The Crime of Julian Wells

by Thomas H. Cook

  I thought of a French painter, James Tissot, the way he’d portrayed the scourging of Christ from different angles, the faces of the men who’d beaten him, obscured in one, revealed in the other.

  I described these paintings to Julian, then said, “The guilt of whipping a great man would be terrible.”

  “Or an innocent one,” Julian said.

  We continued on, now down the hill and toward the bridge below the town. I kept quiet for a time, but finally made an attempt to lighten the mood that had descended upon us.

  “So, when are you coming back to the States?” I asked.

  “Never,” Julian answered so abruptly that I wondered if he had only just made that stark decision. “At least not to live.”

  And so there would be no brilliant career? No rising through the ranks of government? He would never be secretary of state? Wild and unreal as those dreams had been, were they truly to be abandoned now?

  All of this I voiced in a simple question.

  “Are you sure, Julian?”

  He stopped and looked at me. “Yes.”

  His gaze had something in it that chilled me, something I expected him to voice, so that it surprised me when he said nothing more as we descended the slope that led to the river and the bridge.

  I was still reliving that long-ago moment when the phone rang.

  It was Loretta.

  “Harry called,” she said.

  She meant Harry Gibbons, Julian’s editor.

  “We’ve agreed that you should deliver the eulogy at Julian’s memorial service,” Loretta said.

  She repeated what she’d told me earlier: that it was to be a quiet affair, just a few friends and associates.

  “Anyway, Harry has a few things you might want to include,” she added. “He thought the two of you should discuss it at his office tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  A pause, then, “Are you all right, Philip?”

  It was the same question my father had asked only an hour or so before, and I gave the same answer. “I’m fine.”

  “You seem so . . . quiet.”

  “It’s how I grieve, I suppose.”

  “Yes, I can see that in you,” Loretta told me. A brief silence, then, “Well, good night, Philip.”

  “Good night.”

  I hung up the phone, glanced down at the book in my lap. The Tortures of Cuenca with its stark cover, a drawing of the two hapless victims of that crime huddled in the dusty corner of a Spanish prison, shackled hand and foot, waiting, as they eternally would be in this rendering, for the torturer’s approach. I’d found the cover quite disturbing and said so to Julian. He’d replied with the tale of Ned Kelly’s execution, how the murderous rogue had stood on his Australian gallows, peered down at the reveling crowd, then turned to the hangman and, with a shrug, uttered his last words. “Such is life.”

  I peered into the frightened eyes of these baffled and despairing men a moment longer. Had this, in the end, been Julian’s only view of life?

  I drew my gaze back to the window. The park beyond it was well lighted, as it had always been, a fact that made me wonder why its reaches seemed so much darker to me now.

  Darker to me now?

  Heavy-handed, I decided, now in critical judgment of my own last thought. Too much foreshadowing. In a novel, as the last line of a chapter, it would make a wary reader groan.

  4

  “When Bernal Díaz first came with Cortés to the central market in Mexico City, he found little bowls of human feces for sale,” Harry said. “They were used in tanning leather, and Díaz said that the tanners were going around sniffing at these bowls to find the very best of the lot.”

  We were sitting in Harry’s office on Sixth Avenue. It was spacious with a large window overlooking the street. From such a vantage point, I thought, you could actually think of yourself as a prince of the city, something Harry clearly did.

  “That has always been my view of Julian,” Harry continued. “That he was a very fine craftsman who worked with disgusting materials.”

  “Did you ever tell him that?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” Harry answered. “It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. After that book about Cuenca, Julian never considered writing anything but that grim stuff.” He shook his head as if in the face of such repellent work. “Like that African piece.”

  “The one he wrote about Swaziland,” I said. “Yes, that was quite horrifying.”

  “No, not that one,” Harry said. “The one about that French bastard.” He shivered. “Julian really made you feel the misery in that one.”

  He meant Julian’s account of Paul Voulet’s vicious trek into the African interior.

  “But at least that piece had a hero,” Harry added.

  This was true, and Julian had written quite beautifully of Lieutenant Colonel Klobb, the man who’d gone after Voulet, trailed him from one outrage to the next, an archipelago of razed villages, slaughtered men, women, and children, some still alive when Voulet hung them from trees low enough for the hyenas to eat their feet. Klobb emerged at last as a paragon of courage and nobility, and his death at the hands of Voulet’s men generated a final scene of inevitable tragedy, life having once again turned its back upon the good.

  Harry leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over a stomach much rounded by Grey Goose martinis. “I was quite shocked by Julian’s death, of course,” he said. “I suppose you were, too.”

  I nodded.

  Harry drew in a somewhat labored breath and leaned back in his chair. “And so we have seen the last of Julian.”

  I found myself wary of closing the book on Julian so decisively, suspecting, as Loretta had, that the map of Argentina suggested a project Julian had been considering, but which he had, in the strongest possible terms, decided to abandon.

  “Do you have any idea what his next book was going to be about?” I asked.

  “No,” Harry answered. “He hadn’t mentioned any new ideas to me. Why do you ask?”

  “He was looking at a map of Argentina,” I said. “Loretta told me that this was the way he always began to research his next book.”

  Harry cocked his head to the right. “Why would the subject of Julian’s next book matter now?’

  “I don’t know that it matters,” I admitted. “But he seemed very agitated during those last days, and I can’t help wondering what might have been on his mind. I suppose I’ve come to think of the map as a clue.”

  “A clue?” Harry asked. “You’re a critic, Philip, not a detective. Julian’s next book went with him.” He clearly saw that I would not be so easily deterred. “All right, look,” he said, “I have no idea why Julian was looking at a map of Argentina, but he might have been thinking about a book on Pedro Lopez, the ‘Monster of the Andes.’ Three hundred little girls, can you imagine?”

  “When did this happen?” I asked.

  “It may still be happening,” Harry answered. “Because this Lopez fiend is still at large. So, maybe—perhaps like you, Philip— Julian had begun to fancy himself a detective, rather than a writer.” He released the breath of someone chronically frustrated by an author whose unprofitable direction had never changed. “Now, let’s forget about what Julian’s next book might have been and focus on what will surely be his last one. He worked his ass off on it, after all, and it’s going to be published posthumously, so we need to give it a little push.” He looked at me pointedly. “And try not to make the book sound too grim. People don’t like reading dark stuff.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said. “Because they’re missing something.”

  “Really? What?”

  “The gravity of life.”

  Harry sat back and folded his arms over his chest. “What’s bothering you, Philip? Clearly something is.”

  With Harry’s question, the actual nature of what was bothering me came clear for the first time.

  “It bothers me that there might have been something Julian never told
me,” I said, “and that if he had, I might have saved his life.”

  But this was a notion I couldn’t prove, and I had a job to do, so when I got back to my apartment, I considered what I could say at Julian’s memorial service that might help him matter, at least in the eyes of those in attendance. It would need to be something unique to Julian, or at least some gift he’d used uniquely.

  But what?

  I didn’t know, and so I let my mind drift toward other aspects of my remarks.

  I’d need to mention the Russian book, of course. Harry had been right about that. I knew that people liked anecdotes at memorial services, and this realization allowed my mind to range without limit or direction over the years of my friendship with Julian. But soon I realized that to have such liberty was not altogether helpful in terms of organizing a eulogy, so I began to divide his life into the usual chronological segments: boyhood, early manhood, and the like. This was not helpful either, and in the end I found myself dividing Julian’s life into the parts represented by his books. To prepare my talk, I decided to peruse them in hopes of finding something cogent to say about each one. This would allow me to end my talk by giving a plug to the Russian book, Julian’s last and as yet unpublished work.

  Later that evening, after I’d let time calm my mood a little more, I sat down in my favorite chair and again drew down the first of Julian’s books.

  The Tortures of Cuenca.

  The facts of the crime had been well known long before Julian had written his book, but I’d forgotten most of them, so I took a few minutes to familiarize myself with them again:

  On August 21, 1911, a man by the name of José Maria Lopez Grimaldos, twenty-eight, was seen walking alone on the road between Osa de la Vega, a small town, and the nearby village of Tresjuncos in the Spanish province of Cuenca. Grimaldos was known as “El Cepa,” which means “the strain,” an odd nickname, all but untranslatable, as Julian had noted, but it evidently referred to the fact that Grimaldos was short and something of a dullard, thus, presumably, a “strain” on those who knew him.

  On that day in August, Grimaldos had been seen on the road that led from the farm of Francisco Ruiz, where he sometimes worked, to his small house. He never got home, however, and the following day, his sister reported his disappearance to the authorities. Her brother had sold a few sheep on the day of his disappearance, she told them, and at least two men would have been aware that he was in possession of the proceeds from that sale. Their names were Valero and Sanchez, and it just so happened that they had often treated Grimaldos quite badly, ridiculing and bullying him. Was it not possible that they had robbed and killed him, too?

  An investigation ensued, with other witnesses also focusing the investigators’ attention on Valero and Sanchez, but in the absence of Grimaldos’s body or any actual proof of his murder, the case had been closed in September of 1911.

  There is no more haunting story than that of an unsolved crime.

  Thus Julian had declared in the first line of his first book, and thus it had proved for the Grimaldos family.

  Julian’s account of their relentless struggle for justice was the best part of the book, and as I read it again, I realized that it was there that Julian had found the beating heart of his narrative. It had not been in the aerial view of Spain with which he’d begun, suggestive though it was of his later sweep. Nor had it been in his meticulous rendering of the Spanish legal system, for that had been overelaborated and had at last grown rather tedious. It had not even been in Julian’s rendering of the fierce emotions that had seethed beneath Cuenca’s monochromatic landscape.

  According to Julian, those emotions had been unearthed not only by the haunting nature of an unsolved crime, but because, for the people of Cuenca, all mysteries had to be solved, else demons would rule the world.

  Armed by their unwavering faith, the Grimaldos family had refused to forget poor, lowly El Cepa. Holding him in their memory and seeking justice for his murder became their sole obsession, a work of the soul carried out in countless acts of remembrance, El Cepa the persistent subject of their daily conversation. But Julian had also recorded the family’s endless chores—planting and harvesting, sweeping, washing, trudging to the well and back again, the backbreaking work their bodies had endured even as their minds continued to be ceaselessly tormented by their brother’s vanishing—and with each day they grew more convinced that Valero and Sanchez, still their neighbors and men they saw each day, had murdered him.

  They watched and waited, and in 1913, when a new judge was appointed over Cuenca, they seized the moment and drew their swords again, now hopeful that the earlier judge’s dismissal of the case against Valero and Sanchez for lack of evidence might be overturned.

  The new judge was young and zealous, and the specter of an unsolved crime, as Julian wrote, worked like a rattle in his brain.

  Valero and Sanchez were rearrested, and this time the Guardia Civil was determined that the killing of José Maria Lopez Grimaldos, as well as the obvious torment it had caused his family, would not go unavenged.

  The torture inflicted upon Valero and Sanchez was hideous, and Julian’s account of it was highly detailed. Initial reviews of the book had noted, not always approvingly, the graphic nature of his description, but reading it now, I was struck by the fact that Julian had written of those torments through the eyes of the men who’d suffered them. In Cuenca, I had told him about a painting of men scourging Christ, the expressions on their faces as they’d tormented him. Julian had placed his emphasis on the suffering of the victims, and in reading it again, I found myself admiring how he made the lashes fly so that I heard their crack and felt their terrible bite as if entirely encased within the very flesh they tore.

  Had this been Julian’s greatest gift, I wondered, that he had been able to describe with such terrible depth, wounds he had neither felt himself nor inflicted upon another?

  I wasn’t sure, but for my little talk at Julian’s memorial ceremony, it would have to do.

  5

  “It wasn’t Julian’s hard work that made him singular,” I said. “Nor was it even the depth of his research. It was the way he made the reader feel the sting of the lash, the blunt force of the truncheon, the point of the knife. His books are the echoing cries of those whom time has silenced. He never turned away from pain, or cheapened it, or added to it the slightest degree of false amelioration. The purpose of an artist is to convey the harder truths so that we may understand them and learn from them and be less baffled by life. This is what Julian did because he was an artist.”

  Thus, with a thud, my little talk ended.

  The people assembled beneath the white tent Loretta had had erected on the lawn of the Montauk house had listened respectfully, but they were clearly happy I was done. They’d thought me a windbag, I knew, and a boring one at that.

  I glanced to the left, where the pond winked in the light, the yellow boat beside it.

  I had failed Julian once again.

  I recalled Harry’s request for a plug.

  “The Commissar, Julian’s study of Andrei Chikatilo, will be published next fall,” I added. “I hope you all will read it.”

  I waited a beat, added the required “Thank you,” then stepped away from the lectern.

  I was the last to speak, so the people now rose and made their way out of the tent and into the house, where Loretta had food and wine waiting for them. I trailed after the group, but stopped at the entrance of the tent and glanced back toward the lectern. Loretta had placed large photographs of Julian to the right and left of where I’d just spoken. The one to the right was of Julian standing in the snow, the great wall of the Kremlin rising behind him. In the photograph he wore a huge overcoat and an ushanka, a Russian fur cap with large flaps to cover the ears. In one of his letters, Julian had informed me that ushanka meant literally “ear cap.” This had been typical of Julian. He’d known the word for the hippopotamus skin whip with which the Belgians had flayed open the backs
of the Congolese, chicotte, and the word for the labyrinthine mines dug in search of water in the Sahara, foggara—words that had given his books a rare authenticity.

  “Good job, Philip.”

  I turned to find Harry standing next to me, grinning cheerfully, clearly long past our difficult last encounter.

  “And thanks for plugging the Russian book,” Harry added. “Loretta finally sent it to me. It’s pretty strange.”

  “In what way?” I asked.

  “In that Julian focused on Chikatilo’s fantasies,” Harry said. “The way he assumes the part of a patriot when he kills these kids. They were spies. They were traitors. They had to be destroyed to protect Mother Russia.” He glanced toward the house and now clearly wanted to push this unpleasantness aside. “So, you coming?” he asked.

  “In a minute,” I said, then turned back toward the front of the tent, my gaze now focused on the photograph to the left of the lectern.

  I had no trouble placing the photo, of course. I’d taken it when we were in Buenos Aires, the Río de la Plata behind him, the two of us about to take a boat to Montevideo with our guide. I’d left Argentina a week later, but Julian had stayed on.

  For the first time in a long time, I thought of the grave purpose that had kept Julian in Argentina, the many leads he’d followed, the growing sense of futility as each led nowhere. He had looked everywhere, but had failed to find her. Had he been thinking of that failure while he studied the map of Argentina on that last day? Had he still been thinking of it as he later walked to that little yellow boat?

  Loretta had thrown open the windows of the sunroom, and I could hear the white noise of muffled voices, along with the strains of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, which Julian had first heard at Two Groves and he later called the saddest music in the world.

  For the next hour or so I mingled with the guests, most of whom were friends of Loretta’s who’d come to pay their respects to her departed brother but hadn’t actually known Julian.

  By evening everyone had left, so Loretta and I sat alone, still in the sunroom but no longer in the sun. Loretta lit a few candles. They aged the air to a pale yellow, rather than turning the atmosphere romantic. But this perception, I thought, was actually a misperception, a little elegiac twist of mind.