An Imperfect Spy Read Online Free PDF

wasn’t too hard. Many schools have taken up law and literature courses, and besides,you’ll find it interesting. Different points of view. When are you going to talk to Blair about it?”
    “Any day now,” Kate said. “I’ve left a message on his machine and he’s left one on mine. Reed, not to put too fine a point on it, do you think there’s something odd in the fact that we are both going to spend our sabbaticals working at the worst law school in New York and perhaps the whole United States?”
    “It isn’t the worst law school in the United States, even if it isn’t the sort we admire. Many of the students in law schools like Schuyler are older students, returnees, men and women, mostly women, who have decided they don’t want to continue the life they’re leading and want to become lawyers. Often the students are very interested, very earnest, and very motivated. Don’t be a bloody snob, my dear.”
    When, later, they returned to their apartment, well fed and considerably more cheerful than they had been, separately or together, for quite a while, still chatting as Reed unlocked the door, they were both flabbergasted into immobility at the sight of an old woman calmly sitting in their foyer, knitting away on a long, woolly creation.
    Reed instinctively (as Kate accused him later) moved cautiously forward so that Kate was directly behind him. But Kate had recovered from the adrenaline surge which, having inspired neither fright nor flight, as was its wont, left as suddenly as it had come.
    “It’s the woman at the Theban I told you about,” Kate said.
    “How in hell did you get in here?” Reed asked, abandoning his usual civility; she had given him a bad shock.
    “Easy,” the woman said. “I like to prove that I can rob apartment buildings.”
    “Why?”
    “Why what?”
    “Why do you want to prove that?”
    “To demonstrate that I’m invisible, of course. That’s the whole point, you see. As an oldish woman, I’m invisible and can go anywhere, like someone in a fairy story.”
    “Ah,” Reed said. “So tonight you became invisible and melted through the door like ghosts in movies. You’re not a ghost, are you?”
    “Almost. This time I didn’t play on invisibility, but on conventionality. I simultaneously convinced your doorman that I was harmless, in need of rest, and your aunt.” This last was directed at Reed.
    “You aren’t old enough to be my aunt,” Reed said inconsequentially. Kate had already noted after one meeting that one tended to be inconsequential when conversing with this woman.
    “Ours was a large family of which I was the youngest, your father the oldest. I didn’t, as I explained to him, get to New York often, and perhaps you hadn’t got the message I left on your machine about my altered time of arrival. I was also feeling faint.”
    “My father?” Reed asked.
    “Well, I said my name was Amhearst, so it had to be your father. I shan’t presume upon the relationship; please don’t be concerned. I just wanted to demonstrate my thesis and my ability. I was counting, of course, on the fact that you were unlikely to have discussed your extended family with the doorman. That took a certain amount of perspicacity also; give me credit.”
    Reed pulled himself together. “Do come in,” he said. “But please, don’t do that to me again. It won’t be a trick, for one thing, now that the doorman considers you my aunt.”
    “Point taken,” the woman said.
    They moved into the living room, where Kate offered the woman a drink. She chose a single-malt scotch, in which they joined her, and settled herself into a chair.
    “I had another reason for wanting to see you,” the woman said, “apart from proving my skills. This is really excellent whisky,” she added, gently smacking her lips as she had done after her sip of Kate’s drink at the Theban. “I thought the time had come to admit to you that I wasn’t altogether honest about my position at