Tomer’s hand is still tight around her waist. She steps back. Her mind flashes on a day in school when she was eleven. For the dress-up festival of Purim, Savta had sewn Sharon a Tyrolean girl costume, complete with a doll wearing an identical dirndl. Sharon won first prize, yet she was willing to forgo it when the school photographer positioned her next to a boy dressed in Bavarian lederhosen and an Alpine hat. The boy, a year older, was equally mortified at their pairing and pulled Sharon’s braids.

For two more years, he kept pulling her braids, and then one day he asked her to the movies. That was Alon. They had been together for seven years.

“I’ll wait for your call when you return to Israel,” Tomer whispers and kisses her neck.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Sharon

Paris and Cherbourg, France

November 1968

“All your assignments until now were merely a preparation for the big one,” Danny tells Sharon.

She gives him a perplexed look.

“I never shared it with you, but what convinced me that you were the right person for our team here was what your commander told us about the case of the guys from Chad.”

She’s shocked that her former intelligence unit’s major general broke the rule of silence. “My commander talked too much,” she replies.

On her way to Orly to pick up two new reservists, she wonders about her former boss. As a corporal, she had minimal contact with him, but now she understands that he wanted to secure for her this job on the Cherbourg project. How many people in the periphery of her life have shown her their caring without her realizing it? That orphanhood again, forever making her feel like an outsider.

At the airport, she selects a postcard of Paris at dusk shrouded in pink hues to send to her former commander. As an afterthought, she picks up a dozen more postcards for Uncle Pinchas, the Golans, a former music teacher, and friends.

The Chad assignment had been unusual. Sharon was puzzled when she’d been pulled out of her intelligence unit, where she’d been listening in on Arabic phone conversations in neighboring countries. She was sent on a one-day loan to the Ministry of Agriculture as a French interpreter for dignitaries from the African country of Chad. Israel was isolated from most African nations by the Arab boycott, but it offered agricultural know-how and training to any country willing to ignore that boycott. Dressed in civilian clothes, Sharon joined the two Chad visitors on a trip to the Negev to inspect new greenhouse technology. The handsome dignitaries were muscular with bluish dark skin; she imagined they looked like the attendants who had accompanied the queen of Sheba on her biblical visit to King Solomon. The men sat with Sharon in the van’s center row, and she pretended not to understand when they conversed in Arabic. In one brief exchange, they referred to a plan to get hold of night-vision equipment. A much-improved version, Sharon knew, was being developed by the Israeli military. Before any of them exited the van at the experimental hydroponic farm, Sharon quickly scanned the laborers through the tinted-glass window. All seemed busy, laying down hoses and unrolling plastic sheets, except for one man in Bedouin garb who was peeking from behind a shed.

“Don’t let the guests off the van,” Sharon said in Hebrew to the director of the Ministry of Agriculture, himself a former IDF officer. “Let’s talk outside.”

Minutes later, the guests were told that, regrettably, due to toxic vapors in the greenhouse, their visit must be rescheduled. The Bedouin was apprehended. A week later, Sharon received a letter of commendation for helping to avert a serious security breach.

Sharon had uncovered the plot of the Chadians, but her role then was passive—listening, figuring things out. The new project Danny has assigned her hinges on her resourcefulness.

The two reservists she picks up at the Orly airport are cousins, tall, blond, blue-eyed Israelis born to German Holocaust survivors. They grew up in Israel, studied engineering in Germany, and speak English and French with accents that can pass for Scandinavian.

Sharon takes them shopping at Le Bon Marché, where, under a magnificent, seven-story-high stained-glass dome, a suave salesman fits them with Italian-cut suits, soft fabric shirts, and leather shoes. He adds ties, pocket handkerchiefs, and silk socks for when the men sit down and the cuffs of their pants rise. Acting like the girlfriend of one of the men, Sharon instructs them in her broken German—in case the salesman catches snippets of talk—to make sure they select different designers and styles; their outfits shouldn’t look like unnatural getups.

She chokes at the exorbitant bill, but this is the cost of creating a façade. The men are supposed to be Norwegian businessmen from Starboat, a fake company, interested in purchasing the kinds of oil-exploration boats that CMN builds. They’ll be meeting in Paris with executives of the French acquisition office for the approval of such a sale. Then the two “Norwegians” will head to Cherbourg for Amiot’s guided tour of CMN. They’ll have no contact with the Israeli team.

Never break a French law was a recent directive in a telegram from Secretary Meir—Golda, as the grandmotherly Israeli leader preferred to be addressed.

Never break a French law? Sharon faces this dilemma when she holds the men’s fake Norwegian passports she collected from Moka Limon’s office. Tourists must present their passports at the hotel check-in. What if her men used their legal Israeli ones, and tomorrow morning their courteous French host fetches them at the hotel? She imagines a reception clerk’s polite smile as he tells the Frenchman, “Sure, sir, I’ll ring the Israelis right now.”

That you should not obey orders blindly was an important lesson from World War II. Should she obey the directive handed down to her from Limon, Yaniv, and Danny or follow Golda’s policy? Which path is the wrong one? Which is the moral one?

One need not have an intelligence background to know that whatever the ultimate purpose of this ruse, the plan might collapse because of a reception clerk’s slip. The political ramifications from Paris over the deception would be significant. Limon’s diplomatic credibility would be questioned—and there could be no intervention from Amiot to avert a political crisis.

There is no choice. Sharon enters the men’s mirrored dressing room, closes the door, and silently exchanges the Norwegian passports for their Israeli ones. She will keep them in her possession; they mustn’t be found in the men’s luggage, even by a curious chambermaid.

“Norwegians hold their liquor well, so only pretend to be drinking,” Sharon whispers in German. “And if we bump into one another in Cherbourg, you’ve never met me.”

What’s the purpose of this elaborate ploy? Sharon knows not to ask, yet she feels like an important cog in a monumental scheme.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Claudette

Château de Valençay, France

November 1942

The employees who lived in town, like Madame Couture and Marguerite, no longer showed up to work. Any minute, Nazi tanks might roll in or their bombs might drop from the air. The risk of being outside was too great.

Claudette perspired even in the damp chill of the grand rooms. Since returning to her job three weeks earlier, she had been working feverishly to help hide the duke’s ancestral treasures. She cut up flannel liners from garments and sewed them into dozens of pouches for silver pieces. They would be buried in the park, where no air would tarnish them.

Fear coursed through her veins. The enemy was closing in. Among the skeleton staff, she would be singled out by the Nazis as the invalide. What would happen to her baby, away from her in the village?

She recalled the shock two and a half years earlier when the Maginot Line had collapsed. Now, blocked by the Allies’ counterattacks in North Africa, Nazis were advancing into the free zone. Despite de Gaulle’s daily broadcast from London encouraging the thousands of brave spirits to free France from its conquerors, and despite Silvain Auguste’s grand talk about the underground preparing to meet the enemy, Claudette had heard of no French army, definitely not one strong enough to deter Nazi tanks.

“Hurry up, before the Boche take the job off your hands,” Monsieur Vincent told Claudette and the few remaining maids. All she wanted was to hold Benjamin and press him to her breast—except that what little milk she had been able to produce had dried up. Only Léonie could feed him. Claudette’s arms ached with his absence.

In spite of the cloud of doom, the duchess held her back erect and kept her voice gentle yet commanding as she supervised the staff’s work. Paintings were taken down from the walls. Hundreds of fine cloisonné jars and porcelain trinkets were carefully wrapped and hidden in the basement behind a false wall. Crystal chandeliers were hung inside wooden crates along with antique furniture in the wine cellars. Claudette packed the ancient uniforms, swords, and medals—the paraphernalia of aristocracy—for the duchess’s son and his future offspring because, the duchess said, gentility stood firm against shifting political winds.

Only the monumental sculptures from the Louvre remained visible. Claudette passed these marble Greek goddesses in the gallery when she went to her tower room to wash. When would the Nazis come to haul them away—and find her?

Monsieur Vincent ran the staff through air-raid drills. At night, they slept on mattresses in the wide passage parallel to the kitchen. Some nights, just before dawn, a group of men smelling of sweat and gunpowder entered the kitchen, fell hungrily on the cauldron of soup, and dropped to the floor to catch some sleep.

Then it happened. A devastated maid from the nearby Château de Chenonceau bicycled to the estate with the news that men in armored vehicles had taken over the château. The medieval building spanned the Cher River, which had been designated as the demarcation line between the free and occupied zones. The Nazis suspected that Chenonceau operated as a transfer bridge for fugitives and art. Hiccupping, the hysterical maid reported that when the estate manager denied the accusation, the Nazis shot him in front of the staff.

Next, the Nazis plundered Château des Bouffards. Midmorning, Claudette and the others gathered around the radio to hear the transmission by the BBC: “Dozens of German trucks were filled with every stick of furniture, every painting, every piece of china and silver; even silk and brocade curtains were confiscated.” Claudette wanted to put her hands over her ears, to block it all, but she couldn’t stop listening. “First the Nazis emptied all the cellars of France’s great wines and champagne. Now they’re emptying France of all its art treasures and transporting them to Germany,” the reporter continued.

The staff debated whether the brutal Boche would bomb Valençay into a pile of rubble or spare it because of the Louvre sculptures they wished to loot.

But no one doubted that they would come.

The duchess’s maid had escaped, supposedly heading somewhere west with her mother, but the talk was that in fact she had run east with a German officer. Claudette was left to see to the duchess’s needs. Her dream was realized, but it was no longer what she wanted. All she could think of was Benjamin.

“The Boche are not interested in infants. Your baby is in good hands with Léonie,” Monsieur Vincent told Claudette when he came upon her crying.

What did this aging man know about the feel of Benjamin’s tiny, warm body against her chest, his warm skin next to hers?

Léonie had rented out Claudette’s former room to a Parisian couple, both university professors, and their twelve-year-old daughter, Emmaline. When Claudette visited for a day and a half each week, she slept in the front room. If the day wasn’t too cold, she took Benjamin outside to be alone with him. She told him about her week, and his wise eyes—their greenish hue like Raphaël’s—followed her lips when she spoke. When she departed, Emmaline cradled him in her arms and sang to him, which gave Claudette some comfort.

The morning Claudette heard of an air bombing of the village of Vendôme, she could take the separation from Benjamin no more. The attack had left many dead and injured, the surrounding houses and farms flattened, and the Vendôme château barely spared from ruin. Keeping her job was no longer an option. Claudette approached the duchess in her sitting room.

The green silk that covered every inch of the walls showed the unfaded areas where paintings had been removed. The wood floors were discolored in places where furniture had once stood.

Her voice trembling, Claudette said, “Madame la Duchesse, I’m so sorry to let you down, but I must go to my baby.”