Lee Child - The Enemy

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 walkedfast 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 coffinwas 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 wasstill 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.”