The Summer Soldier (7 page)

Hornbeck certainly didn’t look like a spy.
His earlobes stuck out at peculiar angles and his eyebrows were so
bushy they gave the impression that the photo must somehow have
been blurred. Those eyes didn’t look like they had ever registered
fear or cruelty, or much of anything else. They were the sort of
eyes you would expect to find in the man behind the ribbon counter
at Woolworth’s, certainly not staring down at you from behind a
small caliber automatic pistol. “Should be considered dangerous at
all times.” Well, Cruttwell’s people must know what they’re talking
about.

How does one assassinate a ribbon clerk? The
major hadn’t been terribly specific.

“It doesn’t matter, really. As long as you
don’t cut him in half with a shotgun blast in front of the rush
hour crowd at Selfridge’s, we’ll arrange to have the best possible
face put on it—suicide or a stroke or something. It would be nice
if you were able to give us something to work with, however.”

Something to work with, something to work
with. Guinness used the edge of his thumb to fan out the stack of
ten pound notes lying next to him on the bedspread. Now there was
something to work with. Ninety-seven of them, the other three
having gone toward getting him back into his lodging house.

Jesus, he was tired; he could feel himself
sinking into the box springs. The sun would be up in just a few
hours, but friend Hornbeck would just have to wait until after the
troops had had a short siesta. Guinness wrapped his money back up
in the sheet of instructions, slipping that back in lengthways
through the torn open end of its envelope. Without bothering to get
out of his shirt and trousers, he turned off the table lamp beside
his bed and dropped into a profound sleep.

The afternoon found him stepping off the
underground at the Shepherd’s Bush station. He walked west on
Uxbridge Road, turning up on Bloemfontein until he was past the
point where it intersected with Ellerslie. There were some school
buildings on the corner and an enormous athletic field beyond them.
Hornbeck’s house would be across the street.

Ellerslie Road, as it turned out, was only
about three or four blocks long, and Number 23 showed itself to the
sidewalk as a rather handsome leaded glass window that took up the
whole of a narrow second story. You couldn’t see in because the
drapes were drawn, and the first floor was cut off from view by a
high, well trimmed hedge. The entranceway consisted of a narrow
arch through the hedge that opened from an alley running off from
the main street. The alley was narrow enough that two pushcarts
wouldn’t have been able to pass one another. All in all, it looked
like the perfect house for someone who liked his privacy.

It was a quarter to three, and on a Monday
afternoon Hornbeck wouldn’t be anywhere except at work. There
wasn’t a soul around, not even on the playing field on the other
side of the road, so Guinness decided he would have himself a
look.

There was a second story door up a flight of
white stucco steps–it had a brass mail slot about a foot and a half
from the bottom and looked like the main entrance—and another
opening off a small back garden. That one was less visible from the
alley and looked as if it would spring with a hard look, so
Guinness settled on it.

In college there had been a rule that all
freshmen had to be in their dormitories before 2:00 A.M., when they
locked the doors. A lot of the time this conflicted with Guinness’s
work schedule, and try as he might he couldn’t persuade the head
resident to give him a key. Thus, as a matter of pure necessity, he
became something of an expert on the subject of window latches and
door locks. This one was a cinch; twenty seconds with a hairpin he
had had the foresight to bring along and he was inside the
storeroom of Hornbeck’s kitchen.

The kitchen itself was small and rather dark,
with wooden counter tops all the way round on three sides. It
didn’t give the impression of having been used much recently, and
Guinness passed through it quickly to the narrow stairwell that led
up to the second floor.

There was a small foyer behind the main
entrance, opening onto what must have been the living room in the
front and the dining room in the rear. He went into the living
room.

With the curtains drawn it was very gloomy,
and would have been gloomy even if they hadn’t been. The walls were
paneled in dark wood and the furniture was mahogany—late Victorian
in style, and covered with a dark blue material that looked like
velvet but probably wasn’t. The fireplace mantel and four or five
tiny tables scattered around the room were covered with porcelain
figurines, each about six inches tall and most of them dressed in
Eighteenth Century costume. It was a fussy, overcrowded room, the
kind in which you would expect to see seated an eighty year old
widow from Putney.

The bedroom was a little better; at least it
looked more lived in. The bed was unmade and narrow enough to give
the impression that Hornbeck didn’t entertain much.

In one of the bottom dresser drawers Guinness
found a .25 caliber automatic of Portuguese manufacture. The finish
on it was dull with age, but it was well oiled and clear of rust.
Guinness cleared the chamber so he could look down the barrel. It
was perfectly clean, a timely reminder that its owner was not the
grandmother his home might lead you to expect. Guinness wondered
how much of all that shit out in the front room was to Hornbeck’s
actual taste and how much was protective coloration.

There was a set of car keys in the right
table drawer, on a ring decorated with a Jaguar emblem. The house
didn’t have a garage, so Hornbeck’s car must be in a public parking
lot somewhere. That would figure. A Jaguar didn’t really go with
the Victorian bric a brac stands and the lace doilies and the
Dresden shepherdesses; those would be his working wheels. Guinness
looked at the alarm clock on the dresser. Three twenty-seven, time
to get the hell out before the lord and master decided it was time
to come home. He had been careful to wipe off everything he had
touched, so he was back out on Ellerslie Road within a minute and a
half.

There were a couple of adolescent boys in
dark blue gym shorts kicking a rugby ball back and forth between
them on the playing field. They took no notice of the solitary
figure who passed quickly down toward the road that led back to the
underground platform.

Should he have stayed, he wondered, and taken
care of friend Hornbeck the second he stepped in through his front
door? No, he thought not. Who could tell when Hornbeck would come
home? Guinness didn’t think it would have been all that good an
idea to try making his escape when the whole area was clogged with
school kiddies on their way home. Regardless of the major’s
assurances, he didn’t particularly want anything tying him into
this mess.

And besides, he didn’t know enough about the
man’s habits to risk it.

But then, where? And when? Some place where
there wouldn’t be mobs of people around, all of them just dying to
serve as crown witnesses. Some place away from London, yes. And
Hornbeck was leaving London in just a few days, now wasn’t he? He
was going to Yorkshire on business in just four days. Guinness
remembered the set of keys he had found in Hornbeck’s night
table.

It took about three quarters of an hour of
cross checking between a street map and the London telephone
directory to assemble a list of all the parking lots within walking
distance of Ellerslie Road. There were four of them, and on the
third one Guinness hit pay dirt.

“Hello.”

“Hello, is this the Frithville Gardens
Garage? This is Mr. Hornbeck. I wonder if you could tell me whether
I’m paid up through the end of this month? I’m taking a little
trip, you see, and I don’t want to lose my space while I’m gone.
Could you check that for me please?”

“What did you say the name was?”

“Hornbeck.”

Over the telephone cable he could hear the
rustling of pages. He wondered if this guy would have recognized
Hornbeck’s voice; he wondered how successful his British accent
was. He wondered if the guy would ask him the damn car’s color.

“What kind of a car was that, Mr.
Hornbeck?”

“A Jaguar.”

“Yes, sir. It’s paid through the month.”

“Thank you.”

Well, now he knew where Hornbeck kept his
car. He looked up the advertisement for the Frithville Gardens
Garage, and they were open until two in the morning. Give the night
man half an hour to lock up, and make it quarter to three before he
paid his visit. That gave him nearly nine hours.

Guinness took a shower, dressed with care,
and walked over to one of the big hotels ringing Hyde Park for a
roast pork dinner. From there he took a cab to the Garrick Theatre
and watched a performance of She Stoops to Conquer. It was a good
performance, very roughhouse and bawdy. Afterward he dropped in on
a pub just off Leicester Square and nursed a gin fizz through
several dart games with the actor who had played Diggory.

He was enjoying it all enormously, he
discovered. And not just the roast pork and the play and the dart
games, either. He was getting a big kick out of getting ready to
nail this guy. It was fun, as if friend Hornbeck had suddenly
become all those legions against which it had been the business of
his life to conduct war. He was getting his revenge, and, as the
Italians say, revenge is a dish that tastes better cold.

At ten minutes to three he was around the
back of the garage. There was an exposed iron stairway up to a
locked door on the second story, but beside it was a saloon door
window held together in the middle by an old fashioned clasp lock.
By hanging way out from the top of the stairway, keeping hold of
the railing with one hand and one foot, Guinness managed to work
the lock open with his knife blade. He thought sure he would fall
and break his neck swinging over to crawl through the window, but
he managed it in one piece.

It was dark as a tomb inside, and noiseless.
Every footfall sounded like an explosion in a cave.

There were no less than twelve Jaguars. It
took half an hour to find Hornbeck’s, a black 3.8 not more than two
years old. It was a nice car, the kind spies drive in the movies,
but perhaps in England they didn’t have that special aura.

Guinness checked the gas tank—it was right up
to the top—and then emptied in two handfuls of sawdust from a trash
can he had found near the back door. That would do it. In ten
minutes he was walking with studied casualness back to the
underground station.

Now all that remained was to wait, to wait
and to find out as much as he could about his quarry, about Mr.
Peter W. Hornbeck.

Of course there wasn’t very much he could
find out. Not about a man like that, not in any kind of safety.
Hornbeck seemed to be a good agent—hell, he would have to be;
nobody puts out a thousand pound bounty on a punk—and a good agent
would have a sound grasp of the laws of probability and a memory
for faces. If the same one turned up just once too often, he’d know
he was being hunted. No, the very last face Hornbeck would ever see
would have to be one that was utterly strange to him—otherwise
Hornbeck’s might turn out to be the last face he ever saw.

So there was no thought of tailing the man.
Guinness allowed himself just one look at Hornbeck in the flesh,
and that a quick one. On the day after breaking into the garage he
waited in a pub across the street from where Hornbeck worked,
waited most of the afternoon for him to quit and go home.

What he saw wasn’t much help. Hornbeck wore a
hat that covered most of his face, as who wouldn’t in the middle of
a London February?

He was a larger man than Guinness had
expected and he walked with a heavy stride, throwing his shoulder
forward when he took a step. There was something less fierce than
sullen about him, about the way he carried his umbrella far down on
the handle as if it were a club. This was the man whom Guinness had
just two days to kill. He looked dishearteningly durable.

And there was something else. Somehow it made
it different to have seen him like that, just walking down the
street, fighting the wind like a thousand other guys. It might have
been himself.

Before, the whole thing had been like a game,
just dangerous enough to be sort of exhilarating. But the end move
would be to snuff that heavy shape, and it wasn’t any game.

Well, he was committed to it. Either he went
after Hornbeck or all those little nasties who worked for Cruttwell
would be coming after him; and if it had to be Hornbeck or
Guinness, it was going to be Hornbeck.

Maybe it was just as well he had seen him. If
he was going to get the queasies, better now than when it was time
to make the score. He couldn’t afford any second thoughts then. No,
then they might get him killed.

The only other information he could come up
with was that Hornbeck was indeed going somewhere that Friday.
Guinness phoned his office on Thursday afternoon, pretending to be
an Irish importer whose tongue was hanging out over the market
possibilities of cheap Balkan wines. He asked for an interview with
Mr. Hornbeck for late Friday afternoon to discuss brokerage terms,
but the reedy voiced secretary asked if he couldn’t make it the
middle of next week because Mr. Hornbeck would be out of town on
business Friday.

Guinness went ahead and made the appointment
for the following Wednesday. What the hell, Mr. Tyrone would be
happy to see Mr. Hornbeck. Mr. Tyrone didn’t exist, but what did
that matter? By Wednesday one or the other party would be dead
anyway.

On Friday morning Guinness rented a Morris
Minor and took up his vigil two blocks down the street from
Hornbeck’s garage. He had studied his map and had come up with the
route he would have taken if he had wanted to get to Yorkshire and
wasn’t interested in the scenery. It was the obvious way to go and
Hornbeck had no particular reason to start being devious right
away, so one could hope.