The Summer Soldier (24 page)

“I need to disappear for a while. I need
someone to ferry me down to Los Angeles—not you, kid; I’m not a
very safe person to know right at the moment.”

Very gently, she disengaged her hand and
patted him on the back of the wrist. “Don’t you worry. I wasn’t
planning to volunteer.” It seemed a long time before she spoke
again. “How soon will you need to go? Can it wait until
tomorrow?”

“Yes. It can wait that long.”

“Good.” She nodded sharply and smiled a
clever little smile. “Then you’ll need a place to stay the night. I
get off work at seven—come back here then and I’ll have everything
set up. You can buy me dinner.”

Guinness rose from his chair, took a ten
dollar bill from his wallet, and dropped it on Doris’s tray. “See
you then,” he whispered, bending down to kiss her between the
eyebrows. “Will you take care of Miss Birthday Suit for me?”

Without waiting for an answer, he worked his
way down the narrow track between rows of tables and was gone.

The sun was hideously bright outside on the
sidewalk, but that may have been nothing more than the effect of
contrast. Guinness glanced at his watch and was a little surprised
to find it was only eleven-thirty. There probably wasn’t a fugitive
warrant out on him yet, but somehow it still didn’t seem like a hot
idea to spend the next several hours walking the streets. Besides,
he was tired. He hadn’t had much sleep, having been under only a
few hours when Tuttle phoned, and it had been an exciting day.

And he was hungry too; that junk at the bus
station had simply started his juices flowing, and he hadn’t
touched his beer. No problem, though. San Francisco was lousy with
places to eat.

After a chicken salad sandwich and a cup of
tea at David’s Kosher Deli, Guinness found himself a porno movie
house on Sutter Street. There he would be protected by the surreal
darkness of the place and by the fact that no one wished, under
such circumstances, to appear at all curious about his neighbor.
You could spend the day there, as he planned to, and not a soul
would so much as look at you.

He paid his five dollars and decided that a
visit to the men’s room seemed in order. It would be the first safe
chance he had had to inspect the goodies in his flight bag.

Tuttle, lord love the boy, had thought of
everything. There was a nasty looking little .25 caliber snub nose
revolver in a black leather clip holster, an envelope containing
five hundred dollars in fifties, an Oregon driver’s license, a
social security card, and a Union 76 credit card, all made out to
one Thomas S. Linkweather—the color photograph on the license was
of Guinness—and a small, flat drug case just like the one he had
found in Tuttle’s motel room.

Inside were the three numbered vials of clear
fluid, a syringe, and a note: “Number 3 puts you under for keeps.
Happy hunting.”

Guinness stuffed the cards and money into his
wallet, which was already thick with twenty-five hundred from his
own little nest egg, clipped the gun to his belt, and slipped the
drug case into the left inside breast pocket of his coat. He left
the flight bag, containing nothing now except Sergeant of
Detectives Herbert L. Ganjemi’s service revolver, inside the paper
towel dispenser. Eventually, whoever around there was in charge of
keeping things tidy would find it, open it up, and, being engaged
in an enterprise in which you can always use a few extra Brownie
points downtown, call the police. But by then everything with
Vlasov would be settled and, one way or the other, Guinness
wouldn’t have a thing to worry about.

After rinsing his hands, he left the men’s
room, walking past the studied inattention of the guy who had sold
him his ticket and pushing through the heavy curtained doorway into
the theater itself.

Back when Guinness had been in college, they
had called them stag films, and the ones the fraternities traded
around among themselves were supposed to have been pretty hot
stuff. But Guinness hadn’t been a fraternity man, so the closest he
had ever gotten was a thing that had been playing at a place in one
of the seedier parts of Columbus. It had consisted of an hour and a
half of the heroine walking her dog through what one could only
presume was supposed to be Central Park, at the end of which the
audience was rewarded for their patience with a fifteen second peek
at her tits. They had been very substantial tits, he remembered,
but the black and white film hadn’t really been able to do them
justice. Guinness had left with the feeling that his two and a half
dollars had been definitely squandered.

Apparently, things had changed a lot since
then. He took a seat in a rear corner, away from the door, propped
his knees up against the seat in front of him and folded his arms
tightly across his chest, marveling at the amount of noise some
people made in the act of coition.

Someone was standing. . . standing. . .
standing in the what? Where? In the doorway of his bedroom back
home, in his bedroom doorway. . . standing there, looking at him.
Was it Louise? Yes! It was Louise, standing in the light from the
hall. He was home now, and it was nighty night time, and the light
caught Louise from behind, showing the outline of her body through
her nightdress. Then the nightdress slipped to her waist. . . and
then down to the floor. . . slowly, as if it couldn’t bear to leave
her. . .

Yes? She wants him to hold her in his arms.
She wants him to hold her. . . heavy in his arms, there with him
now and weightlessly heavy in his arms. Louise? Is the room too
dark? . . is it too dark? Why couldn’t he see her face?

Guinness awakened with a start, slowly pulled
himself up in his seat, and tried to read the face of his watch in
the almost total darkness. Six-thirty. On the screen they were
still at it, and he watched them with a dull resentment.

At five minutes to seven he was back at the
Board Room, and the translation was astonishing. The noise was
louder, if possible, and every table in the place was taken. The
very spaces between the bar stools were occupied by men with one
foot on the railing and both eyes on the stage.

Even jaded by an afternoon at the skin
flicks, Guinness couldn’t help but be impressed by what was going
on up there; she was ripe and milk smooth and perfectly gorgeous,
facts unobscured by the smudgy reddish flush with which the
footlights bathed her. Clearly, the management had saved its best
effort for the evening crowd.

A touch on his coat sleeve made him aware of
Doris standing just behind his shoulder, and, since they weren’t
more than five feet from the jukebox, he turned slightly and
stooped so she could speak directly into his ear.

‘‘I’m leaving now,” she said. “Give me a
couple of minutes and then meet me at the newsstand about half a
block up.” He nodded and she stepped back behind him and out of
sight. It was as if she had been swallowed up by the elbowing mob
around the bar. Guinness ordered a beer and forced himself to drink
a third of it before he too departed.

She was buying a roll of butterscotch
Lifesavers when he arrived, and she had her back to him. In her
white plastic boots and her leather coat with the ratty fur trim
around the edging and the openings of the sleeves, she looked like
a hooker taking a break from the rigors of patrol. Perhaps on
another evening she would have been. Guinness reminded himself that
he really didn’t know her very well, even if a long time ago they
had been lovers.

She dropped the Lifesavers into the pocket of
her coat and turned to go, passing her arm through his as they made
the sidewalk. The other hand reached up to brush a strand of her
shag-cut hair back away from her eyes. A passing stranger might
have thought they met the same way every night of their lives.

“I have everything arranged,” she whispered,
pressing her head against his shoulder. “But the guy wants three
bills for it. He says the round trip ’ll take him two days and he
won’t take a penny less. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Did you nick him for a broker’s
fee?”

“No.”

“You should have.” They looked at each other
curiously, as if each were trying to read the other’s feelings, and
then first Guinness smiled and then she did. As they walked along
he dipped down and kissed her, thinking how nice it was for a
change to be around a woman who didn’t mind if sometimes you
weren’t a model citizen.

“Where would you like to have dinner?”

“My place.” The way she said it and the way
she smiled made the inside of his mouth feel suddenly very dry.

Her place was a good brisk three quarters of
a mile from the Board Room, on the second floor of an apartment
building that looked like a motel, all the doors on each floor
opening onto a narrow walkway with an open stairwell connecting it
to the one below. It was all perfectly exposed and there weren’t
any back doors; Guinness just hoped that Vlasov didn’t change his
mind about Griffith Park and decide to settle up early.

He had bought a bottle of wine along the way.
Inside he set it down on the coffee table in the living room and
looked around.

The last time he had been in Doris’s
apartment it had been a different apartment, one several blocks
from this one. She must have been in the habit of renting them
furnished, because there wasn’t a stick of it he remembered, not
even an ashtray. Perhaps he simply didn’t remember as well as he
had thought.

He tried to settle on just what it was about
the room that struck him as so depressing. Perhaps it was that all
the furniture was so low—he had had really to bend getting rid of
his wine bottle; the damn table didn’t seem to make it halfway to
his kneecap—or perhaps it was the absence of any pictures or little
knickknacks picked up on afternoon outings to Sausalito or Carmel.
The room was astonishingly bare, a fact which seemed somehow to
heighten your perception of its smallness. It made you feel like
Alice in Wonderland, that peculiar sensation of finding yourself in
a miniature world.

Catercorner from the front door was a tiny
dining alcove and directly off of it, screened by a wall, was the
kitchen. Guinness could hear water running and the refrigerator
door opening and other busy feminine sounds coming from there.

There were a pair of matching chairs in the
living room, square cushioned and modern in design, with a covering
of rough coffee colored fabric. Guinness sat down in the one
furthest from the kitchen and experienced a curious sense of
injury. Somehow he had the overpowering conviction that he was
fated to spend the rest of his private life in rooms like this one,
one after the other—unpleasant and blasted and temporary. There
would be no more small houses in residential areas where your
neighbors were ROTC instructors and their wives, no more mortgages
that would run well into the 1990s, no sense of permanence and
possession.

In short, there wasn’t going to be any more
Louise.

There would be Doris, or, more accurately, a
succession of Dorises, stretching off until he was old enough and
disengaged enough to have lost the appetite. Because that was all
it was ever going to be anymore, merely the satisfaction of an
appetite.

He had been married twice, each time happily
by his own reckoning, but that was over. He had gotten over
Kathleen, had come back to himself and started over, but he wasn’t
going to get over Louise. Not after the way she had died, after
what, in his stupidity and selfishness, he had done to her. There
would be no more wives; that aspect of his life was over.

15

Three fragments of newsprint, none larger
than the back of a man’s hand, limped along in a kind of spasmodic
race down the narrow strip of broken and patched pavement behind
Doris’s apartment building. The wind came only a breath at a time,
leaving them intervals every few feet to throw themselves wearily
down like spent runners. It was a few minutes before six in the
morning, and the gray mist that was just a little too thin to be
called fog still hung weakly to the blurred edges of things. It was
cold, colder than it should have been at that time of year, and
Guinness stood with his collar up and his hands jammed down into
the pockets of his jacket. He was waiting, and his eyes, which
seemed to have taken on some of the morning’s coldness, were
watchful and suspicious.

“How do you like your steak, rare as an
autographed copy of Kafka?”

He had stood in the doorway of Doris’s tiny
kitchen, his hand holding a can of beer and his eyes crinkled in a
tender and remembering smile. It was a joke from the old days.

“Thank you, not quite that rare.”

She had changed out of her tart’s uniform
into a pale blue short sleeved sweater, with a neck that didn’t
constantly tempt you to thrust your hand inside, and a pair of
white slacks ending in cuffs that completely covered her bare feet.
Her back was to him as she adjusted one of the racks in the
oven.

“I heard about your wife, Ray.” There was
something casually gentle in the way she said it, something between
compassion and simple curiosity, but containing no special
invitation to imagine himself the unique victim of fortune. Death,
and even murder, were, after all, common enough events. Guinness
shifted his position slightly, making a vague answer that reflected
that understanding.

“They don’t say so,” she went on, “but the
papers seem to think you killed her.” She was still facing away
from him, but he could see how she had suddenly become very
still.

“Are you asking me if I did?”

“I wouldn’t care one way or the other.”
Rising back up from her crouch, she came around to face him with
features set in an unreadable mask. Apparently, it had been that
kind of a life.

“Then I didn’t kill her.”

“Did you love her?” she asked, smiling, as if
she found the idea amusing. It wasn’t a smile Guinness much cared
for.