The Crime of Julian Wells

by Thomas H. Cook

  “But she’s always on time.”

  “I think you’re overreacting a little, Julian,” I said. “It’s only five minutes.”

  “Yes,” Julian said pointedly, “but it’s five minutes in Argentina.”

  He meant in a country where anything could happen, of course, where a couple could be seized in broad daylight at the obelisk, where in La Plata ten high school students could be kidnapped, raped, and tortured, as they had been some years before in what was known as “The Night of the Pencils.”

  “Borges at first favored the junta,” I said, “but now he attacks it. Usually from Europe.”

  “Where it’s safe,” Julian said. He peered out over the avenue, searching the morning crowds for Marisol.

  “Sometimes that’s the only choice,” I said. “What would be the point of staying here?”

  “To fight,” Julian answered in a way that made me wonder if he’d begun to entertain the romantic notion of adopting Argentina, making its struggle his struggle, Julian a one-man international brigade.

  I might have said something to that effect, but then Marisol came rushing up from behind us, looking a bit in disarray, but with her customary energy and good cheer.

  “Ah,” she said brightly, but with a smile that seemed painted on. “So we have arrived at the cultural center of the city.” She glanced toward the wax figures, Borges, blind, holding his cane, and with that glimpse, an uncharacteristic shadow passed over her. “He wrote once that ‘the present is alone,’” she said, then looked about at the other customers, most of them well dressed, smoking quietly, sipping coffee. “He was not so blind that he could not see the junta’s knife coming for him.”

  Never until that moment had I seen a trace of mockery in Marisol, and although she quickly brushed it aside and assumed her apolitical station as a cheerful guide, her disdain for Argentina’s greatest living writer was clear.

  “He wrote that kindness is not what a dagger wants,” Julian said, his gaze quite intense.

  Marisol looked at him in a way that suggested she had never seen him in exactly the same light. “You are reading Borges?” she asked.

  “After you quoted him in Recoleta, how could I not?” Julian said.

  “What did you read last?” Marisol asked.

  “A short story called ‘The Zahir,’” Julian answered.

  Then he smiled softly and repeated a line from the story: “In the drawer of my writing table, among draft pages and old letters, the dagger dreams over and over its simple tiger’s dream.”

  Tiger.

  Dagger.

  What in the name of heaven, I wondered as my train hurtled toward London, did any of it mean?

  18

  It was around noon when I arrived in London, several hours before I was scheduled to meet Hendricks at Durrants, the small hotel he’d recommended because it was near the American embassy. Durrants had often been used by American officials during the war, a time, spy novelists often pointed out, when the line between the good guys and the bad guys was clearly drawn.

  London had changed considerably since my last visit, the influx of immigrants having put its mark on such places as Oxford Street, where Middle Eastern men now smoked hookahs in sidewalk cafés and women strolled about in full burkas. These were changes that gave the city a deeper sense of intrigue, or so it seemed. For I couldn’t be sure that my present view of London as a place of plots and counterplots came from the actual changes I noted in the city itself or from the troubling details that were emerging from Julian’s life—especially the preoccupation with betrayal that marked both his books and his conversation.

  Durrants was on a side street not far from Hyde Park. By the time I got there, one of London’s famous drizzles had settled in, along with a touch of fog. Beyond the bar’s small windows, I could see black umbrellas sprouting like dark flowers on the street.

  “You must be Philip.”

  I turned from the window to see a man standing at my table.

  “Walter Hendricks,” he said. “I trust your father is well?”

  “As well as can be expected,” I told him.

  “For a man his age, you mean,” Hendricks said with a knowing grin. “And mine, too, for that matter.”

  Hendricks, however, appeared far less frail than my father. In fact, there was something rough-and-tumble about him, a sense that he could still handle other men with a sure hand. His accent was Southern, of the type that held the soft twang of the Appalachians rather than the rounded o’s of the Tidewater. Here was one whose ancestors had fought under Lee, rather than beside him, I thought, men who staggered back from Pickett’s charge to hear their general’s apology while trying hard not to notice that there was no blood on his sleek lapels.

  “I would have expected you and Julian to have gone on the grand tour after college,” he said as he sat down opposite me. “Argentina always seemed to be an odd choice.” He smiled quite warmly. “‘The dusty places,’ your father used to call them. He had a soft spot for the people of those regions.” His smile grew into a soft chuckle. “I told him that he should spend some time in Timbuktu, where even the food tastes like dirt.”

  “I’m sure he would have loved a posting like that,” I said in defense of my father. “To face that kind of reality.”

  Hendricks’s laughter trailed away. “Not for long,” he said with the certainty of one who’d experienced such places. “No one likes that kind of reality for long.”

  He glanced about the bar. “Have you ever been here?”

  “No.”

  He smiled. “Well, my guess is that many a plot was hatched in this place,” he said. We were sitting at a small, round table clearly meant to accommodate drinks only. “It wouldn’t surprise me if Reilly, Prince of Spies, once sat right in this corner, at this little table, and wondered if it might be possible to have Lenin assassinated.”

  Even in such casual conversation, Hendricks’s eyes remained penetrating, the gaze of a man to whom one should not lie.

  “I love history,” he added. “It’s the reason I retired to London, the sheer history of the place. I read history all the time. Probably as much as your father reads spy novels. He seemed to live in books back then.” He laughed. “He was reading The Thirty-Nine Steps the day I met him.”

  “He doesn’t read now,” I said. “He watches old movies. Black-and-white mostly. From the forties.”

  “Yes,” Hendricks said. “That would be his type.” His smile bore the usual indulgence that men of the world accord their dreamier compatriots, and in it I saw the most that was likely ever given to my father by the sturdier and far less idealistic souls who’d pulled the strings at Foggy Bottom. “Stories about lone heroes. That was what he wanted to be, I think.”

  “But instead he lived his life behind a desk,” I said.

  Hendricks nodded. “That’s true,” he admitted. “But I’m not sure your father would have functioned very effectively beyond a desk.”

  “Really?”

  Hendricks nodded. “As a matter of fact, he sometimes reminded me of what Trotsky said about Czar Nicholas.”

  “Which was?”

  “That he should have been a kindly neighborhood grocer or something of that sort,” Hendricks said. “A simple tradesman, invisible to history. But your father not only wanted to change the world, he wanted to do it by means of derring-do.” He laughed. “In C Building, he was the resident Walter Mitty.”

  The resident Walter Mitty.

  That was both the saddest and truest thing anyone had ever said about my father, that he had lived his life behind a desk while watching spy movies and reading spy books and dreaming of the romantic secret-agent life he would never have.

  To think of my father in such a way pained me, so I turned the conversation away from him.

  “So, the report on Marisol,” I said as a reminder of why I’d come to London.

  “Marisol, yes,” Hendricks said. “I have to say that I am a bit curious as to why you’re
so interested in your friend’s quixotic effort to find this young woman.”

  “Was it quixotic?” I asked.

  “I would call it that, yes,” Hendricks answered flatly. “He was trying to find someone he didn’t know much about in a country about which he knew even less. He had no connections in Argentina and no authority to conduct any sort of inquiry into this young woman’s whereabouts. And yet, he felt that he could simply and quite brazenly walk into Casa Rosada and ask whatever questions he liked.” He shook his head gravely. “Such a little boy.”

  I recalled something Julian had said many years before. I’d been talking about Mussolini, how amazingly childlike he’d been, his love for mounting white horses and prancing about, his comical strut. The whole story had seemed to darken Julian’s mood, his voice very serious when he said, “He wasn’t funny to the Ethiopians.” With that, he’d shaken his head softly, then added, “Men with power shouldn’t be little boys.”

  Hendricks’s gaze took on an added seriousness. “How could he have possibly expected anyone in authority to tell him anything? Not only where Marisol was or what had happened to her, but who she was?”

  “Who she was?” I asked by way of directing the conversation back to her.

  Hendricks smiled. “Nowadays they’d call her a ‘person of interest,’” he said.

  “To Casa Rosada,” I added.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she was evidently working for a well-known Montonero named Emilio Vargas,” Hendricks answered matter-of-factly.

  I tried to conceal my surprise. “Julian had a picture of Marisol with him,” I said. “Where would he have gotten it?”

  “Perhaps he was more successful at Casa Rosada than I thought,” Hendricks answered with a shrug. “Anyway, as to Vargas. He was called ‘the Hook.’ It was his method of choice. To hang people on meat hooks.”

  I remembered an atrocity Julian had once mentioned, an entire Balkan village rounded up and loaded onto trucks, then transported to the local abattoir, where every man, woman, and child was put through all the stages of animal slaughter. He had described the process so vividly and with such detail that I’d finally skipped ahead.

  “Vargas was as vicious as they come,” Hendricks said. “Names were given to him and he had those people kidnapped. Their children, too, sometimes. Torturing them was Vargas’s specialty. He would have justified it, of course. And it’s true, there are people who can’t be broken by torture. But when they see their children, naked, strapped to a bed beside a small electric generator . . .” He stopped. “I’m sure you get the picture.”

  I nodded.

  “He operated a torture farm in the Chaco,” Hendricks added.

  “That’s where Marisol was from,” I told him.

  Hendricks nodded. “Yes. I saw that when I read the report.”

  “What happened to Vargas?” I asked.

  “He was shot eventually,” Hendricks answered. “It was quite clear that before he died, he’d been rather badly treated.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That he’d been tortured for a long time,” Hendricks said. “Missing some important parts, if you know what I mean.” A smile slithered onto his face. “He deserved every cut, if you ask me.”

  “Where was he found?”

  “Floating in the Plata,” Hendricks answered.

  “I can’t imagine Marisol having anything to do with a man like that,” I said.

  “Then how do you explain the picture?” Hendricks asked. “I don’t know how Julian got that picture, but I do know this: Casa Rosada had come to suspect that Marisol was a spy for Vargas and that she was primarily trying to find information while working as a guide for the American consulate.”

  I had briefly imagined Marisol in this cloak-and-dagger role, skulking in the shadows of the consulate, pressing her ears against a door or her eyes to a keyhole.

  “Of course, that might only have been her cover,” Hendricks added.

  He saw that I didn’t understand this.

  “It’s called the double take,” Hendricks explained. “The agent allows herself to be revealed as a little, insignificant operative in order to conceal the fact that she is actually a very important one. So you have to look again. Hence, the double take.”

  “But there’s no evidence that Marisol was . . .” My question trailed off.

  “No, but there was an intelligence report on her,” Hendricks answered. “It didn’t say a lot, but it didn’t have to, because what it says emphatically just by existing is that Marisol was a person of considerable interest to Casa Rosada.” He shrugged. “As I’m sure you know, Buenos Aires was a nest of vipers in those days. On both sides, people were being tortured, killed. For most people in the world, politics is not a game.”

  There was more than a hint of condescension in Hendricks’s last remark, the implication that in Argentina Julian and I were playing hopscotch in a torture chamber.

  Hendricks placed his briefcase on the table. “Was Julian political?” he asked.

  “Political,” I repeated. “Do you mean was he an idealist, some kind of an ideologue?”

  “Those two are very different,” Hendricks said.

  “In what way?”

  “An idealist is a man with blinders,” Hendricks answered. “An ideologue is a man who’s blind.” He looked at me gravely. “Which was Julian?”

  “I’m not sure he was either one,” I said. “I don’t think he had time to be before . . .”

  “Before what?”

  “Before Marisol disappeared,” I said. “And after that, as you know, he did nothing but look for her.”

  Hendricks nodded. “Look for her, yes.”

  Now his eyes gave off the sense of a man who’d seen too much and who regarded those who hadn’t as little more than children.

  “Who did this friend of yours think he was, hmm?” he asked. “Some superhero? The type your father dreamed of being?” He looked at me as if the bloom of youth were still on my cheeks. “Grow up, please.”

  He paused a moment, then leaned forward in a way that was decidedly avuncular.

  “Do you know what real warriors say about a fictional creation like Rambo?” he asked. “That he would be dead in five minutes. But that during the course of those fateful five minutes, his bullshit heroics would kill every soul under his command.”

  He watched me for a moment, like a man looking for a hidden motive; then he leaned forward and looked at me as though certain of one thing: that for all my privilege, all my expensive education, I could still stand another lesson.

  “You cannot know a people if you do not share their pain,” he said, “and Julian knew nothing about what was going on in Argentina. He was just a tourist who happened to stick his toe into a river of blood.”

  He drew an envelope from his briefcase.

  “Be glad you’ve lived a cautious life, Philip,” he said. “Because the reckless die young.” The envelope slid toward me. “And they kill young, too.”

  19

  In literature, the unopened envelope occupies a privileged place. Most famous, perhaps, is the one Angel does not find in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and the lack of its discovery causes a deeper tragedy to unfold.

  As I began to read it, I couldn’t help wonder if a further tragedy might also unfold in the report Hendricks had given me.

  It was seventeen pages long. It had originally been written in Spanish, but Hendricks had gone to the trouble of having it translated.

  The first pages were dully biographical. They recounted the date and place of Marisol’s birth, the deaths of her parents, her subsequent border crossings from Argentina to Paraguay, and her final settlement at age six, now an orphan, in the charge of Father Rodrigo, whose parish “presided over various charitable affairs within the region of Gran Chaco.”

  On page 3, Marisol arrives in Buenos Aires. She is fourteen years old, the recipient of a small scholarship at a Catholic acade
my, one arranged by Father Rodrigo “as a result of her intelligence and ambition.” Marisol continues in this school for the next four years, chalking up impressive grades and glowing testimonials from the nuns, who find her dutiful, obedient, and “quick to take advantage of any opportunity to please.” She studies English more assiduously than any other subject.

  On page 9, Marisol graduates from the academy, then begins to take courses at a vocational school that focuses on various aspects of what the report calls “clothing.” While at the school, she focuses on design.

  To support herself, Marisol takes several jobs, all of the sort traditionally opened to the penniless. For a time she is a waitress, but she also serves as an usher at the opera house and as a clerk in its gift shop. She works as a tour guide at one of the city’s art museums. While working at the museum, her proficiency in English is noticed, and she makes a little extra money by leading English-speaking tours.

  Throughout this time in her life, Marisol continues to take courses at the vocational school. In this way, she is like hundreds of other young women in the city. But now, and for the first time, something ominous appears in the report: “Subject makes contact with the American consulate in Buenos Aires and is employed as a guide.”

  I knew that it did not take much to fall under the eye of the junta, but Marisol’s work as a guide struck me as so unlikely to yield useful information that it would hardly have been worth it for them to keep track of her, much less bother to kidnap and “disappear” her. I found no evidence that she’d made any effort to cozy up to any particular person, some high civilian or military official she might seduce, and from whom, during an evening of sex-hazed pillow talk, she might garner a bit of useful intelligence. In fact, she had never even served as a guide to anyone who could have been remotely considered a conduit for vital information.

  The final two pages of the report provided both a chronology that succinctly recorded the previous events and a complete list of the people to whom Marisol had been recommended by the consulate, along with their professions, and their reasons for being in Argentina. Almost all of them were businessmen or people connected in one form or another to cultural exchange. Among the people for whom Marisol had served as a guide, there were no military personnel listed, no diplomats, no high officials from any government. Instead, Marisol appeared to have spent most of her time escorting members of various religious organizations who moved in steady caravans through whatever region was perceived rich in desperate souls, along with low-level representatives from a few small charities. It was such modest figures who made up Marisol’s list of clients, hardly the sort that might interest a spy.