The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  Down had worked out a detailed escape route should Guinness ever decide he had to disappear. It involved four changes of identity and a circuitous series of journeys by plane and train that ended with entry into the United States via Canada. It was a secret not even McKendrick had been in on.

  “It’s very good, of course,” Byron had said once, holding a cigar to his ear to see if it had the right crackle. “But don’t ever think you can stay in this branch of trade for as long as you have and then disappear without a trace.” With the little silver knife he carried on his watch chain, he made a delicate slit in the blunt end of his Havana. He had always contended that the Americans were little short of barbarians for having allowed a trifle like Castro’s communism to hypnotize them into cutting off trade relations with Cuba. “If someone with the proper connections wants to look hard enough, he’ll find you.” A puff or two and Byron had broken out into a smoky smile. “But there’s no getting around it—it is a very good plan.”

  Yes, it had been a good plan; it had worked for seven years. But somebody with the proper connections had decided to find him. The KGB? Did the KGB want to look that hard? Had they finally found him? They never forgot, those guys. They might wait for decades, but they never forgot.

  Guinness dropped the file back into its slot in the organizer of Tuttle’s briefcase, and his lips compressed into a hard, joyless little smile. Well, if after all these years they suddenly wanted to start playing rough, that was just fine with him. All comers welcome.

  9

  “Vlasov. Misha Fedorovich Vlasov. You weren’t far off, though; until about ten months ago he was a member in good standing, but I wouldn’t be the least surprised if right now the KGB would like to kill him even more than they would you. Recognize the name?”

  Guinness set down his little waxed paper bag of French fries, which looked and tasted as if they had been carved out of bamboo, and nodded.

  Game time was over, he had decided. Tuttle wouldn’t be any more dangerous for having confirmed what he knew already; the room didn’t show any signs of having been bugged and nothing he might say here could legally be construed as a confession anyway, and, besides, it isn’t a very hot idea needlessly to antagonize a potential ally.

  “Sure, I know him. I also know you’re just begging for a coronary if you keep on eating like that—chili burgers and Scotch, for the love of God.”

  Tuttle cracked a grin and wiped his upper lip with the hand still holding a last fragment of chiliburger. “You’re trying to tell me that that strawberry gook of yours is any better?”

  “How do you know it’s Vlasov?” Guinness asked, opening up his cheeseburger and peering inside like a Roman augur examining the entrails of some sacrificial animal. “It’s possible, you know, that he might not be the only one who thinks he has a bone to pick with me.”

  Licking chili sauce from his fingers, Tuttle finished his dinner and stepped into the bathroom to wash up. “You mean because you’re such a popular fella?” He laughed over the running water. “Anyway, for the time being you can just take my word for it. It’s Vlasov, and he’s very interested in seeing you dead.”

  Tuttle sat down again, snagging the bottle of Teacher’s off the dresser on the way in and pouring himself another three fingers. He was just reaching that point of drunkenness at which every movement appears to be the product of a separate act of will. The creases in his face seemed damp and thoughtful, as if he were laboring to keep his mind orderly and his sentences consecutive.

  “He wants you dead, old man. He means to kill you, and he’s a clever bastard. I can’t say I envy you much.” He shook his head slowly and smiled, and Guinness decided he could do without the compassionate side of Tuttle’s nature.

  “So he wants me dead. So what? If it’s strictly a private matter, why should the government bother about involving itself?”

  “That’s a long story,” Tuttle said quietly, setting his glass back down on the table. Having apparently realized that Guinness was no longer drinking along with him, he had barely touched it. “It’s a long story, so bear with me. I can’t guarantee a happy ending.

  “Vlasov began to make a name for himself in the middle sixties; at least that was when he first came to our attention. What he did before then or what his background might be is anybody’s guess. Anyway, at about that time he started running a very tidy little shop out of Italy. He lived in Florence with his wife, pretending to be an Aeroflot agent, although his office wasn’t open but for two hours every Tuesday. Better than banker’s hours.

  “And he held the strings, so the story goes, on a man in every major British consulate in Europe. He was a real star.

  “The story might even have been true, because it seems that in nineteen seventy somebody tried to do a job on him. The Russians put a lid on the whole affair, so our information is pretty sketchy, but we do know that his wife was killed and that he very nearly was. As a matter of fact, we did think that he was dead, since he had disappeared from Italy. At least we thought that for a while.

  “Then a year or two later he turns up again working as a strategist for Department V. They seem to like his work—he gets promoted to lieutenant colonel in seventy-three and then to full in seventy-six. He’s a very bright boy, a real comer. We hear that the great Andropov himself has taken a personal interest in his career. Then guess what happens.”

  Tuttle leaned back in his chair, resting his chin in the angle of his thumb and smiling like a Cheshire cat, and Guinness continued stirring with a straw the half inch or so of lukewarm strawberry milkshake that was left at the bottom of his paper cup. He seemed to be hunting for something just underneath the surface.

  “He defected,” Guinness said at last, his tone precisely that of an adult forced to participate in some singularly uninteresting children’s game.

  It didn’t sound like the Vlasov they both knew and loved, but he had, as a matter of fact, guessed right. He could tell from the half surprised, half disappointed expression on Tuttle’s face. Well, Tuttle didn’t need to look so astonished—he was the kind of storyteller who telegraphed his punch lines.

  The rest of the story, except for an ending which hadn’t been played out yet, was at least in general outline fairly obvious. All that needed filling in were the details.

  “Well I’m sorry if I’ve been boring you.” Tuttle seemed seriously annoyed, which was all right. This whole clubby little trip he was on—espionage for the discriminating connoisseur—was beginning to wear on Guinness’s nerves.

  “No, go ahead. One likes to hear the gossip about one’s friends.” Guinness smiled and dropped his fingers down over the mouth of his whiskey glass. He didn’t drink, didn’t even lift the glass from the table, but the gesture alone served to confirm his willingness to be an attentive listener, a good fellow who could dispassionately enjoy the finer points of the game.

  It seemed to work. Tuttle leaned forward in his chair, virtually crouching as his elbows came to rest on his knees. The story began almost visibly to retake possession of him, as if Misha Vlasov’s treason had worked some sorcery and thus made anything possible, had cast a magic pattern into which Tuttle felt himself irresistibly drawn.

  “Anyway, that was when I met him. As a reward for being a good boy and kissing all the proper asses in Washington, I got posted to Zürich. I was supposed to have something to do with coordinating American and Swiss pharmaceutical research, but the cover couldn’t have been any more transparent if I’d run it out of a Christian Science reading room.

  “Have you ever done any work in Zürich? It’s a great place if you feel like playing a little knuckle tag with the opposition—so long as you don’t make a scene or do a number on one of the locals, the police are more than happy not to notice. Hell, they don’t want to get caught in any wringers.

  “But you can go crazy there. You get so you wish somebody would wire your toothbrush or put a tarantula in your bedroom slippers, just so you’d have something to do. When there isn’
t a job on, the time seems to go mainly to padding out your behind. Even the women are ugly, most of them, and the ones who aren’t act like cataleptics in the sack. You have to go all the way to Vienna to get a decent piece of ass.

  “I was there, oh God, for years. That part of the world was a territory I had pretty much to myself, unless trade got very brisk. The breaking into file cabinets and stuff was left to the CIA, and I was only brought in on what you might call a consulting basis. If it was likely to get nasty enough, if it was a question of riding shotgun on something they really didn’t want ripped off, or of getting blood all over somebody’s shirt front, then the matter was turned over to me. Otherwise, they didn’t even want to be reminded of my existence. You know what that’s like.

  “So then one day about ten months ago, somebody in the local office has a personal little chat with somebody from MI-6, all very high level and hush hush. It seems that Comrade Vlasov has it in mind to do a deal and for reasons best known to himself has decided to give the British the honor of acting as his brokers.”

  “The British?” Guinness leaned forward in his chair, suddenly very interested. “Why the British? Why the hell didn’t he simply contact you himself?” He didn’t like the sound of it, not one little bit.

  Tuttle turned the palms of his hands upward and shrugged.

  “Haven’t the faintest idea, pal. All we knew was that he wanted to defect—to us. About that he was very specific. And he wanted the full treatment. A new identity, asylum in the U.S., a colonel’s pension, the works. To top it off, we’d only been given six hours to make our minds, and if we liked the idea we were to have a car with Norwegian plates waiting to pick him up outside of Jelmoli department store before closing time. I guess he was worried that his own people might catch on that he was getting ready to rat; you can’t keep treason a secret very long.

  “Well. It’s not the sort of offer you get every day, and sure as hell not from a boy like Vlasov. The man had a reputation as a True Believer and as far as we could determine, then or later, there was no trouble at home. Hell, they’d just bumped him to full colonel a few months before.

  “It was a problem. And to more than a few untrusting souls it smelled for all the world like a setup. We couldn’t even phone D.C. for instructions because Vlasov had dropped word that our local communications man was one of his plants.

  “He was, too.

  “Finally we decided to go ahead and grab him. I was called in just in case things got bouncy and because Vlasov was the man who planned a lot of Moscow’s thuggery for them and it was thought I might be helpful in the initial phase of interrogation.

  “Also, although nobody came right out and said so, I think they wanted somebody around who would know how to drop the hammer on Comrade Misha if it turned out he wasn’t being entirely candid with us.

  “It was the middle of summer, which was nice because at least we wouldn’t freeze to death—I’m from Maryland myself, and I never have gotten used to that high altitude cold. Anyway, we stole a car with the right kind of plates and took up a position outside the main entrance of Jelmoli. We waited for two hours, and we were beginning to think he had stood us up when, just as the whole downtown started to jam up with the big closing time mob of shoppers, Vlasov opens the back door of our car and climbs in.

  “‘What are you waiting for?’ he says, whispering as if he was afraid the KGB would hear him all the way to Moscow. ‘Drive off.’ Well, you can believe we got out of there. We almost sideswiped some pudgy little middle aged broad who was trying to get across the street so she could catch her trolley. I looked back through the rear window to see if she’d actually fallen down, and I don’t suppose I’ll live long enough to forget the expression on her face.”

  Deciding that the closeness of the tiny motel room had managed to give him a headache, Guinness picked himself up out of his chair and went to the door for a breath of air.

  “You sure you want to do that?”

  With his hand still on the knob, Guinness turned to see Tuttle smiling wanly back at him from where he remained sitting. Without bothering to answer, Guinness jerked the door open, letting it swing wide around until the drag from the carpet brought it coasting gently to a stop. He leaned up against the frame, where he would be silhouetted against the light from behind.

  It was a warm evening and the air outside was only a little cooler than the room, but at least there was a slight breeze. Across the El Camino, in a distance he knew was filled mostly with machine shops and factories that would have been closed for hours, he could see the lights from the cars out on the Bayshore Freeway.

  If Vlasov was out there, and he probably was, he would have a clear shot if he chose to take it. But he wouldn’t. A man doesn’t turn his back on cause and country just to plug some clown leaning up against a door frame. No, there would have to be more to it than that.

  Vlasov would want to say his piece before he pulled the trigger, and that would mean that they would have to come to terms. He would have to set it up so that Guinness would be willing to accept the risks. Otherwise it would be right back underground, and Vlasov didn’t have the time to go digging for another seven years; not with the KGB breathing down his neck.

  So there was no immediate worry. There was plenty of time. Vlasov’s revenge was likely to be a leisurely business.

  The night air didn’t seem to help much, so Guinness went back inside, into the bathroom, and prepared himself a cold washcloth. It didn’t make his headache go away, but at least his eyelids didn’t feel like they were glued shut anymore.

  “So Vlasov defects,” he said, sitting down again and tasting his Scotch. It was pretty nasty at room temperature and he made a face—who could tell, though, it might make his brains stop throbbing. “So then, how did he get from there to putting an ice pick in my wife’s ear?”

  Did Tuttle flinch, just a little? Yes, by God, Guinness thought that perhaps he had. Maybe it was possible for some people to make their living as government assassins and still be squeamish about words, unlikely as it sounded. At any rate, it would seem so.

  “So we got him out of the country,” Tuttle resumed after swallowing about half the contents of his glass—apparently he had decided drinking was safe again. “We took him out of Switzerland in the trunk of a car, and then from Germany we used a military helicopter to fly him to Orly and put him on the first plane to the States.

  “That part was the hardest. The French were as nervous as cats, which might have had something to do with the fact that we wouldn’t tell them what we were coptering in. It gives you some idea of the importance assigned to Vlasov’s defection that it was felt worth nettling our touchy Gallic brothers over.

  “Vlasov and I had gotten on pretty well, so it was decided that I should stay on as his handler during the interrogation phase. If he was horny, I got him a broad—but he was never horny, that guy—if his teeth hurt, I got him a dentist. For two and a half months I was never out of earshot.

  “In all that time he never left the apartment we rented for him, along with the ones on either side and directly below and above—we weren’t about to give anyone a chance to get near enough to give him a cold. The interrogators were brought to him.

  “You know, usually in a situation like that you get to know a person pretty well. I mean, hell, it figures. A guy who jumps the traces has got to feel that even his new ‘protectors’ think he’s a creep. They’re a chatty bunch, defectors, very eager to have you understand what sterling types they are, how they really didn’t have any choice but to fink on their own people. Usually by the end of the first week they’ve told you everything, every sordid little detail of domestic history. God, one time I had one of them tell me how he used to like his mistress to whip him with a clothes hanger.

  “Besides, cooped up together like that for weeks and weeks. . . it doesn’t matter if you hate each other like poison. Eventually you start to talk, if it’s only for the sake of a little noise.

  “But n
ot Vlasov, not him. No lurid confessions from that quarter. I’ve never spent so much time with a man and understood him less. I didn’t have the impression he gave one fuck what anybody thought.

  “One time, though, he came unstuck, just a little. Just enough to remind you that he was human.

  “Vlasov didn’t like television, couldn’t stand the sound of one on in the apartment, so we spent a lot of time in the evenings sitting around reading newspapers. It was one of his permanent grievances against us that we couldn’t get him the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune.

  “So there we were one night, reading away. And suddenly Vlasov folds up his paper and comes over and sits down beside me on the sofa. The next thing you know he’s got his wallet out and he pulls something from the card holder and hands it over to me.

  “‘Would you like to see a photograph of my late wife?’ You can bet I was surprised; in nearly two months it was the first time he’d ever said or done anything to indicate he hadn’t been born in a KGB uniform. It was funny, but I felt kind of honored.

  “It was only a snapshot, of a blond woman in a summer dress sitting in a lawn chair. I guess I said something to the effect that she was pretty and handed it back to him. He put the photo back into his wallet and the wallet back into his inside coat pocket; and then he shook his head and smiled, his hand resting on the bulge in his coat. ‘No, my friend,’ he said finally. ‘She was an angel.’ He never mentioned her again; it was as if the whole thing had never happened.

  “She didn’t look much like an angel to me—just a pretty woman with short blonde hair, a little too delicate for my taste. I was surprised she was as young as she was, though; Vlasov is fifty-two, and in that picture his wife isn’t a day over twenty-five. Maybe that was what made her an angel.

  “Anyway, I finally figured out that Vlasov must have had his reasons for showing it to me. I doubt if it was just a spontaneous gesture—he wasn’t the type. No, he had his reasons, and I’ll bet you could make a pretty good guess as to what they were.”