Danny glances at her suitcase, still unpacked on the floor. “Bring only your backpack. You’ll be carrying a lot of cash.” From his briefcase, he withdraws a money belt and an envelope filled with cash; he asks her to count the French francs, Belgian francs, and English pounds, then sign a receipt. He hands her multi-slipped airline tickets with blank spaces where the passengers’ names go and watches as she folds the bills into small wads and tucks everything, including her passport, into the money belt.
She recalls the old woman who almost picked her pocket.
“Wear it under your dress,” he says, “and use the stall in the ladies’ room to take out what you need. Also, if you must take notes, do it there.” Danny looks at his watch, large-faced with a metal-link band. “Get a little shut-eye now. Be at the train station in time to catch the six o’clock. When I leave, I’ll tell the taxi dispatcher in the plaza to send you a cab. Next time you’ll make all your own travel arrangements.”
She hasn’t even seen a plaza. “I have no idea where I am right now.”
“You’ll find a map in the living-room cabinet.”
A thought occurs to Sharon. “Rina. Did her husband leave today too?”
“He’s the captain.”
“Did she know he wasn’t coming back?”
“Oh, he’ll be back in a couple of weeks, after he brings Saar Six home.”
“So why do you need to train a second team if the first one will return before Saar Seven is launched?”
Danny smiles. “This question proves that you are the right person for the job.” He rises. “Rina traveled more than an hour to buy you the airline tickets because we don’t use the travel agent in Cherbourg. Naturally, he’s in bed with the French brass.”
Sharon is not surprised that Israel’s friendship with the French navy has its limits. The distrust lends the operation another layer of caution that worries her. There’s so much she doesn’t know. Given how Danny evaded her last question, she’s glad that she didn’t make a fuss when the pregnant Rina left baby Daphna with her.
He hands her a note with a phone number. “Call our office collect. But not for routine reports. Only if there’s a real problem.”
She can’t imagine a small problem, only a major fuckup. “You’ll be hanging out here?”
“There’s going to be hell to pay tomorrow when the French discover that Saar Six left without a champagne party. Someone has to take the heat.”
“Here’s a scenario to consider,” she says. “What if this Saar Six’s unauthorized departure heightens security in regard to all things Israeli? Passports are the first things to draw attention. What if our boys fall right into that net?”
“Call the acquisition office in Paris. They handle everything in the diplomatic channels. Do not mention our team here to the authorities.”
So Moka Limon is behind this Cherbourg project? Saar Six’s departure is challenging whether the embargo applies to platform boats designated for oil exploration, but it’s also straining the diplomatic relationship between the two countries.
Suddenly, there is context to her job. Another purpose besides her own agenda, which is impossible for her to get into with Danny now. As difficult as her coming assignment sounds, Sharon no longer wishes to go home.
But what if she gets interrogated and has to lie to the authorities about being based here?
Chapter Eleven
Claudette
Château de Valençay, France
February 1942
“Claudette?” a man whispered, his voice trembling.
“Who is this?”
“Claudette, it’s me.” He approached her, then reached up to remove his hat.
Recognition hit her like a thunderclap. “The Jew?” Her arms reached out to hug him, then dropped. She had never before touched him.
He let out a soft chuckle. “You forgot my name?”
In all the years of this man’s visits, Mémère referred to him only as “the Jew.”
Before Claudette could reply that she had never known his name, he said, “It’s Isaac Baume. And this is my son Raphaël.”
His son. The crippled one? The one she had fantasized about? Claudette couldn’t tell, since the tall young man wasn’t moving. She finally found her voice. “Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” Isaac Baume whispered, “but more important, we need a place to stay.”
Stay? She couldn’t speak. The man who had changed so much in her life for the better now stood in front of her in dire need himself. Her thoughts swirled. She owed him her gratitude, but how could she betray the duchess’s trust and bring in strangers—and Jews at that? By arranging this rendezvous, Lisette had given her tacit approval. Surely, though, the assistant cook had no authority outside this kitchen. Or did the duchess, who allowed planes to land here, know about this? The answer was in Monsieur Vincent’s statement: no Jews in Valençay.
“How did you find me?” Claudette asked.
“Your friend, the blind girl. Her husband helped us.”
Claudette’s heart warmed as she realized that Solange’s husband was a good man. She glanced at the Jew’s son, still standing two steps behind his father, shrouded in the obscurity of the night. All she could see was that he was almost a head taller than his father and that his arms were wrapped around himself from the cold.
The Jew—Monsieur Baume, Claudette corrected herself—shifted his weight from one foot to the other, visibly tired. He must be freezing. If Lisette had known about him and his son during the midday meal, the two of them must have been waiting in the forest all these many hours.
“Can you hide us? At least for a few days?” Isaac Baume’s eyes scanned the massive wall that stretched away in what Claudette knew seemed like infinite possibilities.
She couldn’t bear the pleading in his voice. He had been her grandmother’s friend and healer. He had become family to Claudette. It was winter, and he had no place to go. She shivered. The château was huge and held centuries’ worth of secrets in its thick stone walls, deep wine cellars, hidden chambers, and abandoned turrets. Her section in the massive tower had once housed wet nurses and governesses. The unoccupied chambers now stored rolled rugs, discarded toys, and trunks of old clothes. When these accommodations were built into the second floor of the round tower, an awkward corner had been forgotten. In her first month, Claudette had explored this storage space with a candle and at one end discovered a narrow, steep staircase.
