and the George Cross by the British, and the Distinguished
Service Medal by the Americans.
‘What is it?’ Summer said.
‘Seems like I just met an old Resistance hero,’ I said.
‘What’s it got to do with your morn?’
‘Maybe she and this Lamonnier guy were sweethearts way
back.’
‘And he wants to tell you and Joe about it? About what a great
guy he was? At a time like this? That’s a little self-centred, isn’t it?’
I read on a little more. Like most French books it used a
weird construction called the past historic tense, which was
reserved for written stuff only. It made it hard for a non-native
to read. And the first part of the story was not very gripping. It
made the point very laboriously that trains incoming from the
north disgorged their passengers at the Gare du Nord terminal,
and if those passengers wanted to carry on south they had to
cross Paris on foot or by car or subway or taxi to another
316
terminal like the Gare d’Austerlitz or the Gare de Lyon before
joining a southbound train.
‘It’s about something called the human railroad,’ I said.
‘Except there aren’t many humans in it so far.’
I passed the book to Summer and she flipped through it
again.
‘It’s signed,’ she said.
She showed me the first blank page. There was an old faded
inscription on it. Blue ink, neat penmanship. Someone had
written: ,3, Bdatrice de Pierre. To Beatrice from Pierre.
‘Was your mother called Beatrice?’ Summer asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Her name was Josephine. Josephine Moutier,
and then Josephine Reacher.’
She passed the book back to me.
‘I think I’ve heard of the human railroad,’ she said. ‘It was a
World War Two thing. It was about rescuing bomber crews that
were shot down over Belgium and Holland. Local Resistance
cells scooped them up and passed them along a chain all the
way down to the Spanish border. Then they could get back
home and get back in action. It was important because trained
crews were valuable. Plus it saved people from years in a POW
camp.’
‘That would explain Lamonnier’s medals,’ I said. ‘One from
each Allied government.’
I put the book down on the bed and thought about packing. I
figured I would throw the Samaritaine jeans and sweatshirt and
jacket away. I didn’t need them. Didn’t want them. Then I
looked at the book again and saw that some of the pages had
different edges from some of the others. I picked it up and
opened it and found some half-tone photographs. Most of them
were posed studio portraits, reproduced head-and-shoulders six
to a page. The others were clandestine action shots. They
showed Allied airmen hiding in cellars lit by candles placed on
barrels, and small groups of furtive men dressed in borrowed
peasant clothing on country tracks, and Pyrenean guides amid
snowy mountainous terrain. One of the action shots showed
two men with a young girl between them. The girl was not
much more than a child. She was holding both men’s hands,
smiling gaily, leading them down a street in a city. Paris, almost
317
certainly. The caption underneath the picture said: Batrice de
service ? ses travaux. Beatrice on duty, doing her work. Beatrice
looked to be about thirteen years old.
I was pretty sure Beatrice was my mother.
I flipped back to the pages of studio portraits and found her.
It was some kind of a school photograph. She looked to be
about sixteen in it. The caption was Batrice en 1947. Beatrice
in 1947. I flipped back and forth through the text and pieced
together Lamonnier’s narrative thesis. There were two
main tactical problems with the human railroad. Finding the
downed airmen was not one of them. They fell out of the sky,
literally, all over the Low Countries, dozens of them every
moonless night. If the Resistance got to them first, they stood a
chance. If the Wehrmacht got to them first, they didn’t. It was
a matter of pure luck. If they got lucky and the Resistance got
to them ahead of the Germans, they would be hidden out,
their uniforms would be exchanged for some kind of plausible