Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth

‘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 emigre 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 attache 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.’