The Enemy

Summer said nothing.

“We’re leaving,” I said. “We’ll get a night flight back.”

“California?”

“East Coast first,” I said. “There are things I need to check.”

“What things?” she said.

I didn’t tell her. She would have laughed, and right then I couldn’t have handled laughter.

Summer packed her bag and came back to my room with me. I sat on the bed and played with the string on Monsieur Lamo

“What’s that?” she said.

“Something some old guy brought around. He said it’s something that should be found with my mother’s stuff.”

“What’s in it?”

“I don’t know.”

“So open it.”

I shoved it across the counterpane. “You open it.”

I watched her small neat fingers work on the tight old knot. Her clear nail polish flashed in the light. She got the string off and lifted the lid. It was a shallow box made out of the kind of thick sturdy cardboard you don’t see much anymore. Inside were three things. There was a smaller box, like a jewel case. It was made of cardboard faced with dark blue watermarked paper. There was a book. And there was a cheese cutter. It was a simple length of wire with a handle on each end. The handles were turned from dark old wood. You could see a similar thing in any épicerie in France. Except this one had been restrung. The wire was too thick for cheese. It looked like piano wire. It was curled and corroded, like it had been stored for a very long time.

“What is it?” Summer said.

“Looks like a garrote,” I said.

“The book is in French,” she said. “I can’t read it.”

She passed it to me. It was a printed book with a thin paper dust jacket. Not a novel. Some kind of a nonfiction memoir. The corners of the pages were foxed and stained with age. The whole thing smelled musty. The title was something to do with railroads. I opened it up and took a look. After the title page was a map of the French railroad system in the 1930s. The opening chapter seemed to be about how all the lines in the north squeezed down through Paris and then fa

I flipped to the end of the book. There was a photograph of the author on the back flap of the dust jacket. The photograph was of a forty-years-younger Monsieur Lamo

“What is it?” Summer said.

“Seems like I just met an old Resistance hero,” I said.

“What’s it got to do with your mom?”

“Maybe she and this Lamo

“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-centered, 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 no

“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: À Béatrice 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 Lamo

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 than some of the others. I picked it up and opened it and found some halftone 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 certainly. The caption underneath the picture said: Béatrice de service à 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 Béatrice en 1947. Beatrice in 1947. I flipped back and forth through the text and pieced together Lamo

Maybe.

The first tactical problem was the possibility of a spot check on the train itself, sometime during the initial journey. These were blond corn-fed farm boys from America, or redheaded British boys from Scotland, or anything else that didn’t look dark and pinched and wartime French. They stood out. They didn’t speak the language. Lots of subterfuges were developed. They would pretend to be asleep, or sick, or mute, or deaf. The couriers would do all the talking.

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 Lamo