The Crime of Julian Wells

by Thomas H. Cook

  The old man smiled. “Come then,” he said, now looking at Julian and me and nodding forward, his signal that we were to come with them to the station.

  It was only a short distance to the train station, but much of it was down a long sweep of concrete stairs, which made our progress slow and halting, Father Rodrigo somewhat unsteady on his feet, so that often Marisol took one arm and Julian the other.

  At Retiro, crowds of people gathered in great, noisy throngs. Some carried cardboard boxes tied with twine rather than luggage, but this was Buenos Aires in the eighties, not some distant jungle outpost of a century before, and so the vast majority carried simple, battered suitcases and valises not very different from what would have been seen in any American bus station.

  If the bus to the Chaco was different from the others, it was only in that those who waited for it looked poorer and more resigned than those on their way to less distant and impoverished shores. They were farmworkers, as Father Rodrigo noted, toilers in soy and sorghum and maize.

  The bus pulled in after a few minutes.

  Father Rodrigo got to his feet. “God be with you all,” he said, then turned to Marisol, and drew out a strand of dark beads. “I brought these from the Chaco,” he said.

  Marisol took the beads and hung them around her neck. “I will wear them every day,” she said.

  The old priest smiled. “Be kind to yourself, my daughter,” he said to her, “and remember me.”

  Marisol faced the bus as it pulled away, her hand raised, waving, craning her neck, trying for one last glimpse of Father Rodrigo. But he had taken a seat on the opposite side, and so she did not see him again, though she didn’t give up her effort until the bus had disappeared into the night.

  “He could easily be arrested,” Julian said firmly and in a way that gave his words a distinct authority. Then he looked at Marisol pointedly. “Talking the way he does about spies in the American consulate. If there were such people, spying for Casa Rosada, they might feel threatened.”

  Marisol’s eyes shot over to Julian, and I could see that his remark had struck her as very serious indeed.

  “Threatened? But he is just a country priest,” she said. She began to toy with the beads the old priest had just given her. “He is nothing to the ones in Casa Rosada. Who would listen to a priest from the Chaco? He is dust to them.”

  Julian’s voice was full of warning. “Even dust gets trampled,” he said. He looked out toward the distant and still-departing bus. “No one is too small to be noticed by the generals at Casa Rosada,” he added.

  He spoke with great authority, as if he had knowledge of secret connections between the American consulate and the masters of Casa Rosada, which, of course, he did not have. And yet, as I could see, Marisol took his words to heart, though she added nothing to the exchange that had just taken place and instead nodded toward the stairs that led back to San Marco.

  “There is a nice little restaurant there,” she said. “It is called La Flora.”

  A few minutes later we were seated at an outdoor table of the little café she’d mentioned. For no apparent reason, Julian began to talk about a book I was reading, arguing with me over a certain point. He was almost never wrong in such matters, but on this point I knew he was, which rather pleased me, and so to prove that I was right, I went back to the hotel to get the book. It was a chance, however juvenile, to one-up my always completely confident friend. The hotel was only a block away, so I was back very quickly, moving briskly toward the café because I knew I was right and couldn’t wait to prove it. But as I closed in upon their table, I saw that Julian and Marisol were talking very intently. Julian was leaning forward, and Marisol looked extraordinarily grave, like one who’s just been given a dreadful warning. They both shrugged off this seriousness as I approached, however, and it wasn’t until after Marisol had left us that I brought the scene up with Julian.

  “What were you talking about with Marisol?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Julian answered.

  He said nothing more, but the troubled mood of that earlier conversation returned and seemed to haunt him, and he appeared to be questioning himself rather like a little boy who’d done something wrong.

  “Marisol loves Father Rodrigo,” he said.

  “Yes, she does,” I said. “I hope he’s not in danger. But who knows? You’re right, they could do anything to a man like Rodrigo.” I looked out over the street. “It’s a lost country, just like Marisol says. Because if it gained power, the left would be just as oppressive as the right is now.”

  Julian nodded softly.

  “Marisol’s right to stay out of it,” I said. “Because they’re crazy on both sides.”

  We sat in silence for a time, Julian’s gaze curiously unsettled, like a man trying to find his way in a dark wood.

  Finally, I said, “What’s the matter, Julian?”

  He looked at me and his lips parted, but he didn’t speak. Instead, he turned away again, now looking out in the night-bound depths of San Martín.

  “Nothing,” he said softly.

  I sensed that if I chose to pursue the matter, Julian would probably tell me what was on his mind. But it had been a long day and I was tired.

  “Well, I’m heading for bed,” I said.

  Julian continued to face the park. “Good night,” he said.

  I went to my room and prepared for bed, but just before climbing into it, I glanced out the window, down to the little bar seven flights below. Julian was still sitting, just as he’d been when I left him, still peering out toward San Martín. Even from that distance, I could sense that something was troubling him.

  I thought now, I should have gone down to him. If life knew only happy endings, a friend would have done just that. He would have looked down from the window, seen his friend in the shadowy light, understood, if not the cause of his trouble, then at least the fact that the trouble was there. He would have looked at his bed and felt a great need to climb into it. He would have thought of the soft pillows and the caressing sheets. He would have yearned for sleep and dreams and in his bone tiredness, he would have recognized his need for both. But in the end, this friend would have dressed himself and gone back downstairs, taken a seat at his friend’s table and said to him, simply, “Tell me.” He would have done all this because despite his youth and inexperience, he would have understood that sometimes it is simply such a gesture that makes the difference.

  I knew that in any view of life designed to put a better face on man, this friend would have known these things and done them.

  But I had not.

  Now, however, with that scene playing in my mind, the question rose again as to whether Julian had been right in thinking that Father Rodrigo was going to be arrested. Therefore, when I got back to Paris, I decided to see if I could answer it.

  12

  I dialed the number almost immediately after returning to my hotel in Paris, then waited the usual protracted amount of time it took my father to answer, longer this time than when I’d called him on my first night in Paris.

  But at last he appeared on my computer screen, already dressed for bed, though it was late afternoon in New York.

  “I can see you very clearly,” I told him.

  He smiled. “You, too. It’s really quite amazing.”

  We talked about trivial matters for a time, the weather in New York and Paris, a smattering of world and national news, then on to my impression of René and our visit to Oradour-sur-Glane.

  At last I said, “Do you remember that when Julian and I were in Buenos Aires we met an old priest named Father Rodrigo?”

  “Of course,” my father answered. “You said he’d heard of me. I was surprised by that.”

  “Do you have any idea whatever happened to him?”

  “Only that when Julian went down to the Chaco, he was no longer there,” my father answered. “But I’m sure Julian told you that.”

  “Another of the disappeared,” I said.

&nbs
p; “So Julian thought,” my father answered.

  “He spoke to you about it?”

  “Yes,” my father answered. “Evidently this priest had said some fairly dangerous things when they met. Julian told me what he’d said, but I didn’t see it as all that dangerous. It was common knowledge, after all, that we were more or less in cahoots with the junta.”

  “But what else could explain the fact that Rodrigo went missing?” I asked.

  “Well, sometimes people vanish of their own accord,” my father told me. “In a place like Argentina at that time, there were many reasons a man might want to make himself scarce.”

  “What would have made Father Rodrigo leave Argentina?” I asked.

  “Nothing, if he was what he seemed,” my father said.

  “A country priest, you mean?”

  My father nodded. “Even one with a loose tongue.”

  “You’re saying Father Rodrigo might have been more than that?” I asked.

  “I’m saying it’s possible that in Argentina at that time such a priest might have been used.”

  “By whom?”

  “The Montoneros, of course,” my father answered. “Lots of priests were working for the Montoneros.”

  He saw that I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “They were pretty much finished by the time you went to Argentina,” he explained. “But before the junta, they murdered anyone who opposed them. And if Rodrigo were a Montonero, and he got wind that he had been discovered or was about to be discovered, then he might have found it a very good idea to leave the country.”

  “How could he have escaped?” I asked. “He was a poor parish priest.”

  “Yes, but if he were a Montonero, they could have financed his departure from Argentina,” my father told me.

  “What money would the Montoneros have had?”

  “They would have had the millions they got from kidnappings and bank robberies,” my father answered. “One kidnapping alone brought in sixty million dollars. It was the largest ransom ever paid. It’s in the Guinness Book of Records.”

  “Would Julian have known any of this?” I asked.

  “I doubt it,” my father answered. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because he seemed to think that Rodrigo was going to be arrested,” I answered. “He told this to Marisol.”

  My father suddenly grew very still. “I didn’t know that,” he said quietly, and for a moment looked like a man sitting in a darkened theater, awaiting a film whose story he dreaded.

  “He never mentioned it?” I asked. “Not even after he got back from Argentina?”

  My father shook his head. “Of course, we rarely talked after that.”

  This was true. Julian had but rarely seen my father after Argentina, and even then only at what were more or less public gatherings, Loretta’s wedding, for example, and Colin’s funeral.

  “Good people like this Father Rodrigo can be manipulated, Philip,” my father said quietly, like a man considering the treacheries of life.

  “But Julian couldn’t have known that Rodrigo might be a Montonero operative,” I said.

  “That’s true,” my father said firmly. “The only way he could have had intelligence of that sort was if he had some contact at Casa Rosada.”

  “Which, of course, he didn’t,” I said.

  “No, of course not,” my father said. “They were absolute evil.” His eyes appeared to see that evil quite clearly. “They tortured people mercilessly.”

  I saw that his mood was blackening, so I moved to change the subject.

  “You know, it’s interesting to think that Rodrigo might still be alive,” I said, almost lightly. “And if the Montoneros wanted to get him out of Argentina, he could be anywhere.”

  Now my mind fixed on the shadowy priest with whom Julian had often been seen at Le Chapeau Noir. “Anywhere at all,” I said, almost to myself.

  “Anywhere at all,” my father repeated. The darkness fell upon him again. “It’s a twisted world, Philip,” he said, “the one you’re touching now.”

  “At the end of the conversation, my father said that I was getting into a twisted world,” I told Loretta when I called her later that night.

  She had listened silently, and when I finished, she took a moment before she spoke.

  “Do you think that priest might actually have been a Montonero?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, though I immediately began to consider the possibility. Certainly it was possible that Rodrigo might have gotten carried away with some form of revolutionary theology, agreed to help the Montoneros in some way, and then, with the junta on his trail, found it necessary to flee the country.

  I shared this with Loretta, then added as if I half believed it, “He might even be in Paris. Maybe even at this little bar Julian frequented. René said that Julian often talked with a priest there.”

  I said this jokingly, as if describing the elements of a potboiler plot, but Loretta’s tone turned serious.

  “Your father’s right,” she said. “It is a twisted world.” A pause, then, “Be careful, Philip.”

  Some warnings come like the tolling of a bell, and thus it was with Loretta’s.

  For that reason, if for no other, I should have heeded what she said to me and thus anticipated the terrors that awaited. But the Saturn Turn twists for all, as Julian had already learned, and so I moved unknowingly ahead.

  PART III

  The Terror

  13

  In The Terror, Julian’s curious meditation on one of Gilles de Rais’s awful minions, he wrote:

  The route to moral horror is never direct. There are always ramps and stairs, corridors and tunnels, the secret chamber forever concealed from those who would be appalled by what they found there.

  We all had secret chambers, I thought, though most chambers probably harbored nothing more fearful than some peculiar desire, or if not that, then perhaps simply the sad awareness of an inexplicable inadequacy we dared not reveal. Even so, Julian would have been the last I’d have suspected of having such a place. At his father’s death, he had been deeply stricken, but he had rallied even from this loss, regained his footing, and proceeded on, his confidence returning with each passing day, so that within a month or so, he seemed once again the boy of old, though perhaps even more determined to make a mark in the world.

  For his spiritual resilience alone, I had admired him. But later, as his life took shape, I had also thought him physically brave. He’d been an intrepid traveler, after all, with the courage to cross fields so foreign he must have thought himself on the moon at times. Rimbaud, stranded in Egypt, had written stinging letters of regret, his pen crying out, why, oh why, am I here? I had little doubt that Julian had often found himself floating in some similar sea of strangeness, isolated, friendless, knowing little of the language and customs, short of money, with only history’s most vile miscreants to occupy his mind. It takes courage to roam the world in that way, and roam it Julian certainly had.

  But this same physical courage had sometimes struck me as reckless and foolhardy. I’d seen scars on his arms, bruises on his body. He never mentioned these injuries, but on one occasion, I got a hint about how he’d received them.

  We were walking in Chueca, at that time one of Madrid’s most dangerous neighborhoods, when two young men staggered out of a bar, headed for the bright lights of Gran Via. On the way, they came across a young gypsy woman crumpled against a building in a common beggarly pose. Normally such people were passed without a nod, but on this occasion, the men stopped to taunt her. “Look at this gitana,” they said. “Can you smell this filthy whore?”

  By the time Julian and I reached them, the insults had escalated into a physical assault, one of the men lifting his leg to press the toe of his shoe against the woman’s breast while calling her names—puta, coño, and the like.

  In Spanish, Julian said, “Leave her alone.”

  He said it quietly, but before the man could dr
aw back his foot, Julian rushed forward and plowed into him, and they both went sprawling into the street. I didn’t try to intervene, but neither did the other man’s friend, so Julian and the man simply rolled around for a bit before getting to their feet, the Spaniard muttering curses as he staggered away.

  That night, Julian emerged more or less unharmed, and we went on our way. But I suspected that on other occasions he’d done the same and gotten a thorough beating as a result. I idealized those confrontations in a way that ennobled Julian, cast him as a selfless defender of the weak, and yet, at the same time, I sometimes wondered what his motives were. Was he driven to test his courage? Had he decided that the grand work he once dreamed of could only be realized in small acts of self-sacrifice? I knew that martyrdom was sometimes less the product of saintliness than of spiritual ambition, so had Julian from time to time felt the pinch of his own shrunken hope of doing some great work and for that reason lashed out in acts of reckless altruism?

  I had no answer to this question, of course. Yet, the more I pondered it, the more I felt that something was buried in Julian, a need, a remorse, something that held the key to him. I had no place to go for an answer, but nevertheless I decided to drop in on Le Chapeau Noir. Perhaps, with a little luck, I might run into the man Julian had spoken with there, the one with whom he appeared to have discussed Marisol.

  René was right, as it turned out. Le Chapeau Noir was indeed a good deal like the sort of place one would find in novels of intrigue. In fact, it was less a place than an atmosphere, and even if its shadowy interior were not clouded with cigarette smoke, you would add this smoke to any description of it. You would also include a dim, oddly undulating light that throws this mysterious figure into half shadow, that one into silhouette, by turns revealing or concealing a forehead, a jaw, an eye with a patch, each face broken into puzzle pieces. You would add a random arrangement of wooden tables, and over there, huddled in a corner, you would put two men in linen suits, one with a very thin moustache, the other clean shaven, wearing a panama hat. Snatches of many languages would come at you like bats. Spanish answered by Greek, a hint of German from behind a curtain, Turkish over there, where a man in a red fez drinks tea from a white china cup. To his left, an Englishman in evening dress, come to sample the demimonde after a dazzling night at the embassy. No doubt there’d be an American, too, wearing a dark suit, off in a distant corner, seemingly naive and deceptively trusting, but with a revolver close at hand.