Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  The dining room was nearly empty, just two other couples in a space the size of a Baptist tabernacle, and the air conditioning set too high. Guinness felt cold and lonely, a mood that had been chasing him all day, and experienced that sense of futility peculiar to large meals eaten in solitude. He always seemed to be eating alone; food robbed of its social function struck him suddenly as useless, tasteless, nothing more than the grossest biological necessity. Always meals by himself.

  Except, of course, when he was having lunch with Holman Duelle, setting the poor bastard up for the kill. “Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies.”

  . . . . .

  “Can we really afford all this?” she had asked, pressing her head against his shoulder as her arm twisted around his own until the fingers, obedient to the habits of intimacy, hooked inside his jacket pocket. Not really such an absurd question, even if he hadn’t really expected it from her—since when did Kathleen pay enough attention to the world outside to notice the prices of restaurants? But then, it was common knowledge that you didn’t get rich teaching literature and European history to sixth formers.

  Guinness, however, was very flush at the moment, having at his disposal still some eight hundred pounds of untaxable income—“Don’t even bother to declare it, my boy,” Byron had said, very early on in the history of their relationship; “Her Majesty’s government doesn’t want to be embarrassed with explanations of what you did to get it”—and he didn’t see any good reason not to blow twenty or thirty on their wedding feast. What the hell, it was an occasion.

  Kathleen, of course, hadn’t an inkling as yet about the character of his second income. That didn’t come until much later. After all, he did the banking; even when her allowance checks came from her father, she simply signed them over to Guinness. If their style of life was a little better than could be accounted for by his salary, maybe she thought he was helping himself liberally to hers. Did it matter?

  “Relax.”

  He kissed her on the forehead, just at the hairline, and let his eyes follow the headwaiter as he returned to his little desk from seating another couple. The fellow was dressed in an immaculate tuxedo with braided edging down the faces of the lapels and around the ends of the sleeves, from which the white cuffs of his shirt stuck out a good two inches. A terrifying apparition, the source of whose power was his capacity to suggest that you had no business in this his holy of holies. He had a continental figure, slim almost to the point of deformity; probably an Italian. In a place like this you would feel cheated if everyone didn’t speak with an accent.

  When he came close enough to inquire if they had a reservation, Guinness noticed that the man’s collar was wrinkled and slightly soiled, suggesting that he probably hadn’t changed it for several evenings. It made you feel better almost at once.

  It was a lovely meal. Starched white tablecloths, candles, little arrangements of flowers, napkins the size of army blankets. Squab and wild rice and a bottle of some wonderful, fruity red wine the name of which they were subsequently never able to remember.

  And Kathleen? God! The light would catch in her hair when she laughed, filling him with wonder that anything so beautiful could ever be his. He was lucky, incredibly and inexplicably lucky. The world had suddenly opened itself to him, offering him more than he could ever have imagined. And tonight he would sleep surrounded by the warm, sweet smell of her body, feeling her breath, slow and heavy, on his arm.

  . . . . .

  The waitress brought him his slice of roast beef, on the same plate with a baked potato tightly cradled in aluminum foil—precisely as advertised. Guinness stared at it for a moment, as if he couldn’t immediately recall what it was doing there, and then cut open the skin with a vicious slash of his steak knife.

  12

  Having only just kicked off his shoes, Guinness was sitting on his motel room bed, a can of ginger ale from the machine near the stairwell on the night table, reading a paperback edition of the poems of Andrew Marvell, when the phone rang.

  “The wanton troopers riding by,” one, “Have shot my fawn and it will die,” two—he was supposed to be asleep, so let it ring a few times. “Ungentle men!” In the middle of the third ring, he pulled the receiver off the hook, put the mouthpiece up by his nose so that his voice would have the proper reedy quality, and gasped out his single syllable of interrogative.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mr. McAffee? Is that you?”

  It was Duelle, predictably. Duelle would be the bait to which they would think he could be expected to rise.

  “It’s after one o’clock in the goddamn morning—who is this?”

  “It’s Holman Duelle, Mr. McAffee”—he seemed genuinely surprised at the question—”I have to talk to you, right away. It’s very important.”

  “So talk. I’m listening.” Guinness didn’t see any reason to make it easy on the bastard. Besides, if he came on too willing, Duelle’s friends, who might very well be smarter than their poor tool, would probably smell a setup. It was that kind of a world, unfortunately.

  “It’s not the sort of thing I think I should discuss over the phone, Mr. McAffee.”

  It never was when they wanted to maneuver you off into some dark corner where they could drop a net over you at their leisure. Guinness frowned and closed his book; the periwigged Mr. Marvell, poet and Member of Parliament for the Hull Corporation, patriot and—so scholarly conjecture went—Dutch secret agent during the reign of Charles II, stared up at him from the front cover, with pursed lips and large, intelligent eyes.

  “Very well, Professor Duelle,” he answered slowly, turning the book facedown so that the poet of Cromwell’s “wiser art” wouldn’t have to witness the meanness to which the strategies of entrapment had been reduced. “In your office, in one hour.”

  He hung up before Duelle had any chance to reply. After all, he wasn’t honor bound to spot them any points; if they could issue the challenge, he at least could name the time and the place. That much life insurance he could buy for himself.

  One hour. Now, if he were a nice tame FBI agent, he would probably drive over there in about forty-five minutes, park in the lot next to the library, and walk right in the front door. They might even be expecting him to do that, provided they still believed in the goods as advertised. Provided they hadn’t lost their childlike faith in identity cards and badge numbers and the fingerprints they would have lifted by now, if they were worth a tinker’s damn, from the silverware he had used at breakfast yesterday or the sides of the empty Sprite can that had been lying in his wastepaper basket since the afternoon he arrived. By now they would have gotten confirmation from their moles in D.C., and everything would have underwritten the authenticity of Inspector Peter McAffee, the right hand of God and law enforcement officer extraordinaire.

  Provided they were that dumb. But you never knew. Flycatcher, in his way, was the best in the business; that, however, didn’t guarantee the competence of the people he would have working for him on this one. The day laborers of espionage and terrorism were generally a pretty seedy lot.

  It was his strength and his weakness. Right now, while the roof was caving in on his whole operation, where was Flycatcher? In Kansas City, or Beirut perhaps—far too far away to prop up the center beam and maybe salvage a little something from all his effort. And too, far too far away to get caught.

  There was money behind our boy. Just precisely whose and how much was an open question, but it was there. It took a lot of bread to mount one of these numbers. Probably Flycatcher could afford to write this one off, and then he would live to play another day.

  Or maybe not. Maybe Guinness would be able to shake something loose that would suggest where the tall, skinny dude with the whitish blond hair had taken himself off to. Maybe it would finally be Flycatcher’s turn. Guinness hoped so. It would give him immense personal satisfaction to put a pill in the son of a bitch.

  He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and started t
o put his shoes back on, lacing them up slowly, as if each step in the process were an urgent demand on his attention. He took the five shot .38 from the drawer in the night table, flipped open the magazine to see that it was loaded before slipping it into the waistband of his trousers—pure force of habit, that; when would it have been unloaded since the day before yesterday?—and took a final sip from his can of ginger ale.

  . . . . .

  There were some tennis courts just at the edge of the campus, behind a complex of dormitories in which here and there a window or two still was visible, sharp little oblongs of yellowish light that no more illuminated the surrounding darkness than if they had been sheets of pale stone. Guinness left his car across the street, under a clump of trees that separated an Esso station from the row of tiny houses that stretched dimly out beyond his field of sight.

  He circled away from the front entrance to the university, picking a walkway behind and about a block down from the dormitories and staying in the shadows of buildings. There were always security police, and he didn’t want anyone turning in reports of prowlers. It was the long way to where he was going, but that didn’t matter; he had over forty-five minutes before he was due to arrive, and he didn’t want to get there too early. Let the others arrive first, so he wouldn’t be stumbling over them in the black of night. He wished he had better night vision; his mother should have fed him more carrots when he was a kid.

  Nearly a quarter after one, and the air was as thick and heavy as the steam from a saucepan of cooking oatmeal. The perspiration was running in two little trickles down either side of his spine, under the dark sweater he had put on to keep his shirtfront from picking up the light. He felt as if he had put on a hundred pounds since the six o’clock news.

  But it wasn’t all bad—at this temperature the bugs were making enough noise to have covered the footfalls of a battalion. What was it Kathleen had called them? Cicada. A sound like the splintering of glass.

  It gave him the creeps. Crickets were one thing. On summer nights, even in London, you could listen to the crickets; but they never made a noise like the sexual ecstasies of high tension wires. Crickets were a genuine pleasure, one of the institutions of civilized life. One night, when the two of them had been spending the weekend at an inn just on the outskirts of Windsor, what a racket the damned things had made! He had opened the window, and Kathleen. . .

  Guinness pushed the recollection from his mind, suspecting that the less he thought about Kathleen the better. Sentiment impairs efficiency.

  Having gotten past the dormitories, he worked his cautious way through a nest of newish buildings until he was behind a dark wooden structure that he recognized as the Calhoun mansion—a hell of a ramshackle establishment for a man who had once, back in the days of satin knee breeches and single shot dueling pistols, been vice president of these United States. He had peeked inside the afternoon before, but it had seemed empty and barnlike and inhospitable so he hadn’t gotten further than the front entrance. Empty rooms that echo as you walk over their bare floors aren’t particularly good for the mental health.

  The engineering building was only a stone’s throw, literally a stone’s throw, not more than three or four hundred feet, and as he watched, Guinness saw the light behind Duelle’s office window pop on. They must have hurried from wherever it was they had hatched this little idea—probably that hideous movie house, that sacred citadel of the grade-B action flick. Best to give them a few minutes to settle down, to get over checking doorways and elevator shafts and anxiously pacing the halls. Guinness sat down on the grass, which was remarkably dry, concealed in the black shadow of an oak tree—under which a Thomas Clemson younger than the one whose bronze icon brooded in the shade of his consecrated grove, stained with disillusionment and pigeon shit, might have wooed the eminent statesman’s fluttering daughter—and considered how he should play the next scene.

  Doubtless a door would be left unlocked; they would want him to find his own way up, so they could jump him at their convenience around the corner from the elevator, or in the men’s room, or at any one of the thousand other perfect ambushes the insides of office buildings seemed designed to provide. They wouldn’t send Duelle down to meet him at the entrance—if they had any brains, they wouldn’t trust Duelle not to give the show away.

  He wasn’t particularly worried that they would shoot him or anything like that, not right away. The idea was to establish Duelle’s credit, not to hang a murder on him, and it was harder to clean up after a thing like that than people imagined. No, they wouldn’t want any blood on the lobby carpet or unexplained holes in the woodwork. The disappearance of a federal agent would bring down no end of heat, and there couldn’t be anything to connect it with Duelle. Guinness knew they would have to keep him alive until they could take him to some quiet little spot in the forest primeval and settle their business there. A bullet between the eyebrows and a shallow grave and their troubles would be over; he might not be found for years—if ever. No, they wouldn’t do it anywhere near their precious lad. Guinness was counting on that, figuring that would be what was going to keep him alive.

  If he were wrong, of course, then it would be the shallow grave and the third eye. He sat on the grass, listening to the cicada, trying to imagine that he might be dead in two or three hours. The most terrible part of it, he decided, was the lack of anything more than a faint uneasiness, as if it were a dental appointment. It would have been worth something to be really, genuinely afraid; he remembered Willie Trowbridge, by now doubtless under the coroner’s knife, and Guinness experienced something that might almost have been described as a surge of envy. Willie Trowbridge, at least, had wanted to stay alive. In his own case—Guinness couldn’t have said with any conviction just how he felt. That in itself was disturbing.

  Needless to say, however, the discovery of this ambivalence wasn’t much of a surprise; it had been this way for a little better than a year now, ever since the death of his second wife.

  Damn Mischa Fedorovich Vlasov, whose corpse at that moment really did, in point of fact, lie in some shallow and unmarked grave, probably under a pile of rubble at the bottom of a deserted mine shaft—Ernie Tuttle, who had dealt with the problem of disposal, had indicated it was something like that. Damn Vlasov! Guinness hated his dead guts for the mess he had made of things.

  Not for having killed his wife, of course—he was hardly in a position to resent that—but for not having given him the opportunity to mourn, to say the decent good bye that Louise had had coming. No, thanks to Vlasov, he had had first to think simply of staying alive, so there had been no chance. And then, when it was over and Vlasov was dead and there was all the time in the world, then it had been too late. You can get used to anything, and, if held too long in abeyance, the emotions can become blunted with disuse. That was what had happened, apparently. He would go to visit the vault in Colma where she occupied a place in the second tier of the south wall, and he would find himself trying to pantomime a sorrow and sense of loss that really wasn’t there.

  Finally he had given it up, and then Ernie Tuttle’s armies of psychiatrists had pushed him into the revolving door of tranquilizers and antidepressants and some little yellow tablets shaped like pillows that were supposed to keep you from losing touch with reality. He had finally simply refused to take anything more, or to discuss any further with the nice middle aged man with the pointed beard how he had felt about his teacher in the third grade—it was none of his business—and had asked to be put to work. That was what they wanted from him, that he should go out and blow people away for them, so that was what he had been doing for the last seven or eight months (sometimes he had trouble remembering how long; it seemed like forever, like a continuum with what he had done for the British all those years ago, like the time in between hadn’t existed at all), tracking people down and killing them, as dispassionately as a man might chop wood.

  So it wasn’t an urgent matter if he happened to have guessed wrong this time. Th
ere was, of course, the technical problem—each job was at least that, a technical problem to be recognized and overcome, a mingling of the esthetic and the mechanical—and he would like to have everything work out with a pleasing tidiness. Such a solution would require that he survived, since it can’t very well stand as a resounding triumph if they knocked you over in the process; so maybe life hadn’t become quite the matter of indifference he pretended to himself. Maybe he was simply confusing the instinct for survival with professional pride; the soul was clever enough for that.

  He looked at his watch, the hands barely visible as he turned his wrist a few degrees at a time, trying to catch some tiny glint of light from a streetlamp a good seventy or eighty feet away. It was 1:40, still half an hour before his appointment. For the next ten or fifteen minutes they would be relaxed and off their guard. After all, they weren’t being set up for anything; there had been no ambush waiting for them when they had arrived, and they had had time to make sure of their ground. So they would expect him to keep to his schedule. They wouldn’t be looking for him yet. In their minds he was already their prisoner and they would be thinking beyond, to what they would do with him once he had walked into their little trap. The goons of this world were always so touchingly naive.

  The front door, of course, would be the one they would leave open. From Duelle’s office window they would be able to keep track of the front door, and they wouldn’t dare post a guard—their prize pigeon might see something and flutter off, and they wouldn’t have a second chance. So they would stake everything on being able to take him once he was inside the building.

  Could he get to the front door without being seen? Yes, he thought so; if he came around from the west side of the building, from the direction of the library, and stayed very close to the wall. They would know they had a blind spot, but they wouldn’t expect him to come that way. Still, they probably wouldn’t smell a rat, if, say, the elevator bell rang to indicate his arrival and they hadn’t seen him. A man who had it in mind to pull a fast one wouldn’t use a goddamn elevator. Elevators make entirely too much noise for that.