The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  So there was no thought of tailing the man. Guinness allowed himself just one look at Hornbeck in the flesh, and that a quick one. On the day after breaking into the garage he waited in a pub across the street from where Hornbeck worked, waited most of the afternoon for him to quit and go home.

  What he saw wasn’t much help. Hornbeck wore a hat that covered most of his face, as who wouldn’t in the middle of a London February?

  He was a larger man than Guinness had expected and he walked with a heavy stride, throwing his shoulder forward when he took a step. There was something less fierce than sullen about him, about the way he carried his umbrella far down on the handle as if it were a club. This was the man whom Guinness had just two days to kill. He looked dishearteningly durable.

  And there was something else. Somehow it made it different to have seen him like that, just walking down the street, fighting the wind like a thousand other guys. It might have been himself.

  Before, the whole thing had been like a game, just dangerous enough to be sort of exhilarating. But the end move would be to snuff that heavy shape, and it wasn’t any game.

  Well, he was committed to it. Either he went after Hornbeck or all those little nasties who worked for Cruttwell would be coming after him; and if it had to be Hornbeck or Guinness, it was going to be Hornbeck.

  Maybe it was just as well he had seen him. If he was going to get the queasies, better now than when it was time to make the score. He couldn’t afford any second thoughts then. No, then they might get him killed.

  The only other information he could come up with was that Hornbeck was indeed going somewhere that Friday. Guinness phoned his office on Thursday afternoon, pretending to be an Irish importer whose tongue was hanging out over the market possibilities of cheap Balkan wines. He asked for an interview with Mr. Hornbeck for late Friday afternoon to discuss brokerage terms, but the reedy voiced secretary asked if he couldn’t make it the middle of next week because Mr. Hornbeck would be out of town on business Friday.

  Guinness went ahead and made the appointment for the following Wednesday. What the hell, Mr. Tyrone would be happy to see Mr. Hornbeck. Mr. Tyrone didn’t exist, but what did that matter? By Wednesday one or the other party would be dead anyway.

  On Friday morning Guinness rented a Morris Minor and took up his vigil two blocks down the street from Hornbeck’s garage. He had studied his map and had come up with the route he would have taken if he had wanted to get to Yorkshire and wasn’t interested in the scenery. It was the obvious way to go and Hornbeck had no particular reason to start being devious right away, so one could hope.

  According to those maps, the city of Hull was 168 miles from the center of London, well within range of a tanked ¬up Jaguar. Wherever else he was going in Yorkshire, Hornbeck probably wouldn’t feel compelled to buy gas before Hull.

  Any time after the Jag’s tank was half empty, say after a hundred miles or so, all that sawdust floating on the surface could be expected to begin clogging up the fuel lines. Guinness would follow along, keeping at a discreet distance, and wait for that to happen.

  At about twenty minutes past four in the afternoon, Hornbeck’s car pulled past and along the way anyone would take to connect up with the highways leading north.

  Guinness let him establish about a two block lead and then started squeezing into the flow of cars behind him. It wasn’t easy. The London rush hour was just beginning in full earnest and traffic looked like it had been pasted together in impenetrable walls. It was necessary simply to take it on faith that Hornbeck was out there in front somewhere.

  All the way through the city, just once did he catch a glimpse of him. The Jag pulled off into the Ealing Road and was visible for just a second, but that was enough. Hornbeck was going in the right direction, so it was enough to wait until they both got clear of this damn jam jar.

  In the dark of the turnpikes, as they cut through mile after mile of the flat British countryside, Guinness began to worry that something might have gone wrong. He hadn’t seen the Jag in nearly two hours, not since just after they had cleared London. What if he had misread everything? What if Hornbeck were meeting someone well before he got to Yorkshire, or had switched to another car?

  Then there it was, parked outside a roadside tavern, where Hornbeck had apparently stopped for a little eye opener. Okay. Let him have it. He hadn’t stopped for gas—Guinness would have seen him—and it was only a matter of time before his fuel pump shut off and left him stranded.

  It happened in what had to be the world’s most perfect spot for an assassination. About four miles north of a little village called Deeping Market, Guinness sighted the car. It was pulled over on the shoulder of the road with its hood up, and Hornbeck was standing beside the engine, patting his upper arms to keep warm. There wasn’t a light on the horizon and not one car in five minutes on the road. Perfect. You couldn’t ask for more.

  Guinness pulled off behind the Jag and climbed out of his Morris. He was nice and noisy about it, slamming the door for effect. Everyone automatically trusts a door slammer. Obviously, a door slammer is a man with nothing to hide.

  Everyone, perhaps, except Hornbeck. At Guinness’s approach his hand went into the pocket of his coat and his eyes narrowed.

  “Can I give you a hand?” Guinness almost shouted, smiling his best boyish smile. “This is a hell of a place to be stuck on a winter night.”

  You could almost watch the debate going on behind Hornbeck’s eyes. He needed help or he would never make it to wherever he was going, but he didn’t like being caught out in the open like this. For just a second Guinness wondered whether Hornbeck might not just decide to burn him where he stood and take off in the Morris. It was a relief when the eyes relaxed and the hand came back up out of the coat pocket, empty.

  “I don’t know what happened. It just died on me.” The voice was thick and harsh, as if all that nice frosty night air was beginning to make itself felt. “I don’t know much about cars.”

  Hornbeck smiled suspiciously.

  Against his will, Guinness experienced a surge of compassion for the poor bastard. This was a shitty thing to do to somebody—it made him feel like a real heel. Here the guy was, asking for his help. . .

  Then he remembered the gun in Hornbeck’s pocket, and what the major had said about everyone getting full value, and he decided he had better reserve his finer feelings for a more appropriate time.

  Guinness reached back through the window of his car to get his little set of crescent wrenches and flashlight and then walked around to where the other man was standing. He squatted down and let his light rest on the tiny glass globe that housed the gas filter. The globe was only about a third full, with the gas line just at the bottom of the filter.

  “Well, there’s your problem. You aren’t getting any juice. You’ve probably got a bad pump.” He used one of the wrenches to loosen the induction line, and then went around to turn the key over. “Is anything coming out?”

  Hornbeck shook his head sadly.

  Guinness came around again to retighten the line, going on all the time about how a friend of his had had a lot of trouble with the fuel pump on his Jaguar, and trying all the time not to think about the .25 caliber automatic that Hornbeck doubtless had his thumb on. It wasn’t easy.

  “Let’s see what the pump looks like,” he said brightly.

  Guinness unscrewed the little panel in the right wall of the Jag’s trunk, telling Hornbeck to turn the key just to see if the pump wouldn’t click on. It didn’t, and as he flashed his light over it, Guinness could see a particle of sawdust in one of the lines. That car wasn’t going anywhere.

  They fiddled with it for some time. Guinness banged on the pump with one of his wrenches while Hornbeck worked the key, and gradually Hornbeck began to defrost. He became more talkative. He was beginning, without even being aware of it, to trust the helpful young Yank who seemed to be having such a good time tinkering with his fuel system. It was a mistake, the mistake Gui
nness had been counting on.

  “Here, come have a look at this,” Guinness called out excitedly from the front of the car. “Look at that, that right there. No, a little further down. That’s it, right there. See it?”

  A week later, staring out of the same tea shop window at what might have been the same rain, Major Byron J. Down, who had by then dropped his alias and come at least partially clean, found it hard to keep a rein on his enthusiasm.

  “It was lovely,” he said, his voice low but fervent as he vigorously stirred sugar into what might have been the same cup of tea. “You dropped him like a poled ox. The other side’s Number One iceman for the whole of the British Isles, a man with twelve confirmed hits on his ticket, knocked over by a twenty-three year old college boy. Son, you’re a natural, a born killer. You have found your true vocation, your true self.”

  Guinness wondered if he perhaps wasn’t being put on. No, the guy was serious. It was scary.

  “You might have told me who the hell he was.”

  “I might have, but would you have tried it if you had known?” After a moment of silence, Down turned up his open palms and smiled. “My point precisely. I’m sorry, son, but we were in a hole. We needed to get rid of Hornbeck; he was giving all the nancies in the Foreign Office palpitations, and he was making our organization look bad. We couldn’t use any of our own men—Hornbeck’s been around and would have spotted them in a minute. It was a job for the gifted and lucky amateur.”

  There were, of course, still quite a few things that Down wasn’t being entirely candid about, things Guinness would eventually figure out for himself, after he had gotten to know more about how The Business was run.

  Such as the fact that Down probably hadn’t expected him to survive, that he had probably had in mind some sort of sacrifice play. Probably he had hoped to nail Hornbeck in a nice legal way for murder, his murder.

  Down knew too much. It was almost as if there had been a tail on Guinness while Guinness was tailing Hornbeck. Had they been there, watching the whole show from a comfortable distance, hoping to rush in and catch Hornbeck with his hands covered in Guinness’s fresh gore?

  Well, this didn’t seem a business where you could afford to resent such things. And, in any case, it hadn’t worked out that way.

  Guinness had stood up slowly while Hornbeck was still stooped over, trying to see just what it was that was so interesting under the hood of his car. Guinness came down hard on the back of Hornbeck’s neck, driving home with the heel of his fist. It worked in the movies, and it worked then—Hornbeck went down, after first bringing his head down with a thud on the Jag’s fender.

  But he was still alive; out like a light, but alive. Guinness put his head on the man’s chest and listened to the heart beating. After a few panicky seconds of considering what to do, he took off his coat and pressed it down against Hornbeck’s nose and mouth. He waited five minutes, the longest five minutes of his young life, and then once again put his ear down against Hornbeck’s chest. There was nothing. Hornbeck was dead. Even in the winter cold he couldn’t bear to put that coat back on. He simply threw it in the trunk of the Morris and fled. All he wanted in the world was to get away from there, and in his haste he nearly collided with a vegetable truck that was carrying a load of Valencia oranges to the good people of Humberside.

  And now the protectors of all things democratic and humane had arranged his future for him. First he would be carefully trained—three months at an unspecified location in Western Scotland to study weapons, tactics, the personnel and administrative structures of the other side, everything he needed to convert him into the finely honed instrument of Her Majesty’s revenge.

  And there were other things. A part time job teaching in a public school in London, a school the headmaster of which MI-6 had in its pocket. And his employers, the ones who mattered, could be counted on to be generous, generous and tolerant. After all, he was a valuable property. And all he had to do was once in a while a little job of work for Mr. Byron J. Down.

  “You’ll do the work, son. I haven’t a doubt in the world that you’ll work out just fine. We’re enough alike, you and I, that I can read you like the lettering on an eye chart, and this sort of thing is quite your line of country.

  “Oh, you’ll spend a few more weeks feeling sick and shaky over this little episode—it’s always that way with the first job—and then you’ll be back.”

  Down leaned toward him over the table, his fingers digging into the tablecloth like a hawk’s talons into the flesh of its victim, and his eyes were round and bright.

  “It’s the hunting. Not the killing so much, even if that is a part of it, but it’s the stalking that takes possession of you like divine fire and makes you feel like the master of worlds. You against him, your life measured against his. It’s what every man on earth was designed specifically to do, and you more than most. We have you now, boy; you won’t be able to help yourself. It’s in the blood, you know.”

  And he was right, of course.

  5

  But Creon wasn’t. He wasn’t even close, the stupid bastard. Down would have loved talking to Creon; he ran so perfectly to type.

  Apparently Down had had a lot of ugly dealings with the police and had developed, in addition to the instinctive dislike everyone in the profession entertained for the cops, rather settled opinions about how they should be handled.

  “Basically, they all use the a priori method,” he would say, comfortably crossing and recrossing his legs as he sat by a half open window after one of his enormous lunches. He was always much given to theory during that part of the afternoon. “What they believe to be true is what you have to worry about, not what they can prove—after all, what do they care about proof?

  “The policeman will always construct an initial view of things, sometimes within a few seconds of arriving on the scene, and the evidence, as it filters through to him, will be made to conform. God knows what the ingredients of that marvelous solution are likely to be—how he felt about his mum when he was five, or the quality of his wife’s conjugal embraces—but the great thing is to give him a push in the right direction, or at least in some direction away from you, and allow him to chart his course on that.

  “The analogy with bulls and red flags should be obvious.”

  Creon, it seemed, had the beginnings of a theory, and he was very busy fitting the world around it.

  His office was a little partitioned off cube on the second floor of the new city hall, and, although lacking the floor space taken up by a queen size bed, it represented a shade more than 10 percent of the working quarters of the whole police force, which had to share the second floor with the comptroller’s office and the Department of Youth Services.

  There wasn’t much in that cramped space to suggest the character of its occupant. Aside from the usual pale gray metal desk, which was covered with half filled out yellow forms, nested chrome in and out trays, and of course the black plastic telephone with one red and five clear plastic buttons, there were only a metal filing cabinet and two chairs, both made out of metal and naugahyde, both on rollers and both pale gray. There wasn’t even the usual little clear plastic cube on the desk, filled up on five of its six sides with pictures of Mrs. Creon and her brood.

  Well, you couldn’t fault him for that; perhaps he preferred to keep those parts of his life separate.

  Still, as he waited there alone for the great man to come and take his statement, Guinness couldn’t help but compare Creon’s office with his own, which was twice the size, had furniture made out of real wood, and was decorated with four paintings—three watercolors and an oil—which he had bought at various times from students in the art department. It gave him a small psychological boost to think of the policeman grubbing out his life in this soulless little box.

  Of course Guinness didn’t have any pictures of his wife and daughter on his desk either.

  As it always did, the thought of his daughter left him feeling faintly depressed.
His hand crept up until it rested lightly over his right inside breast pocket, within which he could feel the slight bulge of his wallet. There he kept, almost as a secret from himself, the only photograph of her he owned: a snapshot taken when she was three months old. It was how he remembered her; he hadn’t seen her since. He couldn’t even be sure she was still alive.

  Guinness had known a few bad moments on that score since all this with Louise had started. But no, whoever was zeroing in on him would have had to have done one hell of a lot of homework to have tracked down his ex¬-wife and daughter. Kathleen had probably remarried, human nature being what it was, and might be living anywhere.

  He brought his hand back down on his lap and pushed the idea out of his mind. At the moment it was his own safety he should be thinking about. It was his own damn neck that was stretched out so gracefully over the chopping block.

  But first there was this idiot cop to shake off. Guinness hoped he would hurry his ass up. He was tired of waiting for Creon to decide that Anxious Anticipation Time was over. Being sweated like this was such a bore; it almost made you nostalgic for the white lights and the rubber truncheons.

  Finally it was over, and Creon came in to settle himself behind his desk. Somehow he looked taller sitting down; anyway, he looked solid enough. There were deep furrows tapering down from his cheekbones almost to the line of his jaw; they made his face appear hard and immovable, as if it had belonged to some Polynesian idol carved in wood. It could have been a dead face except for the eyes. They were small and angrily blue and all the more startling for the fact that the eyebrows and lashes were blond to the point of invisibility.

  “Before we begin,” he said quietly, as if he were reading something prepared in advance, “you should know that this conversation is being tape recorded and that anything you say may eventually be introduced in evidence against you.”

  “Am I being charged with anything?” Guinness asked, more to throw Creon off his pace than anything else. He was gratified when the blond eyebrows pressed together in a slight frown.