What was the matter with the woman in the bathroom?

During the beginning of The Defector (orig.: L'espion) Prof. Bower enters his hotel room and surprises a naked woman that is taking a bath in his bathroom. She excuses herself and says that she's living one floor up, her bathroom is not working and she thought this room to be empty. She then leaves the sightly perplexed Bower in a towel and seems to head to her room. Yet on the floor in front of Bower's room she is called into another room by a man standing in an open door.

I wonder what this scene was all about, since it isn't picked up at any later point in the story and I'm not sure what to make of all this. Was this really just a distraction without any relevance to the rest of the plot or was there more to it that I just didn't get? Was this already part of the Stasi's attempt to turn Bower crazy? Or maybe it was a dropped story arc and the source novel might give some explanation.