JК
The English Assassin :: Silva Daniel
Страница: 25 из 209By now word had probably reached TelAviv. The prime minister would be livid. He had enough problems: the West Bank in flames, the peace process in tatters, his brittle coalition crumbling. The last thing he needed was a kidon, even a former kidon, behind bars in Switzerland -yet another Office scandal waiting to explode across the front pages of the world’s newspapers.
And so the lights were certainly burning with urgency tonight in the anonymous office block on Tel Aviv’s King Saul Boulevard. And Shamron? Had the call gone out to his lakeside fortress in Tiberias? Was he in or out these days? It was always hard to tell with Shamron. He’d been dug out of his precarious retirement three or four times, called back to deal with this crisis or that, tapped to serve on some dubious advisory panel or to sit in wizened judgment on a supposedly independent fact-finding committee. Not long ago he’d been appointed interim chief of the service, the position he’d held the first time he was sent into the Judean wilderness of retirement. Gabriel wondered whether that term had ended. With Shamron the word interim could mean a hundred days or a hundred years. He was Polish by birth but had a Bedouin’s elastic sense of time. Gabriel was Shamron’s kidon. Shamron would handle it, retired or not.
The old man… He’d always been “the old man,” even during his brief fling with middle age. Where’s the old man? Anyone seen the old man? Run for the hills! The old man is coming this way! Now he was an old man, but in Gabriel’s mind’s eye he always appeared as the menacing little figure who’d come to see him one afternoon in September 1972 between classes at Betsal’el. An iron bar of a man. You could almost hear him clanking as he walked. He had known everything about Gabriel. That he had been raised on an agricultural kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley and that he had a passionate hatred of farming. That he was something of a lone wolf, even though he was already married at the time to a fellow art student named Leah Savir. That his mother had found the strength to survive Auschwitz but was no match for the cancer that ravaged her body; that his father had survived Auschwitz too but was no match for the Egyptian artillery shell that blew him to bits in the Sinai. Shamron knew from Gabriel’s military service that he was nearly as good with a gun as he was with a paintbrush.
“You watch the news?”
“I paint.”
“You know about Munich? You know what happened to our boys there?”
“Yeah, I heard.
And so the lights were certainly burning with urgency tonight in the anonymous office block on Tel Aviv’s King Saul Boulevard. And Shamron? Had the call gone out to his lakeside fortress in Tiberias? Was he in or out these days? It was always hard to tell with Shamron. He’d been dug out of his precarious retirement three or four times, called back to deal with this crisis or that, tapped to serve on some dubious advisory panel or to sit in wizened judgment on a supposedly independent fact-finding committee. Not long ago he’d been appointed interim chief of the service, the position he’d held the first time he was sent into the Judean wilderness of retirement. Gabriel wondered whether that term had ended. With Shamron the word interim could mean a hundred days or a hundred years. He was Polish by birth but had a Bedouin’s elastic sense of time. Gabriel was Shamron’s kidon. Shamron would handle it, retired or not.
The old man… He’d always been “the old man,” even during his brief fling with middle age. Where’s the old man? Anyone seen the old man? Run for the hills! The old man is coming this way! Now he was an old man, but in Gabriel’s mind’s eye he always appeared as the menacing little figure who’d come to see him one afternoon in September 1972 between classes at Betsal’el. An iron bar of a man. You could almost hear him clanking as he walked. He had known everything about Gabriel. That he had been raised on an agricultural kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley and that he had a passionate hatred of farming. That he was something of a lone wolf, even though he was already married at the time to a fellow art student named Leah Savir. That his mother had found the strength to survive Auschwitz but was no match for the cancer that ravaged her body; that his father had survived Auschwitz too but was no match for the Egyptian artillery shell that blew him to bits in the Sinai. Shamron knew from Gabriel’s military service that he was nearly as good with a gun as he was with a paintbrush.
“You watch the news?”
“I paint.”
“You know about Munich? You know what happened to our boys there?”
“Yeah, I heard.