‘You take him on the street. You are like a pimp with a whore. You sell him.’
What he had done was for her. Krause laid the album with the empty pages back on her lap. From the first day he had always told himself, he had gone to Cologne for her, and made his statement. He went to the wooden cabinet beside the television set for which he had the only key. He took the video-cassette, knelt and slotted it into the recorder. He switched on the recorder and the television. He would say to himself, and he would believe the lie, that everything he had done was for her.
He stood, again, behind her, his hands heavy on her shoulders, and watched, as the old clothes were ripped from her body, her kneeling in front of his friend, her loosening the belt and trousers of his best friend, her taking Pyotr Rykov in her mouth… She did not fight him. She did not turn away her head or close her eyes.
The week after he had shot dead Hans Becker in the small square near the church at Rerik, he had been called into the office of the Generalleutnant in the building on August-Bebel Strasse and he had been given the video-cassette. He left her watching the monochrome images of loving and laughter.
He told Christina that her mother was not well and should not be disturbed. He drove his daughter to school, and they talked in the car about the tennis match in the evening.
The station chief drove.
She had dressed herself that morning with particular consideration. Olive Harris had left in her bag, stowed in the locked boot of the station chief’s car, her scarf and the hat that was a memento of her previous times in Moscow. They would have obscured her face and the profile of her head, would have hindered recognition of her features. It was her style to leave utile to chance.
A light snow squall fell on the street. She peered between the wipers, recognizing what she had reconnoitred the night before. The shops were still shuttered but the first queues of the day had formed. The first market stalls were being set up and the vegetables laid out. She made the gesture for the station chief to slow. The shift duty of the watchers was changing. They should allow the new surveillance team time to settle and absorb. Two hundred metres down the straight street, blurred by the snow squall, was the old apartment block that she recognized where the target of consequence lived. They had not spoken that morning. He had been waiting in the hallway of the embassy for her. She had no need to speak to him. If the fool cared to sulk… They drove past the new surveillance car, three men, and the front passenger had a camera slung loose on a strap hanging from his neck. She pointed to where he should park ahead of the car, splitting the distance between the surveillance position and the street door of the apartment. The car would have a clear line of sight on them.
They waited. She had expected that a ministry car would be outside the street door. She had the photograph of him. He would be wearing uniform. She had no doubt that she would recognize him.
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
