pattern of behaviour — they could be regarded as suspicious with ease, my dear fellow.'
Zimmermann watched Massinger carefully slicing at his portion of
The dining-room of the Konigshof was almost deserted. They were some of the last guests enjoying — no, not that word, Zimmermann instructed himself… enduring a late supper. Behind them, the river glittered with, lights reflected from both banks of the Rhine. Navigation lights moved on the river apparently without solid forms beneath them. Rain pattered against the huge windows.
When Massinger did not reply, Zimmermann pursued: 'I have made a great many telephone calls this evening, since I left you…' He had rushed, in an unseemly way, from the hothouse of that hotel room, escaping the tense, violent, heady emotions sparking between the American and his wife. He had plunged into the pursuit of his intuitions regarding Babbington as into a cold, refreshing swimming pool. Babbington had indulged a brief affair with a married woman during his residence in Bonn in '74; it was the perfect cover, if it was a cover. 'There is a woman in prison in Cologne…'
Massinger looked up. His eyes were abstracted, hardly focused. 'What?' was all he said.
Margaret Massinger continued to devote her attention to her dessert, picking at it without appetite. Zimmermann realised that the woman was determined. For her, there were no more decisions to be taken. They had all been made. Zimmermann cursed himself once more for giving them the address of Clara Elsenreith as a peace-token between them when he returned to the Konigshof to join them for supper. The instant, greedy lights in their eyes had predicted the manner of this conversation and its outcome. He was no more than a boring pedagogue on the last day of term, insisting on unremitting study while the sun shone outside and the holidays stretched ahead.
'Prison. She was arrested two years ago, on charges arising from… for war crimes. She still has not been brought to trial. I intend to see her. She was the secretary assigned to Babbington during his residence here… he used her flat for — his assignations, you see.' Zimmermann spoke without pause or interruption, as if speed and emphasis would attract their deeper attention.
Massinger stared with little interest across the table. Margaret, Zimmermann could tell, was alert but stubbornly refusing to accept the importance of the subject he had broached.
'What — what do you expect to learn?'
'The truth of Babbington's story — what else?' Zimmermann snapped. He dabbed his lips with his napkin, his own dessert of cheesecake finished.
'You think Babbington's the man?'
'I don't think, I merely suspect.'
'But that's nonsense—!' Massinger burst out, as if all that had been said to him had only just impinged on his reason. 'That's too fantastic to be true.'
Margaret looked up, shaking her head. 'The idea of Andrew being a traitor is ridiculous,' she said calmly, with utter, dismissive certainty. 'Impossible,' she added as she saw his expression change to one of anger.
Zimmermann remembered the murmured promises, over and over repeated, that the American had made to this woman. It had been like overhearing the whispers of approaching climax, having strayed into a darkened bedroom where copulation was taking place. Promises, adorings, devotion, deep passion. It had made him flee the room. Now, he realised it blinded and determined them. Tomorrow, they would travel to Vienna to see Clara Elsenreith.
Zimmermann had sent no one, had not spoken to the woman himself. It was cowardice, he acknowledged. He did not wish to know.
But they did. More than anything; more than safety, more than friendship, more than the future, they had to know. Who killed Castleford, and why.
Zimmermann understood the woman. She was behind it. Her whole being rejected the idea that her father could have been, might have been, was ever a Nazi. To disprove that monstrous fiction, she had to know from Clara that, if he was killed by Aubrey, it was a crime of passion. That she would accept, her father's death as an adulterer. But never a Nazi, at one with the beasts of the past.
It was hopeless. He would never convince them.
'Will you promise me to come back — once you have spoken with Frau Elsenreith — and help me?' he pleaded.
Even now they hesitated, as if they could not see that far ahead; cautious investors in an uncertain future, machines programmed for one simple, immediate task. It was as if they mutually assumed everything would be over, ended, once they knew the truth of Berlin in 1946. He sighed inwardly. Anger and frustration were as palpable.as indigestion. Why could they not see — ?
'We'll — yes, but we can't promise until we — we've been to Vienna,' Massinger replied lamely after a long, embarrassing silence. Margaret touched his hand, as if to strengthen a flagging resolve.
God, Zimmermann thought — God in Heaven!
'I see,' he said coldly, rebuffing them. He laid his napkin on the table. He wished to be cruel, so added: 'Remember you are known in Vienna. Be careful. Employ your old professional instincts, my friend.' He stood up, nodded a stiff little bow towards Margaret, who remained silent, then announced: 'I shall go to Cologne at once. I am concerned to hear this woman's story. Good night — and good luck.'
Massinger made as if to rise. Zimmermann waved him back onto his chair, and left with a firm military step.
The snow in his mouth and nostrils was choking him. It hadn't melted and run icily into his throat. His eyes were caked with snow and he was blind. He brushed at them, opened them, coughing out the snow and sneezing. He sat up quickly to clear his nose by violent blowing. He was white from head to foot, encrusted with snow.
The soldier was standing over him, Kalashnikov pointed towards the middle of Hyde's form. The Australian looked up, searching the pale young face for nerves, for apprehension and doubt and the need for prompt support. He found everything he sought, and rolled over slowly, clutching his right arm with his left, groaning.
'Stay still,' the young soldier warned. Hyde continued to roll slowly until his right arm was masked by his body. Melted snow trickled down his back like a trail of fear. His chest and stomach were icy with the melted snow he had swallowed. He reached carefully behind him and drew the Makarov automatic that had once, long ago, belonged to the young lieutenant he had killed. He sat up, gun masked by his thigh, then shot the Russian soldier twice, once in the stomach, bringing his head forward, then a second time through the forehead, just above the left eye. The Russian's body sprang away from him, as if in surprise at some electric shock, and lay unmoving in the snow.
He had killed the man without calculation as an immediate response to the threat of capture. He looked up the furrow of disturbed snow that indicated his fall. The flying-buttress of the ridge stretched up and away from him and was empty of other troops. They'd split up, then — probably on orders from the nearest helicopter; the one he could hear clattering up the side of the mountain, still well below his own altitude. The sky was now uniformly grey.
He scrambled to his feet and fought his way up the slope, slipping and staggering in the deep drifted snow, eventually reaching the ridge once more. Still no one. He skirted the hidden crevasse and climbed the buttress to the point where it joined the face of the mountain. Slowly, with caution that memory advised, he edged his way along the narrow, snow-hidden ledge that climbed around the mountainside, no wider than a goat-track, its precise dimensions fattened and masked by the snow. He rubbed his back against the rock for the sense of security its contact gave him as he moved.
Gradually, he moved out of sight of the place where he had fallen, where the dead Russian lay. He was perhaps a couple of hundred feet above the overhang where Petrunin lay. He was exposed above the tree line. After twenty minutes, he could see the most distant and higher peaks, beyond Parachinar and in Pakistan, tinted with gold.The sky had lost its leaden greyness. The cloud was wispy and thin and the snow had stopped. The ledge broadened ahead of him into a path where two men could have walked abreast, climbing steeply to the sharp crease in the mountain that gave access to the long, narrow valley at the other end of which lay Pakistan.
He began moving more quickly now, wishing he had stolen the dead Russian's R/T and so enabling himself to keep in contact with his pursuers, monitoring their progress, their distance from him. He was bent and worn,
