The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  “Who is he?”

  “For the moment that needn’t concern you either. You’ll be told everything you need to know if you decide to take the job, and until then the less you know the better. You should, however, in all fairness be warned that he is very dangerous; it won’t be at all like robbing little girls of their sweet shop money. It will require planning and intelligence.”

  Down sipped his tea as calmly as if he were discussing Georgian furniture. “You will, of course, be paid in advance, and you will have five days, no more, in which to do the job.”

  “What would keep me from just taking the money and cutting out?”

  Down’s eyes narrowed. No, he wasn’t kidding. And, no, he wasn’t discussing Georgian furniture.

  “Young man, I have very unpleasant friends all over the world, any one of whom would do a number on you just as a professional courtesy. It’s a kind of rule we have: Human life isn’t worth very much, almost nothing in fact, but money is sacred. Everyone has to get full value. If you have any notions of doing a flit, I suggest you just forget them. As I said, research is one of our strong points—we’re frightfully good at finding people.”

  So there it was. He was given a telephone number to call if he decided to go through with it, and he had until eight the next morning to decide.

  “Don’t be shy, lad. You just call any time you like. I live alone and I’m a light sleeper.”

  The sky was still the color of mud and looked like it might break loose again any second, so Guinness made his way back to the shop where he had pawned his coat and redeemed it for six and six. He also stopped in at a chemist and bought a razor for half a crown. There was no reason he should go around looking like a vagrant, even if he was one. In the men’s room of one of the big department stores on Oxford Street he used wads of paper towels to give himself a kind of sponge bath from the waist up, and he used the liquid soap from the dispenser over the washstand to shave with. It was the most uncomfortable shave of his life, and his face itched like the devil for an hour afterward, but at least he looked decent. He could walk into a restaurant without the waiter automatically trying to pitch him out onto the sidewalk.

  Dinner consisted of a fried cutlet and fried potatoes, with surrealistically green peas. He had heard someone say once that the English used baking soda in their cooking water to get their vegetables that color, but who cared. What with the tip, he was left with about three and a half shillings; he wouldn’t even try to find a place to sleep for that.

  To kill a man, Jesus. Could he do that? Was it possible to just walk up to some guy you didn’t even know, and then simply kill him?

  Yes, he thought so. He could plan it out and do it—it might even be sort of fun. Merely the idea of it excited him. And he could use the money—that much money would take care of everything. All he had to do was to pull it off—and survive—and he could have everything he wanted. Presented to him, for once, on a silver platter.

  But to kill a man. He didn’t know, he just didn’t know.

  The food made him realize how long it had been since he had slept. Walking around afterward, he felt as if his arms and legs were in iron braces and his head were stuffed with cottage cheese. He had to find a place to lie down.

  A few short blocks took him down to the Thames. It was a nice part of the city, and the retaining walls under which the river could be heard rustling by were lined with benches. He picked one and lay down, throwing the curve of his arm over his eyes. He was asleep almost instantly.

  How long was he out? He couldn’t say precisely, but it was pitch black when he was awakened by something tapping on the side of his skull. It was a night stick, the other end of which was attached to a policeman who in the dim penumbra of his flashlight beam looked about fifteen feet tall. He had a pencil line mustache; that was all that made him human.

  “Come on, now,” came a murmur in heavy cockney. “You can’t sleep ‘ere. These benches isn’t for sleepin’ on. The river ain’t no hotel.”

  Guinness worked himself up into a sitting position. The cop had been reduced by then to nearly a human scale.

  “Come on, now. You move off down the way there, and be about your business. Come on, now.”

  Without speaking, too tired to be anything but obedient, Guinness submitted to the Law’s womanish nagging and began to shuffle off. He stayed by the river until he was sure the cop was out of sight, and then sat down again on another bench. He was awake enough now to be angry.

  He didn’t have any business to be about, that was the thing. He couldn’t just keep on walking forever. He had to help himself somehow—he had a right to do that much.

  Fully awake now, he continued on the bench for perhaps five minutes more as his anger and his despair ran together and hardened into a single idea.

  Yes he did. He had business to be about. Yes, by God, it was time he was about his business. With a vengeance he’d be about his business.

  Outside a pub that was closed for the night he found a telephone booth.

  “Major?”

  “Yes? Who is this?” The voice at the other end of the line didn’t sound like that of a light sleeper.

  “Major, I’m signing on.”

  4

  According to the single spaced, typewritten instructions he had received with his money, the Victim Elect’s name was Hornbeck. Peter W. Hornbeck. Five feet eleven, one hundred and sixty-five pounds, dark brown hair, brown eyes. Age, forty-seven. Never married but no known homosexual tendencies. Address: 23 Ellerslie Road, Shepherd’s Bush—a respectable middle class neighborhood given to semidetached houses faced with stone or dark wood and white plaster. Hornbeck was listed on his tax returns as an “import consultant” and his business seemed to be almost exclusively with Eastern European countries.

  Under the heading “REMARKS” there were two compound sentences, set off from each other as separate paragraphs.

  “Hornbeck is an agent for the East German government, functioning primarily as a courier but sometimes as a masher or dipperman; he is usually armed when working, preferring small caliber automatic pistols, and should be considered dangerous at all times.

  “Hornbeck will be leaving for Yorkshire (precise destination unknown) on the evening of the fifth: he usually travels by car.”

  Guinness could imagine what a masher might be, but what the hell was a dipperman?

  The sixteenth. Today was the morning of the twelfth, so the sixteenth was the deadline for taking care of Hornbeck. One could wonder what was going on in Yorkshire that they were so anxious Hornbeck should never make it there alive. The man didn’t sound terribly formidable; certainly not formidable enough that Her Majesty’s government should budget a thousand pounds toward having his lights turned out.

  Well, this wasn’t his line of work. He didn’t have any idea what its rules and priorities were. Perhaps it was just policy to deal with smalltime couriers and musclemen as they became visible and troublesome. Somehow, though, he didn’t really think so. It didn’t sound very practical.

  Yorkshire. The last place God made. What the hell could be going on in Yorkshire?

  There was a photograph stapled to the upper right hand corner of the instruction sheet, the head and shoulders of a middle aged man who looked like he had a lot of difficulty keeping his weight down. It was obviously posed, probably for a passport.

  Hornbeck certainly didn’t look like a spy. His earlobes stuck out at peculiar angles and his eyebrows were so bushy they gave the impression that the photo must somehow have been blurred. Those eyes didn’t look like they had ever registered fear or cruelty, or much of anything else. They were the sort of eyes you would expect to find in the man behind the ribbon counter at Woolworth’s, certainly not staring down at you from behind a small caliber automatic pistol. “Should be considered dangerous at all times.” Well, Cruttwell’s people must know what they’re talking about.

  How does one assassinate a ribbon clerk? The major hadn’t been terribly specific.


  “It doesn’t matter, really. As long as you don’t cut him in half with a shotgun blast in front of the rush hour crowd at Selfridge’s, we’ll arrange to have the best possible face put on it—suicide or a stroke or something. It would be nice if you were able to give us something to work with, however.”

  Something to work with, something to work with. Guinness used the edge of his thumb to fan out the stack of ten pound notes lying next to him on the bedspread. Now there was something to work with. Ninety-seven of them, the other three having gone toward getting him back into his lodging house.

  Jesus, he was tired; he could feel himself sinking into the box springs. The sun would be up in just a few hours, but friend Hornbeck would just have to wait until after the troops had had a short siesta. Guinness wrapped his money back up in the sheet of instructions, slipping that back in lengthways through the torn open end of its envelope. Without bothering to get out of his shirt and trousers, he turned off the table lamp beside his bed and dropped into a profound sleep.

  The afternoon found him stepping off the underground at the Shepherd’s Bush station. He walked west on Uxbridge Road, turning up on Bloemfontein until he was past the point where it intersected with Ellerslie. There were some school buildings on the corner and an enormous athletic field beyond them. Hornbeck’s house would be across the street.

  Ellerslie Road, as it turned out, was only about three or four blocks long, and Number 23 showed itself to the sidewalk as a rather handsome leaded glass window that took up the whole of a narrow second story. You couldn’t see in because the drapes were drawn, and the first floor was cut off from view by a high, well trimmed hedge. The entranceway consisted of a narrow arch through the hedge that opened from an alley running off from the main street. The alley was narrow enough that two pushcarts wouldn’t have been able to pass one another. All in all, it looked like the perfect house for someone who liked his privacy.

  It was a quarter to three, and on a Monday afternoon Hornbeck wouldn’t be anywhere except at work. There wasn’t a soul around, not even on the playing field on the other side of the road, so Guinness decided he would have himself a look.

  There was a second story door up a flight of white stucco steps–it had a brass mail slot about a foot and a half from the bottom and looked like the main entrance—and another opening off a small back garden. That one was less visible from the alley and looked as if it would spring with a hard look, so Guinness settled on it.

  In college there had been a rule that all freshmen had to be in their dormitories before 2:00 A.M., when they locked the doors. A lot of the time this conflicted with Guinness’s work schedule, and try as he might he couldn’t persuade the head resident to give him a key. Thus, as a matter of pure necessity, he became something of an expert on the subject of window latches and door locks. This one was a cinch; twenty seconds with a hairpin he had had the foresight to bring along and he was inside the storeroom of Hornbeck’s kitchen.

  The kitchen itself was small and rather dark, with wooden counter tops all the way round on three sides. It didn’t give the impression of having been used much recently, and Guinness passed through it quickly to the narrow stairwell that led up to the second floor.

  There was a small foyer behind the main entrance, opening onto what must have been the living room in the front and the dining room in the rear. He went into the living room.

  With the curtains drawn it was very gloomy, and would have been gloomy even if they hadn’t been. The walls were paneled in dark wood and the furniture was mahogany—late Victorian in style, and covered with a dark blue material that looked like velvet but probably wasn’t. The fireplace mantel and four or five tiny tables scattered around the room were covered with porcelain figurines, each about six inches tall and most of them dressed in Eighteenth Century costume. It was a fussy, overcrowded room, the kind in which you would expect to see seated an eighty year old widow from Putney.

  The bedroom was a little better; at least it looked more lived in. The bed was unmade and narrow enough to give the impression that Hornbeck didn’t entertain much.

  In one of the bottom dresser drawers Guinness found a .25 caliber automatic of Portuguese manufacture. The finish on it was dull with age, but it was well oiled and clear of rust. Guinness cleared the chamber so he could look down the barrel. It was perfectly clean, a timely reminder that its owner was not the grandmother his home might lead you to expect. Guinness wondered how much of all that shit out in the front room was to Hornbeck’s actual taste and how much was protective coloration.

  There was a set of car keys in the right table drawer, on a ring decorated with a Jaguar emblem. The house didn’t have a garage, so Hornbeck’s car must be in a public parking lot somewhere. That would figure. A Jaguar didn’t really go with the Victorian bric a brac stands and the lace doilies and the Dresden shepherdesses; those would be his working wheels. Guinness looked at the alarm clock on the dresser. Three twenty-seven, time to get the hell out before the lord and master decided it was time to come home. He had been careful to wipe off everything he had touched, so he was back out on Ellerslie Road within a minute and a half.

  There were a couple of adolescent boys in dark blue gym shorts kicking a rugby ball back and forth between them on the playing field. They took no notice of the solitary figure who passed quickly down toward the road that led back to the underground platform.

  Should he have stayed, he wondered, and taken care of friend Hornbeck the second he stepped in through his front door? No, he thought not. Who could tell when Hornbeck would come home? Guinness didn’t think it would have been all that good an idea to try making his escape when the whole area was clogged with school kiddies on their way home. Regardless of the major’s assurances, he didn’t particularly want anything tying him into this mess.

  And besides, he didn’t know enough about the man’s habits to risk it.

  But then, where? And when? Some place where there wouldn’t be mobs of people around, all of them just dying to serve as crown witnesses. Some place away from London, yes. And Hornbeck was leaving London in just a few days, now wasn’t he? He was going to Yorkshire on business in just four days. Guinness remembered the set of keys he had found in Hornbeck’s night table.

  It took about three quarters of an hour of cross checking between a street map and the London telephone directory to assemble a list of all the parking lots within walking distance of Ellerslie Road. There were four of them, and on the third one Guinness hit pay dirt.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, is this the Frithville Gardens Garage? This is Mr. Hornbeck. I wonder if you could tell me whether I’m paid up through the end of this month? I’m taking a little trip, you see, and I don’t want to lose my space while I’m gone. Could you check that for me please?”

  “What did you say the name was?”

  “Hornbeck.”

  Over the telephone cable he could hear the rustling of pages. He wondered if this guy would have recognized Hornbeck’s voice; he wondered how successful his British accent was. He wondered if the guy would ask him the damn car’s color.

  “What kind of a car was that, Mr. Hornbeck?”

  “A Jaguar.”

  “Yes, sir. It’s paid through the month.”

  “Thank you.”

  Well, now he knew where Hornbeck kept his car. He looked up the advertisement for the Frithville Gardens Garage, and they were open until two in the morning. Give the night man half an hour to lock up, and make it quarter to three before he paid his visit. That gave him nearly nine hours.

  Guinness took a shower, dressed with care, and walked over to one of the big hotels ringing Hyde Park for a roast pork dinner. From there he took a cab to the Garrick Theatre and watched a performance of She Stoops to Conquer. It was a good performance, very roughhouse and bawdy. Afterward he dropped in on a pub just off Leicester Square and nursed a gin fizz through several dart games with the actor who had played Diggory.

  H
e was enjoying it all enormously, he discovered. And not just the roast pork and the play and the dart games, either. He was getting a big kick out of getting ready to nail this guy. It was fun, as if friend Hornbeck had suddenly become all those legions against which it had been the business of his life to conduct war. He was getting his revenge, and, as the Italians say, revenge is a dish that tastes better cold.

  At ten minutes to three he was around the back of the garage. There was an exposed iron stairway up to a locked door on the second story, but beside it was a saloon door window held together in the middle by an old fashioned clasp lock. By hanging way out from the top of the stairway, keeping hold of the railing with one hand and one foot, Guinness managed to work the lock open with his knife blade. He thought sure he would fall and break his neck swinging over to crawl through the window, but he managed it in one piece.

  It was dark as a tomb inside, and noiseless. Every footfall sounded like an explosion in a cave.

  There were no less than twelve Jaguars. It took half an hour to find Hornbeck’s, a black 3.8 not more than two years old. It was a nice car, the kind spies drive in the movies, but perhaps in England they didn’t have that special aura.

  Guinness checked the gas tank—it was right up to the top—and then emptied in two handfuls of sawdust from a trash can he had found near the back door. That would do it. In ten minutes he was walking with studied casualness back to the underground station.

  Now all that remained was to wait, to wait and to find out as much as he could about his quarry, about Mr. Peter W. Hornbeck.

  Of course there wasn’t very much he could find out. Not about a man like that, not in any kind of safety. Hornbeck seemed to be a good agent—hell, he would have to be; nobody puts out a thousand pound bounty on a punk—and a good agent would have a sound grasp of the laws of probability and a memory for faces. If the same one turned up just once too often, he’d know he was being hunted. No, the very last face Hornbeck would ever see would have to be one that was utterly strange to him—otherwise Hornbeck’s might turn out to be the last face he ever saw.