The Enemy

his permanent address, even though he avoided spending time there. There was a standard military ID card. There was a photograph of Mrs. Kramer, behind a plastic window. It showed a much younger version of the woman I had seen dead on her hallway floor. It was at least twenty years old. She had been pretty back then. She had long auburn hair that showed up a little orange from the way the photograph had faded with age.
    There was nothing else in the wallet. No receipts, no restaurant checks, no Amex carbons, no phone numbers, no scraps of paper. I wasn’t surprised. Generals are often neat, organized people. They need fighting talent, but they need bureaucratic talent too. I guessed Kramer’s office and desk and quarters would be the same as his wallet. They would contain everything he needed and nothing he didn’t.
    The hardcover book was an academic monograph from a Midwestern university about the Battle of Kursk. Kursk happened in July of 1943. It was Nazi Germany’s last grand offensive of World War Two and its first major defeat on an open battlefield. It turned into the greatest tank battle the world has ever seen, and ever will see, unless people like Kramer himself are eventually turned loose. I wasn’t surprised by his choice of reading material. Some small part of him must have feared the closest he would ever get to truly cataclysmic action was reading about the hundreds of Tigers and Panthers and T-34s whirling and roaring through the choking summer dust all those years ago.
    There was nothing else in the briefcase. Just a few furred paper shreds trapped in the seams. It looked like Kramer was the sort of guy who emptied his case and turned it upside down and shook it every time he packed for a trip. I put everything back inside and buckled the little straps and laid the case on the floor by my feet.
    “Speak to the dining room guy,” I said. “When we get back. Find out who was at the table with Vassell and Coomer.”
    “OK,” Summer said. She drove on.

    We got back to Bird in time for dinner. We ate in the O Club bar with a bunch of fellow MPs. If Willard had spies among them, they would have seen nothing except a couple of tired people doing not very much of anything. But Summer slipped away between courses and came back with news in her eyes. I ate my dessert and drank my coffee slowly enough that nobody could think I had urgent business anywhere. Then I stood up and wandered out. Waited in the cold on the sidewalk. Summer came out five minutes later. I smiled. It felt like we were conducting a clandestine affair.
    “Only one woman ate with Vassell and Coomer,” she said.
    “Who?” I asked.
    “Lieutenant Colonel Andrea Norton.”
    “The Psy-Ops person?”
    “The very same.”
    “She was at a party on New Year’s Eve?”
    Summer made a face. “You know what those parties are like. A bar in town, hundreds of people, in and out all the time, noise, confusion, drinks, people disappearing two by two. She could have slipped away.”
    “Where was the bar?”
    “Thirty minutes from the motel.”
    “Then she would have been gone an hour, absolute minimum.”
    “That’s possible.”
    “Was she in the bar at midnight? Holding hands and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’? Whoever was standing next to her should be able to say for sure.”
    “People say she was there. But she could have made it back by then anyway. The kid said the Humvee left at eleven twenty-five. She’d have been back with five minutes to spare. It could have looked natural. You know, everybody comes out of the woodwork, ready for the ball to drop. The party kind of starts over.”
    I said nothing.
    “She would have taken the case to sanitize it. Maybe her phone number was in there, or her name or her picture. Or a diary. She didn’t want the scandal. But once she was through with it, she didn’t need the rest of the stuff anymore. She’d have been happy to hand it back when asked.”
    “How would Vassell and Coomer know who to ask?”
    “Hard to hide a long-standing affair in this fishbowl.”
    “Not logical,” I said. “If people knew about Kramer and Norton, why would someone go to the house in Virginia?”
    “OK, maybe they didn’t
know.
Maybe it was just there on the list of possibilities. Maybe way down the list. Maybe it was something that people thought was over.”
    I nodded. “What can we get from her?”
    “We can get confirmation that Vassell and Coomer arranged to take possession of the briefcase