Laughing, Sharon orders a pitcher of sangria to share with her new friends.
Before the Shabbat, she returns to Cherbourg with the new recruits and deposits them in the caserne. Upon entering her apartment, she finds a note from one of the reserve officers informing her of a group disco outing tonight. Tomer is yet another transient buddy, Moroccan-born with raisin-dark smiling eyes and magnificent white teeth.
Behind the sleepy façade of Cherbourg, the evenings come alive in the discos where the sailors dance. The reserve officers often invite Sharon to the Bull Casino as their “good-luck muse.” The many men surrounding her know about her lost fiancé, which stops them from making a pass at her. Their respect for their fallen brother overpowers the usual Israeli male bluntness.
The midnight air is cold and suffused with the smell of rain when Tomer walks Sharon home. She gets a whiff of his cinnamon aftershave. In the cobblestoned streets, their footsteps echo.
“It’s my last night here,” Tomer tells her.
She giggles. “A month of laughter, beer, and dancing.”
His gloved hand finds hers. “Also some essential work, but the most important thing is that I met you.” He kisses her, and she responds.
Hunger consumes her—for lips and tongues to intertwine, for her body to press against the whole of him.
She stops. Her insides are churning, and she breathes hard.
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
