your own paranoia. You try and dismiss it and you could, but for one thing: the fedora hat.
I raised the gun and pointed it at him. It didn’t seem to worry him. He looked with mild interest at the dead Pieman, and then turned his attention to the Pieman’s brains disfiguring the wall. He didn’t seem perturbed by that, either. He had the air of someone who has spent a lifetime standing in the doorways of dingy rooms where dead men sit slumped in the chair, their brains on the wall; a man wiping off a gun in the other corner of the room. He was about fifty-five or sixty, filling out round the waist but with an air of physical hardness about him. His face was expressionless but not cold; it was the absence of expression that professionals acquire, the habit of not judging; worn by people who have seen so many things in life that expressions of shock or disgust become merely a chore. It could have been a cop’s face if it had been colder.
‘Two handkerchiefs are better for wiping it off,’ he said.
I stared at him blankly.
‘That way you don’t miss anything. Doing it with one looks slick, but it’s more of a party trick, like striking a match on your chin.’ He smiled. His voice was soft and relaxed, with a gentle American drawl. I couldn’t place it, but that was no surprise: everything I knew about America came from the movies.
I stopped wiping and considered. ‘I could always use it to shoot you.’
‘That’s not a bad idea.’
I tapped my jacket pocket. ‘Looks like I’m out of second handkerchiefs.’
He took one out and threw it across the room. I caught it, wiped both guns more thoroughly, and replaced them.
He asked, ‘Is he still alive?’
‘I didn’t hit him that hard.’
‘Often you don’t need to. Maybe we should go for a walk; if he’s not dead he’ll come round soon.’
‘I have this thing about going for walks with strangers.’
‘Sometimes events don’t leave you much choice.’
We left together and walked across the road to my office. I poured two shots of Captain Morgan and began collecting things: car key, papers, money. It was a routine I had often prepared for. The man sat in the client’s chair and drank rum.
I stopped gathering and said, ‘Are you Hoffmann?’
He laughed. ‘No. Are you?’
‘So tell me why you’re following me.’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘I’m patient.’
‘You have to be in this line of work, but I was thinking more about our friend across the road. Maybe we should go somewhere more discreet.’
‘I’m not leaving here with you until you tell me what your angle is.’
He swirled the rum around in the tumbler and stared at it. He raised his eyes and smiled. ‘Once upon a time there was a man called Ricardo Klement – just an ordinary guy with a small house on Garibaldi Street in the San Fernando district of Buenos Aires. He ran a laundry business. To the neighbours he seemed respectable enough. Kept himself to himself, but that’s not a crime. Then one day they watched in astonishment as a car turned up and four tough guys jumped out. They bundled Ricardo Klement into the back and drove off. A few weeks later they saw his face spread across the front pages all around the world. He’d changed his name to Adolf Eichmann, and was on trial for his life in Jerusalem.
‘By all accounts he was surprisingly co-operative, almost pathetically eager to please his captors. It was hard to believe that this polite, well-spoken, respectful man was the same one who had sent millions of innocent people to the gas chambers. They had to keep reminding themselves that the man before them was a monster. They asked him about a document they were interested in. He told them it had been stolen from him by a woman he met in the reading room of the Buenos Aires public library. He said she seduced him and they spent a night in a pension nearby. He had left the document in his coat pocket and she stole the coat after their night of passion. A classic honey trap, he said. His captors were dubious; it seemed like he was just spinning a yarn. But they managed to track down the woman and she confirmed his story. She said she had sold the coat to a soldier on leave from the front, and had never once looked in the pocket. The soldier was called Caleb Penpegws. Now, there’s a funny thing about spooks: for people who spend their lives veiled in secrecy they’re hopeless at keeping secrets. At any given time you can guarantee half of them will be working for both sides. The other half forget which side they’re working for and swap; after a while they swap back. It’s a merry-go-round; and the secrets in which they trade are the like the prize in the kids’ parlour game Pass the Parcel. Sooner or later everyone gets to hold it. That’s what happened to the story of the coat; it got passed around, and soon everyone was looking for Eichmann’s coat.
‘It just so happened that Odessa got to Caleb first. They wanted the document, too. They tortured him for a week and he told his interrogators that the coat had been stolen from him while he lay on a hospital bed recovering from surgery. Stolen by Hoffmann. Who was Hoffmann? No one knew, but they started looking for him, in all the usual places. East Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Moscow, Peking, even Hanoi. And no one got so much as a sniff. Then one of the smarter spooks asked himself, how did Hoffmann know about Caleb and the coat? Answer: the woman must have tipped him off. So then they started searching for her, the beautiful Mata Hari who had sprung the honey-trap. All they knew about her was contained in the transcript of Eichmann’s testimony. He met her in the public records room of the library. They didn’t even exchange names, he said, because of the tacit understanding that existed between two lonely strangers who became lovers but knew in their hearts it would be but for one night. In the morning they would go their separate ways never to meet again on this earth. To introduce the sad wrecks of their lives into the romance would have spoiled it. Or so he said. It seems a bit convenient to me, and maybe his interrogators thought so, too. But he stuck to his story, and what sanction can you bring against a man who is going to the chair and knows it? But though he couldn’t give her name he did say one interesting thing: she was researching her family tree. Her grandparents had been outlaws hiding out in Patagonia. Their names were Mr and Mrs Harry Place, names which meant nothing to anyone at the time. South America has always been full of fugitives of all colours and persuasions, including ex-Nazis. She showed him a newspaper cutting from the turn of the century about her grandfather and grandmother. The headline was
‘As I said, the names didn’t mean much at that time in the early sixties. No one apart from a few specialists had heard of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Then in 1969 the movie was released. It won four academy awards and the whole world went to see it, including a young Mossad agent called Elijah. You’ve met him, I know. He had been present when they interrogated Eichmann, and during one of those sessions Eichmann had used a certain Spanish expression. Years later, sitting there in that darkened movie theatre, Elijah heard the phrase again.
The man paused and refilled his glass. ‘Bored?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you think we should be going?’
‘Let them come. Carry on.’ I stood at the window. Across the street two medics threaded their way through the crowd of gawkers towards the back of an ambulance. The body on the stretcher was too small to be the Pieman. It was probably Erw Watcyns, but I couldn’t be sure; there was a sheet covering his face.
The man took another drink and tapped his hat on the desk: I walked to the door and said, ‘Thanks, it was a good story, but I have something to attend to that can’t wait.’ I closed the door and turned the key. There was the expected sound of a chair scraping. The door handle turned and rattled a few times in its socket. ‘Sorry about this,’ I said. ‘The cleaner will be along later.’
I ran down the stairs and out into the cold December air, my heart pounding as fast as if I were going on a date.
Llunos was slumped over a pint in the Castle, looking morose. I knew he would be. He was reading the sporting pages and on the seat next to him there was a bag from Lampeter House. He looked up at my approach, pulled out a chair and moved the bag to the floor.
‘It’s for my mum, a cardi for when she wants to sit up in bed. They suggested I get it. Not sure about the
