The Enemy

where the tanks are, not where the grunts are. Much easier to transport men across a continent than tanks.
    “Or maybe he met her at Irwin,” Summer said. “In California. Maybe she worked Irwin, but had to leave California for some reason, but she liked working military bases, so she moved to Bird.”
    “What kind of a hooker would
like
working military bases?”
    “The kind that’s interested in money. Which is all of them, presumably. Military bases support their local economies in all kinds of ways.”
    I said nothing.
    “Or maybe she always worked Bird, but followed the infantry to Irwin when they did a joint exercise out there one time. Those things can last a month or two. No point in hanging around at home with no customers.”
    “Best guess?” I said.
    “They met in California,” she said. “Kramer will have spent years at Irwin, on and off. Then she moved to North Carolina, but he still liked her enough to make the detour whenever he was in D.C.”
    “She doesn’t do anything special, not for twenty bucks.”
    “Maybe he didn’t need anything special.”
    “We could ask the widow.”
    Summer smiled. “Maybe he just liked her. Maybe she made damn sure he did. Hookers are good at that. They like repeat customers best of all. It’s much safer for them if they already know the guy.”
    I closed my eyes again.
    “So?” Summer said. “Did I come up with something you didn’t think of?”
    “No,” I said.

    I fell asleep before we were out of the state and woke up again nearly four hours later when Summer took the Green Valley ramp too fast. My head rolled to the right and hit the window.
    “Sorry,” she said. “You should check Kramer’s phone records. He must have called ahead, to make sure she was around. He wouldn’t have driven all that way on the off chance.”
    “Where would he have called from?”
    “Germany,” she said. “Before he left.”
    “More likely he used a pay phone at Dulles. But we’ll check.”
    “We?”
    “You can partner with me.”
    She said nothing.
    “Like a test,” I said.
    “Is this important?”
    “Probably not. But it might be. Depends what the conference is about. Depends what paperwork he was taking to it. He might have had the whole ETO order of battle in his case. Or new tactics, assessment of shortcomings, all kinds of classified stuff.”
    “The Red Army is going to fold.”
    I nodded. “I’m more worried about red faces. Newspapers, or television. Some reporter finds classified stuff on a trash pile near a strip club, there’ll be major embarrassment all around.”
    “Maybe the widow will know. He might have discussed it with her.”
    “We can’t ask her,” I said. “As far as she’s concerned he died in his sleep with the blanket pulled up to his chin, and everything else was kosher. Any worries we’ve got at this point stay strictly between me, you, and Garber.”
    “Garber?” she said.
    “Me, you, and him,” I said.
    I saw her smile. It was a trivial case, but working it with Garber was a definite stroke of luck, for a person with a 110th Special Unit transfer pending.

    Green Valley was a picture-perfect colonial town and the Kramer house was a neat old place in an expensive part of it. It was a Victorian confection with fish-scale tiles on the roof and a bunch of turrets and porches all painted white, sitting on a couple of acres of emerald lawn. There were stately evergreen trees dotted about. They looked like someone had positioned them with care, which they probably had, a hundred years ago. We pulled up at the curb and waited, just looking. I don’t know what Summer was thinking about, but I was scanning the scene and filing it away under
A
for
America.
I have a Social Security number and the same blue and silver passport as everyone else but between my old man’s Stateside tours and my own I can only put together about five years’ worth of actual residence in the continental U.S. So I know a bunch of basic elementary-school facts like state capitals and how many grand slams Lou Gehrig hit and some basic high-school stuff like the constitutional amendments and the importance of Antietam, but I don’t know much about the price of milk or how to work a pay phone or how different places look and smell. So I soak it up when I can. And the Kramer house was worth soaking up. That was for sure. A watery sun was shining on it. There was a faint breeze and the smell of woodsmoke in the air and a kind of intense