Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “Don’t,” I said. “I don’t feel bad about it. My mother wouldn’t either. She was French, after all. If she’d known those were my options, she’d have insisted.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  “Well, I guess she wasn’t very broad-minded. But she always wanted whatever made us happy.”

  “Did she give up because she was left alone?”

  I shook my head. “She wanted to be left alone so she could give up.”

  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 Lamonnier’s box.

  “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 fanned out again to points south. You couldn’t travel anywhere without transiting the capital. It made sense to me. France was a relatively small country with a very big city in it. Most nations did it the same way. The capital city was always the center of the spiderweb.

  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 Lamonnier. I recognized him with no difficulty. The blurb underneath the picture said he had lost both legs in the battles of May 1940. I recalled the stiff way he had sat on my mother’s sofa. And his walking sticks. He must have been using prosthetics. Wooden legs. What I had assumed were bony knees must have been complicated mechanical joints. The blurb went on to say he had built Le Chemin de Fer Humain. The Human Railroad. He had been awarded the Resistance Medal by President Charles de Gaulle, 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 mom?”

  “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-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 nonnative 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 terminal like the Gare d’Austerlitz or the Gare du 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: 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 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 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 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, their uniforms would be exchanged for some kind of plausible disguises, forged papers would be issued, rail tickets would be bought, a courier would escort them on a train to Paris, and they would be on their way home.

  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 prob
lem 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 Lamonnier dreamed up was to use a kid he knew. She would meet airmen at the Gare du Nord and lead them through the streets to the Gare du Lyon. She would laugh and skip and hold their hands and pass them off as older brothers or visiting uncles. Her manner was unexpected and disarming. She got people through checkpoints like ghosts. She was thirteen years old.

  Everyone in the chain had code names. Hers was Béatrice. Lamonnier’s was Pierre.

  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 Lamonnier back there.”

  We were at the apartment fifteen minutes later. Lamonnier was already there. Maybe he had never left. I gave the box to Joe and told him to check it out. He was faster than I had been, because he started with the medal. The name on the back gave him a clue. He glanced through the book and looked up at Lamonnier when he recognized him in the author photograph. Then he scanned through the text. Looked at the pictures. Looked at me.

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

  “Never. You?”

  “Never,” he said.

  I looked at Lamonnier. “What was the garrote for?”

  Lamonnier said nothing.

  “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.”

  Lamonnier nodded. “At that age the physical differences between girls and boys are not a significant handicap.”

  “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 planned. It’s not a difficult instrument to use. Nerve and determination were all she needed. Then she used the original cheese wire to attach a weight to his belt. She slipped him into the Seine. He was gone 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 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,” Lamonnier said. “Fish ate through the boy’s belt. He floated up some days later, a short distance downstream. 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 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 go
ing 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.

  We got out at international departures and found the Air France ticket desk. Swapped two vouchers for two seats to Dulles on the eleven o’clock red-eye. That gave us a long wait. We humped our bags across the concourse and started out in a bar. Summer wasn’t conversational. I guess she couldn’t think of anything to say. But the truth was, I was doing OK at that point. Life was unfolding the same way it always had for everyone. Sooner or later you ended up an orphan. There was no escaping it. It had happened that way for a thousand generations. No point in getting all upset about it.

  We drank bottles of beer and looked for somewhere to eat. I had missed breakfast and lunch and I guessed Summer hadn’t eaten either. We walked past all the little tax-exempt boutiques and found a place that was made up to look like a sidewalk bistro. We pooled our few remaining dollars and checked the menu and worked out that we could afford one course each, plus juice for her and coffee for me, and a tip for the waiter. We ordered steak frites, which turned out to be a decent slab of meat with shoestring fries and mayonnaise. You could get good food anywhere in France. Even an airport.

  After an hour we moved down to the gate. We were still early and it was almost deserted. Just a few transit passengers, all shopped out, or broke like us. We sat far away from them and stared into space.

  “Feels bad, going back,” Summer said. “You can forget how much trouble you’re in when you’re away.”