The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  In his free hand he carried two bathroom glasses, which he set down on the glass topped chest of drawers in order to extract a half empty bottle of Teacher’s Scotch from the pouch of a folding suit bag that lay open on one of the room’s two single beds.

  “You want a snort?” he asked, holding the bottle up to about eye level of where Guinness was sitting in the chair nearest the door. “I’m sorry I don’t have any ice.”

  “No thanks. I’m not the one who got tagged today.”

  Tuttle grinned, very much the good fellow, and took the washcloth from the back of his neck, tossing it back through the bathroom door and into the sink. For all his gray at the temples, it was a boyish grin, open and friendly. He had a certain animal liveliness of manner that made you think of a slightly decayed fraternity brother at a college reunion, still game for a few beery choruses of “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” The sort of man you trusted instinctively because he didn’t give the impression of having brains enough to be devious, the sort of man it would be childishly easy to underestimate. It wasn’t a mistake Guinness was much interested in making.

  Tuttle poured himself about two fingers of the Scotch and set the bottle down next to the still empty glass on the chest of drawers before allowing himself to sink into the other chair.

  “Yeah well, most people would expect an apology at the very least. You really laced me, you know.” He pulled a rueful face and Guinness laughed. Then Tuttle laughed—it was a big joke.

  “Okay, so it might not have been very elegant tradecraft coming around a corner flat footed like that, but I was beginning to think I was never going to get an opening. You sure as hell aren’t an easy man to invite by for a drink and a quiet word.” He took a sip of his Scotch and shook his head slowly, as if engaged in some lengthy meditation on how hard Guinness had been making his life lately.

  “If that was all you wanted, I haven’t precisely been in hiding. What’s the matter with the phone?”

  “Rule Number One—sacred.” Tuttle raised one finger in a warning gesture. “Never unnecessarily involve the local police. The Company wouldn’t like it.” He looked at Guinness as if he expected some sort of reaction, but Guinness’s face remained masklike. Suddenly Tuttle understood, and he grinned again. “Or didn’t you know they’ve had your hotel phone wired?”

  Guinness had not, in fact, known. The possibility hadn’t actually occurred to him, a lapse of vigilance he found difficult to explain to himself. In the old days you had always simply assumed that someone was listening in. He must be slipping.

  It wasn’t the sort of thing he much cared to admit, however—although he would have liked knowing how Tuttle had found out; perhaps he had cultivated a source in Creon’s office—so he picked up Tuttle’s little plastic identity card from where it was lying on the table between them and held it up by a corner. “Is this your ‘Company’?”

  Tuttle shook his head and laughed. “The Secret Service? That band of fairy godmothers? Not likely. The card is strictly out on loan; it gives us something to flash at the cops if things go drastically sour. Sorry, pal—the people I work for aren’t in the habit of advertising.”

  For an uncomfortable moment Guinness had the sensation of looking into some sort of weird retrospective mirror, of having reflected back at him his own insane hubris as a younger man. With perfect clarity he could recall the perverse egotism, the professional pride he had felt at being one of those who did the really nasty stuff, of numbering himself among the world’s political garbage men. Oh boy, the traps they laid for you.

  “And besides,” Tuttle went on, with a slow contemptuous wave of his hand, “if Uncle Sam has got business with a hit man of your particular distinction, what concern is that of some small time cop trying to polish his badge on a little domestic murder?”

  Guinness started to say something but then thought better of it. Instead, he picked himself up out of his chair and took a few heavy steps to the bureau to fix himself a drink. He really didn’t care much for Scotch, but it wasn’t the moment to be fastidious.

  So they knew. They absolutely knew now who he was.

  In the end, as he had always realized they would be, all the elaborate precautions he and Byron Down had taken had been for nothing. He could almost see his dead patron shaking his head over the sad certainty of it. As if to say, I told you so. Well, he had.

  “How did you find me?”

  “It wasn’t easy.” Tuttle’s tone of voice suggested a world of blind leads and wasted labor. He laughed shortly, as if at some private irony. “Man, you really know how to go about burying yourself; I don’t imagine even the British have any clear idea of what became of you.”

  More by a kind of general relaxation than through any perceptible movement, he took on the attitude of a man settling down to begin some favorite story, the kind you would hear sometimes from people in The Business when they were tired and had had a drink or two more than was good for them and thought it might be safe to unbutton a little and recount some particularly significant and instructive personal triumph, or some disaster that after years and years still had the power to make them cringe. It was by definition a lonely and secretive line of work, and opportunities to brag or confess, or simply to talk openly, were rare enough to be enjoyed almost voluptuously.

  Guinness prepared himself to listen, to nod and to grunt from time to time and to let Ernest Tuttle talk on for as long as he liked. People want to tell their stories on their own terms, and in present circumstances Tuttle’s good will might be worth something. Besides, there was no hurry. And it was nice after all these years to have a moment or two during which he didn’t have to wear his psychic disguise, when he could put off his sheep’s clothing.

  “I joined the Company in sixty-five,” Tuttle began quietly, his eyes seeming to focus on some point behind Guinness’s left shoulder, where he might have been reading the Book of the Damned. “I was in the CIA then; they’d recruited me right out of college and set me to fieldwork in Honduras. Jesus, sometimes it feels like I spent the whole two and a half years down there crouched all night in the middle of a damned banana grove, listening to some greasy little urban terrorist tell how for five hundred dollars and a Benrus watch he was going to sell me Che Guevara’s ass.

  “Anyway, that August a guy came around to the little office we were using in Tegucigalpa and asked if I wouldn’t be interested in a transfer to another service. He said I’d be posted back to Washington at first, but that if things panned out for me I could expect to get in on some real action. Well, that time of year down there you can’t see the wallpaper for the flies, so I said okay.

  “For the first year I was in Research. They always do that; it gives them a chance to watch you for a while and teach you enough to keep you from getting your head plucked off, and also they can kind of break it to you gently that you haven’t exactly joined the Boy Scouts. Anyway, I spent the time putting together files on current operations being mounted by other governments, mainly so we wouldn’t accidentally fuck up anything for our beloved allies, and on any new players our people might come across in their own games.

  “D.C. isn’t a bad town to play spy in. Every embassy had its own little gig going, so you kept busy; and if things got too dull you could always pull a black bag job on HEW or something. Hell, we were burgling our own people more often than we ever did the Russians.

  “And the women, you wouldn’t believe. Everyone of those government office buildings was about six deep in broads and they all have a weakness for bad guys. A man could die of tuberculosis just trying to keep up.

  “Anyway, about that time we were just beginning to get some rumbles that MI-6 had this new headhunter. We like to keep track of the talent in that field, so we opened a file and made a few inquiries, but there was nothing. Not a god damned thing. We never got a fingerprint or a photograph or even so much as a decent description.

  “I mean it was embarrassing. All we had was a file full of assassinations we couldn’
t hang on any of the established pros, and that was about it. We couldn’t even be sure all of them were the work of the same hand because the methodology kept changing. There were plenty of rumors, which we figured the British were probably spreading themselves just to scare the hell out of everybody. Just whispers, something that would float by one day in an internal memo we’d get a peek at, but nothing we ever had any hopes of being able to check.

  “Anyway, we kept up the file. Nobody we cared about was getting zapped, but we like to stay informed. That way we know who to keep off the guest list for the State Department’s Fourth of July party.

  “All that cold meat. God, there must have been close to thirty hits in all and each one a tailor made. The only thing they all had in common was a stylishness, a certain aesthetic polish to the work. Every time it was a very tidy job—no loose ends, no clues, no witnesses spilling their guts about the mysterious stranger in a tan raincoat. Somebody would just die.

  “Word was that Byron Down ran things, but that wasn’t much of a shock. Down held the strings on most of the British hit men, and he generally kept them out of the normal lines of command. Even then, most of the time we can come up with a name and a photograph and a pretty complete track record, but not on this one. Down was being extra special careful, even for Down—I guess he knew when he had a good thing—so we were left with nothing.

  “But you’ve been through all this already, haven’t you, sport?” Tuttle punctuated his grin with a slow theater wink. “No need to tell you what a hotshot you were.”

  The hotshot might have been cast in bronze. If he was breathing, it didn’t show. Finally, in an almost imperceptible movement, he began to shake his head and his eye fixed on Tuttle in a way that suggested he was not prepared to be joshed.

  “Watch yourself, sport. If you want to tell stories I’m prepared to listen, but don’t try to hang things on me. I figure I don’t have the patience to be suspected of more than one murder at a time.”

  Guinness shifted uncomfortably in his chair, wondering why the hell he bothered protesting his innocence. Habit, he supposed. They both knew perfectly well who he was.

  “Sure. I keep forgetting you’re just a harmless professor of poetry who wouldn’t step on an ant.” Tuttle smiled and got up to fix himself another drink. “Can I freshen yours?”

  Guinness surrendered his glass and watched it being filled to about halfway. Then he watched Tuttle sit back down and take a long pull on his own glass before setting them both back down on the table between them.

  “Okay then, have it your way. This for the moment unspecified gentleman was supposed to be an American, just like you and me. Anyway, he wasn’t British.

  “We kept getting worried memos, all the time. Why weren’t we getting a fix on this guy? That sort of thing. It made a lot of very respectable people very nervous that he might be a citizen; the thinking was that if he ever got caught, everyone would be only too eager to assume that he worked for us and there would be a big stink about how the nasty Yankee imperialists were sending out squads of murderers to prey upon the innocent commissars; that sort of thing.

  “Also, it was voiced here and there that maybe we could steal him. Good assassins are hard to come by.

  “So there was a plan developed. We would borrow him from MI-6, or at least get them to send him out after a target of our choosing—nobody really believed our trusted allies would just hand him over—and we could sort of keep an eye on things. We would know who he was after. We would even set things up so that the touch would be made under controlled conditions. Some nice little country like Greece or Portugal, where they were already paranoid about the Red Menace and we own the local intelligence service.

  “We arranged a trade. I don’t remember the details, but we were going to give them something we thought perhaps might amuse them, some new circuit design or something, and they were going to let us use their new secret weapon, this human meat grinder of theirs that had every spook in Europe crapping in his drawers.

  “Everything was all set, and then Down says he won’t allow his man off the leash. It made a lot of second secretaries very mad, but apparently Down had enough clout with his own service to get away with it. Or maybe the British really never had it in mind to trade and were just using Down as a graceful reason for saying no. Who’s to say? They have a peculiar sense of tact over there.

  “Say, I’m getting kind of hungry.” By way of emphasis, Tuttle put his hand over his stomach. The contact seemed to remind him that he wasn’t wearing a shirt, so he got up out of his chair and fished one out of the suitcase on the bed. “There’s a hamburger place about a block down on El Camino. It isn’t too bad. You want to go there?” Guinness smiled tensely and shook his head.

  “Not unless you want me picked up. I imagine Creon is a little curious by now about just where I took off to. This is his town, you know.”

  Within a minute Tuttle had put on his jacket and was on his way, with orders for a double cheeseburger, fries, and a strawberry shake. And within a minute and a half Guinness was busy turning over Tuttle’s motel room. That, of course, had been the whole idea.

  From Tuttle’s point of view it made perfect sense. He knew that if Guinness had wanted him dead, he would have left him in the john of that gas station with a pill in his brain, and he wouldn’t be dumb enough to leave anything behind that he would really mind having found. Everyone in The Business was always patting down everyone else’s motel rooms, and the practice had developed a decorum of its own. So long as you didn’t break the furniture and remembered to put everything back, nobody really minded.

  After riffling through the suitcase and discovering Tuttle’s deplorable taste in pajamas, Guinness turned his attention to the briefcase that was lying on the desk. Considerate chap, Tuttle hadn’t even locked it. Inside was a well thumbed passport with visa stamps that suggested Central Europe, from Switzerland to Hungary, as his main theater of operations. There was also a hard leather case containing a syringe and three little numbered tubes of colorless liquid—a drug kit; Guinness wondered which number would put you away for keeps—and, in the organizer clipped to the inside of the briefcase lid, a folder with a red “SECRET” stamp across its face and the words “SUMMER SOLDIER” typed in capitals on the file tab.

  It was his very own dossier—his professional biography, or as much of it as the Americans had been able to piece together.

  Summer Soldier. Just the sort of priggish witticism you might expect from the boys in Planning and Analysis, chubby little nerds who liked to play god from behind a memo pad and wouldn’t dream of risking their own necks.

  Summer Soldier. A pattern observation or a moral judgment? Probably both. Most of his work had been in the summer months, the flood tide of espionage all over Europe, when you could scoot in and out unnoticed on the annual tourist inundation. Hell, in the winter the security police might arrest you just to fill up their quotas. Besides, Down had always been as obliging on that score as he could. He tried to keep his hands off in the middle of the term, although once Guinness had nearly flunked a seminar on the Anglo-Saxon lyric because of a rush job in the middle of April. Somebody needed killing, and it couldn’t wait.

  But there was no getting around it: all those patriotic career boys in their short hair and their three piece suits kind of looked down their noses at you when they knew you did it for money. One should only commit murder for the most high minded reasons.

  It was all such bullshit—they were all in it for the same thing. The only thing that mattered was the action. After the first time, money never really had had much of a role. More than anything, it provided an excuse, a motive that made some sense. You did the work and the work was your living through school, but it wasn’t a matter of cause and effect. You did it because doing it filled some need that had nothing to do with paying the bills.

  And then one day the need wasn’t there anymore—or it got in the way of something you needed even more—and you quit. You pac
ked it up and paid the bills some other way.

  The Summer Soldier. What a name. What a pile of horseshit.

  The file contained a lot of loose papers, not many of which seemed to have much to say, and there was a list of names and dates and places, with references to other files, pasted to the inside front cover:

  Collins, Eugene; 23/7/63; Berlin; see 465943-C

  Genik, Vasili; 1/9/63; Prague; see 759247-G

  Kleutgen, Georg; 30/ S/64; Liege; see 557523-K

  Shevliskin, Janik; 15/7/65; Belgrade; see 968434-S

  There were twenty-eight names in all. Some of them he recognized, some of them not. They had missed a few—more than a few—of his early clients and there were some that must have been the handiwork of someone else.

  The only other item of interest was a photocopied page of typescript—a translation, it seemed, from the KGB’s Bluebook, the list they kept of all the standing orders for execution: “The person or persons, not yet identified, responsible for the deaths of the following Soviet citizens.” And then there was a list of about seven names, all of which appeared again on the American list. The date at the top of the page was November 1969. A quick check of the other sheets in the file didn’t turn up any later Bluebook extracts.

  Guinness wondered who else had made the connection between Byron Down’s Number One mechanic and a certain associate professor of literature now living in California. Byron had always been so careful, so meticulous. He had never used Guinness’s real name, not even in internal correspondence, never allowed him to be photographed or fingerprinted. There had never been anyone else present when Guinness had received his instructions.

  When Byron died, there had been a prearranged exchange of announcements in the personal column of the Times, and Guinness got a new handler: a tall, reedy Scotsman with a sandy mustache. His name was McKendrick. He had been Down’s second in command for eleven years and continued his methods. He and Guinness had never hit it off.