“He was gone by the time I returned from the Nazis’ forced labor. I recall my wife telling me about him.” He shakes his head in amazement. “It’s incredible that the story is resurfacing.”

Forced labor? For a split second Sharon thinks that he’s referring to concentration camps, but then recalls Rachelle telling her about the Vichy government shipping half a million able-bodied Frenchmen to Germany’s ammunition factories. It’s never right to compare suffering, but the French also had their share of misery.

Sharon looks out the window at corduroy-like rows of vineyards radiating up the undulating hills. A silvery ribbon of a river runs alongside the main thoroughfare. A majestic château looms on the horizon, but then a forest blocks it from view.

“Where is Valençay?” she asks.

“About an hour’s drive north.”

“Is the château still standing?”

“Oh, yes. It’s a tourist attraction. Nothing to do with us. We live our simple lives, keep to ourselves.” By way of explanation, he adds, “Many châteaux operate vineyards, grow wheat, or raise cattle, and the adjacent villages’ economies are attached to them. In Châtillon-sur-Indre, there’s no duke lording over us.”

“And Valençay has a duke?”

“Not since the war. The last duchess never returned. She lost the estate, like so many members of the nobility did. I heard that she lived in poverty in Paris, even served as a personal maid to a former friend of hers. Then one day she was selling cosmetics in a department store, and an old admirer showed up—the owner of Hennessy Cognac, no less. She married him, and he gave her back the lifestyle to which she had been accustomed.”

“A fairy-tale ending.” One day, Sharon thinks. One day she will have to visit that place. How can she not try to find out about the Pelletier family? If Danny’s Jewish mother was deported, could the non-Jewish father—someone named Pelletier—still be alive?

When the conductor on the train from Tours announces Paris’s Montparnasse station, Sharon realizes that she assumed all trains on this line went to Gare d’Austerlitz. How irresponsible of her not to check every detail. She’s now in Paris but nowhere near her stored suitcase.

She glances at her watch. She has an hour to travel to Orly before the new recruits land. Even allowing for fifteen minutes for them to get through passport control, if she tries to retrieve her suitcase, she’ll be late to meet them and might lose them altogether. Her only option is to meet them first, then schlep all six of them across Paris to fetch her valise. But then they are likely to miss the last train to Cherbourg.

What a mess. Perspiration erupts on her neck. She has no choice but to abandon her suitcase until her next trip to Paris, whenever that might be. Even if all she has now are the clothes she’s wearing, her duty takes priority. She won’t compound her mistake.

In her head, she runs through every detail to ensure that she’s not overlooking anything else. Ah—she must confirm the flight’s arrival time.

A huge sign on the building across from the Montparnasse terminal blinks air france in red and blue. Weaving her way through taxis, cars, and buses, Sharon rushes over. A pleasant clerk, her hair in a beehive, informs her that flight 359 from Rome was canceled. “Our ground personnel secured seats for the passengers on other airlines,” she adds.

“Which flights?”

“Names of passengers, please?”

Sharon’s old unease grows. Had the men been given alternate plans in case of eventualities like this, as she had recommended last year? The Mossad would never have been this amateurish about an operation, even a small one like this, a peg in a much larger scheme.

She places a call to the office from a phone booth. “I need the names of all six guys to find out the flights they’re on,” she tells Danny. “Do they have my name and description? Do they know their final destination?”

“I doubt it.”

“Do they know one another?”

“Like before, they are selected from different units.”

She fumes. “I might lose one or two.”

The only positive outcome of the delay is that she can steal forty minutes, take the Métro, and fetch her valise before leaving for Orly.

At the airport, she stops by the roped-off area opposite the passport control booths. A throng of people—some whole families—wait to welcome arrivals. A dozen flights have landed. Sharon has no idea what the men look like or how she can signal to them that she is their liaison. Six men, after all the careful drills of no more than four.

A child drops his ice cream cone, and the mother wipes his hands but does not bother to pick up the pink-and-brown mess. Sharon watches to see who will step into it and, distracted, almost misses an unusual movement behind one of the booths. She looks up and sees a female agent scanning the three long lines of passengers. The woman pulls out five men in blue windbreakers.

Sharon recognizes the jackets sold for decades by Atta. This Israeli brand manufactures functional garments worn by farmers and townspeople interested in durability, not fashion. Sharon swallows hard. Her men will be interrogated. The first question will expose that they don’t know their destination. An inspection of their suitcases will reveal an Israeli navy uniform tucked in each.

Five men are being questioned. Suppressing her alarm, Sharon puts on her sunglasses and pulls a French magazine from her satchel. She pretends to read it while she searches for the sixth man. She spots him, wearing the same jacket, at the farthest booth to the left, his passport already held by an officer. From the Israeli’s unconcerned stance, it’s clear that he can’t see that his colleagues have been detained. He seems to be chatting amiably with the officer.

Sharon watches their banter and catches a snippet of what sounds like Hebrew, although she can’t make out the words.

She can’t believe her audacity and the risk she’s taking, but she glides along the rope to a spot near the booth, leans forward, and says in Hebrew, “Officer, would you please process the others over there?”

He frowns and looks over at the female agent who is holding the five men’s passports. His glance shifts back to Sharon.

“Please.” She points at her watch as if time is pressing. She smiles while her dread grows.

He rises, puts on his hard cap with its center insignia, and steps out of his booth. When he reaches the female agent, she points to something in the passports. Sharon is unsure if she should feel relieved when he takes charge. Holding the stack of passports, he walks back to his booth, the five men in tow.

Sharon seethes. Nothing illegal here, she reminds herself, but nevertheless, it’s a mess. Having revealed her connection to the men, she may be the one interrogated. What will she say?

The officer processes the passports and hands them back to the men. Then, as they file down the center aisle to the exit, he approaches Sharon at the separating rope.

He turns slightly, his back to his colleagues. “So this is your Ping-Pong team?” he asks in Hebrew with a Moroccan accent.

Ping-Pong? Catching his drift, Sharon collects herself. “They are here to win the Ping-Pong tournament. I’m grateful for your assistance.”

“A national pride.” He adds quietly, “Tell your headquarters that next time they issue passports, they should not use consecutive numbers.”

The luggage carousel rolls lazily across the hall. The coffee Sharon drank in the morning boils in her stomach. She is furious. At Danny, for sure, because he is her supervisor, but also at those above him who are scheming something big to which she isn’t privy. How high does it reach? To Yaniv and the naval top brass in Haifa. Perhaps also to the Tel Aviv IDF headquarters. And what about Moka Limon, the revered retired admiral who claims to be no more than a diplomat in Paris? He’s her contact if she is detained. What kind of a spy ring is he running—probably all over Europe—if he can’t get these very basic details straight?

Sharon’s old anger at the navy’s failure to locate the Dakar—to take responsibility for its sinking in the first place—flares up. It has no outlet. There’s no one to rail against. It is down in the trenches that mistakes are discovered, often too late. People die—suffocate in the belly of a submarine—because of human errors.

Luckily, these recruits have the sense to disperse along the length of the luggage conveyor belt. Sharon lets out all the air in her lungs to start afresh. Right now, she has a job to do; she does not have the luxury of giving in to her emotions. Still, the sheer luck of having the crisis handled by a Jewish-French national who must have lived in Israel keeps her nerves on edge. From now on, she will insist on coordinating a background story. And those Atta jackets? Most Israelis don’t own winter coats, but they are a necessity in Northern Europe’s winter. Until they receive the heavy jackets with fake-fur collars that the French navy supplies them, she should buy a cartload of used overcoats from Paris’s flea market.

Tonight, she’ll have a serious talk with Danny—about more than this fiasco.

Chapter Fifty-Four

Cherbourg, France

October 1969

Exiting the train with the six men after dark in Cherbourg, Sharon inhales the salty smell of the ocean. It is stronger than that of the Mediterranean.

She is pleasantly surprised to see Naomi waiting on the platform. “I thought you’d be back in Israel!” She hugs her friend, thinking of Naomi’s son, the lone soldier, still cut off from his family while his mother provides support to her husband on his national security job. “How is Pazit doing?”

“You can ask her yourself, since you’ll be sharing her room.”