by Lee Child
“An hour before that.”
“Where did we go?”
“No idea. You didn’t say. I assumed you were returning to base.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Better not tell me where you’re really going.”
“Paris,” I said. “Personal time.”
“What’s going on?”
“I wish I knew.”
“You want me to call you a cab?”
“That would be great.”
Ten minutes later we were in another Mercedes-Benz, heading back the way we had come fifteen hours before.
We had a choice of Lufthansa or Air France from Frankfurt-am-Main to Paris. I chose Air France. I figured their coffee would be better, and I figured if Willard got around to checking civilian carriers he would hit on Lufthansa first. I figured he was that kind of a simpleton.
We swapped two more of the forged travel vouchers for two seats in coach on the ten o’clock flight. Waited in the gate lounge. We were in BDUs, but we didn’t really stand out. There were American military uniforms all over the airport. I saw some XII Corps MPs, prowling in pairs. But I wasn’t worried. I figured they were on routine cooperation with the civilian cops. They weren’t looking for us. I had the feeling that Willard’s telex was going to stay on Swan’s desk for an hour or two.
We boarded on time and stuffed our bags in the overhead. Buckled up and settled in. There were a dozen military on the plane with us. Paris always was a popular R&R destination for people stationed in Germany. The weather was still misty. But it wasn’t bad enough to delay us any. We took off on time and climbed over the gray city and struck out south and west across pastel fields and huge tracts of forest. Then we climbed through the cloud into the sun and we couldn’t see the ground anymore.
It was a short flight. We started our descent during my second cup of coffee. Summer was drinking juice. She looked nervous. Part excited, and part worried. I figured she had never been to Paris before. And I figured she had never been AWOL before either. I could see it was weighing on her. Truth is, it was weighing on me a little too. It was a complicating factor. I could have done without it. But I wasn’t surprised to be hit with it. It had always been the obvious next step for Willard to take. Now I figured we were going to be chased around the world by BOLO messages. Be on the lookout for. Or else we were going to have a generalized all-points bulletin dumped on us.
We landed at Roissy–Charles de Gaulle and were off the plane and in the jetway by eleven-thirty in the morning. The airport was crowded. The taxi line was a zoo, just like it had been when Joe and I arrived the last time. So we gave up on it and walked to the navette station. Waited in line and climbed into the little bus. It was packed and uncomfortable. But Paris was warmer than Frankfurt had been. There was a watery sun out and I knew the city was going to look spectacular.
“Been here before?” I said.
“Never,” Summer said.
“Don’t look at the first twenty klicks,” I said. “Wait until we’re inside the Périphérique.”
“What’s that?”
“Like a ring road. Like the Beltway. That’s where the good part starts.”
“Your mom live inside it?”
I nodded. “On one of the nicest avenues in town. Where all the embassies are. Near the Eiffel Tower.”
“Are we going straight there?”
“Tomorrow,” I said. “We’re going to be tourists first.”
“Why?”
“I have to wait until my brother gets in. I can’t go on my own. We have to go together.”
She said nothing to that. Just glanced at me. The bus started up and pulled away from the curb. She watched out the window the whole way. I could see by the reflection of her face in the glass that she agreed with me. Inside the Périphérique was better.
We got out at the Place de l’Opéra and stood on the sidewalk and let the rest of the passengers swarm ahead of us. I figured we should choose a hotel and dump our bags before we did anything else.
We walked south on the Rue de la Paix, through the Place Vendôme, down to the Tuileries. Then we turned right and walked straight up the Champs-Élysées. There might have been better places to walk with a pretty woman on a lazy day under a watery winter sun, but right then I couldn’t readily recall any. We made a left onto the Rue Marbeuf and came out on the Avenue George V just about opposite the George V Hotel.
“OK for you?” I said.
“Will they let us in?” Summer asked.
“Only one way to find out.”
We crossed the street and a guy in a top hat opened the door for us. The girl at the desk had a bunch of little flags on her lapel, one for each language she spoke. I used French, which pleased her. I gave her two vouchers and asked for two rooms. She didn’t hesitate. She went right ahead and gave us keys just like I had paid with gold bullion, or a credit card. The George V was one of those places. There was nothing they hadn’t seen before. Or if there was, they weren’t about to admit it to anyone.
The rooms the multilingual girl gave us both faced south and both had a partial view of the Eiffel Tower. One was decorated in shades of pale blue and had a sitting area and a bathroom the size of a tennis court. The other was three doors down the hall. It was done in parchment yellow and it had an iron Juliet balcony.
“Your choice,” I said.
“I’ll take the one with the balcony,” she said.
We dumped our bags and washed up and met in the lobby fifteen minutes later. I was ready for lunch, but Summer had other ideas.
“I want to buy clothes,” she said. “Tourists don’t wear BDUs.”
“This one does,” I said.
“So break out,” she said. “Live a little. Where should we go?”
I shrugged. You couldn’t walk twenty yards in Paris without falling over at least three clothing stores. But most of them wanted a month’s pay for a single garment.
“We could try Bon Marché,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Department store,” I said. “It means cheap, literally.”
“A department store called Cheap?”
“My kind of place,” I said.
“Anywhere else?”
“Samaritaine,” I said. “On the river, at the Pont Neuf. There’s a terrace at the top with a view.”
“Let’s go there.”
It was a long walk along the river, all the way to the tip of the Île de la Cité. It took us an hour, because we kept stopping to look at things. We passed the Louvre. We browsed the little green stalls set up on the river wall.
“What does Pont Neuf mean?” Summer asked me.
“New Bridge,” I said.
She looked ahead at the ancient stone structure.
“It’s the oldest bridge in Paris,” I said.
“So why do they call it new?”
“Because it was new once.”
We stepped into the warmth of the store. Like all such places the cosmetics came first and filled the air with scent. Summer led me up one floor to the women’s clothes. I sat in a comfortable chair and let her look around. She was gone for a good half hour. She came back wearing a complete new outfit. Black shoes, a black pencil skirt, a gray-and-white Breton sweater, a gray wool jacket. And a beret. She looked like a million dollars. Her BDUs and her boots were in a Samaritaine bag in her hand.
“You next,” she said. She took me up to the men’s department. The only pants they had with ninety-five-centimeter inseams were Algerian knockoffs of American blue jeans, so that set the tone. I bought a light blue sweatshirt and a black cotton bomber jacket. I kept my army boots on. They looked OK with the jeans and they matched the jacket.
“Buy a beret,” Summer said, so I bought a beret. It was black with a leather binding. I paid for the whole lot with American dollars at a pretty good rate of exchange. I dressed in the changing cubicle. Put my camouflage gear in the carrier bag. Checked the mirror and adjusted the beret to a rakish angle and st
epped out.
Summer said nothing.
“Lunch now,” I said.
We went up to the ninth-floor café. It was too cold to sit out on the terrace, but we sat at a window and got pretty much the same view. We could see the Notre-Dame cathedral to the east and the Montparnasse Tower all the way to the south. The sun was still out. It was a great city.
“How did Willard find our car?” Summer said. “How would he even know where to look? The United States is a big country.”
“He didn’t find it,” I said. “Not until someone told him where it was.”
“Who?”
“Vassell,” I said. “Or Coomer. Swan’s sergeant used my name on the phone, back at XII Corps. So at the same time as they were getting Marshall off the post they were calling Willard back in Rock Creek, telling him I was over there in Germany and hassling them again. They were asking him why the hell he had let me travel. And they were telling him to recall me.”
“They can’t dictate where a special unit investigator goes.”
“They can now, because of Willard. They’re old buddies. I just figured it out. Swan as good as told us, but it didn’t click right away. Willard has ties to Armored from his time in Intelligence. Who did he talk to all those years? About that Soviet fuel crap? Armored, that’s who. There’s a relationship there. That’s why he was so hot about Kramer. He wasn’t worried about embarrassment for the army in general. He was worried about embarrassment for Armored Branch in particular.”
“Because they’re his people.”
“Correct. And that’s why Vassel and Coomer ran last night. They didn’t run, as such. They’re just giving Willard time and space to deal with us.”
“Willard knows he didn’t sign our travel vouchers.”
I nodded. “That’s for sure.”
“So we’re in serious trouble now. We’re AWOL and we’re traveling on stolen vouchers.”
“We’ll be OK.”
“How exactly?”
“When we get a result.”
“Are we going to?”
I didn’t answer.
After lunch we crossed the river and walked a long roundabout route back to the hotel. We looked just like tourists, in our casual clothes, carrying our Samaritaine bags. All we needed was a camera. We window-shopped in the Boulevard St.-Germain and looked at the Luxembourg Gardens. We saw Les Invalides and the École Militaire. Then we walked up the Avenue Bosquet, which took me within fifty yards of the back of my mother’s apartment house. I didn’t tell Summer that. She would have made me go in and see her. We crossed the Seine again at the Pont de l’Alma and got coffee in a bistro on the Avenue New-York. Then we strolled up the hill to the hotel.
“Siesta time,” Summer said. “Then dinner.”
I was happy enough to go for a nap. I was pretty tired. I lay down on the bed in the pale blue room and fell asleep within minutes.
Summer woke me up two hours later by calling me on the phone from her room. She wanted to know if I knew any restaurants. Paris is full of restaurants, but I was dressed like an idiot and I had less than thirty bucks in my pocket. So I picked a place I knew on the Rue Vernet. I figured I could go there in jeans and a sweatshirt without getting stared at and without paying a fortune. And it was close enough to walk. No cab fare.
We met in the lobby. Summer still looked great. Her skirt and jacket looked as good for the evening as they had for the afternoon. She had abandoned her beret. I had kept mine on. We walked up the hill toward the Champs-Élysées. Halfway there, Summer did a strange thing. She took my hand in hers. It was going dark and we were surrounded by strolling couples and I guessed it felt natural to her. It felt natural to me too. It took me a minute to realize she had done it. Or, it took me a minute to realize there was anything wrong with it. It took her the same minute. At the end of it she got flustered and looked up at me and let go again.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be,” I said. “It felt good.”
“It just happened,” she said.
We walked on and turned into the Rue Vernet. Found the restaurant. It was early in the evening in January and the owner found us a table right away. It was in a corner. There were flowers and a lit candle on it. We ordered water and a pichet of red wine to drink while we thought about the food.
“You’re at home here,” Summer said to me.
“Not really,” I said. “I’m not at home anywhere.”
“You speak pretty good French.”
“I speak pretty good English too. Doesn’t mean I feel at home in North Carolina, for instance.”
“But you like some places better than others.”
I nodded. “This one is OK.”
“Done any long-term thinking?”
“You sound like my brother. He wants me to make a plan.”
“Everything is going to change.”
“They’ll always need cops,” I said.
“Cops who go AWOL?”
“All we need is a result,” I said. “Mrs. Kramer, or Carbone. Or Brubaker, maybe. We’ve got three bites of the cherry. Three chances.”
She said nothing.
“Relax,” I said. “We’re out of the world for forty-eight hours. Let’s enjoy ourselves. Worrying isn’t going to get us anywhere. We’re in Paris.”
She nodded. I watched her face. Watched her try to get past it. Her eyes were expressive in the candlelight. It was like she had troubles in front of her, maybe piled high into stacks, like cartons. I saw her shoulder her way around them, to the quiet place in the back of the closet.
“Drink your wine,” I said. “Have fun.”
My hand was resting on the table. She reached out and squeezed it and picked up her glass.
“We’ll always have North Carolina,” she said.
We ordered three courses each off the fixed-price page of the menu. Then we took three hours to eat them. We kept the conversation away from work. We talked about personal things instead. She asked me about my family. I told her a little about Joe, and not much about my mother. She told me about her folks, and her brothers and sisters, and enough cousins that I lost track about who was who. Mostly I watched her face in the candlelight. Her skin had a copper tone mixed behind pure ebony black. Her eyes were like coal. Her jaw was delicate, like fine china. She looked impossibly small and gentle, for a soldier. But then I remembered her sharpshooter badges. More than I had.
“Am I going to meet your mom?” she said.
“If you want to,” I said. “But she’s very sick.”
“Not just a broken leg?”
I shook my head.
“She has cancer,” I said.
“Is it bad?”
“As bad as it gets.”
Summer nodded. “I figured it had to be something like that. You’ve been upset ever since you came over here the first time.”
“Have I?”
“It’s bound to bother you.”
I nodded in turn. “More than I thought it would.”
“Don’t you like her?”
“I like her fine. But, you know, nobody lives forever. Conceptually these things don’t come as a surprise.”
“I should probably stay away. It wouldn’t be appropriate if I came. You should go with Joe. Just the two of you.”
“She likes meeting new people.”
“She might not be feeling good.”
“We should wait and see. Maybe she’ll want to go out for lunch.”
“How does she look?”
“Terrible,” I said.
“Then she won’t want to meet new people.”
We sat in silence for a spell. Our waiter brought the check. We counted our cash and paid half each and left a decent tip. We held hands all the way back to the hotel. It felt like the obvious thing to do. We were alone together in a sea of troubles, some of them shared, some of them private. The guy with the top hat opened the door for us and wished us bonne nuit. Good night. We rode up in the elevator, side by side, no
t touching. When we got out on our floor Summer had to go left and I had to go right. It was an awkward moment. We didn’t speak. I could see she wanted to come with me and I sure as hell wanted to go with her. I could see her room in my mind. The yellow walls, the smell of perfume. The bed. I imagined lifting her new sweater over her head. Unzipping her new skirt and hearing it fall to the floor. I figured it would have a silk lining. I figured it would make a rustling sound.
I knew it wouldn’t be right. But we were already AWOL. We were already in all kinds of deep shit. It would be comfort and consolation, apart from whatever else it would be.
“What time in the morning?” she said.
“Early for me,” I said. “I have to be at the airport at six.”
“I’ll come with you. Keep you company.”
“Thanks.”
“My pleasure,” she said.
We stood there.
“We’ll have to get up about four,” she said.
“I guess,” I said. “About four.”
We stood there.
“Good night then, I guess,” she said.
“Sleep well,” I said.
I turned right. Didn’t look back. I heard her door open and close a second after mine.
It was eleven o’clock. I went to bed but I didn’t sleep. I just lay there and stared at the ceiling for an hour. There was city light coming in the window. It was cold and yellow and hazy. I could see the pulses from the Eiffel Tower’s party lights. They flashed gold, on and off, somewhere between fast and slow and relentless. They changed the pattern on the plaster above my head, once a second. I heard the sound of brakes on a distant street, and the yap of a small dog, and lonely footsteps far below my window, and the beep of a faraway horn. Then the city went quiet and silence crowded in on me. It howled all around me, like a siren. I raised my wrist. Checked my watch. It was midnight. I dropped my wrist back down on the bed and was hit by a wave of loneliness so bad it left me breathless.
I put the light on and rolled over to the phone. There were instructions printed on a little plate below the dial buttons. To call another guest’s room, press three and enter the room number. I pressed three and entered the room number. She answered, first ring.
