The Summer Soldier (28 page)

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.

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. Spignaldo, 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.