Little Grey Mice (6 page)

Werle smiled. ‘I don't think I could function without you.'

‘It'll give you an opportunity to review everything: to decide if you want anything else.' Elke wished he hadn't made the remark, just as she wished he hadn't said what he had that morning. It wasn't how things normally were between them.

‘All this afternoon's meetings are here in the Chancellery,' he said, looking casually at his typed schedule. ‘I'll get back before the last appointment to deal with this morning's correspondence.'

‘It will all be ready,' Elke guaranteed.

Again Werle felt the urge to tell her what he had set into motion. Instead, lamely, he said: ‘I know it will be.'

Elke ordered the extra missile research at the same time as asking for all the secretarial work to be delivered to her within thirty minutes. She'd already indexed three files by the time it came.

Her immediate concern just as quickly became anger. There were mistakes to be corrected on four of the letters she first read and even more serious errors in two much lengthier reports she had wanted duplicated for overnight ministry distribution.

Gerda Pohl had prepared every one.

Elke's first consideration was to minimize delay. She searched hurriedly through the pile, separating everything upon which the woman had worked and putting it to one side. There was no correction necessary on anything the other secretaries had prepared. Elke went back to the isolated pile and found two more wrongly typed pieces. She made a further separation, leaving herself with only the erroneous material. Patiently, utterly absorbed, she scrutinized and corrected everything before finally summoning the older woman into her office.

‘Do you have a problem?' Elke demanded. The anger helped, but she always found it difficult to convey authority.

‘Problem?' Gerda's attitude was insolent.

‘I was called here on Saturday by security. A classified reference file released to this office, into your custody, was not recorded as having been put in your own safe.'

‘I put it in the safe,' insisted Gerda, at once.

‘But didn't log it!' said Elke. She pushed the rejected letters across the desk. ‘Now this! Seven items with figures wrong and facts wrong and places appallingly mistyped!'

‘I can't hear what he says,' protested Gerda. It was the established defence to any correction or rejection.

‘Difficulty in hearing doesn't excuse mistyping or misspelling. And there are addressee and destination faults that are clearly – and correctly – printed on file,' retorted Elke.

‘Must have made a mistake,' said the older woman. The insolence was becoming childishly petulant.

‘I'm
telling
you that you've made mistakes!' said Elke, in an exasperated effort for sarcasm that didn't work. ‘That's why I want to know if there's some problem, beyond this office.'

‘No,' said Gerda. ‘I haven't got a problem.'

‘So why did it happen? Seven times! And why didn't you complete Friday's security log?'

The woman shrugged, carelessly. ‘Unavoidable mistakes.'

‘They're not unavoidable.'

‘Are you accusing me of doing it deliberately!'

Elke recognized the first direct challenge. She had to take account of the unions. She said: ‘I'm asking, not accusing.'

‘I've explained.' Gerda looked disappointed at Elke's answer.

‘Not satisfactorily.'

‘What do you want me to do?' demanded Gerda, still challenging.

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 faultlessly 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?'