I agreed. At the Prom we stopped and stood by the sea railings, watching the nothing that was going on out at sea. The man took a few hurried steps and put a hand gently on my shoulder. I turned to face him.
Seen close up, he was strangely indistinct, wrapped in layers of smeared greyness like a wet sky, or watercolour washes on wet paper. Only the thin darker line of the brim of his hat against the knobbled cloudscape had a discernible edge. There were holes in his coat.
‘My name is Elijah,’ he said. ‘I represent the government and people of Israel. I can arrange to provide bona fides if you require it.’
‘How can we help you?’
‘Your little girl has an item belonging to the people of Israel. I must insist you surrender it to my safekeeping.’
I looked at Calamity, who feigned surprise.
‘Do you have an item belonging to the people of Israel?’ I asked.
‘Not me, boss.’
‘She says she doesn’t have it. She’s an honest kid.’
A weary look passed across his face, which seemed already deeply lined with the imprint of a life spent upon a thankless quest.
‘Of course she says that.’ He removed his hat and then replaced it. He seemed to be perspiring in the cold morning. ‘She says that, even though she knows I stood in the alley and watched her take it.’
‘Supposing she did find something in this alley you mention, what was it doing there if it belonged to you?’
‘Did I say it belonged to me? I recall saying it belonged to the nation of Israel. I have the honour to represent them, I do not aggrandise to myself the notion that I embody them.’
‘That’s a fair point, but it’s still hard to understand how a nation can lose something in an alley.’
‘To you, perhaps, but my people have lost many things in their sad history . . .’
‘Not in alleys.’
‘Did I say it was lost? I do not recall saying it was lost.’
‘You implied it.’
‘We didn’t find it,’ said Calamity.
‘No, how could you find that which was not lost? You stole it. That much is clear.’
‘Tell us what you are looking for and maybe we can help you look for it.’
‘I have been working in the shadows of this world and with the spectres who inhabit it for over forty years. Do you not think I might by now have tired of people feigning ignorance?’
‘Maybe I’m not feigning.’
‘Feigning ignorance is a difficult stratagem to employ, perhaps the most difficult of all. There are very few people who can do it convincingly. You are not one of them. Time is running out. Mr Knight, please surrender the item and go in peace.’
‘What item?’
He sighed. It was a phoney sigh. Feigning a sigh is a difficult stratagem.
‘Tell us how an item belonging to the people of Israel happened to be in an alley belonging to the Corporation of Aberystwyth.’
‘As if you didn’t already know.’
‘Humour me.’
‘A man was recently cruelly slain in the alley and mutilated in a fashion which shocks even a people whose name has become a byword for suffering.’
‘A man called Absalom.’
‘Perhaps. He has had many names, as indeed I suspect have you.’
‘My name has always been Louie.’
‘It is inevitable that you say that. But have you always been a private detective? My information is that you have not. Your current occupation is a tactic, a brilliant one, to cover your investigation into this man you call Absalom.’
‘How come you know him?’
‘He was my brother. The item he hid in the alley was meant for me. He placed it on the window ledge and with the last of his dying strength wrote “Hoffmann”, confident that the shocking manner of his death would be reported in the world press and that the word “Hoffmann” would agitate an elaborate and sophisticated series of tripwires which would cause a bell to ring in the offices of the organisation for which I work. He knew as surely as if he had sent it by registered mail that his message scrawled in blood would reach the awareness of me, his brother. And to help his brother in his search he inserted a rudimentary signal of incoherence in the arrangement of his scene of death such that a policeman would overlook it but one with trained eyes, one who knew there was something there to look for, would not.’
He made a summing-up gesture with his hands. ‘And thus we arrive at the scene in the alley, where your little girl – your very smart little girl – decoded the signal and found the hidden item.’
‘I’m not his little girl, I’m his partner.’
‘What’s the item?’
‘That I do not know; there you have the advantage of me.’
‘Who is Hoffmann?’
He looked annoyed at what he perceived to be my amateurish play-acting. ‘It is time to stop fooling, Mr Knight. Or there will be more unnecessary deaths.’
‘We’re not fooling, we really don’t know who Hoffmann is.’
‘So you say, but how can that be?’ He tilted his head and regarded us quizzically. ‘You know, I am still trying to guess who you work for.’
‘I can tell you that. It’s the person who put the ad in the Cambrian News.’
‘Ah, yes. The Queen of Denmark. I forgot.’ He stepped away from the railing and paused in the motion of turning away. A look of gnomic purpose crept across his features.
‘Mr Knight, if you are indeed who you say you are, if you are really a nobody, a . . . a . . . a nothing, just a scrap of newspaper blown along in the wind of the Hoffmann case, I must ask you to reconsider your position.’
‘Who is Hoffmann?’
‘Indeed! Who is he? How many men over the years have uttered that deceptively simple phrase? How many times have those syllables quivered on the lips of a dying man? Who is Hoffmann? I myself have sought the answer to this riddle. In Moscow, in Warsaw, in Buenos Aires, in Jerusalem, in Zurich and London and Washington; in Peking and Kamchatka, in Berlin and Ljubljana. . . Who is he? An enigma for sure. A myth perhaps. A riddle, yes. Perhaps the greatest spy of the late twentieth century. Maybe the greatest who ever lived.’
He paused and stared up the Prom towards the Pier, as if the answer to this the deepest of mysteries, the riddle of Hoffmann’s identity, could be found up there somewhere amid the rusting ironwork that was a home to a thousand seagulls and pigeons.
‘I see that we will make no more progress today. Perhaps after another innocent person has been killed you will begin to appreciate the gravity of this situation. And it is indeed most grave. You see, Mr Knight, you and I and your little girl are standing before a unique fissure in the topography of the epoch. Hoffmann has decided to come in from the cold.’
Chapter 3
THE OLD JEW wandered off in the direction of the kids’ paddling pool and sat down on a bench. He stared out to sea but it was clear he was still observing us. Two workmen in overalls were pasting posters to boards attached to the sea railings. Two posters that represented in many ways the twin poles of love and terror to be found in the collective Aberystwyth heart.
One advertised a new movie, Bark of the Covenant, featuring Clip the Sheepdog. Clip had been the canine hero of the war in Patagonia at the end of the ’50s; a beloved star of the What the Butler Saw newsreels, the Welsh Lassie. After the end of that insane conflict the dog had been stuffed and now sat obediently in a glass case in the museum on Terrace Road, his muzzle permanently fixed in the bright smile that they said was a high-water mark of the taxidermist’s art. The movie was a re-release, the director’s cut. The other poster bore a different sort of smile, the grin of a man less beloved than Clip: it was the face of my old games teacher, Herod Jenkins. The bogey man who haunted all our nightmares. Years ago in school I had watched him send my consumptive schoolmate Marty off on a cross-country run into a blizzard from which he never returned. In later years Herod had tried to blow up the dam and drown our town. His face, too, was famous for its smile, or rather the horizontal crease across his face that he called a smile.