“And then I know she’s thinking again about the exercises in Berlin, and the letter the Unit commander showed her, proving it was necessary, there was no choice, she was doing the right thing—killing an old man on his vacation. Beyond the window overlooking the street, she can see the ornate entrance doors of the hotel, the concierge standing outside in the cold wind. And she wonders, Will he remember me when they investigate the man’s death? And she knows she still has the option of retreat. There’s no one else around, and if she says she saw a police patrol, or Strauss arrive with an escort, or she simply took fright, we’ll believe her because we have no alternative.
“The rest she summed up in a brief cable, sent after she returned to her apartment. ‘I went into the hotel,’ she wrote, ‘I drank coffee, paid, waited for one hour. I got up. I knew he could arrive at any moment. I put my gloves on, ready to leave. He came in. I bumped into him and dropped my paper. He picked it up for me and apologized. He introduced himself, I mumbled my name, not a name he was likely to remember. He said he was glad to have been of service and kissed my hand and shook it with his own gloved hand. Everything exactly as planned, just like the last exercise.’
“I kept for her the modest obituary notice that appeared in the city of his birth. I didn’t show her a transcript of the secret report we intercepted, an assessment of the damage caused by the untimely death of their eminent scientist. Nor did I tell her it was suspected he had been poisoned but that postmortem tests had revealed nothing. I couldn’t resist sending her the message: ‘How are you feeling?’ And she replied, ‘I have done the deed,’ and I imagined a smile of quiet satisfaction. It’s happening to her. She’s playing with the grown-ups now, making a difference to the world, a difference achieved through a sudden death. ‘Did he suffer?’ she wrote to me a few days later. I said no, and I knew I was lying. But for the right reason, lying is permissible. Permissible to help Rachel bear the heavy burden of a human life taken.”
Ehud looked at his friend and asked, “Have you ever killed anyone who wasn’t a direct threat to you, who came into a hotel and wanted to help you, who smiled at you affably, who could have been your own father, whose English was ponderous and formal, who kissed your hand? In exercises it was always this part. A typical mannerism of polite Germans. When they kiss hands they lower their heads, but still manage to look directly into your eyes. That’s how she saw him when they parted company.
“I collected the letters of congratulation and put them into her file, also the small feature that was run by Haaretz after the Reuters agency noticed the modest funeral in Germany. The correspondent was floundering in the dark and he could only report that back in the sixties Israel had targeted German scientists working in Egypt and mention other notorious poisonings. The subject was closed, and only from surveillance data and random reports from local agents could we gauge the scale of the success, also the delays and the cancellations, the desperate search for a replacement.
“And I? I enjoyed the praise on her behalf. She went back to the capital city the same day, and the day after she was in school again as usual. Another two months were to pass before her next furlough, and when we met there was already another assignment on the agenda. And in the meantime we had a successful operation, and when the Prime Minister wanted to meet who had carried it out, and it was explained to him that bringing her in on such short notice was not feasible, the chief of the Mossad asked me and the Unit commander to accompany him to the meeting and represent her.”
“‘HOW DID SHE DO IT?’ THE Prime Minister asked, and the Unit commander was generous to me and didn’t demand the right to speak for himself. I took out a map and showed the route of travel and the border she needed to cross. ‘Driving was preferable to an international flight, and it also meant she could come and go at times of her own choosing,’ I said, and he nodded; it seemed he understood the intricacies and the mechanics of arriving at the objective and departure from it. Then I explained the location of the hotel where the target was in residence, and also pointed out the small hotel where our operative was based, watching Strauss go through his daily routine, with the regularity that only an elderly German is capable of. I explained to him how the poison worked and showed him the formulas the scientists had provided. ‘Even if they found the poison in a postmortem examination, the likelihood of working out when it was administered would be extremely remote, and there would be nothing to link her to it.’ I was very sure of myself, and the Unit commander and the Mossad chief were backing me up. I haven’t told you yet what happened much later, and we’ll come to that too. As always, in retrospect everything seems clear now, but we were all in postoperative euphoria.
“I was prepared to go on and explain how we trained her for the operation and the precise synchronization that was needed, so she could identify Strauss in the hotel lobby and go out to meet him precisely on time, without observers to tell her when he arrived, without backup and a getaway vehicle in case either he or the bodyguard assigned to him should realize that the elegant young woman did not collide with him by chance, that she was carrying out a death sentence approved by the Prime Minister himself six months ago. I also wanted to tell him about the misgivings Rachel had before the operation, and the authorization we needed to get from his office, but the Mossad chief gave me a look and the Unit commander put a hand on my arm, and I realized as well that the Prime Minister wasn’t interested and in fact he wanted to say something himself.
“He leaned back in his unpretentious armchair. His expression, which always appeared angry and harassed on TV, was calm and engaged and you could tell he was in a congenial mood. In his youth he too served in a special unit, and concepts like teamwork and strategic planning and other military codes were well known to him. On the way to Jerusalem the Unit commander told me the Prime Minister loved hobnobbing with men of action in small gatherings such as this, and he always took the stage himself as a way of indulging in his past.
“He spoke, and we all listened. My bosses listened out of politeness, having heard all these stories before, and I was fascinated. I don’t remember all of it, and that isn’t important, and I’ll tell you only what leapt out at me straightaway, it was all so different from what she was going through out there. The Prime Minister talked of his days in the army and described in particular the return from operations, the last few paces before crossing the fence and his commander standing there and shaking hands with every soldier individually, and then to the canteen, which was open whatever the hour, where a feast had been prepared.
“I was sure he meant to go on and on, but there was a knock at the door and the Military Secretary looked in and gestured to the Prime Minister, pointing to the clock, to tell him time was pressing and there were other things to be done besides telling heroic tales. The Prime Minister nodded impatiently and signaled to the chagrined secretary to go away and close the door behind him. I had insisted the man be kept out of the room.
“‘HE KNOWS RACHEL. SHE GAVE HIS son private lessons before we recruited her,’ I told the Unit commander on our way to Jerusalem.
“‘So what? You don’t trust him?’
“‘I don’t know. And I don’t want to put him to the test. He doesn’t need to know that the teacher who came to his house is living in a place he’s only seen in newsreels.’”
“‘You’re exaggerating,’ the commander said, but he knew I was right. In the Prime Minister’s inner sanctum there are no secrets, but the Military Secretary does his job and moves on elsewhere when the next PM is voted into office. Better he doesn’t know.”
“‘AND FAIRY?’ THE PRIME MINISTER ASKED. ‘Is she there now? Going on living there after poisoning that lowlife? Unbelievable. It takes a lot of character to do something like that and carry on as if nothing has happened. I want to meet her when she comes to Israel and, in the meantime, find some way of passing on my appreciation to her.’ I felt he meant more than this. He admired her becau
se she did something that he himself, and the former officers who made up his personal staff, would be incapable of doing.
“He apparently pressed a hidden button, and a fan on the ceiling began to circulate the air in the room. Cigars were handed out and the Prime Minister made a point of telling us these had been bought at his personal expense. I knew this was the ritual that followed a successful operation, but I had never been a participant before. The four of us sat around a low coffee table that I remembered from television news stories. Just imagine it, there I was, Ehud, who grew up in some hole in Morocco, sent from there straight to the transit camp, worked for the Mossad all my life, and now I’m sitting beside the Prime Minister and he’s offering me a cigar. Of course, I refused.
“‘How does she feel? What does she do with the knowledge that every moment she has to be in control? That the danger never diminishes? That operations will never be behind her?’ The Prime Minister shot the questions out in sync with the perfect smoke rings he was blowing toward the fan, and it wasn’t clear if he was waiting for an answer. ‘Ask Ehud,’ said the Unit commander. ‘He’s her handler, he knows her better than anyone else.’
“‘Isolation,’ I said, ‘that’s what you feel, and the need to trust, to know that what you’re doing is important. That someone is thinking about you all the time. That although you’re far away, you’re not forgotten. Like an artist in a garret—you sit and work and sleep and eat and move, all by yourself, and just occasionally you meet one of your friends, someone who gives you the chance to speak your language, who gives you the chance to reveal your true identity, your real problems and real joys. And then you want everything from him, as from a lover or a parent. You want him to listen to you, make sympathetic noises in the right places, show empathy and solidarity. And you pay attention to every nuance, every hint of impatience, and you forget, as a child forgets, that your handler has problems too, that he has a family and a timetable and a function that he needs to fulfill. You don’t care about any of this and you feel deprived if he doesn’t satisfy all your needs.’
“I could have gone further and expanded on this theme, but the Mossad chief glanced at his watch and the Prime Minister, who was listening to me with rapt attention, noticed this and said that regretfully he must ask us to excuse him, since party business was calling him. We left the building, and I knew that what I really wanted to tell him was how she obtained the first picture of Strauss. Believe me, it would take nerves of steel to do what she did to Rashid, while loving him with all her heart.”
CHAPTER NINE
The Capital City
EHUD FELT GREAT WHEN THEY LEFT the Prime Minister’s house. The operation had succeeded, and he hadn’t been shunted aside when others were congratulated. He had no second thoughts about Strauss. The man was helping to develop the enemy’s war machine and he knew the risks. About Rachel too he had no doubts. This was what she was recruited for. She did her job like a true professional, and she would receive her certificate of merit at a drink-fueled celebration in her honor the next time she came back on vacation. Meanwhile, there’s more work to be done, no time to wonder what’s happening between her and Rashid, who was the source of the picture and the key to the start of the operation. Ehud thought of Rashid as an instrument, and privately he admitted this made it easier for him to accept their relationship. She doesn’t love him, he told himself again and again, and in his reports to Unit Headquarters he made a point of stressing that Rachel was exploiting Rashid, and was apparently sleeping with him for the same purpose. Nothing more than that.
And if Ehud wanted to know more about what was going on between them, he wouldn’t get far, because Rachel didn’t inform him about what she was thinking on the way back and what she was preoccupied with instead of focusing on the operation that wasn’t yet over. She did report that the journey had gone smoothly, but she said nothing at all about what she had gone through on that journey. “There were no hitches,” she reported tersely.
And indeed there were not. She was supposed to drive carefully and cautiously toward the border crossing. If she succeeds in crossing it without checks, as on the way to the operation, it’s likely no one will know she was there. True, she was registered at the hotel, but the ops officer said that to the best of his knowledge, hotels don’t submit lists of their guests to the security services on a regular basis, and anyway, cross-checking would be very difficult. In the school she didn’t tell them about the trip, and even Barbara didn’t know. But Rashid knew. She had to tell him, her friend, her lover.
So instead of looking in the mirror to see if anyone was following her, and instead of opening a button of her blouse as she approached the barrier—usually a useful ploy—she was thinking about him. She thought about their conversation before the journey, and the disappointment she heard in his voice when she told him she was going alone, she needed time to herself to review what was going on between them, everything was so stifling and so new and so intense, she needed a short break away from it all.
“Take your time,” he said. It was obvious he was hurt, but there was something else. The expression in English made it sound as if she really were the mistress of her time and as though she didn’t have to turn up for a final observation of Strauss’s hotel a few hours from now.
She felt her stomach tightening and the tears threatening to break out. Why did I choose this terrible cover story? She resisted the urge to hug him. Why didn’t I invent something else? And then the thought occurred to her that perhaps this was right after all. Perhaps she really was feeling that everything was becoming too loaded and too confusing, and sacrosanct rules were being broken, and the reason for the journey loomed up before her like an iceberg—threatening to sink everything around it. It’s thanks to you I’m going, Rashid, she wanted to tell him. You made it possible for me to copy the documents and the picture of Strauss. You were careless and you trusted me and you don’t know who I really am. And I’m exploiting you and I’m going to kill the man you were embracing at the factory gate.
Rashid opposed the unexpected journey, also her intention to drive to a strange city in the middle of winter and find herself a hotel at the last moment, because she didn’t tell him the hotel was booked and she even knew the number of the room, overlooking Strauss’s hotel. He wanted to contact his friends and ask them to look after her. It took all her powers of persuasion, and a tsunami of kisses, to reassure him and make him tell her that he loves her, in the accent of a Levantine Lothario out of central casting. In fact his English had improved a great deal and they both loved to remind each other that when it came to learning a language, there was no substitute for time shared in bed. She liked to hear his deep voice, the mistakes he was unable to get rid of, and the heavy accent, which always made her feel he belonged only to her.
I really love him, she told herself. It’s true that I need to lie to him, true that I’m using him, but I love him, and that is no lie. I want him, and I won’t do anything to harm him. Her fingers played with his curly hair. He mumbled something she didn’t understand, and she knew she must not fool herself or be led astray by dreams. She’s risking her heart’s greatest love for the sake of the mission she’s been sent on. She cried, and Rashid woke up when she reached out for the tissues on the shelf beside her. Still drowsy, he licked her tears and told her everything would be all right, he loves her and he’ll wait for her.
I need to talk to him, she told herself on the winding road from the border crossing to the city. Her mind was made up, she’s going to spend a whole night with him. He won’t be going back to his parents’ house, as he always does, and she’ll get up with him in the morning, hair mussed and the smell of sleep in her mouth, and she’ll kiss him before brushing her teeth. She’ll curl up with him and indulge with him in delights, a picture of their future life together, before she even thinks about the next step.
So instead of checking out the army camps alongside the road and making s
ure she wasn’t being followed, she was busy making plans for their night’s reunion, and she tried, in vain, to convince herself that even a woman who doesn’t have to hide the fact that she’s a spy has to tread carefully where love is concerned.
SHE REACHED HER APARTMENT EARLY THAT evening and called his office before even taking off her shoes. The driver answered her and said Rashid was busy. She didn’t like the driver and the driver didn’t like her from the beginning, and she guessed he disapproved that the young Muslim who employed him was spending time with a Christian infidel. Sometimes it occurred to her he might be informing on her to the security services, but there was nothing she could do about this and she remembered the ops officer saying, “Half the population are informers and the other half are intelligence targets who have to be watched.”
She asked the driver to tell Rashid she was home, and after checking that no one had tampered with her cache of communications gear, she went out to retrieve her pets. The little old lady in the impoverished neighborhood opened the door, and with difficulty restrained Gracie from leaping on Rachel and licking her joyfully. “It’s hard for me to part from them,” said the woman, a Christian like Rachel and every inch an Arab. And Rachel was thinking, What would you say if you knew that for me they were just tools, backing up my cover story? and yet she wouldn’t deny she was touched by the emotional reception. She put a small envelope on the table and said it was a present from her, as if the widow who barely survived on her pension was doing her a favor and not getting money in return for her service. Mango the cat was put in the traveling cage, Gracie leapt into the backseat, the old woman waved goodbye to her, and Rachel drove back to her apartment with her operational accessories.
The English Teacher Page 15