“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
Cherbourg, France
Late December 1969
It’s past midnight. Solange, the talkative blind woman, has fallen asleep on one of the two beds in the room. The storm outside roars. Sharon pulls an upholstered chair next to Claudette’s wheelchair, and the two of them stare out the large window into the darkness. Only the outlines of the five Saars are visible in the canal. Their engines haven’t yet blasted. Despite her trepidation, Sharon no longer wants to see the operation aborted. All will be lost. Israel won’t have its full naval fighting capacity for the next war. Its shores—the Mediterranean Sea, bordered by Egypt on one side and Lebanon and Syria on the other, and the Red Sea, flanked by Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Sudan, and Eritrea—will be unprotected.
There is no movement on the docks. A couple of streetlamps throw yellow cones of light webbed sideways by sheets of rain. Sharon knows that in a residential building on the other side of the canal, Kadmon is watching through his binoculars. Limon is in his suite somewhere in this hotel, probably twisting the radio dial in search of weather forecasts from France and England.
At Sharon’s side, Claudette fidgets and lets out a groan.
“May I help you get into bed?” Sharon asks. “You’ll be more comfortable.”
“And miss seeing my son navigating a boat for Israel?” She smiles. “Did you see his blue tattoo?”
Sharon lets out a little laugh. She loved seeing Danny open himself so graciously to the unexpected gift of meeting Claudette. She loved witnessing the tenderness mixed with play between them. She also loved how, after she walked him to the elevator, they stole one more moment together. This time they kissed long and hard. Now the memory of his lean, muscular body as she pressed into him arouses the whole of her.
“Are you his girlfriend?” Claudette asks.
“Almost. Hopefully soon.” Sharon places her hand on her heart to still it. “When all this is over.”
When the news of the Saars’ escape breaks in a few days, she’ll call Uzi Yarden and convey the regards of the woman who was once his landlady. And when Sharon is back in Israel, she will check Yad Vashem’s archives for records of Isaac Baume and Raphaël Baume—the names Claudette gave her. She’s learned that Raphaël had a sister who was deported and probably perished, but a younger brother had been sheltered in a monastery. How amazing would it be if he had survived?
At two in the morning, Sharon slaps her own cheeks to fight off sleep. She helps Claudette to the bathroom, then splashes cold water on her own face and thinks of the men in the boats below, all awake, all waiting. Returning to her seat by the window, Sharon wishes again that she believed in prayer.
While Claudette dozes off in her wheelchair, Sharon contemplates the journey she has made in Danny’s convoluted history—and in her own. It all comes down to belonging, belonging to something larger than herself. For some people, it’s belonging to a shared faith; for others, a shared ideology. For some, it is a matter of love; for others, a matter of family. But her arc of belonging—and Danny’s—comes from their national spirit, one defined not by the Holocaust but by the common destiny of connecting with the past, present, and future of the Jewish people. Belonging to Israel is central to their identity.
Just then she hears the blasts—the blessed blasts of twenty engines firing in a thunderous burst. “Hooray!” she calls out.
In her bed, Solange sits bolt upright with a loud yelp. Claudette claps enthusiastically. She pushes herself out of the wheelchair, grabs the windowsill, and stands. Solange comes over and puts her arm around her waist, propping her up. Sharon leans against the window, the cold glass pressed against her burning forehead.
Mast lights come on. Two by two, the first four boats begin to glide forward, the fifth one close behind. Claudette narrates the scene for her friend. A hundred meters out, darkness swallows the boats. In the storm, Sharon can’t even make out the light of the sentry watchtower. She holds her breath, recalling the young man to whom she handed the cognac; he was as bewildered as her fresh recruits. No doubt he had been placed on duty to free the senior staff to go home for their Christmas Eve dinner.
She hopes that the rest of Limon’s and Yaniv’s gambles prove equally prescient.
All is silent except for the breathing of the three women and the roaring wind outside. In her head, Sharon accompanies the Saars sailing against the ferocious waves through the harbor, past the French navy port, then to the ancient set of breakers, after which they are met with mountain-high waves.
At any point, they might be intercepted by the French navy. Will they be forced back to harbor by cannon fire?
Thirty minutes pass. And then, under the lamppost’s cone of illumination, Sharon spots a lone figure in a long coat, its collar turned up. Moka Limon is holding on to the post with one hand and waving goodbye with the other.
