The Summer Soldier (30 page)

Even for them he had experienced compassion
and a certain contemptuous fondness, symptoms that grew more
noticeable after Kathleen had been brought to fruition and had put
him squarely in the parent racket himself. And something had
survived and followed him to California and the corridors of
Belmont State.

But of course he had outgrown it.

And even that was a lie. What he really felt
at that moment, as he perfectly well knew, was envy. Again,
envy.

Across the room from him was a girl of
perhaps twenty, dressed in a pair of skin tight elaborately faded
denims and a yellow tee shirt that showed off her breasts to the
best possible advantage. She had soft blond hair that perhaps
hadn’t even come out of a tube, and she was laughing and talking
with appropriately adorable gestures and now and then coyly closing
her lips over the straw of her pineapple milkshake. The boy toward
whom all this was directed was also blond and ruggedly handsome in
a solidly midwestern sort of way—he rather reminded Guinness of the
kid who had been his roommate during his freshman year at Ohio
State.

The two of them had so much future ahead that
it probably never occurred to either of them to think about it.
They would never be old or afraid or intimate with pain and death;
everything to come would be part of an unbroken series of triumphs.
And tonight they would lie in each other’s arms, after making
wonderful, prelapsarian love, and dream no dreams. So it had been
destined from the first star swirls.

19

The park, which according to Guinness’s map
had a circumference of several miles, was surrounded by a chain
link fence. Thank God there weren’t the customary three angled
strands of barbed wire at the top—the stuff that had made his life
miserable all over Eastern Europe—so getting over wasn’t going to
be a big problem. He figured the height at about ten feet.

It was two-fifteen in the afternoon and a
taxi had dropped him off on Los Feliz Boulevard, within walking
distance of the southeastern corner of the park. On the other side
of the fence was a stand of medium sized scrub oaks that seemed to
go on up the rising ground forever, providing plenty of cover.

Besides, who was going to notice? Why, after
all, would anyone break into Griffith Park in the middle of the
afternoon when he could just as easily drive through the main gate
without even having to pay admission? Why indeed?

Because for once in his life he might like
not having his every move anticipated and observed by one Misha
Fedorovich Vlasov, formerly of the KGB. That was why. It seemed
like a good enough reason.

He climbed over in the approved manner, first
throwing his jacket up and over the top and then picking a spot
where the chain was anchored to a post—it wouldn’t rattle so much
that way, and it wasn’t as likely to buckle under the strain and
make you lose your toehold—and then just crawling straight up, like
a lizard up the face of a hot rock. The trick was to do it fast, so
the thought of how the wire seemed as if it would cut your fingers
straight through to the bone wouldn’t make you shift weight back to
your feet. You couldn’t walk up a fence like a god damn flight of
stairs; the purchase was lousy.

He jumped down onto the other side, landing
with his knees well bent and catching himself with his hands as the
shock of impact tried to send him sprawling.

Not too bad. Ray Guinness, former boy wonder
of the cloak and dagger set, could still manage a ten foot fence
without putting himself in the hospital. That, at least, was a
start. He picked up his jacket, dusted it off, checked to make sure
that the drug kit in the inside pocket had survived intact (perhaps
it would have been better to have kept it with him, but all he
needed was to slip and he would have stood a better than even
chance of ending up with a butt full of curare soaked glass), and
headed off into the trees. It was a long walk from there to the
merry go round.

He felt better this afternoon. But then that
was the way it always happened—you got the jitters the night before
every touch, regular as clockwork, and they translated themselves
into self loathing and Weltschmerz. The more dangerous the job, the
more you felt like slashing your wrists, or taking a vow of silence
at the door of a Trappist monastery.

Once in Liege, in 1964, he had spent the
entire night, right on through from dusk to dawn, drafting and
redrafting a letter to his mother, with whom he had held no contact
in almost ten years.

It had taken the form of an extended apology
for his having been such a prick as a kid, for it seemed that
Mamma, with her beer bottles and her doorknob sized knuckles, had
actually been a poor thing. He should have understood, it became
apparent in the harsh light of his desk lamp, that her indifference
to him had grown out of the dead end quality of her own life. For
those ten or so hours he had lived through every detail of her
imagined history, and he realized what must have been the precise
nature of her despair. But of course he hadn’t realized it at the
time and, in consequence, of course, had failed her. Everything, it
seemed—her misery and his own—was his fault.

But such things pass, and the next morning,
with a tight disapproving little smile at his own apparent flair
for the melodramatic, he had burned all versions of the
letter—there had been five, if he remembered correctly—one page at
a time in the wastepaper basket of his hotel room, and that
afternoon one Georg Kleutgen, himself an assassin noted in the
trade for his flawless, if perhaps excessively brutal, methodology,
was found in the basement garage of his apartment building, slumped
over the steering wheel of his Citroen with a bullet hole about the
diameter of a lead pencil in front of his left ear. The attendant
hadn’t seen anybody leave or enter except his regular tenants, and
Kleutgens employers were at a loss to explain how their man could
have allowed himself to be polished off so neatly.

By the time the body had been discovered,
Guinness was already on a plane back to London. That night he slept
like a baby.

The afternoon sunlight flickered through the
branches of the scrub oaks as they stirred in a faint breeze that
must ultimately have come from the ocean. Guinness walked slowly,
enjoying the coolness of the mottled shade and the sound of the
leaves crackling under the sales of his shoes. There was no
hurry.

After all, what difference did it make?
Raymond Guinness and Misha Fedorovich Vlasov, both former
government employees and widowers, and both, if judged by any
reasonable standard of conduct, evil men. Ray and Misha, the
Katzenjammer Kids, Tweedledum and Tweedledee—as alike as clones.
One of them would die and then, eventually, the other would die
under circumstances that were predictable but ultimately beside the
point; they were the twin horsemen of their own private apocalypse.
Ray and Misha, the Katzenjammer Kids, Tweedledum and
Tweedledee.

And where was Tweedledee this bright
afternoon—oiling his dueling pistol? Making peace with his Marxist
god, or grieving over the long dead Raya Natalia?

It would be nice to indulge the luxury of
remorse, but it was something Guinness was painfully aware that he
simply could not afford. In that respect, Vlasov had been
lucky.

Or perhaps it was simply that Guinness had
been able to set private feelings aside in order to be about the
business of surviving, and perhaps Vlasov had not. Perhaps that
made Vlasov better—having that capacity for surrendering even his
life to the act of mourning.

In his advance, Guinness startled a chipmunk,
who ran hurriedly up the trunk of an oak tree, and Guinness smiled
and noticed how much the bark of oak trees looks like the fractured
surface of dried mud and wondered, quite dispassionately, whether
or not he would be alive the next day, the day on which he had
contracted to return his rented car to the Avis office in downtown
Los Angeles. Well, perhaps if he asked him nicely enough, Vlasov
would do it for him.

Maybe it was simply part of his
technique—Guinness had never really bothered sorting it all out—but
somewhere along the line, somehow every hit finally ended up
looking like a particularly kinky kind of suicide attempt. You
study a man, you study his routines and his preferences and his
patterns of thought, you get so far inside his head that you sit
down in a restaurant and, as you run your eyes over the items on
the menu, catch yourself thinking, “No, I can’t have that; he
probably doesn’t care for it.”

His image and your own become so blurred
together in your mind that it no longer seems possible, or
particularly worthwhile, to try separating them. Perhaps that, and
not the fear of death, is what gets to you the night before you’re
supposed to drop the hammer. Or perhaps it’s more complicated than
that.

Or perhaps it really doesn’t matter, because
by the next morning the success or failure of the thing, the
question of who is going to live and who die, has begun to appear
perfectly academic. Am I the same person I was yesterday? And if
I’m not, did I kill that other person in order to become me?

Of course, Vlasov had killed Louise out of
motives that were purely personal; it wasn’t as if the Communists
had put a contract out on her. Vlasov had put himself outside of
all law, had turned his back on everything and gone out entirely,
irrevocably, on his own. That did seem to constitute a real moral
difference between them.

Oh hell, who did he think he was kidding?
Hadn’t he gone out to nail Vlasov because of Kathleen? Vlasov had
created a few marital problems for him, so he had gotten all huffy
about it and trotted off to Florence to try barbecuing the guy in
his garage. And the fact that, like a good little soldier, he had
done it with the encouragement and in the name of the British
Foreign Office did not, after all, constitute much of a defense.
Some jobs should be left to other hands.

They had both of them violated the one
absolute commandment of a profession not noted for honoring ethical
mandates: thou shalt not go around snuffing people just because
they happen to have pissed you off.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Jesus, to throw it all away like that, to
kiss a lifetime of service to the Party goodbye just for the
exquisite pleasure of doing a number on the man who inadvertently
had killed your better half. Vlasov had to be off the wall; it was
the act of a lunatic.

And yet, somehow, rather grand. Confronted
with that kind of passion, Guinness suddenly couldn’t help feeling
rather paltry. It was so outside the range of his simple
Anglo-Saxon soul; perhaps you had to be a Russian.

According to the map he had picked up at a
gas station in Santa Monica, it was, as the crow flies, probably a
good three miles from where he had climbed the fence into the park
to the little picnic area near the main entrance. Guinness was sure
that was the spot Vlasov meant; they don’t move merry go rounds
around much, and he thought he remembered the thing from a time he
and a friend from grad school and a couple of girls from the
College of Nursing at USC had gone there to lie on the grass and
drink beer.

And, since he wasn’t a crow, it wasn’t an
easy three miles, either. Overland all the way, because he couldn’t
risk using the roads. All he could do was to keep the sun over his
left shoulder and plod on.

Once, he made a vast detour to avoid
disturbing a couple who had parked their Volkswagen off the road
and were stretched out on an army blanket, apparently just getting
ready to make love. Or perhaps they had finished already; it was
impossible to tell. Guinness only just caught sight of the girl,
who was just facing away from him, sitting up with her hands behind
her back either to hook or to unhook her brassiere. As soon as he
saw her, he dropped down to a crouch, where he waited perhaps ten
or twenty seconds, just to make sure she hadn’t noticed him, before
starting back the way he had come. It would have seemed monstrous
to have wrecked their little moment, and what woman wouldn’t have
been deeply unsettled at being discovered three quarters of the way
out of her clothes? It was a tough life, but one tried to keep
civilians away from the combat zone. He came away as quietly as he
could.

It was close to four o’clock when he saw the
Golden Gate Freeway in the distance. He saw it first, even though
it was furthest away, and then the main gate and finally the picnic
area. He made a wide arc to the left, traveling on rising ground
for perhaps half an hour, before he had a clear view of the merry
go round.

He was just below the crest of a hill. A good
spot, he decided, well concealed but with plenty of visibility. And
there were plenty of underbrush and dry leaves; if he kept his ears
open, nobody was likely to be able to sneak up on him. So he sat
down, with his back against the trunk of one of the larger scrub
oaks, and began to wait.

The cars started heading out through the main
gate by about five-thirty. At a quarter to six a blue Volkswagen,
indistinguishable from the one belonging to his pastoral lovers,
wound around the bottom of the hill and was gone. Perhaps it was
them. Perhaps they were students anxious not to miss dinner at
their college union. They seemed about the right age, and students
can be poor enough to want to save a few bucks on the price of a
motel room. God, didn’t Guinness know that.

Perhaps it was somebody else—completely
different people. And what difference did it make anyway?

The picnic grounds weren’t completely empty
until close to seven, by which time the sun was almost directly at
Guinness’s back. Finally, at a little before seven-thirty, a truck
drove through and parked just beyond the gates and someone climbed
out to swing them shut and stitch them together with a padlock and
a length of chain. After that, it was perfectly quiet, and before
long the only light was from the cars out on the freeway. Guinness
wondered how long it would be before Vlasov decided it was time to
begin.