The English Teacher Read Online Free PDF Page A

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. Asimple 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.”
    â€œYou 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 shelearned 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