“I missed it on your psychometric test,” he says, smiling.

An officer pokes his head out of the dining room. “Danny?”

Danny waves him away. “Coming.” After the man closes the door, he turns to look at Sharon again, his gaze tender. “I said we’d talk about us when this is over. Just in case, may I leave you something as a down payment?”

“What’s that?” she asks, knowing the answer as he bends toward her. His lips gently touch hers.

In the dining room, the other four captains are already seated. To Sharon’s surprise, Amiot is there, and he half rises as she enters.

“Monsieur, I thought that you’d left for the French Riviera,” she says.

“And miss this important night?”

Sharon takes a seat at an available chair at the end of the table. The man she has been suspecting as an anti-Semite, or a former anti-Semite, is in on the conspiracy to deceive his own government.

She sips the consommé, so light and airy and different from the heavy Jewish chicken soup. From his seat, Danny sends her a sad smile. She lowers her gaze so he doesn’t see her eyes brimming with tears again. If he is intercepted tonight, he might spend time in a French jail, at least until all five crews are cleared of wrongdoing. That would be preferable to having any of them founder in the storm.

The winds might subside by the time the Saars reach Portugal waters. The risk of France bombing the boats from the air will remain, not only once they’re outside Cherbourg’s harbor but along the entire length of the Mediterranean on their weeklong sail home. Considering the huge public defiance of the embargo—and given the oversize ego and temperament of the French—Sharon gives this intelligence analysis a high probability. She glances at Yaniv, Vaknin, and Limon. Are they really gambling on a war with France?

Two waiters wheel in trays of food, then disappear, closing the door behind them. Sharon crumples her cloth napkin in her lap, her nails digging into the fabric. Her stomach tightens.

For a while, quiet conversation and subdued laughter is heard around the table. The tension of the coming hours is as thick as the béchamel sauce over her lamb. Sharon pushes her plate away.

Moka Limon stands up and, with ceremonial flare, makes a toast to Félix Amiot, a dear, devoted friend of Israel. He circulates a signed check around the table. “Gentlemen—and one lady—you’ll never see such a large check in your life. Five million dollars—the balance on the ten million contracted with CMN.” When the check is returned to him, he hands it to Amiot. “From the Norwegians, with our thanks.”

Amiot chuckles. Sharon can see that his helping Israel is not about resolving the economic woes of his enterprise. Given the stigma he’s carried for twenty-five years—and the public trial that banned him forever from his beloved aviation industry—his loyalty to France will surely be questioned again. Will he be prosecuted for treason? This seventy-year-old genius has chosen the moral path.

From her seat, Sharon sends him a smile. Despite the generational gap, their time together has brought them closer. He’s fond of her, she knows. He’s a special friend and she wishes to keep him in her life, yet she will probably never see him again.

“My dear friends, I promise to visit you in Israel very soon,” he says in English and lifts his glass. When the cheers and good wishes die down, he asks Danny in French, “Young man, will you step outside with me, please?”

A puzzled expression on his face, Danny rises. Amiot crooks his finger toward Sharon. “You too.”

They ride the elevator in silence. Danny tosses Sharon a perplexed look. She shrugs. She can’t imagine why Amiot would waste Danny’s precious moments at such an important juncture.

Danny glances at his watch. “Monsieur Amiot, I’m a bit busy tonight—”

“I imagine that you are,” the Frenchman replies.

At the third floor, he exits, Sharon and Danny following as he walks down a corridor. He stops at a door and knocks.

She hears a rustle on the other side; Christmas carols play on the television.

The door is opened by a tall, thin woman with braided hair who smiles, but her eyes are vacant. She steps to the side. Behind her, facing the door, is a woman in a wheelchair whose gray hair is braided the same way. A brown blanket is thrown over her knees.

Sharon’s breath catches and she hears Danny gasp. His body freezes. His eyes lock with the woman’s for a long moment.

The woman is wearing a plaid wool jacket and listing to one side in her wheelchair. Claudette Pelletier looks fragile and older than what Sharon guesses her age to be, about fifty. Behind her, the blind woman fumbles her way to the television and turns it off. The room falls silent except for their breathing and the wind howling outside.

“Benjamin! Oh, my baby,” Claudette cries. “You’re the spitting image of my Raphaël!”

Danny takes a step forward and halts. “God in heaven,” he mumbles. Sharon can see only the side of his face but she can read the incredulity in the raised eyebrows and slack jaw. “I can’t believe it.”

The woman breaks into a sob and reaches her arms up.

He drops to his knees in front of the wheelchair. Sharon registers the instant kindness he’s showing to the woman whose existence he hadn’t known about until this afternoon and whom he’d never sought. Or perhaps he’d buried any natural curiosity.

“My baby Benjamin,” the woman cries again. She takes his face in her hands. They search each other’s features, then Danny wraps his arms around her.

Her heart beating fast with the significance of the moment, Sharon signals to Amiot to give them privacy. The two of them inch toward the door, but she glances back to see Danny drop down on the carpet. He unlaces his right shoe. Sharon stops moving. She can’t tear her eyes away from the unfolding scene.

“Thankfully, I darned my sock.” Danny chuckles as he removes it and raises up his foot for Claudette to see.

Claudette passes a gentle finger over his foot. It tickles Danny, and he withdraws a bit, but extends it again to let her touch more.

Solange approaches, reaches out, and feels his foot.

He wiggles his toes. “It tickles,” he says, laughing in an easy way as he does when joking around the office. The two women laugh with him.

Solange asks to touch his face, and her fingers trace his features, then run down his back. He rises to his knees to face Claudette. “So tall and handsome,” Solange says.

“You darned your sock?” Claudette reaches for it and checks the stitches.

“I do it for my crew too,” he says. “It relaxes me during downtime at sea.”

She laughs. “That’s my son for sure.”

Sharon can hardly contain her elation, more for Claudette than Danny. This mother had searched for her lost son, had ached for him for twenty-seven years. Sharon goes to the door and joins Amiot outside. “So extraordinarily kind of you,” she says.

He smiles the sad smile that she now recognizes, a smile that cracks through a cloud of stigma and possible regrets. “Due to the weather, I couldn’t fly them here,” he tells her. “I had a driver pick them up. Unfortunately, Claudette Pelletier’s condition forced them to stop frequently. They stayed overnight at a hotel.”

“But how did you know?”

“You’d given me the big clue. ‘The mother of someone I care about may be alive.’” He chuckles. “My lawyer sent an investigator to speak with both of the men you visited, and he knew how to search for Madame Pelletier.”

She doesn’t correct him and say that it is Mademoiselle Pelletier. “How did you figure out that she was Danny’s mother?”

“He’s the only one on your team born in France.” Amiot raises his eyebrows. “Is it true that he has a blue Star of David tattooed on the bottom of his foot?”

She giggles. “If not for that clue, I doubt we’d be here right now.”

Danny comes out. “What an emotional encounter, but my men are waiting,” he says to both of them, and dabs his eyes with a handkerchief. Then he turns to Amiot. “How can I thank you for your thoughtfulness?”

“Bring your boat safely home.”

Chapter Sixty-One