Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  It was his marriage to Kathleen that sometimes gave him trouble. Any fool can live with what he’s done; but what he’s lost, especially what he’s been stupid enough to throw away, is something else again.

  Kathleen. After all these years, Kathleen. Hard to believe, after all this time, that this woman, with her lips pressed together in a hard little line and her eyes that seemed to wander fearfully from object to object, that this could be Kathleen.

  Not that Guinness had never seen that strained, restless look before. It, or something like it, was his final memory of her. It was what he had done to her, what had driven her so far out of his life that until this moment he had had no idea what might have become of her.

  And now, apparently, she had other reasons for feeling that the universe was out of joint, reasons, he took a peculiar pleasure in reminding himself, that could have nothing to do with himself.

  You see? It wasn’t only me. These things happen.

  And the daughter, of course. There couldn’t be much of a mystery about her. It gave Guinness a bit of a turn to realize that his own kid was the proposed object of Flycatcher’s very special attentions. His very own little Rocky, whom he had not seen since her infancy, whose baby picture he still carried, as a kind of guilty secret, in one of the compartments of his billfold.

  His own child, with whom that woman had stolen away, leaving him a little note to the effect that it might be better all around if in this one instance he didn’t exercise his professional skills and attempt to find them. Not that he could much fault Kathleen; subsequent history had demonstrated the wisdom of her action.

  With humiliating clarity, Guinness remembered what had happened, only last year, to Louise, his second wife. How she had ended up in a little heap on his kitchen floor, with an ice pick sticking out of the soft spot under her left ear. Poor Louise, someone out of his past had turned up to settle accounts and she had just happened to be convenient.

  It might have been Kathleen, though, if she’d hung around. It might have been Rocky. She’d been right to cut her losses and run.

  Kathleen. Hard to believe it, but there she was. Thirty­fiveish now, not quite the dewy college girl he had married when she had come over to Cambridge to study ordinary language philosophy at the feet of Wittgenstein’s tweedy apostles. It had been long hair in those days, all the way down to the small of her back, and peasant skirts that brushed against the floor; she had been very much the easygoing, pleasantly drifty flower child then, complete with the compulsory strumming box. Only hers had been a lute instead of the guitar you saw slung from the shoulder of every jackass who wanted to advertize that he was a free spirit, and she had really had some idea of how to play it.

  Now the hair was short, or at least tied back in some kind of bun behind her head (at this distance, and with the way she was facing, he couldn’t be sure), and whatever was under her carefully fitted green coat stopped squarely at the knee.

  Guinness watched mother and daughter climb into their car, the daughter first, and from the driver’s side; Kathleen wasn’t taking any chances. As they drove away, he sat glumly looking after them, remembering how the rain had come clattering down on the sidewalk outside the registry office that morning in London.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” she had asked, standing under an awning in his spare mackintosh, clutching, in both hands, a little spray of violets he had picked up from a street vendor five minutes before—her bridal bouquet, without which the ceremony almost wouldn’t be legal. She had looked out tentatively at the rain, as if it and the perils of matrimony were somehow connected in her mind, doubtless feeling a little self conscious as they waited for a clerk to come along with his key and open the joint up. “I don’t see what’s so bad about the way things are now.”

  She was just being noble. You don’t trap people into permanent commitments with the lure of your tender flesh, or, worse yet, by playing on the vulnerability of their better nature. It wasn’t cricket.

  But she needn’t have worried; Guinness didn’t have a better nature. He just wanted to stop playing house and get married.

  “Sure I’m sure. Like the proverb saith, ‘Happy is the bride the rain falls on.’ You bet I’m sure.”

  He wasn’t, of course, having been warned that the nesting instinct was something you did well to keep in check in his line of work, but he smiled anyway and tightened his arm around her shoulders and felt her melting into him, and it reassured them both. Hell, everybody got married.

  An obvious civil servant, with large, bony hands sticking out past the frayed cuffs of his respectably gray suit coat, suddenly appeared behind the glass of the office door (he had been hiding in there the whole time, the little dickens, just waiting until the last possible minute) and drew back the bolt from the inside. Pulling the knob toward himself, he made just enough of an entrance to allow them to file in out of the rain. He frowned, first at the puddles of water their soaked raincoats were making on his floor and then at them, as if he too wasn’t sure that what they contemplated was such a hot idea. Perhaps he was married himself and knew better; perhaps he was merely irritated at having to be pestered with business so early in the morning. Guinness noticed that there were a couple of carefully sharpened pencils in his breast pocket and that the graphite from them and, no doubt, generations of their predecessors seemed to have worked its way into the lines around his eyes and mouth, making him look rather corpselike.

  “You’ll need a witness,” he said finally, looking down at Kathleen’s sodden little bunch of flowers. “If you want to be married, you’ll need a witness.”

  Guinness and Kathleen exchanged an embarrassed glance, feeling suddenly like very small children. This was a contingency that hadn’t occurred to either of them.

  “Well, you needn’t worry,” said the clerk, sniffing. “One of our regulars should be along in a few minutes. Don’t tip him more than five shillings.”

  It was a good marriage, for as long as it lasted. Right up until the moment Kathleen walked into their bedroom and found him with his leg bandaged up, and he had had to explain that part of the rather peculiar work he did on the Continent from time to time involved getting shot at and shooting back. Right up until then it had been nearly perfect.

  Even at the end he never told her the whole truth. After all, how does one tell a well-bred girl from Seattle that the man she’s married, the father of her child, is MI-6’s star headhunter, with twenty-eight confirmed hits on his ticket? No, he never told her the whole truth. But even the little he did tell her was more than she could live with. Within two weeks she was gone, leaving him nothing but a note, a plea that he should simply let her disappear out of his life, her and their daughter both. All the warnings had come true, and so he respected her decision and let her go.

  Lying in the dark in his room back in the Clemson Holiday Inn, having long since turned off the television set out of respect for the neighbors, he stared up at the ceiling he could no longer see, occasionally breaking off a piece of oatmeal cookie from the bag of them he had gone out and bought after dinner, trying to pretend he was thinking about what he should do.

  It was a game called Considering Your Options. Hell, he could always just pack up and go back to Washington. He didn’t owe the Company all that much; he didn’t for a minute think that they were all simply the victims of a grotesque coincidence, that Ernie Tuttle and his masters hadn’t known from the first move just exactly how they’d set him up. In Guinness’s circles, coincidence was the sort of word that made people smirk knowingly, as if at an obscene joke.

  No, the coincidence part of it had doubtless been fairly small, extending no further than to the fact that the wife of a certain harassed government employee happened to have a cast off hubby who was on the payroll of one of Uncle Sam’s numberless spook shops; some computer somewhere—and the company had secret wires on everything in town above the size of a pocket calculator—had churned up that remarkable bit of luck, and someone among Guin
ness’s employers had decided that it might be worth exploiting. An interagency agreement having been reached, probably in one of the plush cocktail lounges along Massachusetts Avenue so beloved by the boys in the pinstripe suits (“Say, pal, do you mind if we borrow this one? Granted this stateside stuff is more in your line, but we have a special interest, and we’ll cut you in on any dividends so you won’t have to shell out a dime.”), and our boy Raymond gets his marching orders.

  They probably just wanted to see how he would behave.

  They had spent a lot of time and taxpayers’ money rebuilding themselves a shooter, and they probably just wanted to see how the fine tuning would hold up under pressure. The sort of thing that was done all the time.

  Well, he could just blow the whole thing up on them, just march right back up north, but he knew he wasn’t going to. And he wasn’t going to worry too much about nailing their precious Flycatcher for them either, although he wasn’t going to let the guy off just for the lack of a trigger pulled. It was his kid that was being threatened, his little girl whom he hadn’t seen since she was still on her potty chair, and she received first priority. If it got nasty and Flycatcher got caught in the middle, that was fine—you had to teach people that it wasn’t a good idea to go around hassling your children—but first we deliver the scion of the House of Guinness safely out of the line of fire.

  But none of this came very near to the front of Guinness’s mind, even when he tried to put it there by force. Every decision of that kind had been made in the first instant after having seen Kathleen’s taut, worried face, and the way she had held their child to her as she walked with her down the school building entranceway. Now all he could see before him in the darkness was the face itself, even when he closed his eyes. Kathleen’s face, as it was now and as it had been in their salad days, when they might as well have had a hundred year lease on the universe. And all he could do was remember and regret. Their hours together seemed to be the only language he knew.

  Kathleen had been special, special enough so that even after the thing was over and he had found himself married to another woman, another whom he had loved as much as it was in him to love, the first wife had never been very far away. He doubted if there had been two days together in the past nine years when he hadn’t thought about Kathleen. No vows of fidelity, and Guinness had always been a faithful husband, could have superseded that lady’s special claims.

  They had met at some dreadful seminar at Cambridge, one of those hermetically sealed little gatherings that made graduate work so boring, so distant from what you thought you had set yourself up to study; and when it was over, out on the dark, dappled street with its rows of sleeping houses of gray stone, they had come together as if by appointment. For three days they didn’t part, and when he took the train back to London, all Guinness could think about was if there wasn’t some way he could evade his little sixth form brats and return by the evening train. It was maddening; it made him almost ill with giddiness, the thought that he wouldn’t see her again until the next Friday.

  Of course by then it had been almost five years since he had graduated from Byron Down’s private little academy for thugs, up in the wilderness of northeastern Scotland.

  Byron was his handler, his paymaster, his solver of all problems in this life and the next, a tubby, pink-faced gourmet who was probably the most dangerous man in Europe. He had set Guinness up, gotten him his job in a posh public school out near Oakleigh Park, taught him the proper way of slitting a cigar end, and showed him how to crack a man on the temple so that he’ll fall down dead at your feet without a murmur. Byron had been most emphatic in his disapproval of Guinness’s plans for the fair Kathleen. Byron had said there was no way in the world to reconcile a family life with the rather more flexible morality of the assassination business, and of course he had been perfectly right.

  But Guinness had been young enough and sufficiently successful to think it very likely that he could get away with anything, and he hadn’t had many qualms about deceiving his intended. So he had gone ahead and done the thing anyway, kept his appointment outside the Registry Office just off the Caledonian Road, within a stone’s throw of the university, and had settled down to prove that he was as good a juggler as he needed to be to have everything he wanted in the world.

  And, there was no denying it, he did manage to keep everything in the air, at least for a couple of years. The blowup didn’t come until not quite a year after Rocky was born—so that Guinness would have the satisfaction of knowing that he had made a mess of three people’s lives instead of merely two. There was no point in doing things in a small way.

  Guinness broke off another fragment of oatmeal cookie and put it into his mouth. It was soft and sweet and he held it for a long time against his palate, letting it dissolve. Somehow the taste of the thing was reassuring—probably that was the main reason people ate them.

  He looked at his watch, taking it from the night table and twisting the face around until the metal hands caught a glimmer of light from somewhere, and he could see that it was a little after two in the morning. Another eight hours at least before he could begin to do anything; another five before he could even have his breakfast. The thought of sleep never crossed his mind as a possibility.

  He wondered if there might not be some way he could do the whole number and never have to see Kathleen at all, never have her know that he was even alive on the face of the earth. But of course that would have been the last thing he wanted. He would have to see her again; how could he live another day with himself if he didn’t see her again? Just to hear her voice, just to talk to her and to be able to watch her lips move as she formed an answer, what wouldn’t that be worth?

  And little Rocky—christened Roxanne after Kathleen’s dead mother, but that wasn’t a name you called your little baby—what about her? He wondered what this daughter of theirs could be like, after so many years. The little face framed in blond hair, the color of tarnished wheat, would she be like her mother or was that too much to hope for? She was a stranger to him, as unfamiliar and distant as the mountain peaks of Tibet, and the face was an inscrutable mask. They were morons if they thought they could read your soul in your face; people weren’t branded by their crimes, thank God. That little innocent face, it could hide anything. Even sweetness.

  Perhaps she took after her old man, or perhaps Kathleen worried that she might. He bet that thought kept her awake nights.

  When she was little, just a baby in nothing but a cotton diaper, her mother would bring her sometimes to their bed in the morning and Guinness would have the task of keeping her entertained while Kathleen made breakfast. Rocky had loved it. She would press her little fists into his rib cage and push herself up on her feet until she could look down into his face, and then she would smile wetly at him and make happy little sounds that had the cadence, if not yet the precise tone, of laughter. She would wait for him to take her little body between his hands and raise her up into the air like a bird. And she would laugh even more, putting out her arms and unclenching her hands—she never could quite manage to get both legs up at the same time, but that was a perfectly insignificant detail—while he provided appropriate sound effects. One morning a jet plane and the next a chicken hawk; they all met with the same enthusiastic reception.

  “Be careful not to drop her,” Kathleen would say, not in the least worried that he would. “You don’t want her growing up with a thing about plane crashes.” It was a big joke.

  Had she grown up with a thing about not having a father in the house? But of course there had been a father, this guy Duelle. Guinness wondered how long Kathleen had been married to him, where they could have met, that sort of thing. It was hard to think of her living in this punky little southern village, but maybe it suited her. He didn’t have any way of knowing; so far as he could remember, except for the little while at the beginning when she was still living in Cambridge—and once in a while a weekend by the sea—they had never been more than
ten miles away from Leicester Square. Maybe underneath she had been a country girl at heart all along and he had simply never noticed.

  He wondered again how long she had been married to Duelle. Better for Rocky, he supposed, if it had been a long time, so she would have thoroughly accepted him and there wouldn’t have been any long, drawn out dislocation. But he didn’t like to think that Kathleen could have gotten over him in a couple of weeks. Right back to stateside and then the first eligible bachelor to give her a nod—no, he didn’t think so. He would refuse to believe that; that wasn’t his Kathleen.

  Not that you could really say he had been freezing in the grip of celibacy himself, of course. There had been Louise, his wife of five highly agreeable years, bracketed by the usual run of dimly lit gropings; he hadn’t been pining alone in the wilderness precisely.

  But neither had he been the one to walk out. At bottom, he discovered, he still held that against Kathleen; there was still that little pea of resentment under the mattress. All these years it had been hidden under too much other crap, all his other little psychic aches and pains had just made too complicated a pattern for him to notice that it was even there, but it was. She had kissed him off, the bitch. And why? Because she had discovered the awful truth about him, that he wasn’t really Little Lord Fauntleroy after all, that was why, and by God he was entitled to resent it. It served her right that now, even married to the simon pure Professor Duelle, she still somehow found herself being hassled by the baddies. And wouldn’t he just laugh his ass off when she finally woke up to the fact that she might conceivably need a baddie of her very own; that these were the times when all those nasty and alarming talents of her wicked old Ray, the jettisoned husband of her foolish girlhood, might come in handy. Wouldn’t he just laugh, though. Wouldn’t he just.

  Guinness played that little scene to himself every way he could imagine. Kathleen tearfully contrite while he wrapped himself in scornful dignity. The reconciliation of the shining knight with his grateful, panting paramour. The lonely, existential hero with his unsung victory, and no one but Kathleen knowing the truth, their private and triumphant little secret that they would carry with them to their separate graves. It was all very entertaining, his own personal version of Wuthering Heights with himself as Heathcliff, as long as he could trick himself into forgetting that it was his little girl’s neck that was in danger. That generally wasn’t very long.