I looked at her in surprise, unsure whether she was asking me to do it or asking if I planned to. She saw the look on my face and nodded and said, ‘It’s all right. I know. I’m sorry I said that.’
We walked out into the falling snow; the Prom was hushed and filled with a soft luminescence. Light was a thing you had to be very wary of. In summer it flashed in strange, haunting fashion off the hot chrome bumpers of distant cars turning at Castle Point. All cars have chrome, so why should a flash like that stop you and make you long for things you cannot name? We stood at the brim of the Wishing Well, maintained by the Round Table, and heavily padlocked against wish-thieves.
‘Make a wish,’ I said.
‘I could do with some shoes that don’t pinch.’ She looked down at her feet, clad in old grey vinyl trainers, the ones put out by one of the high-street chains in a forlorn attempt to imitate a famous brand.
‘That Salvation Army shop has plenty on display.’
‘Army Surplice? They always charge me double.’
‘You never find charity where they advertise it.’
‘Oxfam are nice enough.’
I threw in a 50p piece and made a wish about Myfanwy and Christmas and snow.
Son of God, love’s pure light, and then the line I liked best: Sleep in Heavenly peace. But only children know the secret of how to do that. It’s a different country when you grow up.
An old man approached the Wishing Well and stopped when he noticed us. I could understand; being caught making a wish is undignified, like reading pornography. It was Elijah and he was crying. Instinct or tact made Lorelei step away into the shadows.
Elijah said, ‘I am sorry about your little girl, what I did: pulling the gun.’
‘It’s OK.’
‘I am astounded at what has become of me.’
‘You just got carried away.’
‘That is what astounds me most. All my life I have made it a point of principle not to get carried away. Giving in to passion is for fools.’
‘And for human beings.’
‘This, you see, is the poison of Hoffmann. May the ever-merciful Lord blight and curse that fiend.’
‘They say he is coming. They say the name means Hopeman.’
Elijah scoffed. ‘They! Who are they? The peasants of Aberystwyth? What do they know, the poor ignorant fools? They see a word painted in blood and they think their troubles are over.’
‘You don’t think he’ll come?’
‘You ask that of me, a man who has spent a lifetime searching for this chimera? You think this ignis fatuus will just turn up and sing “Away in a Manger”?’ He scoffed again.
‘If that’s the case, why don’t you give up your quest? Can it really be so important now, after all these years? Surely most of the people involved must be dead?’
‘Two brothers I have lost to this cause. Two lovely brothers, two of the noblest men ever to walk the earth . . . First there was delightful Ham the poet; and then delicate Absalom, the prophet and scholar. I never knew a human heart so little visited by the vice of pride as Absalom’s. He was willing to wear the ludicrous red robes of a Christian icon and work in a department store in order to fill his belly with bread – honourable bread – rather than shame his family by begging. Both those boys were superior to me in so many ways. Sometimes I wish God had taken me in their stead. You ask me to give up my quest, after such a price has been paid? After my family has lost so much? I should pack my bag and go home to the grave of my dear beloved Mama and tell her I could not save her sons; I could not find them because I lacked the strength to carry on when so near my goal? You ask me to do that? You ask me to dishonour myself.’
‘But if he’s not coming . . .’
‘Did I say that? You asked if I thought he would turn up and announce himself to the people of Aberystwyth and I said no. But all the same I feel that he is here. And so must my brother Absalom have felt it, too. Otherwise, why would he have come?’
‘But Absalom came in search of Ham.’
‘Yes, and Ham was seeking Hoffmann. By finding one you find the other. Such are the perplexities that confront me. And yet you could so easily lift my burden by telling me what your girl found in the alley.’
‘Why don’t you lift my burden and tell me what was in the coat pocket, the one stolen from Eichmann?’
‘You offer to trade?’
‘That’s fair, isn’t it?’
‘The item in the pocket was the list of names of people who attended Eichmann’s weekly card game.’
‘Just a list of names?’
‘Ah, but think who would be on that list. Think who would want to see it. Every Nazi fugitive in Patagonia would be on it. What wouldn’t the Israeli secret service give for that information? What wouldn’t Odessa give to see that they did not get it?’
‘So why did the Americans want it?’
‘Because the Israelis wanted it. And the Russians wanted it because the Americans wanted it.’
‘Who is killing all these people?’
‘The Pieman.’
‘Who does he work for?’
‘Hoffmann.’
‘And who does he work for?’
‘Welsh Intelligence.’
‘Do they also want the list of names?’
‘Oh yes, they want it more badly than any of them.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the people on that list were witnesses to the commission of an evil crime.’
‘What sort of crime?’
‘One so grave it caused a priest, so they say, to lose his wits.’
‘Yes, but what was it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Hey! We’re supposed to be trading . . .’
‘Truly, I don’t know. I haven’t the faintest idea. It’s your turn now, anyway.’
‘The item we found was just a picture of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.’
Elijah’s face flashed with anger and disappointment. ‘Even now he mocks me. After I treat fairly with him, he cheats me, the Gonif.
‘It’s true.’
‘Oh yes, it’s true! A picture of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? You like to swindle me, heh? You . . . you . . . moyshe Pupik! You . . . you chiam Yankel . . . with your Shikseh from the Shandhoiz!’
‘But it was! Truly!’
‘Of course it was a picture of Butch Cassidy. But what else?’ He threw his hands up in weary despair and walked off, shouting, ‘I throw salt in your eyes! And pepper in your nose, you Kucker!’
Lorelei and I walked the length of the Prom. She was taking me to see an old soldier called Eifion, one of those sad, benighted fools who are addicted to the Laughing Policeman machine. It was too early to find him and we headed for the Castle for a drink. At the shelter overlooking the crazy golf course a man stood on an orange-box preaching to a small crowd. It was the army chaplain, the one who left his wits behind in Patagonia. His voice drifted over and we stopped to listen.
‘. . . and yet, like many here tonight, they had no stomach for the truth. They expected me to pull a rabbit out of a hat and say, “It’s not really happening; you’re not really ensnared in a tragedy from which the only escape is the grave; you’re not really about to die in a cause that no one here can remember any more the point of.” I tried to show them, to make them see how little a thing to be feared is death. I said, “Why do you fear to die?” And they did not know. The fools did not know why. I told them. We fear death because in looking upon it we contemplate our non-existence and see how utterly the world will be unchanged by our absence from it; and, even more terrifyingly, how little difference it would have made to the world if we had never existed at all. A few minutes is all it would have taken at the dawn of our life for us never to become even a spark in the eternal night. Imagine it! He who was to be your father comes home and pauses to scrape some dog poo off his shoe. And lo! the universe is different. He does not mount that woman who would have been your mother; that night they watch TV instead. Their first child, the one that is no longer you, is conceived the following night. So easily could you not have existed. And therein lies our salvation, because if that is the case, if our existence is really such a trivial accident, what pain could it possibly cause us to end it? This I said to them and they repudiated me for it.’