The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  There is a certain kind of man who never believes what he hasn’t beaten the shit out of somebody to find out, and then he’ll believe anything. Absolutely anything. Pfeifer was pretty clearly of that kind. It might momentarily be a little rough on the diaphragm, but ultimately it would make everything a lot simpler. Those kinds of men are generally pretty stupid.

  But when the time came, Guinness promised himself, when the time came. . .

  “Look,” he managed, after perhaps three minutes of concentrated effort, “look, I can’t. Please. They’ll kill me.”

  Pfeifer just smiled. He was having such a good time. “Well then, Mr. Lickweather, I’m afraid I’ll just have to settle for what you got in y’r wallet and leave you planted under one o’ these here big ol’ trees.” Still smiling, he pulled a familiar looking revolver from the back pocket of his jeans. Then, using both hands to steady it, he lined up the sights on a spot just perhaps a quarter of an inch under the bottom inside corner of Guinness’s left eye.

  “Okay.” Guinness had his eyes screwed shut and had turned his head away, as if trying to avoid the bullet. It was a realistic performance. He would have believed it himself except that Pfeifer hadn’t bothered to draw back the hammer, something almost anybody would do if he really had it in mind to shoot. “Okay, okay. I’ll tell you. Just put that thing away.”

  The story also was very good, full of those specific little details that add such an aura of authenticity. It seemed that Mr. Linkweather had been, until comparatively recently, an accountant for certain parties in Portland, Oregon, who controlled most of that city’s gambling and vice. Mr. Linkweather had been skimming from the receipts and, when things got warm, had taken himself off and was now en route to join his mistress and the rest of his ill gotten gains in one of the Banana Republics.

  Really, it was a very good story. It accounted for everything—the two sets of identification, all the cash he had on him, the gun. Guinness was very proud of it.

  Of course, there was still the drug case, with its needle and its three little vials of colorless fluid—but it turned out that Mr. Linkweather was a diabetic.

  Friend Boyd bought it, the whole package from start to finish. Hell, who lies about being a bookkeeper? Guinness was beginning to experience that delicious feeling of power that comes when everything falls into place precisely as it should, when you know, positively know, that your brilliant plan has worked right down to the tiniest detail.

  The poor simple bastard—you could almost hear the wheels turning as he tried to figure how Mr. Linkweather’s troubles could be made to pay something. It was going to be such a pleasure stomping his ass.

  “How ’bout I decide to sell you back to y’r friends up in Portland? How’d you like that, Mr. Lickweather? Hey, how’d you like that?” He laughed and shook his head and laughed again. He was feeling just fine, just fine and full of how diabolically clever he was.

  Oh, he was a whiz kid, sure he was. He was on top of the world. He’d even put Guinness’s gun away, back in his pocket. What the fuck, he didn’t need any gun to take care of any little diabetic pencil pusher with his hands tied. Not him. Not a smart boy like him.

  Gradually, a little at a time, Guinness had made his preparations. He would have liked to have gotten his hands free, but it is never really practical to work knots loose right under somebody’s nose. Besides, there was the tactical advantage that almost no one expects to be jumped by a man with his arms sewn together.

  So he had settled for making it to his feet. Pfeifer didn’t seem to mind. After all, he was the man in charge here; what did he have to worry about?

  “You just go right ahead,” Guinness said finally, with a short, brutal little laugh. “You just try shaking them down, sweetheart, and two minutes after they’ve finished with me they’ll be converting your face into a sieve.” Pfeifer’s eyes narrowed, and Guinness knew that he had scored his point. “In fact, it might be a good idea if you just stayed out of this altogether.”

  They were perhaps fifteen feet apart now, which was perfect. If Pfeifer came for him, and he would, he would come in a rush—it was always that way. And by the time he had made half the distance, he would be too deeply committed to his own forward movement to save himself.

  It was obvious from the way Pfeifer was beginning to balance on the balls of his feet that he was at least thinking about coming over there and showing everybody who was boss, and when he did that he was a goner. When they charged you like that, all hot and careless with anger and dented pride, they set themselves up for you.

  It wouldn’t take much to get him to take those first few steps.

  “Yes. Yes, you ought to stay out of this one, Boyd. A punk like you is bound to get carved into stew meat if he tries playing games with his betters, so you just cut me loose and I’ll go on about my business and no hard feelings. Maybe I’ll throw you a bone after I’ve gotten to where I’m going.”

  He didn’t announce himself, didn’t start yelling or making threats—he just came. Guinness waited until he had crossed most of the distance and then stepped forward with his right foot and, continuing the counterclockwise movement until his back was completely turned, cocked his left foot up under him and let it shoot straight back.

  They say that if the person you’re mad at lives through a kick like that, you haven’t done it right, but Guinness had never made any claims to godlike proficiency in the martial arts and so was pleased with less.

  It caught Pfeifer just under the navel and took him completely off the ground with a wheeze like that of a cork coming out of a half flat bottle of champagne. After that, a carefully placed kick to the temple rendered him perfectly quiet.

  Pfeifer never stirred while Guinness untied himself, or while he patted him down, retrieving his revolver and wallet, along with the drug case that, according to Ernie Tuttle, had in it the means of rendering the world forever safe from bearded hippies who preyed on runaway accountants from Portland.

  Guinness weighed the possibility in his hand, and then decided to hell with it. Another time, should it prove necessary, he would have with the greatest personal pleasure put the big clod’s lights out, but there was no pressing reason why right then and there he had to kill Boyd Pfeifer, and it wasn’t his place to go around playing avenging angel. He was himself, according to almost any criteria, a pretty terrible person. The role of society’s guardian should go to someone with cleaner hands.

  So he contented himself with tying the still limp form around one of the larger available redwoods. Pfeifer would awaken to discover himself embracing the trunk, his hands bound with the same length of clothesline he had used to tie Guinness and about a foot and a half apart. It would take him several hours, possibly on into the next day, to work himself loose, and by then even the soft bark of these trees would have burned and cut his face and bare arms until they looked like raw liver.

  The keys to the truck were in the ignition. Guinness wasn’t wild about driving himself all the way to Los Angeles, but events hadn’t given him a second choice. Anyway, it was getting dark; no one would be able to see that clearly into the cab. And he simply wasn’t an important enough criminal to have justified an intensive statewide search. He was out of the Bay Area, and that was what really mattered.

  His fingers were already curled around the door handle when he noticed that Pfeifer was beginning to stir. Guinness hesitated for a second and then picked the drug case out of the side pocket of his coat and went back over to where he had left him tied. Okay, so he wouldn’t kill him; that didn’t mean he couldn’t have a little fun with the bastard.

  When Pfeifer opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Guinness, sitting on the ground next to him, loading up a syringe from the plastic vial marked “2.” Guinness smiled at him, the way Browning’s duke must have smiled at the envoy.

  “Guess what, Boyd. I lied to you; this isn’t insulin. Can you imagine what it might really be?” A yellowish light came into Pfeifer’s eyes and he shook his
head mechanically, as if the joints in his neck were gradually freezing shut.

  “No?” Guinness raised his eyebrows, as if terribly surprised and disappointed, and then smiled again. “Well, that’s all right; it’ll give you something to ponder over while you feel your brains turning into jelly.” He slipped the needle in just at the insertion of the neck muscle, and Pfeifer let out a short muffled little scream. “So long, pal.”

  He was out cold, even before Guinness could withdraw the needle. Somewhere, some government chemist had really known what he was doing.

  It was the better part of an hour before Guinness could find his way back to the Coast Highway. One little dirt road looked pretty much like another, and at every fork you just had to guess. Eventually, though, he found a paved road with a sign that said he was in the Los Padres National Forest and could get to where he was going if he would only turn to the left and keep plugging along. The sign was correct, and within twenty minutes he was back on his way south.

  Dinner was a rushed business at a Howard Johnson’s in Morro Bay. It was well after nine when he arrived there, and he practically had the place to himself. They must have been in a hurry to close up and go home, because the waitress gave him the wrong flavor of ice cream for dessert—mocha fudge instead of chocolate ripple—and slapped his check down before he had a chance even to touch his second cup of tea.

  At about five minutes before four, he pulled into the parking lot of the Los Angeles International Airport. He hadn’t, so far as he could tell, been followed, but that wasn’t very far. A child could have tailed Pfeifer, and after their little forest interlude anyone could have picked him up again and just stayed with him all the way down. How are you going to know who’s behind you on the freeway?

  There was a line of cabs along the curb in front of the loading area, but Guinness didn’t take one until he had gone into the terminal, taken the up escalator to the ticket desks on the second floor, stood around for a few minutes watching the arrival notices change, taken the down escalator back to the baggage docks, and passed back out through the double glass doors to the outside. He didn’t want to be remembered by anyone who might happen to be interested as the man who had hired a cab immediately after coming out of the parking lot. Nobody would be interested—at least nobody who wasn’t already—but it was bad technique to exhibit unusual behavior, and sometimes bad technique can get you killed.

  He paid off his taxi at the corner of Sunset and Vine, wishing he could simply find himself a bed and catch some sleep, but of course that was out of the question. Unless accompanied by a peroxide blonde, you couldn’t check into a motel, not without luggage, and Guinness was a trifle short of blondes. Fortunately, however, it was a Friday night, and along Hollywood Boulevard there wouldn’t be any problem about staying occupied and inconspicuous until daylight.

  Walking the one block north, he found an all night movie and sat through two and one half performances of The Bedford Incident before the department store across the street was open for business.

  As soon as it was, Guinness bought himself some underwear, socks, two pairs of wash and wear trousers—one tan and the other black—two short sleeved dress shirts, a black long sleeved turtleneck sweater, and some toilet articles.

  All that, plus the canvas suitcase he afterward purchased at a luggage store next door, cost him a total of $137.64. Next time the police chased him out of town, he would have to remember to pack.

  Using his Linkweather driver’s license, he rented a car from a pretty little brunette behind the Avis desk at the Roosevelt Hotel and drove to a motel on Los Feliz Boulevard, not more than three quarters of a mile from Griffith Park.

  Throwing his suitcase on the bed, he headed for the shower. Five minutes later, when he came back into the room with a towel wrapped around his loins, the phone rang.

  17

  Without lifting it from its hook, Guinness held the receiver under his hand through nine rings. Two. . . three. . . His lips moved silently as he counted them off, one after the other (five. . . six. . .) the way felons at the post must have counted off the strokes of the lash. Finally, making himself a small private bet (eight. . . nine), he picked up the receiver and cradled it against the side of his face.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Guinness,” answered a suave, indefinably foreign sounding voice. “You are no doubt fatigued from your travels. Would tomorrow evening be too soon?” Guinness frowned at the bare wall, counting at one the number of foreign gentlemen who would be likely to call him at a Los Angeles motel he had picked at random not more than twenty minutes earlier. Okay, so he had won his bet. Didn’t that make him a clever fellow.

  “That would be fine, Mr. Vlasov.” His voice was under far better control than he had dared to hope.

  “I am so glad. By the way, were you aware that you have been followed? I mean, of course, by parties other than myself. I leave it to you to deal with them as you think best. Pleasant dreams.”

  The line went dead, and Guinness replaced the receiver. For a long moment he simply stared at the motel room carpet, trying to decide why he wasn’t a whole lot more scared than, in fact, he was.

  Oh, he was scared; anybody would have been scared. But he should, by rights, have been terrified. Vlasov was a pretty terrifying person.

  In their line of work what made the difference was command of technique, and Vlasov had that. Jesus, to tail a man for over four hundred miles, a man who knew you by sight, who would be expecting you, looking for you, and not to be spotted once. You had to be very good to do that, and Vlasov was very good. All the time Guinness had known he was back there somewhere—the whole trip down he had had that funny feeling in the back of his neck that invariably meant he was being followed—but there had never been a single sign.

  And in thirty-six hours Vlasov wanted to play hide and seek amid the eucalyptus trees in Griffith Park. Any sensible man would be scared green.

  “He’s a constitutional fanatic,” Tuttle had said, “a man given to causes and holy crusades. Nobody could figure out why he had defected—it’s the sort of question that has to be answered in a deal like this—and that was all the shrink who looked at Vlasov’s interrogation films could tell us. ‘This is not a man who turns traitor so he can raise fruit trees in Oregon. No way.’”

  And yet he had defected. In response to a higher loyalty perhaps—but he had broken faith. With the KGB, the Party, Mother Russia, you name it. For all of which there would have to be an atonement. That streak of fanaticism, which for those outside the profession might go under the name of moral decency, would demand no less.

  And what of that higher loyalty, the late Raya Natalia Vlasov? She would demand her revenge; it was only a question of how wide a net she would cast, of how many little fish would have to be dragged in before she would consent to rest quiet in her grave.

  One’s wife, what would she not demand of her murderer, of the one who had put her in the line of fire? Guinness understood the ethics of the thing as clearly as did Vlasov, although perhaps he did not feel himself bound to them to quite the same degree.

  Who the hell wouldn’t be scared?

  Somehow, though, he was only bored. The whole thing had come to seem so inevitable, so outside the control of either of them, that it seemed pointless to worry. One way or the other, it would sort itself out.

  For some reason, Guinness found himself thinking not about Vlasov, but about the basement of a schoolmate of his in Newark. He hadn’t been down in that basement in, hell, probably thirty years. Probably it didn’t exist anymore.

  In the basement had been a train set, an enormously complex business laid out on a huge sheet of plywood. The trains had belonged to Guinness’s friend (whose father, unheard of luxury, had laid out the track for him), and sometimes Guinness had been invited down there to help him play with them. There had also been, on a wall shelf that was otherwise cluttered with gardening tools and mason jars filled with preserved peaches, a set of about fifteen of the
Tom Swift novels. Guinness had always meant to borrow a couple of them sometime and read them, just to see what they were like, but he had never gotten around to it, and then his friend had moved to Indiana and had taken the train set and the Tom Swift novels with him, and that had been that.

  Guinness wondered what Tom Swift would have done about Vlasov, foreign agents having been something of a specialty with him. But then Tom Swift wouldn’t have incinerated Mrs. Vlasov in the garage of her Florentine villa (you don’t do that to ladies, not if you’re Tom Swift), so perhaps the complexities of the situation would have been beyond him.

  Anyway, Tom Swift, Mrs. Vlasov’s husband, the Armies of Infernal Justice, and whoever the hell else was lurking around out there in the shadows—they were all just going to have to wait until Raymond Guinness, expert on murder, treachery, and the intricacies of Jacobean poetry, had had himself a couple of hours of sleep. Guinness drew back the counterpane on the bed furthest from the bathroom door, climbed in, and was gone before he had time even to remember to pull down the shades.

  . . . . .

  By a quarter to three that afternoon, nap time was over and Guinness was headed north along the Pasadena Freeway, He had reached no firm conclusions yet as to who was following him, but the field had narrowed itself down to three cars.

  The freeway shot up a little ramp and abruptly terminated in your typical downtown warehouse district, with tangles of traffic signals and telephone lines overhead and gas stations and electrical generating plants and truck tire dealerships on either side of the street. One of three possible tails made a right turn, heading off on God only knew what innocent mission, and the second passed Guinness on the outside and was soon a good two blocks ahead of him.

  That left just one late model dark blue hardtop to worry about. Just to make sure, Guinness continued on up until he hit Colorado Boulevard, stopped in at a coffee shop and bought himself a roll of orange flavored Tums at the cashier’s desk, and continued on his way. Of course, within half a mile his friend in the dark blue hardtop was back there behind him again. There was no mistake.