Little Grey Mice Read online

  There were several answers. Elke chose what she considered the easiest. ‘I want you to take them back and do them all again. Correctly. Tonight.’

  ‘That would involve my working overtime,’ said Gerda, at once. Invoking the enshrined work rule, she added: ‘Overtime has to be by mutual agreement: I can’t work tonight.’

  Elke’s anger flooded back, but she refused to allow Gerda the satisfaction of realizing it. Instead, with attempted reasonableness, she said: ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘Doing what?’

  Elke sighed, fearing the dispute was slipping away from her by the sheer nonsense of it. Stiffly formal, she said: ‘I consider this work grossly incompetent. I shall record that assessment upon your personnel file. You will receive a copy of that assessment, which is your right: so will your trade union representative, which regulations require.’

  Striving to retrieve the earlier insolence, Gerda said: ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘Quite a lot,’ said Elke, considering herself completely in charge now. ‘I want every rejected piece of work properly completed upon my desk by noon tomorrow. If it is not – or if there is the slightest mistake in anything – that further incompetence will be added to your file. And that complaint also forwarded to your union representative …’ With a sudden determination to get some concession from Gerda, she said: ‘Do you completely understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gerda, tight lips barely moving.

  She had won, decided Elke, knowing a relief greater than the victory justified. And she could go on, dominating the secretary further. She didn’t. Indicating what lay between them, Elke said: ‘I will lodge it all in my safe overnight, for security. They will be on your desk, waiting, in the morning.’

  There was no drop in Elke’s anger as she entered Werle’s office for the final encounter of the day. By inference, as the person in ultimate charge of the Cabinet Office Secretariat, some of the incompetence reflected upon her. And never being professionally incompetent was so very necessary to support what little other, outside confidence she had. ‘I am afraid there is a problem,’ Elke announced at once.

  She had to list the replies that could not be dispatched that night, according to their regular practice, because he clearly had to know each individual one. When Elke finished he said without needing to be told: ‘Frau Pohl was the stenographer.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Elke. Security would automatically inform him of the Saturday episode, Elke knew. She said: ‘There was a weekend difficulty, as well. She quite properly returned a classified file to the office safe, but failed to log it. The classification was minimal, but she should have registered it, according to regulations.’

  ‘Have there been any other occasions?’

  ‘Some clerical errors,’ admitted Elke. Why should she have any reluctance to criticize someone who had been as obstructive as Gerda Pohl?

  ‘What have you done about it?’ There was nothing relaxed between them now: Werle was extremely serious, stern-faced and demanding. Elke recounted the interview with Gerda. without mentioning the other woman’s permanent resentment, and Werle said: ‘She can be moved if she is causing disruptive difficulties, without your having to consider union objections. Dismissed entirely, if necessary.’

  Elke was shocked at the unexpected ruthlessness. From the personnel file from which she’d learned Gerda’s age Elke knew the woman to be a widow, with only a small pension from the Federal railways which had employed her husband. Even a move from this department could affect her seniority and salary scale. Urgently Elke said: ‘Please don’t arrange a transfer. Or consider dismissal. I’m sure it won’t happen again.’

  ‘I won’t allow it to happen again,’ insisted Werle. ‘I won’t ever have this a department in which mistakes occur.’

  When Elke entered the Kaufmannstrasse apartment Poppi made a slightly wavering approach of welcome, his tail barely moving. There had been no further sickness. Normally it would have been sufficient to elevate the day into a pleasant, relieved ending, but this night Elke felt unusually depressed. The argument with Gerda had left her dejected. And Werle’s abrupt and totally surprising hardness towards the woman had distressed her. Elke didn’t know how to deal with the unexpected. Her narrow life had a pattern and a pathway and she didn’t like it being disarranged, minuscule though that disarrangement might have appeared to anyone else.

  It was another day she did not want to record in her diary. She left it blank, as she had the day before.

  ‘There’s only one further matter to discuss, before you begin,’ announced the Russian psychologist. His name was Yuri Panin, although of course he had never been identified, always remaining anonymous throughout the months he had acted as the chief psychologist at the most unusual of all KGB academies. ‘What about your wife?’

  ‘We were given permission to discuss it.’

  ‘What was her feeling about the entire operation?’

  ‘A professional one.’

  ‘No reservations whatsoever?’

  ‘She regards it as an assignment, nothing else. Nothing personal.’

  ‘Do you believe that’s an attitude she’ll be able to sustain?’

  ‘Of course. She is a very controlled, objective woman.’

  Panin frowned. ‘How would you describe your personal relationship?’

  ‘Very good,’ the man insisted.

  ‘There are no children?’

  ‘My wife is a very dedicated woman. For several years now everything has been subjugated to her career as an intelligence officer.’

  ‘In West Berlin she was officially your superior, the cell leader,’ reminded Panin. ‘Did your having to be subservient create any difficulty between you?’

  ‘I never regarded it as subservience. What degree of authority there was only applied to our professional activities.’

  ‘What about your feelings at what you are going to have to do? Do you have any doubts or reservations?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘You don’t fear your marriage could be endangered?’

  ‘Most certainly not!’

  ‘Good,’ nodded the psychologist, approvingly. ‘There is to be a recognition for the dedication you have shown. Your wife is being flown here to join you for a brief holiday.’

  ‘I am very grateful,’ said the man.

  His name was Otto Höhn, although he had already completely adopted the legend name of Otto Reimann, under which he was to work. His intended mission was to make the lonely, abandoned, locked-inside-herself Elke Meyer fall so hopelessly in love with him that she would tell him every secret with which she came into contact.

  Chapter Four

  Otto Reimann was not a blatantly sexual man, as a gigolo is blatantly sexual, because to have been so obvious in either appearance or demeanour would have been dangerously wrong. He had, in any case, been chosen because of a remarkable resemblance to another man, so his selection was in some ways imposed upon the KGB. His hair, predominantly deep brown, was greying slightly at the sides, which conveyed the impression of maturity but not age, because his face was unlined and his skin very clear, a clear indication of health heightened by the physical exercise that was a part of the curriculum of the training academy at Balashikha, on the outskirts of Moscow. His eyes were brown, too, and he had been taught how to use them since his arrival. He was naturally broad-shouldered and slim-waisted, but the physique had improved from the same exercise that had given his skin its tone: the stomach had tightened and there was no longer the slight excess that had shown over his waistband in the beginning. He had undergone extensive dental treatment, to fill two cavities and whitely to scale all plaque, but the slightly protruding eye-tooth on the left had not been corrected nor the remainder capped into perfect evenness, because few men apart from matinee idols have exquisitely even teeth. His hands, which he had disregarded with the casualness of most men, were smooth now, softened by the prescribed creams he had been ordered to administer nightly, and the nails were fa
ultlessly manicured, not irregularly clipped as before. After so much instruction he no longer automatically thrust those hands into his pocket in the stance of the majority of men who stood waiting, as he was waiting now, as if they were embarrassing attachments at the end of either arm, which his psychological lecturers had defined as inherent nervousness. Instead he stood with them by his sides, calmly relaxed and supremely confident.

  The confidence, measurably short of either conceit or arrogance, would probably have been the most noticeable difference to anyone who had known him before, but Otto Reimann was never again going to encounter any of the few people who had known him before, apart from his wife for whose flight from East Berlin he was waiting at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport. So good had been his tuition, however, that Reimann was not obviously conscious of the changed attitude: for him to have had such awareness would have made it all a pose and therefore recognizable to others. Nothing that marked him out could ever be recognizable to others. From the moment of his graduation, a man reborn like a Frankenstein experiment that this time had brilliantly succeeded, not created a physical monster, Otto Reimann had always to be perfect, never making the slightest error.

  Jutta was one of the first through the arrival gate looking around her not with the anxiousness of a stranger in an unfamiliar airport but with the imperious command of an assured woman in complete control of herself. Reimann did not move to meet her and at first she failed to see him. She wore a belted raincoat he had not seen before and guessed she had bought for the visit. She carried only one small weekend case. Her pale brown hair was as she always wore it, combed severely back from her forehead and collected into a tight bun. The lipstick and eye colouring were light and perfectly applied. He decided she was quite different from any of the professional women with whom he had trained. But then, he supposed, she should have looked different: Jutta practised another profession altogether.

  The smile when she finally located him was brief, quickly followed by a frown. When she reached him she didn’t offer a kiss but waited for him to move. There was hardly any contact between them when he did.

  ‘You were standing, watching me,’ she said, accusingly.

  ‘I wanted to see you first,’ Reimann admitted.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To decide if you’d changed.’

  Jutta frowned again. ‘How could I have changed?’

  ‘It was stupid of me.’ It had been a very intentional experiment, providing him with an answer. Jutta certainly hadn’t changed. She wore autocratic authority like an article of clothing.

  She was already looking around the terminal, as though eager to be moving. Confirming the impression, she said: ‘Shall we go?’

  ‘There’s a car waiting.’

  Jutta’s controlled demeanour weakened slightly at the chauffeurdriven Zil and then further when he led her into the apartment which spanned almost an entire floor of a high-ceilinged, pre-revolutionary mansion in Neglinnava Ulitza. Those high ceilings were corniced and moulded and most appeared still to retain the original gilding. The furnishings accorded with the apartment and the period. The drapes for the full-length balconied windows were heavy velvet and the carpets, although faded, were clearly antique and probably Persian. The table in the separate dining-room had scats for twelve, although leaves had been removed for their visit, to make it smaller. It was satinwood, as was the serving sideboard already set with silver salvers and silver serving cutlery. The two settees and an array of easy chairs in the main lounge were brocaded and heavily padded and there was actually a canopy, complete with more quilted brocade, over the bed. To one side, arranged into a vast window alcove in the bedroom, was a claw-legged breakfast table, bordered by four chairs, and a chaise-longue nearer a dressing table display of cream jars and lotion and perfume bottles. The modern, contrasting bathroom led off. Everything – the bath, the double wash-basins, the alcove-recessed toilet and bidet – was in black-speckled white marble: reflected by an assortment of mirrors, chrome glittered everywhere.

  ‘You live here!’ exclaimed Jutta.

  Reimann laughed, enjoying the rare experience of Jutta being impressed with anything. ‘We’re allowed it while you’re here. I normally live at the school.’

  ‘It’s …’ Jutta straggled to a halt. ‘… amazing.’ Jutta visibly jumped at the appearance of a fat, sag-breasted woman.

  ‘You don’t have to bother about cooking,’ assured Reimann, who had been given a tour and had the apartment facilities explained to him by the chauffeur before being driven to Vnukovo.

  ‘I didn’t intend to.’ On their previous assignment in West Berlin, they’d eaten out most days. When they’d stayed in, Reimann had done most of the cooking. And become good at it.

  ‘We’ll eat early,’ decided Jutta, ahead of Reimann, to whom the housekeeper had put the question about what time they wanted dinner.

  Reimann served white wine with the fish, fresh salmon, and changed to a mellow Georgian red for the strogan off, opening a second bottle by the middle of the course. Throughout, his attention was entirely upon Jutta, encouraging when she spoke, deferring to any interjection she made. When Reimann held the conversation almost everything he said was light, amusing: he actually made jokes about the Balashikha women, insisting upon his initial apprehensions and exaggerating his embarrassments. Jutta listened attentively, although occasionally her eyes strayed around the opulent apartment.

  Jutta went into the bedroom ahead of him, which Reimann allowed her to do under the pretence of his dismissing the housekeeper. Jutta was already in bed when he entered. She kissed him properly for the first time when he got in beside her, but again waited for him to come to her, not initiating it herself.

  Reimann didn’t hurry.

  He played his lips over her neck and shoulders, momentarily mouthing her nipples before kneeling over her but not close enough for their nakedness to touch, diving and darting with his mouth, to her gorged nipples and belly dimple and at last into the anxious thatch. He entered her as he’d always done, from above, and she locked her legs familiarly around his waist. Reimann remained utterly controlled, feigning the reaction to her quick urgency, and only partially climaxed with her. Almost immediately she squirmed under his weight and when he rolled off she leaned at once to the bedside table for tissues. She dried between her legs and handed him tissues to dry himself.

  ‘That was good,’ she said, edging away.

  Reimann thought she sounded like a schoolteacher praising a homework project. Jutta really hadn’t changed. Why had he expected – or hoped – she might have done?

  ‘How many others have there been?’ she demanded, suddenly. It was an objective question, with no sexual interest. Or jealousy.

  ‘Six,’ he answered at once. All better, he thought.

  ‘Singly? Or sometimes more than one?’

  ‘Sometimes more than one.’

  ‘Why an orgy?’

  ‘To see if I could sustain it.’

  ‘Could you?’

  ‘Not at first.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s it like?’ She was still objective.

  ‘Mechanical.’

  ‘Do you enjoy it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you come?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So you enjoyed it!’

  ‘A man has an orgasm with a prostitute: he forgets what she looks like by the time he walks out into the street. The entire act is meaningless.’ He was almost surprised she was bothering with the questions.

  ‘Is that what they all were, prostitutes?’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘You could have caught something! Given it to me!’

  ‘They’re special girls, retained exclusively by the KGB: subject all the time to medical tests and examination.’

  ‘What’s special about them?’

  Reimann sighed. ‘Aren’t you bored with this conversation?’ He was. Sex had never been important to her, in
their marriage.

  ‘I want to know!’

  ‘They’re special in what they do: particular tastes.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Some like pain: to hurt. Others need a woman, as well as a man. Some do nothing, not at first: they like to watch others.’

  Jutta was silent for several moments. ‘Why so much?’

  ‘I have to know everything. Never be surprised.’

  ‘Why! You’re not going to seduce prostitutes! Perverts!’

  ‘I don’t know who I’m going to have to seduce.’

  ‘What I …’

  ‘Stop!’ said Reimann, loudly. ‘You want to talk sex, I’ll talk sex: I’ve been taught how to do that, too. But I don’t want to.’

  Her indifference was immediate. ‘Tomorrow we’ll sightsee.’

  Which was what they did. They went to Red Square, although not to Lenin’s tomb because the queue was too long. They toured the cathedrals and the Kremlin museum, Jutta lecturing with a guidebook in hand. Because the weather was so perfect Reimann took her on a half-day cruise on the Moskva River. And every night they made love, always in the same position, always with the tissues waiting. Twice Reimann didn’t climax at all. Jutta never realized.

  In the intelligence parlance of the KGB, men trained as professional seducers of women, versed in every type and aspect of sexual expertise, are officially called ravens. Women are also trained, to that same degree of expertise, to entrap men. They are known as swallows. Thus a room or an apartment in which a swallow seduces her prey is called a swallow’s nest. The sometimes suggested term honey-trap is not a professional description. Sexual blackmail is, of course, the objective: swallows’ nests are fitted in every room and vantage point with recording equipment and self-focusing and adjusting cameras, both still and movie. Mirrors and apparently framed pictures which from one side appear genuine are frequently two-way glass screens from the phoney side of which observers can sit and witness everything that takes place.

  The apartment on Neglinnaya Ulitza in which Otto Reimann was reunited with his wife was one of the best equipped swallows’ nests existing in the Soviet capital. Everything that occurred there, in any room at any time, was recorded or filmed, usually on more than one machine, as a fail-safe. On this occasion, however, blackmail had not been the objective.