The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  How could he have missed the guy all that morning and the night before? He must be losing his touch, getting sloppy in his twilight years. Four hundred miles of highway, plus the whole length of Los Angeles, and he hadn’t spotted him.

  Well, he could forgive himself the four hundred miles—he hadn’t been driving through half of that, and it had been dark the other half—but the city! All those stop signs and turnoffs: it was embarrassing.

  Anyway, Guinness promised himself, he would make up for it with the smooth professional polish of his takedown.

  Because the guy had to be taken down. It had to be established just who was in on this phase of the game besides Vlasov and himself. What neither of them needed now was some hideous new complication, so whoever he was, and whosoever’s interests he was in there to protect, Guinness was just going to have to get rid of him.

  The Huntington Library had been one of those places Guinness had haunted while he was in graduate school. It was a tidy drive from UCLA, but he had made it perhaps as often as once a week for the eighteen or so months before he was far enough along on his dissertation to be able to take that job at Belmont State and move north.

  The place was a bookish paradise, almost as good as the Bodleian, and with a little help from his director he had obtained permission to use the reading room, spending many happy hours there at work at a desk from which he could look up and see before him the complete Dictionary of National Biography nestled in between Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and a two-volume set of the Alumni Cantabrigiensis.

  Today he parked his rented car in the visitors’ lot just at the side entrance. Inside the reading room he hitched a stool up close to a window from which the main driveway was completely visible, opened a volume of Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, and pretended to read until he saw a familiar dark blue hardtop—a Chevy, as it turned out—moving tentatively through the ornate wrought iron gateway and up the gravel roadbed. It pulled into a space on the left hand side of the almost perfectly square parking lot, just about as far away from Guinness’s car as the dimensions of the area allowed. Whoever was inside seemed, for the time being, prepared to stay there.

  Guinness couldn’t see much of him; just the lower half of his face was visible through the side window. All you could really tell was that he had on a moss green jacket and wore his sideburns down almost to the corner of his jaw. That would probably be enough, though.

  There was a back door that led through a series of corridors into the main display hall, where they kept the Ellesmere Chaucer and the holograph copy of “Lycidas.” That emptied into a covered walkway leading to the gallery, the entrance to which sported a little semicircular terrace with giant ferns shading you from too vulgar a contact with the afternoon sun. It was the sort of spot Henry James would have hit upon for the big scene in one of his later novels, if you can imagine such a thing as a James novel set in Los Angeles. Guinness only tarried long enough for a glance back through the greenery to make quite certain before he went inside that there was nobody immediately on his tail.

  On the wall at the end of the main gallery hung Reynolds’ Mrs. Siddons As the Tragic Muse, to which, because of a fancied resemblance to his first wife, Guinness had always been drawn. The figures in the background were ludicrous, of course: What had the Eighteenth Century understood about tragedy? But the calm melancholy of Mrs. Siddons’s eyes, or perhaps simply the looseness of her hair or the way she held her hands, reminded him of Kathleen.

  “Look at the expression on that face,” Louise had sputtered on the one occasion when he had taken her to see it—they had snuck off, at her insistence, for a few hours of relief from her father’s reminiscences about life in the stationery business. “‘Now where could I have left the car keys?’ You have funny taste in paintings, Ray,” and they had gone out to sit in the garden until it was time to go back to paying their honeymoon visit to the mausoleum at Autumn Years.

  Perhaps, in one of those uncanny flashes of intuition women are reputed to have, she had suspected something of the reasons for his absorption in what, after all, was not really one of the supreme achievements of Western art. But then, how could she have? She knew nothing about Kathleen apart from the bare fact of her existence.

  Now, all these years later, Guinness once again stared up at the Tragic Muse as if hoping she might reveal to him the wellsprings of his destiny. Perhaps in future he shouldn’t teach his sophomores quite so lively a contempt for the English Augustans.

  When he turned around there was, sure enough, a fairly tall man with longish sideburns, wearing a moss green sport coat. He was standing by the main stairway and gazing with rapt attention at a small Watteau. Guinness began a slow circuit counterclockwise around the room, stopping for a few seconds before all of the larger paintings, until he was directly across from the other man, who had not moved. There were perhaps fifty feet between them then, and Guinness undid the button of his coat to give himself access—should it come to that—to the .25 caliber revolver that was tucked into his belt. Tuttle’s holster, for some reason, had been right-handed.

  He walked right across the room, knowing his friend with the sideburns wouldn’t dare to turn around, and stopped only about a foot behind him. Fortunately, there was no one else in the gallery who seemed interested in that particular Watteau, so there was no one to overhear Guinness’s melodramatic opening.

  “Don’t move, pal,” he breathed into Sideburns’s ear. “The first time I see your elbows wobble I’m going to burn you, right here in front of the tourists.”

  There was one of those pregnant silences that you read about in books. Since it is normally rather difficult to see a person’s face through the back of his head, Guinness couldn’t be sure just exactly how his little caution had been received.

  “So now what?” the man said at last. Sensible fellow, he was going to be reasonable and not force Guinness to prove in public how tough he was.

  “So now you clasp your hands together behind your back—nice and relaxed, nothing showy; just like you were taking a little stroll to ponder on the mysteries of art—and you walk on out of here and into the garden, where we’ll find a quiet little nook and talk things over. And remember, I’ll be right behind you. One bad move and you’ll miss your birthday.”

  Sideburns did as he was told. The hands came around to the back slowly, and the fingers knitted loosely together. And then they both started moving slowly toward the door, Guinness about ten feet behind and a little to the right. It was nice to be dealing with professionals again; Sideburns had probably been through this routine, on one side or the other, half a dozen times in his life, and he knew enough to stay calm and do as he was told. An amateur would have started screaming bloody murder; he wouldn’t have been able to help himself.

  Once out in the garden, the two of them found a nice little out of the way cement bench, screened off on one side by a thickly overgrown grape arbor. Before letting him sit down, Guinness subjected his prisoner to a quick frisk that came up with nothing beyond a Western-style stitched leather wallet, complete with carvings of bucking broncos and longhorn steers. There were no guns, no lethal looking pointed instruments, nothing particularly sinister at all. Guinness took his first close look at the man who apparently had been following him all the way from the San Francisco Bay Area, and he didn’t add up to much either.

  Just a man, perhaps in his mid to later forties, with dark brown hair and that puffy, rather seedy complexion suggestive of too many five o’clock Happy Hours, of too much time fueled by salted peanuts and beer.

  The wallet did contain a number of business cards reading: “Ralph Spignaldo, Confidential Enquiries,” with an address and phone number in Oakland.

  “Sit down.” The man sat down on the cement bench and Guinness held up one of the cards. “Is this you?”

  Ralph Spignaldo nodded his head three or four times, as if anxious that the gesture should not be missed.

  “Now, Mr. Spi
gnaldo, if you want to get any older, you’re going to tell me why I keep seeing your face in my rear view mirror.”

  Driving away from the Huntington, after having left Mr. Spignaldo unconscious and leaning restfully against the grape arbor, Guinness considered the answer he had received to his question. He had taken up his position behind the bench, just touching the back of Spignaldo’s head once in a while with the revolver muzzle, which had rendered that gentleman only too eager to provide any information he could. Mr. Spignaldo had, in fact, maintained with some heat that “a lousy seventy-five bucks a day, plus expenses” didn’t oblige him to ornament the library lawn with his brains.

  “Look, man,” he had said, and Guinness, through the muzzle of his revolver, could feel his trembling, “look, man, I don’t carry any heat—you patted me down, so you know I don’t carry any heat. I’m just a guy trying to make a buck, that’s all.”

  “Tell me how you were supposed to make it, Ralph.”

  “This guy comes to my office and pays me a week in advance. That’s over five hundred—I ain’t seen that much together in one place for months.” His hands touched the bench on either side of him and then sprang nervously back into his lap. “All I was supposed to do was to follow you and let this guy—this guy who comes to my office—let him know about anybody you have anything to do with. That was all.”

  That was all. Anybody he had anything to do with. And that, so far, would hang it all on Doris. Guinness closed his eyes, and for a fraction of a second he thought he saw her face, the way it would be while she was being slapped around by some thickset goon who wanted her to tell him things she didn’t know. It might not happen that way, but it could. There was no rule to say it couldn’t, and she would know who to thank for it. Terrific.

  “Who was it, Spignaldo? Who is it you’re working for?”

  He pressed the gun muzzle a shade harder against the back of Spignaldo’s skull. “Spill, Ralph, or it comes off right this very minute. What did he look like?”

  “Look, man, I don’t know who he was. Just a guy with five hundred bucks. Why should I ask?”

  “You want to die, Harry? What did he look like?”

  “Okay, man, okay. Around six feet. A dark suit, double breasted; looked like he must have bought it second-hand from Harry Truman. Maybe fifty years old; maybe a hundred and ninety, two hundred pounds. A big guy. Lightish hair, but not blond. Foreign from the sound of him.”

  “Foreign from where, Ralph?”

  “How should I know, man? I never finished the tenth grade.

  “Okay, okay. I’m trying.” Spignaldo’s hands came back out of his lap and pressed palms down against the surface of the bench on either side of him. Guinness noticed how white the nail beds were. “He sounded like that guy in the old movies—the one that was supposed to turn into a bat.”

  “Dracula? Bela Lugosi? You mean he sounded like Bela Lugosi?”

  “Yeah. That’s right. Like Dracula.”

  “How were you supposed to get in touch when you had learned something? You were supposed to report, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah. By phone. He gave me a number to call.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Eight two seven, three seven nine five. In the City.”

  “Good boy, Harry. And when you wake up, just remember that you did, in fact, wake up.”

  With that, he quickly transferred the revolver over to his right hand and used the side of his left to give Spignaldo a sharp crack at the top joint of his neck, just where it ran into the base of his skull. Spignaldo started slightly, but then went limp and began falling forward from the waist. Guinness caught him by the nape of his collar and leaned him against the arbor.

  “That’s right. Like Dracula.” Dracula in an antique, double-breasted suit. Guinness stared grimly over his steering wheel as he drove back along Colorado Boulevard, unable to restrain a certain sneaking admiration for Comrade Vlasov’s imaginative daring. Because in his position it took guts to con the Russians into providing you with your stalking horse. They must have been sorry to lose him; the man was obviously a tactician of genius.

  What had he done? Phoned up the San Francisco consulate at a quarter to three in the morning, ranting hysterically into some undersecretary’s ear about how he was going to cancel the ticket on a certain Raymond Guinness of 1427 Avon Street in the obscure hamlet of Belmont, California, and how they’d never be able to stop him? Something like that, probably.

  Not that the Russians would care, even if he did throw in that said Guinness was the gentleman mentioned on such and such a page of the Bluebook. But Guinness would be their first solid lead to Vlasov, and they would care about that. Those people took a very dim view of treason.

  So they would put a tag on Guinness, just to see if he would lead them to Vlasov. They wouldn’t dare use any of their own personnel, not when there was such an excellent chance of Guinness ending up messily murdered. No, they would use outside help. Some innocuous slob like Ralph Spignaldo. And Vlasov, who clearly had his ways of finding such things out, would just tag along behind. Spignaldo would follow Guinness, Vlasov would follow Spignaldo, and Guinness would be spared the sight of any uncomfortably familiar Slavic faces. It was very tidy. Very tidy indeed.

  18

  Guinness used his fork to turn over the cherry tomato in the center of his small green salad. The other side didn’t look as shriveled, but he decided not to eat it anyway and lifted it out and onto the glass ashtray just in front of the napkin dispenser. The dispenser was at the wall end of his table, which he had picked because it was away from the windows and allowed him an unobstructed view of the main entrance.

  In addition to the salad, he had before him an “extra cut” rib-eye steak, a baked potato that came with a little paper tub of sour cream, a small steel pot of hot water in which to steep his tea bag, and a slice of Boston cream pie. The condemned man enjoyed a hearty meal.

  Except that he wasn’t enjoying it. He ate with the glum determination of a twelve year old playing scales on the piano. The food, though objectively tasty, sat like lead on his stomach, and he felt almost ready to gag with every swallow. He had only bothered with dinner on the assumption that it would steady his nerves

  They needed steadying. Guinness had devoted the entire previous four hours, ever since he had left Spignaldo sleeping peacefully in the gardens of the Huntington Library, to making absolutely certain that no one was following him.

  Staying away from the freeways as much as possible, he had made his cautious way to the downtown area of Los Angeles and parked on the roof of a five story garage just catercorner from the Times Mirror Square. It was probably silly of him, but he didn’t really much care for the idea of riding around in a car that Vlasov and anybody else who cared to play would by this time be able to spot in a second. It made him feel naked. There was an Avis office just three blocks to the east, so what the hell.

  For the rest he just kept on driving through into the evening. He didn’t dare go back to his Los Feliz motel room, and it wasn’t necessary anyway. He hadn’t even bothered to unpack.

  The old fuddy behind the desk had decided to take it as a personal affront when Guinness checked out after only four hours, but life is hard and you can’t please everyone.

  If Spignaldo had a relief man—hell, he would have to have had a relief man; nobody can tail you for days on end by himself—the motel would be where he would have to go. It would be about his only chance of picking up the trail.

  But as he sat in the Lariat Steak House in Santa Monica, picking over the contents of his salad bowl, it wasn’t any crushing anxieties about Spignaldo and his confederates that were disturbing Guinness’s digestion. No, in all likelihood, Spignaldo was at that moment on his way back to Oakland, pondering over the merits of some other line of work. No, he was safe enough from Spignaldo; it was Vlasov who presented the danger.

  But then, ever had it been so.

  Vlasov was brilliant and apparently in perfect control,
both of the situation and himself. “Would tomorrow evening be too soon?” He might have been issuing an invitation to play bridge.

  And this was the man who was planning to kill him, who had apparently lived through the last seven years with no other purpose. Seven years of planning and hatred, and it was all aimed right at Guinness’s head. Seven years, and they were but as few because he loved her.

  She must have been quite a lady, Mrs. Vlasov; she would have to have been to have inspired such a revenge. A grand passion apparently, the real thing. Guinness wondered what it must be like to love like that. It had to be neurotic, that kind of love; it had to be.

  As if physically to disengage himself, Guinness let his fork drop with a clatter onto the little sterling steel plate on which his half eaten steak rested, and rose to leave. The huge menu board that you faced as you slid your tray along to place your order and pick up your dessert and hot drink had said, “No Tipping,” but he left a dollar for the busboy anyway, folding it once and placing it underneath his cup and saucer. He had been overtipping now for some time, as if in a series of small acts of contrition.

  Outside, with the breeze from the ocean just catching at the side vents of his open jacket, he felt better. Vlasov shrank in his imagination back down to human scale; after all, like Guinness, he was merely a man. He could be killed. And for all his enormous virtuosity as a tactician, he was pretty obviously off the wall.

  Sane men didn’t go around slipping ice picks into housewives just to satisfy some private whim. They didn’t scare the shit out of you by stuffing your ignition lock full of nitrogen triiodide and then issue elaborate challenges to come shoot it out with them in back of the merry go round at Griffith Park. The guy was a nut.

  Guinness closed his eyes for a moment and tried to think about something else.