The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  It was all a question of velocity and impact, as if they had been weights colliding in a vacuum, and not men. How far apart had they been when Vlasov fired? A yard, perhaps two—and Guinness closing fast. He might not ever have seen the flash, let alone felt anything. Anything less than a clean kill—the heart or the brain—would not have mattered. There would have been no time for a second try.

  He had grabbed Vlasov’s arm, just above the elbow, using his grip to pull himself in even faster and to keep the gun away from him, punching out with his right hand into the man’s thorax. That was when he felt it for the first time, the terrible scorched wrenching, as if every sinew in his arm were being torn loose. The pain shot through him, through the whole length of his body, it seemed; but by then Vlasov was already stunned and helpless.

  They went over together, tumbling and rolling down the gentle slope, further and further into the darkness. Guinness contrived to bring his knee up so that it came down into Vlasov’s solar plexus the first time they made contact with the ground, and then his own momentum pitched him free. He managed one turn on his shoulder, trying to protect the injured arm, and then landed on his back with a shock. It was a second or two before he was sure he could still move.

  Then came a moment, only a flicker, of blind panic.

  What about Vlasov? Where was he, the bastard? That gun, that damned gun.

  But no problem. The gun hadn’t landed two feet from Vlasov’s right side, but he couldn’t have picked it up, couldn’t have squeezed the trigger if it had been lying in the palm of his hand. He was too busy dying.

  Guinness brought himself up to where he was resting on his knees and looked at the dim outline of his enemy, knowing that it was over, that he had won, Vlasov lay on his back, his hands down at his sides as they trembled mechanically against his trouser legs. He seemed to be concentrating every shred of his will on trying to breathe, but he couldn’t—the only sound he made was the gurgle from his smashed windpipe as he suffocated in his own blood. It was over for him. Without the glasses—they had been lost somewhere in all that bouncing around; Guinness would have to find them—his was already the face of a corpse.

  Just to be on the safe side, Guinness picked up the gun: a nasty little thing but of small caliber, which was a blessing. In a minute or two he would take a look at how much damage it had done and then decide if he was likely to live or not, but just then the question didn’t strike him as very interesting. All that seemed permanently important was that Vlasov was dying.

  And he was taking his time, the poor bastard. He might be getting a little air, just enough to draw the process out another fifteen or twenty minutes; he might be at it for another half hour. It probably wasn’t much fun.

  Guinness brought the gun to level, resting the muzzle directly against Vlasov’s temple—Vlasov didn’t seem to notice—and then thought better of it. No bullet holes. Just in case something went wrong, just in case the disposal people messed up and Vlasov somehow managed to become police property, there couldn’t be any bullet holes. Nothing absolutely inconsistent with accidental death.

  And besides, guns make noise.

  Until they were hanged for it in 1829, an enterprising pair of hoodlums named Burke and Hare had kept the medical school at Edinburgh supplied with fresh cadavers, no questions asked. They had developed a technique: finding a vagrant in the streets at night, then covering the mouth with the palm of the hand and pinching off the nose between first finger and thumb. It left no mark, no sign of violence.

  Guinness wiped his hand on the front of his shirt and then covered Vlasov’s face with it. Vlasov didn’t even struggle, never lifted his hands, never tried to twist away—perhaps he was already unconscious; perhaps he had simply stopped caring. After three or four minutes, when he pressed his thumb against the side of Vlasov’s neck, there was no heartbeat, and Guinness gently closed the blind eyes. The war between them was over; they would both simply have to be satisfied with the result. The night had suddenly become very cold, and haunted with the spirits of the restless dead.

  On the fourth morning after Guinness’s disappearance, the phone in Tuttle’s motel room in Belmont rang, waking him up. The message had been brief and very much to the point: “That package in which you were interested is buried under a pile of branches in Griffith Park. Take the main road in about a half mile past the merry go round, then get out of your car and head into the trees on your left. About fifty yards should do it. It won’t stay hidden forever, so I wouldn’t linger.”

  Tuttle was scribbling furiously. “Where the hell is Griffith Park? Listen, Guinness, are you okay?”

  “Los Angeles, stupid. And I’ll live. I’m coming home this evening. When I get back to my hotel room, I plan to have about three drinks more than is good for me and then go to bed, and I’ll be very angry if at any point along the way I’m arrested. So that gives you the rest of today to do your little number with the cops. Any trouble, and all bets are off.”

  Then the line went dead.

  Tuttle didn’t like it, not at all. The man sounded very ragged, like maybe the first badge that came near him might just get itself blown away. Guinness didn’t strike him as the type to make idle threats.

  Tuttle frowned and replaced the receiver. Ten minutes later he was dressed and standing in a phone booth next to the entrance of a Safeway—which, except for the neon tubes in the dairy cases, was still dark inside—dialing a number you simply didn’t call from your motel room. It wasn’t done.

  The phone at the other end rang only once before Tuttle heard the familiar voice of a middle aged woman whom he had never seen and probably never would.

  “Yes?”

  They ran through the current security procedure and then Tuttle gave his instructions for having Vlasov’s body retrieved. Whoever was sent was to keep his eyes open and call back between twelve and one that afternoon with a quality report. Tuttle would be in his room.

  What he heard had scared the hell out of him.

  “We borrowed a station wagon from the City Recreation Service and got there a little after ten. You should have seen the joint—we almost decided that we had better forget the whole thing and wait for dark.

  “Cops all over the place. I asked some old guy who tended the peanut machines what the fuss was, and according to him they’d found the night man in a shed over by the merry go round, very dead. A length of electrical extension cord was still twisted around his neck.

  “Anyway, the office had led us to believe that you were reasonably hinky about clearing this one up, so we decided to risk it. We found your stiff right where you said he’d be.

  “Whoever iced him was the tidy type: all the papers were gone from his wallet, no weapons, no personal effects, even the labels had been torn out of his clothes—your perfect John Doe, or as perfect as you can make one without cutting off his hands and pulling the dental work out of his head. There was an ugly looking bruise on his throat and the cartilage in his windpipe was all smashed up—enough to kill him, but we don’t think he died of that. We also found a trace of blood in his right ear; everything else was consistent with death by smothering. Somebody doesn’t mess around.

  “We wrapped him up in a plastic tarp and put him in the back of the wagon and got out of there, fast. He’s stashed now where he’ll keep for the time being. You want an autopsy?”

  “Thanks just the same. Just take his prints and lose him.”

  Jesus. Think of the fun if the cops had found him first.

  A double murder, right in the middle of a public park, in all likelihood with Vlasov’s face staring out from the front page of every newspaper in the state. Oh, the fine times the Russians could have had with a little disaster like that—no wonder Guinness had hauled the body such a distance, and on foot.

  With a car he could have left the damn thing in the middle of the Nevada desert, so he had to have been on foot. Better than half a mile, carting a corpse. Very considerate of him, especially since he had had to man
age it with a bullet in him. It must have taken forever.

  From about 4:00 P.M. on, which was as soon as he could get away from the coils of the law, Tuttle had met every plane coming into the San Francisco Airport from Los Angeles. Guinness was on the nine o’clock PSA flight, and he really looked like hell.

  At first Tuttle had thought he might be carrying a package or something under his coat, but then he noticed that there was no arm in the sleeve. The arm was in a sling that seemed in some way immobilized against his body.

  In basic training they always told you the story about the Spartan boy who concealed a fox under his cloak and then, rather than make a spectacle of himself, let the thing claw his guts out. You were supposed to be very tough in this business, very much the hard nose, and every once in a while it did prove necessary to go walking gamely past a hostile guard with your leg broken in four places; but one wondered what Guinness could think he had to prove.

  Behind the casualness of his gait there was a willful precision, a care that every movement should stay in control, as if it were beneath him to suffer. His eyes looked weary, though, and his face was the color of wet paper. Tuttle’s presence didn’t seem to register at all until he was almost directly in front of him.

  “What the hell happened to you?” he asked, putting out a hand. Guinness didn’t take it and didn’t answer. He only frowned slightly, as if Tuttle had cracked some tasteless joke. He didn’t say anything, as a matter of record, until they were in the car and going over the cloverleaf that fed airport traffic back onto the Bayshore Freeway. And even then he wasn’t precisely what you could call chatty.

  “Will you watch it?” Guinness had snapped as they went around the curve, perhaps a trifle faster than necessary. “I don’t much care to have my arm smashed flat just because you feel like burning rubber.”

  “Sorry.” Tuttle eased his foot down a little on the brake pedal and began to check for cross traffic as they came out of their turn. “Vlasov get a shot off?”

  “One.”

  He didn’t go back to his own hotel—Tuttle didn’t think he was in any shape to be left alone and so talked him into spending the night on the extra bed in his motel room—and Tuttle, as usual, did most of the drinking. But gradually Guinness’s disposition began to improve and Tuttle found out what had happened. Or, at least, as much as he was going to.

  The bullet, it seemed, had entered just to one side of Guinness’s breastbone and had bounced merrily along over his rib cage before it exited and finally buried itself just below the right bicep, flush up against the bone. Guinness had been lucky: The bone was bruised but unbroken, not even cracked, and none of the major arteries had been touched. Otherwise, out there alone in the middle of the night, it was a pretty safe bet he would have bled to death.

  Jesus, a half mile carrying a dead body slung over his shoulder and all shot up like that. Guinness said he had had to put Vlasov down and rest every few hundred yards to keep from fainting. Not good for too many laughs, that kind of thing, not with a bullet in you.

  “You should have said something—we have our connections, you know, How the hell did you get yourself pieced back together down there without bringing the cops in on it?”

  Guinness only shrugged. And, true, it had been a stupid question; hell, the man had lived in L.A. for over a year. No doubt he knew half a dozen doctors who would forget their civic duty for an extra hundred bucks.

  In The Business it was considered a breach of etiquette to inquire too closely into how a job had gone. If Guinness had wanted to talk about it, that would have been one thing, but he hadn’t. So it seemed unlikely that Tuttle would ever find out precisely what had passed between Vlasov and the man who had killed him. It would have been worth something to know.

  But, God knows, Guinness wasn’t going to tell him. Guinness had hardly talked at all, and what he had said didn’t precisely make worlds of sense.

  “Vlasov wanted to die,” he had almost whispered, as if he were saying it to himself. And then he had looked up at Tuttle, as if noticing his presence for the first time, and had smiled a peculiar ironic little smile. “If he could have killed me first, that would have made everything perfect, but I wasn’t the main target. He brought all of us—you, me, the Russians, every player in the game—all down on him at once, and one or the other of us could be counted on to take him off. He planned it that way; he was too moral a man for it to have had any other ending. You have to admire that kind of integrity.”

  Maybe Guinness did, but as far as Tuttle was concerned it was strictly off the wall. It made you wonder how Guinness had managed to survive as long as he had, this not really being a line of work that was very kind to the philosophical type.

  Anyway, the next morning, having refused all offers of breakfast, the former front runner on San Mateo County’s Most Wanted Fugitives list walked out through the door of Tuttle’s room at the Casa Belmont to resume what one supposed had to be called “normal life,” or what from now on would have to pass for it.

  But at least he was no longer an object of official interest to the police. It had taken some doing, but finally Creon had been persuaded of the wisdom of canceling his a.p.b. and regarding the investigation into the death of Louise Harrison Guinness as concluded. He hadn’t liked it much, even after Tuttle had produced the ice pick with the blood that would type with the victim’s and the fingerprints that belonged to somebody whom he was rather pointedly told was none of his affair.

  It seemed he had had his heart set on busting Guinness. And even forgetting the murder rap, there was still the small matter of assault, grand theft firearm, and possibly even kidnapping, all committed against the person of one Herbert L. Ganjemi, late of the Oakland Police. Ganjemi, for all of being a dumb shit, was a friend and a brother officer, and you just didn’t drop a friend of Creon’s into a laundry basket, steal his piece, and then go on about your business. After all, there was the dignity of the Law to be considered.

  “Look, pal,” Tuttle had answered, rising up out of his chair and leaning over his hands on Creon’s desk, their faces not more than half a yard apart, “the government is not interested in having its citizens hassled by every small town cop who happens to think he’s Matt Dillon. If Dr. Guinness is in any way molested, if he gets so much as a traffic ticket any time in the next hundred years, you are going to find this two bit department of yours picked over like the underwear in Macy’s basement. You don’t know what harassment is until you’ve gone a few rounds with us, and when we’re done you won’t be able to find a job as a warehouse guard in Hermosillo, Mexico. We want the man left alone, you got that?”

  Well, Creon had toughed it up a lot and yelled about how nobody, but nobody, could tell him how to do his job—as if an asshole like that would have the faintest idea how to do his job—but eventually the message had filtered through. Guinness was off the hook. There would even be an item in the local papers about a new official theory that the murder had been committed by a transient, whom the police had every hope of eventually apprehending.

  And that was that. Guinness had taken an apartment not far from his office, his house was unpadlocked and up for sale, and he was back at his job. Everything seemed to be back to normal.

  Except, what was normal anymore? Guinness was behaving like a zombie. For the past two weeks he had lived his life in precisely three rooms: his apartment, his office at school, and the mausoleum in Colma, where his wife occupied a space in the next to the bottom tier of the south wall. He would sit there for hours, four or five times a week, staring at the blank square of marble to which the little steel plate reading “Louise Harrison Guinness/1944- 1977” had not yet been bolted. It was a grief that seemed too large for the exclusive use of just one little mortal, and God knows what else the man was mourning beyond his late missus. He was like someone haunted by ghosts, willing them up from their several graves out of a recognition that he deserved to be tormented.

  The night Guinness came back, he had crawled
onto the spare motel room bed and lain there in his clothes, not even bothering to take down the spread. It made Tuttle nervous; every few hours he would wake up and every time Guinness would still be awake, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling. You could see his eyeballs glistening in the faint light that came in through an open space between the curtains. Guinness might not have slept at all that night.

  Was he sleeping at all now? It was a safe bet Tuttle wasn’t; his buddy Prescott had seen to that.

  “Listen, Tuttle,” he had said over the phone, in that maddening Harvard Yard accent of his, “we made a deal. You want me to go waltzing into the Old Man’s office and tell him that you’re the only man to fill the slot he’s owed me since Kaufmann’s heart attack? You want me to ooze all over the place about how we just can’t live without you another second? Then you deliver Guinness. I want him, Tuttle, and I don’t care if you have to wheel him in trussed up like a turkey. We’ve got lots of shrinks around here and it won’t take them any time at all to put his head back together enough so that he can hold a gun. After all, how sane does he have to be?”

  Tuttle made a face at himself in the glass wall of the telephone booth, thinking about Kaufmann’s heart attack and wondering if the actuarial figures for people in Prescott’s department were likely to be all that much of an improvement.

  “I keep telling you, Al. You can’t rush a man like this. Four days now, and every damn day I’ve asked him the same question and he’s given me the same answer. He says that he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life having to look over his shoulder, and it might even be that he means it. What the hell do you expect me to do? I can’t hang around out here forever; the Vlasov business was cleared up a long time ago.”

  On the other end of the line there was silence, broken only by the faint sound of a pencil eraser being tapped against the surface of a glass topped desk some three thousand miles away.