Lee Child - Night School

A guy inside beckoned Reacher in.

Reacher mouthed, “How much?”

The guy held up his hand, fingers and thumb all extended.

Reacher mouthed, “Five what?”

The guy came to the door and opened it and said, “American dollars.”

“My regular barber is cheaper.”

“But I’m better. You get your uniforms tailored, right?”

“Do I look like I wear a uniform?”

“Oh, please.”

Reacher said, “Five bucks? I remember when five bucks got you two hamburgers and the back row of the movies. Plus car fare for her, if you fell out along the way. A shave and a haircut was two bits.”

“Was that an homage?”

“What?”

“Did you say that deliberately?”

“Sometimes I let things out by accident, but generally only one syllable at a time.”

“Therefore you said it deliberately. It was an homage. You were building the energy.”

“What was I doing?”

“You like this place.”

“I suppose.”

“Then support it by paying the full five bucks.”

“I don’t need a haircut.”

The guy said, “You know the difference between you and me?”

Reacher said, “What?”

“I can see your hair from the outside.”

“And?”

“You need a haircut.”

“For five bucks?”

“I’ll add a shave for free.”

Which turned out to be a luxurious experience. The water was warm, and the lather was creamy. The steel was perfect. It hissed through, on a molecular level. The mirror was tinted, so the finished job looked tan where it was probably pink. But even so, it looked pretty good. Call it a buck, Reacher thought. Which leaves the haircut costing four. Which is still outrageous .

The guy swapped the razor for scissors and started in on Reacher’s hair. Reacher ignored him and looked at the visual chart instead. The twenty-four styles. He went through them in order, only his eyes moving, carefully, as if studying them, from the plain number-one at the beginning, all the way to a fantastically elaborate DA at the other end of the scale.

He looked back at the Mohawk.

The guy said, “What do you think?”

Reacher said, “About what?”

“Your new haircut.”

Reacher looked in the mirror. He said, “Have you done it yet?”

“Are you in doubt?”

“It doesn’t look like it’s just been cut.”

“Exactly,” the guy said. “The best haircut looks like it was done a week ago.”

“So I pay five bucks for a haircut that already looks grown out?”

“This is a salon. I am an artist.”

Reacher said nothing.

He looked back at the Mohawk.

Then he dug in his pocket and gave the guy five American dollars, and asked, “Do you have a phone?”

The guy pointed at the wall. An old Ma Bell pay phone. All metal. For outside a gas station rather than inside a barbershop, but points for effort.

Reacher said, “Does it work?”

“Of course it works,” the guy said. “This is Germany. It was rewired as a normal telephone.”

Reacher dialed the number on Griezman’s business card. From the envelope with the fingerprint. He got ring tone. The phone worked. Germany. Rewired.

Griezman answered.

Reacher said, “We’re just simple detectives, you and I, hoping for favors, one to the other.”

Griezman said, “You’re going to run the print.”

“If you do something for me.”

“What something?”

“Two somethings, actually. Put some guys in cars around that bar. Where Klopp goes. With radios. Watch for the guy in the sketch. But don’t be obvious about it.”

“And?”

“There’s an apartment five streets away. Same thing, cars and radios. Not obvious. Sooner or later a Saudi kid is going to show up. He’s going to stay home for a spell, and then he’s going to come out again and head for a rendezvous. I need to know where he goes, in real time.”

“That’s a lot of people and a lot of cars.”

“This is Europe. What else do you need them for?”

“When?”

“Immediately.”

“That won’t be possible. It will take time to arrange.”

“Do you want me to run the print or not?”

Griezman was quiet for a second, and then he said yes, he did, and he said it with a little more enthusiasm than Reacher expected. The guy had a lot of departmental pride. He wanted to close his case.

Reacher said, “You do your best for me, and I’ll do my best for you.”

Griezman said, “OK.”

Then Reacher called the hotel and asked the desk for Neagley. She was in her room. He said, “I need Orozco. Right now. And then five minutes after that you and I need to meet with Sinclair.”

“She’s looking for you anyway. She has something for you.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Something Vanderbilt did. She’s all excited.”

“Tell Orozco I’m in a barbershop three blocks from the hotel. Tell him to be quick.”

“What have you got?”

“I know who the American is.”

The hairdresser guy made coffee, and Reacher sat in the barber chair, and the guy asked him questions about his childhood memories of old-time America. Hoping to build the energy, Reacher figured. Truth was Reacher had spent virtually his whole childhood outside the continental United States. He was the son of a Marine officer who had served all over the world. Reacher had gone with him, with his brother and his mother, as family. The Far East, the Pacific, Europe. Dozens of bases. Which helped, in a way. Old-time America had always been a myth to Reacher. So he repeated the same made-up crap he had lived on then, about bubblegum machines and Cadillacs with fins, and endless sunshine, and drive-in movies and waitresses on roller skates, and cheeseburgers and cold Coca-Cola in green glass bottles, and baseball on AM radio, out of Kansas City, static and all. The hairdresser guy’s smile got wider and wider, as if the energy in the room was indeed building to a satisfactory level.

Then Orozco’s sedan squelched to a stop on the street outside, and Reacher hustled out to join him. He got in the passenger seat. Orozco said, “Nice do, man.”

Reacher ran his fingers through his hair. He said, “You can tell?”

“Picks up your cheek bones big time. The ladies will love it.”

Reacher took out Griezman’s envelope.

He said, “I want you to run this print.”

“Through what?”

“Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. But very quietly.”

“What happened?”

“A hooker was killed. Local cops figure this is the guy who did it.”

“Any reason to believe he’s American military?”

“None at all, but I need a favor.”

“We can’t do it.”

“Which is why I said quietly. Your eyes only. Then mine. Then it’s on me.”

“The words court and martial spring to mind.”

“Hasn’t happened yet.”

Orozco sat still for a long moment. Then he took the envelope. But he said nothing. He made no promises. Deniability, from the start. Always a good idea. Reacher got out and Orozco drove away. Reacher hustled for the hotel.

–

They met in Sinclair’s room again. Her big news was that Vanderbilt had been struck by a bolt of proactive initiative and had taken the faxed sketch of the American to Bartley, over at the Fort Myer Visiting Officers’ Quarters. The lieutenant colonel, who had refused to say where he was on the day in question. The guy bleeding equity out of the family home, ahead of divorcing his unsuspecting wife. He recognized the face in the sketch. He said he had seen the guy at the Zurich airport. On his last-but-one trip. They had been on the same flight back to Hamburg. Exactly two weeks before the first rendezvous. The guy had been carrying a glossy multi-pocketed folder with a bank logo on it. The kind of thing you got when you opened an account. The lieutenant colonel had one of his own, from a year before, when he had rented his safety deposit box.