The Bear's Tears (28 page)

"I think there were more than fifty of them," Miandad murmured.
"Including the wounded." Hyde turned to him, open-mouthed. "Including
two of his sons." He nodded his head at the man beyond Hyde.

"I - I —" Hyde began, but he could say nothing more. His mouth
remained open, as if expecting comment. What was it? What lurked at the
back of his mind like a shadow? Some book, was it? Conrad - Kurtz?
Heart
of Darkness, that was it…

Petrunin had become - a savage. A murdering savage. 'The
horror…
the horror', Kurtz had said of his own decline into savagery; or
the world's decline. Petrunin was Kurtz now. Once urbane, clever,
far-seeing, professional; now a butcher, and one who gloated. The camp
guard with the lampshades of Jewish skin…

Hyde retched, but nothing came.

There was a smell of burnt flesh, burnt people, reaching them
from
the floor of the valley, together with the faint aroma of chemicals.
The black eggs he had seen must have burst open on impact, spreading
the gas that he had been able to see as a mist. The spark dropped by
Petrunin's helicopter had ignited the mist that by then clung to
everything - especially to fleeing human skin and clothing. A
twelve-foot high box of fire, a prison of flame.

Mohammed Jan was standing over himself and Miandad. He spoke to
Miandad in Pushtu; perhaps two brief sentences. Hyde looked up into the
chieftain's face, above the cradled Lee Enfield. The whites of his eyes
gleamed, but Hyde could distinguish no expression on his face. Then he
turned and was gone.

"Come," Miandad said. "He wishes to speak with us. Of the
Russian."

Miandad got up and brushed off his trousers. Hyde rose weakly.
Turning slowly, he could see Mohammed Jan descending to the floor of
the valley, moving towards the charred remains of his two sons and
fifty of his Pathan subjects. Hyde dragged the cold air into his lungs.
There was a black, charred swathe through the valley; through the clean
snow that blanketed the high pass. Hyde found himself shivering. He had
always feared Petrunin. Now, he was terrified. He was in dark,
turbulent water, entirely out of his depth.

Paul Massinger carefully stamped the snow from his shoes at the
top
of the steps leading to the low wooden cabin. After the cries of an
unseen bird, more like a cough than a song, had faded, the taxi's
idling engine behind him made the only sound. The forest of dark-boled,
snow-laden pines seemed to crowd upon the cabin, threatening its
temporary occupation of the small clearing. There, no more than twenty
miles north of Helsinki, Massinger felt totally isolated, utterly
without resources.

He tugged at the bellrope. The noise of the bell suspended near
his
head reminded him of his own schooldays; his turn to be the bell
monitor. When the heavy sound died, he could hear no noise or movement
inside the house. His breath smoked, the air was chilly against his
face. The clearing was almost colourless; only black and white, trees
and snow. He shivered.

He rang the bell again, then shrugged at the taxi driver, who
seemed
uninterested; or interested only in his meter. Phillipson had answered
the telephone, had agreed to talk to him, albeit with some reluctance.
They had agreed the time, but now -

Footsteps?

"Who is it?" a voice asked. Its evident anxiety, even through
the
wooden door, chilled Massinger more deeply than the temperature.

"Massinger - Paul Massinger… we talked on the telephone —"

"I've nothing to say to you, Mr Massinger."

Massinger heard his own surprised, quickened breathing in the
silence that followed as if it were the noise of Phillipson's fear. The
man was evidently afraid - had been frightened…

Massinger ignored the idea. "Mr Phillipson - it could be
important,"
he said as levelly as he could, leaning confidentially towards the
rough, unpainted surface of the door. A strong lock, he noticed. "It
really could prove very important." He glanced behind him. No, the
driver wouldn't hear, not with the engine running. "It has to do with
the arrest of Kenneth Aubrey. I couldn't explain to you over the
telephone line, but…" He breathed deeply. He could hear, above the
engine of the taxi, the heavy, persistent silence of the small clearing
and the forest around it. It intimidated. He continued in what seemed a
small inadequate voice: "I'd like to explain it to you in detail - in
private, Mr Phillipson." He felt like an unsuccessful salesman.

"I have nothing to say to you - please go away."

"Mr Phillipson - what's the matter? Can I help? You can
certainly
help me."

"Please go away!" The voice was high enough to be described as a
shriek of protest. It was the voice of a child or a very old man.
Someone bullied —?

"Mr Phillipson —"

"No!"

"Please —!"

"Go away!"

Massinger knew that the taxi driver was watching him, that he
had
heard Phillipson's desperation and terror. Yes, it was terror.

Phillipson had spoken to someone - someone in Helsinki, London,
anywhere, it didn't matter - and that person had frightened him into
complete silence. That someone might —

Might be behind the door, standing next to the frightened
Phillipson, hand firmly upon his arm.

Massinger shivered. "Then be damned to you, Phillipson!" he
called
defiantly through the door before turning on his heel. The taxi
driver's head flicked round and the man stared through his windscreen.
Massinger stamped down the wooden steps, using his stick to make as
much noise as possible. The fading afternoon light between the massed
pines was like darkening smoke. The clearing seemed tiny, imprisoned.
Massinger wanted to hurry, to urge the driver to accelerate, but he
merely gestured wearily and said, "I'm afraid I'll have to change my
plans. Let's go back to Helsinki."

The driver nodded and let off the brake. The car's rear wheels
slipped slightly, then gripped with their studded tyres. Massinger did
not turn his head to look back at the lonely cabin as they bounced down
the rutted, snow-covered track towards the main road. No other tracks,
he told himself. You fool. There was no one else there.

He wouldn't have talked. He was afraid for his life.

He folded his arms tightly across his chest and tried to relax
into
his seat. The taxi turned onto the main road. There was a hurry of
traffic heading in the opposite direction, away from Helsinki. The
afternoon darkened into evening, a red sun little more than a thumbnail
on the horizon. The short winter day was already over. They passed
through Haarajoki, then joined the moottoritie into Helsinki.
The traffic thickened and headlights rushed at them out of the darkness.

Massinger gratefully allowed himself to doze, refusing to
acknowledge that somehow he had run out of will, energy, even purpose.
He hardly realised that the taxi left the motorway in the outer suburbs
of Helsinki, diverted because of an accident and the subsequent traffic
jam. Dimly, he glimpsed the grubby edges of the city; light industry's
chimneys, low factory blocks on snowbound plots that still appeared
scrubby, wire fences. Bungalows, tower blocks, two-storey houses
invested the spaces between the chimneys and the factories. His eyes
were open as they passed the circle of a concrete stadium, preyed upon
by its floodlights.

He dozed again, to be woken by the coughing of the taxi's
engine. It
faded, caught again, then died and the taxi began to slow down. The
driver steered it to the kerb, then turned to Massinger apologetically,
shrugging his meaning rather than speaking. Massinger pursed his
features and nodded impatiently. The driver got out and went to the
taxi's boot. Massinger saw him waving a petrol can at the window,
nodded again, and then watched him in the mirror as he began to trudge
back the way they had come. Massinger had no idea when they had last
passed a garage.

Massinger sighed. He had no desire to be left to his own devices
in
the back of a taxi in the suburbs of Helsinki. He was suddenly hungry,
and he needed the satisfying narcotic of alcohol - half a bottle of
good wine, if his hotel stocked any. He wanted something to stifle the
procession of speculations regarding Phillipson that had paraded
through his fitful dreams.

The driver had left his radio on after reporting his whereabouts
and
his delayed return. Its splutter of incomprehensible Finnish grated on
his nerves at first, but he found a superficial reassurance in it after
a while. It was normal; utterly normal. He settled further in his seat,
pulling his overcoat closer around him. The car was growing cold
without the heater.

There were houses and bungalows set back from the quiet road;
mere
slabs of darkness without feature, pricked or squared by lights.
Occasionally, a car passed him. His body continued to register the
rapid drop in temperature inside the car. The windscreen and the
windows began to steam over. He almost dozed again.

A bleep from the radio and another burst of Finnish woke him. He
stretched his eyes, and saw the car, parked without lights across the
quiet road from him. A pale Mercedes. He could see nothing behind the
dark windscreen, but he sensed people inside. It was parked on the main
road, not in the service road, and he knew it belonged to neither
resident nor visitor.

Then the voice on the radio began speaking in heavily-accented
English. It did not seem addressed to him - he knew it was but the
voice never made that clear — but it referred to him by name. It
referred to the taxi, to the taxi's delay, to the American passenger of
the taxi. It was the despatcher at the company office informing someone
of the temporary fate of the taxi Massinger had hired. Nothing more or
less than that. But the voice spoke in English which he knew he was
meant to understand and fear. Involuntarily, he glanced across the road
at the parked car. No lights, but then the flare of a lighter or match.
Then nothing again.

There was another scratch of static from the radio, followed by
mumbled messages, replies from the despatcher, all once more in
Finnish; incomprehensible. He fumbled with the handle, opened the door
and climbed out of the taxi. The air chilled him. He stood with his
hand still gripping the handle; whether for security or support he was
uncertain. The darkened Mercedes remained still and lifeless, gathering
menace. Two cars passed in quick succession, and then the road was
silent and empty once more. Massinger was aware of the tiny distance
that separated him from the Mercedes.

He stood there for minutes which had no precise shape or
division.
Then the headlights of the Mercedes flicked on and off three times, and
the engine fired. The car pulled out and away, heading north. Massinger
was gripped by a fear that it meant to make a U-turn and come back for
him, but its tail-lights eventually disappeared over a slight rise in
the straight road.

Massinger realised he was shivering uncontrollably, with relief
and
with the lingering sense of menace. Someone was trying very seriously
to frighten him - had frightened him. He opened the door of the taxi
and slumped like a boneless old man into the back seat. His heart was
racing. He felt nauseous, weak and unwell, and pressed his hand against
his thumping chest as if to quiet it. He felt perspiration growing
chill on his forehead and around the collar of his shirt. He no longer
wanted to go on with it or have anything at all to do with the fate of
Kenneth Aubrey.

If she kept her eyes closed, tightly closed for just one more
moment, her father would walk out of that bright, wet haze where her
tears refracted the sunlight through the branches of the old tree. It
wouldn't just be Simmonds in the Bentley, or even Mummy sitting in the
deep rear seat - it would be her father, smiling…

Margaret Massinger snapped upright in her chair, lifting her
head,
shaking it to remove the insidious past. Present, she reminded herself.
Her attitude was still childlike, unevolved since the age of six, since
times like the one she had just remembered, the end of the 1947 summer
term at school. Even many months later, she still believed he would
come. Mummy had made certain of that.

The body in the ruins that had been identified as that of Robert
Castleford, in 1951, had been as much of a shock as if he had been
murdered that day or the previous one. She had never been allowed to
imagine that her father was dead or would not return - not for a single
moment in five years. And he had indeed come back - as a hideous
skeleton whose grinning, broken skull she had seen in grainy monochrome
in a newspaper photograph. The placards had borne his name for days,
the teachers and some of the older girls at school had reminded her by
their looks and words for many weeks. Mummy had never coped with it.
She had shut it out. To her, he would always, one philandering or
amnesiac day, return to her; as he always had done.

After the sanatorium, the hospital, the mortuary, and finally
the
cemetery, her mother was buried next to the grinning skull of her
husband. Margaret went to live with her paternal grandmother, where her
relatives had, by degrees, explained her father to her. A warm man.
Unfaithful, often. Everyone had assumed, without voicing the thought,
that it had been a woman in Berlin who had been instrumental in his
disappearance. Even after 1951, that assumption had continued. He had
been killed by a jealous husband, another lover, by an enraged or
abandoned woman.

It was her mother's image of him, however, that indelibly
remained;
the fictitious, idealised portrait of husband and father that so suited
her years and her sense of loss. And it still continued plaguing and
paining her.

Throughout her adult life, she had been able to comprehend her
attitude to her father, explain it rationally to herself. Like stunted
growth. Yet, like dwarfism, it was impossible to grow out of or beyond.
She had only her child's veneration, nurtured in the hothouse
atmosphere of her mother's quiet madness. Mummy had never admitted him
to be less than a saint, a minor god. Never permitted any other view of
Robert Castleford as her reason slipped beneath dark water.