The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  And he was hungry too; that junk at the bus station had simply started his juices flowing, and he hadn’t touched his beer. No problem, though. San Francisco was lousy with places to eat.

  After a chicken salad sandwich and a cup of tea at David’s Kosher Deli, Guinness found himself a porno movie house on Sutter Street. There he would be protected by the surreal darkness of the place and by the fact that no one wished, under such circumstances, to appear at all curious about his neighbor. You could spend the day there, as he planned to, and not a soul would so much as look at you.

  He paid his five dollars and decided that a visit to the men’s room seemed in order. It would be the first safe chance he had had to inspect the goodies in his flight bag.

  Tuttle, lord love the boy, had thought of everything. There was a nasty looking little .25 caliber snub nose revolver in a black leather clip holster, an envelope containing five hundred dollars in fifties, an Oregon driver’s license, a social security card, and a Union 76 credit card, all made out to one Thomas S. Linkweather—the color photograph on the license was of Guinness—and a small, flat drug case just like the one he had found in Tuttle’s motel room.

  Inside were the three numbered vials of clear fluid, a syringe, and a note: “Number 3 puts you under for keeps. Happy hunting.”

  Guinness stuffed the cards and money into his wallet, which was already thick with twenty-five hundred from his own little nest egg, clipped the gun to his belt, and slipped the drug case into the left inside breast pocket of his coat. He left the flight bag, containing nothing now except Sergeant of Detectives Herbert L. Ganjemi’s service revolver, inside the paper towel dispenser. Eventually, whoever around there was in charge of keeping things tidy would find it, open it up, and, being engaged in an enterprise in which you can always use a few extra Brownie points downtown, call the police. But by then everything with Vlasov would be settled and, one way or the other, Guinness wouldn’t have a thing to worry about.

  After rinsing his hands, he left the men’s room, walking past the studied inattention of the guy who had sold him his ticket and pushing through the heavy curtained doorway into the theater itself.

  Back when Guinness had been in college, they had called them stag films, and the ones the fraternities traded around among themselves were supposed to have been pretty hot stuff. But Guinness hadn’t been a fraternity man, so the closest he had ever gotten was a thing that had been playing at a place in one of the seedier parts of Columbus. It had consisted of an hour and a half of the heroine walking her dog through what one could only presume was supposed to be Central Park, at the end of which the audience was rewarded for their patience with a fifteen second peek at her tits. They had been very substantial tits, he remembered, but the black and white film hadn’t really been able to do them justice. Guinness had left with the feeling that his two and a half dollars had been definitely squandered.

  Apparently, things had changed a lot since then. He took a seat in a rear corner, away from the door, propped his knees up against the seat in front of him and folded his arms tightly across his chest, marveling at the amount of noise some people made in the act of coition.

  Someone was standing. . . standing. . . standing in the what? Where? In the doorway of his bedroom back home, in his bedroom doorway. . . standing there, looking at him. Was it Louise? Yes! It was Louise, standing in the light from the hall. He was home now, and it was nighty night time, and the light caught Louise from behind, showing the outline of her body through her nightdress. Then the nightdress slipped to her waist. . . and then down to the floor. . . slowly, as if it couldn’t bear to leave her. . .

  Yes? She wants him to hold her in his arms. She wants him to hold her. . . heavy in his arms, there with him now and weightlessly heavy in his arms. Louise? Is the room too dark? . . is it too dark? Why couldn’t he see her face?

  Guinness awakened with a start, slowly pulled himself up in his seat, and tried to read the face of his watch in the almost total darkness. Six-thirty. On the screen they were still at it, and he watched them with a dull resentment.

  At five minutes to seven he was back at the Board Room, and the translation was astonishing. The noise was louder, if possible, and every table in the place was taken. The very spaces between the bar stools were occupied by men with one foot on the railing and both eyes on the stage.

  Even jaded by an afternoon at the skin flicks, Guinness couldn’t help but be impressed by what was going on up there; she was ripe and milk smooth and perfectly gorgeous, facts unobscured by the smudgy reddish flush with which the footlights bathed her. Clearly, the management had saved its best effort for the evening crowd.

  A touch on his coat sleeve made him aware of Doris standing just behind his shoulder, and, since they weren’t more than five feet from the jukebox, he turned slightly and stooped so she could speak directly into his ear.

  ‘‘I’m leaving now,” she said. “Give me a couple of minutes and then meet me at the newsstand about half a block up.” He nodded and she stepped back behind him and out of sight. It was as if she had been swallowed up by the elbowing mob around the bar. Guinness ordered a beer and forced himself to drink a third of it before he too departed.

  She was buying a roll of butterscotch Lifesavers when he arrived, and she had her back to him. In her white plastic boots and her leather coat with the ratty fur trim around the edging and the openings of the sleeves, she looked like a hooker taking a break from the rigors of patrol. Perhaps on another evening she would have been. Guinness reminded himself that he really didn’t know her very well, even if a long time ago they had been lovers.

  She dropped the Lifesavers into the pocket of her coat and turned to go, passing her arm through his as they made the sidewalk. The other hand reached up to brush a strand of her shag-cut hair back away from her eyes. A passing stranger might have thought they met the same way every night of their lives.

  “I have everything arranged,” she whispered, pressing her head against his shoulder. “But the guy wants three bills for it. He says the round trip ’ll take him two days and he won’t take a penny less. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Did you nick him for a broker’s fee?”

  “No.”

  “You should have.” They looked at each other curiously, as if each were trying to read the other’s feelings, and then first Guinness smiled and then she did. As they walked along he dipped down and kissed her, thinking how nice it was for a change to be around a woman who didn’t mind if sometimes you weren’t a model citizen.

  “Where would you like to have dinner?”

  “My place.” The way she said it and the way she smiled made the inside of his mouth feel suddenly very dry.

  Her place was a good brisk three quarters of a mile from the Board Room, on the second floor of an apartment building that looked like a motel, all the doors on each floor opening onto a narrow walkway with an open stairwell connecting it to the one below. It was all perfectly exposed and there weren’t any back doors; Guinness just hoped that Vlasov didn’t change his mind about Griffith Park and decide to settle up early.

  He had bought a bottle of wine along the way. Inside he set it down on the coffee table in the living room and looked around.

  The last time he had been in Doris’s apartment it had been a different apartment, one several blocks from this one. She must have been in the habit of renting them furnished, because there wasn’t a stick of it he remembered, not even an ashtray. Perhaps he simply didn’t remember as well as he had thought.

  He tried to settle on just what it was about the room that struck him as so depressing. Perhaps it was that all the furniture was so low—he had had really to bend getting rid of his wine bottle; the damn table didn’t seem to make it halfway to his kneecap—or perhaps it was the absence of any pictures or little knickknacks picked up on afternoon outings to Sausalito or Carmel. The room was astonishingly bare, a fact which seemed somehow to heighten your perception of its smallness. It made you
feel like Alice in Wonderland, that peculiar sensation of finding yourself in a miniature world.

  Catercorner from the front door was a tiny dining alcove and directly off of it, screened by a wall, was the kitchen. Guinness could hear water running and the refrigerator door opening and other busy feminine sounds coming from there.

  There were a pair of matching chairs in the living room, square cushioned and modern in design, with a covering of rough coffee colored fabric. Guinness sat down in the one furthest from the kitchen and experienced a curious sense of injury. Somehow he had the overpowering conviction that he was fated to spend the rest of his private life in rooms like this one, one after the other—unpleasant and blasted and temporary. There would be no more small houses in residential areas where your neighbors were ROTC instructors and their wives, no more mortgages that would run well into the 1990s, no sense of permanence and possession.

  In short, there wasn’t going to be any more Louise.

  There would be Doris, or, more accurately, a succession of Dorises, stretching off until he was old enough and disengaged enough to have lost the appetite. Because that was all it was ever going to be anymore, merely the satisfaction of an appetite.

  He had been married twice, each time happily by his own reckoning, but that was over. He had gotten over Kathleen, had come back to himself and started over, but he wasn’t going to get over Louise. Not after the way she had died, after what, in his stupidity and selfishness, he had done to her. There would be no more wives; that aspect of his life was over.

  15

  Three fragments of newsprint, none larger than the back of a man’s hand, limped along in a kind of spasmodic race down the narrow strip of broken and patched pavement behind Doris’s apartment building. The wind came only a breath at a time, leaving them intervals every few feet to throw themselves wearily down like spent runners. It was a few minutes before six in the morning, and the gray mist that was just a little too thin to be called fog still hung weakly to the blurred edges of things. It was cold, colder than it should have been at that time of year, and Guinness stood with his collar up and his hands jammed down into the pockets of his jacket. He was waiting, and his eyes, which seemed to have taken on some of the morning’s coldness, were watchful and suspicious.

  “How do you like your steak, rare as an autographed copy of Kafka?”

  He had stood in the doorway of Doris’s tiny kitchen, his hand holding a can of beer and his eyes crinkled in a tender and remembering smile. It was a joke from the old days.

  “Thank you, not quite that rare.”

  She had changed out of her tart’s uniform into a pale blue short sleeved sweater, with a neck that didn’t constantly tempt you to thrust your hand inside, and a pair of white slacks ending in cuffs that completely covered her bare feet. Her back was to him as she adjusted one of the racks in the oven.

  “I heard about your wife, Ray.” There was something casually gentle in the way she said it, something between compassion and simple curiosity, but containing no special invitation to imagine himself the unique victim of fortune. Death, and even murder, were, after all, common enough events. Guinness shifted his position slightly, making a vague answer that reflected that understanding.

  “They don’t say so,” she went on, “but the papers seem to think you killed her.” She was still facing away from him, but he could see how she had suddenly become very still.

  “Are you asking me if I did?”

  “I wouldn’t care one way or the other.” Rising back up from her crouch, she came around to face him with features set in an unreadable mask. Apparently, it had been that kind of a life.

  “Then I didn’t kill her.”

  “Did you love her?” she asked, smiling, as if she found the idea amusing. It wasn’t a smile Guinness much cared for.

  “Let’s just say I didn’t kill her and leave it at that.”

  The smile became just a shade broader, and then after a moment she nodded and turned back to her cooking.

  She wasn’t a bad cook, as it turned out. She wouldn’t have won any prizes, but she wasn’t bad. Of course she had never claimed to be a student of the domestic arts; it was the bedroom that she had taken as her special arena.

  She had a way, after she had reached a certain pitch of enthusiasm, of suddenly hooking her pelvis an inch or so to one side. Each time, the movement would be accompanied by a little catch in her breath, as if you had suddenly somehow caused her a twinge of pain; but of course it wasn’t pain. She would do it perhaps three or four times, several seconds apart, before she was finished. It was tremendously exciting. Perhaps more so because you never could be sure if it was passion or artifice—or perhaps because it seemed that the distinction had become blurred.

  They had made love twice that night—each time brilliantly, like two highly accomplished technicians. But Guinness had been left with a sense of personal emptiness for which Galen’s maxim did not seem entirely to account. It was as if the act no longer had any fixed place in the pattern of his life, as if the pattern itself had been violated to a degree admitting of no reconstruction.

  For none of which, of course, Doris was in any way responsible. It wasn’t as if the two of them had suddenly rediscovered Original Sin. And perhaps he was simply being melodramatic and things would eventually sort themselves out. He hoped so .

  The mouth of the alleyway where he stood was suddenly blocked off by a blue pickup truck with an enormously wide aluminum camper in the payload. The truck seemed to hesitate for a second or two, and then slowly it finished its turn into the alleyway, the walls on either side of which it almost bridged. Guinness took one sideways pace, putting himself in the precise middle of the roadway, and the truck jerked to a stop a few yards short of him. The door on the driver’s side popped open and the driver got out. He had to close the door again before he could get past the trash cans and to where he could put his foot up on the front bumper.

  He folded his arms over his knee and stood balanced like that, looking at Guinness from under his eyebrows, for a long time without speaking. He was a big boy, only an inch or two taller than Guinness, but filled out. There must have been a good two hundred fifty pounds hung on that frame, and none of it looked the least little bit soft.

  The impression of size was increased by a darkish blond beard and long hair that stuck out perhaps as much as three inches around the full circle of his face, making him look uncomfortably like an enormous bobcat. His thick forearms, where they were visible below the rolled up sleeves of his Pendleton work shirt, were matted with the same darkish blond hair.

  All in all, he was pretty impressive—the sort of man you instinctively wonder if you can handle, should it come to that. And he looked rather as if it might. He really didn’t strike Guinness as the amiable type.

  “You want a ride south,” the bobcat said finally, with a faint down home twang in his voice. “You got my three bills?”

  Guinness said yes, he had the money, and the bobcat unfolded one hand from the pile on his knee, and thrust it out in front of him. “Then let’s have it.”

  Guinness, for just a moment, contemplated how much he would enjoy twisting the son of a bitch’s arm out of its socket, just to teach him a decent respect for business etiquette. Once upon a time, in a burst of enthusiasm for polishing his professional skills, he had enrolled in a ten week crash course in Gung Fu offered by the Anglo¬Chinese Friendship League. They had met, for two hours in the evening every week night for ten weeks, in the basement of a Masonic lodge hall in Marylebone, and they had taught him how it was done. It was supposed to be easy, like pulling the drumstick off a Christmas turkey.

  Of course, in the real world you couldn’t dismember people just because they failed to display the proper deference. Not people you needed, at any rate, and at the moment our friend with the whiskers was a necessary person. Later would be time enough.

  So Guinness did the sensible thing and took out his wallet, extracted six of Ernie Tuttle
’s fifty dollar bills, and slapped them down in the outstretched hand, the fingers of which closed over the money like filaments of a meat-eating plant over an unwary fly. The bobcat held them in his closed fist for a moment, as if trying to decide if they felt like enough. Apparently they did, because when the moment was over, he pushed the fist into the pocket of a pair of elaborately shabby jeans and pulled it out again, empty.

  His foot came off the front bumper of the truck, and he wiped the hand that had held Guinness’s money on the front of his shirt. “I don’t want no trouble from you,” he said with a kind of sullen rumble. “Money or not, you start gettin’ cute with me and you’ll end up by the side o’ the road someplace, tryin’ to flag down a ride with both y’r arms busted.”

  His head dropped slightly so that once again he stared out from under cover of his eyebrows. Guinness was suddenly struck by the idea that all this was probably meant to be intimidating—he was being threatened; good heavens, what a surprise!—and he smiled a ratty smile. These low budget goons were all alike.

  “Don’t you worry, pal. God knows, I’d never want anyone to think I was getting cute.”

  The low budget goon didn’t seem entirely satisfied with his answer, and for a few seconds appeared to be meditating some response. Apparently, he thought better of it, however, and merely pointed back over his shoulder with his thumb.

  “Get in the back. I don’t want you seen on the way through town.”

  Guinness didn’t particularly want to be seen, so he went around to the back of the truck and climbed in without further comment.

  The inside of the camper was just a shade under six feet high, yet the light filtering in from tiny windows on either side created rather the impression of a cathedral in which the immense vaults are concealed in a gloom of their own fashioning. Lengthways against either wall were cots only slightly wider than park benches, between which ran a narrow little alley. On the left hand cot lay an army fatigue jacket with the name Pfeifer stenciled in black over the right breast pocket. Guinness picked it up and read another name, this one embroidered in two-inch-high white letters on the back. Boyd. He set it down again and frowned. Boyd Pfeifer. Something told him most emphatically that he and Boyd Pfeifer would be having trouble before they were finished.