Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  Let us not lose sight of the unpleasant fact that there were certain parties out there who had made noises about blowing his darling daughter’s head off—the only child he was ever likely to have in this dark world, Louise never having felt much pressure from the maternal instinct. Not that he minded that about Louise; one kid was plenty, if you could just hang on to her.

  It scared the hell out of him. As he lay there in the darkness he could feel the fear almost as a tangible thing, a feeling that would seem to locate, cold and shaky, somewhere just under his breastbone and then become diffuse again and fill the room so he could barely breathe. Guinness had been beaten half to death a couple of times in his life, had collected a reasonable array of scars from bullet wounds in various parts of his anatomy, had had his share of close brushes; but the idea of anyone doing some terrible, nameless thing to his Rocky simply appalled him. Death was a thing that happened to people all the time, something never very far away in his line of work and not so very terrible—except that it should not touch his child. That was unspeakable. That he couldn’t bring himself to face, even to think about. All his little difficulties about Kathleen were invisible when measured against that. No matter what, no matter if he died for it a dozen times over and took Kathleen with him, no matter if Flycatcher lived on into his nineties, he had to keep Rocky out in the clear. The little girl with the reddish blond hair was his own, and the flesh did have a memory. He had to keep her clear somehow.

  4

  You had to have security clearance to get into the federal research compound, which was located alongside an isolated finger of the lake. The whole thing was sealed off behind a chain link fence with a couple of strands of barbed wire at the top. The fence even ran out into the water, so that approach was blocked off as well. Probably, if they were serious about their privacy, they even had armed patrols. Maybe even dogs. Guinness didn’t like dogs, and he didn’t have any security clearance.

  But it wasn’t a problem that kept him awake nights. According to the cards in his wallet and the shiny gold badge Tuttle had loaned him for window dressing, he was a member in good standing of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and so far as he knew, the FBI didn’t go in much for breaking into restricted federal installations, at least not these days, at least not if you could believe the newspapers.

  So, what the hell. For the time being he was the all American boy, nice as pie. He’d help little old ladies at traffic lights and obey all signs, even the ones posted every thirty or so feet around their precious fence, telling him to keep his ass out.

  There was, however, a gate. To get into it you turned off one of the county roads that threaded through the hills which were stacked up along the western edge of the lake until they gradually became the Blue Ridge Mountains. What you turned off onto was a narrow little ribbon of fresh and unbroken asphalt—the AEC knew how to spend its money—that snaked around for nearly three quarters of a mile and then got its head chopped off by a line of fence that kept going in both directions until it got lost in the pine trees. There was the fence, and the gate, and not another thing. You just knew you were in the right place.

  Guinness let his car coast to a halt about six feet from the wire and gave a nice long blast with the horn. Then he turned off the ignition and settled down to wait. He didn’t get out of the car; in these matters of impersonation the image was everything, and he didn’t think guys from the FBI got out of their cars for anything short of the Second Coming. So he would wait in the car and let them come to him.

  And they came. After about two minutes a police car pulled into view from behind the trees and parked on the other side of the gate. There were two men inside, both in uniform, although Guinness suspected they were just private security guards. The one in the driver’s seat got out and walked up to the fence, and it was like something right out of a movie. The swagger, the one way sunglasses—it was so shady in there you practically needed a flashlight to read your watch—the black leather gun belt with the holster swinging free and the nightstick on the other side, the whole scene. He even had the red and blue flashing lights going on the top of his car roof. It made you want to cry.

  The cop was probably about twenty-five, and he looked strong and like he knew it. When he got to the fence he pushed the fingers of both hands through the spaces between the linkage, at about shoulder height, and leaned against them. You had the feeling that he was the type who was always leaning against something.

  It was a type Guinness had come to know pretty well. The type who belong to gun clubs and motorcycle gangs and SDS or the American White People’s Party, the type who keep big collections of toy soldiers or World War II memorabilia or books about the sins of the power structure. They were the dime a dozen foot soldiers of everybody’s undeclared war, just dying to be put into some kind of uniform, be it a blue flak jacket or a gray fedora or a string of beads, and waiting to be given a license to think of themselves as men. You want somebody beaten up or murdered? You want your turf protected against all comers? Just point them in the right direction. You want somebody to take the fall when the time comes to cut your losses? They were usually too stupid to know how to save themselves, or to know until it was too late that they had been hung out to dry. They made up half the cops and two thirds of the spooks and nearly all the criminals in every country of which Guinness had ever had any experience. They were the cannon fodder, the white chips in the pot, and they were all just about the same. It got so you couldn’t tell them apart.

  Finally, this particular specimen grew tired of giving him the insolent stare routine and took a key out of his pocket, unlocked the little sleeve latch on the gate, pushed it open, and came over to Guinness’s car. He put his hands on the roof, just over the window on the driver’s side, and leaned against it exactly as he had against the fence.

  “Somethin’ you want?” he asked finally, in that exaggerated hillbilly accent that is supposed to sound just tough as hell.

  Without bothering to look at him, Guinness reached into an inside pocket for his lending library badge case and stuck it up through the rolled down window, open so that the identity card with his picture on it was visible. The guard sprang to attention so fast that you might have thought the roof of Guinness’s car was wired for high voltage. It must be nice to be a G-man.

  “The first thing I want, mister, is through that gate,” Guinness whispered between his teeth, just barely loud enough to be heard. “And then I want Dr. Holman Duelle. He works here, doesn’t he?” He finally turned up his head enough to look at the kid, but there was no eye contact because the kid, apparently under the illusion that he was being addressed by Robert E. Lee, was much too firmly locked into his salute to risk glancing down.

  “Yes, sir,” came the breathless answer. “Ah mean, Dr. Duelle works here, sir, but Ah cain’t let you in. It’d be all mah job was worth.” Finally the eyes came down, and they were pleading with Guinness not to insist.

  “Besahdes, sir, he ain’t here now anyway. Most afternoons he works over t’ his office at the university. You should find him thar now, sir; you want me t’ phone over f’r his office number?”

  Guinness shook his head and returned the badge case to his pocket. Through the chain mail fence, through the glare from the two windshields, he was watching the other guard, the one who had stayed in the police car, who was watching him. He wondered what that cop was making of all this, what sort of a report he would write and who would read it. He wondered if Flycatcher had his fingers in enough pies to get to see a copy, and whether he would or could check to see if the FBI had an agent named Peter McAffee, and whether the people in Guinness’s own office had done their homework well enough to make sure that Flycatcher got the right answer. He wondered whether this kid, the guy’s partner, was in sufficient control of himself to remember the name and the badge number that went with it. He wondered whether anyone would at least have the presence of mind to phone ahead and tell the good doctor that he should start expecting
company.

  “Thanks, but no. I’ll stumble around until I find him.”

  He rolled his window back up—it was warmer than it had been the day before, and he was making full use of the air conditioning; hell, it wasn’t his battery—and started maneuvering the car back and forth in a tight little circle until he managed to turn it all the way around without bulldozing any pine trees. Looking through the rearview mirror as he drove away, he could see the guard reclosing the gate from the inside. His impassive partner continued as still as a Buddha.

  So, apparently, no one was particularly glad to see him.

  After this morning there wasn’t much reason why that should have been much of a surprise.

  He had promised himself over and over in the sleeplessness of the preceding night, had sworn up and down, that he would stay the hell away from Kathleen. After all, she was no part of the work; it wasn’t her neck that people were threatening to chop off, and there was no way she would be able to help him reach Flycatcher. Kathleen was a side issue, strictly personal, best stayed away from lest she distract him. In this business, if you let yourself get distracted you were likely to end up in a ditch somewhere with your face turned inside out.

  One can resolve, in the abstract, to give up anything—food, sex, ambition, life itself. But by morning Guinness knew that he could not give up this chance to see Kathleen. Hell, he had known it from the beginning, from the first moment he had seen her protectively guiding their child down the walkway from the Morrison School; he was simply too exhausted to bother trying to con himself any longer.

  So he had waited until a few minutes after ten, by which time he could be reasonably sure that both husband and daughter were on their merry ways, and then he had driven past her house, noticing that the station wagon was still parked in the driveway.

  It was a pretty nice house, large and well laid out. It had a stone facing and there seemed to be a screened in porch on one side, and the landscaping was well kept up. Well in the background, through a screen of trees, Guinness could make out the shimmer of sunlight on water, so apparently it was a lakefront lot.

  Too nice a house, really, for a professor of engineering, even if he did have a government salary to sweeten the pot a little. But Kathleen’s father had been fairly well fixed, and she had been his only child. He hadn’t been well even back in the days when she had been Mrs. Guinness, so probably he was dead by now and Kathleen had a nice chunk to lay out on houses with stone facings and access to the lake.

  Somehow, though, it didn’t seem to him the kind of house she would have chosen for herself, so maybe Duelle was putting his late father in law’s money to good use. Or—who could say?—maybe he held the patent on the law of gravity.

  The street had several other houses on it, and this was, after all, a small town in the South, but Guinness decided that there wasn’t anything to be gained by playing coy. He simply parked his car right in front of Kathleen’s white enameled mailbox, walked up to the door along a little path of flagstones individually embedded in the lawn, and rang the bell. If the neighbors were watching, at least he wasn’t acting like a cat burglar or a guilty lover; his presence could be explained to everyone’s perfect satisfaction—except, perhaps, his own.

  He waited a long time, or what seemed a long time, and while he waited he amused himself with speculations about whether he hoped she would answer more than he hoped she wouldn’t. Having finally committed himself, he couldn’t help thinking he was an idiot to be standing there on his ex-wife’s doorstep, after better than eight years. He tried to think of what he would say to her, to settle on some way of explaining that he had come to help, but he couldn’t seem to think at all. The labor was simply beyond him at that moment; every scrap of a consecutive idea was simply crowded out by the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears, suddenly as loud as cannon fire.

  All he could seem to do was to remember. And that only in little fragments, little pictures of the past fitted in between the hammerings of his pulse, as if he were sorting through a pile of snapshots.

  Kathleen on their honeymoon, walking along the pier with him in a tiny coastal town in Cornwall. Kathleen in their apartment in London, reading the Paris Tribune with her glasses slipping down on the bridge of her nose. The first day back from the hospital, Kathleen and little Rocky. The frozen look on her face when he had finally told her what it was that the British paid him so well for doing.

  Then suddenly the door opened, and there she was, standing behind the screen. When she saw him—or rather, when she saw who it was—she became perfectly motionless, no emotion registering in her face, as if she were a wax icon. Then, slowly, seemingly unprompted by will, her arms came up and crossed below her breast, and she hugged herself as if she were cold. For a while they just looked at each other.

  “Hello, Katey. It’s been a long time.”

  Still she said nothing. She only stood there, behind the aluminum screen door, fixed and unreadable.

  It was hard for Guinness to realize that this woman had any connection with the girl he had married all those years ago in London; even through the softening blur of the screen she seemed far too old. This unhappy housewife, with her severe hairdo and the lines of anxiety etched into her face, with her sweater set and her knee length skirt and her nylons—hell, ten years ago she wouldn’t even have owned a pair of nylons—this woman, whom he had seen for the first time only yesterday afternoon, was almost a stranger. Guinness felt something of the surprise and embarrassment of one who has begun to raise a hand to wave, has prepared to shout some greeting to a familiar figure seen from behind, only to have the figure turn and suddenly be recognized as someone else entirely, someone unknown and indifferent.

  Except, of course, that this really was Kathleen.

  “Katey, I want to help you if I can. I know what’s been going on.” Still there was no answer. Guinness felt as if he were throwing pebbles into a well, too deep for him to see the bottom or even to hear the splash they made. Perhaps there was no bottom.

  Then, with no sign, she took a step backward into the house, let one hand drop down to the knob, and pushed the door closed. And that was that. When he heard the bolt clicking into place, he turned on his heel and walked back to his car. He had other calls to make.

  . . . . .

  Guinness knew from experience that academicians, provided their classes didn’t interfere, tended to stretch their lunch hours well into the middle of the afternoon, so he was in no hurry to track Duelle to his office. Besides, he wanted to give the guy time to receive word of his coming, and he didn’t know how soon it would be before the watchdogs got around to making their report.

  Besides, he hadn’t had any lunch himself.

  The company tended to be generous in the matter of per diem, so he thought perhaps he would treat himself to a real restaurant this time, if such were to be found. In the course of the last year he had had no end of experience with Holiday Inn cuisine; it was perfectly adequate to most of life’s needs, but he didn’t feel himself very drawn in that direction today. And eating a hamburger out of a paper bag wasn’t what he had in mind either. For anything else you had really to hunt. It was one of a number of shocking little discoveries he had made over the last year, since Louise’s murder had rendered it necessary for him to look after his own diet, just how hard it was to eat out all the time and not die of boredom.

  A little paper cup full of macaroni salad, something called a Roman sandwich (cheese and two or three different but unspecified luncheon meats subjected to fifteen seconds in a microwave oven) and a beer. There wasn’t much change left from his fiver by the time he had pushed his plastic tray the full distance along the deli counter to where the cash register was ringing away every few seconds, like the bell on a five year old’s new bicycle. Guinness felt distinctly as if he had been defrauded as he glared sullenly around the cramped, murky little dining room, trying to find a place to sit down.

  The three men at the next table were manif
estly English professors; the border of the university, after all, was only sixty or seventy feet up the street and, even without the occasional allusions to curricular matters, Guinness would have recognized their origin from the way each of them kept trying to top the other two.

  God, he thought, how many lunches exactly like that had he lived through in his first year or two of teaching in California, before he had had the sense to get married and go home for lunch? At least in that respect London had been better. You could manage a whole meal with your colleagues without anyone acknowledging anyone else’s existence. The British, bless them, always seemed to think there was something slightly suspicious about conversation.

  The dining room was a long, narrow affair, partially divided by screens into little alcoves, so that you could look all the way around you and never see more than half a dozen or so people and yet nobody could either enter or leave without being subjected to a general inspection.

  He tried not to wonder whether every man in his mid forties who came through with a tray in his hands was Duelle. Without any information on the subject, he had somehow formed an image of his ex-wife’s new husband as four or five years older than himself. He had tried not to think about Duelle at all because he didn’t want to form any prejudices that might get in the way later. He wanted Duelle to be a clean slate when they had their little chat later in the afternoon, but he had to admit to himself that he wouldn’t really mind if it worked out so he wouldn’t much like the son of a bitch. It somehow seemed perverse that men who had been married to the same woman should ever be anything except the bitterest of antagonists, but he realized that that was childish.