Little Grey Mice (7 page)

‘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.

‘Well?' demanded the psychologist, Yuri Panin. With Nikolai Turev he had spent two days reviewing and assessing all the film footage and tape recordings. Both had actually sat, quite unmoved, on the other side of the main mirror in the bedroom to watch the sexual activity on the day of Jutta's arrival.

‘I didn't think much of his performance,' said Turev. He was chainsmoking American cigarettes, Camels, clouding the room with the odour. Turev, who was a full ranking colonel, was apprehensive at being chosen as Reimann's field control, which would anyway have been far below his position but for the Politburo and Executive President monitor on the operation. Everyone associated with Reimann's mission survived or fell by its success.

‘It was absolutely brilliant!' contradicted Panin, at once.

‘Brilliant?' frowned Turev, wishing he understood.

‘Think how he's been trained!' urged the psychologist. ‘He could have shown her the sort of sex she's probably never even heard of: gone through every trick there is. But that's what it
would
have been, a set of tricks. Which she would have realized. They made love as they probably always have. He was actually reassuring her, keeping the tricks for his target. Showing Jutta she's not threatened. Which, as I said, was absolutely brilliant.'

‘I suppose so,' said Turev, doubtfully. He was a butter-ball of a man, with heavy jowls and a shiny, pink face. The shortness of his neck was accentuated by a heavy moustache that hung like two question marks from either side of his upper lip. The moustache, like his hair, was pure white.

‘He was doing something else, for his own satisfaction,' continued Panin, reflectively. ‘He
knows
what he could have done: what he held back from her.'

Turev frowned again. ‘Where's the satisfaction in that?'

‘Remember the circumstances!' urged Panin. ‘He was sent to Berlin, to join the group of which she was cell leader. She was the cell leader when they got married, so she always had the superior authority. Always – professionally – he had to defer to her.'

‘So?'

‘That's unnatural: completely so, for every minute of their private and working lives. He insisted at our last meeting that it didn't worry him. But now I think it did. I think he was amusing himself with her: feeling superior at last. I think he's resented her superiority all along.'

‘Could that be a problem?' demanded the KGB chief, quickly alarmed.

‘The fact that he's married has always been a potential problem,' said Panin unhelpfully. ‘I've always wished the look-alike could have been a bachelor. But it's Reimann. So we've got to live with it.'

‘Isn't there any precaution we can take?'

Panin shook his head. ‘Just remain very aware that it is a weakness: something we should constantly monitor. And I think I should sit in when you brief her, on what she's expected to do.'

‘How should I handle that?'

‘Flatter her.'

Chapter Five

It was difficult to give absolute attention, even for someone as conscientious as Elke, because the security lectures had always been formalized and now seemed more so, nothing she had not heard a dozen (or was it a hundred?) times before. She glanced around the small conference room at the other supervisors, all with a clearance as high as her own, and guessed they all felt the same: boredom permeated the room.

‘…
continued and unremitting vigilance
…' she heard the speaker intone. He was a tall, intense, moustached man who had not addressed them before. She wondered if the speakers were changed in an attempt to keep the talks as interestingly different as possible. It wasn't succeeding with this man: he was as pedantic as the title of the ministry he represented, the Federal Agency for the Preservation of the Constitution.

‘…
apparent relaxations between East and West do not mean Soviet intelligence efforts have diminished at all
…'

Last weekend's visit to Ursula had been much better, although she'd been upset by Ida's last-minute telephone call announcing she couldn't come as promised. It hadn't mattered, in the event. Ursula had seemed much quieter this time, happy to walk in the grounds, seemingly content for them to hold hands. Maybe it had been silly leaving Poppi in the car, as she had: it was a relief he had recovered so completely. And so quickly.

‘…
anything strange should be reported immediately to your superiors or to
the
security division here in the Chancellery
…'

Gerda Pohl appeared to have been corrected, which was another relief. The meeting with the union representative had become a mere formality, after the slipshod work had actually been produced for him to see. Elke hadn't expected Werle's personal intervention, when he'd heard of the requested interview. All he'd said afterwards was that he'd supported her, in everything, but Elke suspected there had been more than that. The improvement hadn't removed Gerda's resentment, but Elke was wearily accustomed to that.

‘…
almost every case on record would have been preventable if the proper alertness had been shown, at the proper time …
'

Ida had been right, about Kissel serving the same disgusting wine because she'd praised it on the first occasion. Poor man.

‘…
reporting suspicion about other people in a department is not unnecessary interference …
'

Elke feared that a woman in the Chancellor's Secretariat whom she did not know by name, only to return an acknowledging smile, was definitely asleep. Elke wished she were closer, to nudge her awake.

‘…
our secrets ensure our future … our security
…'

Elke decided the moustached intelligence official was more pompous than any they'd listened to before. She was looking forward to lunching with Ida, and hoped she wouldn't cancel it as she'd cancelled the visit to Ursula. She had to get some more bathroom cleanser. Polish, too. She'd do the bedrooms tonight. Like all things, the arrangement was very regulated, according to days of the week.