The Crime of Julian Wells

by Thomas H. Cook

  So if she had indeed been a Montonero operative, what information had she brought to Vargas, I wondered, and from whom had she received it? The answer was that her information would have been of little value and she herself of little importance as a spy.

  Such is what any Casa Rosada agent would have seen on first glancing at Marisol.

  But what might he have seen, I wondered, if he’d done a double take?

  The Skype screen flickered slightly, but I could see my father quite clearly. He was wearing a burgundy robe with a velvet lapel, and it struck me that he looked much more like some retired CIA chief than a lowly State Department functionary. Because of that, I wondered if he might sometimes still be captured by the Walter Mitty fantasies Hendricks had mentioned, a man who, in his private moments, assumed an imaginary role far more important than any he’d ever actually had.

  “I spoke to your friend, Hendricks,” I told my father. “He thinks that Marisol might have been a Montonero operative of some sort.”

  I half expected my father to laugh at this, but instead he only nodded. “Well, it can be seductive,” he said. “The world of intrigue.”

  I took him through the details of my talk with Hendricks, Casa Rosada’s suspicions that Marisol was a spy who had kept her ears open while working for the American consulate. Then I added the odder supposition that she might have been a far more important figure, her lowly guide job merely a mask.

  “What might she have been?” he asked.

  “She seems to have been associated with a very bad guy,” I said. “His name was Emilio Vargas. He was from the Chaco, like Marisol.”

  My father didn’t seem at all surprised by what to me still seemed an outrageous conjecture.

  “It’s easy to get caught up in a revolution,” he said in his most worldly tone. “It’s a very heady business. Especially for the young. You start to imagine yourself a Mao or a Lenin, the savior of your country.”

  I recalled what Harry had said about Julian’s book on Chikatilo, how he’d gone to some lengths to detail the killer’s elaborate fantasies, the serial killer and sexual psychopath as savior of Mother Russia.

  “It has a terrible allure, being part of a secret army,” my father added. “It’s possible that Marisol could have been swept into something like that. Youth is a minefield, after all. Even Julian was attracted to the idea of being a secret agent.”

  This was true, of course. Even before our trip to Argentina, he mentioned “secret gears,” which I took to mean some sort of intelligence work. But he appeared to drop any interest in such a life after Argentina.

  “What part of that sort of work interested him?” I asked.

  “Deception,” my father answered matter-of-factly. “Disinformation, that sort of thing. Playing psychological games. He thought himself quite clever, you know.”

  “Very clever, yes,” I said.

  “He thought he would be best at winning someone’s confidence,” my father added. “Particularly in a one-on-one situation.”

  I thought of the times I arrived at the exact time and place of rendezvous only to find Julian and Marisol already waiting for me, sitting at some little table, their glasses half-empty, so it was obvious that they’d been there for quite a while.

  “Hendricks gave me the report Casa Rosada had on Marisol,” I said. “It makes it pretty clear that Marisol never had contact with anyone who would been of interest to the Montoneros while she worked as a guide for the American consulate.”

  I stopped cold as the thought hit me, worked it through, then stated it.

  “No one except for me, that is,” I told my father. “And Julian.”

  “Why would the Montoneros have had any interest in you or Julian?” my father asked.

  “Because we were connected to you, Dad,” I answered.

  My father said nothing, but I could see his mind turning this over.

  “We would have been the perfect targets, wouldn’t we?” I asked. “If Marisol had actually been a spy.”

  “But how would she have known that you and Julian were connected to me?” my father asked.

  “Well, for one thing, she heard Father Rodrigo mention you,” I answered. “And beyond that, I once heard Julian describe you as something of a mentor. As a matter of fact, he even suggested that you were a little higher up in the department than you were.”

  “Did he?” my father asked softly.

  “Yes, and I also remember him telling her about our house,” I added. “He described it pretty grandly, so she might have gotten the idea that you were quite powerful, the center of an influential circle.”

  “How ironic,” my father said quietly. “Since I was never anything but—”

  “Julian had a picture of Marisol with Emilio Vargas,” I interrupted. “Where would he have gotten it?”

  “From someone in Casa Rosada, I suppose,” my father answered. He appeared to run a curious possibility through his mind. “He might have gotten it from my contact there.”

  “You had a contact in Casa Rosada?” I asked, surprised that he’d even lightly touch such cloak-and-dagger operations.

  “She was only a clerk,” my father added quickly. “She’s in her eighties now.”

  “So no longer a Casa Rosada functionary, of course.”

  “Not for many years,” my father said.

  “Where is she now?”

  “Why do you want to know that, Philip?”

  “Because this contact of yours might have some idea of who Marisol was, what she was doing,” I answered. “She might know if any of this is true about her, that she was . . . a deceiver.”

  My father drew in a long, slow breath. “She went back to Hungary,” he said. “You should be aware that hers was not a clean record. You’ve probably never heard of the Maros Street hospital massacre.”

  It occurred in Budapest, he went on to tell me, a peculiarly monstrous incident during the last-ditch effort by the collaborationist Arrow Cross to annihilate the few Jews not yet deported from Hungary. Having taken control of the city in the wake of the retreating Germans, the men of the Arrow Cross Party went on a rampage, and among the victims were the most helpless of the city’s remaining Jews. The poorhouse on Alma Street was attacked, as well as the hospital on Városmajor. But it was the patients, doctors, and nurses at the Jewish hospital on Maros Street who suffered the full brunt of Arrow Cross cruelty, a full day of slaughter that included torture and murder.

  “My contact played a part in it,” my father said at the end of this narrative. “She never denied this. At least that was to her credit.”

  “What happened to her after she left Casa Rosada?”

  “She returned to Budapest,” my father answered. “She got a job with the American consulate.”

  “Her reward for being a spy?” I asked.

  My father didn’t answer, but I saw the answer in his eyes, all the dirty little deals he’d known about but never approved of, the ratlines and secret bombings and clandestine overthrows.

  “Do you know where she is?” I asked.

  “She retired and moved into a small town in what is now Slovakia.”

  I was surprised that my father knew this, as he could tell from my expression.

  “We were . . . friends briefly,” he told me. “Your mother died long before.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “We met in a restaurant on one of my few trips to Buenos Aires,” he added. “Each time I went there, I saw her. It was never love.” He shrugged. “But she worked in Casa Rosada, and so I . . .”

  “Played the secret agent?” I asked.

  My father nodded with the sadness of one who had run out of fantasies, a Walter Mitty no longer inclined to daydream.

  “Foolish,” he said softly. “It was all very foolish.”

  For a moment he seemed lost in thought. Then, quite suddenly, like one who sensed himself rather under surveillance, he said, “Anyway, since she was my only contact, I sent Julian to her when he was
looking for Marisol.”

  “It was you who sent him to Casa Rosada?” I asked, surprised that he’d never mentioned this.

  “It was a fool’s errand,” my father said. “But he seemed desperate to find this young woman. She’d gotten under his skin somehow. He was really quite determined. I thought my contact might help him solve the mystery of her disappearance.”

  “Would she talk to me, this contact of yours?” I asked.

  “I’m sure she would,” my father said. “For old times’ sake, as they say.”

  “Who did this woman work for?”

  “A colonel by the name of Ramírez,” my father answered. “Juan Ramírez. He ran a few of the junta’s escuelitas.”

  He saw that I didn’t understand the word.

  “The ‘little schools,’” my father said. “There were a great many of them in Argentina at that time. They were places where the enemies of Casa Rosada were taken to be reeducated. That is to say, where they were tortured.” He appeared to consider his next move with a strange seriousness. “I could write to her if you like. I’m sure she’d been willing to talk to you.”

  “Yes, do that,” I said. “I’ll follow up with a letter of my own.” I reached for a paper and pen. “What’s her name, your contact?”

  “Irene.”

  “And her last name?”

  “Jóság,” my father answered. “It’s Hungarian, of course. It means ‘goodness.’”

  Goodness.

  How bright a word, I would later realize, to have given so dark a new direction to my tale.

  20

  When I later located Irene Jóság’s village on a map, I saw that it was quite near to Čachtice, where the Bloody Countess had lived and in whose looming castle she had carried out her many torture-murders, her life and crimes the subject of Julian’s fourth book, The Tigress.

  The countess was born in Nyirbator, Hungary, in 1560, the daughter of one of that country’s ruling families, and according to Julian, nothing in her early life suggested the monster she would become. Rather, she was quite studious, and by the time of her marriage, she had mastered Latin, German, and Greek, and had read a great deal in science and astronomy—learning that Julian portrayed as part of her perfect disguise.

  At the age of fifteen, she married the son of another equally favored family, and in 1575, the presumably happy couple took up residence at Varanno, a small palace, before moving to a larger one at Sárvár, and finally to the castle that was her wedding gift, the looming, often fogbound Čachtice.

  The war to defend Europe against the Ottoman encroachment would last until 1606, and during all that time it fell to Elizabeth not only to manage but to defend her holdings against the ever-threatening Ottomans. This she did with great skill and vigor. But it was not all she did, for although the outer walls of Čachtice remained strong, something was crumbling inside them; it was during this period that loneliness began to weather Elizabeth’s carefully constructed edifice and, in that weathering, reveal what lay beneath. With her husband at his studies in Vienna, Elizabeth now, for the first time in her life, had real power, that is to say, power on the scale of a man’s. She was the lady of the estate, her authority absolute, and like Ilse Grese at Ravensbrück, she began to wield a whip.

  It was a weapon she could use with complete impunity, as it turned out, because her husband had by then become chief commander of Hungarian troops in the western war against the Ottoman Empire, a campaign that removed him for months at a time. Thus, with no one to stay her hand, she began first to berate and then to slap her servants, each attack fueling the next, until at last she drew blood and later found that where this drop had fallen on her cheek, the flesh beneath had seemed to bloom. In the blood of servants, she had miraculously discovered youth’s eternal fountain.

  More of this restorative blood was easy to find, of course, and in the coming months and years, Elizabeth found plenty of it. Enough first to taste, then to sip, then to drink. Enough first to dot her finger, then to cover her face, then to coat her body.

  But even the walls of Čachtice were not thick enough to hide what was going on there. The first rumors began to circulate as early as 1602, and by 1604, when Elizabeth’s husband died, they could no longer be dismissed, for they were not rumors of infidelity or even of odd sexual practices, both of which were common among the nobility of the time.

  It was a Lutheran minister who finally raised his voice so loudly that the authorities were forced to hear it. Even then, however, they were slow to act, and it was not until 1610 that an investigation was ordered, which resulted in Elizabeth’s being caught in the act of beheading a teenage girl.

  Elizabeth, being of such high birth, was put under house arrest, where she remained until her death in 1614.

  During those intervening years, the investigation continued and more than three hundred victims were discovered, Julian reported, though the exact number of young girls who lost their lives in the secret chambers of Čachtice could never be known.

  Julian had not been reticent to detail the horrors of Čachtice. There’d been whippings and mutilations. Elizabeth had bitten off parts of her victims’ faces and other body parts. She’d taken some of the girls out into the snow and watched them freeze to death. She’d performed surgery and other medical procedures upon them as well. She’d observed the stages of starvation before death. She’d used needles and hot irons. There seemed no end to her cruel ingenuity.

  But in Julian’s account, the countess’s crimes, horrible as they were, were in some sense less cruel than her deceits, her great show of piety, her many gifts to the Church, the changing aspects of her mask. For Julian, it seemed, of all creatures great and small, it was the chameleon that should be most feared, particularly—I thought of both the Terror, La Meffraye, and the Tigress, Countess Báthory—when deceit took the shape of a woman.

  On the map, a jagged road led from the countess’s castle to what I imagined to be the far more modest abode of Irene Jóság, and I found myself imagining Julian driving down it, bleary-eyed from another sleepless night, his head spilling over with the horrors of Čachtice.

  I could have simply corresponded with Irene Jóság, of course, but by then I’d come to think of myself as something of a detective, and in that guise I entertained the hope that by actually talking to her I might learn something that would clear up the great bramble I’d stumbled into, a thicket of intrigue in which identities changed as well as motives, where I could no longer tell what Marisol had been or whether Julian had ever guessed that she was something other than she seemed.

  “You’ll miss Paris,” Loretta said when I told her that I was heading for Hungary. “Everyone does.”

  I told her that I was going to Hungary because my father had given me the name of someone who was at Casa Rosada when Julian was in Argentina. Now I added, “Julian went to Casa Rosada looking for Marisol.”

  “Why would he have gone there?” Loretta asked. “I thought Marisol had nothing to do with politics.”

  “That’s not so clear anymore,” I said, then related what Hendricks had told me in London, along with my subsequent conversation with my father, the result being that I was now quite uncertain about who Marisol had been.

  “So she might have been anything,” Loretta said at the end of my account.

  “Yes,” I said.

  For the first time, I felt a turn in the narrative I’d been living through.

  It was clear that Loretta had noticed a dark undertow in my answer.

  “Do you think Julian ever knew any of this?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  For a moment I felt that we were both fixed in a space no one else could share.

  “Philip, are you still there?” Loretta asked.

  Her tone was troubled, and I realized that I’d been silent for a long time, and the silence alarmed her.

  “Yes,” I said.

  There was a brief pause, then Loretta said, “Would you min
d if I joined you, Philip? Could you use a traveling companion?”

  It struck me that Julian had never had such a companion, and that perhaps this, too, had served to doom him.

  Might it doom me, too?

  With that question I felt myself curiously imperiled, like a man moving down a river, into a darkness, now afraid that at the end of the journey there might be revelations as fatal to me as they had been for Julian, terrors that he had faced in solitude and isolation but that I had not the courage to face alone.

  “Yes,” I said, like a man reaching for a life rope. “Yes, I could.”

  She arrived in Budapest a week later, dressed in a dark red blouse and floral skirt, glancing swiftly here and there, until she saw me in the waiting crowd.

  “Welcome,” I said when she came over to me, and meant it.

  Even so, she looked at me doubtfully. “Really, Philip?”

  “Yes, really,” I assured her. “As you guessed, I could use some company.”

  “But you’ve always seemed quite self-contained.”

  “We’re not always how we seem,” I said.

  “Almost never, in fact,” Loretta said.

  Something in her gaze took hold of me so that I felt exactly as Charles feels when he sees Emma Bovary, how dark her eyes are and how marked with fearless candor.

  The intense feeling that swept over me at that moment had to be diverted, so I nodded toward where I had a car waiting.

  On the drive into the city, Loretta kept her eyes keenly fixed on the new surroundings. In that keenness, that hunger for things she had not seen before, I glimpsed the young girl she had once been, the one who had traveled with Julian, two brilliant children facing their father’s camera as they stood at the bottom of the Spanish Steps or at the Eiffel Tower, pictures she’d framed and hung in the Montauk house. There’d been other pictures, too, those same children walking through the butterfly house in Salzburg or along the shaded trails of the Vienna Woods. They had also strolled Barcelona’s Ramblas together and paused to marvel at Sagrada Família.