The Summer Soldier (31 page)

It was after ten before he got his
answer.

Almost on a line between where Guinness was
sitting and the merry go round, there was a narrow little dirt path
of perhaps a hundred yards in length. On the left was a grassy
shoulder that sloped down to the picnic area and on the right a
stand of eucalyptus trees that stretched on out past the clearing
occupied by the merry go round and covered altogether perhaps as
much as three quarters of a mile square. The path ran from the
asphalt roadway that skirted the bottom of Guinness’s hill to the
merry go round. Probably, from the air it looked like the stick of
a lollipop.

At the far end, on the left, was a little
unpainted shed, from which, presumably, the merry go round was
controlled and powered. At seven minutes after ten an electric
light over the shed’s one and only doorway popped on.

Well, it would have been something like that.
Vlasov was no kind of an idiot; he wouldn’t have been expecting
Guinness to just drive right up to the front gate. No, he would
know that his man would sneak in hours ahead of time and find
himself a nice safe place from which to watch developments. Neither
of them was going to walk blindly into anything, and it wouldn’t
have been good form to expect it.

Vlasov had just issued his invitation to the
dance. Guinness began working his way down the hill—not straight
down, but at an angle. He didn’t have any illusions about Vlasov
not having guessed his approximate location, and he didn’t
particularly want to walk into his arms; so he took it careful,
changing his direction every two or three dozen yards and stopping
every few minutes to listen. That sort of thing takes time.

He made it to the roadway without anything
ugly happening, so he took his jacket off, with the drug kit still
in the inside pocket, folded it carefully, and jammed it in behind
a fallen log. Then he waited a few seconds before running like hell
for the eucalyptus grove on the other side, staying low and rolling
for cover when he made it across.

Nobody shot at him.

Okay, so apparently Vlasov had decided to be
a sport and play by gentlemen’s rules. Wonderful. So here he was,
Raymond Guinness, in the middle of the Great Outdoors, all set to
take on an experienced and clever, if slightly daft, Russian
agent—and without so much as a fucking tailor’s needle for
protection.

Oh yes, he had left his gun back at his motel
room. And on purpose, no less.

The plan was, you see, that he was going to
psych friend Vlasov out. Vlasov, so the theory goes, had to be
hanging onto his self possession by a thread, so what would it do
to him to realize that the man he had centered his life around
destroying wasn’t even frightened enough to bother about coming
armed? Anyway, that was the plan.

Besides, it was impossible to believe that
the issues between them could be resolved on so crude a basis as
their relative firepower. You do not aim guns at mirror images of
yourself. Whatever Vlasov might think, they would have to fight it
out on some other level than that. One suspected, one hoped, that
the upper hand would be a state of mind.

The drug kit—well, that was for later. When
the time came for shooting hypos full of curare into people’s
veins—if it ever did—there would be all the time in the world.

A quick search turned up a sizable eucalyptus
branch, about eight feet long and reasonably sound, lying on the
ground. If you plan to strike a gong, you need a mallet. Guinness
took the branch in both hands, like a baseball bat, squared off
against the biggest tree he could find, and cut loose. Branch broke
across trunk with a satisfying whack, loud as a pistol shot, that
after bouncing around through the eucalyptus grove for a while
would sound from a distance as if it might have come from
anywhere.

R.S.V.P. Now the next move was up to
Vlasov.

After several minutes—he would need plenty of
time to make up his mind; this wasn’t precisely charades they were
playing—the merry go round light went on. Guinness took a cautious
survey and through the trees was finally able to make out a human
form sitting on the turntable, just at the foot of the path.
Perhaps if he had brought a gun. . .

But no. Vlasov was well out of range, and
there was no way he was going to sit there like a good boy until
Guinness could get close enough to draw a bead. It was because they
both understood things like that that Guinness had left the damn
thing behind.

He stepped out into the middle of the path,
and the figure on the merry go round turntable never moved.
Guinness could see him quite clearly now; it was Vlasov all right,
little changed in seven years.

“You should have seen him, cool and
unreachable, slouched down in a chair with his head back, his
elbows on the armrests and his knees crossed, holding a Turkish
cigarette between thumb and first finger and looking for all the
world like a character out of a Fitzgerald novel.” That was how
Tuttle had described him, and there he was, to the life, his back
against one of the brass merry-go-round poles, smoking a
cigarette.

One step at a time, very slowly, Guinness
started down the path toward him. Each step constituted an
individual act of will.

Vlasov, of course, didn’t even seem to
notice. He just sat there, occasionally taking the cigarette from
between his lips and exhaling a feathery plume of white smoke that
would rise through the night air to swarm around the overhead light
like a cloud of angry bees. There was a pistol lying beside him on
the turntable, but he never looked at it. Why should he? He knew it
was there.

Finally, when Guinness had stopped at a point
just outside the sixty foot distance beyond which not many men in
the world can be expected to hit a moving target, Vlasov brought
down his gaze and smiled. The light caught his rimless glasses at a
peculiar angle, etching two dark smears of shadow down his
cheekbones.

“Good evening, Mr. Guinness. It was gracious
of you to come.”

20

It was a warm night and the crickets were
busy. The air was heavy with the competing odors of eucalyptus oil
and smog, and in the extreme distance, really only as a gray
suggestion of sound, was the muffled throbbing of traffic.

They were quite alone. Possibly nowhere else
in Greater Los Angeles could they have contrived to be quite so
alone. Somehow it really wasn’t a very encouraging thought.

Guinness tried hard to remember what it had
been like the only other time in his life he had been genuinely
afraid, afraid with no compensating alloy of excitement, no surging
of adrenaline and heroic passion. What he wanted was to recall the
texture of that fear, to see if he could bring back how it had
felt.

That had been Hornbeck, of course. The first
man he had ever killed for money. The first man he had ever killed,
period. Climbing out onto the shoulder of that lonely stretch of
English roadway, and smiling and saying, “Can I give you a hand?”
It had been the bravest thing he had ever done in his life, and he
had been scared to death.

But it didn’t compare with this. There could
never have been anything like this.

Vlasov. The way the light from overhead
turned his rimless glasses into shining impenetrable disks behind
which it was impossible to imagine there could be eyes. Then he
would move and the face would become human again.

He had lost weight, it looked like. In seven
years he had lost quite a lot of weight. Guinness could remember,
seven years before, thinking how slender, how ascetic he had
looked; but now there were hollows in his temples and the skin over
his jawbone seemed as thin as paper.

He looked like a death’s head, like Dr. Donne
in his shroud. The man reeked of death; it seemed to surround him
like a private atmosphere. Surely, anyone who touched him or spoke
to him or even breathed the same air would have to die.

Come on, Guinness, you’re letting him get to
you. Stay loose, man. Stay loose and don’t let him psych you—that
was going to be your gambit, remember? What the hell, he’s just a
man, not a visitation.

Guinness hooked one thumb through the front
belt loop of his trousers and forced himself to grin. He tried to
make it a good grin, full of easygoing contempt, but it didn’t seem
likely that he was fooling anybody.

“It was good of you to ask me. I take it that
we’re alone here?” The question was purely rhetorical. If there had
been anything else alive there, any living thing at all, Guinness
would have known about it. It was a sense that you developed in The
Business, if you lived, or perhaps you were born with it. A kind of
private radar.

The cigarette dropped from between Vlasov’s
fingers onto the asphalt walkway, and his shoe pivoted slightly on
its heel to cover the spot where it had landed. With the thumb and
first finger of his left hand, he reached into his shirt pocket and
extracted a nearly empty pack. His right hand never moved from
where it was resting lightly on the side of his thigh—just a spasm
of movement away from the pistol, the make of which Guinness
couldn’t seem to place but which looked to be small, no more than 7
mm.

For some reason, it seemed worth noticing
that the cigarettes were Camels, the kind without the filters.

Vlasov shook one out and placed it between
his lips. He crumpled the pack and dropped it on the turntable
beside him before going back to his shirt pocket for a lighter. The
shadows down from his cheekbones disappeared as he clicked on the
tiny point of flame.

“We are,” he said quietly, drawing on the
cigarette. “Now. There was a watchman, as it turned out, but. . .”
The meaning was completed in a tiny shrug as the lighter flame went
out with a snap. “He is in the shed.”

Guinness didn’t find it necessary to inquire
what had happened to the watchman. He shifted his weight from one
leg to the other, but the grin never wavered.

“Okay, so be it. Now that there’s only the
two of us, what exactly did you have in mind?”

Just like Eric Von Stroheim on “The Late
Show,” Vlasov took the cigarette out of his mouth, pinched backward
between first finger and thumb. He waved it around in a languid
faintly theatrical circle that made you wonder if he wasn’t
deliberately trying to distract your attention away from the other
hand, the one that sooner or later was going to make a dive for
that gun.

“Eventually, of course, I have it in mind to
kill you.”

There was nothing particularly remarkable
about the way he said it, except that when he said it he moved his
head slightly and his eyeglasses lost the glare from the overhead
light. For just a second, then, you could see his eyes, and his
eyes were as eloquent as you could want.

This, Raymond M. Guinness, in case you hadn’t
noticed, is a man who hates the insides of your bones.

Well, that was his problem.

“But there is, after all, no great need for
haste.” Vlasov readjusted himself, and once again his eyes were
lost behind their blank disks of yellow light. “We have time to
talk.”

“Maybe I don’t feel like talking.”

Vlasov only smiled his weird death’s head
smile and turned his hand slightly on the end of his wrist. It was
a gesture that conveyed his indifference to what Guinness maybe
didn’t feel like—that and a profound confidence that he could
afford to be just as indifferent as might please him.

“Well, something would have to be done about
that, the son of a bitch.

And that was the great thing at this
moment—to break his confidence, somehow to put him off his stride.
At the moment the initiative was Vlasov’s,

“Oh come now, Mr. Guinness. A man must surely
be interested in the reasons why he is about to die. So much
curiosity is only natural.”

Somewhere high up in the eucalyptus trees a
night bird was singing a peculiar, restless, tumbling sort of song.
Perhaps there were two of them and they were having an argument—the
air was too hot and windless to allow you to tell. Guinness laughed
softly, but not too softly to be heard.

“If I remember, you’ve tried to kill me once
already. Just what possesses you to think I’m going to let you do
any better this time?”

“I take it you are referring to Oslo?” Vlasov
shrugged slightly and might even have been smiling behind his
clouds of cigarette smoke. “Yes, that was a sadly mismanaged
affair.”

He seemed for a second to have lost himself,
to have surrendered entirely to the thought of just how sadly
mismanaged it had been. If it had worked, after all. . .

But he was back an instant later, and with
his cigarette he made a slight pointing gesture in Guinness’s
direction. He made it once, and then, as if driving some conclusion
home, twice more.

“But, you see, you were the difficulty. You
were nothing more to us than a code name on the index tab of a
dossier filled with dates and speculation, and it is less than
simple to assassinate a ghost.

“And then there was the problem of
subordinates; no plan is better than the people one chooses to
carry it out. Those two, I knew they were not ‘up’ to it, as you
Americans say. ‘Up to it’—such a curious idiom.” Again the
cigarette made its slow circle, and again the death’s head
smiled.

“But you are no longer a ghost, Mr. Guinness,
and, as you see, this time I have taken the task upon myself.
Perhaps before I simply did not want you badly enough.”

“And you want me badly enough now, you
think?”

“Oh yes, Mr. Guinness,” Vlasov half
whispered. And then he laughed. It was an ugly sound. “Yes, I want
you very badly now. Now, you understand, the matter is personal. I
should imagine that it is now for the both of us.”

Without moving his eyes, Guinness began to
study the ground fall to his right. The eucalyptus was particularly
thick just there and, away from the overhead lighting around the
carrousel, it was dark as the inside of a bat’s ass hole.