Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth (26 page)

‘Oh, I hadn’t really thought about it. The usual, I suppose.’

‘Stay at home? Yeah, that’s the best. Get a few bottles in, stoke up the fire, watch the Queen on the telly.’

‘Why did you want to see me, anyway?’

He shrugged dismissively. ‘Oh nothing much, just paperwork, really. Someone tried to fence a stolen library book – it came from the police library. It’s probably a case of mistaken identity, you know how it goes, but you have to follow these things up.’

‘Library book? That sounds serious – you could throw the book at me for that.’

Erw Watcyns became convulsed with fake laughter. ‘Hey, that’s very funny! You should be on the TV. Oh yes, ha ha! Throw the book at you.’

‘I’m always happy to oblige the police.’

‘I’ve noticed that.’

‘Anything they want, I’m there to help.’

‘You’re a model citizen. I wish there were more like you.’

‘The thing is, I really don’t remember taking out any library books.’

‘To tell the truth, we don’t think it was you. We think it was your father. As I say, it’s purely routine.’

‘This wouldn’t be a book about the Pinkertons would it?’

‘Yes, I think it might be.’

He walked over to the incident board and examined it. ‘You’ve got a board like this in your office, haven’t you?’

‘Ours doesn’t have the fruit pie filling all over it.’

‘Is that what this is?’

‘I’ve no idea. What does it taste like?’

He ran his finger through the goo and tasted it. ‘It tastes like that stuff coming out the side of his head. It’s not fruit, more like meat. Do you prefer sweet or savoury pies?’

‘I can go either way.’

‘Me, too. Depends on my mood. You know, there’s something about all this that isn’t quite right.’

‘Really?’

‘I can’t put my finger on it but I have this strange feeling – call it intuition if you like – that I’ve seen a man who was strangely silent like this before. Only I can’t recall where.’

‘I hate it when that happens. It’s on the tip of your tongue, but the more you try to recall, the more it eludes your grasp.’

‘This is driving me nuts. Where’ve I seen a guy like this before?’

‘Take your time, it’ll come to you. How did you know I have an incident board like this in my office?’

‘I was there a while back looking for you.’

‘I see.’

‘That’s where I saw the library book. Police property, you see, I always notice.’

‘Don’t they have a statute of limitations on things like that?’

‘Of course not. It would encourage people to hang on to the books wouldn’t it?’

‘That’s true. What made you go round to my office in the first place?’

‘I wanted to talk to you about a blood-stained photo of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid you removed from the Pier cloakroom. Whoever deposited it left some blood behind on the register; seems it matches the blood of the poor Santa Claus who was so cruelly murdered in Chinatown. Remember us discussing that case a while back?’

It was as if the temperature in the room had dropped ten degrees. People often report feeling like that when a ghost is present, and maybe one had just turned up. Or maybe it was the realisation that his question earlier about where I would be spending Christmas was the first part of a little joke which had as its punch line the sure fact that I would be spending it not watching her Majesty on TV but enjoying her hospitality. You could tell he’d spent all yesterday working it out.

‘Bingo!’ Watcyns cried in pantomime joy. ‘I’ve got it! I’ve suddenly remembered where I’ve seen a guy like this before. In the morgue. Because he was dead.’ He turned towards the dead Pieman and shouted, ‘I think he’s dead!’

‘That’s right,’ I shouted back. ‘Someone has blown his fucking brains out.’

‘Oh, look over there!’ he shouted. ‘A gun!’ He walked across to the side of the bed. On the floor was a gun. ‘Do you suppose it could be the murder weapon?’ He threw a sick smile. ‘That would be a stroke of luck, wouldn’t it?’

The temperature dropped another ten degrees. The gun was the same one, or I guessed it was, that Elijah had pulled on me and then let me take from him; and here it was with my prints all over it.

Erw bent down with that world-weary puff of air of a man who is not as sprightly as he used to be. He pressed a hand onto his thigh to support himself and took out a pencil with the other hand. He lifted the pistol by the trigger guard and put it into a clear plastic evidence bag that he just happened to have handy.
‘If we can find some prints on this, we might be able to find out who shot this man. Wouldn’t that be a stroke of luck!’

He was kneeling with his back to me. A couple of feet away was the corner post of the bed. Reinforced iron ending in a globe of steel the size of a melon. I looked at the hard metal ball, I looked at the soft flesh and bony globe of Watcyns’ head, and back at the ball. I thought about Myfanwy packing her case. I contemplated Christmas in jail. I remembered Miss Evangeline. I looked at the ball of iron and at Erw Watcyns’ head. I realised I had so much to do today, and yet it was the shortest day. I lunged forward, grabbed the collar of his coat and yanked. His head hit the globe with a mixture of sounds: a boing, a crunch and an oh! He slumped to the floor, rivulets of blood matting and darkening his hair; blood and tissue were on the bedstead. I paused. I had a number of options. I could wipe the prints off the gun, or I could simply remove it. But the sight of Watcyns’ own police-issue revolver peeping out from the folds of his jacket gave me a better idea.

I walked over to the incident board, on which the Pieman’s gore was congealing. I peered closely and, helped by the swirling patterns of splattered blood that led me to the epicentre, I located the bullet embedded in the wall. I prised it out with my door key. Then I removed Watcyns’ gun and walked up to the Pieman. I put the muzzle of the gun into the hole the first bullet had made, pulled back about six inches, and fired. There was less gore thrown against the wall this time round. But the slug went home accompanied by a plop of flesh, like a spoonful of jam catapulted by a naughty child. I stood for a second, entranced by the ghoulish abattoir on the wall, amazed at what I was doing. I could have gone a stage further and shot Watcyns with the other gun and put it in the Pieman’s hand. But that would have been gilding the lily. Besides, that would have been murder, assuming he wasn’t already dead. Whereas shooting the Pieman, a man who had already been shot and was assuredly dead, was simply a misdemeanour.
This was better. The slug in the wall, which ballistics would eventually identify as matching Erw Watcyns’ gun, was a slow-burner. I took out my handkerchief and wiped the gun for prints, then put it back inside Watcyns’ jacket. I picked up the other gun and wiped it. I cast a glance down at Erw: he didn’t look very well. I had no idea what to do next so I decided to listen. There were four sounds in that room: My breathing; the tiny tick-tock of a travel alarm clock; the noise a dead man makes; and, from the door, the cough of a man who wasn’t me.

HE STOOD IN the doorway, leaning casually against the jamb. A man I thought I’d seen a number of times recently: once on the Prom; once underneath a street-light holding a match to an unlit cigarette; once hurrying away from Sospan’s; and once in the shadow of an arch when the light was especially bad. The sort of man you try and dismiss as a mirage brought on by the dark fear of walking these streets at night, just a phantom invented by 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
Pistoleros Norteamericanos
.