Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth

Chapter 22

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan

The Prom was a mixture of late-winter afternoon greys: mist and drizzle and drab, brooding cloud; a filmy luminescent quality to the light that gave the faintest whisper of snow. There was only one way to describe a light like that: plangent. Never before had I longed more deeply, or more simply, for the chaste and temporary purification that snow brings. I wandered along the Prom towards Sospan’s kiosk. Up by the kids’ paddling pool I could see the lone figure of Eeyore on his way to the Pier with a donkey for the crib at the carol concert. I could tell from the slight limp in the donkey’s step that he had chosen Abishag this year. He saw me and waved. Outside the bandstand a group of men in dark coats held silver tubes of metal and blew into them. It sounded hopeful.

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone

Sospan poured out a mug of mulled wine and handed it to me. ‘On the house,’ he said, and we chinked mugs and wished each other a better year next year.

‘I suppose you’ll be going to the concert, then?’ he asked.

‘Maybe. What about you?’

He looked sheepish. ‘Oh, I might pop my head round the door later.’

It meant that he wouldn’t.

‘Who do you reckon it is, then?’ I said, changing the subject. ‘This fat guy in the red and white coat. Is it Odin or the fourth-century Bishop Niklaus?’

‘That’s an easy one. It’s Odin.’

‘You sure he’s the man?’

‘Has to be. How would a fourth-century Christian bishop be able to deliver all the presents and put them in your pillowcase?’

I chuckled politely. ‘But he doesn’t really put the presents in the pillowcase, does he?’

‘Who doesn’t?’

‘Father Christmas.’

Sospan look puzzled. ‘Who does, then?’

Llunos pulled up in a prowl car. ‘I can’t stop,’ he said. ‘I have to go back to the hospital.’

‘How is she?’

‘She’s holding on. Maybe she can make it.’

‘The Lord will provide,’ said Sospan in clear defiance of the available evidence.

Llunos looked annoyed and pulled me over to the railings. The sea was going out, and down below the wet shingles gleamed in the streetlight. The sea returned and gently sucked. You could watch it for hours.

Snow had fallen, snow on snow

‘There’s a man crying in your office,’ he said. ‘A Jewish guy.’

‘I’m going there now.’

‘Thought you’d also like to know, we found Erw Watcyns dead an hour ago. He was stabbed, down near the harbour.’

Snow on snow

‘He won’t be mourned.’

‘We don’t think it was anyone local.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘Too merciful. Whoever did it wept for the victim. We found this next to the body.’ He handed me a small phial of artificial tears.

In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

* * *

I went to Smith’s to buy some wrapping paper for the Pinkerton manual and returned to the office. Elijah was sitting in my chair. There was a suitcase next to his feet. He looked up, old eyes glistening with tears.

‘Ah! Mr Knight, my poor old heart is broken. Never will it be whole again.’

‘Really? How sad.’

‘Yes, truly.’

‘They sure teach you how to cry well at Mossad spook school.’

‘My tears are real. You can taste them if you wish.’

I slumped into the client’s chair and began to wrap the book. ‘No, thanks.’

‘My brothers, my two lovely brothers, Mr Knight. Lost. Both of them lost. One dead, one worse than dead. Lost in Aberystwyth. Oy vey!’

‘I’ll mention it to the mayor. What do you want?’

‘I have come to apologise once more for that ignoble scene involving the gun and your daughter.’

‘How about the ignoble scene where the same gun gets planted, covered in my prints, in the room of a dead Pieman? You going to apologise for that?’

He wiped his eyes and looked at me in puzzlement, genuine or feigned, who could tell? He’d probably lost track himself. ‘But I wiped the gun. You think I would frame you for the murder of the Pieman? What would it benefit me?’

‘You admit you killed him, then?’

‘Yes, I killed him. You left me with little choice after the danger you put me in with your ingenious counter-surveillance technique.’

‘What was that?’

‘You said you would put my name on your incident board. Yes, I killed him; who shall cry over that? He was a man who had killed many people in his life, and I at least killed him with more compunction than he would have killed you or me. And now I must say goodbye.’

‘Aren’t you going to hang around for the concert tonight? Apparently Hoffmann’s on the bill.’

‘I care nothing for that Schlemiel Hoffmann.’

I raised my eyebrows.

‘You look surprised.’

‘I thought the fact that you cared about Hoffmann was the one piece of solid ground in this quicksand of a case.’

‘I despise Hoffmann, whoever he is. He is a Momzer, a chiam Yankel, a . . . a . . . a Putznasher. I throw pepper in his nose! I spurn the quest; it has cost too much blood. Whoever he is, he cannot be worth a single drop of Ham’s blood. The only solid ground amid this metaphysical quicksand is the promise I made to my dying mother that I would find the sons she lost to the fiend Hoffmann.’

‘So it was Absalom who cared about Hoffmann?’

‘Absalom cared about Ham, my sweetest, youngest brother.’

‘Now I’m lost.’

‘It all started, you see, many years ago, when I became captivated by the gaudy chimera that is Hoffmann. And to my everlasting regret I infected my dear brother Ham with my obsession. We lost him at Checkpoint Charlie in January 1968, the year of the Prague Spring. Ham made contact with a Russian émigré who had information about the original dossier relating to the interrogation of Caleb Penpegws. This Russian introduced him to a Czechoslovakian dancer who had been the mistress of the Soviet military attaché in Ljubljana who had connections to a KGB agent by the name of Alekhin who once served in North Africa and drank Ricard at a bar in Algiers with a Foreign Legionnaire who had been incarcerated in a military prison in Marseilles with a man who flew covert missions for the CIA in Laos; his co-pilot was a man who once forged papers for a fugitive Nazi who told him about the perplexing reference in the Hoffmann dossier to the horizontal crease in his face that denoted a smile. What did it mean? They assumed it must have been some sort of code. The same CIA pilot introduced Ham to a secret procedure being developed by his organisation, called forensic physiognomy. Ham became obsessed by this new technique and his obsession took him to all four corners of the earth on the trail of the perplexing smile motif. We never saw him again; we just received postcards in which he described, in handwriting shaking with excitement, the various leads and discoveries that, he felt, were taking him ever closer to his goal. He claimed to have found glimpses and subtle allusions to the mystery in the tales our grandmothers used to tell us of the bogeyman of Jewish folk tradition, the Golem; and in the various troll traditions of northern European myth – the so-called ‘eat me when I’m fatter’ tales embodied in the story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff. As the years passed he receded more and more; became ever more remote from us; the postcards ever rarer, the writing on the cards ever more shaky, the language and idiom ever more crazy as he followed a trail of hints glittering like lost pennies in the dark forest of the world’s folk literature. Our beloved young brother turned slowly insane and relayed the symptoms of his sickness to us through the medium of the international postal service.’

He paused and blinked back tears. ‘When the cards stopped coming, my brother Absalom and I went our separate ways across the face of this earth in search of him. We did not meet again for many years. Then earlier this month Absalom sent me a letter from Cannes where he had seen a trailer for the movie Bark of the Covenant. Quite by chance, in the audience he met a Welshman who kindly invited my brother to his home; he put before him a dish comprising lamb and cheese. He called it cawl. My brother was astonished. This was the very same dish that Eichmann had spoken of in his interrogation, the dish he claimed the spy in the library had used in the honey-trap. The Welshman told him it was very popular in his homeland. Truly Absalom was amazed. All these years we assumed that Eichmann had invented this aspect of the case. It seemed not possible that people could make a stew of lamb and cheese; and yet here was a Welshman claiming it was true. It meant that the entire supposition about Etta Place had been wrong. We all thought she had gone back to Kansas, and that was where we conducted our searches. But it appeared she must have travelled to Wales, that her daughter and granddaughter would have been Welsh. The revelation was shocking. My brother set forth for Aberystwyth at once, because he knew that here finally he might find the bones of dear Ham.’

‘The lamb and cheese helped you find your Ham?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Nothing.’

‘And so here he came. And here he died, leaving that message in his blood, knowing I would follow. But why he would hide a picture of Butch Cassidy in the alley I do not know. The Butch and Sundance angle has been understood since the movie came out in 1969. That is a puzzling aspect of the story.’

I took out the photos Mrs Dinorwic-Jones had given to me and slid them across the desk.

‘He hid these, too. This is a simpleton who lives in a house belonging to a girl called Tadpole. I don’t know its significance. This headstone is from the grave of Sundance’s daughter, Laura. She married a man called Llantrisant. It means that the granddaughter will bear the surname Llantrisant. It is a very rare surname and only one person has it round here: Gertrude Llantrisant, a woman who used to swab my step. She was the woman in the reading room of Buenos Aires library, the one who stole the coat.’

Elijah picked up the pictures and examined them. He put down the picture of the grave and held the other one, the picture of the simpleton at Tadpole’s house. He stared sadly at the image and said, more to himself than to me, ‘I have met this Tadpole yesterday. She tried to sell me a ticket to see Hoffmann at the Pier.’

‘I wonder how Tadpole knew about Hoffmann?’

Elijah tapped the photo with his finger. ‘This man, the simpleton who chops wood and hauls coal, a man who dresses like a little boy because he does not have the wits of a man any more, . . . he told her long ago who Hoffmann was. He knew because this man is my brother Ham. Or at least he used to be. What is he now, I do not know. A man who wears the outward appearance of Ham, but from whom everything inside, all the sweetness and grace, has been sucked out, leaving . . . leaving behind just an oaf. A man who mined the ore of the horizontal-crease motif in the caverns of folk mythology, who sought a troll but acquired only the wits of one. And so the quest devours itself. This I now see is the revenge of Hoffmann. This is the bell-jingling cap of motely that Fate places on the heads of those who pursue him. What could have robbed my brother of his wits like this? It is my belief that it was fear, the nameless terror that gripped his heart one day when he looked into the mirror and beheld that familiar mocking smile upon his own face.