Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  24

  It was raining in Atlanta, had rained hard all that night and morning and on into the middle of the afternoon, breaking the heat and making it possible to breathe again. Guinness stood before one of the huge observation windows at the airport terminal and watched the planes moving about—tentatively, as if governed by some ponderous and only dimly comprehended etiquette—on the glittering tarmac.

  The American Airlines flight to Seattle wouldn’t leave for another ten minutes. He hadn’t gone out to wait with them in the passengers’ lounge; they didn’t let you do that kind of thing anymore and, really, he didn’t much feel like any protracted good byes. Everything that needed to be said had been, so there wasn’t any point.

  . . . . .

  “You’re getting heavy—you know that, don’t you?” He had been carrying her for about twenty minutes, and his arms were almost ready to give out. Besides, she had stopped crying, and it wasn’t going to do her any good to let her nurse her helplessness. “Think you can walk?”

  So they walked. They would follow the road—it was pitch black out—and then double back to his car when they reached the fork. Rocky held his hand the whole way, saying very little and staying as close to him as she could.

  She was in pretty good shape, considering. All the guy had done was twist her arm, which is painful enough and pretty scary when you begin to think it’s going to pop out of its socket, but not the worst thing that could have happened to her. She would have some pretty gaudy bruises around the shoulder for a couple of weeks, but that was all. Someone with more imagination might have crippled her for life.

  On the drive home, she sat pressed up against his side, and he allowed himself the luxury of putting his arm around her. She must have been exhausted, because she had fallen asleep by the time they were back in Clemson.

  It was a quarter to nine before he stopped in front of the house on Strawberry Lane—and, oh, the hullabaloo! Kathleen was almost to the bottom of the walkway before he had even taken the key out of the ignition, hungrily gathering up her child as soon as Guinness would let her. She was almost wild, almost struggling with him for possession.

  “Relax, Katey. She’s just fine,” he snapped, irritated by her wresting their daughter from him, as if it were from him that she needed to be protected, and he was too weary not to show it.

  “Don’t bother putting her to bed; I’m taking the both of you out of here, tonight. You’ve got two hours to pack.”

  She stared at him for a few seconds and then, seeming finally to have understood, carried Rocky with her into the house. Guinness followed, feeling curiously dejected. Probably that was just lack of sleep and the sudden relaxation of strain. His emotional life was already too complicated to make any other explanation either practical or particularly alluring.

  He found Duelle sitting in his study, perhaps tactfully wishing to keep from intruding himself into matters that he no longer took to be any of his business. Guinness knew exactly how he felt.

  “She’s fine,” he said, smiling wanly. Duelle seemed to appreciate the intelligence. “I’m taking them away with me; we’ll leave in an hour or so.”

  They talked for a few minutes, quite cordially, precisely as if their relationship had never been anything extraordinary. They were simply two civilized men, trying to get through an awkward moment.

  “I have a few calls to make, and I think it would be better for you if you didn’t hear them.”

  Duelle nodded and went out into the living room, closing the door behind him, leaving Guinness alone to consider how odd it was that every shred of the jealousy and hatred, even the contempt he had felt for Kathleen’s errant second husband, had simply evaporated. Poor slob, he wouldn’t have won any prizes, but he wasn’t such a bad sort, and the world was filled with worse men—probably, by any objective standard, he was a worse man himself—and, God knows, Duelle had paid and would go on paying for whatever he had done. Firbank and Healy, and all the rest of them, they would never let him out of their clutches.

  He picked up the phone and dialed the number of Firbank’s safe house. As before, the call was answered on the first ring.

  “Everything go okay?”

  Guinness indicated that it had. “You can cut your little charge loose now. I’ll phone his old man and tell him to look in front of the Dairy Queen. You know where that is? Buy the kid an ice cream cone.”

  Firbank laughed.

  “His mother won’t like it, though; I’ve fed the little monster enough junk food today to justify purchasing some stock in a few relevant companies. We went to the movies in Greenville; we just got back. You know they’re still running Star Wars down here?”

  No, Guinness hadn’t known that, and really didn’t much care either.

  “Will you be going back to the motel after you drop him off?” Yes, Firbank thought he might. “Then would you mind breaking into my room and throwing my stuff back in my suitcase? I can pick it up in the lobby when I pay my bill; I want to get away from here as fast as I can. How much lead time do you want with Healy—I don’t suppose you’d be too pleased about bumping into him out in the parking lot.”

  Firbank suggested something on the order of ten minutes, and Guinness hung up the phone, looking down at his trousers and sport coat. They were filthy; the clerk at the Holiday Inn would probably think he’d been out rolling in the mud. Well, it didn’t matter. He could change in a filling station rest room somewhere along the way.

  He waited the prescribed period of time and then phoned Healy, who was still at his office. In the background you could hear the sound track of what might have been World War II with the original cast.

  They had a lot to discuss, as it turned out. Guinness checked his watch when they were finished, and it was 9:20.

  For over an hour, until Kathleen came in to tell him they were ready to leave, he simply sat in the chair behind Duelle’s desk, not really sure whether he was asleep or awake. It seemed to him that he was awake, but he couldn’t be sure. He kept seeing the man back at the camper, the last one of the three, the one who had tried to force his way out with Rocky as a hostage, he kept seeing him die, over and over again, falling backwards, leaving a long smear of blood down the corrugated aluminum siding. Over and over again. . .

  He never saw Duelle when they left. He too had become a kind of ghost, haunting a few rooms here and in the back of Guinness’s mind. On the way down to Atlanta, with Rocky asleep in her mother’s lap and the windshield wipers slapping out little wedges from the rain that had begun almost immediately after they left, Kathleen expressed something like indignation that her husband should have gotten off so lightly, that he had been allowed to escape merely because someone had decided it would be more expedient.

  “What makes you think he’s escaped anything?”

  “What can you possibly mean?” she had replied, with what seemed like an about equal mixture of impatience and curiosity. “He has gotten off, hasn’t he? He won’t have to go to prison—he won’t even lose his precious job!”

  Guinness shook his head, a little sadly.

  “One of these nights,” he began, “he’ll be driving alone somewhere, on his way to meet someone—it’ll be a big emergency of some kind, it nearly always is—and a car will pull up beside him on an inside lane, and the window will roll down, and maybe he’ll have a few seconds, not enough time to do anything to save himself of course, during which he’ll be able to see what’s coming. And the next morning the state police will find him slumped over his wheel, piled up in a ditch between nowhere and nothing, and the buckshot will have done such a good job on his face that they’ll have to identify him from his fingerprints.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  Without even looking, he could see the shudder passing through her. He nodded.

  “I won’t argue with you about that.”

  He reached over to flick on the defroster; with three people inside, the car windows steamed over pretty quickly.

&nbs
p; “But it’s going to happen. Healy will sell him to someone, some one or another of the Russian or Chinese client nations, or maybe even the Israelis or the French—when it comes to any of the secrets that are worth keeping, nobody has any allies—and for a while the Americans will use him as a pipeline for all the things that aren’t true that they want believed, and then one of two things will happen.

  “Either something he slips them will come up a ringer, because it doesn’t check with information from other sources, or he’ll do something himself that will force them to the conclusion that he’s a plant.

  “I’m inclined to think it’ll be the latter; there aren’t very many people clever enough or tough enough to pull that sort of thing off for very long, and I don’t think Duelle’s one of them. He just doesn’t have the nerves for this kind of work, and I think he knows that. I shouldn’t be surprised if he realizes that he’s in for it. He’s not a total jug head, you know. I’d give him six months, at the outside.”

  For a long time neither one of them said anything. Guinness watched the water shimmering on the highway and tried to keep track of the lane markers; he had almost forgotten about Duelle and his problems when Kathleen turned to him, and there were tears shining in her eyes.

  “It’s all so ugly,” she said. Her voice was choked with a sorrow that seemed to encompass more than just the one little circle of people she might care about.

  “Yes, it is.”

  They stayed the night at a hotel near the airport, and he ordered adjoining rooms. He left the door between them open; he didn’t want them out of his sight until they had boarded their plane and would be out of his life forever. He wanted to preserve a little longer the illusion that they were a family.

  That night was the first opportunity he’d had to take a shower in he didn’t know how long—there would have been time, but somehow he had felt disinclined to in Duelle’s house; the idea struck him as faintly repulsive—and it felt so marvelous that he almost went to sleep under the warm water.

  When he was finished, he put on his pajamas and his bathrobe and went into the other bedroom, where Rocky was already fast asleep, apparently untroubled by frightening dreams. He stood a little way off, not wanting to wake her by sitting on the bed or throwing a shadow across her face, and simply looked at her, remembering what she had been like as a baby, remembering what they had all been like then.

  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Kathleen had come up beside him from where she had been sitting, brushing out her hair for the night, and slipped her arm through his. Guinness didn’t answer her. It wasn’t the sort of thing you needed to answer; it wasn’t the sort of thing you could. It was a truth as self evident as any axiom in Euclid. He simply covered her hand with his own, where it rested on his arm.

  “You’re a hero, did you know that?” There was just a hint of playful mockery in her voice. “You are, too. You’re the Lone Ranger and Sir Galahad, all rolled up into one. She thinks you’re the most tremendous thing since sliced bread, even better than Robert Redford.”

  “Then she has an odd taste in heroes,” he said dryly. “Perhaps she didn’t think to tell you—I killed three men getting her back.”

  “Was it three? Well, perhaps that’ll make it even better, more spectacular. Perhaps that’s what it means, being a hero.”

  He took his hand away, and the contact between them dropped apart. He didn’t look at her, didn’t even blame her, really; perhaps she was even right. What it amounted to, how he felt, was nothing more than a refusal to be ashamed.

  “Don’t argue with the results, Kathleen.” He jammed his fists down into the pockets of his bathrobe, but his voice was perfectly even. “It came down to a choice between them and her. It always does in these affairs; the sort of people who go in for kidnapping generally know they’re playing for keeps, or at least they should. I don’t suppose you would have preferred the other solution.”

  He looked down at the tiny sleeping figure—as when she had been a baby, it was her smallness that he found ceaselessly surprising—and he knew that he didn’t care whether he had been right or not. He had read once that most men would prefer the deaths of ten thousand Chinese to the loss of their own little fingertip—assuming, of course, that they weren’t themselves Chinese—and he believed it, even appreciated the logic of it. The men he had killed didn’t bother his conscience. He would remember them with a certain amount of psychological discomfort, no doubt, but without regret that he had killed them. They were no loss to anyone, but even that wasn’t really the point. The point was that innocence didn’t matter. He would have killed the Healy boy if that was what it would have taken. He wasn’t an avenging angel. He had simply done what had to be done, and he would leave the measuring of right and wrong to the theologians.

  It was late at night, and he was tired and irritable as a result. He had spent the day dickering with hooligans and lying in the mud getting shot at. Somehow it seemed perfectly pointless to stand there arguing with his ex-wife over the appropriateness of a nine year old’s version of heroism.

  What the hell, they were both glad that Rocky was still alive, and Kathleen was entitled, if it pleased her, to be of two minds about Raymond M. Guinness and the ethical status of his methods.

  “I’m going to bed,” he announced. “You needn’t leave a call; we can all sleep late tomorrow, especially Rocky. She’s had a rough time today, rougher than you’ll ever know.” He turned around and walked through the door into his own room, without looking back.

  But the next morning was wonderful. At about ten thirty, they all went down to the hotel coffee shop and had an enormous breakfast—little patties of ground sausage, French toast, three kinds of syrup, the unheard of luxury of fresh squeezed orange juice. Rocky insisted on sitting next to Guinness and spent a good part of the time giggling and flirting, all the horrors of the previous day, apparently, having been forgotten.

  Kathleen, although she smiled and said nothing, didn’t seem to approve—not of her daughter’s interest in Guinness, but of her being so unimpressed by what had happened to her. She kept glancing at her daughter, as if all the brightness and the charm, the obliviousness, were somehow dangerous and sinister signs. Perhaps it offended her moral sense that this extension of herself wasn’t more shaken.

  Guinness, however, wasn’t worried; he was delighted. If Rocky turned out to be a callous little bitch, so much the better for her. If she was able to forget, to bury the whole gruesome business in the vast carelessness of childhood, then let her forget.

  It would have been nice to have taken a walk afterwards, but the rain was still smoking off the sidewalks; you could have thought it was August in Borneo. So they stayed inside, sitting in the lobby rather than going back up to their rooms. Guinness bought a pack of cards from the gift shop, and his daughter taught him how to play fish.

  Finally Rocky had to go to the ladies’ room and Guinness and Kathleen were left alone for a few minutes. It was something that both of them, probably, had been dreading.

  It would have been impossible for the two of them to sit quietly and talk like strangers about the lousy weather, or the likelihood of the plane having a decent movie, so there seemed no way of evading the burden of intimacy.

  At first the silence was dreadful; Kathleen fiddling with the fingers of a pair of gloves, like a penitent waiting for the confessional to be empty.

  “I’m sorry about last night,” she said finally, and when Guinness made a little gesture of dismissal she shook her head, still looking down at her gloves, her lips pressed together in a tight little line.

  “No, I didn’t have any right to—. It was true what you said; I didn’t have any business criticizing. I didn’t even mind that you’d killed those men—I suppose I even wanted them dead. I don’t know what possessed me to act that way.”

  And she turned her head away. She might even have been crying. There wasn’t really any way to know; her eyes were dry when she looked back at him, but what did t
hat mean?

  Guinness reached over and squeezed her hand.

  “Don’t worry about it, Katey. You don’t like to see her admiring me for the way I blow people’s heads off; that’s not something you have to feel bad about. I don’t think even Rocky would be too thrilled if she knew what you know, that I do that kind of thing on a regular basis. I don’t kid myself that there’s anything admirable about it.

  “But don’t give it a second thought—in two months she won’t even be sure anymore that it really happened. It’ll get confused in her mind with reruns of ‘Kojak,’ and she won’t even remember what I look like.”

  “I don’t think so.” She shook her head again in that determined, positive way of hers, her claim to higher moral truth. “And I’m not even sure I would want her to.”

  Guinness watched her resigned smile and continued to hold her hand, and experienced a small thrill of dread.

  “You see,” she continued, fully conscious of the irony of the thing, “it’s a trade off. She has something now she didn’t have before, something I’d always known she’d needed and simply wasn’t able to let her have—Holman wasn’t of any use, even though I suppose he tried. But now she has you. She knows that you’re her father.”

  Kathleen waved her hand for silence, although Guinness couldn’t imagine what he would have said.

  “I didn’t tell her, if that’s what you’re thinking—I didn’t have to. She’s a bright kid, Ray. Bright enough to have figured out that her mother wasn’t being entirely candid with her. I suppose I should have guessed she’d have sense enough to know you wouldn’t have gone out after her like that, and done what you did, just because poor little Katey Duelle was an old flame. It was her father who saved her life—and now she has her white knight. She’ll remember you till the day she dies, and I’m happy for her. She needed a man in her life, someone whose love she could trust, and now she’s got you.”