The English Teacher (16 page)

R
ACHEL SAT ON THE GREEN SO
FA
that she bought with Barbara and looked around her. The checkered cushions were plumped up against the chair-backs, the coffee table was spotless, and the album of pictures by local artists was placed in the middle beside a small vase of flowers. The door to the bedroom was closed, and she wondered if he would carry her there in his arms or lead her in, or if nothing at all would happen.

“I don't want it to be like this anymore,” she said after they made love for hours in his car on the side of the road, on the hill, wherever they felt like stopping. “Nor do I,” he agreed. And now it's happening, any moment now she'll hear his car stopping on the open ground outside the house, the sound of the door closing, the sound of the beeper confirming that everything is locked, and the erratic beating of her heart. She wore a dress to make it easier for him to touch her and was barefoot to give him a sense of domesticity.

Of course she remembered the security rules. Of course she made sure her equipment was in a safe place, the music room was locked, and the books on display testified to no unusual interests. But there's no way of controlling the pulse and no way of slowing the flow of the blood.

And then she heard the sound she had been waiting for, stood up and smoothed down her dress, looked at her face in the mirror again, and saw in it anticipation and excitement and longing for his embrace. There was a knock on the door. She turned the key and saw him standing there, holding a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of wine. She wanted to hug him, she wanted to fall on his neck, but instead led him inside and signaled to him to sit in the armchair beside the table.

Her voice sounded hollow when she offered him a drink, and she was glad when he answered her with a joke. Why did you come? Why don't you take me in your arms? she wanted to ask, but she put the wine on the table that was set for supper and arranged the flowers in a colorful vase, bought on one of her trips to the south. Then she stood with her back to him and made him tea, as he requested, and asked him about ordinary things, as if she didn't know his father had a different woman in mind for him. And he talked to her about the weather (as if she cared), and about the visit of the American Secretary of State (as if she didn't know), and a planned concert featuring a well-known rock band whose arrival had been delayed pending presidential approval, because the band had played in Israel. Occupied Palestine, he called it.

She didn't quite remember how they ended up in her bed, and she knew she wouldn't be telling Ehud about this. Rachel clung to Rashid. His body was warm and hairy, and she adored it. He sighed when he came and she remembered Oren, who always laughed.

Rashid slept on his back, close to her, his hand in hers. The candle
on the dining table lit up the plates, which remained unused. She lay awake, thinking about all the things she wanted. She wanted him for herself and daydreamed about a little house and a child playing in the garden; it wasn't impossible. But there was a price to be paid for this. She wanted to love him the way an English teacher can love a favorite pupil, but she also wanted to complete her operation, to obtain information in accordance with the directives sent to her, find out from him what he was doing, look at his papers, and use him. This was possible too, but this also came at a price. Impossible to do it all—you have to choose a route and follow it, and anyone who doesn't do this and tries to be in two places and hold both ends of the stick, needs to lie. And this is what she did.

E
HUD SIGHS AS IF
HE'S CARRYING
a heavy burden. “I don't know when this happened, but from the first day she slept with him she knew she wasn't prepared to give him up, and that was the day she started lying to us too. I too wanted the best of all worlds, I wanted to think she was in control of the situation; she was exploiting him, blowing his mind. She could, of course, have told me she loved him. I would have shaken my head and told her that human frailties were nothing new to me, made her swear not to endanger herself, and then I would go straight to the Unit commander and make him pull her out. Love and secret service are like oil and water. But she said something about companionship and a casual fling, what it is to be young and frivolous, and I wanted to believe her.

“A few months passed before she was able to do anything really big. Till then she used him as a way of getting access to all kinds of places, and she sent us some interesting scraps of information. We assumed we had a new routine in place.

“When we received the photographs of the documents, we called her to Milan urgently. I asked her to tell me exactly how this happened and what she did. I explained to her there had to be serious analysis of the risks she had taken and the likelihood of exposure. I promised her this would stay between us because I wanted to hear all the details. And because I was jealous. Of course I reported that she exploited the fact he was asleep, but I didn't elaborate.

“She told me she passed a hand over his face. If he'd woken up, she'd have changed it to a caress. Rashid slept and she got up quickly. If he opened his eyes she would carry on to the bathroom. She had no time to spare, and if he caught her she would confess that she needed money. This was the first time he brought his briefcase with him when sleeping with her, and she was afraid the opportunity wouldn't be repeated. She couldn't read Arabic or Russian, so she photographed the documents quickly by the light of the bathroom. This was very dangerous, I reprimanded her, and told her stunts like this are pulled only in movies and she must not do such a thing ever again, but secretly I was elated. The reactions we had from the research department were excellent, and the data on chemical warheads was seen as vitally important. The operations officer sent me a private cable, encoded of course, congratulating me for a small victory in the endless turf war between the information-gatherers of the Mossad and Army Intelligence, and pressing me to ask her for more. And the jewel of the collection? The photograph of the German scientist was the last piece in the jigsaw that our operations department had been trying to complete for years.”

“I
T WAS SOME TIME UNTI
L
I met her again. It was only when we'd completed the preparations that we sent her a coded message saying she was needed in Florence for a briefing. ‘Busy. No one else?' was her initial response. ‘No choice,' we replied, and I almost felt the need to remind her why she was there. She came back to us with ‘Rashid, Barbara, questions,' and I had the feeling, although I had no real evidence for it, that she was answerable to him as well, and not just to us.

“I thought about the life she had set up for herself there and wondered if there was something else I didn't know. She carried out the regular tasks and toured various parts of the country in accordance with the coded instructions sent to her electronically. By now this was a relatively easy assignment for her, since she could rely on Rashid to help her get into places normally inaccessible to foreigners. I went through the file of cables, dispatches, and reports, to see if anything had changed since I last saw her, and it seemed to me she was growing impatient as well as more self-confident. Some would say this is a
familiar symptom with veteran operatives, and I suspected perhaps that her life was too good and she was slipping into a dangerous routine.

“Then there was a long and exhaustive debate in headquarters. Some said the time had come to pull her out, things get dangerous when the operative in the field starts to dictate policy to the case officers, and naturally there were some who said the opposite. They asked me what I thought. I was ambivalent: if the opinion of the hard-liners was accepted, she would be on her way home, and me too. No more comfortable life in Rome and American School for the boys. I hoped my judgment wasn't influenced by this fact, or by my other thoughts about her, but there's no way of knowing.

“I looked at them. They were depending on me. They came to the department every morning, they felt important, they read the dispatches, and held long conversations with their cronies in the intelligence branch. I was in the field. Not in the operational zone, but as close as I could get to Rachel, and I was the last barrier between her and the demands that were constantly being issued by someone sitting behind a desk in an air-conditioned office in Tel Aviv. I recognized this feeling, and the difference between us. A staffer at headquarters can issue requests, give instructions, offer advice, but he isn't the one who does it, he isn't the executor. Rachel was like a crane with a very long arm, long enough to reach all objectives, and I was the operator of this crane. Without me, nothing could happen. I felt the power in me, and I convinced myself I was making proper use of it.

“I said it was just as well I had arrived in the country in time for this discussion, and bearing in mind the fact that Strauss knew we were on to him and was unlikely to leave the Middle East, we had no option but to use her. I hated having to put it that way, like she was just an implement, but that was the truth. She was our weapons system, and that was how they saw her, all those sitting at the table.
There was no doubting this would be dangerous and complicated, and it could also be her last operation, but we were all in agreement on the need to terminate the activities of this scientist; no one objected to the idea of a former Nazi departing this world under mysterious circumstances.”

“S
HE ARRIVED IN
F
LORENCE AFTER A
few days of touring and shopping in Milan, giving her a chance to relax and also to frustrate anyone taking the trouble to follow her. I remember she opened the door to me and retreated at once to the armchair by the window. I could see she was tense, as if she had something to tell me. I didn't ask her what had happened. I hoped she would tell me herself.

“Usually she would give me a big smile, hug, and start speaking Hebrew; it was a treat for her to come out from under her rigid cover and be an operative on leave. I approached her and held out my hand, and I sensed there was something new in her handshake and her body language, as if she had not been waiting impatiently to see me before spending a few days of debriefing and briefing.

“And there was something else. I sensed something was burning inside her and she was keeping it to herself. I repeated what I had told her at the very beginning. I said I needed to know everything about her, and this was to her advantage, there could be no secrets between us, and she denied there were any. I wanted to know how she felt about Rashid, and she replied without so much as a blink that Rashid was an information source and she understood her job. But I heard the way she spoke his name, and I didn't believe her.

“I decided that instead of going through a detailed survey of her recent activities in the field and then moving on to the accounts and all the other technical details that shape the lives of those living
undercover, I would start straightaway with the mission. Perhaps this would bring her back to me and release the Rachel that I knew from the start. I spoke very slowly and cautiously before getting to the central point. I wanted to be sure she wasn't afraid, that she wouldn't tell me she was incapable of the mission. As I talked I saw her eyes narrowing and her fingers twitching. We had returned once more to the situation I was used to, the situation I wanted. I was in control, and she was an operative accepting instructions. ‘And what are you asking me to do?' she said. Something about the way she said
you
suggested it was meant to be singular rather than plural, as if all this was between the two of us, the two of us and no one else.

“I showed her the picture that she copied from Rashid's briefcase and told her about Strauss. ‘At the end of every month he goes away for a two-day break and stays in the same hotel. A German is a German and routine can kill,' I said, and showed her a number of pictures of him in the hotel lobby and in other places. Then she asked me why we didn't give the job to the man who took these pictures, and I had no choice but to admit he was scared of getting too close to him, and not everyone is capable of taking on an operation like this.

“It was evening. Outside, through the double-glazed windows, there was the roar of traffic, and the rumbling of a heavy truck shook the wall and the picture of the Madonna and Child, obligatory room decoration in every Florentine hotel. She examined the equipment I'd brought. It was obvious what she needed to do; it was less obvious how she was going to do it. How would it be possible to get so close to Strauss and also disappear after the operation without leaving any traces?

“‘I know this isn't your private operation,' she said suddenly, ‘but it sounds to me like an exercise in irrelevance. Forgotten history.'

“‘There are some who remember.'

“‘I thought they didn't do things like this anymore,' she said. ‘Even Eichmann they put on trial before they executed him. You're asking me to commit murder.'

“‘This isn't murder,' I said, ‘this is an executive action, something like the liquidation you carried out with Stefan.' But she wasn't convinced.

“‘Why don't they snatch him when he's on vacation in Europe and bring him to justice? Who knows, maybe he's not guilty, who knows? Maybe it's a case of mistaken identity.' She wrapped herself in a thin sweater that she took from her case, and it seemed to me she was defending herself against me. She sank into the armchair, leaned back, and closed her eyes. I waited. I knew she needed time.”

“I
ONCE DID THIS TOO,” SAID
Joe, “but it was immediately after the war. That was different. I wouldn't envy her. Interesting to know what she was thinking.”

“I don't know,” said Ehud. “She didn't tell me. She just kept on asking questions, and although I wasn't planning to disclose that he was supervising a biological warfare facility, designing toxic warheads for missiles that would ultimately be aimed at us, I did eventually tell her. I wanted her to be sure the operation was justified; we weren't just eliminating an old Nazi scientist. So I violated the sacred principle of need-to-know and wrecked the cover story they'd prepared in Israel. The chief security officer never forgave me for this. He said, ‘If she falls into their hands and reveals this information, the source we've been cultivating in the missile project will be blown as well.' I couldn't convince him it was necessary to tell her; fortunately, the Unit commander stood by me. He had been an operative before he moved to headquarters and he understood the needs and the
problems, not only as seen from the control desk but from the sharp end as well.

“The next day we traveled to Zurich and moved into a room rented by one of the other staffers. No one checked our papers on the train between Italy and Switzerland, and as far as the authorities knew, Rachel wasn't there. ‘You're sure this will work?' she asked our scientist, who was explaining to her how to use the materials, and I sensed that privately she was comparing him with Strauss, and thinking they weren't so different: both of them understanding toxins, both of them wanting to kill their enemies, but now she has a side to support, and that makes all the difference.

“‘Yes, but pay attention,' he said.

“‘To what?'

“‘The three substances are completely innocuous by themselves, and as long as they're in their “original” packaging it will be very hard to figure out their real purpose. Only experts could do that, and they would need to suspect something wasn't right before investigating. Only after mixing does this stuff become lethal. Don't forget the material dissolves four hours after mixing. That's to erase any traces and protect you if you discard it instead of using it, but this is also the window of time available for you to get the job done.' He waited a moment, she nodded, and he continued, ‘Don't worry, the gloves that you'll smear the poison on can be kept at home if you don't manage to dispose of them. But'—and here I saw him swallow a smile—‘don't push your luck. Don't go kissing them the morning after. Everyone reacts slightly differently.'

“Rachel took the three medicine bottles and read the labels. We went through it all with her. She knew where she bought them and how much she paid for them. She had a prescription that we prepared for her, and the labels were correct. She examined the gloves that the
technical department had stitched according to the latest style and reminded me that German men don't always kiss women's hands.

“It was her idea to travel to Berlin. I saw the instructor we brought in from Israel looking bemused. She had been hired to train her in German manners and mannerisms, and Rachel commented that if her grandparents were still alive she could have learned from them. We were in Berlin for a week and she didn't ask to see the apartment they left behind or the antique shop that had changed hands. I didn't encourage her to take time out and revisit her family's past. It could have affected her judgment at the crucial moment. It was likely that there wouldn't be another opportunity to meet Strauss without risking recognition, and she needed to be focused, precise, and confident.