We repacked our bags and moved out of our VOQ rooms and paid a final courtesy visit to Swan in his office. He had some news for us.
"I'm supposed to arrest you both," he said.
"Why?" I said.
"You're AWOL. Willard put a hit out on you."
"What, worldwide?"
Swan shook his head. "This post only. They found your car at Andrews and Willard talked to Transportation Corps. So he knew you were headed here."
"When did you get the telex?"
"An hour ago."
"When did we leave here?"
"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 amp;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 Peripherique."
"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 Peripherique was better.
We got out at the Place de l'Opera 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-elysees. 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 Marche," 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 ile de la Cite. 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 stepped out.
Summer said nothing.
"Lunch now," I said.
We went up to the ninth-floor cafe. 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 ecole 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-elysees. 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, not 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.
"You awake?" I said.
"Yes," she said.
"Want company?"
"Yes," she said.
I pulled my jeans and sweatshirt on and walked barefoot down the corridor. Knocked at her door. She opened it and reached out her hand and pulled me inside. She was still fully dressed. Still in her skirt and sweater. She kissed me hard at the door and I kissed her back, harder. The door swung shut behind us. I heard the hiss of its closer and the click of its latch. We headed for the bed.
She wore dark red underwear. It was made of silk, or satin. I could smell her perfume everywhere. It was in the room and on her body. She was tiny and delicate and quick and strong. The same city light was coming in the window. Now it bathed me in warmth. Gave me energy. I could see the Eiffel Tower's lights on her ceiling. We matched our rhythm to their rhythm, slow, fast, relentless. Afterward we turned away from them and lay like spoons, burned out and breathing hard, close but not speaking, like we weren't sure exactly what we had done.
I slept an hour and woke up in the same position. I had a strong sensation of something lost and something gained, but I couldn't explain either feeling. Summer stayed asleep. She was nestled solidly into the curve of my body. She smelled good. She felt warm. She felt lithe and strong and peaceful. She was breathing slow. My left arm was under her shoulders and my right arm was draped across her waist. Her hand was cupped in mine, half-open, half-curled.
I turned my head and watched the play of light on the ceiling. I heard the faint noise of a motorbike maybe a mile away, on the other side of the Arc de Triomphe. I heard a dog bark in the distance. Other than that the city was silent. Two million people were asleep. Joe was in the air, somewhere on the Great Circle route, maybe closing in on Iceland. I couldn't picture my mother. I closed my eyes. Tried to sleep again.
The alarm clock in my head went off at four. Summer was still asleep. I eased my arm out from under her and worked some kind of circulation back into my shoulder and slid out of bed and padded across the carpet to the bathroom. Then I put my pants on and shrugged into my sweatshirt and woke Summer with a kiss.
"Rise and shine, Lieutenant," I said.
She stretched her arms up high and arched her back. The sheet fell away to her waist.
"Good morning," she said.
I kissed her again.
"I like Paris," she said. "I had fun here."
"Me too."
"Lots of fun."
"Lobby in half an hour," I said.
I went back to my own room and called room service for coffee. I was through shaving and showering before it arrived. I took the tray at the door wearing just a towel. Then I dressed in fresh BDUs and poured my first cup and checked my watch. It was four-twenty in the morning in Paris, which made it ten-twenty in the evening on the East Coast, which made it well after the end of bankers' hours. And which made it seven-twenty in the evening on the West Coast, which was early enough that a hardworking guy might still be at his desk. I checked the plate on the phone again and hit nine for a line. Dialed the only number I had ever permanently memorized, which was the Rock Creek switchboard back in Virginia. An operator answered on the first ring.
"This is Reacher," I said. "I need a number for Fort Irwin's MP XO."
"Sir, there's a standing order from Colonel Willard that you should return to base immediately."
"I'll be right there, soon as I can. But I need that number first."
"Sir, where are you now?"
"In a whorehouse in Sydney, Australia," I said. "Give me that Irwin number."
He gave me the number. I repeated it to myself and hit nine again and dialed it. Calvin Franz's sergeant answered, second ring.
"I need Franz," I said.
There was a click and then silence and I was settling in for a long wait when Franz came through.
"I need you to do something for me," I said.
"Like what?"
"You've got a XII Corps guy called Marshall there. You know him?"
"No."
"I need him to stay there until I can get there myself. It's very important."
"I can't stop people leaving the post unless I arrest them."
"Just tell him I called from Berlin. That should do it. As long as he thinks I'm in Germany, he'll stay in California."
"Why?"
"Because that's what he's been told to do."
"Does he know you?"
"Not personally."
"Then that's an awkward conversation for me to have. Like, I can't just walk up to a guy I never met and say, Hey, hot news, another guy you never met called Reacher wants you to know he's stuck in Berlin."
"So be subtle," I said. "Tell him I asked you to ask him a question for me, because there's no way I can get there myself."
"What question?"
"Ask him about the day of Kramer's funeral. Was he at Arlington? What did he do the rest of the day? Why didn't he drive his guys to North Carolina? What reason did they give him for wanting to drive themselves?"
"That's four questions."
"Whatever, just make it sound like you're asking on my behalf because California isn't in my travel plans."
"Where can I get back to you?"
I looked down at the phone and read out the George V's number.
"That's France," he said. "Not Germany."
"Marshall doesn't need to know that," I said. "I'll be back here later."
"When are you coming to California?"
"Within forty-eight hours, I hope."
"OK," he said. "Anything else?"
"Yes," I said. "Call Fort Bird for me and ask my sergeant to get histories on General Vassell and Colonel Coomer. Specifically I want to know if either one of them has a connection with a town called Sperryville in Virginia. Born there, grew up there, family there, any kind of connection that would indicate they might know what kind of retail outlet was where. Tell her to sit on the answers until I get in touch."
"OK," he said again. "Is that it?"
"No," I said. "Also tell her to call Detective Clark in Green Valley and have him fax his street canvasses relating to the night of New Year's Eve. She'll know what I'm talking about."
"I'm glad someone will," Franz said.
He paused. He was writing stuff down.
"So is that it?" he said.
"For now," I said.
I hung up and made it down to the lobby about five minutes after Summer. She was waiting there. She had been much faster than me. But then, she didn't have to shave and I don't think she had made any calls or taken time for coffee. Like me, she was back in BDUs. Somehow she had cleaned her boots, or had gotten them cleaned. They were gleaming.
We didn't have money for a cab to the airport. So we walked back through the predawn darkness to the Place de l'Opera and caught the bus. It was less crowded than the last time but just as uncomfortable. We got brief glimpses of the sleeping city and then we crossed the Peripherique and ground slowly through the dismal outer suburbs.
We got to Roissy-Charles de Gaulle just before six. It was busy there. I guessed airports worked on floating time zones all their own. It was busier at six in the morning than it would be in the middle of the afternoon. There were crowds of people everywhere. Cars and buses were loading and unloading, red-eyed travelers were coming out and going in and struggling with bags. It looked like the whole world was on the move.
The arrivals screen showed that Joe's flight was already on the ground. We hiked around to the customs area's exit doors. Took our places among a big crowd of meeters and greeters. I figured Joe would be one of the first passengers through. He would have walked fast from the plane and he wouldn't have checked any luggage. No delays.
We saw a few stragglers coming out from the previous flight. They were mostly families slowed by young children or individuals who had waited for odd-sized luggage. People in the crowd turned toward them expectantly and then turned away again when they realized they weren't who they were looking for. I watched them do it for a spell. It was an interesting physical dynamic. Just subtle adjustments of posture were enough to display interest, and then lack of interest. Welcome, and then dismissal. A half-turn inward, and then a half-turn away. Sometimes it was nothing more than a transfer of body weight from one foot to the other.
The last stragglers were mixed in with the first people off of Joe's flight. There were businessmen moving fast, humping briefcases and suit carriers. There were young women in high heels and dark glasses, expensively dressed. Models? Actresses? Call girls? There were government people, French and American. I could pick them out by the way they looked. Smart and serious, plenty of eyeglasses, but their shoes and suits and coats weren't the best quality. Low-level diplomats, probably. The flight was from D.C., after all.
Joe came out about twelfth in line. He was in the same overcoat I had seen before, but a different suit and a different tie. He looked good. He was walking fast and carrying a black leather overnight bag. He was a head taller than anyone else. He came out of the door and stopped dead and scanned around.
"He looks just like you," Summer said.
"But I'm a nicer person," I said.
He saw me right away, because I was also a head taller than anyone else. I pointed to a spot outside of the main traffic stream. He shuffled through the crowd and made his way toward it. We looped around and joined him there.
"Lieutenant Summer," he said. "I'm very pleased to meet you."
I hadn't seen him look at the tapes on her jacket, where it said Summer, U.S. Army. Or at the lieutenant's bars on her collar. He must have remembered her name and her rank from when we had talked before.
"You OK?" I asked him.
"I'm tired," he said.
"Want breakfast?"
"Let's get it in town."
The taxi line was a mile long and moving slow. We ignored it. Headed straight for the navette again. We missed one and were first in line for the next. It came inside ten minutes. Joe spent the waiting time asking Summer about her visit to Paris. She gave him chapter and verse, but not about the events after midnight. I stood on the curb with my back to the roadway, watching the eastern sky above the terminal roof. Dawn was breaking fast. It was going to be another sunny day. It was the tenth of January, and the weather was the best I had seen in the new decade so far.
We got in the bus and sat in three seats together that faced sideways opposite the luggage rack. Summer sat in the middle seat. Joe sat forward of her and I sat to the rear. They were small, uncomfortable seats. Hard plastic. No legroom. Joe's knees were up around his ears and his head was swaying from side to side with the motion. He looked pale. I guessed putting him on a bus was not much of a welcome, after an overnight flight across the Atlantic. I felt a little bad about it. But then, I was the same size. I had the same accommodation problem. And I hadn't gotten a whole lot of sleep either. And I was broke. And I guessed being on the move was better for him than standing in the taxi line for an hour.
He brightened up some after we crossed the Peripherique and entered Haussmann's urban splendor. The sun was well up by then and the city was bathed in gold and honey. The cafes were already busy and the sidewalks were already crowded with people moving at a measured pace and carrying baguettes and newspapers. Legislation limited Parisians to a thirty-five-hour workweek, and they spent a lot of the remaining hundred thirty-three taking great pleasure in not doing very much of anything. It was relaxing just to watch them.
We got out at the familiar spot in the Place de l'Opera. Walked south the same way we had walked the week before, crossing the river at the Pont de la Concorde, turning west on the Quai d'Orsay, turning south into the Avenue Rapp. We got as far as the Rue de l'Universite, where the Eiffel Tower was visible, and then Summer stopped.
"I'll go look at the tower," she said. "You guys go on ahead and see your mom."
Joe looked at me. Does she know? I nodded. She knows.
"Thanks, Lieutenant," he said. "We'll go see how she is. If she's up for it, maybe you could join us at lunch."
"Call me at the hotel," she said.
"You know where it is?" I said.
She turned and pointed north along the avenue. "Across the bridge right there and up the hill, on the left side. Straight line."
I smiled. She had a decent sense of geography. Joe looked a little puzzled. He had seen the direction she had pointed, and he knew what was up there.
"The George V?" he said.
"Why not?" I said.
"Is that on the army's dime?"
"More or less," I said.
"Outstanding."
Summer stretched up tall and kissed me on the cheek and shook Joe's hand. We stayed there with the weak sun on our shoulders and watched her walk away toward the base of the tower. There was already a thin stream of tourists heading the same way. We could see the souvenir sellers unpacking. We stood and watched them in the distance. Watched Summer get smaller and smaller as she got farther away.
"She's very nice," Joe said. "Where did you find her?"
"She was at Fort Bird."
"You figured out what's going on there yet?"
"I'm a little closer."
"I would hope you are. You've been there nearly two weeks."
"Remember that guy I asked you about? Willard? He would have spent time with Armored, right?"
Joe nodded. "I'm sure he reported to them direct. Fed his stuff straight into their intelligence operation."
"Do you remember any names?"
"In Armored Branch? Not really. I never paid much attention to Willard. His thing wasn't very mainstream. It was a side issue."
"Ever heard of a guy called Marshall?"
"Don't remember him," Joe said.
I said nothing. Joe turned and looked south down the avenue. Wrapped his coat tighter around him and turned his face up to the sun.
"Let's go," he said.
"When did you call her last?"
"The day before yesterday. It was your turn next."
We moved off and walked down the avenue, side by side, matching our pace to the leisurely stroll of the people around us.
"Want breakfast first?" I said. "We don't want to wake her."
"The nurse will let us in."
There was a car abandoned halfway up on the sidewalk. It had been in some kind of an accident. It had a smashed fender and a flat tire. We stepped out into the street to pass it by. Saw a large black vehicle double-parked on the road forty yards ahead.
We stared at it.
"Un corbillard," Joe said.
A hearse.
We stared at it. Tried to figure which building it was waiting at. Tried to gauge the distance. The head-on perspective made it difficult. I glanced upward at the rooflines. First came a limestone Belle epoque facade, seven stories high. Then a drop to my mother's plainer six-story building. I traced my gaze vertically all the way down the frontage. To the street. To the hearse. It was parked right in front of my mother's door.
We ran.
There was a man in a black silk hat standing on the sidewalk. The street door to my mother's building was open. We glanced at the man in the hat and went in through the door to the courtyard. The concierge was standing in her doorway. She had a handkerchief in her hand and tears in her eyes. She paid us no attention. We headed for the elevator. Rode up to five. The elevator was agonizingly slow.
The door to the apartment was standing open. I could see men in black coats inside. Three of them. We went in. The men in the coats stood back. They said nothing. The girl with the luminous eyes came out of the kitchen. She looked pale. She stopped when she saw us. Then she turned and walked slowly across the room to meet us.
"What?" Joe said.
She didn't answer.
"When?" I said.
"Last night," she said. "It was very peaceful."
The men in the coats realized who we must be and shuffled out into the hallway. They were very quiet. They made no noise at all. Joe took an unsteady step and sat down on the sofa. I stayed where I was. I stood still in the middle of the floor.
"When?" I said again.
"At midnight," the girl said. "In her sleep."
I closed my eyes. Opened them again a minute later. The girl was still there. Her eyes were on mine.
"Were you with her?" I said.
She nodded.
"All the time," she said.
"Was there a doctor here?"
"She sent him away."
"What happened?"
"She said she felt well. She went to bed at eleven. She slept an hour, and then she just stopped breathing."
I looked up at the ceiling. "Was she in pain?"
"Not at the end."
"But she said she felt well."
"Her time had come. I've seen it before."
I looked at her, and then I looked away.
"Would you like to see her?" the girl said.
"Joe?" I said. He shook his head. Stayed on the sofa. I stepped toward the bedroom. There was a mahogany coffin set up on velvet-padded trestles next to the bed. It was lined with white silk and it was empty. My mother's body was still in the bed. The sheets were made up around her. Her head was resting gently on the pillow and her arms were crossed over her chest outside the covers. Her eyes were closed. She was barely recognizable.
Summer had asked me: Does it upset you to see dead people?
No, I had said.
Why not? she had asked me.
I don't know, I had said.
I had never seen my father's body. I was away somewhere when he died. It had been a heart thing. Some VA hospital had done its best, but it was hopeless from the start. I had flown in on the morning of the funeral and had left again the same night.
Funeral, I thought.
Joe will handle it.
I stayed by my mother's bed for five long minutes, eyes open, eyes dry. Then I turned and stepped back into the living room. It was crowded again. The croques-morts were back. The pallbearers. And there was an old man on the sofa, next to Joe. He was sitting stiffly. There were two walking sticks propped next to him. He had thin gray hair and a heavy dark suit with a tiny ribbon in the buttonhole. Red, white, and blue, maybe a Croix de Guerre ribbon, or the Medaille de la Resistance. He had a small cardboard box balanced on his bony knees. It was tied with a piece of faded red string.
"This is Monsieur Lamonnier," Joe said. "Family friend."
The old guy grabbed his sticks and started to struggle up to shake my hand but I waved him back down and stepped over close. He was maybe seventy-five or eighty. He was lean and dried-out and relatively tall for a Frenchman.
"You're the one she called Reacher," he said.
I nodded.
"That's me," I said. "I don't remember you."
"We never met. But I knew your mother a long time."
"Thanks for stopping by."
"You too," he said.
Touche, I thought.
"What's in the box?" I said.
"Things she refused to keep here," the old guy said. "But things I felt should be found here, at a time like this, by her sons."
He handed me the box, like it was a sacred burden. I took it and put it under my arm. It felt about halfway between light and heavy. I guessed there was a book in there. Maybe an old leather-bound diary. Some other stuff too.
"Joe," I said. "Let's go get breakfast."
We walked fast and aimlessly. We turned into the Rue St.-Dominique and passed by two cafes at the top of the Rue de l'Exposition without stopping. We crossed the Avenue Bosquet against the light and then we made an arbitrary left into the Rue Jean Nicot. Joe stopped at a tabac and bought cigarettes. I would have smiled if I had been able to. The street was named after the guy who discovered nicotine.
We lit up together on the sidewalk and then ducked into the first cafe we saw. We were all done walking. We were ready for the talking.
"You shouldn't have waited for me," Joe said. "You could have seen her one last time."
"I felt it happen," I said. "Midnight last night, something hit me."
"You could have been with her."
"Too late now."
"It would have been OK with me."
"It wouldn't have been OK with her."
"We should have stayed a week ago."
"She didn't want us to stay, Joe. That wasn't in her plan. She was her own person, entitled to her privacy. She was a mother, but that wasn't all she was."
He went quiet. The waiter brought us coffee and a small straw basket full of croissants. He seemed to sense the mood. He put them down gently and backed away.
"Will you see to the funeral?" I said.
Joe nodded. "I'll make it four days from now. Can you stay?"
"No," I said. "But I'll get back."
"OK," he said. "I'll stay a week or so. I guess I'll need to find her will. We'll probably have to sell her place. Unless you want it?"
I shook my head. "I don't want it. You?"
"I don't see how I could use it."
"It wouldn't have been right for me to go on my own," I said.
Joe said nothing.
"We saw her last week," I said. "We were all together. It was a good time."
"You think?"
"We had fun. That's the way she wanted it. That's why she made the effort. That's why she asked to go to Polidor. It wasn't like she ate anything."
He just shrugged. We drank our coffee in silence. I tried a croissant. It was OK, but I had no appetite. I put it back in the basket.
"Life," Joe said. "What a completely weird thing it is. A person lives sixty years, does all kinds of things, knows all kinds of things, feels all kinds of things, and then it's over. Like it never happened at all."
"We'll always remember her."
"No, we'll remember parts of her. The parts she chose to share. The tip of the iceberg. The rest, only she knew about. Therefore the rest already doesn't exist. As of now."
We smoked another cigarette each and sat quiet. Then we walked back, slowly, side by side, a little burned out, at some kind of peace.
The coffin was in the corbillard when we got back to her building. They must have stood it upright in the elevator. The concierge was out on the sidewalk, standing next to the old man with the medal ribbon. He was leaning on his walking sticks. The nurse was there too, standing on her own. The pallbearers had their hands clasped in front of them. They were looking down at the ground.
"They're taking her to the depôt mortuaire," the nurse said.
The funeral parlor.
"OK," Joe said.
I didn't stay. I said good-bye to the nurse and the concierge and shook hands with the old guy. Then I nodded to Joe and set off walking up the avenue. I didn't look back. I crossed the Seine at the Pont de l'Alma and walked up the Avenue George V to the hotel. I went up in the elevator and back to my room. I still had the old guy's box under my arm. I dropped it on the bed and stood still, completely unsure about what to do next.
I was still standing there twenty minutes later when the phone rang. It was Calvin Franz, calling from Fort Irwin in California. He had to say his name twice. The first time, I couldn't recall who he was.
"I spoke to Marshall," he said.
"Who?"
"Your XII Corps guy."
I said nothing.
"You OK?"
"Sorry," I said. "I'm fine. You spoke to Marshall."
"He went to Kramer's funeral. He drove Vassell and Coomer there and back. Then he claims he didn't drive them the rest of the day because he had important Pentagon meetings all afternoon."
"But?"
"I didn't believe him. He's a gofer. If Vassell and Coomer had wanted him to drive, he'd have been driving, meetings or no meetings."
"And?"
"And knowing what kind of a hard time you would give me if I didn't check, I checked."
"And?"
"Those meetings must have been with himself in the toilet stall, because nobody else saw him around."
"So what was he doing instead?"
"No idea. But he was doing something, that's for sure. The way he answered me was just way too smooth. I mean, this all was six days ago. Who the hell remembers what meetings they had six days ago? But this guy claims to."
"You tell him I was in Germany?"
"He seemed to know already."
"You tell him I was staying there?"
"He seemed to take it for granted you weren't heading for California anytime soon."
"These guys are old buddies with Willard," I said. "He's promised them he'll keep me away from them. He's running the 110th like it's Armored's private army."
"I checked those histories myself, by the way. For Vassell and Coomer, because you got me curious. There's nothing there to suggest either one of them ever heard of any place called Sperryville, Virginia."
"Are you sure?"
"Completely. Vassell is from Mississippi and Coomer is from Illinois. Neither of them has ever lived or served anywhere near Sperryville."
I was quiet for a second.
"Are they married?" I said.
"Married?" Franz said. "Yes, there were wives and kids in there. But they were local girls. No in-laws in Sperryville."
"OK," I said.
"So what are you going to do?"
"I'm coming to California."
I put the phone down and walked along the corridor to Summer's door. I knocked and waited. She opened up. She was back from sightseeing.
"She died last night," I said.
"I know," Summer said. "Your brother just called me from the apartment. He wanted me to make sure you were OK."
"I'm OK," I said.
"I'm very sorry."
I shrugged. "Conceptually these things don't come as a surprise."
"When was it?"
"Midnight. She just gave up."
"I feel bad. You should have gone to see her yesterday. You shouldn't have spent the day with me. We shouldn't have done all that ridiculous shopping."
"I saw her last week. We had fun. Better that last week was the last time."
"I would have wanted whatever extra time I could have gotten."
"It was always going to be an arbitrary date," I said. "I could have gone yesterday, in the afternoon, maybe. Now I'd be wishing I had stayed for the evening. If I had stayed for the evening, I'd be wishing I had stayed until midnight."
"You were in here with me at midnight. I feel bad about that too."
"Don't," I said. "I don't feel bad about it. My mother wouldn't either. She was French, after all. If she'd known those were my options, she'd have insisted."
"You're just saying that."
"Well, I guess she wasn't very broad-minded. But she always wanted whatever made us happy."
"Did she give up because she was left alone?"
I shook my head. "She wanted to be left alone so she could give up."
Summer said nothing.
"We're leaving," I said. "We'll get a night flight back."
"California?"
"East Coast first," I said. "There are things I need to check."
"What things?" she said.
I didn't tell her. She would have laughed, and right then I couldn't have handled laughter.
Summer packed her bag and came back to my room with me. I sat on the bed and played with the string on Monsieur Lamonnier's box.
"What's that?" she said.
"Something some old guy brought around. He said it's something that should be found with my mother's stuff."
"What's in it?"
"I don't know."
"So open it."
I shoved it across the counterpane. "You open it."
I watched her small neat fingers work on the tight old knot. Her clear nail polish flashed in the light. She got the string off and lifted the lid. It was a shallow box made out of the kind of thick sturdy cardboard you don't see much anymore. Inside were three things. There was a smaller box, like a jewel case. It was made of cardboard faced with dark blue watermarked paper. There was a book. And there was a cheese cutter. It was a simple length of wire with a handle on each end. The handles were turned from dark old wood. You could see a similar thing in any epicerie in France. Except this one had been restrung. The wire was too thick for cheese. It looked like piano wire. It was curled and corroded, like it had been stored for a very long time.
"What is it?" Summer said.
"Looks like a garrote," I said.
"The book is in French," she said. "I can't read it."
She passed it to me. It was a printed book with a thin paper dust jacket. Not a novel. Some kind of a nonfiction memoir. The corners of the pages were foxed and stained with age. The whole thing smelled musty. The title was something to do with railroads. I opened it up and took a look. After the title page was a map of the French railroad system in the 1930s. The opening chapter seemed to be about how all the lines in the north squeezed down through Paris and then fanned out again to points south. You couldn't travel anywhere without transiting the capital. It made sense to me. France was a relatively small country with a very big city in it. Most nations did it the same way. The capital city was always the center of the spiderweb.
I flipped to the end of the book. There was a photograph of the author on the back flap of the dust jacket. The photograph was of a forty-years-younger Monsieur Lamonnier. I recognized him with no difficulty. The blurb underneath the picture said he had lost both legs in the battles of May 1940. I recalled the stiff way he had sat on my mother's sofa. And his walking sticks. He must have been using prosthetics. Wooden legs. What I had assumed were bony knees must have been complicated mechanical joints. The blurb went on to say he had built Le Chemin de Fer Humain. The Human Railroad. He had been awarded the Resistance Medal by President Charles de Gaulle, and the George Cross by the British, and the Distinguished Service Medal by the Americans.
"What is it?" Summer said.
"Seems like I just met an old Resistance hero," I said.
"What's it got to do with your mom?"
"Maybe she and this Lamonnier guy were sweethearts way back."
"And he wants to tell you and Joe about it? About what a great guy he was? At a time like this? That's a little self-centered, isn't it?"
I read on a little more. Like most French books it used a weird construction called the past historic tense, which was reserved for written stuff only. It made it hard for a nonnative to read. And the first part of the story was not very gripping. It made the point very laboriously that trains incoming from the north disgorged their passengers at the Gare du Nord terminal, and if those passengers wanted to carry on south they had to cross Paris on foot or by car or subway or taxi to another terminal like the Gare d'Austerlitz or the Gare du Lyon before joining a southbound train.
"It's about something called the Human Railroad," I said. "Except there aren't many humans in it so far."
I passed the book to Summer and she flipped through it again.
"It's signed," she said.
She showed me the first blank page. There was an old faded inscription on it. Blue ink, neat penmanship. Someone had written: A Beatrice de Pierre. To Beatrice from Pierre.
"Was your mother called Beatrice?" Summer asked.
"No," I said. "Her name was Josephine. Josephine Moutier, and then Josephine Reacher."
She passed the book back to me.
"I think I've heard of the Human Railroad," she said. "It was a World War Two thing. It was about rescuing bomber crews that were shot down over Belgium and Holland. Local Resistance cells scooped them up and passed them along a chain all the way down to the Spanish border. Then they could get back home and get back in action. It was important because trained crews were valuable. Plus it saved people from years in a POW camp."
"That would explain Lamonnier's medals," I said. "One from each Allied government."
I put the book down on the bed and thought about packing. I figured I would throw the Samaritaine jeans and sweatshirt and jacket away. I didn't need them. Didn't want them. Then I looked at the book again and saw that some of the pages had different edges than some of the others. I picked it up and opened it and found some halftone photographs. Most of them were posed studio portraits, reproduced head-and-shoulders six to a page. The others were clandestine action shots. They showed Allied airmen hiding in cellars lit by candles placed on barrels, and small groups of furtive men dressed in borrowed peasant clothing on country tracks, and Pyrenean guides amid snowy mountainous terrain. One of the action shots showed two men with a young girl between them. The girl was not much more than a child. She was holding both men's hands, smiling gaily, leading them down a street in a city. Paris, almost certainly. The caption underneath the picture said: Beatrice de service a ses travaux. Beatrice on duty, doing her work. Beatrice looked to be about thirteen years old.
I was pretty sure Beatrice was my mother.
I flipped back to the pages of studio portraits and found her. It was some kind of a school photograph. She looked to be about sixteen in it. The caption was Beatrice en 1947. Beatrice in 1947. I flipped back and forth through the text and pieced together Lamonnier's narrative thesis. There were two main tactical problems with the Human Railroad. Finding the downed airmen was not one of them. They fell out of the sky, literally, all over the Low Countries, dozens of them every moonless night. If the Resistance got to them first, they stood a chance. If the Wehrmacht got to them first, they didn't. It was a matter of pure luck. If they got lucky and the Resistance got to them ahead of the Germans, they would be hidden, their uniforms would be exchanged for some kind of plausible disguises, forged papers would be issued, rail tickets would be bought, a courier would escort them on a train to Paris, and they would be on their way home.
Maybe.
The first tactical problem was the possibility of a spot check on the train itself, sometime during the initial journey. These were blond corn-fed farm boys from America, or redheaded British boys from Scotland, or anything else that didn't look dark and pinched and wartime French. They stood out. They didn't speak the language. Lots of subterfuges were developed. They would pretend to be asleep, or sick, or mute, or deaf. The couriers would do all the talking.
The second tactical problem was transiting Paris itself. Paris was crawling with Germans. There were random checkpoints everywhere. Clumsy lost foreigners stuck out like sore thumbs. Private automobiles had disappeared completely. Taxis were hard to find. There was no gasoline. Men walking in the company of other men became targets. So women were used as couriers. And then one of the dodges Lamonnier dreamed up was to use a kid he knew. She would meet airmen at the Gare du Nord and lead them through the streets to the Gare du Lyon. She would laugh and skip and hold their hands and pass them off as older brothers or visiting uncles. Her manner was unexpected and disarming. She got people through checkpoints like ghosts. She was thirteen years old.
Everyone in the chain had code names. Hers was Beatrice. Lamonnier's was Pierre.
I took the blue cardboard jewel case out of the box. Opened it up. Inside was a medal. It was La Medaille de la Resistance. The Resistance Medal. It had a fancy red, white, and blue ribbon and the medal itself was gold. I turned it over. On the back it was neatly engraved: Josephine Moutier. My mother.
"She never told you?" Summer said.
I shook my head. "Not a word. Not one, ever."
Then I looked back in the box. What the hell was the garrote about?
"Call Joe," I said. "Tell him we're coming over. Tell him to get Lamonnier back there."
We were at the apartment fifteen minutes later. Lamonnier was already there. Maybe he had never left. I gave the box to Joe and told him to check it out. He was faster than I had been, because he started with the medal. The name on the back gave him a clue. He glanced through the book and looked up at Lamonnier when he recognized him in the author photograph. Then he scanned through the text. Looked at the pictures. Looked at me.
"She ever mention any of this to you?" he said.
"Never. You?"
"Never," he said.
I looked at Lamonnier. "What was the garrote for?"
Lamonnier said nothing.
"Tell us," I said.
"She was found out," he said. "By a boy at her school. A boy of her own age. An unpleasant boy, the son of collaborators. He teased and tormented her about what he was going to do."
"What did he do?"
"At first, nothing. That was extremely unsettling for your mother. Then he demanded certain indignities as the price of his continued silence. Naturally, your mother refused. He told her he would inform on her. So she pretended to relent. She arranged to meet him under the Pont des Invalides late one night. She had to slip out of her house. But first she took her mother's cheese cutter from the kitchen. She replaced the wire with a string from her father's piano. It was the G below middle C, I think. It was still missing, years later. She met the boy and she strangled him."
"She what?" Joe said.
"She strangled him."
"She was thirteen years old."
Lamonnier nodded. "At that age the physical differences between girls and boys are not a significant handicap."
"She was thirteen years old and she killed a guy?"
"They were desperate times."
"What exactly happened?" I said.
"She used the garrote. As she had planned. It's not a difficult instrument to use. Nerve and determination were all she needed. Then she used the original cheese wire to attach a weight to his belt. She slipped him into the Seine. He was gone and she was safe. The Human Railroad was safe."
Joe stared at him. "You let her do that?"
Lamonnier shrugged. An expressive, Gallic shrug, just like my mother's.
"I didn't know about it," he said. "She didn't tell me until afterward. I suppose at first my instinct would have been to forbid it. But I couldn't have taken care of it myself. I had no legs. I couldn't have climbed down under the bridge and I wouldn't have been steady enough for fighting. I had a man loosely employed as an assassin, but he was busy elsewhere. In Belgium, I think. I couldn't have afforded the risk of waiting for him to get back. So on balance I think I would have told her to go ahead. They were desperate times, and we were doing vital work."
"Did this really happen?" Joe said.
"I know it did," Lamonnier said. "Fish ate through the boy's belt. He floated up some days later, a short distance downstream. We passed a nervous week. But nothing came of it."
"How long did she work for you?" I asked.
"All through 1943," he said. "She was extremely good. But her face became well known. At first her face was her guardian. It was so young and so innocent. How could anyone suspect a face like that? Then it became a liability. She became familiar to les boches. And how many brothers and cousins and uncles could one girl have? So I had to stand her down."
"Did you recruit her?"
"She volunteered. She pestered me until I let her help."
"How many people did she save?"
"Eighty men," Lamonnier said. "She was my best Paris courier. She was a phenomenon. The consequences of discovery didn't bear thinking about. She lived with the worst kind of fear in her gut for a whole year, but never once did she let me down."
We all sat quiet.
"How did you start?" I asked.
"I was a war cripple," he said. "One of many. We were too medically burdensome for them to want us as hostage prisoners. We were useless as forced laborers. So they left us in Paris. But I wanted to do something. I wasn't physically capable of fighting. But I could organize. Those are not physical skills. I knew that trained bomber crews were worth their weight in gold. So I decided to get them home."
"Why would my mother go her whole life without mentioning this stuff?"
Lamonnier shrugged again. Weary, unsure, still mystified all those years later.
"Many reasons, I think," he said. "France was a conflicted country in 1945. Many had resisted, many had collaborated, many had done neither. Most preferred a clean slate. And she was ashamed of killing the boy, I think. It weighed on her conscience. I told her it hadn't been a choice. It wasn't a voluntary action. I told her it had been the right thing to do. But she preferred to forget the whole thing. I had to beg her to accept her medal."
Joe and I and Summer said nothing. We all sat quiet.
"I wanted her sons to know," Lamonnier said.
Summer and I walked back to the hotel. We didn't talk. I felt like a guy who suddenly finds out he was adopted. You're not the man I thought you were. All my life I had assumed I was what I was because of my father, the career Marine. Now I felt different genes stirring. My father hadn't killed the enemy at the age of thirteen. But my mother had. She had lived through desperate times and she had stepped up and done what was necessary. At that moment I started to miss her more than I would have thought possible. At that moment I knew I would miss her forever. I felt empty. I had lost something I never knew I had.
We carried our bags down to the lobby and checked out at the desk. We gave back our keys and the multilingual girl prepared a long and detailed account. I had to countersign it. I knew I was in trouble as soon as I saw it. It was outrageously expensive. I had figured the army might overlook the forged vouchers in exchange for a result. But now I wasn't so sure. I figured the George V tariff might change their view. It was like adding insult to injury. We had been there one night, but we were being charged for two because we were late checking out. My room service coffee cost as much as a meal in a bistro. My phone call to Rock Creek cost as much as a three-course lunch at the best restaurant in town. My phone call to Franz in California cost as much as a five-course dinner. Summer's call to Joe less than a mile away in my mother's apartment asking him to get hold of Lamonnier was billed at less than two minutes and cost as much as the room service coffee. And we had been charged fees for taking incoming calls. One was from Franz to me and the other was from Joe to Summer, when he asked her to check if I was OK. That little piece of sibling consideration was going to cost the government five bucks. Altogether it was the worst hotel bill I had ever seen.
The multilingual girl printed two copies. I signed one for her and she folded the other into an embossed George V envelope and gave it to me. For my records, she said. For my court-martial, I thought. I put it in my inside jacket pocket. Took it out again about six hours later, when I finally realized who had done what, and to who, and why, and how.
