The Enemy

“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.

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.

twenty

We made the familiar trek to the Place de l’Opéra and caught the airport bus. It was my sixth time on that bus in about a week. The sixth time was no more comfortable than the previous five. It was the discomfort that started me thinking.