heard of and sat down
across the table from him, with her back to the bar. Guinness
ventured a quick glance at the man she had left to join him, who
looked as if he were trying to decide whether or not he should
lodge a protest. Apparently, he decided not, because after a few
minutes he finished whatever it was he had been drinking and walked
stiffly out, leaving a dollar bill on the stage for the dancer.

“Aren’t you still teaching, Ray?” she asked
after she had settled into her chair and poured his beer for him.
“It’s the middle of the goddamn week.” She smiled, or at least the
distance between the ends of her mouth lengthened, and Guinness
knew that she had heard about his wife. She was baiting him, just a
little—daring him to tell some lie about passion and memory and old
time’s sake, and knowing that he wouldn’t bother. Perhaps she half
wished he would.

It was more with her eyes that she smiled,
that she said she really was glad to see him and didn’t care why he
had come. They mirrored a weary cynicism that had learned to
compromise with the frailties of human nature.

“The beer is going to cost you two
seventy-five,” she said quietly, putting her hand over the back of
his. Guinness let his breath catch in a tiny voiceless laugh and
took her fingers between his palm and thumb.

“I’m in a certain amount of trouble, Doris;
and I could use some extralegal help.”

“Sure.” She gave his hand a small squeeze,
whether in sympathy for his trouble or in acceptance of his
weakness as a man he couldn’t tell. “I kind of figured that. Just
tell me what it is.”