The Enemy

getting all upset about it.
    We drank bottles of beer and looked for somewhere to eat. I had missed breakfast and lunch and I guessed Summer hadn’t eaten either. We walked past all the little tax-exempt boutiques and found a place that was made up to look like a sidewalk bistro. We pooled our few remaining dollars and checked the menu and worked out that we could afford one course each, plus juice for her and coffee for me, and a tip for the waiter. We ordered
steak frites,
which turned out to be a decent slab of meat with shoestring fries and mayonnaise. You could get good food anywhere in France. Even an airport.
    After an hour we moved down to the gate. We were still early and it was almost deserted. Just a few transit passengers, all shopped out, or broke like us. We sat far away from them and stared into space.
    “Feels bad, going back,” Summer said. “You can forget how much trouble you’re in when you’re away.”
    “All we need is a result,” I said.
    “We’re not going to get one. It’s been ten days and we’re nowhere.”
    I nodded. Ten days since Mrs. Kramer died, six days since Carbone died. Five days since Delta had given me a week to clear my name.
    “We’ve got nothing,” Summer said. “Not even the easy stuff. We didn’t even find the woman from Kramer’s motel. That shouldn’t have been difficult.”
    I nodded again. She was right. That shouldn’t have been difficult.

    We boarded forty minutes before takeoff. Summer and I had seats behind an old couple in an exit row. I wished we could change places with them. I would have been glad of the extra room. We took off on time and I spent the first hour getting more and more cramped and uncomfortable. The stewardess served a meal that I couldn’t have eaten even if I had wanted to, because I didn’t have enough room to move my elbows and operate the silverware.
    One thought led to another.
    I thought about Joe flying in the night before. He would have flown coach. That was clear. A civil servant on a personal trip doesn’t fly any other way. He would have been cramped and uncomfortable all night long, a little more than me because he was an inch taller. So I felt bad all over again about putting him in the bus to town. I recalled the hard plastic seats and his cramped position and the way his head was jerked around by the motion. I should have sprung for a cab from the city and kept it waiting at the curb. I should have found a way to scare up some cash.
    One thought led to another.
    I pictured Kramer and Vassell and Coomer flying in from Frankfurt on New Year’s Eve. American Airlines. A Boeing jet. No more spacious than any other jet. An early start from XII Corps. A long flight to Dulles. I pictured them walking down the jetway, stiff, airless, dehydrated, uncomfortable.
    One thought led to another.
    I pulled the George V bill out of my pocket. Opened the envelope. Read it through. Read it through again. Examined every line and every item.
    The hotel bill, the airplane, the bus to town.
    The bus to town, the airplane, the hotel bill.
    I closed my eyes.
    I thought about things that Sanchez and the Delta adjutant and Detective Clark and Andrea Norton and Summer herself had said to me. I thought about the crowd of meeters and greeters we had seen in the Roissy–Charles de Gaulle arrivals hall. I thought about Sperryville, Virginia. I thought about Mrs. Kramer’s house in Green Valley.
    In the end dominoes fell all over the place and landed in ways that made nobody look very good. Least of all me, because I had made many mistakes, including one big one that I knew for sure was going to come right back and bite me in the ass.

    I kept myself so busy pondering my prior mistakes that I let my preoccupation lead me into making another one. I spent all my time thinking about the past and no time at all thinking about the future. About countermeasures. About what would be waiting for us at Dulles. We touched down at two in the morning and came out through the customs hall and walked straight into a trap set by Willard.
    Standing in the same place they had stood six days earlier were the same three warrant officers from the Provost Marshal General’s office. Two W3s and a W4. I saw them. They saw us. I spent a second wondering how the hell Willard had done it. Did he have guys standing by at every airport in the country all day and all night? Did he have a Europe-wide trace out on our travel vouchers? Could he do that himself? Or was