“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 Périphérique and entered Haussmann’s urban splendor. The sun was well up by then and the city was bathed in gold and honey. The cafés 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’Opéra. 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’Université, 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 Époque 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 Résistance. 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.
Touché, 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 cafés 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 café 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 dépôt 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.”
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