Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  “I went over to see her the afternoon they left—she was the best friend I had—and she showed me the photo she had gotten, just like this one, of their seven year old son. She was so scared, Ray. She couldn’t get away fast enough. She and Hillary were just like Holman and me—Kevin was all they had. They got that photo and they just vanished, like ghosts. But Holman—Holman—”

  But Holman had gone to the security people at the government project that was so much the focus for his every human passion. Like the good eagle scout, he did the right thing and to hell with the little lady’s anxieties about her bratty daughter. After all, it wasn’t any kid of his. Holman wasn’t the type to throw over his career just so Kathleen’s little girl wouldn’t end up with her head looking like a piece of broken pottery. Not Holman.

  “Kathleen,” Guinness said quietly—somehow he couldn’t seem to get his voice above a whisper—and he covered her hands with one of his own. “I think there’s something you ought to know about Holman.”

  9

  In the end, the amazing thing was that she really was surprised. Apparently it had never occurred to her that her husband’s treachery could have extended to such a length, but then Kathleen had never been one to see very deeply into the more unpleasant possibilities of human conduct. For an intelligent woman, she could be astonishingly naive.

  At the same time, it also never seemed to have occurred to her not to trust Guinness’s word, even about such a thing as that. Perhaps it was the intellectual’s reverence for expertise, or perhaps some deeper rooted knowledge that Guinness, who had once told her such stunning lies about the scope of his involvement with British military intelligence, would still not deceive her about a danger to their child or about the character of the husband who had taken his place. In any case, she only asked him the one question. Was he sure.

  “Absolutely. I don’t know yet to what degree he’s involved in this. He may be just a bit player who’s been backed into a corner and doesn’t know how to get out; that kind of thing happens. But he’s in it.”

  There didn’t seem to be any more that needed saying. Kathleen’s eyes narrowed as she contemplated what had become for her the fact of Holman Duelle’s wormlike infamy. To think that she could ever have thought to love such a creature; you could almost watch the words taking shape in her mind. Guinness did watch, and he had the distasteful feeling that on some level or other she was enjoying this moment, that it gave her some sort of humiliated thrill to contemplate the degradation of her bed.

  “I think you’d better leave him,” he almost whispered, staring down at the backs of his hands as they rested on his lap, curled into loose fists. “The best thing to do is go home and pack a bag. Do it now, take Rocky out of school; don’t wait another hour. I can ride shotgun on you from here to Atlanta, and then you can get on a plane and go back to Seattle. You can be there by the middle of the afternoon. Start a new life, use your maiden name. After that you’ll never see me again, I promise; and I’ll see to it that Duelle won’t ever bother either of you.”

  He glanced up and saw that her eyes were closed. The hard line of her mouth had become a tight, mirthless little smile, as if at last she had seen the terrible joke.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying, Kathleen?” When she didn’t respond, he took hold of her arm, just a little above the wrist, and pulled it toward him, squeezing slowly until she opened her eyes. “Do you hear me, you bitch? Once again it’s time to go.”

  It was astonishing how easily she pulled herself free from his grasp. The ugly little smile broadened just a shade as the other hand closed around her wrist, the way it might have if she had wanted to feel her pulse to remind herself that she was alive. Her voice, when she spoke, was surprisingly even.

  “Yes, I heard you.” She turned her eyes away and gazed off into the distance, still holding her wrist. “It will be necessary to leave him, won’t it?” She might have been talking to herself.

  And then, apparently she remembered that he was there too, sitting beside her in the wilderness.

  “But I won’t need you to help me do it.”

  Somewhere behind them, far enough out on the main body of the lake so that the sound only reached them as a faint, liquid murmur, someone started up an outboard motor. Guinness listened for a moment, but then the flat hum of the engine blurred away into nothing, until once again the only sounds he could hear were the insects flying by and the water lapping sullenly against the reeds and the pebbles along the shore. It was probably just a fisherman; he was too far away to have had anything to do with them.

  Guinness smiled at his ex-wife. They were all alone together, with nothing in the world to occupy them except their own private quarrels.

  “I should imagine not. Lord knows, you’ve had enough practice.”

  Pushing down against the edge of the tailgate, he levered himself off and walked over to his own car. When he was behind the wheel, and the ignition was already switched on, he looked back at her. She was still sitting where he had left her, looking as if she planned to stay there forever, so he gave her a little hand waggle of farewell and slid the stick shift into reverse.

  The road was narrow, and there weren’t any spots along either side where the ground was bare enough or looked sufficiently solid to let him think of turning around, so he had to back out the whole distance to the main road. It kept him pretty busy with the rearview mirror; he never did notice whether she had gotten back into her own car. And he didn’t stop to find out. As soon as he made the pavement, he was on his way. To hell with Kathleen—for all he cared she could sit there and wait for the coming of the next ice age.

  . . . . .

  To hell with Kathleen. She could work out her own problems. It didn’t take a Fulbright Fellow to figure out that she had it in mind to play this one just exactly her own way; so let her. Guinness had no plans to stand around in the wings, discreetly wringing his hands; if she wanted to make a muck of things all by herself, that was her sovereign right as far as he was concerned. She could go straight to the deuce. She could make the trip on her own, and with his blessing.

  Guinness sat on one of the two double beds in his motel room, staring at the suitcase that lay open on the other. Aside from one shirt and a dirty set of underwear in the bottom drawer of the dresser, he was all packed. All he had to do was to make up his mind to it and he was on his way; check out time wasn’t for another three hours and he had given them two days’ room rent in advance, so he wouldn’t even have to bother with settling up. Just leave the key in an ashtray.

  And just maybe, with any kind of luck, his tangle footed employers had managed to run down Flycatcher for him, if indeed it was Flycatcher he had seen on first arriving in this very paradise of bullfrogs and exotic insects. He might still have a job to do if he decided he still wanted to do it, if he didn’t chuck the whole stupid business after the cute little number they’d pulled on him. His employers were not, at the moment, very high on his list of people he felt like obliging.

  And all the time, of course, he knew he wasn’t going anywhere. It wasn’t going to be that easy.

  There was a round, pinkish welt on the back of his right hand; doubtless some particularly guileful mosquito had nailed him while he had been out there in the tall grass, with the water moccasins and his ex-wife, listening to the story of Duelle’s courtship. He pinched up the spot between first finger and thumb, and a tiny drop of blood, hardly even enough to be called a drop, appeared in the center. Ideas of malaria and encephalitis briefly flitted through his mind, but he dismissed them almost at once. He should be so lucky.

  Flycatcher could wait. It wasn’t unimaginable that he might decide after all simply to forget about that end of things altogether—after all, there were, in fact, ways of making a living that didn’t involve shooting anybody—but Kathleen was a different matter. It wouldn’t be so easy to just forget about her. If he abandoned her now, she wouldn’t give him another minute’s peace for the whole of his life.
It was as simple as that.

  Kathleen. Guinness thrust his hand into his jacket pocket and let the fingers close around his car keys. If he drove anywhere it would be to park in front of her door to see that she got home all right; and he really wasn’t much interested in playing that particular scene, not after this morning, so he took his hand back out, empty. It wouldn’t help anybody if he made himself look like an idiot.

  Kathleen. He lay down on the bed, not bothering to take off his shoes, and threw an arm over his eyes to keep the light out, wondering how long it had been since he’d had a full night’s sleep. It felt like ages. Usually when he was working he slept like a baby; it was very restful when life was simply a series of technical problems to be analyzed and solved. This woman was going to make an old man out of him.

  . . . . .

  “Catch me, Ray,” she had called to him, laughing as she combed the loose masses of her hair through her fingers. She was bent slightly at the waist, the way one does to summon back a dog, and the hand that rested on her thigh held her flimsy little leather sandals and the glasses she never liked to wear out of doors, even if without them there was nothing to St. James’s Park but a vague greenish blur. “Come on and catch me, lover. Don’t be such an old man.”

  Guinness frowned and dug his fist into the pocket of his trousers without moving. Three months pregnant and blind as a mole, and she wanted to play tag. He shuddered slightly, thinking about pieces of broken glass and sharp stones. “But this is England,” she would say. “People wouldn’t throw garbage on the Queen’s front lawn. They’ve been rolling the grass here for four hundred years; it’s as smooth as a pool table.” And the soles of her feet, for all that she acted as if shoes were some basic attack on human liberty, were as white and soft as a vanilla custard.

  The thought of her feet, so small she could almost stand on his hands, and of the child she was carrying sent a twinge of giddy pleasure up through the inside of his chest cavity.

  “Come on!” She turned and ran away, her long skirt kicking up at the hem and her arms swinging awkwardly. She was a clumsy runner.

  But Guinness wasn’t. He had closed the distance between them before she had made twenty yards, and he grabbed her by the shoulders as he jerked to a stop, laughing in spite of himself. In a kind of ecstasy of animal happiness they came together in a quick embrace and then separated, walking now over Her Majesty’s grass, with Kathleen’s hand held inside his own. It was a constant miracle to him that he could love anything as much as he loved her.

  And now, as if to confirm the miracle, there was this baby that was going to be theirs. Only hers now, in some dark corner of her body; but very soon, she promised him. . . Very soon. Giving the lie to all of Byron’s prophecies of disaster.

  “It will never work out,” Byron had said, his master and only friend. Byron had shaken his head sadly and his hand pressed absentmindedly against his heart, a gesture that meant nothing more than that he wanted a cigar and was checking to see if he had remembered his case in the inside pocket of his overcoat. Byron was a hedonist, but the pleasures of family life, judging from the fact of his long bachelorhood, apparently had little attraction for him. “Wives and babies don’t square very well with the sort of life you’ve been leading for the past several years, and I’d think you would bloody well see that. Raymond, my lad, you must be off your chump.”

  But Byron was dead now, had died less than a month ago.

  As if to refute his own dogmatic law that no one in their line of work ever died a natural death, he had keeled over in the billiard room of his club, half an hour after dinner. Byron Down, who had probably been responsible for the taking of more lives than any Englishman since Henry VIII, dead of a coronary occlusion at the age of fifty-eight. It hardly seemed possible. Guinness had attended the funeral—a mad act—and had wept as if it were his own father they were carting off to Holgate Cemetery.

  Still, he had died what was called a “natural” death. His own body had killed him, not some nameless thug; and he had not had to die alone, behind a garbage can in a dark alley in a strange city, the thing he had dreaded most. So perhaps something approximating the normal conditions of human life was really possible. If Byron could get away with it, almost by accident, couldn’t Guinness through planning and applied intelligence? On that particular afternoon, walking through St. James’s Park with his pregnant wife’s fingers tangled up in his own, it certainly seemed so.

  And Kathleen, of course, what could she imagine that would keep them from going on forever, exactly as they were at that moment? She, who could barely credit the reality even of that natural death, who could hardly believe that a man could fall down stone dead next to a billiard table in the heart of Mayfair, who had never even been aware of the existence of such a person as Byron J. Down. No, for Kathleen love was immortal.

  “What shall we call him?” she whispered, resting her head against his arm as they walked along. It was another of her inviolable assumptions that the child would be a boy, and that that was what Guinness would want, a son. Guinness only replied with a short, meaningless little laugh—a chuckle, if the word could really represent any human sound—and kissed her hair.

  “What shall we call him?” Apparently she meant to be answered.

  “Rocky. Whatever name we give him, we’ll call him that. And if, by any miracle, it should turn out to be a girl, then we’ll christen her Roxanne, after your mother, and call her Rocky just the same.”

  Let it be a girl, he thought. He didn’t want to bring another like himself into the world. Let it be a girl, and like her mother.

  . . . . .

  He must have taken his arm down from over his eyes, because the sudden light made him aware that he had been asleep. It had all been just a dream. Byron and St. James’s Park with Kathleen, nothing more than a memory come back to life. He brought himself back up to a sitting position and covered his eyes with the tips of his fingers, trying to wipe away the fatigue that made it seem so much longer ago than nine years since that day. A hundred lifetimes since then, and Byron had been right after all; you couldn’t make it square.

  St. James’s Park was forgotten—it was better that way, because all those people were dead. And what Guinness remembered, at that moment, alone in a motel room located at a wide spot in the road somewhere in South Carolina, was the frightened little face of Mrs. Duelle’s daughter, on the sidewalk in front of her school, sheltered against her mother’s body as they hurried to the car. The past was dead. Its survivors hopeless and embittered. But the ties of blood were not to be set aside.

  10

  Guinness cupped his hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone receiver and frowned as he watched a red faced housewife, the rollers in her peroxided hair covered with a tiny cotton scarf, struggling to get both her two children and her shopping cart through the electric door of the Winn-Dixie supermarket. “Don’t tell me,” he murmured to himself. “Let me guess. You lost him at the airport.”

  “We lost him at the airport,” came the answer, Ernest Tuttle’s voice thin and reedy from six hundred miles of bad connections. “Sorry, Ray.”

  Guinness closed his eyes at the sad fatality of it and nodded. “But it was Flycatcher, wasn’t it? I assume you were able to find out at least that much.”

  “Sure. The car was in the long term parking lot; we found it yesterday morning, and there was part of a thumb print on the rearview mirror. It was him all right.

  “We’re contacting everyone who worked the check in counters that afternoon and evening. With any kind of luck maybe one of them will remember him from the description—he’s the type somebody would remember—and then maybe we can find out where he was going. You got your shopping list?”

  Guinness made his report, ticking off the things he wanted checked out, and when he was finished there was a longish pause, during which both men could listen to the circuits crackling, and he wondered how his trusted friend, with all those resources of smooth bureaucratic tact, w
as going to bring it up; it being the little matter of his good friend Ray’s unexpected personal involvement in Professor Duelle’s trifling domestic difficulty. It was something that really required an explanation if Tuttle didn’t want his operation going balky on him. Guinness didn’t have the slightest inclination to make it any easier for the son of a bitch.

  “How are things at your end, Ray?” The tone of voice, even allowing for distance and subsequent distortion, was just too unguarded to be real. Tuttle, the disingenuous bastard, of course he knew.

  “Why don’t you just guess, Ernie?”

  During the next interval of embarrassed silence, Guinness thought perhaps he heard a desk drawer being opened at the other end of the line. Perhaps Tuttle was turning off the tape recorder he invariably had running whenever he took a call on his office phone—Ernie was a very careful fellow these days.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said at last. “I felt rotten about it. It was Prescott’s idea; he likes doing that kind of thing to his field men, on the theory that that way he’ll know which way they’ll jump if it’s ever anything really important. Actually, if you ask me, he just likes to stick pins in people. He likes to hear them squeal.

  “Listen, Ray,” he went on, his voice dropping to a confidential murmur, as if he were afraid George Prescott, in his office three doors down, might hear. “I don’t know much, but it seems there are wheels within wheels on this one. Watch your step.”

  Guinness didn’t answer. He just hung up, standing there in the phone booth a moment longer, with his hand still on the receiver as it rested in its hook. He hadn’t issued any threats, hadn’t made any declarations of what he planned to do to certain parties the moment he got back to Washington. He hadn’t had to. If Ernie Tuttle knew anything, he knew that Ray Guinness wasn’t going to let this one ride. Some things were just a little too close to home.