Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth Read Online Free Page 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