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 clothes stores. But most of them
wanted a month’s pay for a single garment.
‘We could try Bon March6,’ 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.’
294
‘Let’s go there.’
It was a long walk along the river, all the way to the tip of the
^
The de la Cit. 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.’
We stepped into the warmth of the store. Like all such places
the cosmetics came first and filled the air with scent. Summer
led me up one floor to the women’s clothes. I sat in a comfortable
chair and let her look around. She was gone for a good half
hour. She came back wearing a complete new outfit. Black
shoes, a black pencil skirt, a grey-and-white Breton sweater,
a grey wool jacket. And a beret. She looked like a million
dollars. Her BDUs and her boots were in a Samaritaine bag in
her hand.
‘You next,’ she said. She took me up to the men’s department.
The only pants they had with 95-centimetre inseams were
Algerian knock-offs of American blue jeans, so that set the tone.
I bought a light blue sweatshirt and a black cotton bomber
jacket. I kept my army boots on. They looked OK with the jeans
and they matched the jacket.
‘Buy a beret,’ Summer said, so I bought a beret. It was black
with a leather binding. I paid for the whole lot with American
dollars at a pretty good rate of exchange. I dressed in the
changing cubicle. Put my camouflage gear in the carrier bag.
Checked the mirror and adjusted the beret to a rakish angle
and stepped out.
Summer said nothing.
‘Lunch now,’ I said.
We went up to the ninth-floor caf. It was too cold to sit out
on the terrace, but we sat at a window and got pretty much the
same view. We could see the Notre-Dame cathedral to the east
and the Montparnasse tower all the way to the south. The sun
was still out. It was a great city.
295
‘How did Willard find our car?’ Summer said. ‘How would he
even know where to look? The United States is a big country.’
‘He didn’t find it,’ I said. ‘Not until someone told him where it
was. ‘
‘Who?’
‘Vassell,’ I said. ‘Or Coomer. Swan’s sergeant used my name
on the phone, back at XII Corps. So at the same time as they
were getting Marshall off the post they were calling Willard