The dark eyes were liquid suddenly, shimmering, the mouth parted and the tips of the sharp teeth touching together, the small face drawn into a rictus, fierce, vulpine, carnal.
'I can imagine,' I said.
Third time lucky: I'd creased the rear ends of a Fiat and a VW last night and toyed with schweinfleisch and sauerkraut in two shifts and hadn't got anywhere, but this was the one I wanted, manic, obsessed and pro-Gorbachev.
''That surprised me.' She was still twisted in her chair, watching me.
'What did?'
'My reference to orgasm.'
'When feelings get intense enough, there's nowhere else they can finish up.'
'You don't seem,' she said, 'the kind of man who lets his brakes fail.'
Still watching me, her eyes dipping to my mouth, lifting to my eyes again.
'It didn't have to look like a pickup.'
'But that isn't all it is.'
'No.'
The man in the moth-eaten fur hat had been sitting opposite, under the portraits of Lenin and Honecker; now he was leaving, shrugging to his coat. I'd been checking him, because he'd come in here soon after I had; but I was satisfied; he'd sat too close, and was known here, a regular. And Werneuchen Air Force Base was eighteen kilometres from Berlin and I'd driven here with enough feints and detours to arrive totally clean. That was essential. Back in Berlin I would have to leave myself open again, but I was here to get information and I didn't want to be disturbed.
'I'm not the type,' she said, 'that men want to pick up.'
'Most men are conservative.'
In a moment, her eyes still on me, 'I think we have a lot in common. You're very disciplined. So am I.'
'I don't take it. But I could give it.'
'I'm more complicated,' she said, 'than that.'
I looked for the boy in the apron. 'Would you like some more coffee?'
'No. I'm going now. Will you come with me?'
'Of course.'
Underberg, black, bitter, gold-rimmed on the surface, the German version of Fernet Branca, lighter but not much, in a shot-glass, scented, viscid.
Light came from slits in a shutter, blue light falling across black leather, black silk, turning the smoke milky, the tendril of smoke curling from the incense in the black lacquer bowl. A single gold eye, fixed in the brow of a mask on the wall, watched.
'There are these,' she said, the blue light dwelling on pale skin and the darkness of coarse hair, the shadows sculpting the long lines of muscle.
Metal glinted, chased, knurled, cloisonne; the smell of leather came into the air, underlying the sandalwood and the emanations from her body.
'Where did you get them?'
'I collect them.'
It wasn't an answer. Heat came in waves from a floor unit, the thermostat cutting on and off.
'How did you get them through the customs?'
'Are you serious? They were smuggled in from Poland.'
Faintly, from inside the building, the voice of the guardian. Someone coming in late.
'Feel this,' she said. 'Feel it now.'
The thermostat cut on, cut off. Try this one, look how they made it. Have you ever seen such imagination? There was no fierceness in her now, in this different aspect of her obsessiveness; she became loosened, languid, pliant. I wasn't uninterested; the libido is linked with the urgent needs of the psyche, not the body, and there were the same dark reaches in her that were in me, the same urge to go beyond the knowable. Here was the demesne not of Eros but Thanatos, and this had nothing to do with the creation of life, but with the expression of the fear of death.
She masked herself and unmasked, during the night hours, revealing herself in a way that left her with a nakedness that seared the nerves.
I'm taking so much risk, she said again and again, and this was the nucleus of her innermost identity, the dark heart of the vortex: she talked of risk as she talked of love, and I had the thought, at some time before dawn, that in this brief exposition of her psyche she was expressing the same pathological drives that had goaded me into mission after mission, each time seeking the ultimate experience — a kiss from death.
She made coffee and we drank it in the first pooling of daylight that came through the shutters. She looked sated, drained, liberated.
'This brave new world of yours,' I said, 'isn't some kind of facade?'
'I know it seems contradictory, but no, it's all I live for. It's an intellectual concept, nothing to do with — what goes on underneath.'
So I told her there was a major threat to General-Secretary Gorbachev and that she could help to defuse it by tunnelling immediately into the substructure of Werneuchen Airforce Base and looking for any changes of plan in its routine training operations during the next four days. I gave her the number of my room at the hotel and told her to use the code-name Renata.
11: MIRROR
Twelve noon: meeting with Yasolev.
I'm not absolutely sure, but at that time I think he was ready to cancel Quickstep and tell us to get out of Berlin. 'We wanted information.' Standing with his feet placed solidly apart to balance him. 'We now have information. We should act upon it.' Thick square hands chopping at the air.
'It's not exactly information,' Cone said quietly.
'It has been confirmed that the target is Gorbachev. Your department has alerted you to Werneuchen Airforce Base and its bombers as a possible threat.'
'It's just possibilities, Viktor, not information.'
'In any case,' I said, 'I've got someone working for us at Werneuchen.'
'Who?' His eyes sunk deep under their brows, defensive, impatient. I believe he might have thought we were trying to play down the few shreds we had to work with, for our own reasons. Yasolev hadn't been trained to trust people.
'One of the officers,' I said, 'in their administration.'
'An agent-in-place?'
Cone looked down. I didn't answer. Yasolev tilted his head, didn't persist. London and the KGB were working in liaison for a single mission, and that didn't mean exposing our networks. Nor was I going to blow 'Renata'.
'I can send ten agents into Werneuchen.'
'We know.' Cone, hunched forward, hands lost in his pockets, watching Yasolev intently. 'You can send fifty in, and the whole of the personnel is going to close up like crabs, and you — '
'Going to shut their mouths,' I said, because Cone's Russian was patchy and he'd meant clams — molluski — and I didn't want any misunderstandings. Yasolev was tricky enough to handle as it was.
'That's right,' Cone said, 'and you wouldn't get anything out of them.'
Yasolev was quiet for a bit, looking anywhere but at us, at the Wall through the window, at the tea tray with its cups still upside down, at the carpet with its cigarette-burns and its worn threads. We hadn't poured any tea; we didn't even sit down; the tension was keeping us on our feet like puppets with their wires jammed.