The second tactical problem was transiting Paris itself. Paris was crawling with Germans. There were random checkpoints everywhere. Clumsy lost foreigners stuck out like sore thumbs. Private automobiles had disappeared completely. Taxis were hard to find. There was no gasoline. Men walking in the company of other men became targets. So women were used as couriers. And then one of the dodges Lamonnier dreamed up was to use a kid he knew. She would meet airmen at the Gare du Nord and lead them through the streets to the Gare du Lyon. She would laugh and skip and hold their hands and pass them off as older brothers or visiting uncles. Her manner was unexpected and disarming. She got people through checkpoints like ghosts. She was thirteen years old.
Everyone in the chain had code names. Hers was Beatrice. Lamonnier's was Pierre.
I took the blue cardboard jewel case out of the box. Opened it up. Inside was a medal. It was La Medaille de la Resistance. The Resistance Medal. It had a fancy red, white, and blue ribbon and the medal itself was gold. I turned it over. On the back it was neatly engraved: Josephine Moutier. My mother.
"She never told you?" Summer said.
I shook my head. "Not a word. Not one, ever."
Then I looked back in the box. What the hell was the garrote about?
"Call Joe," I said. "Tell him we're coming over. Tell him to get Lamonnier back there."
We were at the apartment fifteen minutes later. Lamonnier was already there. Maybe he had never left. I gave the box to Joe and told him to check it out. He was faster than I had been, because he started with the medal. The name on the back gave him a clue. He glanced through the book and looked up at Lamonnier when he recognized him in the author photograph. Then he scanned through the text. Looked at the pictures. Looked at me.
"She ever mention any of this to you?" he said.
"Never. You?"
"Never," he said.
I looked at Lamonnier. "What was the garrote for?"
Lamonnier said nothing.
"Tell us," I said.
"She was found out," he said. "By a boy at her school. A boy of her own age. An unpleasant boy, the son of collaborators. He teased and tormented her about what he was going to do."
"What did he do?"
"At first, nothing. That was extremely unsettling for your mother. Then he demanded certain indignities as the price of his continued silence. Naturally, your mother refused. He told her he would inform on her. So she pretended to relent. She arranged to meet him under the Pont des Invalides late one night. She had to slip out of her house. But first she took her mother's cheese cutter from the kitchen. She replaced the wire with a string from her father's piano. It was the G below middle C, I think. It was still missing, years later. She met the boy and she strangled him."
"She what?" Joe said.
"She strangled him."
"She was thirteen years old."
Lamonnier nodded. "At that age the physical differences between girls and boys are not a significant handicap."
"She was thirteen years old and she killed a guy?"
"They were desperate times."
"What exactly happened?" I said.
"She used the garrote. As she had planned. It's not a difficult instrument to use. Nerve and determination were all she needed. Then she used the original cheese wire to attach a weight to his belt. She slipped him into the Seine. He was gone and she was safe. The Human Railroad was safe."
Joe stared at him. "You let her do that?"
Lamonnier shrugged. An expressive, Gallic shrug, just like my mother's.
"I didn't know about it," he said. "She didn't tell me until afterward. I suppose at first my instinct would have been to forbid it. But I couldn't have taken care of it myself. I had no legs. I couldn't have climbed down under the bridge and I wouldn't have been steady enough for fighting. I had a man loosely employed as an assassin, but he was busy elsewhere. In Belgium, I think. I couldn't have afforded the risk of waiting for him to get back. So on balance I think I would have told her to go ahead. They were desperate times, and we were doing vital work."
"Did this really happen?" Joe said.
"I know it did," Lamonnier said. "Fish ate through the boy's belt. He floated up some days later, a short distance downstream. We passed a nervous week. But nothing came of it."
"How long did she work for you?" I asked.
"All through 1943," he said. "She was extremely good. But her face became well known. At first her face was her guardian. It was so young and so innocent. How could anyone suspect a face like that? Then it became a liability. She became familiar to les boches. And how many brothers and cousins and uncles could one girl have? So I had to stand her down."
"Did you recruit her?"
"She volunteered. She pestered me until I let her help."
"How many people did she save?"
"Eighty men," Lamonnier said. "She was my best Paris courier. She was a phenomenon. The consequences of discovery didn't bear thinking about. She lived with the worst kind of fear in her gut for a whole year, but never once did she let me down."
We all sat quiet.
"How did you start?" I asked.
"I was a war cripple," he said. "One of many. We were too medically burdensome for them to want us as hostage prisoners. We were useless as forced laborers. So they left us in Paris. But I wanted to do something. I wasn't physically capable of fighting. But I could organize. Those are not physical skills. I knew that trained bomber crews were worth their weight in gold. So I decided to get them home."
"Why would my mother go her whole life without mentioning this stuff?"
Lamonnier shrugged again. Weary, unsure, still mystified all those years later.
"Many reasons, I think," he said. "France was a conflicted country in 1945. Many had resisted, many had collaborated, many had done neither. Most preferred a clean slate. And she was ashamed of killing the boy, I think. It weighed on her conscience. I told her it hadn't been a choice. It wasn't a voluntary action. I told her it had been the right thing to do. But she preferred to forget the whole thing. I had to beg her to accept her medal."
Joe and I and Summer said nothing. We all sat quiet.
"I wanted her sons to know," Lamonnier said.
Summer and I walked back to the hotel. We didn't talk. I felt like a guy who suddenly finds out he was adopted. You're not the man I thought you were. All my life I had assumed I was what I was because of my father, the career Marine. Now I felt different genes stirring. My father hadn't killed the enemy at the age of thirteen. But my mother had. She had lived through desperate times and she had stepped up and done what was necessary. At that moment I started to miss her more than I would have thought possible. At that moment I knew I would miss her forever. I felt empty. I had lost something I never knew I had.
We carried our bags down to the lobby and checked out at the desk. We gave back our keys and the multilingual girl prepared a long and detailed account. I had to countersign it. I knew I was in trouble as soon as I saw it. It was outrageously expensive. I had figured the army might overlook the forged vouchers in exchange for a result. But now I wasn't so sure. I figured the George V tariff might change their view. It was like adding insult to injury. We had been there one night, but we were being charged for two because we were late checking out. My room service coffee cost as much as a meal in a bistro. My phone call to Rock Creek cost as much as a three-course lunch at the best restaurant in town. My phone call to Franz in California cost as much as a five-course dinner. Summer's call to Joe less than a mile away in my mother's apartment asking him to get hold of Lamonnier was billed at less than two minutes and cost as much as the room service coffee. And we had been charged fees for taking incoming calls. One was from Franz to me and the other was from Joe to Summer, when he asked her to check if I was OK. That little piece of sibling consideration was going to cost the government five bucks. Altogether it was the worst hotel bill I had ever seen.