“Maybe,” I said.

“So Kramer chose a good time to check out. Everything will be different in the future.”

“Probably.”

“What are you going to do?”

“When?”

He turned in his seat and looked at me. “There’s going to be force reduction, Jack. You should face it. They’re not going to keep a million-man army going, not when the other guy has fallen apart.”

“He hasn’t fallen apart yet.”

“But he will. It’ll be over within a year. Gorbachev won’t last. There’ll be a coup. The old communists will make one last play, but it won’t stick. Then the reformers will be back forever. Yeltsin, probably. He’s OK. So in D.C. the temptation to save money will be irresistible. It’ll be like a hundred Christmases coming all at once. Never forget your Commander-in-Chief is primarily a politician.”

I thought back to the sergeant with the baby son.

“It’ll happen slowly,” I said.

Joe shook his head. “It’ll happen faster than you think.”

“We’ll always have enemies,” I said.

“No question,” he said. “But they’ll be different kinds of enemies. They won’t have ten thousand tanks lined up across the plains of Germany.”

I said nothing.

“You should find out why you’re at Bird,” Joe said. “Either nothing much is happening there, and therefore you’re on the way down, or something is happening there, and they want you around to deal with it, in which case you’re on the way up.”

I said nothing.

“You need to know either way,” he said. “Force reduction is coming, and you need to know if you’re up or down right now.”

“They’ll always need cops,” I said. “They bring it down to a two-man army, one of them better be an MP.”

“You should make a plan,” he said.

“I never make plans.”

“You need to.”

I traced my fingertips across the ribbons on my chest.

“They got me a seat in the front of the plane,” I said. “Maybe they’ll keep me in a job.”

“Maybe they will,” Joe said. “But even if they do, will it be a job you want? Everything’s going to get horribly second-rate.”

I noticed his shirt cuffs. They were clean and crisp and secured by discreet cuff links made from silver and black onyx. His tie was a plain somber item made from silk. He had shaved carefully. The bottom of his sideburn was cut exactly square. My brother was a man horrified by anything less than the best.

“A job’s a job,” I said. “I’m not choosy.”

We slept the rest of the way. We were woken by the pilot on the PA telling us we were about to start our descent into Roissy-Charles de Gaulle. Local time was eight o’clock in the evening. Nearly the whole of the second day of the new decade had disappeared like a mirage as we slid through one Atlantic time zone after another.

We changed some money and hiked over to the taxi line. It was a mile long, full of people and luggage. It was hardly moving. So we found a navette instead, which is what the French call an airport shuttle bus. We had to stand all the way through the dreary northern suburbs and into the center of Paris. We got out at the Place de l’Opéra at nine in the evening. Paris was dark and damp and cold and quiet. Cafés and restaurants had warm lights burning behind closed doors and fogged windows. The streets were wet and lined with small parked cars. The cars were all misted over with nighttime dew. We walked together south and west and crossed the Seine at the Pont de la Concorde. Turned west again along the Quai d’Orsay. The river was dark and sluggish. Nothing was moving on it. The streets were empty. Nobody was out and about.

“Should we get flowers?” I asked.

“Too late,” Joe said. “Everything’s closed.”

We turned left at the Place de la Résistance and walked into the Avenue Rapp, side by side. We saw the Eiffel Tower on our right as we passed the mouth of the Rue de l’Université. It was lit up in gold. Our heels sounded like rifle shots on the silent sidewalk. We arrived at my mother’s building. It was a modest six-story stone apartment house trapped between two gaudier Belle Époque facades. Joe took his hand out of his pocket and unlocked the street door.

“You have a key?” I said.

He nodded. “I’ve always had a key.”

Inside the street door was a cobbled alley that led through to the center courtyard. The concierge’s room was on the left. Beyond it was a small alcove with a small, slow elevator. We rode it up to the fifth floor. Stepped out into a high, wide hallway. It was dimly lit. It had dark decorative tiles on the floor. The right-hand apartment had tall oak double doors with a discreet brass plaque engraved: M. amp; Mme. Girard. The left-hand doors were painted off-white and labeled: Mme. Reacher.

We knocked and waited.

six

We heard slow shuffling steps inside the apartment and a long moment later my mother opened the door.

“Bonsoir, Maman,” Joe said.

I just stared at her.

She was very thin and very gray and very stooped and she looked about a hundred years older than the last time I had seen her. She had a long heavy plaster cast on her left leg and she was leaning on an aluminum walker. Her hands were gripping it hard and I could see bones and veins and tendons standing out. She was trembling. Her skin looked translucent. Only her eyes were the same as I remembered them. They were blue and merry and filled with amusement.

“Joe,” she said. “And Reacher.”

She always called me by my last name. Nobody remembered why. Maybe I had started it, as a kid. Maybe she had continued it, the way families do.

“My boys,” she said. “Just look at the two of you.”

She spoke slowly and breathlessly but she was smiling a happy smile. We stepped up and hugged her. She felt cold and frail and insubstantial. She felt like she weighed less than her aluminum walker.

“What happened?” I said.

“Come inside,” she said. “Make yourselves at home.”

She turned the walker around with short clumsy movements and shuffled back through the hallway. She was panting and wheezing. I stepped in after her. Joe closed the door and followed me. The hallway was narrow and tall and was followed by a living room with wood floors and white sofas and white walls and framed mirrors. My mother made her way to a sofa and backed up to it slowly and dropped herself into it. She seemed to disappear in its depth.

“What happened?” I asked again.

She wouldn’t answer. She just waved the inquiry away with an impatient movement of her hand. Joe and I sat down, side by side.

“You’re going to have to tell us,” I said.

“We came all this way,” Joe said.

“I thought you were just visiting,” she said.

“No you didn’t,” I said.

She stared at a spot on the wall.

“It’s nothing,” she said.

“Doesn’t look like nothing.”

“Well, it was just bad timing.”

“In what way?”

“I got unlucky,” she said.

“How?”

“I was hit by a car,” she said. “It broke my leg.”

“Where? When?”

“Two weeks ago,” she said. “Right outside my door, here on the Avenue. It was raining, I had an umbrella, it was shading my eyes, I stepped out, and the driver saw me and braked, but the pavé was wet and the car slid right into me, very slowly, like slow motion, but I was transfixed and I couldn’t move. I felt it hit my knee, very gently, like a kiss, but it snapped a bone. It hurt like hell.”

I saw in my mind the guy in the parking lot outside the nude bar near Bird, writhing around in an oily puddle.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Joe asked.

She didn’t answer.

“But it’ll mend, right?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said. “It’s trivial.”

Joe just looked at me.

“What else?” I said.

She kept on looking at the wall. Did the dismissive thing with her hand again.