The Assignment Read Online Free PDF Page A

cut short and the cuticle is bitten down. She is wearing no makeup and has a thin downy shadow on her upper lip, and he thinks that most young women would have this removed. There is nothing conspicuous about her. She wouldvanish into anonymity on any European or American street, and if she had been sitting a few yards farther away he would quite likely never have noticed her. Presumably she had been in the waiting room at Kastrup all the time while he had been looking for her.
    He thinks: Be careful, Manuel. They mean it.
    Then she turns her head and looks at him with her strange dark-gray eyes. She says nothing, but smiles slightly and calmly.
    He looks at the clock and turns away, leaning his forehead against the windowpane and staring into the darkness.
    He notices that she rises and goes to the washroom and when she comes back down the aisle he follows her with his eyes. She walks like an animal, softly and rhythmically, with gliding steps.
    It was ten past nine when they touched down in Zürich. During the long wait there Manuel Ortega drank coffee and brandy in the waiting room. She sat opposite him and read an American paperback.
    At one point he said: “You have an unusual name.”
    “My mother was a Croat.”
    “Not your father?”
    “No.”
    Another time he asked: “Have you a clear picture of the job we’ve got ahead of us?”
    “Only in principle.”
    “I must admit I’ve not really had time to look into the matter. I didn’t get my instructions until eight o’clock this morning.”
    “Mine came even later.”
    “As soon as possible we must get the negotiations going again from where they … were broken off.”
    “I don’t think there was time for much negotiating before Larrinaga was shot.”
    When she said this she looked straight into his eyes.
    “Your knowledge of the province will be extremely useful.”
    “I wasn’t there for very long.”
    At that point the conversation ceased.
    As the plane bounced in the air pockets over the Alps, Manuel Ortega sat with his legs crossed and wrote. He had put his notebook with its black oilcloth cover on top of his briefcase and he was trying to write down his thoughts. This was a habit he had acquired long ago; he had often found it useful.
    The woman had fallen asleep, and when he looked at her he realized how tense and nervous her face had been when she was awake. Now it was open and relaxed, and he noticed that her features were finely-drawn and pure like those of a little girl. She was breathing through her nose and her breath played in the soft hair on her upper lip.
    He wrote: Am I afraid? Yes, but not rationally. I have never concerned myself with politics in their active and more extreme forms, but on the other band I have come across many other and similar situations, for example in the commercial world, and have handled difficult negotiations between obviously incompatible parties. In these cases it has always been possible to come to some agreement in a rational way. A small group of people working on the same problem sooner or later always come around to what is possible and what is absolutely out of the question. Politics prove this: in situations in which it is a question of saving everyone’s skin, compromise solutions always appear to be quite honorable. One assumption is that the parties are represented by people who are neither mentally ill nor entirely without talent. The work that lies ahead in this unhappy province should then, on my part, be accomplished with reasonable expectations of progress. The first step must be to create a state of peace and guarantees of public safety. Then it should be possible to find practical solutions which would to some extent satisfy and benefit the backwardmasses without the occupying (and, one supposes, the more able) class suffering any real damage. There should, of course, be found within this “upper” class technically and administratively trained people who must not be pushed out, but who