The Summer Soldier (5 page)

No, tonight would be another night of walking
and hiding out in doorways and walking and walking. And tomorrow he
would have to turn himself over to the American embassy so they
could ship him home. It was all over, the whole fucking thing.
Finished.

It had begun toward the end of his senior
year in high school, a week after he had received notice that he
had been accepted into the following year’s freshman class at Ohio
State. They would waive tuition and give him a scholarship, enough
to cover most of his expenses, the assumption probably being that
his parents would pick up the slack. What a laugh.

Anyway, a week after the good news, Guinness
dropped a dime in a pay phone and called up the margarine plant
where he worked five nights a week as a swamper and told them he
had the flu. They believed him, and twenty minutes later he was in
the Reserve Book Room of the university’s main library, sitting in
front of a stack of graduate school bulletins.

They were all there, all the luminous names.
Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Berkeley, Oxford, Columbia, Princeton,
Cambridge, Stanford. But the one that really made his fingers sweat
was the University of London.

To be sure, it wasn’t Oxford, but then
Guinness wasn’t George Lyman Kittredge. Bright, yes—good enough.
His scholarship proved that much. Not even OSU, however, was
scattering rose petals in his path.

But London might just be within reach, with a
lot of crust wiping over the next several years. And wouldn’t it be
something to live in London.

A little after nine-thirty, when the only
people left at the long study tables were those few who had set up
shop for the evening and would be there, huddled over their math
books, until the closing bell rang, Guinness began reshelving his
catalogs. At the last, stepping into a deserted alcove for cover,
he stuffed the University of London in under his belt, pulled down
the back of his nylon windbreaker to cover it, and walked out. It
was the first directly criminal act of his life.

For the next four years the catalog was his
holy book, his sustenance. He read it over and over, until he had
it practically memorized, until so many of the pages had come loose
that it was necessary to keep it held together with a rubber
band.

His entire undergraduate program was based on
a series of elaborate deductions about what the D.Phil. program
would require in the way of prerequisites. Lots of languages,
especially Latin, so Guinness took a double minor in Latin and
German. French he cobbled together on his own, working from a copy
of French for Reading Knowledge that he had picked up used from the
Salvation Army store.

Money, of course, was the real problem; it
would take a lot of money. Seven thousand dollars would cover his
passage and perhaps see him through as much as a year and a half,
but how was he going to get his hands on seven thousand dollars?
How else but the hard way?

So it was a good thing he had stolen the
catalog—over the next four years he had need of sustenance. After
his freshman year the university somehow got wind of the fact that
he was holding down a full time job and decided to regard him as in
violation of the terms of his scholarship. It came down to a choice
that was really no choice at all—give up the scholarship or give up
the job. He gave up the scholarship.

Hell, what did they expect? He couldn’t live,
let alone save anything, on the money they gave him. They had even
made him live in one of their damn dorms for the first year, even
when he knew from experience that he could live on less on his
own—he’d been doing it long enough.

So for the next three years he worked full
time and went to school full time, even during the summers. He took
light loads, as few courses as he could without them yanking his
tuition waiver, but it wasn’t often he managed more than five hours
of sleep a night.

And anything he could do to save back some
money, he did it. Once he lived for a month off a thirty pound bag
of rice he had picked up when the restaurant he was working for
went out of business. Very economical if you don’t die of
scurvy.

So two weeks before he was due to show up at
Russell Square to register for classes, Guinness quit his job as a
packer with the Indianola Tool & Die Company, packed a bag,
bought a bus ticket to New York and a tourist class seat on a BOAC
flight to London, and was on his way.

When he landed, he still had $5,720 in
traveler’s checks—the goal of a $7,000 bankroll had just managed to
elude him—and a little over $40 in cash. It was to last him for
almost seventeen months, the best seventeen months of his life.

A little over two weeks before he figured his
money would run out completely, Guinness went to his embassy. They
weren’t very sympathetic. The officer he eventually got to talk to,
a puffy little man whose eyes seemed almost totally buried in his
pink face, apparently entertained some permanent grievance against
anyone who wasn’t suffering from hardening of the arteries. He
peered at Guinness through his gold rimmed spectacles, loving every
minute of giving him the bad news.

“I am very sorry, Mr. Guinness, but I’m sure
you can understand that there’s very little help we can offer you.
Your difficulties about a work permit are entirely a matter between
you and the British government. All we can do is advance you the
money to book passage to New York, which of course you will be
required to repay as soon as you can find employment there.”

“Look,” Guinness wheezed, running the palm of
his hand over his hair, “all I need is maybe a year in this
country, one lousy year, and I can at least have my course work
done and go home. Surely you must have enough drag to get me a work
permit for that long.”

The clerk frowned and shook his head. No he
hadn’t that much drag, he said, implying that if he had he
certainly wasn’t going to dissipate it on some punk of a college
kid who had probably just blown his grant money buying an abortion
for some skinny little peroxide blonde with bent teeth. Not him, no
sir.

He picked up a black plastic ballpoint pen
from a desk set just at the corner of his leather rimmed blotting
pad and began making precise, tiny notations in the margin of a
page of typescript. “Good day, Mr. Guinness,” he went on, without
bothering to lift his almost invisible eyes. “Come see us again
when you have made up your mind to accept the assistance of your
government and go home.”

So that was that—the Great World was
indifferent to his fate. Hardly a paralyzing surprise to one whose
own mother had thrown him out of the house two days after his
sixteenth birthday because, as she put it, she was sick of the
sight of him and had her own life to lead.

It was a cold day, and Guinness turned up his
collar and thrust his fists deep into the pockets of his raincoat
as he tramped angrily down the street toward an underground. As he
walked, the fingers of his right hand began automatically counting
out his change; it was something he had caught himself doing a lot
lately.

Just at the entrance to the underground he
stopped for a second and then went round the corner and began
moving quickly off in the other direction. Fuck it—he would walk
home and save his money. He had the time.

Fuck them all, every last fucking one of
them. From his mother to the clowns at the Labour Ministry to this
latest sleek little shithead, his fellow countryman. All the
bureaucrats and the university administrators and the bosses who
had paid him next to nothing simply because they knew he couldn’t
do without the work, what he would give to have them all together
in one place so he could put a bomb under them, except that at the
moment he couldn’t afford the blasting powder.

Oh how he had loved it, this place, this way
of life that he would have to leave behind him now. In England he
had been officially a gentleman; not just a grubby little college
kid with dirt under his fingernails, but a gentleman. He had been
just as poor as in Ohio, but what difference did that make? He had
been working on an advanced degree in literature, which did not in
this country mark you off forever as a constitutional failure. You
could be a gentleman and poor in England. You could forget, at
least while something wasn’t thrusting it in front of your eyes,
that you were locked in combat with the whole human race. Perhaps
that, in the end, was what undid you.

Well, in two weeks he would be on his way
home, and there he would have less trouble remembering.

More for form’s sake than anything else,
since he had gone through it all already, Guinness spent the last
two weeks making the rounds of all the places he thought might hire
him even without a work permit, but everywhere the answer was the
same. Britain, it seemed, was in one of her cyclical recessions. We
must all pull together and to hell with the bloody foreigner.

Finally, when his money was almost gone and
his room rent was due, he packed his suitcase and checked it in a
locker at Paddington Station and moved out to continue his endless
walk.

After a while he wasn’t even looking for work
anymore; he was just walking, trying to exhaust his demon. He
pawned his raincoat—it was a dry day, hell, and he wouldn’t need it
after they had thrown him out of England; anyway, he was sick of
carrying it—and he walked. He walked all over the town: down to the
Tower and then along the river as far as Chelsea, and then over
near the Victoria and Albert Museum and then along the edge of Hyde
Park and then down to Buckingham Palace and then up again to Oxford
Street. He followed Oxford Street until he was sick of the crowds
of evening shoppers.

Finally he reversed his route, walking on
into the night.

And to a degree the program worked; hunger
and cold began to replace bitterness, and to limit the horizons of
his imagination to the next hundred yards of pavement, the next
time he could dole himself out something to spend on food. He tried
to see how long he could go without feeling shaky.

Toward morning it began to rain, and the rain
made him stop walking. That was fatal. After a few hours of
standing around under store awnings he capitulated and went into a
tea shop.

The tea was the cheapest thing on the menu,
so he ordered a cup and sat down, thinking how restored he would
feel after he had drunk it. But as he sat at the window and watched
the rain he drank less and less. After all, what’s a little
discomfort in the old GI tract compared to a good case of
pneumonia?

He sat there—weighing one evil against
another and thinking how in a few hours he would have to turn
himself over to the embassy for shipment home—for perhaps three
quarters of an hour. The tea had long since ceased to make him
anything except faintly nauseous when MI-6, in the soon to be
familiar person of Mr. Byron J. Down, made its move.

Guinness always liked ol’ Byron J. He was,
indeed, a likable man, not the sort at all you would expect to be
running a stable of assassins. He looked exactly like what in fact
he had been before the war had given him the opportunity to
discover where his real genius lay—a professor of linguistics, in
fact a specialist in deep structure syntax with three degrees from
Cambridge University.

He must have been in his early fifties when
Guinness first met him. A heavyset man with a placid, rather dreamy
face set off by a pair of heavy, black rimmed glasses. His hair was
brownish and thinning, and he never wore a hat, no matter what the
weather, on the theory that the hatband would cut off the
circulation in his scalp and hasten the balding process. He had a
nice smile, ol’ Byron did, and he smiled it as he sat down at
Guinness’s table and offered him a nice thick wedge of apple pie.
He slid the plate across the table with the tips of his thumb and
first finger, as if it weighed nothing.

“Here you go, young man,” he said in a
caressing voice. “You have a bit of that. You look done in.”

Guinness glanced up at him suspiciously as he
picked up the fork and started eating. His first thought was that
the guy was probably a fairy on the hustle, but what the hell. He
was starving and a slice of pie doesn’t bind you to anything. It
hardly seemed an occasion in which to display one’s outraged
manhood. That could wait on events.

Down must have divined his thoughts—he had
that knack—because the smile died.

Neither one of them said anything for perhaps
as long as five minutes. Guinness was being careful, famished
though he was, not to rush through his pie. He tried to make each
piece about the size of his thumbnail, and he chewed carefully. It
was ice cold and lovely, even with that hideous lardy crust the
British favor, but he didn’t want to appear to be enjoying it too
much. Regardless of what Chubby had in mind, he didn’t care to
appear too terribly hard up. It was bad psychology—people always
want to kick you when you’re down.

“There now,” Down began at last. “That’s
better. You don’t look the sort of lad to go to the dogs from long
standing habit.” The pleasant smile reappeared slowly, and Guinness
thought he noticed the faintest trace of an Edinburgh burr stealing
in behind the words. “And you don’t look the type to turn down an
honest offer of employment—how would you like to make a round
thousand quid all in one lump, hum? That would tide you over for a
while, now wouldn’t it?”

A little quick mental arithmetic made that
out at about twenty-five hundred dollars. You could live a long
time on that kind of money. Seven, maybe eight months if you were
careful. Yes, Guinness would have to agree. Twenty¬ five hundred
dollars would solve all of life’s immediate problems quite
nicely.

“Who do I have to kill?”

For the next six years, until Down fell over
dead from a heart attack in the billiard room of his club—it was a
real heart attack; Guinness checked and Byron’s arteries were hard
enough to pound through a tree—they always laughed about that
unintentionally appropriate question.