Little Grey Mice (36 page)

Reimann replaced the diary precisely as it had been laid in the bedside cabinet, crossing to the dressing table containing the photographs of Ursula. Another point to bear in mind, he reminded himself, lifting the frames from their concealment among the underwear. That very concealment betrayed her shame: showed that it was instinctive for her to lie. He shouldn't forget that point of pressure, either, if it became necessary to impose. Ursula had, in fact, many uses, not all of which he had fully thought through. The early pictures told him nothing, except Elke's obvious delight, with the mother he recognized from those wedding photographs he had been shown in Moscow. To Reimann babies always looked like babies, without any definitive difference, one from another. He would not have guessed, not truthfully, at any mental problem from the later photographs. Ursula appeared quite an ordinary, normal-looking child. Noticeably tall, perhaps: well developed, although Reimann did not really know at what age girls started to develop. Heavy-featured, too, although again there was no hint of any mental gap in those features. She could even have been considered relatively pretty.

Thirty thousand! The figure rushed back at him, in demanding recollection. The amount – precisely thirty thousand Deutschmarks! – they already knew Elke had withdrawn from her account! The dates even fitted, within the acceptable cheque-issue, cheque-cancellation span. It was, partially at least, the first provable, positive discovery he had made: the first time he had been able to make the facts fit so smoothly. So how should he carry it forward, to complete the deduction? A financial difficulty within the family, obviously. Something between sisters, one lending to another? But why
Fool?
Had Ida done something foolish enough to need thirty thousand Deutschmarks? Or family in the wider sense, a general loan? If it was a general loan, it had to involve the brother-in-law (name! name! name! Reimann demanded of himself; then, relieved, it came – Kissel, Horst Kissel), and there might be an advantage there. Personnel director for the postal authorities, Reimann identified, the recollection coming smoothly. Conceivably a
very
definite advantage. Under the proper, necessary duress Kissel, at his level of authority, could be forced to access anything, nationwide. Unlisted, secret numbers; war-footing emergency communication systems; wire-tap applications, from the security services; Chancellery hotlines.

All these possibilities jostled through Reimann's mind as he stood with Ursula's photographs in his hand. He halted the jumbled ideas, aware of the time-lapse since she had left. As he replaced the frames he automatically erased any fingerprints with the bath towel he still carried. Brilliant, he thought, his own confident assessment: he was doing brilliantly.

Reimann used the cue of the outer door opening to emerge from the bathroom, towelling dry his hair. ‘Excellent timing!' he declared. ‘I'm ready.'

Satisfied with his morning's discoveries, Reimann let the middle of the day in Cologne float by without pressing for any advantage but not neglectful for a moment, either. Guessing at the guilt she would have for not going to see Ursula, and not wanting it to twist in her mind into any convoluted criticism of him for persuading her to do something she regretted, he kept everything buoyant and light, refusing as well to let her develop any remorse for the previous night. They café-hopped in their vague approach to the cathedral square, Reimann urging champagne upon her (
Haven't we every reason and excuse to celebrate! I certainly think we have!)
so that by the time they reached it Elke was quite lightheaded, uncaring. The restaurant
was
called the Three Bishops and his Leberkase was as good as he'd anticipated it would be.

On their way back to Bonn, Reimann announced abruptly: ‘I can't stay tonight.' He spoke as if it were automatically accepted by both of them that he should have done.

‘Oh!' said Elke, who
had
expected it and was disappointed.

‘I've still got some time, to change the interpretation of German thinking between East and West I told you about yesterday. There are still one or two things I'm not entirely happy about in my own mind.' He'd prepared and practised every phrase in his mind.

‘What things?' Elke asked, predictably.

‘I don't know if I told you,' said Reimann, airily. ‘But I've speculated that the Cabinet here in Bonn are completely unified, talking without any dissent or disagreement with each other. But I've been thinking that maybe that's making it too strong: we know the pressures – they've been commented upon in newspapers and on television enough – so there must be some disagreement between the ministers, no matter how committed they are to the basic principle of unity.'

There
had
been an enormous amount of newpaper and television coverage saying just that, Elke accepted: ministers eager and quite prepared to talk, off the record, she supposed. Who'd told her that? Otto, she remembered: and very true, as she'd acknowledged herself at the time. She said: ‘I should imagine the department for Intra-German Relations are finding it difficult. And the cost has to be enormous: there have been public statements to that effect.' There was not the slightest indiscretion there.

‘You're right!' said Reimann, as if he had been suddenly reminded, uncaring that she was telling him nothing. Get accustomed to it, Elke, he thought: get accustomed to talking to me in generalities so I can sift out the secrets you won't at first imagine you're telling me. Should he try it? Why not? He said: ‘What I really need to know, to be sure, is if there has been any real approach from the East. Or whether the movement has been entirely one way, Bonn towards East Berlin.'

‘Yes,' agreed Elke. ‘That would make any interpretation a lot easier, wouldn't it?'

Sidestepped, assessed Reimann, still unperturbed. She had responded at once, without discernibly preparing her words: at a guess – and it was certainly not a guess to which he would have attached any decision – he would have said she didn't know whether there had been any such contacts or not. He said: ‘I'll just have to grope on.'

He didn't make any effort to leave the car when they got to Kaufmannstrasse.

‘Are you coming up?' she asked, boldly.

You get rewards for how well you perform the tricks, he thought: that was how Pavlov trained his obedient dogs. He said: ‘I really do want to recast what I've written. So not tonight.'

‘All right,' she accepted, her tone of voice showing she considered it anything but all right. She shouldn't crowd him: make him feel suffocated.
Don't lose him.
‘Will vou call me tomorrow?'

‘If I can,' Reimann promised, leaning across to kiss her. passionately.

Elke sat for a long time that night, unsure what to inscribe in her diary. Her first impulse was to record everything, even the sex, but she didn't, of course. In the end she wrote, quite simply and with absolute sincerity:
I
am in love.

The following day one of West Germany's most sensational exposure magazines, based in Munich, published a detailed account of the Transport Minister's affair with a twenty-eight-year-old girl whom they proved, by documentary evidence, to be a former hostess at a Bonn escort agency. There were nightclub and restaurant photographs of the man with her, hand in hand and once kissing, and a separate picture of the girl by herself, naked, performing in a Hamburg strip club before joining the agency. There were also photographs of the Transport Minister's wife and two daughters.

The man resigned the same day, forcing a Cabinet reshuffle.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The postcard summons had been waiting for Reimann when he returned to Rochusplatz, which was a convenient coincidence because he had intended using the now established two-way system to ask for a personal meeting and now he didn't have to bother. With the five-day-gap built in between the receipt of the card and his expected arrival in East Berlin he guessed they would be able to discuss what he intended passing back through Jutta, which was more convenient still. The trip away from Bonn could also be useful to maintain Elke's uncertainty.

Reimann was curiously apprehensive at Jutta's reaction to learning he had actually seduced Elke Meyer, and was surprised when inititially there was little reaction at all. He was beginning to outline what he guessed to be the Cabinet meeting when she interrupted and said: ‘You stayed the entire weekend?' Reimann said: ‘Yes,' and Jutta nodded and said: ‘Go on,' nothing more.

He concentrated, of course, upon the conjectural Cabinet gathering, about which there had been no public disclosure, and Elke Meyer's apparent disillusion with some of the ministers involved. When Reimann suggested there might be some disunity within the West German Cabinet on how to deal with new freedoms in the other half of the country, Jutta came in immediately to say: ‘That's public enough knowledge: it's been discussed in most newspapers and magazines.'

‘Speculated upon,' argued Reimann, irritated by his wife's dismissal. ‘And I'm trying to convey how delicately I have to go, at this stage: always having to talk as if it's something I know or I've written and asking her to give her views. That's a difficulty I'd like you to make sure they understand.' And if you don't they'll hear it anyway through the microphones, he thought: would he be able to get any indication during the later East Berlin encounter if she failed to convey the message?

‘And what did she say?' Jutta demanded.

‘That the Intra-German Relations Ministry was over-stretched and that it was costing their exchequer an enormous amount.' Reimann was suddenly caught by an impression of hardness in Jutta, a hardness about her clothes and a hardness about her make-up and careful hairstyle. It was something that had not occurred to him before. Yet he didn't really think she was appreciably different. His lack of awareness, he accepted: before, he had thought of his wife's unbending attitude as professionalism. A steel-like dedication. He'd come, by comparison, to think of Elke as soft: soft and feminine. The self-criticism was immediate: comparison, between one and the other, had no place in what he was doing.

‘Christ!' exclaimed Jutta, contemptuously. ‘That hasn't been speculated about! That's been spelled out, with facts and figures!'

Reimann didn't like such outspoken opposition, nor the way it would sound on any recordings. He said: ‘It was the first time, for God's sake! She's got to learn to trust me more!'

‘Wasn't she cooperative?'

‘What's that mean?' asked Reimann, who knew. They shouldn't have talked at Nord-Stadt, not this time. He should have taken her out, flattered her: what they were talking about could as easily have been discussed in a public place without any danger.

‘What was she like?'

‘Boring.' She hadn't. been, judged Reimann, although dispassionately. He'd actually enjoyed it.

‘Are you staying tonight?'

Given the free choice Reimann would have preferred to go back to Rochusplatz and be entirely by himself. He said: ‘Of course I'm staying. I want to.' The experience left him curious. That night their lovemaking was not as predictable as it usually was. She climaxed noisily, and clung to him and said she loved him. Reimann held her just as tightly and said he loved her too. He'd feigned his own climax: she didn't realize that, either. But then she shouldn't have done: it was something else in which he had been expertly trained.

He telephoned Elke in the middle of the week and at the Chancellery, once more intentionally intruding into another exclusive domain. The call came half an hour after she'd learned of another Cabinet committee meeting the following morning: her initial distraction was obvious to Reimann, at the other end of the line. He insisted he was truly sorry but that it was essential he go out of town for a few days, to comply with the latest story request from Australia. Elke put all consideration of the Cabinet session out of the mind, insisted in return that she understood and asked when he would be back. Reimann, prepared for the question, said he did not think until after the weekend, allowing her the opportunity to visit the child at Marienfels and also, hopefully, to compare the dullness of an ordinary weekend against what had happened during the one that preceded it.

‘I'll miss you,' he said.

‘I'll miss you, too.'

‘Be careful.'

‘And you.'

‘Don't fall in love with any strange man,' he said. On the jotting pad by the telephone, Reimann was distractedly doodling squares within squares.

‘Why not?' demanded Elke, responding.

The interlocked squares became a maze-like prison: at its centre he wrote her name. He said: ‘Because if you do I'll get jealous.'

‘Do you really mean that?'

‘You know I do.'

Reimann showed the same caution as before in reaching Berlin, although he took a different evasive routing, staging through Munich and arranging the flights differently, so that there was no need to stay overnight in the west sector. The atmosphere – or rather lack of it – that he'd imagined on the earlier visit was more pronounced this time. Always, when he'd lived and worked in the city, he'd had the feeling of being enclosed, locked up. But not any more: now the impression was of openness: illogically, as if suddenly more space had become available.

A lot more of the Berlin Wall appeared to have come down since his last crossing: as he approached he saw a lorry trundle along the Friedrichstrasse loaded with rubble. It was not destined for any dump, he knew. It was en route to some entrepreneurial yard to be carefully broken into the smallest practical pieces and sold as genuine souvenir fragments that would enter the display cabinets of idiotic memorabilia collectors all over the world.
Look at that, if you will! That's a bit of the original Wall! The Wall! Can you believe it! The very Wall. What about that, then!
Lucky the one – anyone – who got a piece of the real Wall. Pragmatically he recognized that communism had created a permanent capitalistic market, like bits of the Cross upon which their Christ was supposed to have been crucified: enough chips to restore the Brazilian rain forests a million times over, soon to be equalled by enough pieces of masonry to build a mile-high wall to encircle the world. Buy on, idiots: buy on.