The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

A little after nine-thirty, when the only people left at the long study tables were those few who had set up shop for the evening and would be there, huddled over their math books, until the closing bell rang, Guinness began reshelving his catalogs. At the last, stepping into a deserted alcove for cover, he stuffed the University of London in under his belt, pulled down the back of his nylon windbreaker to cover it, and walked out. It was the first directly criminal act of his life.

  For the next four years the catalog was his holy book, his sustenance. He read it over and over, until he had it practically memorized, until so many of the pages had come loose that it was necessary to keep it held together with a rubber band.

  His entire undergraduate program was based on a series of elaborate deductions about what the D.Phil. program would require in the way of prerequisites. Lots of languages, especially Latin, so Guinness took a double minor in Latin and German. French he cobbled together on his own, working from a copy of French for Reading Knowledge that he had picked up used from the Salvation Army store.

  Money, of course, was the real problem; it would take a lot of money. Seven thousand dollars would cover his passage and perhaps see him through as much as a year and a half, but how was he going to get his hands on seven thousand dollars? How else but the hard way?

  So it was a good thing he had stolen the catalog—over the next four years he had need of sustenance. After his freshman year the university somehow got wind of the fact that he was holding down a full time job and decided to regard him as in violation of the terms of his scholarship. It came down to a choice that was really no choice at all—give up the scholarship or give up the job. He gave up the scholarship.

  Hell, what did they expect? He couldn’t live, let alone save anything, on the money they gave him. They had even made him live in one of their damn dorms for the first year, even when he knew from experience that he could live on less on his own—he’d been doing it long enough.

  So for the next three years he worked full time and went to school full time, even during the summers. He took light loads, as few courses as he could without them yanking his tuition waiver, but it wasn’t often he managed more than five hours of sleep a night.

  And anything he could do to save back some money, he did it. Once he lived for a month off a thirty pound bag of rice he had picked up when the restaurant he was working for went out of business. Very economical if you don’t die of scurvy.

  So two weeks before he was due to show up at Russell Square to register for classes, Guinness quit his job as a packer with the Indianola Tool & Die Company, packed a bag, bought a bus ticket to New York and a tourist class seat on a BOAC flight to London, and was on his way.

  When he landed, he still had $5,720 in traveler’s checks—the goal of a $7,000 bankroll had just managed to elude him—and a little over $40 in cash. It was to last him for almost seventeen months, the best seventeen months of his life.

  A little over two weeks before he figured his money would run out completely, Guinness went to his embassy. They weren’t very sympathetic. The officer he eventually got to talk to, a puffy little man whose eyes seemed almost totally buried in his pink face, apparently entertained some permanent grievance against anyone who wasn’t suffering from hardening of the arteries. He peered at Guinness through his gold rimmed spectacles, loving every minute of giving him the bad news.

  “I am very sorry, Mr. Guinness, but I’m sure you can understand that there’s very little help we can offer you. Your difficulties about a work permit are entirely a matter between you and the British government. All we can do is advance you the money to book passage to New York, which of course you will be required to repay as soon as you can find employment there.”

  “Look,” Guinness wheezed, running the palm of his hand over his hair, “all I need is maybe a year in this country, one lousy year, and I can at least have my course work done and go home. Surely you must have enough drag to get me a work permit for that long.”

  The clerk frowned and shook his head. No he hadn’t that much drag, he said, implying that if he had he certainly wasn’t going to dissipate it on some punk of a college kid who had probably just blown his grant money buying an abortion for some skinny little peroxide blonde with bent teeth. Not him, no sir.

  He picked up a black plastic ballpoint pen from a desk set just at the corner of his leather rimmed blotting pad and began making precise, tiny notations in the margin of a page of typescript. “Good day, Mr. Guinness,” he went on, without bothering to lift his almost invisible eyes. “Come see us again when you have made up your mind to accept the assistance of your government and go home.”

  So that was that—the Great World was indifferent to his fate. Hardly a paralyzing surprise to one whose own mother had thrown him out of the house two days after his sixteenth birthday because, as she put it, she was sick of the sight of him and had her own life to lead.

  It was a cold day, and Guinness turned up his collar and thrust his fists deep into the pockets of his raincoat as he tramped angrily down the street toward an underground. As he walked, the fingers of his right hand began automatically counting out his change; it was something he had caught himself doing a lot lately.

  Just at the entrance to the underground he stopped for a second and then went round the corner and began moving quickly off in the other direction. Fuck it—he would walk home and save his money. He had the time.

  Fuck them all, every last fucking one of them. From his mother to the clowns at the Labour Ministry to this latest sleek little shithead, his fellow countryman. All the bureaucrats and the university administrators and the bosses who had paid him next to nothing simply because they knew he couldn’t do without the work, what he would give to have them all together in one place so he could put a bomb under them, except that at the moment he couldn’t afford the blasting powder.

  Oh how he had loved it, this place, this way of life that he would have to leave behind him now. In England he had been officially a gentleman; not just a grubby little college kid with dirt under his fingernails, but a gentleman. He had been just as poor as in Ohio, but what difference did that make? He had been working on an advanced degree in literature, which did not in this country mark you off forever as a constitutional failure. You could be a gentleman and poor in England. You could forget, at least while something wasn’t thrusting it in front of your eyes, that you were locked in combat with the whole human race. Perhaps that, in the end, was what undid you.

  Well, in two weeks he would be on his way home, and there he would have less trouble remembering.

  More for form’s sake than anything else, since he had gone through it all already, Guinness spent the last two weeks making the rounds of all the places he thought might hire him even without a work permit, but everywhere the answer was the same. Britain, it seemed, was in one of her cyclical recessions. We must all pull together and to hell with the bloody foreigner.

  Finally, when his money was almost gone and his room rent was due, he packed his suitcase and checked it in a locker at Paddington Station and moved out to continue his endless walk.

  After a while he wasn’t even looking for work anymore; he was just walking, trying to exhaust his demon. He pawned his raincoat—it was a dry day, hell, and he wouldn’t need it after they had thrown him out of England; anyway, he was sick of carrying it—and he walked. He walked all over the town: down to the Tower and then along the river as far as Chelsea, and then over near the Victoria and Albert Museum and then along the edge of Hyde Park and then down to Buckingham Palace and then up again to Oxford Street. He followed Oxford Street until he was sick of the crowds of evening shoppers.

  Finally he reversed his route, walking on into the night.

  And to a degree the program worked; hunger and cold began to replace bitterness, and to limit the horizons of his imagination to the next hundred yards of pavement, the next time he could dole himself out something to spend on food. He tried to see how long he could go withou
t feeling shaky.

  Toward morning it began to rain, and the rain made him stop walking. That was fatal. After a few hours of standing around under store awnings he capitulated and went into a tea shop.

  The tea was the cheapest thing on the menu, so he ordered a cup and sat down, thinking how restored he would feel after he had drunk it. But as he sat at the window and watched the rain he drank less and less. After all, what’s a little discomfort in the old GI tract compared to a good case of pneumonia?

  He sat there—weighing one evil against another and thinking how in a few hours he would have to turn himself over to the embassy for shipment home—for perhaps three quarters of an hour. The tea had long since ceased to make him anything except faintly nauseous when MI-6, in the soon to be familiar person of Mr. Byron J. Down, made its move.

  Guinness always liked ol’ Byron J. He was, indeed, a likable man, not the sort at all you would expect to be running a stable of assassins. He looked exactly like what in fact he had been before the war had given him the opportunity to discover where his real genius lay—a professor of linguistics, in fact a specialist in deep structure syntax with three degrees from Cambridge University.

  He must have been in his early fifties when Guinness first met him. A heavyset man with a placid, rather dreamy face set off by a pair of heavy, black rimmed glasses. His hair was brownish and thinning, and he never wore a hat, no matter what the weather, on the theory that the hatband would cut off the circulation in his scalp and hasten the balding process. He had a nice smile, ol’ Byron did, and he smiled it as he sat down at Guinness’s table and offered him a nice thick wedge of apple pie. He slid the plate across the table with the tips of his thumb and first finger, as if it weighed nothing.

  “Here you go, young man,” he said in a caressing voice. “You have a bit of that. You look done in.”

  Guinness glanced up at him suspiciously as he picked up the fork and started eating. His first thought was that the guy was probably a fairy on the hustle, but what the hell. He was starving and a slice of pie doesn’t bind you to anything. It hardly seemed an occasion in which to display one’s outraged manhood. That could wait on events.

  Down must have divined his thoughts—he had that knack—because the smile died.

  Neither one of them said anything for perhaps as long as five minutes. Guinness was being careful, famished though he was, not to rush through his pie. He tried to make each piece about the size of his thumbnail, and he chewed carefully. It was ice cold and lovely, even with that hideous lardy crust the British favor, but he didn’t want to appear to be enjoying it too much. Regardless of what Chubby had in mind, he didn’t care to appear too terribly hard up. It was bad psychology—people always want to kick you when you’re down.

  “There now,” Down began at last. “That’s better. You don’t look the sort of lad to go to the dogs from long standing habit.” The pleasant smile reappeared slowly, and Guinness thought he noticed the faintest trace of an Edinburgh burr stealing in behind the words. “And you don’t look the type to turn down an honest offer of employment—how would you like to make a round thousand quid all in one lump, hum? That would tide you over for a while, now wouldn’t it?”

  A little quick mental arithmetic made that out at about twenty-five hundred dollars. You could live a long time on that kind of money. Seven, maybe eight months if you were careful. Yes, Guinness would have to agree. Twenty¬ five hundred dollars would solve all of life’s immediate problems quite nicely.

  “Who do I have to kill?”

  For the next six years, until Down fell over dead from a heart attack in the billiard room of his club—it was a real heart attack; Guinness checked and Byron’s arteries were hard enough to pound through a tree—they always laughed about that unintentionally appropriate question.

  “Who do I have to kill?” It became a kind of in house joke.

  Poor ol’ Byron, dead and buried lo these many years.

  Very much alive for the moment, Down smiled even more broadly, made a little sound that came out about halfway between a cough and a chuckle, and patted the air between them with his palms to indicate things were going too fast.

  “You rush me; allow me to introduce myself.” He pulled his wallet from the inside pocket of his heavy slate gray jacket and produced an official looking card that identified the bearer as Major Thomas Cruttwell, placing it on the table in front of Guinness: Cruttwell, as it later turned out, was Down’s brother in law and the owner of several hop farms in Kent. The picture was right, though.

  What in God’s gracious name had put this dude on his tail? It was a question that plagued him vaguely until finally he asked Down over lunch in one of the series of squalid little government offices in which their business contacts were usually made.

  “Oh that,” he said abstractedly, holding his claret up to the light. “Well, you came very highly recommended.”

  It seemed that the man at the embassy who had interviewed Guinness was a member of Down’s London club. He had had such an amusing story about the young freeloader who had come to see him that morning; he was quite proud of the firmness he had shown.

  “Maybe it’ll help to shape him up when he realizes that the world isn’t his oyster.” And then he had laughed softly. “But when he left my office, he looked like he wanted to kill someone.”

  Down had done a little checking to discover whom the man had been talking about, and then a little more checking to satisfy himself as to just how hard up Guinness actually was, and then he had tracked him down.

  “It wasn’t easy.” Down took a tentative sip on his claret, made a face, and set it down on the desk. “What with that hike you set out on, you really ran my people ragged.”

  So that was how—a chance remark between two middle aged clubmen and the whole direction of his life was changed. No, that wasn’t fair. He had had some hand in changing it himself.

  Guinness slid the card in toward himself with the ball of his thumb and looked it over without picking it up from the table. After a few seconds he slid it back.

  “So big deal,” he said blankly. “You’re in the army. Are you after me to enlist?”

  “Not precisely.” Down’s smile compressed a little, becoming kinder and perhaps a trifle sad. He was used to dealing with frightened and desperate people, and the experience had given him compassion. “I haven’t actually been on active service since the end of the war. I have a position with the Home Office these days; it involves some aspects of military security—you might say that our interests have points of contact—but we tend to be emphatically civilian. I simply wish to identify myself to allay any suspicions you might have been harboring. There’s no question of smuggling or male prostitution, nothing like that. Would you care for some more tea?” he asked, his hand going up before Guinness had a chance to respond.

  “Waitress! “

  The girl was there in a second to take his order. That was another of Byron’s talents he had always envied.

  “But it is illegal,” Guinness said after she had come and gone. “Am I right? For that kind of money it just has to be illegal.”

  Down sifted about half a spoonful of sugar into his tea and set the spoon down on his napkin, where it left a pale tan stain. He looked genuinely surprised that so obvious a point should even be raised.

  “Naturally it’s illegal, but that isn’t the aspect of it that presents the difficulty.” He picked up his cup and set it back down again, untasted. “If it were merely illegal I could arrange to have it taken care of for a good deal less than a thousand pounds, I assure you. The world is knee deep in criminals.” He picked up his tea again, tasting it this time, and his eyes rested on its surface when he set it down. “I will concede, however, that it does involve an element of risk.”

  Now we come to it. Now we see where all the fancy patter has been leading. The man was beautiful m his way; he made it all sound so devastatingly simple.

  “How much risk?”

 
; “Considerable. Why? Does it matter?” Down’s eyes were steady on his own now, as if the question were a challenge. Which, of course, it was. Guinness simply smiled, eventually forcing a smile from Down.

  “It depends.”

  “Look, young man,” Down began, in the manner of someone making an incontrovertibly obvious statement, “we have been watching you very carefully since you were brought to our attention. We have checked into your background, and I mean from the day you were born; research is one of our strong points. And you look the type to do the kind of work we have in mind, and believe me when I tell you that we know the type.”

  He picked up his cup again, and his manner seemed to soften with his voice.

  “Besides, I have an idea you’d like to stay in this country. You came over here to study, didn’t you? Well, we can see to that.”

  “Just exactly what was it you had in mind?”

  Down smiled his magic smile again and reached over to pat Guinness on the arm.

  “That’s the lad.”

  The rain had let up for a while by the time Guinness paid his check and left. Down, who was a good psychologist and knew that starvation is the handmaiden of fear, had given him two one pound notes so he could think things over on a full stomach. Two pounds—just enough to keep him comfortable through tomorrow, but not enough to fill him with unreasonable hope. Well, he wasn’t going to waste them on little cream cakes and watery tea. He felt the need of some protein and had plans with reference to something like a chophouse.

  Down had made it sound like the most obvious thing in the world, just the sort of thing any well brought up young American would do in an instant if he suddenly needed a few bills to tide him over. Facilis descensus Averno.

  “There is a man who for various reasons which need not greatly concern you has made himself objectionable to a certain department of Her Majesty’s government. We would in fact, as you so cleverly divined, like you to kill him for us.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Young man, I never kid about such matters.”