The Summer Soldier (29 page)

“That’s right. Like Dracula.” Dracula in an
antique, double-breasted suit. Guinness stared grimly over his
steering wheel as he drove back along Colorado Boulevard, unable to
restrain a certain sneaking admiration for Comrade Vlasov’s
imaginative daring. Because in his position it took guts to con the
Russians into providing you with your stalking horse. They must
have been sorry to lose him; the man was obviously a tactician of
genius.

What had he done? Phoned up the San Francisco
consulate at a quarter to three in the morning, ranting
hysterically into some undersecretary’s ear about how he was going
to cancel the ticket on a certain Raymond Guinness of 1427 Avon
Street in the obscure hamlet of Belmont, California, and how they’d
never be able to stop him? Something like that, probably.

Not that the Russians would care, even if he
did throw in that said Guinness was the gentleman mentioned on such
and such a page of the Bluebook. But Guinness would be their first
solid lead to Vlasov, and they would care about that. Those people
took a very dim view of treason.

So they would put a tag on Guinness, just to
see if he would lead them to Vlasov. They wouldn’t dare use any of
their own personnel, not when there was such an excellent chance of
Guinness ending up messily murdered. No, they would use outside
help. Some innocuous slob like Ralph Spignaldo. And Vlasov, who
clearly had his ways of finding such things out, would just tag
along behind. Spignaldo would follow Guinness, Vlasov would follow
Spignaldo, and Guinness would be spared the sight of any
uncomfortably familiar Slavic faces. It was very tidy. Very tidy
indeed.

18

Guinness used his fork to turn over the
cherry tomato in the center of his small green salad. The other
side didn’t look as shriveled, but he decided not to eat it anyway
and lifted it out and onto the glass ashtray just in front of the
napkin dispenser. The dispenser was at the wall end of his table,
which he had picked because it was away from the windows and
allowed him an unobstructed view of the main entrance.

In addition to the salad, he had before him
an “extra cut” rib-eye steak, a baked potato that came with a
little paper tub of sour cream, a small steel pot of hot water in
which to steep his tea bag, and a slice of Boston cream pie. The
condemned man enjoyed a hearty meal.

Except that he wasn’t enjoying it. He ate
with the glum determination of a twelve year old playing scales on
the piano. The food, though objectively tasty, sat like lead on his
stomach, and he felt almost ready to gag with every swallow. He had
only bothered with dinner on the assumption that it would steady
his nerves

They needed steadying. Guinness had devoted
the entire previous four hours, ever since he had left Spignaldo
sleeping peacefully in the gardens of the Huntington Library, to
making absolutely certain that no one was following him.

Staying away from the freeways as much as
possible, he had made his cautious way to the downtown area of Los
Angeles and parked on the roof of a five story garage just
catercorner from the Times Mirror Square. It was probably silly of
him, but he didn’t really much care for the idea of riding around
in a car that Vlasov and anybody else who cared to play would by
this time be able to spot in a second. It made him feel naked.
There was an Avis office just three blocks to the east, so what the
hell.

For the rest he just kept on driving through
into the evening. He didn’t dare go back to his Los Feliz motel
room, and it wasn’t necessary anyway. He hadn’t even bothered to
unpack.

The old fuddy behind the desk had decided to
take it as a personal affront when Guinness checked out after only
four hours, but life is hard and you can’t please everyone.

If Spignaldo had a relief man—hell, he would
have to have had a relief man; nobody can tail you for days on end
by himself—the motel would be where he would have to go. It would
be about his only chance of picking up the trail.

But as he sat in the Lariat Steak House in
Santa Monica, picking over the contents of his salad bowl, it
wasn’t any crushing anxieties about Spignaldo and his confederates
that were disturbing Guinness’s digestion. No, in all likelihood,
Spignaldo was at that moment on his way back to Oakland, pondering
over the merits of some other line of work. No, he was safe enough
from Spignaldo; it was Vlasov who presented the danger.

But then, ever had it been so.

Vlasov was brilliant and apparently in
perfect control, both of the situation and himself. “Would tomorrow
evening be too soon?” He might have been issuing an invitation to
play bridge.

And this was the man who was planning to kill
him, who had apparently lived through the last seven years with no
other purpose. Seven years of planning and hatred, and it was all
aimed right at Guinness’s head. Seven years, and they were but as
few because he loved her.

She must have been quite a lady, Mrs. Vlasov;
she would have to have been to have inspired such a revenge. A
grand passion apparently, the real thing. Guinness wondered what it
must be like to love like that. It had to be neurotic, that kind of
love; it had to be.

As if physically to disengage himself,
Guinness let his fork drop with a clatter onto the little sterling
steel plate on which his half eaten steak rested, and rose to
leave. The huge menu board that you faced as you slid your tray
along to place your order and pick up your dessert and hot drink
had said, “No Tipping,” but he left a dollar for the busboy anyway,
folding it once and placing it underneath his cup and saucer. He
had been overtipping now for some time, as if in a series of small
acts of contrition.

Outside, with the breeze from the ocean just
catching at the side vents of his open jacket, he felt better.
Vlasov shrank in his imagination back down to human scale; after
all, like Guinness, he was merely a man. He could be killed. And
for all his enormous virtuosity as a tactician, he was pretty
obviously off the wall.

Sane men didn’t go around slipping ice picks
into housewives just to satisfy some private whim. They didn’t
scare the shit out of you by stuffing your ignition lock full of
nitrogen triiodide and then issue elaborate challenges to come
shoot it out with them in back of the merry go round at Griffith
Park. The guy was a nut.

Guinness closed his eyes for a moment and
tried to think about something else.

Where was he, exactly? Probably somewhere
near Venice; he knew that if he looked behind him he would just be
able to make out a smear of light from the cars on the San Diego
Freeway.

For a brief while in grad school he had kept
company with a girl who lived in Venice. She had worked in the
records department at city hall, sorting traffic tickets or
something, but in her free time she had been very into ceramics and
little theater—that sort of thing. After a couple of months she had
decided that Guinness just didn’t have an artistic soul and they
had split up.

The luckiest break of her life, as it had
turned out. Otherwise it would have been her body they found on his
kitchen floor.

And, merciful God, what about himself? Even
if by some miracle Vlasov didn’t kill him tomorrow, that wouldn’t
exactly turn him into a preferred risk. How long could he last? The
KGB knew who he was, knew all about him—Vlasov had seen to that—and
he would be a sitting duck any time they decided they wanted to
balance the score.

And then there was Tuttle to deal with.

Tuttle would be after him to take up his old
line again; that had almost been part of the deal. And Tuttle would
have his ways of making it difficult if he tried to refuse.
Guinness wasn’t even sure he wanted to refuse.

A sitting duck, a goddamn sitting duck. He’d
be lucky if he lasted out the year. Vlasov could almost save
himself the trouble.

Guinness unlocked his car door, having
decided he needed to find himself a nice noisy crowd. He wasn’t the
best company for himself tonight, and he needed distracting.

The Baskin-Robbins in Westwood was like a
fishbowl—brightly lit, with three walls almost entirely of
glass—but so what? No one was dogging his trail, of that he had
abundantly satisfied himself, and it was just the sort of place
Vlasov would most wish to avoid. Hell, half the adult population of
the world was out looking for him—so while he wanted to live,
Vlasov would keep his head pulled in. And on a Saturday evening
every sidewalk and store in the area was packed with Dionysian
undergraduates from UCLA, which was within walking distance.

Guinness knew, or at least had once known,
precisely how far it was by shank’s mare from the English
department offices to this part of the downtown, if you could talk
about a place like Westwood as having a downtown. He had walked it,
back and forth, almost every day during the year and a half he had
lived in Los Angeles and spent his hours pouring over volumes of
early Seventeenth Century meditative verse.

It had been a strange period in his life,
those eighteen months—or at least the first three or four—far worse
than what he was going through now. This was a cakewalk; all he had
to deal with was the probability, shading off into certainty, that
he was for it. It was over—this week, or sometime. But it was over.
If Vlasov didn’t get him, they, whoever they would be, were coming
for him, and it would be his turn to be found one night in a seat
at the movies, with a needle mark hidden by the hairline at the
base of his skull. Big deal—nobody lives forever.

But back then, Jesus. If he had dinner at the
Tia Maria, he would spend ten minutes sifting through the chili,
looking for the slivers of glass; walking down a city sidewalk, he
would study the faces, wondering which one would be his man and
where the bullet would hit.

But that wasn’t the worst. Perhaps you will
be more sensitive to it one day than another, but the feeling that
you are a target never leaves. A person can get used to
anything.

It was the living over of every touch he had
ever made, night after night, while he tried to sleep. Very
specific memories—the precise geometry of Janik Shevliskiri’s fall,
the patterns traced through the air by his arms and legs as an
ounce and a half of copper-jacketed lead turned his brain into
blackberry cobbler.

Everything. The powder loads in the
cartridges, the times of the trains, the room numbers of hotels in
Munich and Amsterdam. Like a little boy who has mucked up his
homework and has to stay after school to write it out a hundred
times on the blackboard.

Not guilt, exactly. Simply the burden of a
past. The past is the one constant—it and the fact that its ghosts
always find you out in the end.

But this too passed away—everything does.
Guinness learned how to sleep again, and the bogeymen didn’t come
to get him after all. He knew that they would, but they didn’t. So
he survived and took a degree in British literature and a job up
north and, eventually, a wife. There had been plenty of time to
lull him to sleep. And then Vlasov had come, who was enough of a
bogeyman for anybody, and proved him right after all.

Guinness sat at one of the little desk-seats
Baskin-Robbins provides its customers with and slowly worked his
way through the hot butterscotch sundae with French vanilla ice
cream (no nuts and no cherry) he had purchased for ninety-five
cents. All the other little desk-seats were filled along all three
walls, filled with little clusters of two or three people
identifiably together. It was an unpleasant shock to realize
suddenly that he was the only one there alone, and the only one
there over the age of twenty-three or so; all the rest were in some
variation of the Student Uniform: jeans and polo shirt or jeans and
nylon windbreaker or jeans and army fatigue jacket. All the
boys—and they were mostly boys for some reason—sat bunched down
with their legs thrust far out in front of them, as if their chairs
were runaway soapbox racers and they were trying to brake them with
their feet.

The girls didn’t seem to have any feet at
all; their legs were drawn up under them, giving them rather the
appearance of nesting birds.

Male and female, they all seemed engaged in
the same vast, shapeless, intensely jocular debate, which would
spill over from one little cluster to the other as people got up or
sat down or left or came away from the counter with their arms full
of various combinations of ice cream and heavy syrup and carbonated
water. It was a familiar phenomenon, for which the appropriate
metaphors were tribal rites and feeding time at the zoo.

Behind his eyes, where he could be reasonably
certain it wouldn’t show, Guinness frowned slightly and decided
that perhaps he wasn’t being entirely fair. It was, of course, easy
to be disdainful of what one of his colleagues—a man who had
himself at around age sixty shed his tie and wife and tweed jacket
for beads and a Pendleton shirt that never seemed to get buttoned
above the navel—called “The Young.” It was especially easy if you
weren’t a captive of the Mr. Chips Syndrome, and Guinness
wasn’t.

Of course, he had been once; or at least he
had contrived to think that he was, which comes to the same thing.
All along, their respect and regard, which probably he had never
had, had been important to him, even at that upper crusty public
school in London into which Byron had somehow managed to smuggle
him.

All those skinny, pimpled, pale faced
adolescent boys in the upper forms, to whom he had solemnly
assigned “research” papers designed to arrive at profound
conclusions about Longinus and Romanesque art and the origins of
the Punic Wars in three to five typewritten pages, due Monday. God,
how he had worried over them and browbeaten them and invited them
to tea on Thursday afternoons so they could talk about their plans
for university and their terror of their parents and stare
hopelessly at the curve of Kathleen’s thigh muscle under her long
peasant dresses.