The Enemy

It was a short flight. We started our descent during my second cup of coffee. Summer was drinking juice. She looked nervous. Part excited, and part worried. I figured she had never been to Paris before. And I figured she had never been AWOL before either. I could see it was weighing on her. Truth is, it was weighing on me a little too. It was a complicating factor. I could have done without it. But I wasn’t surprised to be hit with it. It had always been the obvious next step for Willard to take. Now I figured we were going to be chased around the world by BOLO messages. Be on the lookout for. Or else we were going to have a generalized all-points bulletin dumped on us.

We landed at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle and were off the plane and in the jetway by eleven-thirty in the morning. The airport was crowded. The taxi line was a zoo, just like it had been when Joe and I arrived the last time. So we gave up on it and walked to the navette station. Waited in line and climbed into the little bus. It was packed and uncomfortable. But Paris was warmer than Frankfurt had been. There was a watery sun out and I knew the city was going to look spectacular.

“Been here before?” I said.

“Never,” Summer said.

“Don’t look at the first twenty klicks,” I said. “Wait until we’re inside the Périphérique.”

“What’s that?”

“Like a ring road. Like the Beltway. That’s where the good part starts.”

“Your mom live inside it?”

I nodded. “On one of the nicest avenues in town. Where all the embassies are. Near the Eiffel Tower.”

“Are we going straight there?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “We’re going to be tourists first.”

“Why?”

“I have to wait until my brother gets in. I can’t go on my own. We have to go together.”

She said nothing to that. Just glanced at me. The bus started up and pulled away from the curb. She watched out the window the whole way. I could see by the reflection of her face in the glass that she agreed with me. Inside the Périphérique was better.

We got out at the Place de l’Opéra and stood on the sidewalk and let the rest of the passengers swarm ahead of us. I figured we should choose a hotel and dump our bags before we did anything else.

We walked south on the Rue de la Paix, through the Place Vendôme, down to the Tuileries. Then we turned right and walked straight up the Champs-Élysées. There might have been better places to walk with a pretty woman on a lazy day under a watery winter sun, but right then I couldn’t readily recall any. We made a left onto the Rue Marbeuf and came out on the Avenue George V just about opposite the George V Hotel.

“OK for you?” I said.

“Will they let us in?” Summer asked.

“Only one way to find out.”

We crossed the street and a guy in a top hat opened the door for us. The girl at the desk had a bunch of little flags on her lapel, one for each language she spoke. I used French, which pleased her. I gave her two vouchers and asked for two rooms. She didn’t hesitate. She went right ahead and gave us keys just like I had paid with gold bullion, or a credit card. The George V was one of those places. There was nothing they hadn’t seen before. Or if there was, they weren’t about to admit it to anyone.

The rooms the multilingual girl gave us both faced south and both had a partial view of the Eiffel Tower. One was decorated in shades of pale blue and had a sitting area and a bathroom the size of a tennis court. The other was three doors down the hall. It was done in parchment yellow and it had an iron Juliet balcony.

“Your choice,” I said.

“I’ll take the one with the balcony,” she said.

We dumped our bags and washed up and met in the lobby fifteen minutes later. I was ready for lunch, but Summer had other ideas.

“I want to buy clothes,” she said. “Tourists don’t wear BDUs.”

“This one does,” I said.

“So break out,” she said. “Live a little. Where should we go?”

I shrugged. You couldn’t walk twenty yards in Paris without falling over at least three clothing stores. But most of them wanted a month’s pay for a single garment.

“We could try Bon Marché,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Department store,” I said. “It means cheap, literally.”

“A department store called Cheap?”

“My kind of place,” I said.

“Anywhere else?”

“Samaritaine,” I said. “On the river, at the Pont Neuf. There’s a terrace at the top with a view.”

“Let’s go there.”

It was a long walk along the river, all the way to the tip of the Île de la Cité. It took us an hour, because we kept stopping to look at things. We passed the Louvre. We browsed the little green stalls set up on the river wall.

“What does Pont Neuf mean?” Summer asked me.

“New Bridge,” I said.

She looked ahead at the ancient stone structure.

“It’s the oldest bridge in Paris,” I said.

“So why do they call it new?”

“Because it was new once.”