The Enemy

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 te

“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 stepped 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 di

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.”