“Tuttle?” came the answer at last. “Tuttle, he hasn’t slammed the door in your face or anything like that, has he? I mean, he hasn’t threatened to string your guts out to dry; he’s still talking to you, isn’t he?” Tuttle had to admit, yes, Guinness was still talking to him. They were almost—well—almost friends.
“Well then? Isn’t that answer enough for you? You said it yourself: once a shooter always a shooter. He’ll come around. He just wants to stew over his grievances a while longer. Ten to one, by now he already knows he’s coming back and just isn’t ready to admit it.
“Don’t you have some vacation time coming, Tuttle?”
“Yes.” Tuttle nodded sullenly at his reflection in the glass. He could see what was building. “Yes, I’ve got two weeks.”
“Then enjoy yourself in sunny California. Have a big time. Ride the trolley cars and eat all the Chinese food you can hold. When you come back, I’ll expect you to have a beautiful tan and Raymond Guinness with a ring through his nose.”
The line went dead. Tuttle hung up the receiver with a shade more violence than is strictly good for the equipment.
That had been—what?—ten days ago? Tuttle fed another thirty-five cents into the soft drink machine and pushed the button for grape soda. Grape soda turned out to have been a judicious choice. A little sweet, perhaps, but it was cold and this time they hadn’t left the gas out.
“Come on, man,” he whispered under his breath. “It’s your karma; you can’t hold out forever.”
And what Prescott had said was perfectly true: as long as Guinness continued to allow himself to be approached, he had not really said “no.” He had merely said “not yet,” which is not the same thing. If the pressure were kept up, it would only be a matter of time.
Tuttle shaded his eyes with his left hand and looked off down the slope of the hill into which most of the college’s buildings had been embedded, on down to the tennis courts and the playing fields that occupied a narrow strip of flatland. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad life to be a professor and spend your time correcting essays; in a sense, he could see Guinness’s point. After all, wasn’t it his own ambition to come in out of the cold and join the charmed circle of the paper pushers?
In a way, it made him feel a little guilty, what he was trying to do to Guinness—but not very. He was tired of all the rough stuff; he had never been anything beyond merely proficient at it, and it was only a matter of time before he would meet another somebody like Guinness behind a gas station men’s room, somebody who had been born a thug the way Paganini had been born to play the violin—and that time it would probably be for keeps. Guinness was his ticket to safety, and if one or the other of them had to go out into the cold, cruel world and get shot at, then it was damn well going to be Guinness.
And who could say, in his present temper, that it might not be the best thing for him? He needed something to keep his mind occupied; perhaps it was necessary for him to begin risking his life again in order to be reminded that it was worth living.
Sometimes, in the evening, they would sit together in Guinness’s room (Tuttle had gotten into the habit of inviting himself and Guinness hadn’t objected, hadn’t even seemed to notice), and for periods of twenty or thirty minutes Guinness would not even move. He would stare at some object in the middle distance that only he could see, hardly seeming to breathe. What it was he thought about, whether it was simply the death of his wife or the neurotic little tragedy of Misha Vlasov or the whole ugly coil of earthly destiny, he never said. Perhaps he didn’t think about anything; perhaps his mind was too numb with what had happened for him to think at all.
So perhaps it would be the best thing for him. God knows, if he kept up like this much longer, he’d either blow his brains out or end up in one of those loony bins that seemed to line the south side of Ralston Avenue. There might be no limit to what a man could stand, but there was to what he could bear to brood about.
So perhaps, for Guinness, getting back in would be what getting out was for Tuttle: a way to survive. It wasn’t absolutely out of the question.
Anyway, Guinness was a big boy. At one time he had been at the very top of their highly competitive profession, so it wasn’t as if anyone were seducing the innocent. If he went back—and he would go back—it would be because that kind of life was something he needed the way other men need air, something finally impossible to evade.
If not today, then tomorrow. Finally, however, it would happen, just the same. In three days Tuttle would take a plane back to Washington, so that was the deadline for both of them. Guinness might hold out until the last possible moment, but in the end, like a man of sense, he would perceive the necessity of the thing.
Room 244, Humanities Building. That was what the little girl who answered the English Department phone had told him, and she should know.
About the Author
NICHOLAS GUILD was born in 1944 in Belmont, California. He received a B.A. degree in English from Occidental College in Los Angeles and an M.A. in Comparative Literature and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. Since then he has divided his time between teaching and writing. He is the author of critical articles on 17th Century poetry and 20th Century fiction, along with twelve novels, several of which have been international best sellers and which have been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Greek and Czech.
Presently he lives in Frederick, MD
Visit his website: http://www.nicholasguild.com/
Discover other titles by Nicholas Guild at Smashwords.com:
Angel
The Assyrian
The Blood Star
Old Acquaintance
The Favor
The President’s Man
Chain Reaction
The Berlin Warning
The Linz Tattoo
The Summer Soldier Page 26
