Little Grey Mice

by Brian Freemantle

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  There couldn’t be anything wrong! Elke knew there couldn’t: impossible. No need at all then for the bygone, please-never-again feeling. They’d always been careful: openly talked about it, mature adults. Always observed the safe period. Always. Otherwise he’d used something. Every time. So there couldn’t be anything wrong. Mature, she thought again. That had to be it: obviously that was it. She was almost thirty-nine, so she could expect to start to become irregular. It happened early to a lot of women. Probably the reason, too, for those see-saw moods of uncertainty, those confidence dips, before she’d met him. The logical, sensible explanation. Definitely. Only five days. Women her age sometimes went a month, two months, without seeing anything. Not like before. At her most fertile then. Every cause to worry then when she’d missed: shouldn’t have been so stupid. But not now. Why the same feeling now, just like before? Because of before, that’s why. The same disbelief at first, too. Not me: can’t have happened to me! Except that it had. Different now: altogether different. Not just her age, when she should expect it. Or the caution they’d shown, every time. The most important difference was between Otto and Dietlef. There’d never been any substance in Dietlef. She’d always known that, deep down: the hope of marriage had been because she was pregnant, not because she loved him. Not like she loved Otto. Otto wouldn’t run away. Let her down. She knew Otto: knew him completely. He was a good man. Honest. Someone who could be trusted, without question. Wonderful.

  Elke felt the apprehension subside, just slightly. She put the calendar back in its place and went to the refrigerator, knowing there was some wine open. She sat at the kitchen table, the glass between both hands, looking down at it. Not the slightest need to worry, even it it had happened. Which it hadn’t, of course. Just if. No question of their not getting married. Secretly – deep down again – Elke was sure it was inevitable that they would, although he hadn’t given her the opal ring in the way she’d hoped. All this would do – if- was make it happen sooner. Somewhere quiet. Away from Bonn if possible. Cologne maybe. Cologne was nice. Otto could fix it. Just Ida and Horst and the children. Ursula, too, if Dr Schiller agreed. What she would have wanted anway. It would mean leaving the Chancellery, of course. She’d regret that. Deeply. She’d been respected, admired, there. Known by ministers. The Chancellor, too. Had the top-secret job, a recognition of her ability. She’d miss it. Even miss the hopeful, stumbling Günther. All unavoidable. Frau Elke Reimann. It had an easy sound — a good sound – echoing in her mind.

  Elke sipped her wine, positively making the reflection come to mind, another if. What if Otto didn’t want to get married? It was an incredible, inconceivable doubt but what if? She wouldn’t have any hesitation, not this time. No empty, pointless religious misgivings. Cologne again. Some discreet clinic. She’d read it was a simple operation, if it was done early enough. Quite safe. No more than a fortnight’s leave from the Chancellery. Ida would help find a place: Ida would always help. What she’d do was …

  Elke thrust the glass down upon the kitchen table, a noise to break the reflection. Enough! She’d let her mind drift far enough! They had been careful, always. So it was impossible for anything to be wrong. Which made all the other fears utterly ridiculous. Her age: that’s all it was. Early, possibly, but still just her age. No need to talk to Otto about it. Or Ida. Simply wait for it to happen. Probably come tomorrow. Or the day after. What if it didn’t? A doctor, she supposed: a gynaecologist. Not because she was pregnant. For the irregularity. A gynaecologist could treat that, advise her what other symptoms and problems she might experience.

  Elke felt her eyes fill, clouding, so the glass before her blurred. Not me: can’t have happened to me! She began to cry.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Sorokin.

  Yuri Panin did not respond immediately. ‘It was always a risk, that he would become over-confident. Instilling that confidence was vital, for what he had to do.’

  ‘I never trusted all this psychological crap,’ said Cherny.

  ‘Reimann has succeeded exactly as we intended,’ argued the psychologist, not intimidated by the soldier. ‘We trained him to seduce the woman and he’s done precisely that.’

  ‘With what result?’ demanded Cherny.

  ‘It’s the other woman who concerns me,’ Turev told them.

  ‘The wife?’

  Turev nodded. ‘I accept the argument that involving her distanced us, in the event of any seizure by West German counter-intelligence: that any arrest could be turned to seem like espionage against West Germany by two provable members of East German intelligence. But I’m doubtful now of that benefit. Every tape I have listened to indicates some antagonism. And Reimann never wanted her direct involvement: he argued against it from the beginning.’

  ‘Is she creating actual difficulties?’ Sorokin asked.

  ‘Distracting irritation.’

  ‘If it becomes anything worse, we can simply lift her out,’ said Sorokin.

  ‘She knows about the operation,’ Panin pointed out.

  ‘She couldn’t cause any problems, here in Moscow,’ said Sorokin, simply.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Jutta stood expectantly, hoping for some embrace, but Reimann stalked by her into the Nord-Stadt apartment. ‘Why?’

  ‘I …’Jutta started, about to lie. Instead she said: ‘Why not?’

  ‘You know damned well why not! We should never get close, when I’m with her. It’s against every instruction … every rule.’

  ‘I’m disappointed you didn’t detect me following you all the way from Kaufmannstrasse!’ Jutta was attempting to fight back.

  ‘I don’t look out for stupidity, not from you.’

  ‘No harm was done,’ she insisted.

  ‘Why?’ he repeated.

  ‘I wanted to see what she was really like,’ she admitted. ‘You said she was a dried-up spinster. She’s not. She’s an attractive woman.’

  More than attractive, thought Reimann. Accusingly he said: ‘You parked your car where I could see it, didn’t you!’

  ‘No,’ denied Jutta, weakly.

  ‘Then your surveillance was no better than my observation.’ The microphones would be recording everything. If he’d wanted he could have staged the confrontation away from the apartment. So why hadn’t he?

  ‘No harm,’ she repeated, stubbornly.

  ‘Satisfied now?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me what she was really like?’

  ‘I described her as she appeared to me.’

  Jutta knew she had to stop: there was no benefit from continuing the conversation. He’d seen her car, which she’d intended: that was enough. She said: ‘So I followed you and saw you with her, just once …’ She snapped her fingers. ‘… That’s it. All that it is. I don’t want to talk about it any more. I want to talk about getting another apartment, away from this rat-hole.’

  Did it matter? wondered Reimann, instantly assessing. He’d decided months ago that the KGB would bug any apartment to which she moved, so the ears he wished to hear would still exist. There might even be a professional argument for her changing her home, getting out before anyone else in the block became curious about her. He said: ‘Why not? Have you looked round yet?’

  Jutta wished he had shown more sincere interest. ‘Not yet. I wanted to see how you felt about it.’ That wasn’t true. She’d driven all the way to the Plittersdorf district to look at one place, been shown two at West-Stadt, and had an address to visit the following day across the river at Niederdollendorf, although like Plittersdorf it was further away than she wished to go.

  ‘You’ve known how I’ve felt about this place from the beginning.’

  That was another reply Jutta hadn’t wanted to hear. Hopefully she said: ‘I thought perhaps you could help me choose?’

  ‘You know I can’t do that!’

  Jutta had known but she’d needed to try. Still trying she said: ‘I don’t think there would be any difficulty in your just c
oming with me. Just to look.’

  ‘That’s as absurd as following me to restaurants!’

  ‘It was only a suggestion,’ retreated Jutta, lamely.

  ‘Have you discussed it, with them?’

  ‘I intend to, at my next contact.’

  They’d already know, by then: know, too, how she’d wanted to involve him in the move and about her trailing him to the Bad Godesberg restaurant to which he’d taken Elke. ‘I think it’s a good idea. Maybe find a bigger block next time, where you can be even more anonymous. There’s always a danger, staying too long in one place.’

  ‘I can tell them you agree, then?’

  He was surprised she needed his reassurance. Or his approval. ‘Of course.’

  Show more interest! Jutta thought: please show more interest! She said: ‘I’d like us to spend a weekend together. We haven’t, for a long time.’

  ‘She has the weekends off,’ he reminded her. ‘That’s when there’s the best opportunity for her properly to ease up. When she lets things slip.’

  Just one weekend!’

  It didn’t become Jutta, to plead: he wasn’t used to it. He tried to balance the priorities. He did have to impose more pressure on Elke. If he spent part of the next weekend away from her there could be an advantage, making her realize that things were still not as positive between them as she imagined. And he supposed Jutta deserved the consideration. He wished he could feel more enthusiasm. He said: ‘All right. Next Saturday. We’ll spend all of next Saturday together.’

  ‘I want the day to be on the river, like before,’ said Jutta, insisting further.

  ‘We’ll go on the river,’ Reimann promised, going along with everything. What would the Russians do, when they heard the tape?

  ‘Do you know what I wish?’ said Jutta. ‘I wish this could all be over, so we could be like we were before.’

  Reimann knew it could never be like it was before, between them: he didn’t think he wanted it to be. What would happen to them, when this operation was over? Berlin was impossible: had been, before this began. Anywhere else in the former bloc was unlikely, as well. Only Moscow then. But what would he do, what could he do, in Moscow? Some headquarters role, in Dzerzhinsky Square or in one of the outlying Directorate buildings? He didn’t want that: didn’t want to live in Moscow at all. He said: ‘It’s far too early to think like that.’

  ‘I’d like it not to be.’

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Gerda Pohl’s arrest came, as such seizures so often do, from routine. Random security checks over three earlier months had disclosed an occasional failure of classified documents to be accounted for and returned at the end of each working day from the division to which Gerda had been reassigned from the Chancellery. The division, responsible for liaison and communication between the Foreign Ministry and the Chancellery, was monitored and special entrapping designations put upon all material passing through it to establish which papers were handled by which clerk or official. Gerda Pohl was identified during the first week: a file check showed within hours that she had been guilty of such carelessness in the past. She was placed under observation for a month, to trace through her other members of any spy cell. During that time she was in possession of papers from three departmental files, all bearing a security rating. Never, however, during that period of surveillance was she seen to make contact with anyone counter-intelligence considered to be a member of an espionage group. Only much later, during intense examination of the surveillance records after Gerda made a complete confession, was the significance of the Post Office visits realized.

  In her first, incomplete admission, Gerda Pohl denied any espionage activity or intent. At the age of fifty-nine, she insisted, she found difficulty maintaining the required turn-around of work essential if she were to remain in her department, which she needed to do if she was to be retained. Which it was essential that she should be. As a widow she was entirely dependent upon her salary: she had taken the documents home to complete there because even if she worked overtime at the government building, which she did at least two nights a week, she had still been unable to complete everything according to schedule.

  Only later, under intensive interrogation, did Gerda change her story and admit to posting copies of documents to the Soviet embassy in Vienna. She further admitted acting in spite, for the way she considered she had been unfairly treated in her earlier position, actually within the Chancellery Secretariat. Despite a full week of sometimes brutal interrogation, the elderly woman insisted she was unable to remember exactly how many documents she had sent to Vienna or what their contents had been.

  Counter-intelligence officers were waiting when Elke arrived the morning after the arrest, and her top-security classification allowed her to attend all the sessions at which Gerda’s confession gradually emerged. Gerda’s statement never mentioned Elke by name as the person against whom she felt a grudge. Counter-intelligence requested everything upon which the woman had ever worked while she was in the Chancellery Secretariat to be made available to them. The seemingly enormous demand was, in fact, reasonably easy to meet. Another of Elke’s innovations had been always to reference documents against the name of the clerk or secretary who prepared them: the first day it only took three hours to produce duplicates of all the material Gerda Pohl had handled in the preceding two full years of her employment in Werle’s department.

  ‘A disaster!’ judged Werle.

  ‘According to what she says, she didn’t start doing it until after her transfer,’ Elke pointed out.

  ‘There’s no way of knowing if she’s telling the whole truth,’ Werle argued. ‘There’s a lot of sensitive stuff going through Foreign Ministry liaison.’

  Elke was surprised that she did not feel more strongly about what Gerda had done. She actually tried, for shock or anger, but the emotion wouldn’t come. Her only tangible feeling was pity for the woman.

  Throughout the rest of the Cabinet Secretariat that first day the affair created an air of excitement: almost, bizarrely, a holiday atmosphere, because the presence of so many investigating intelligence officers made it impossible for the usual and normal amount of work to be completed.

  Elke, her mind occupied by her other, personal worry, didn’t feel any excitement either. She’d actually thought there had been something that morning, hurrying into the bathroom hopefully to feel herself, but there had been nothing. And the stomach discomfort – not the usual cramps but definite twinges of pain, coming and going – had gone completely as she drove to the Chancellery, leaving the faintest suggestion of nausea. But not bad, she told herself, anxiously. The sickness had been bad, with Ursula: every morning, during the first months and starting before she’d really known, positively, that she was even pregnant. She could remember – as she could remember everything about that time – how she and Ida initially snatched at it to convince themselves she was suffering from something medical, an ulcer maybe: pitifully going over what she might have eaten, day by day, to upset her.

  The publicity was incredible, in both newspapers and on radio and television, and by midday the Chancellery was besieged by cameramen and journalists. That first day one Munich newspaper, linking one scandal to another, reprinted the incident of the Transport Minister and the stripper because it gave them the opportunity to republish photographs of the girl. To avoid being photographed – because everyone either entering or leaving the Chancellery was being photographed running the gamut of the press – Elke left by one of the side entrances and made her way to Kaufmannstrasse along the river road.

  That night Reimann suggested they stay in, at Rochusplatz, and Elke was glad, not wanting to do anything else. He offered to cook for her, as he frequently did when she really had her period, and she was glad for him to do that, too. He grilled the steaks to perfection, knowing just how she liked them prepared, but the nausea became worse than it had been all day and she found it difficult to eat, leaving most of it.

  ‘What’s the matter?�
� asked Reimann.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’ve eaten hardly anything.’

  ‘I’m not very hungry.’

  ‘And you’ve been very subdued, all evening.’ It was a mood he hadn’t experienced: always, before, there’d been the detectable apprehension, a keenness to defer and to please. Tonight Elke was practically introverted.

  ‘The Chancellery is in uproar, over this spying business,’ said Elke. She felt guilty invoking a poor, frightened old lady to account for a mood brought about by something entirely different. Elke supposed Gerda would be in a prison cell, under guard, with bars at the window. All alone.

  ‘I suppose it must be,’ he agreed. It was an incredible fuck-up, affecting everything he was expected to do. How could he now hope to get her to bring out official papers? The entire Chancellery – but her Secretariat particularly – would be in uproar, everyone lectured and reminded of their security responsibilities and how to conduct themselves. Everything absolutely fucked up!

  ‘I feel sorry for her,’ Elke admitted.

  ‘Sorry?’ Reimann was immediately attentive, curious.

  Elke felt the nausea positively rising and had to swallow against it, so she couldn’t speak at once. ‘I know perhaps that I shouldn’t: that she did something terribly wrong. But that’s what I feel. Sorry.’

  Room to explore here, thought Reimann. He said: ‘But she took classified documents!’

  Enough – practically everything – had been reported in that day’s newspapers, Elke decided: there was no indiscretion discussing it at this level. ‘Not from the Chancellery Secretariat, I don’t think. From the Foreign Ministry. Her clearance isn’t particularly high, so it can’t have been anything too sensitive.’

  ‘There’ll be a tightening up of security at the Chancellery, I suppose?’ said Reimann, a question he very much wanted answering.