The Crime of Julian Wells

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Look at these,” I said to René.

  He stepped over and looked at the pictures I’d spread out before him.

  “I took that one,” I told him, “but I don’t know where the others came from. The young woman is Marisol. She was our guide in Argentina, the young woman who disappeared.”

  “Ah,” René said softly. “Pretty, but not my type.” He smiled. “Too small. Not enough meat. Who is the guy?”

  “Someone named Emilio Vargas,” I said. “At least that’s what it says on the back of the picture.”

  René continued to stare at the pictures. “They look like surveillance photographs,” he said. “They remind me of the old days in Algiers.” He took out a cigarette and lit it. “There are eyes upon these two.”

  “Police surveillance, you mean,” I said.

  “Police, army, intelligence operatives,” René said. “What’s the difference?” He smiled, but rather mirthlessly, like one recalling a memory that still troubled him. “There was a young woman in Algiers,” he said. “Her name was Khalida. It means ‘eternal’ in Arabic, but it didn’t turn out to be so with this girl.” Something in René’s eyes shifted to the dark side. “By what you call coincidence, one of our men—”

  “Our men?” I interrupted.

  “A cop, like me,” René answered casually, then continued. “Anyway, he took a picture outside the Milk Bar Café a few minutes before the bombing. Khalida was in this picture, standing a few feet from the door, looking nervous.” He tapped the face of Emilio Vargas in the photograph. “Like this one. You can see it in his eyes. He is not at rest, this fellow. His mind is busy. With Khalida, we thought she was this way because she knew about the bomb, that she was maybe a lookout, waiting for the man who was to bring it, but it turned out to be a boy she was waiting for, a boy her father didn’t like.” He shrugged. “But it was too late before we found this out.”

  That outcome seemed to strike René as one of life’s cruel turns, a twist in events that had swept poor innocent Khalida into the maelstrom of the Algerian revolt.

  René laughed, but dryly. “In those days, we did what we did to whoever we thought deserved it.” He laughed again, no less humorlessly. “Revolution is not a kind mother to its children.”

  “What happened to Khalida?” I asked.

  “We followed her,” René answered. “We thought maybe she would lead us to the big boss. But this girl, she goes to the casbah to buy vegetables; then she goes home with her little basket. She lives with her stupid father, who fills her mind with the massacre at Setif, how the Pieds-Noirs must all be killed, the usual ‘Allahu Akbar’ bullshit.”

  “She told you what her father said to her?” I asked.

  “Not for a while,” René answered with a casual shrug of the shoulders. “But like I said, we did what we did. And by the time we finished, it was too late for little Khalida.” He picked up the picture of Marisol and Emilio Vargas and looked at it closely. “Their hands are touching.”

  I glanced at the photograph, and it was true. On the bench between them, they’d rested their hands in such a way that their fingers touched.

  René continued to stare at the picture. “Betrayal is like a landslide in your soul, no?” he said. “After it, you cannot regain your footing.” When I gave no response to this, he looked at me. “Perhaps this boy was Marisol’s lover,” he said. “It is an old story, no? The secret lover. It would have made Julian very jealous, no?”

  I shook my head. “Not at all, because Julian was never in love with Marisol,” I said. “You’ve read too many bodice rippers, René.”

  He was clearly puzzled by the phrase. “Bodice rippers?”

  “Romance novels,” I explained.

  René dutifully drew out his notebook and added the phrase to it. “Very good,” he said with small laugh. “I like the English language.” His lingering smile coiled into a grimace. “The people, not so much.”

  16

  We left Julian’s place a few minutes later. René had obviously found Julian’s apartment depressing. But so had I, and thus, with no reason to linger, I had already returned to my hotel later that afternoon when the phone rang.

  “Philip Anders?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Walter Hendricks. Your father asked me to call you. He said that you were investigating a friend of yours.”

  Investigating?

  Was that truly what I was doing now? I asked myself.

  “Your friend was Julian Carlton Wells, I believe?” Hendricks asked.

  He had pronounced Julian’s full name in the way of a man reading it from a dossier, but I only said, “Yes.”

  “I live in London now,” Hendricks said. “But in the early eighties I was stationed in Buenos Aires. Your father thought I might be of help since I was in charge of the Argentine desk at the time that Mr. Wells became involved with a young woman who worked as a guide for the consulate.”

  “Marisol,” I said. “What do you mean by ‘became involved’?”

  “Well, at least to the extent that after her disappearance, he inquired about her at Casa Rosada,” Hendricks said.

  “Julian went to Casa Rosada? I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s a matter of record,” Hendricks said.

  “What kind of record?”

  “Well, I’m sure you’re aware that dictatorships keep good records on people who visit the seat of government.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “They record their names, their addresses, and if a flag is raised, they investigate them.”

  “Did Casa Rosada investigate Julian?” I asked.

  “No, he wasn’t investigated,” Hendricks said. “But he was noted. Anyone connected to Ms. Menendez would have been noted.”

  “Anyone connected with Marisol?” I asked. “Why?”

  “Because she had gotten the government’s attention, evidently,” Hendricks replied. “At least enough for them to have done a background check on her.”

  “But she seemed so uninvolved in politics,” I said. “She seemed quite innocent, actually.”

  Hendricks laughed. “Well, there’s an old line in intelligence work,” he said lightly. “Play the kitten. Conceal the tigress.” He seemed rather like a man who had completed a small task and was now anxious to move on. “In any event, Casa Rosada had a report on Marisol. There was nothing of intelligence value in it. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such reports were compiled during the Dirty War. Marisol’s is no different from the others.”

  “May I see it?” I asked cautiously.

  “I see no reason why not,” Hendricks said. “But you’d have to come here. It’s not something I could just put in the mail.” He offered a small laugh. “It’s of no importance to anyone, but procedure is a form of paranoia, as I’m sure you know.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I could be in London by Monday if that’s convenient for you.”

  “Monday is fine,” Hendricks said. “If you’re sure you want to make that effort.”

  He seemed genuinely surprised that I would pursue the matter any further.

  “You thought I wouldn’t want to see the report?” I asked.

  “Frankly, yes,” Hendricks answered.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, nothing, really,” Hendricks said. “Just something your father said.”

  “Which was?”

  “That you were the opposite of Julian.”

  “In what way?”

  “That you had no taste for the ‘cloak-and-dagger’ life,” Hendricks said.

  “And Julian did?” I asked.

  “Your father seemed to think so,” Hendricks admitted.

  “But Julian was just a writer,” I said.

  This was clearly a line of conversation that Hendricks had no interest in pursuing. “So, I’ll see you in London, on Monday, right?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Meet me in the bar at Durrants Hotel,” Hendricks said, and gave me the address. “Say
four in the afternoon?”

  “See you on Monday,” I said firmly, then, rather than dwell on my father’s curious comment about Julian, I decided to go out into the Parisian night, where I found a small café, took a table outside, and ordered a glass of red wine.

  It was a warm summer evening, and given my visit to Julian’s garret earlier in the day, it inevitably reminded me of Buenos Aires, the similar nights I spent there, often at an outdoor café, all of us talking about whatever came to mind, but almost never politics. It was the one subject Marisol carefully avoided, though at the time I noticed that Julian often tried to move the topic of conversation in that direction. Why had he done that? I wondered now, and on that thought, I recalled the few occasions when he abruptly canceled meeting me at one place or another, times when I didn’t know where he was, and during which I now imagined him skulking behind some street kiosk, taking pictures of Marisol.

  It was an almost comic notion of Julian as a spy, but a tiny shift in perception can sometimes bring about a seismic shift in suspicion, and in thinking through all this, I felt just such a shift and remembered a particular evening when we were all seated at a small café.

  It was more or less at the corner of Avenida de Mayo and the wide boulevard of 9 de Julio, the obelisk at Plaza de la República rising like a gigantic needle in the distance. The night before, one of the junta’s notorious Ford Falcon trucks had screeched to a halt before the obelisk. According to several witnesses, four men had leaped out, seized a young couple who were standing at the monument, thrown them into the back, and then jumped in after them as the truck sped away.

  The abduction was so blatant, and occurred in the presence of so many witnesses, that the government had issued a statement decrying the kidnapping, though everyone knew that the government’s own paramilitary thugs had carried it out and that these latest victims of the repression would likely never be seen again.

  “But where do they take them?” Julian asked. “I mean, in the middle of a huge city, hundreds of people will see them.”

  “And hundreds will say nothing, so some little house in La Boca will do,” Marisol answered in that nonpolitical way of hers, as if it were merely a matter of convenience that such people might disappear into one of Buenos Aires’s most colorful neighborhoods.

  “But they have to take them somewhere,” Julian insisted.

  “But why to some secret place?” Marisol said. “If they can take them in the middle of a city in the middle of the day, why should they need some cave in a faraway place to put them in?”

  She saw that Julian was taken aback by what she said.

  “It is before such men have the power that your courage should make you act,” she said. “Once they have the power, your fear will control you.”

  “So you would do nothing to find this young man and woman?” Julian demanded, as if now accusing her of complicity in these crimes.

  In response, and for the first and only time, Marisol’s eyes flashed with anger, and with the force of a wind she shot forward.

  “How would you find these two people, Julian?” she fired back. “Would you take some other man or woman from the street? Would you bring them to some place and torture them or maybe torture their children before their eyes? For, this you would have to do. Do you know why this is true? It is because once a monster has the power, to destroy this monster, you must become a monster, too.”

  With that, she sat back and with an unexpected violence drained the last of the wine. “There is no blood in your politics. But down here, it is always blood.”

  Julian said nothing as Marisol drew her hands from the table and let them fall into her lap, a gesture that told me she regretted her outburst because it was not how a guide should act.

  Yes, Julian said nothing, but now I recalled that something in his eyes had glimmered darkly, as if, deep inside some secret chamber, a door had opened up.

  I had taken the photographs of Marisol that I’d found in Julian’s garret with me, and now I drew them from my jacket pocket and looked through them again. The one on top was the one I’d taken, and for a moment, I studied Marisol’s face, her quiet features, her gentle eyes.

  Play the kitten, conceal the tigress, I heard Hendricks say, and with those words I drew my gaze away from Marisol’s face and settled it on her hands. To me, they seemed soft and delicate. I could not imagine them with claws.

  PART IV

  The Tigress

  17

  We must imagine a little girl looking up from her manacled hands, seeing a woman approach, and believing in that instant that she is surely saved. For this woman is the mistress of the castle, she whose delicate white fingers hold authority over the secret chambers of Čachtice. With a gesture, she can open every barred door, pull down all the ropes and chains, order Ficko to the gallows and Dorottya to the pyre for what they have done: stripped her naked, forced her onto this sticky straw mat, and placed the manacles on her wrists and ankles, crimes for which she knows they will now be punished. It is beautiful Elizabeth she sees enter her cell, approach her, and, after a short pause and with a gaze no innocent should ever face, bid Ficko fetch her whip.

  It was not Julian’s words that awakened me, but my visualization of what the passage described: I’d seen Countess Báthory in her gown, weighted with jewels, her fingers sprouting precious stones, drawing nearer to me, her deception so perfect and so humbling. I’d glanced down, like one presented to royalty.

  I was not prone to nightmares. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time one had shaken me from sleep. But this one had been extraordinarily vivid, and I’d felt the manacles around my wrists, the gummy straw beneath my feet.

  In memory, I thought the scene was much longer and more detailed, but in one of Julian’s surprises, as I saw when I found the passage in the book, he had cut it short, then gone into a brief meditation on the added horror, as he supposed it, of being tortured by a woman rather than a man, the ordeal intensified, he said, by a horrifying turn in which humanity’s oldest vision of female comfort is suddenly and terrifyingly reversed.

  René arrived at the hotel just after nine, looking quite rested, clearly a man who never did battle with himself or questioned his past deeds, even the dark ones he’d probably committed in Algeria.

  “You look like Julian,” he said when I joined him at the little outdoor café not far from my hotel. “In the morning, he looked like a man who’d spent his night being chased by dogs.”

  “This happened often?” I asked.

  “Many nights, yes,” René answered. “Nightmares.” He lit his breakfast cigarette, though I suspected it was not his first of the day. There’d probably been one when he rose, one before he shaved and one after, one before he dressed, one on the way out into the morning light. “Julian had terrible ones.”

  “I had a nightmare of my own last night,” I told him. “It had to do with Julian’s book The Tigress. The scene where we see the countess through one of the girls’ eyes, a girl she is about to torture and murder.”

  “Julian was always doing that,” René said absently. “Putting himself in the place of the victim.” He glanced toward the street and seemed to lose himself in the traffic, until he said, “Perhaps he did not like to live in his own skin.” He shrugged. “But we can live only in the one we have, no?”

  The question was so rhetorical I felt no need to answer it.

  “Last night, I got a call from a man in London,” I told him. “He had a file on Marisol. He implied—well, a bit more than implied—that Marisol was something more than a guide.”

  René blew a column of smoke out of the right side of his mouth. “Perhaps a dangerous woman? We had one in Algeria. She was called ‘the Blade,’ and we feared her more than any of the men.”

  “Feared that she would do to you what you did to Khalida?” I asked cautiously.

  “Algeria was a bad place, and in such places, bad things happen,” René said. He looked at the lit end of his cigarette l
ike one considering an ember from hell. “She was a torturer and an assassin, this one. These things she did, as you say in English, ‘by night.’” He smiled as if admiring of her cunning. “By day, she was an ordinary woman. A teacher in a school.” His smile widened and became more cutting. “She deceived everyone. Only her lover knew. And he was as bad as she was. They were—what do you say—‘partners in crime’?”

  I thought of the pictures of Marisol that Julian had placed in that unmarked file, Marisol looking entirely unaware, going about her business, except when she was with Emilio Vargas. In that picture she had looked quite intense. Had she lived a secret life? I wondered, with Emilio Vargas her partner?

  I left Paris by way of Gare du Nord the next morning. On the high-speed train it was a journey of a little more than two hours, a pleasant ride through the French countryside, then under the channel and on to London. On the way, I thought of nothing but Marisol, though it was one particular memory that triumphed over all the rest.

  Julian and I had gone to the Gran Café Tortini to meet her. It was on one of Avenida de Mayo’s busy corners and had been long favored by Argentina’s greatest artists and performers. Before more or less leaving the country, Borges had been a frequent visitor, along with a number of playwrights and actresses less well known to the outside world. The tavern had even gone so far as to commission wax figures of its most famous customers, so there was Borges, frozen in time, seated at a small table, in conversation with Carlos Gardel, the renowned tango singer, the great writer rendered so peacefully that I could hardly imagine him in the Argentina that now swirled around this serene representation of himself, the violence and the chaos, his beloved country very much in the turmoil my father had recommended that we see.

  Marisol, so very punctual on all other occasions, was late. Her failure to appear shook Julian in a way that surprised me, and he’d begun to fidget and glance about.

  “She’s always on time,” he said.

  “She’s only five minutes late,” I reminded him.