The Bear's Tears

been made out of desperation.

'No, I don't.'

'How is the old man?'

'Aubrey? Afraid — running out of hope, I think,' he replied with deliberation.

'Aren't we all, sport?'

'Hyde — why can't you come in? It is a question of can't, isn't it?'

Hyde was silent for a moment. The morning spilled pale sunlight across the dark green carpet of Ros's lounge. It touched the back of the sleeping tortoiseshell cat. Massinger sensed immediately that the woman had brought Hyde's cat to her flat for safety — from what she would not have been able to explain.

Then Hyde blurted out: 'I'm running from our side — comical, isn't it?'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean — collusion between the KGB and SIS. Look, Massinger, I'm as good as dead—!' Hyde's voice broke on the word, like a dinghy against a rock. Massinger sensed the utter weariness of the Australian, his collision with the brick-wall dead-end of hope and will. He was at the end of his tether.

'I don't understand you…'

'You don't fucking well understand?' Hyde yelled. His voice seemed to move closer, be in the room together with the scent of his fear and the desperation that must be on his face. 'I don't give a fuck if you understand! Vienna Station tried to terminate me — terminate, as in finish, bump off, kill …!' Massinger heard Hyde's dry throat swallow, then: 'I tried to come in… I knew the old man wanted help… I rang the Station, gave the proper idents…' There was no way in which Hyde could stop himself talking now. His boat was leaking, and he was drowning. He had lost control of his situation and himself, now that the faint possibility of escape had gleamed; help had whispered down the international telephone lines. 'Ten minutes later, the KGB turned up, and they were loaded for 'roos. They wanted me dead — they must have wanted me silent on the subject of Kapustin's watching the whole arrest…'

Some dramatist's instinct warned Hyde that he had laid out sufficient of his mysterious wares for the present, and he left the sentence unfinished. Massinger could hear his harsh breathing down the line. The information whirled like sparks from a windblown bonfire in his mind.

Collusion… Kapustin… Vienna Station… collusion…

'I–I can't believe it, Hyde…' he managed to say at last.

'Then try,' Hyde sneered.

'You must — must…'

'What? Stay alive? I want to! How can you help me to achieve my ambition?'

'Your papers?' They were in one of Ros's plump, beringed hands, clutched against her breast. She seemed to offer them towards Massinger. The cat stirred, then fell asleep once more, the tension in the room insufficient to disturb it.

'This city's sewn up — I need those if I'm to get out. Let me talk to Ros about that — where to send them.'

Collusion — Kapustin — Vienna Station — KGB — SIS — collusion.

'I'll — bring them to you. I must talk to you,' Massinger offered suddenly, surprising his rational, conscious brain, unnerving his objective self.

'You'll come…?' Hyde was suspicious, and relieved.

'I'll come. I'll bring them. We must talk.'

'When?'

'Tomorrow, two days — I'll have to be — careful.'

'They're onto you!' Hyde accused.

'No. I've been warned off Aubrey — nothing to do with you. There's no connection between us.' He saw the blue Cortina parked in Philbeach Gardens very vividly in his imagination. 'I — give me a little time to cover my tracks. I have to talk to Shelley anyway—'

'No—!'

'It's all right. I won't mention you. It's about Aubrey — the frame…'

'How have they done it — who's done it?'

'KGB — I don't know much more. Shelley has — some information for me.'

'So have I. Watch yourself, for my sake. I said collusion and I meant it.' Hyde had recovered something of himself; a patient who has been bled and is weakened but more clearheaded. A boil had been lanced, pressure eased, by his outburst. He would now last, perhaps, as long as it took Massinger to reach him in Vienna. 'Watch your back. Someone wants me dead and Aubrey out of the game. It could be anyone. It's someone who can give termination orders concerning his own people and expect to be obeyed, and someone who has established two-way access between SIS and the KGB in Vienna. You understand?'

'I understand the implications,' Massinger murmured. Blue Cortina, Aubrey framed, blue Cortina, collusion … The word pained him like a blow. A rumbling headache had begun in his left temple. He rubbed it. 'I understand,' he repeated,

'You're my only hope,' Hyde said flatly.

'I know. Give me a little time. Ring — ring your landlady tomorrow, at the same time…' He looked up questioningly. Ros nodded. 'At the same time,' he repeated. 'She'll have information for you. Try — try to stay out of trouble until then.'

'Just believe it, mate.' Hyde paused. The connection seemed distant, unreal, tense once more. 'All right,' he said finally, 'I'll trust you. Everyone always said you were a bit too nice for our kind of work, but you're Aubrey's closest pal. All right — I trust you.' Then he cackled in an ugly, fearful way. 'After all, I can kill you when you get here, can't I?'

'You can — if I'm not what you need or expect.'

The connection was broken at that point. The telephone purred. Hyde was gone, almost as surely as if the call had never been made; as surely as if he had been taken.

He gingerly put down the receiver. Ros was glaring at him, but her lips moved with a silent, involuntary fear.

'I'll try — as hard as I can, I'll try,' he soothed. 'Meanwhile, you know nothing. You have not heard from Hyde, you don't expect to. As his landlady, you're angry enough to let his flat to someone else. Understand?'

Slowly, uncertainly, Ros nodded. 'OK.'

'Good. Now, I must go.' He glanced at his watch. Ten-twenty. He would have to hurry to meet Shelley. The sunlight lay chill and pale across the carpet, cold on the cat's fur. Massinger shuddered, as at an omen.

* * *

'What will you do?' Massinger asked.

'Hide the car and keep a look-out,' Peter Shelley's breath curled around him like grey signals of distress.

'You say you lost the tail?'

'I lost one car by hiding in a coal merchant's yard,' Shelley replied without amusement. 'But I only spotted one car, I'm not Hyde — not a field man. I don't trust my judgment that much. Neither should you.'

'Very well. To photocopy this—' He indicated the buff envelope, thickly filled with paper, that the younger man had given him. ' — I'll need at least half an hour.'

Shelley looked at his watch with a feverish little gesture, fumbling back the cuff of his dark overcoat. When he looked up again, his face seemed to Massinger even paler and more drawn than before.

'I have to have that file back at Century House by one,' he pleaded. 'The meeting is immediately after lunch — the copies will be collected…'He seemed to be damming a small flood of reluctance, excuses.

'Very well — I'll hurry,' Massinger replied stiffly, and opened the car door, climbing out as quickly as he could from the bucket seat. He slammed the door of the BMW without looking back at Shelley.

Shelley watched him ascend the steps to the portico of the Imperial War Museum, its huge dome threatening to topple and crush him in the now grey, low-clouded morning. His slightly limping figure was dwarfed by the two fifteen-inch naval guns in front of the portico. Bedlam, Shelley thought. The Bethlem Royal Hospital for the Insane was what the building had once housed. It seemed an apt meeting place, after he had crossed the river and passed the weatherstained concrete of the South Bank buildings only to find a tailing red Vauxhall in the driving mirror. It