She checked again, for the third time, that her ticket and British Council diplomatic passport were in her bag. He gripped her arm, his face was cold and hostile, and he pointed. It annoyed Olive Harris that she had been looking in her bag and had needed to be alerted.
He was on the pavement. Quite small, but heavy in the Army greatcoat. His cap seemed to her too big for him and was low on his head. There was a woman with him, wrapped well against the cold: she carried two large shopping bags and a piece of paper. In between looking up and down the street for his driver, he checked the paper with her… God, how pathetic, a ranking colonel close to the greatest power in the Russian state was looking over his wife’s shopping list, pitiful… He kissed her cheek, awkwardly because of the depth of the peak of his cap, and she walked away.
Olive Harris felt no emotion. She checked that her bag was fastened. She sensed, beside her, the contempt of the station chief, but when she was back in London she would bury him, deep, so he squealed. Colonel Pyotr Rykov was isolated, alone, on the pavement in front of the street door.
She walked from the car. When she crossed the road she made certain that she looked up the street towards the surveillance car. They should see her face clearly from it, and her greying hair that was gathered in a clip above the nape of her neck.
He looked once more at his watch. She was sufficiently close to him to see the annoyance on his face. It was always a precious moment, exciting to her, when the face of a target replaced a photograph’s image.
She walked forward slowly, looked furtively behind her, then hurried towards him. He was trying to wave down a taxi but it swept past.
She reached him. Olive Harris stood in front of Colonel Pyotr Rykov. She spoke to him. She stood at the angle which guaranteed that the long lens in the surveillance car would have a sharp view of her face. She asked him about the weather and about the price of heating oil, and saw his bewilderment. She took his hand, and saw his confusion. For a moment she held his hand… She spun on her heel and did not look back at him. She was in full view of the long lens in the surveillance car. She dropped her head, and held her arm up and over her face, as if to shield it from any long lens. She swept open the door of the car.
The station chief sat stolid beside her and stared ahead. She slammed the door shut.
‘Well, come on, get a move on. Don’t hang about.’
He recited quietly, ‘Nescio quis teneros oculus mi/u fascinat agnos…‘
‘What the hell’s that?’
The station chief drove away. He said, ‘I could see it in the mirror, the camera was up, they’d have banged off best part of a roll
… It’s Virgil, from his Bucolics, it’s the evil eye that has the power to bewitch lambs. It’s evil destroying innocence… The airport, Mrs Harris?’
She brushed the snow off her shoulders and off her hair. He had gone three blocks when he reached into his jacket pocket and took out a gummed-down envelope with no name and no address on it. He handed it to Olive Harris.
‘It’s my resignation letter. Please, be so good as to deliver it to the head man. Of course, I’ll be expelled after this little charade, but I’d like my letter in first. I have to believe, Mrs Harris, that we’re all answerable for our actions. One day. I hope, one day, you feel true shame. The airport, right?’
She put the envelope in her bag. She looked out at the streets of the Moscow morning. She wanted to see them, remember them, because she would never return.
He was unannounced.
A marine guard escorted him from the hail, up in the elevator, along the corridor, past another marine and through the bombproof door, to the rooms used by the Agency.
‘What the hell’s with you?’
‘I’ve seen, Brad, what I call the evil eye. Sorry, it’s not the time for riddles, sorry.. I feel rather sick, and I’d quite like to hit someone. You have the resources, we do not, so I’m here with the begging bowl. The evil eye – sorry, again, sorry – has fallen on Rykov. We expect, don’t ask me details, that Pyotr Rykov, in the next few hours, will be arrested.’
‘You kidding? You know that? How the hell do you know that?’
‘We’d like to know when it happens – your resources are so much better.’
‘What’s the charge?’ the Agency man asked, distant. ‘If Rykov is arrested, what’s the charge?’
‘Espionage.’
‘Are you saying he’s your man? Holy shit! That’s not true. Not your man?’
‘We’d like to be told, like your resources, to watch for it. I’ll be out of here in a day or so, and we won’t meet again. I don’t wish to evade responsibility. Yes, we’ve done that.’
He could not look into the eye of the man who had been his colleague. He shuffled for the door. He would go home and he would tell his wife that the children’s things should be packed, that they were going home, that the future was uncharted. He would tell his wife that he had not been able to look into the eye of an honourable man.
The marine, waiting outside the door, escorted him back to the embassy hallway.
‘Where is he, Frau Krause?’
They had come to the house in the Altst-adt. Raub had rung the bell beside the door. The house was luxury compared to the home he could afford in Cologne. Goldstein had banged with his fist on the door’s panels. No answer, and they had gone to the window. She had been sitting in the chair facing the television. Raub had called through the window glass and Goldstein had rapped it, but she had not moved from the chair. The door had been unlocked. They had entered without invitation and gone into the living room.
‘It is important, Frau Krause, that you tell us where is your husband.’
The light material of the robe had fallen away from her legs and sagged on her chest. She faced the television. Raub flushed. Goldstein stared at the clean shape of her legs under the silk smooth nightdress and the darkness at her groin and the hang of her breasts. She stared at the snowstorm television picture. Goldstein thought a video had played on the television and reached its end.
Raub said, ‘It is critical for your husband’s future and your future, Frau Krause, that you tell us where we may find him.’
Her eyes were pale, without lustre. Her hands moved, clasping and unclasping. On the carpet was a photograph album with blank pages. She did not acknowledge the questions. Torn scraps of photographs were on the floor, ripped too small for Goldstein to recognize their content. She did not look at Raub. He went to the television and turned it off. She still stared at the screen.
Raub barked, ‘It gives me no pleasure, Frau Krause… but, then, I have no pleasure in working with your husband. I despise your husband. I work with your husband because that is my duty
Now, Frau Krause, it gives me less pleasure to remind you that we own you. We own everything of you and your husband. Where is he?’
The blood ran in Raub’s cheeks.
‘You are nothing, Frau Krause, without us. You are back in the gutter with the other Stasi scum dirt without us. Without us he is driving taxis, sweeping streets, selling insurance on commission, guarding building sites at night. Where has he gone?’
With slow, deliberate movements she eased two rings from her fingers – Goldstein remembered paying for the rings that Krause had chosen – and they sparkled in the palm of her hand. She unhooked the clasp of the gold bracelet – Raub had paid for the bracelet when he had first come to debrief Krause in Rostock – and it folded into the palm of her hand. She fiddled with the fastening of the strap of her wrist-watch – Raub and Goldstein had both been with her, on the orders of the senior official in Cologne, to buy the watch as a mark of his appreciation at the end of the first month of the debrief – and she let it fall into the palm of her hand.
‘The last time, Frau Krause, or it goes badly for you, or your attitude is reported, or you go back where you belong in the gutter. Where is he?’