The English Teacher (3 page)

A
T AROUND TWELVE O'CLOCK
Y
ANIV
AND
Ehud entered the archive. Ehud glanced at his watch impatiently and scanned the shelves. Yaniv asked how they were going to get through all the material and what were they actually looking for. “How long has she been missing?” Ehud asked instead of answering. “A week at least,” Yaniv replied. “We know she left this country with her Israeli passport, and after the
shivah
there's been no trace of her. We sent someone to the apartment with the estate agent. He went from room to room and found an up-to-date tourist brochure for India. Hard to draw conclusions from this, but perhaps that's the direction. We also checked the call that you received. It was on a Belgian phone card. The phone was apparently bought at the airport, with calls prepaid. Then the people we approached”—Ehud noticed that Yaniv was holding back whatever he could—“established that she used her British passport to leave
England. We asked certain associates of ours to check out the airlines, where she went to, and with whom, and then it turned out she crossed the Channel by train, but they don't keep any record of onward destinations. We checked for transactions on her credit card and bank account. We're not sure how she got her bank to clear it, but she transferred close to a hundred thousand dollars to England, and the money was withdrawn from the Western Union office in Leicester Square. We sent our representative there, but needless to say they don't remember anything. That's what we have up to now.” Ehud suppressed a smile. She hasn't forgotten, he told himself. She still knows the job.

They lingered beside a low shelf. Gray files filled to bursting were lined up, tied together in pairs with ancient string and covered in dust. Obviously no one had touched them in years, and only firm regulations going back to the last century had deterred some efficient clerk from sending them away for incineration. At the end of the row there was an apparently new file, noticeably slimmer than the others. Yaniv pulled it out and proudly showed Ehud how they were keeping in touch with former operatives. Ehud glanced at reports of medical exams that the department asked Rachel to undergo every year, and at letters politely declining invitations to retirement parties.

Someone had numbered the files and marked in black felt-tip the years they had been opened and closed. “Here you'll find the answer,” Ehud said to Yaniv, and he pointed to the files that documented her service in the Arab country. Yaniv nodded. Despite his age and his lack of experience, he also knew these were the crucial years of her life. Fifteen years had passed since Rachel came back from there, and in the archive there were also files documenting her handling since she left, but only there, at the country of destination, were the real clues to what would later be revealed. Ehud thought of the
astonishingly small number of operatives involved in that mission, of the “perfect” people, individuals capable of spending many years in a hostile country, constructing their cover stories and living them when in action and between assignments. Who knows what happens to the solitary operative, all those days and nights in a strange and tough environment? And what he will do if one day agents of the opposition's counterintelligence approach him and offer him a deal that will save his life? Betrayal? Ehud didn't dare say the word aloud, but it had haunted him since the moment he noticed the looks exchanged between the commander and Yaniv. And if she had betrayed, he thought as he looked downward to hide his now-tearful eyes from Yaniv, then she betrayed him, Ehud, who was like a father to her, the one who loved her secretly, the one who perhaps turned his back on her.

He opened one of the files and riffled through it, and a picture fell from an open envelope. Rachel bent over and stroking the back of a pigeon in St. Mark's Square. He remembered that trip to Venice. He remembered other trips too. It seemed he remembered everything. Meetings, journeys, hired cars, wayside cafés, shops, briefings, and above all the partings, the “good night” before turning to their separate rooms, the lingering look following her tall figure as she disappeared behind her door.

“W
HAT DO YOU
THINK HAPPENED TO
her?” he asked Yaniv as they entered the modern war room and sat on the chairs marked with their names. A young clerk offered them coffee, and a technician leaned toward Ehud and offered to help him work the computer. “Don't be afraid to ask,” Yaniv said when Ehud looked nervously at all the new technology and then back at the clerk, who smiled at him. “I've heard a lot about you,” she said, and went on to explain that her mother used
to work in the Unit. She mentioned the name, which Ehud didn't remember, but this didn't mean anything. His memory these days was letting him down often, too often.

“And what do you think happened to her?” he repeated, and let Yaniv talk about Rachel, about meetings with her, about her little apartment in Rehovot, the school, and about the private lessons she used to give here and there. “Do you think it's possible that after the funeral she went off with one of the students? A fling with someone?” Ehud asked.

“I don't think so,” said Yaniv, a serious expression on his young face. “I've been monitoring her for the past five years. She's okayed every trip with us. This is something else.”

“I also think there's something more dangerous here,” said someone who had entered the war room by a side door, and Ehud wondered how long he had been standing behind them. Yaniv introduced Ehud to the chief security officer, and the two of them disliked each other at first sight. He was short, years younger than Ehud, but also the veteran head of a department who didn't like being contradicted. “Security trumps everything,” he tended to say, and he didn't want to hear any other opinion. They all knew he did his job conscientiously, and when the day came and promotion was discussed, he would be promoted ahead of the others, ahead of those who think that a coin has two sides.

“Have you been to her flat?” Ehud asked.

The chief security officer smiled scornfully and surveyed with pleasure the group of people sitting there in the room, engrossed in the assignment they had been given only this morning. What does he know, this old man? thought the chief to himself. He had a search warrant an hour after Ehud called in. “We didn't find anything. A
simple apartment, a little too orderly. One toothbrush. The place of a person who lives alone. We didn't find a safe, apparently there wasn't one. We didn't find drugs, apparently there weren't any. We found the life-signs of a normal woman who needs to work on her standards of cleanliness.” He leaned back in the chair in which he sat like the lord of the manor and patted his paunch with a self-satisfied air. He didn't like outside teams being brought in, didn't like being bypassed or forced to work with people he didn't know, people who questioned his authority, who didn't rely on him and defer to him. But he had no choice. He had never met Rachel and didn't know her file, although his job description required that he meet all operatives who had spent long periods of time in Arab countries, even those who had retired. “It's essential to know the operatives of the past,” was the emphatic statement. “There aren't so many of them.” He himself used to say there is no substitute for personal acquaintance, but he had no time. Meetings gobbled up his time. Excursions abroad kept him busy, and his second wife was demanding her rights as well.

Ehud had no intention of trying to convince the chief security officer that there was some point in an additional visit to the apartment. He didn't want to use the authority he had been granted and the black plastic card that Yaniv gave him when they left the commander's office, but now he enjoyed pulling the card from his wallet and flaunting it before the staring eyes of the security officer. “I'm licensed for everything except killing.”

“You know,” said the chief security officer before they went their separate ways, “maybe her move to Rehovot is somehow connected with the Weizmann Institute. Don't forget that after she returned Rachel was assigned to the biological weapons department, and she sometimes visited the laboratories at Weizmann. Don't forget everything she
learned from us, what a talented operative can get from the observation of routine actions. Who knows what she's still capable of doing?”

E
HUD CLIMBED INTO
J
O
E'S NEW
M
ERCEDES.
The soft leather seats invited him to relax, but he was too tense to give in to the small fripperies that Joe's wealth enabled him to offer. He waited patiently while his friend slowly set the car in motion and said, as if continuing a conversation that began many years before: “And perhaps she's just gone out of her mind. Perhaps everything was too much for her. The years that go by, the mirror that doesn't lie, and the glory left behind. I met her after she left and she told me she didn't want any more contact with the Unit. We sat in a café and I told her about my children and she didn't have anything to say. ‘Work, work, work,' was her answer when I asked her about her life, and I saw she already wanted to go. We had nothing to talk about, because our friendship and whatever else was between us was only about her operations. Sometimes I think that's the way it should be, maybe it's wrong to develop any other kinds of relationships and there's no point taking an interest in what your operative is doing after you part company. I think of the years we were together and search my memory and I can't remember what we talked about. Maybe I don't want to remember. Memory is so selective. It chooses on its own what to ignore and what to retain.”

Ehud took from his briefcase the two photographs that Yaniv supplied and studied them with Joe, who pulled up at the roadside. The Shabak, the Israeli Security Agency, required a photograph of Rachel before her visit to the Prime Minister's house sixteen years ago.

“There's no choice,” the man on the phone had told him, “we need an up-to-date photograph for identification and confirmation. We too have rules that we need to comply with.”

Ehud was adamant that he didn't want a photograph of his operative going to another organization. Even the Shabak could make mistakes. “I trust you,” he said in a final attempt at persuasion, “and I know you're incomparable when it comes to keeping your secrets.” He stressed the word your. “But even you don't know where this picture might end up.” Ehud went on without waiting for the expected promise that everything would be kept in a secure file: “Think of the people in the archive. They travel abroad too sometimes, don't they? Imagine that one of them sees her somewhere; who can promise me that he won't point her out or approach her just for a moment, to say job well done?”

“You don't trust us?” He heard the rising resentment. But she was his responsibility and he had no intention of backing down, and the secure line enabled him to say what he wanted: “She's working undercover. She has a foreign passport.”

“Without a picture there's no entry,” said the voice, and the line went dead. Ehud knew he was being overprotective. The Shabak had rules of its own, and the head of the Mossad wouldn't want to become embroiled in another petty dispute with his colleague.

Rachel, sixteen years younger, looks at the camera. Her eyes were brown from the contact lenses she wears when she has to get her picture taken, and the wig flatters her face, lending it an enigmatic beauty.

Ehud started to tell Joe about her meeting with the Prime Minister, but Joe cut him off, said there would be time for that, and asked to see the other picture. The chief security officer brought it from her apartment, and Ehud wondered why she had kept it, and whether her operational skills were forgotten. Rachel stares with narrowed eyes in a mug shot inserted into a ski pass. A tag attached to the plastic card gave the name of the resort, and Ehud realized that he didn't know
she had learned to ski. In training they taught her how to avoid the camera and how to leave behind her as few pictures as possible, and yet here, many years later, apparently this no longer mattered to her. Or apparently so she thought, and she was wrong. This picture would help them to track her down, would be useful to the search and surveillance teams in the field.