“Did you have to take a test?”
“Sure.”
“Was it hard?”
“Not very.”
“What state are we in?”
“Germany.”
“That’s the country. It’s a federal system. There’s a clue where it says Bundesrepublik. It means it has states, like America. Only sixteen of them, not fifty, but the principle is the same.”
“I guess I forget.”
“Hamburg,” Reacher said.
“That’s the town.”
“Also the state. Like New York. Next to Schleswig Holstein and Bremen. Then comes Lower Saxony. Did you change your name?”
“Why not?”
“Why Durnberger?”
“I like the way it sounds.”
“Did you retain your American citizenship?”
“No, we renounced. We’re not dual. So there’s nothing you can do.”
“We can be impolite.”
“What?”
“Americans often are, overseas. You Europeans are always complaining about it. We could just sit here in the way.”
“No, we’re going to leave now.”
“Why?”
“Because we want to.”
“You need the bathroom?”
“No.”
“You got a pressing engagement?”
“We got freedom of movement.”
“Sure you do. Like a person in Times Square, trying to get to work on time. No way to do that, unless he runs right over the tourist in front of him.”
The guy said nothing.
Reacher looked at the other guy, and said, “How did you choose your name?”
“The same,” the guy said. “I liked the sound of it.”
“Really? Say it for me.”
The guy didn’t answer.
“Say it for me,” Reacher said again. “Let me hear how nice it sounds.”
No response.
“Say it for me.”
Nothing.
Reacher hooked his thumbs under the edge of the table top and clamped down hard with his fingers. He leaned forward. He said, “Say your name for me.”
The guy couldn’t.
Reacher said, “So we got one guy who can’t remember Germany has states, and another guy who can’t remember his own name. You’re not doing a real great job of convincing me.”
He was clamping the table and leaning forward not for the drama, but to be ready for what came next. And it came right then. The guy on the right shoved the table hard, aiming to jab Reacher in the midsection with it, like a punch, or even to knock him over backward in his chair, but Reacher was ready, and he shoved back ten times as hard and drove the wooden edge into the guy’s gut. A satisfactory blow, but the movement of the furniture gave the guy on the left a widening gap to stand up in, which he did, and then he slid around behind Reacher’s seated back and hustled for the street door. Except by then Neagley was also on her feet, stepping left, leading with her shoulder, drifting toward the guy, and then rotating savagely and slamming a roundhouse right into his chest, dead on the solar plexus, which stood him up panicked and breathless, like he had swallowed an electric cattle prod. Which gave her plenty of time to call her next shot. Which was her left knee to his groin, followed by her right knee to his face, as he crumpled to the floor in front of her.
Reacher kept the other guy hemmed in behind the table. He said, “See what I mean? Now I have to clean that up.”
He turned his head, and saw an old lady behind the counter getting ready to scream or faint or grab the phone. He called out, “Sexueller Angriff,” which he knew from taking a prisoner to a civilian courthouse in Frankfurt meant sexual assault. He pointed to himself and added, “Militarpolizei,” which he knew meant military police. The old woman calmed down a little. The forces of order were in control. And actually nothing was broken. The guy had gone down and missed everything. Neagley was a precision worker. There was blood on the floor, but not much. Nothing a minute with a mop wouldn’t take care of. No harm, no foul, overall.
Reacher said to Neagley, “Ask to use her phone. Call Stuttgart and find out who we know who could get here today.”
“For these guys?”
“The background noise is starting. We’re going to need garbage disposal.”
“Not through Sinclair?”
“This is army business. We shouldn’t bore her with the details.”
Neagley spoke no more German than Reacher, so she mimed with raised eyebrows and her right-hand thumb and pinky, the universal dumb-show for a telephone, and the old lady bustled off to the far end of the counter and came back with an old black instrument tethered by a wire. Neagley dialed and waited and started talking.