The Bear's Tears (40 page)

But him —? Him —

He was skulking away from England. The wind now seemed like an
obscuring curtain drawn between himself and the lights of Brighton. The
wake of the ferry straggled away into the darkness like a lost hope.
Him
—

He thought of them, then. The others. The secret others. The
notorious ones, most of whom he had known or met or questioned at some
time. William Joyce, sitting detached and even amused in the dock of
the Old Bailey after the war. Lord Haw-Haw, voiceless. Then Fuchs, then
Burgess and Maclean and
Philby
and Blake and Blunt, and others behind them. It was as if he had become
a dream through which they paraded, much as the Duke of Clarence had
seen the ghosts of those he had helped his brother to murder on the
night they came to drown him in the butt of wine. He saw his own
ghosts, who seemed to wish to number him among them. Traitors.

Aubrey knew he was full of self-pity. He looked down at the
choppy,
churned water as if it offered escape, then sniffed loudly. He was
filled with anger, too. More than forty years of loyalty. When Joyce
and Mosley had become Fascists and Blunt and the others had become
Communists in secret, he had enlisted in the service of his country.

And now his country was slipping away below the horizon, only a
haze
of lights to remind him of its position, its existence. He was going
into exile. When they discovered him gone, they would search for him,
then they would wait until the mole popped its head above ground in
Moscow to collect its medals and state pension.

In the darkness, too, he heard the laughter of his father, that
ugly, exultant barking at the misfortunes and come-uppances of others
that had served him as a source of satisfaction for as long as Aubrey
could remember. The verger had hated the secret life, and Aubrey had
often suspected that he had escaped into it to put a final and complete
barrier between himself and his father. Perhaps he might not have been
able to keep it from his mother, but she died while he was still at
school. His increasingly infrequent visits to his father had been
filled with that abiding satisfaction, that his whole adult life was a
secret from his vindictive parent. Now, years after his death, his
laughter at his son's downfall could be heard on the dark wind.

The noises of teenage horseplay - someone threatening to throw
someone else overboard, he thought - interrupted his reverie. His body
was chilled anew by the wind and the company. One of the group lurched
into him, reeling from the spring of one of his companions. Aubrey
shrivelled away from the contact. He clenched his lips to prevent an
escaping moan of protest.

"Sorry, Grandad," a black face said, and disappeared laughing.
Aubrey felt his whole body shaking. He gripped the rail fiercely. The
wake seemed to fade close to the ship. Brighton was a smudge of lights,
no more. He shuddered with cold and self-pity and fear. England
continued to slide beneath the sea like a damaged vessel.

He turned his back on it, and went forward again, towards the
lights
and noise and sleepers in the lounge.

The British Airways Trident dropped out of the low, clinging
grey
cloud only hundreds of feet above the runways of Flughafen Koln-Bonn.
No more than minutes later, Massinger and his wife were hurrying across
twenty yards of cold tarmac to the terminal building from the aircraft.
As she followed Massinger, who moved urgently yet without real purpose,
Margaret puzzled at his strange, withdrawn mood, his constant
half-smiles tinged with guilty sadness, his reassuring pats on the back
of her hand. He seemed to wish to comfort her - or was it that he
wished to promise something? Margaret was confused. Paul seemed
distracted rather than tense or excited. For herself, she was relaxed
after the tensions of their flight from Heathrow. She knew that no one
was especially interested in them, that there would be, in all
probability, no secret watchers. But she had not been able to believe
it, not for whole calm minutes at once. Small tensions heated her body,
tickled or twitched at her arms and legs and face. She hated Paul's
secret world until they boarded their flight and the Trident lifted
into the anonymity of grey cloud, then through to a uniformly blue sky
above a white cloud-carpet. Then, with a gin and tonic, she had begun
to relax.

But Paul —? She could not tell what seemed to be driving him. He
had
spent most of the night at the Australian's flat in Earl's Court, using
the untapped telephone to talk to Wolfgang Zimmermann. Shelley had been
there, too. Margaret had been unable to rest. She had packed and
repacked in an attempt at self-therapy until Paul had returned to
Wilton Crescent.

The passenger lounge was warm, as was the baggage hall. Their
suitcases inched towards them along a conveyor belt, the building
around them whispered and purred in its efficiency. Paul Massinger
stood near his wife, intensely aware of her even as he concentrated on
their suitcases, wobbling like targets pulled on wires across a
shooting range. Now that he appeared even to himself to be safely out
of England, his guilt had increased sharply, like the return of a
virus. He knew he had to establish the truth of Castleford's death, and
that he had to persuade Wolfgang Zimmermann to help him. He had to
know. By knowledge, by the truth alone, could he repay his wife's
loyalty, her decision to throw in her lot with him, believing as she
did that he was helping the man who had murdered her father. To repay
that…

There was only one way. The truth, even if the truth damned
Aubrey.

"Mr Massinger?" a slightly-accented voice enquired beside him.
His
body jumped with surprise. He turned. "I'm Wolfgang Zimmermann," the
tall man offered, handing Massinger his ID with what appeared to be
amusement. Then the German took off his fur hat, doffing it to
Margaret. "Mrs Massinger - welcome to the Federal Republic." His
identification of the political reality of West Germany was formal yet
intense. Zimmermann's diffidence, Massinger guessed, was little more
than superficial. Massinger shook his hand warmly.

"Thank you for meeting us - thank you for your offer of help,"
he
said, smiling.

Zimmermann released his hand. He stood perhaps two inches taller
than the American. Massinger could see in him the ability and charm
that had, at one time, made him indispensible to ex-Chancellor Vogel.
He could also see a sleepless night in the smudges beneath his keen
blue eyes. "I have made a start," Zimmermann offered. "There is, as you
will imagine, a great deal of material to cover. I have my car outside.
I will drive you to your hotel. I thought we might set up our
headquarters —" Again, there was the persistence of some secret
amusement in Zimmermann, as if the disappointment of his political
hopes in the collapse of the Berlin Treaty had left him detached from,
and amused at, the antics of the body politic. "— if Mrs Massinger has
no objections, of course?" he added.

Margaret smiled and shook her head. Then she said, "I've come to
help, if I can. Paul's life is in danger until this business is cleared
up." She looked at Zimmermann levelly.

"Quite," he agreed with a slight bow. "Come, I will take one of
the
suitcases, and we shall make our way to the car park." He picked up
Margaret's pale blue leather case and went ahead of them.

Outside the airport buildings, the wind clipped and tousled them
coldly. There was snow in the air. Zimmermann led them to a grey
Mercedes and unlocked the rear door, gesturing them in.

A minute later, he turned the car south-west onto the autobahn
to
the Rhine and Bonn. Beside Zimmermann on the passenger seat, Massinger
saw a heaped, neat pile of folders, envelopes and ring-binders. As if
sensing his curiosity, Zimmermann patted the heap.

"A little preliminary sifting," he explained with a chuckle.
"The
BfV, fortunately, do not keep as much paper from the past as the Abwehr
once did. You, Mr Massinger, were too young for G-2?"

"Post-war experience only," Massinger agreed.

"CIA. A somewhat distinguished record."

"You've checked of course."

"My apologies. My curiosity, not my suspicious nature. My old
acquaintance Aubrey is lucky to have you for a friend." He was silent
for a time, as if studying the heavy midday traffic, then he added: "As
I, too, was lucky to have him - a man of such skill and such loyalty. I
was very saddened - even alarmed - at what recently occurred. Surely
your MI5 does not really believe it? It is - quite preposterous."

"As was your own frame-up by the Chinese - and the Americans,"
Massinger snapped, leaning forward in his seat.

"Out of bounds - I'm sorry," Zimmermann said.

"I apologise."

"Don't mention it."

They drove on towards Bonn in silence for a time. An airport bus
rushed past them. As always, the newness of most of the cars struck
Massinger. They were worn on the country's roads and autobahns like
badges of merit and success, even with the German economy in a
recession.

Evidently, Zimmermann regarded his own experiences as verboten,
even though they so nearly parallelled those of Aubrey. Someone was
framing the head of SIS just as someone had tried to frame Zimmermann
as a Russian agent. Zimmermann had survived, in part because Aubrey
exposed the frame-up - but Aubrey would not survive his trap. Unless —

Zimmermann had been labelled, during his crisis, as a second
Gunther
Guillaume. And it was the last days of freedom of that same Gunther
Guillaume that might hold the truth of
Teardrop
. Might. Just
might.

Zimmermann was speaking once more.

"… a number of areas of interest, Mr Massinger. The World Cup
was,
of course, a time of detailed cooperation. My service was most
concerned to avoid a repetition of '72 in Munich - at all costs to
prevent such another tragedy. There were a number of people, apart from
Mr Aubrey, in and out of Bonn over a period of weeks, even months.
Also, there was, I gather, some internal investigation in the British
embassy, regarding accounts or funding - I'm not sure of the details.
No security implications, however…"

Massinger listened with a polite, non-committal half-attention
while
he considered how he might raise the subject of Berlin and Castleford's
murder. Surely there must be people still in BfV who might have been
there, people Aubrey had used? He had to do it. Now, more than ever, he
owed it to Margaret.

They crossed the Rhine via the Kennedybrücke. The river was
stormily
grey beneath the leaden, snow-filled sky. Massinger noticed that the
windscreen wipers of the Mercedes had been switched to intermittent,
clearing the first snow flakes. Mistily, wintrily, the group of
buildings that comprised the federal parliament, the Bundeshaus, and
the residences of the Chancellor and the President appeared white and
isolated in their parkland on the far bank. Massinger watched as
Zimmermann's head turned sharply, then straightened to look ahead once
more. It was the glance of an exile.

A minute later, Zimmermann was turning the car off the
Adenauerallee
into the forecourt of the Hotel Konigshof. Ten minutes after that, the
three of them were ensconced in a spacious suite that looked towards
the river - black long barges sliding through the tactile-looking
steel-grey water - the heap of files and envelopes spread out on the
large low coffee-table. Zimmermann, having carried the documents to
their suite, showed no inclination to leave. Massinger felt himself
organised, playing a subordinate role; a fact for which he felt a
strange gratitude, as if his burden had been lightened. Margaret seemed
prepared to begin working to Zimmermann's direction like someone
drafted in to do an unpleasant, even distasteful job. Someone who was
stoically determined to see the matter through.

She poured drinks for them - a gin and tonic and two whiskies.
Then
they seated themselves around the heaped files, as if ready to open the
parcels that contained their belated Christmas presents.

"Shall we begin?" Zimmermann asked, removing a notebook from the
pile. "You understand, this is only a preliminary selection of the
material. I have some very enthusiastic, but not necessarily
experienced young men who work for me. I think we can make a better job
than they could." He splayed his fingers on the top file. "Mr
Massinger… ?" he invited.

"What are we looking for?" Margaret asked, putting down her
glass. A
barge hooted on the grey river. Sleet melted against the window, traced
snail-tracks down the huge pane of glass. "Are you familiar with the
actual arrest of this man Guillaume?"

Zimmermann's face pursed; Massinger could not be certain whether
the
reaction was a personal one, or some national distaste or hurt. "I am,"
he replied.

"Then, do you think there was - was someone here who tried to
help
Guillaume?" she blurted.

Zimmermann nodded. "I do. And I do not think it was Aubrey.
Incidentally, with regard to your father —" Zimmermann was already
turning towards Massinger, who leaned forward in eagerness.

"I'm not here to discuss that," Margaret snapped. The window was
obscured by snail-tracks now, themselves interrupted or made to adopt
new courses as large flakes of snow burst silently against the glass.
The river was hardly decipherable in the distance. The room was warm
behind its double glazing. "I'm here because my husband's safety is at
stake."

A glance she resented passed between the two men, and then
Zimmermann said with a slight nod of his head: "I'm sorry. Let me
clarify the events of April '74. Guillaume was arrested by officers of
the BfV - our security service, like MI5 in England - on the night of
April 23rd. He had been under suspicion for some time before that. BfV
recommended to Chancellor Brandt that he be allowed to continue in
office as one of his close advisers, hoping that the man would
eventually betray his network and his control - his pipeline into the
DDR or even to Moscow…" Massinger nodded. Margaret, leaning her chin on
her fist, listened intently as to a new and exciting teacher. She
looked, Massinger realised, almost childlike. He realised that her
untroubled, rapt features betrayed how much of her self and her past
lay buried at that moment. She was working only with the surface of her
mind and feelings. "… I would not have done that. However, what it
meant was that, though the Chancellor continued to use Guillaume, even
to trust him because he discounted much of the BfV's evidence for many
months before April '74, the man himself was put under very close
surveillance."