Little Grey Mice (52 page)

Maybe Jutta Sneider hadn't been such a good fuck after all. Elke said: ‘I was lonely, too.' He was a superb actor, she decided. Or a superb liar. Obviously a combination of both.

He said: ‘I guessed you wouldn't want to go out tonight.'

‘No,' said Elke, quickly. Appearing to remember, she said: ‘I saw Horst yesterday. He gave me another story to pass on.' She took it from her handbag and gave it to him.

Reimann accepted the envelope without interest, carrying it across to his desk. It was cluttered, but in the manner of someone who worked, not like Kissel's, carefully arranged into chaos. ‘I'll send it on tomorrow. He's becoming quite popular.'

‘Have you got any here? Ones that have been published?' Elke asked him, knowing of the back copies stacked in a pile beside the desk.

As if responding to a cue, Reimann gestured towards the heap. ‘Help yourself while I make us something to eat. It's trout. I didn't know how you'd feel so I took a chance with trout.'

‘Trout's fine.' Elke accepted. A lot of things were working out fine.

By the time Reimann announced that the meal was ready, Elke had read five back copies. All had included articles under Reimann's byline, as well as Kissel's fiction. As always the meal was perfect, and she ate without any feeling of sickness, positively hungry. Reimann hovered constantly, trying to anticipate whatever she wanted. Elke decided against going back to the desk and the magazines afterwards, although she wanted to. Instead she sat on the voluminous leather couch while Reimann cleared away.

‘Are you going to stay tonight?' he asked, returning.

‘I didn't know if you'd want me to, as I …'

‘… I could become irritated by your thinking that,' he cut in. ‘I very much want you to stay.'

There were still some prepared questions. Elke said: ‘Will you be going away again soon?'

‘I don't know. I hope not,' said Reimann. He put out his arm, invitingly, and Elke settled into his shoulder. Again she enjoyed the physical contact.

‘Any more rude letters? Or cables?'

He had to respond professionally, Reimann told himself, remaining reluctant to do so. ‘Not yet,' he said. ‘I'm frightened there will be if I can't provide the material they want.'

‘You'll tell me if the pressure starts, won't you?' urged Elke. ‘You never know. I might be able to help.'

‘Help!' seized Reimann instantly. He was almost over the final barrier. All she had to do was part with one item – it wasn't really necessary on the first occasion for it to be particularly important – and the flow would start like water finding its way through a crack in a dam.

‘Not by doing anything I shouldn't,' said Elke, in apparent correction. ‘I mean we could discuss things, like we have in the past.'

That wasn't what she'd meant, Reimann gauged: Elke was drawing back from an over-commitment. He said: ‘That would be helpful: I've found it extremely useful when we've done that.'

Was Jutta Sneider employed in any section of the government, Elke wondered. It was the source of substantial employment in the city, so it was a possibility. She said: ‘So we'll talk if you've got a problem.'

‘Definitely,' he promised.

Elke was glad, as usual at such times of the month, that he considerately let her go into the bedroom ahead of him to undress and put on a nightgown. She still needed the additional protection of a pad – a proper one she had bought that day – and as well as a supporting belt she wore underwear.

Reimann got into bed beside her, sighing with genuine contentment, stretching out a gentle arm to embrace her. ‘It's so good, just being here next to you. I love you very much.'

Had he used such sentimentality upon Jutta Sneider, like everything else? wondered Elke. She decided he'd told several other lies that night: how many more would there be that she could isolate?

‘Remember, I don't want her becoming suspicious.'

‘She won't,' Turev assured Sorokin. ‘Don't overlook her need to be the person in charge. She'll be flattered.'

‘You're ready to wind up everything else?'

‘Within hours of her arriving here in Moscow. A day after we've got her here there won't be a trace of Jutta Sneider ever having been in Bonn.'

‘I hope you're right about Reimann's reaction.'

‘I've timed his arrival in East Berlin to follow immediately.'

Chapter Forty

Elke was in a hurry to get all her decisions settled and established, although there was no definite cause for urgency in any of those plans. A meeting of the special committee was rescheduled for the Friday, with its inevitably increased workload, so she got a telephone recommendation from her regular physician and made an appointment with the gynaecologist early in the week. He was an urbane, grey-haired man with a pink polished face and the affectation of making towers with his fingers, which he collapsed at the end of sentences, to emphasize the finality of what he said. He listened to her account of increased difficulty with her periods and asked whether she was involved in a sexual relationship: without any of the awkwardness she would have shown so very recently Elke admitted, almost proudly, that she was. Under further, gently uncritical questioning she conceded that the relationship was extremely active, that she enjoyed it, but that it came after many years of total abstinence. When she said that, the man's fingers collapsed even though he wasn't talking himself. Elke insisted, again without any embarrassment, that there had not been any pregnancy alarms, reflecting as she did how easy it was becoming to lie. The consultation took an hour and concluded with her being prescribed a birth control pill which the gynaecologist assured her would ease the period difficulties in addition to providing the protection she obviously needed.

When she returned to the Chancellery Elke found waiting for her a letter of appreciation from the counter-intelligence department, praising her creation of a referencing system that had enabled their inquiries to be concluded so quickly and so satisfactorily. A copy was marked for Günther Werle, and attached to her original security letter was a copy of a personal commendation from Werle that was being recorded on her work file. When Elke thanked him, at their winding-up session for the day, the Cabinet Secretary said it was nothing less than she deserved to mark the efficiency with which she ran the entire Secretariat.

Among the other things waiting for her when she had returned from the gynaecologist was a message from the personnel directorate that there was no Jutta Sneider listed on any of the government employment records.

It had been Elke's insistence that they spend the second night at Rochusplatz, although not because of the continuing period discomfort which she let Reimann infer. Elke reached Nord-Stadt quite quickly, although it was more difficult locating the address she had for Jutta Sneider. The identification was helped by the Audi parked outside. Elke's impressions, at seeing the apartment block, were mixed. There were vaguely formed thoughts of the woman being outside and an idea of confrontation (instantly dismissed as foolish), but over-all it was a bizarre feeling of disappointment, which was more foolish than a confrontation. The block was cheap and tawdry, a crumbling place for crumbling people. Jutta Sneider hadn't looked cheap and tawdry during that snatched sight on the ferry, and later, walking along the river path. Elke waited, hopefully, for almost an hour but the woman didn't emerge. Elke didn't know what she would have done if Jutta Sneider
had
come out. Nothing, she supposed. What could she have done?

Reimann's greeting was as solicitous as she expected, and although Elke no longer had either discomfort or weakness she allowed him to prepare the promised meal. He ushered her towards the couch, but she went instead back to the desk, intent upon the magazines she hadn't got around to studying the previous night. This time she actually sat at the desk, the pages spread before her. Once, coming into the room from the kitchen, he asked her what she thought, and Elke, scarcely bothering to look up, insisted she was impressed. She'd read all she wanted by the time he announced dinner.

Towards its end, casually, he said: ‘We're becoming quite a domesticated couple, aren't we?'

Elke hesitated and then, with her new-found attitude, became irked by her own uncertainty. ‘I always thought to be domesticated people had to be married?' She spoke looking directly at him, holding his eyes for a change.

‘Yes,' he said, returning the gaze unwaveringly. ‘I suppose that's how it has to be.'

Why not go on? Elke thought; she'd never know now what, if anything, she had to lose. She said: ‘And we're not married.'

‘I know. Which seems quite wrong, don't you think?' What was he doing, saying? How could he encourage such a meaningless conversation? He was forgetting everything: professionalism, training, common sense, everything. It was madness! Stark, raving madness!

Elke regarded him warily across the table, searching for the right response. Was he telling her, clumsily but still telling her, what she wanted to hear? That he'd been undecided, unable to make a choice, but now he had, and that he'd chosen her? That the previous weekend had not, in fact, been anything like it had appeared to be? That it had been the end of a competing affair, not a continuation of it? Cautiously Elke said: ‘Maybe wrong isn't the way to think about it. Too protracted seems better.'

He couldn't retreat now, endangering everything. It was only words: always an escape. ‘You're right,' he said. ‘Too protracted.'

‘So!' demanded Elke, unashamedly bold.

Reimann decided, anxiously, that he had to give himself time – space – but not for the one moment risk her guessing his avoidance. Training! he thought, summoning the proper reminders to mind at last. Training
and
professionalism. He had to use it, hide behind it. He said: ‘I wouldn't – couldn't – consider asking anyone to marry me with all the uncertainty going on in Australia. That wouldn't be fair: not fair to you.'

‘Shouldn't I be the judge of that?'

‘No!' he said, forcefully, fully recovered. ‘That's never the way it's going to be. I'll make the decisions, always.'

Surely he'd said it! But not properly. Determined now, Elke demanded: ‘Are you asking me to marry you?'

Reimann sat utterly without expression or reply for several moments, so long that Elke began to regret her insistence. At last he said: ‘Yes, I think I am. But when I say so: when I think it's right – safe – to do so.'

Safe, picked out Elke: the word that used to be so important to her. She felt momentarily lifted – exalted, as she sometimes had before with him – by the way the conversation had gone. He
had
chosen: he'd chosen her. Anxiously agreeing she said: ‘All right. When you say so.'

Reimann smiled at her across the table, enjoying the moment despite its true emptiness. ‘Is that an acceptance?'

‘Yes,' said Elke. ‘It's a very proud and grateful acceptance.' If he married her she could forgive everything: learn to forget all the unpleasantness in time.

Reimann was aware how Elke felt, so for a long time he let the evening drift, not wanting to spoil the mood he had created by announcing another absence, this time a genuine one. Turev's summons, through Rome, had arrived that morning. It was not until just before they went to bed that he said he had to go away again, hurrying the assurance that it did not have to be until after the weekend. They could go to Ida's on Saturday if she wanted. And he wanted to go with her to Marienfels on the Sunday.

‘How long away this time?' asked Elke, dully.

‘Just a day,' Reimann promised. He couldn't guess the reason for being called yet again to East Berlin, but he was so accustomed to the trips by now that he knew he could get there and back without having to stay overnight.

‘But we'll have the rest of the week together?' Elke pressed.

‘I can't see you tomorrow night,' he evaded. ‘I've got a column to write.' Jutta was leaving the day after tomorrow for Vienna: she could take with her his belief that Elke was about to cross the final divide with a provably official document.

Like so much else, Elke was never able, later, to find an explanation for what she did. So much about it was illogical. Coincidental, too: it made her hate coincidence. She was at Nord-Stadt by five-thirty the following evening, going there directly from the Chancellery. His Mercedes was already there, parked directly behind the Audi. Elke waited, her fragile, recovered happiness withering inside her, until midnight. The Mercedes was still there when she finally drove away.

She'd wanted to believe him: begged to believe him. But it had been another lie: the worst so far. And now she didn't regard Jutta Sneider as the only one. Who, Elke wondered, had sent the postcard from Rome that she'd read the previous night, discarded on the desk at Rochusplatz? The one that said
Looking forward to meeting again.

Chapter Forty-One

Jutta had been off-balanced by the announcement, but pleasantly so, and now she was excited, impatient to get to Moscow, straining through the aircraft window for the first sight of the countryside below that she would know to be Russia. The fat man overflowed from the seat beside her, his arms and legs intruding into her space, and she was inhaling as much cigarette smoke as he was, which were further reasons for her wanting the journey to be over. There was never enough room in Aeroflot jets.

She looked towards the man and said: ‘You must have some idea!' She'd shown the same insistence several times since they'd met, only a few hours before, in the glass-fronted café of the Sacher, in Vienna.

Turev shook his head. ‘Just that you are to be given more responsibility: that things need to improve, as they did when you ran the operation more completely in West Berlin.'