The Summer Soldier (20 page)

The problem, of course, was with
Kathleen.

“What happened to you?” she screamed when she
came into the bedroom and found him with his trousers off and his
left thigh all taped up. “You look white as a sheet. What the hell
is going on?” It was the first time Guinness could remember that
she had ever raised her voice.

After a second or two, her eye caught the
shiny little brass jacketed slug in the ashtray and she picked it
up. She looked at him with the same questions, unspoken but in her
face. Unfortunately, he wasn’t sure what kind of answers to
give.

12

Well, it was no good pretending anymore that
he was just a lowly courier, not with a bullet hole in his thigh.
Even in the spy business they didn’t generally shoot you merely for
delivering the mail. She would have to be told.

“It gets sort of bouncy out there sometimes,”
he said quietly. He had pulled himself up into a sitting
position—it didn’t seem quite fair to discuss the matter from the
supine—and he was resting his back against the headboard. “I’ve
been relatively lucky, I suppose. This makes just the second time
I’ve been clipped, and the other was nothing but a scratch.”

Kathleen was sitting next to the bedroom
door, in the room’s solitary chair. It was a bare little wooden
thing and uncomfortable to begin with, but the way she sat in
it—perched on the edge with both feet planted on the ground and her
knees pressed together—made it look like an instrument of torture.
Her hands were folded in her lap, one over the other, and her
elbows were tight against her body; she gave the impression of
wanting to occupy as little space as possible, of holding her
breath in an effort not to stir.

The mere fact that she was using a chair at
all marked the solemnity of the occasion. Why couldn’t she just
come over and plop down next to him on the bed? He wanted to touch
her hair, to rest his hand in the crook of her arm and enjoy that
reassurance of contact.

“Do you kill people?” Except for the
slightest trace of a quaver in her voice, you could have thought
she was asking if he liked her lipstick. She wouldn’t look at him,
though. Her eyes seemed to focus on the carpet under the window
ledge. She wouldn’t look at him and she wouldn’t come near.

“Sometimes.”

“I see.” A long, ragged breath escaped her,
like a soundless sigh, so maybe she had been holding it in. Perhaps
his answer, for all the ugliness it implied, had even been
something of a relief. Very slowly, as if to illustrate her
tranquillity, she drew the tip of her middle finger across her
right eyelid. “Did you this time?”

“Yes. As it happened, I didn’t have much of a
choice.”

There was no immediate reaction, at least
nothing to which you could attach a meaning. She merely continued
to sit on the edge of the chair for a while, abstractedly stroking
her left elbow, lost in some private consultation. She might have
been trying to remember when next the laundry would be delivered,
but Guinness didn’t really think so.

Then suddenly she stood up.

“You’ll probably want some tea,” she said, as
if to herself, and left the room, closing the door behind her.

Apparently she forgot about the tea, because
she didn’t come back into the bedroom all the rest of that day, not
even when it was time for bed. At long intervals he could hear her
step as she moved from one room to another, but she didn’t come
back.

And that was that. Kathleen, it appeared,
didn’t think too much of having an assassin for a husband. Guinness
sat staring at his hands, wondering why in heaven’s name he felt so
disappointed. Had he perhaps expected her to be impressed? That
would have been dumb; she wasn’t precisely the bloodthirsty
type.

He should have known, of course. Kathleen
hated anything like that, hated even to hear about it. All that
winter the British papers had been full of this Manson business in
California—running background pieces on the victims, and heaven
knows what. They hadn’t had anything like it since the Christie
case, and they seemed determined to milk it for all it was worth.
One paper even printed a special number containing the lengthy
confession of one of the women defendants.

Kathleen had read the news after dinner every
evening for at least as long as he had known her; it was a ritual
of sorts. But the Tate killings had been too much for her.

“I don’t know why people bother with such
tripe,” she had said at the time, turning past page one and
refolding the paper with a rich, angry crackle. Guinness, who was
sitting at the other end of the sofa, looked up from behind a
library copy of The Allegory of Love and smiled.

“They didn’t just make it up, you know. It
happened.”

Kathleen uttered a contemptuous little sound
and pushed her glasses back up off the fleshy part of her nose.
“God, here it is again,” she hissed after a few seconds. A few
seconds more and the whole paper was dumped in a wad on the coffee
table.

Finally she had canceled her subscription, so
perhaps she did believe they were making it up. People had believed
that the moon landing was a hoax. Everything like that—butchered
starlets, gang killings, foreign service officers who got pushed
under trains, all that stuff only happened in bad movies, not in
the world. How could he possibly have expected her to accept it
when it was just dumped in her lap like that?

There wasn’t much doubt about it, he would
have to quit if he was going to hang on to her. That was clear
enough; he would have to break with it entirely. There was nothing
unreasonable in that part of her attitude.

And it was time, anyway. Your life expectancy
wasn’t very long when people were sufficiently annoyed with you to
think of setting up so intricate an ambush as the one at Oslo.

But he could still get away clean. It was
still okay; the KGB still didn’t have a make on him—they couldn’t
even know his name yet, or what would have stopped them from
ferrying someone over to London and having him taken care of
there?

It happened. You would simply go to the
movies some night to see Steve McQueen’s latest and be found dead
in your seat when the theater closed for the evening. The civilian
authorities probably wouldn’t even notice the tiny needle mark at
the base of your skull, just at the hairline. It happened all the
time—nothing easier.

But they hadn’t sent anyone to deal with him
at home, where he would have been off his guard. Instead, they had
launched a whole operation, complex and tricky, to flush him out
into the open. And it hadn’t worked.

So he still had his anonymity; he could still
simply slip back into the mob and be lost from view. It wasn’t as
if he had dumped anybody really important to them, and the KGB had
their cost accountants too. They wouldn’t want him badly enough to
start a manhunt that might very easily last for years.

He would just drop out of sight, and they
would lose interest fast enough. What doesn’t itch doesn’t get
scratched.

Still, it would be better if he could take
Kathleen and the baby away from England. A nice circuitous route
with a few changes of papers, and then home, just like Byron had
mapped it out. They would all be safer back in the States. No one
would ever find them there.

Guinness covered his face with his hands,
trying to make his mind a blank. Such speculations weren’t really
very entertaining, and his leg was beginning to feel like it was on
fire. It was getting dark in the bedroom, dark enough to leave
visible only the outlines of things, but that didn’t make it much
past the middle of the afternoon. The room’s only window faced into
a tiny interior court, and they were only on the second floor—you
had to stick your head out and twist almost the whole way around to
see the sky.

He took one of the morphine tablets the
doctor had left him and wished to hell Kathleen would come back, if
only just that he could look at her. He wished a lot of things. He
wished he had accepted the gracious offer of the American
government that time when he was broke and had allowed himself to
be shipped home. He wished he had never heard of MI-6 or the KGB or
the CIA or any of the rest of the hoodoos under cover of which
otherwise perfectly sensible people went around making precisely
calibrated little holes in other people’s skulls.

Serving the cause.

Of course he had never been that stupid. He
had never been guilty of that particular piece of folly, not him.
No, he had done it for the money. Just the bread, sweetheart, and
none of your bullshit about duty and the old school tie. Not for
Ray Baby. Not for him.

As he lay there on the bed, contemplating his
lack of illusions and the moral sophistication it suggested, he had
to blink hard several times to keep back the tears. He had been so
fucking smart, as if any of that made any difference now.

He was getting hungry, that was all. Visceral
spasms converting themselves into agonies of the spirit. In truth,
he hadn’t had a god damn thing since yesterday afternoon, since
before the fireworks had started, and it was a rule in life that
one’s personal arrangements always looked particularly bleak on an
empty stomach. Nothing like a good meal to keep off the Dark Night
of the Soul.

That sounded like something Byron might have
said. Poor old Byron. Yes, he probably had.

Kathleen did finally come back in the
morning. Of course, he couldn’t swear she hadn’t been in the room
before then; after the morphine had taken hold, Guinness had slept
straight on through. But he awoke still lying on the bedspread, and
her side didn’t look as if it had been disturbed.

She came only perhaps a foot over the
threshold, and her hand never left the doorknob. Nothing could have
been more tentative than the expression on her face.

“Do you think you’d like some breakfast?”

Guinness slapped the flat of his hand against
his belly and grinned. “I suppose I might be able to choke down a
mouthful, yeah.” God, that sounded corny.

Glancing down at her shoes for a second,
Kathleen’s only response seemed one of embarrassment. She looked
drawn, as if the last several hours had worked on her like a
vampire.

“I’ll bring you in a tray then,” she said and
stepped back out of the room, closing the door behind her
again.

Breakfast, when it came, consisted of two
slices of lightly buttered toast, a poached egg, a small glass of
orange juice, and a cup of clear tea. He wondered if perhaps
Kathleen didn’t think that bullet holes were like the ’flu.

She might have from the way she went around
to the other side of the bed to set the tray down, where it would
be within reach but she wouldn’t. Her retreat was a curious
mingling of graciousness and panic, in which, once again, she
didn’t speak before her hand closed over the safety of the bedroom
doorknob.

‘‘I’m going out for a while. Will you be all
right?”

Again Guinness tried out his best boyish grin
and again Kathleen only dropped her eyes, the way people do when
they don’t want to commit themselves. “Sure. And don’t worry; I can
hobble into the nursery if I hear Rocky fussing.” There was a
nervous little pause during which her hand stole off the doorknob
to close over the fingers of the other hand.

“Not to bother,” she answered at last,
smiling tensely. ‘‘I’m taking her with me. She can use the
airing.”

Her voice was just a little too smooth, just
a shade too reassuring. What was she afraid of, that he would carve
their infant daughter into stew meat in her absence? God damn her,
it was his kid too; she didn’t have the right. He ought to do
something, to put a stop to all this shit and reclaim his family.
Once and for all.

Instead, he returned her smile, hoping his
own was more convincing than hers, and nodded.

“Okay. Have a nice time.”

The door closed again, and after a few
minutes he could hear Kathleen leaving. She didn’t come back until
late in the afternoon.

That night she slept with him, or at least in
the same bed. But she stayed with her back to him, as far over on
her side as she could. Once he reached for her under the covers,
resting his hand on her arm; she didn’t draw away, but there was no
response and she was perfectly rigid, as if catatonic.

Of course, there could be no thought of an
embrace.

The next morning Guinness got out of bed and
started to walk the kinks out of his leg. After that, the normal
pattern of their comings and goings resumed, but life together
continued as a kind of charade. They almost never spoke, and they
began taking elaborate care to stay out of each other’s way. Like a
couple of bitter enemies condemned for some reason to share the
same rooms and conscious of the futility of quarreling about
it.

What to do, what to do? If only they could
have stopped being so maddeningly civilized about it; if only for a
moment or two, things might have worked out differently. A good
shouting, screaming, knock down, drag out battle and they might
have been all right again. A little infuriated table pounding, some
high pitched raging, a few tears, and they would have made the baby
cry and perhaps reminded themselves that they were human beings and
not abstractions of good and evil.

But it hadn’t happened that way. Guinness
could perceive easily enough that his wife was under growing inner
tension, that they couldn’t possibly go on this way, but what to
do?

“I’ve quit, you know,” he said over one of
their silent dinners. ‘‘I’m not going to do that kind of work
anymore.”

She just looked at him with large frightened
eyes, as if his announcement had done nothing but remind her that
her husband, the man with whom she had lived for three years and
whose child she had borne, was covered in blood. Then, without a
word, she put down her fork and left the room.