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
afterwards. 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 down
stream. 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
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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 labourers. 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
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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 for ever. 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