The Enemy

Everyone in the chain had code names. Hers was Béatrice. Lamo

I took the blue cardboard jewel case out of the box. Opened it up. Inside was a medal. It was La Medaille de la Résistance. 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 Lamo

We were at the apartment fifteen minutes later. Lamo

“She ever mention any of this to you?” he said.

“Never. You?”

“Never,” he said.

I looked at Lamo

Lamo

“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.”

Lamo

“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 pla

Joe stared at him. “You let her do that?”

Lamo

“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,” Lamo

“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 i

“Did you recruit her?”

“She volunteered. She pestered me until I let her help.”

“How many people did she save?”

“Eighty men,” Lamo

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?”

Lamo

“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,” Lamo

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 di

The multilingual girl printed two copies. I signed one for her and she folded the other into an embossed George V envelope and gave it to me. For my records, she said. For my court-martial, I thought. I put it in my inside jacket pocket. Took it out again about six hours later, when I finally realized who had done what, and to who, and why, and how.