The Bear's Tears (54 page)

"But you escaped?"

"I did."

"How?"

"With help. People who helped me because they could not afford
to
see me broken. My people. It was during one of my transfers
from prison to their headquarters - Elsenreith's office, to be exact.
The car was ambushed and I was smuggled away from the scene and back
into the Allied Sector."

"And that's it?" Massinger asked. "All of it?"

Aubrey shook his head softly, but Margaret caught the gesture.

"What else is there?" she challenged.

"My dear - there is no easy way to tell you this. The
information
that Elsenreith gave me - that he had promised me as a lure and
supplied out of amusement because it was intended I should never be
free to use it - was the name of the man in the Allied Sector into
whose care and protection he consigned those kameraden who
periodically embarrassed him by appearing with demands for help."

Hatred was clear on Margaret's face. "And —? And —?"

"My dear, it was your father…"

"No!" she wailed, and yet Massinger knew that, hearing it from
Aubrey, she had immediately begun to believe it. Believing him to be
her father's murderer, she had also in her own mind to believe all he
confessed.

"How could he?" Margaret sobbed, but she wished only
to
hear of opportunity, not motive.

"It was easy for him, my dear. He was in command of so much
valuable
paperwork. New identities were easy."

"Then why?"

"Because he was a soul in torment," Aubrey announced. The words,
the
compassion with which they were said, stunned Massinger. "A soul in the
most grievous torment."

"Oh God," Margaret sighed lifelessly.

"And?" Massinger pressed.

"I killed him."

The words hung in the still, warm air of the room, followed by a
silence that seemed endless, inescapable. Massinger thought they would
remain forever at this exact stage of emotion and knowledge. He could
not see ahead, or see beyond.

Eventually, Margaret said in a stilted, dull voice: "You are his
murderer, then?"

Aubrey nodded gravely. "In the struggle, it was the pressure of
my
finger that squeezed the trigger of his gun. Yes, my dear, I am guilty
of your father's death."

Margaret seemed spent. She neither moved nor spoke in reply. Her
face was turned into the armchair, her legs ungainly spread out, her
feet turned awkwardly, as if she had been thrown into the chair. One
shoe was half off her foot. She might have been a costume dummy
rejected by a fashionable shop.

Massinger cleared his throat and said, "What hold could they
have
had over him, Kenneth? How could they make him do it?"

Aubrey spread his hands. "Quite easily," he said. "What he
confessed
to me, I believed. He had known many prominent German diplomats and
soldiers and civil servants before the war. Many of them became his
friends, as they did of many Englishmen of his class in the 'thirties -
our age of innocence. At Cliveden, in London - parties, operas, shows,
brothels, hunts, shoots… the same faces. Hopeful, confident, blond
young men. Castleford admired, imitated, sympathised. Oh, I don't think
he did much more than many others. Certainly, there is no suggestion
that he was false once war was declared, even though he thought it
lunacy on behalf of Poland, and further and greater madness when we
allied ourselves with barbarian Russia in '41."

"But, before… ?"

Aubrey waved his hand for Massinger to desist. "I think only
indiscretions, loose talk - no secrets. No more than a friend at court,
so to speak."

"So - what hook did they have in him in 1946?"

"A generous gesture. An old friend, one of the blond young men
from
Cliveden and all the other country houses and the brothels, appeared.
He recognised Castleford in the street. He'd been skulking about the
city for weeks, a hunted man… you can hear it pouring out, I imagine?"
Massinger nodded. "Castleford helped him with a set of forged identity
papers which described him as a Pole - a former POW, now a displaced
person. The man got away. And sent his friends, one after the other. An
endless queue, all wanting new papers, new identities. You see, we'd
been catching a lot of the smaller fry whose papers were second-rate
and poorly produced. They needed other outlets, fresh supplies. English
papers, duly signed by Castleford and people he controlled who were not
in the know. Elsenreith sent people, too. Probably, he sent people like
himself, SS now working for the Russians. I had to plug the leak, close
up the hole. I don't know whether or not the first young man who
approached Castleford - he'd whored with him, shot with him, ridden
with him, got drunk with him, I heard all this from Castleford - was
genuine or a trap. He served the purpose of a trap, anyway."

"And so it went on?"

"For almost a year. Long before I got to Berlin. I didn't know
why
Castleford disliked me so much from the outset. I think now he was
afraid of me. Clara - our involvement with her - was a blind-alley. She
explains nothing, except perhaps the chance Castleford saw of winning
her over and using her to keep a check on me. It never reached that
stage."

"What happened - at the end?" Massinger breathed. He saw
Margaret
become immediately alert. The room was already becoming dark beneath
the late afternoon's leaden sky. The windows rattled slightly in the
gusts of wind. Yet he could quite clearly see her shoulders tense, her
head become more upright.

"A struggle for the gun. I had listened to him for what seemed
like
hours. I had come to charge him, arrest him. Even when I saw the gun, I
imagined his suicide, so desperate and tormented did he seem. Instead,
he intended to kill me. We struggled, and he was killed. He died almost
at once. It took me many hours, almost until daylight, to hide the body
in a cellar and bring about the collapse of enough remaining masonry to
effectively bury him. That is what happened. I have, if you wish to see
it, a fuller written record which Clara has kept for me for almost
forty years. I came here, desperate to destroy it." He looked directly
at Margaret. She was watching him like a creature prepared to spring.
"Now, you may have it, if you wish. It is yours by right, I almost
think…"

Margaret lunged out of her chair, her loose shoe almost tripping
her. She stood in front of Aubrey, fists clenched, her whole body
quivering, shoulders hunched towards him. Her small frame threatened
him. Aubrey sat very still, his face tired but still wearing the
sadly-wise, apologetic expression it had worn during much of his
narrative. It seemed to defeat any physical intention on her part.
Instead, she scrabbled her missing shoe onto her foot and immediately
plunged towards the doors as if escaping a fire.

Massinger stood up. "Margaret —!"

She slammed the doors violently behind her. Massinger made as if
to
follow her, limping suddenly from the renewed ache in his hip.

"Paul!" Aubrey warned. "Paul - not yet. Let her have a little
time
to herself."

Massinger was halfway to the doors, alert for the noises of
Margaret's retreat, then his shoulders slumped and he turned towards
Aubrey.

"You're right," he admitted. "I wouldn't know what to say to
her.
You're right…"

"The Elsenreith woman's gone out - there's only a maid in the
place,
apart from our friends."

"We can't involve the maid or her mistress, Wilkes - not at this
stage. They're Austrian citizens. You're certain all three of them are
there? Aubrey himself is there?"

"All three."

"Then you'd better get on with it. Take them to the house. Keep
them
there until I arrive."

"Very good."

"Be careful with the maid. And with your cover story. For the
moment, the Massingers are only being detained in connection with their
attempts to aid and abet Aubrey. Nothing more than that. Whatever they
think or say to the contrary, that's your story."

"Understood. When will you be here?"

"Tomorrow - I have a number of important committees and
appointments. Just hold them until I arrive."

"Very good."

She was dazed by her misery and by the betrayal she felt taking
place within herself; parts of her mind - memory, thought, feeling,
intuition, guilt - were already siding with Aubrey, accepting the
terrible, haunted figure her father had become at the end. She had
begun accepting the struggle with the gun, the intention to murder that
Aubrey had recognised almost too late…

She struggled into her coat, dropped her handbag in the hall,
gathered it up and clutched it against her, fumbling with her buttons.
She pushed against the door, then remembered to pull the latch. The
darkening air outside was chilly, empty. She went out into the
courtyard. The fountain sprayed out almost horizontally in a gust of
wind, the green plants looked dead as their leaves moved stiffly. The
cold wind buffeted her, as if attempting to force her back into the
house. She had seen the bodies rolled into the mass grave filled with
lime on the grainy newsreel as Aubrey was speaking, the bulldozer's
blade shovelling at the white, stick-like limbs and the lolling
skull-like faces. The awful striped pyjamas and the Stars of David…

Now, the image would not leave her. She had seen it first as a
child, part of a documentary history of the war on television. Now, it
had become personal, attached to her like a leech or a disease. She
could not rid herself of it. Her father did not deserve the image, not
now that she knew the whole and exact truth, but everything to do with
him was horrible, awful, foul…

She scuttled beneath the archway into the Stephansplatz. The
cathedral's bulk was grim and sooty in the dark air, its darkness
heightened by the street-lamps. Horrible. A soul in torment.
Even the man who had gone to arrest him, who had killed him, had said
that. Everything lost - he had lost everything - helping them
-!

The voices of relatives pursued her across the Stephansplatz.
Aunts
and uncles, grandparents - even her grandmother on her mother's side -
especially her, because her father had been anti-Semitic, that much she
knew. He had admired the Nazis, befriended them - yes, she knew that,
too. In the 'thirties, he had not been like many other brilliant young
men - he had eschewed Communism from the beginning of his student days.

The voices clashed and reiterated in her head, and her shoulders
and
head ducked as if to avoid the missile-voices in the dark windy air
just above her. Hurrying across the square in the beginnings of the
rush-hour, she looked old, weak, and pursued by an invisible cloud of
stinging insects.

The hardest knowledge of all was to know that he had been
destroyed
long before he was killed. That knowledge erased, cancelled out,
expunged
all other images of him, all his earlier manifestations. He was no
longer the man she remembered, the man her mother.had gone mad through
loss of… the man smiling into the camera and the sun or coming through
the dappled light beneath the apple trees towards her childish swing…

Up, up - further, further - push harder, harder…

Their joined laughter on the summer air. Her dress flying up in
the
breeze of her upswing, obscuring the view of the Downs, his hands
catching at the seat of the swing lightly, then pushing strongly -
catching the ropes of the swing at last, when she was giddy and almost
frightened - catching her in his arms…

He was gone, that father. It was darker here, and musty rather
than
fresh. The air was still… All those fathers were gone.

Destroyed. Robert Castleford had disintegrated.

Still, musty air. The reflected glow of street-lamps through
high
windows. Patterned windows. High, unearthly voices, as from the distant
end of a tall tunnel.

She shook her head. More images of distress. She went on shaking
her
head, twisting her body as if she were held powerfully from behind. She
was trying to escape the truth, deny it —

Because she believed!

She believed Aubrey. He had confessed to her father's murder.
The
rest of it, too, was the truth. Truth from an old man. She knew it was
true. Just as she knew her father had been to Cliveden, had travelled
and stayed with influential friends in Germany in 1937 - she had seen
the snapshots; dead boars, wooden hunting lodges, feathered green hats
and leather shorts or green plus-fours - black uniforms, too… her
father had been laughing in almost every picture… her maternal
grandmother had been half-Jewish and now she understood the old, old
woman's suspicions of her son-in-law.

She believed it all.

She recognised her surroundings for the first time, as if she
had
only that moment opened her eyes. The cathedral - the Stephansdom. The
great roof, the slender nave, the chancel - the musty, cold, still air,
the boy trebles whose voices floated just below the roof.

It was something she did not believe. There was no comfort for
her
here, except that it was out of that apartment and out of the wind and
she was almost alone. She sat wearily, perching herself on the edge of
a chair, as if about to kneel on the hassock at her feet. She listened
to the anthem, and the organ quietly decorating it. Dusty lights glowed
faintly, running down towards the high altar. Gold gleamed dully, paint
obtruded shapeless colour in patches and glimpses. There was nothing
for her here —

Except the almost quiet, the almost stillness…

When she noticed that the choir and the organ had become silent,
and
that she was cold, despite her coat - her legs especially were chilly -
she looked around her, then at her watch. It was almost six-thirty.
Immediately, she thought of Paul, and she looked about anxiously, as if
expecting to see him close at hand. She thought, too, of Aubrey, and of
the written account he had promised her. She did not want it. She would
tell him so. He could destroy it, if it helped him.