The Crime of Julian Wells

by Thomas H. Cook

  In each photograph, they appeared splendidly happy, children endowed with as much good fortune as anyone could wish.

  Those two bright young faces had changed quite a bit over the years, but it was Julian’s that changed the most, and at our last meeting I’d gotten the feeling that it was not just exhaustion that plagued him but some tumorous mental growth that had at last broken through the surface.

  When I said this to Loretta, she considered it a moment, then said, “You know, he said something quite disturbing a couple of days before he went out in the boat. He was sitting by the pond. I went out to him. He had that look in his eye, like he was deep in thought. Just as a matter of conversation I said, ‘So, how are you doing, Julian?’ I expected him to answer the way he usually did, something like, ‘I’m fine, Loretta, how are you?’ But instead he quoted that line from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. You know, the one where he says, ‘A thousand slimy things lived on and so did I.’ I took it for a little joke and made nothing of it. Julian often said things like that. Self-deprecating things. But this time, I should have known that he was in a very bad place.”

  “We let a lot go by, didn’t we?” I asked. “There were signs we didn’t read.”

  She nodded. “Yes, there were.”

  When we reached the hotel, Loretta stepped out of the car and looked at its ornate facade. I could see that she recognized it.

  “Julian mentioned this hotel,” she said. “I remember it from his letters. ‘It has beautiful Zsolnay tiles,’ he said.”

  “They’re in the bathhouse,” I told her. “In the old days, it was used by the Soviets. It’s where they met their agents. Or at least that’s what the hotel manager told me. In any event, it gives the place some history.”

  Seconds later we were in the lobby. I nodded toward the bar. “Maybe a drink before you go up?”

  “Yes, that would be nice.”

  We were soon seated at a small table in the bar, drinks in hand, Loretta casting her eyes about the room with what still seemed like a hint of childlike wonder.

  “Very dark here,” she said. “Thick curtains.”

  “It looks like a place where ‘certain documents’ might have been exchanged,” I said, rather as a joke.

  “Julian described it in one of his letters,” Loretta said. “He said that it looked like an old man still concealing his crime.” She took a sip of her drink. “Do you think he came upon this hotel by accident?”

  I shrugged. “I suspect the bullet holes near the door and around the first-floor windows might have gotten his attention,” I answered. “The manager here speaks English quite well, so I’ve listened to his history of the place. I asked him about the bullet holes. They’re from when the Arrow Cross—the Hungarian fascist party that collaborated with the Nazis—defended the city against the Russians. The Germans had abandoned it by then.”

  Loretta reached into her bag and retrieved a single photograph. “I thought you might want to see this,” she said as she handed it to me.

  In the photograph, Julian is seated at the little office alcove on the second floor of the Montauk house, a large window behind him, the pond shimmering in the background. He is holding a book whose title I can’t make out, but which seems as battered as the man holding it. His hair is slightly mussed, as it often was in the morning, and he is wearing the blue robe I gave him as a welcome-home gift upon his return from Russia.

  “Why this picture?” I asked.

  “I thought of it after I talked to you,” Loretta said. “It’s the last picture of Julian. He set up the camera and took it himself.”

  “It’s an odd self-portrait,” I said. “Not very flattering.”

  “I didn’t know he’d taken it,” Loretta said. “But when I started to put the camera away, I noticed it and printed it out.” She drew the picture from me and looked at it very intently. “It’s a warning, a picture like that: ‘Don’t end up like me.’” She handed the photograph back to me, then looked toward the window, out at the busy street life. “I’ve often thought that if life were fair, we’d be given a picture of where we’ll end up if we continue down the road we’re on.” She turned, and the smile she offered quickly faded. “That might be enough to save us.”

  For a time, she was silent, then she said, “So, what’s your theory about Julian at the moment, Philip?”

  “I don’t have one,” I admitted.

  “I don’t either,” Loretta said. “I simply think Julian was a condemned man, a man who was sentenced to some sort of inner life imprisonment.”

  “But for what crime?” I asked.

  “That would be the question, wouldn’t it?” Loretta asked. She took another sip from her drink. “The crime of Julian Wells,” she added. “Still unsolved.” She seemed suddenly to shuffle off the weariness of her long flight, perhaps even some part of the long aridity that had marked her life since Colin’s death. “So,” she said, “where do we begin?”

  21

  All literature skirts the otherwise insurmountable issue of man’s many different languages. Fictional characters roam from country to country miraculously speaking whatever language they encounter. The fictional character is sent from London to Istanbul and gets off the train in a city in which everyone speaks English. Throughout the fictional world, the Tower of Babel ever lies in ruins, so that upon first encounter with an African bushman or a Bedouin trader, all indecipherability vanishes, and our hero immediately engages in a profound discussion of life, death, and eternity, when, in actuality, he would have been struggling to locate the nearest watering hole.

  This is to say that it was not within my power or Loretta’s to simply head out of Budapest and locate Irene Jóság somewhere in the wilds of Slovakia without assistance. Arrangements had to be made, and several days were required to make them, a time during which Loretta and I strolled the streets of the city, took in its churches and museums and monuments.

  By then I’d spoken often enough with the hotel manager to have gained some slight knowledge of the city, at least enough to add a bit of local history to our strolls about the city.

  “After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russians were required to take away all the other monuments they’d erected to themselves in Budapest,” I told Loretta. “All the plaques and red stars, everything.” I pointed to a pedestal upon which rested a single pair of boots. “Of course the Hungarians had already beheaded the statue of Stalin. In fact, they cut him all the way down to his boots.”

  We turned and walked on for a time, now closing in upon the Danube.

  “I remember something Julian once told me,” I said. “He said that a traveler enters the world into which he travels, but a tourist brings his own world with him and never sees the one he’s in.”

  “Where did he say this?” Loretta asked.

  “In Buenos Aires,” I answered.

  She walked on without speaking until she suddenly stopped and said, “Then Julian must, at some point, have no longer thought of himself as a tourist there.”

  “But that’s what he was,” I told her, then returned to my meeting with Hendricks, how he’d seemed contemptuous of Julian’s “quixotic” effort to find Marisol. “And in a way, I think Hendricks was right about Julian,” I said. “Because in a sense, he was a tourist. How could he have been anything else?”

  “By being drawn into the turmoil,” Loretta answered.

  “How might that have happened?”

  Her expression was pure collusion, as if we two were now in league, testing the same conjectures, exploring the same possibilities.

  “I’ve been thinking of something you said the night you called me and told me you were going to Hungary,” Loretta answered. “It was about the report on Marisol, the fact that she might have been a spy. You mentioned that she hadn’t been with anyone important as a guide but that she might have gotten the idea that you or Julian could have known something.”

  “Or someone—namely, my father,” I said.

  �
�Yes,” Loretta said. Her gaze became quite intense. “And I thought, if she actually was a spy, she might have had a completely different idea about Julian. Not as someone who knew something but as someone who might later be in a position to know something.”

  “I’m not sure where you’re headed.”

  “That she might have thought he had access to information,” she answered. “Or at least that he could gain access to it. Information from your father, for example. And so, for that reason, she might have tried to turn Julian. That’s the term, isn’t it? To ‘turn’ someone?”

  “You mean Marisol might have tried to turn Julian into a traitor?”

  She saw how unlikely I thought that was.

  “It’s the oldest turn there is, Philip,” she reminded me. “As a matter of fact, it goes back to Eve.”

  There was Jezebel, too, and Delilah. The list of female deceivers is very long indeed. Could Marisol have been such a woman? If so, her disguise was quite brilliant, for I had no inkling that she was anything other than an admirable young woman, dutiful and striving, who simply wanted a fighting chance.

  And yet, the photograph I’d found in Julian’s apartment couldn’t be denied. Marisol seated with Emilio Vargas, leaning toward him, whispering in his ear. Might she have targeted a young man who was naive and inexperienced in the ways of intrigue, one already determined to do some great good in the world, romantic and idealistic, a well-connected young American she could “turn”?

  I thought again of the photograph, Marisol’s lips at Vargas’s ear.

  Might she have been whispering the name of this young man?

  It was only a question, and yet I could almost hear the name she whispered.

  Julian, I thought, and on that name, I once again recalled the time he got into an argument with me over some small detail, how uncharacteristically wrong he was, and how, to prove him so, I rushed back to my room to find the evidence. It was just after Father Rodrigo’s departure, and I’d left him with Marisol at a small café near San Martín. I’d returned to find them talking very somberly, and at that moment, as I thought now, they had truly looked like two conspirators caught in a moment, to use René’s phrase, “of dark conclave.”

  As if it were a surveillance photograph, I saw Julian at the instant he suddenly caught me in his eye, his expression not unlike that of a little boy caught in a disreputable act.

  Had I caught him? I wondered now.

  And had the “crime” he’d long ago claimed that I had witnessed been his treason?

  There are times when no alternate route presents itself, so that your only choice is to continue down the road you’re on. Now that road led out of Budapest.

  By the time I took it, I’d secured the service of a guide. His name was Dimitri, and he was quite young and eager, utterly unlike René. On the way to Irene Jóság’s village, he spoke of his great love of English, how assiduously he read the great writers of that language. He was astonishingly impressed to learn that I was a critic and that Loretta was the sister of what he called a “real writer,” though he was quick to admit, not without apology, that he’d never heard of her brother.

  “What is again the name of your brother?” he asked as he pulled out a small notebook.

  “Julian Wells.”

  “I am sorry to say that I have not read his books,” Dimitri told her, “but I am certain that I will very soon search for them.”

  Loretta promised to send him some of Julian’s books when she returned to the States, and when we stopped for lunch, Dimitri responded by gathering her a bundle of wildflowers.

  After that we drove on, now through a countryside that felt increasingly dense.

  “There’s Čachtice,” I said when it came into view. “Countess Báthory’s torture chamber.”

  Loretta’s gaze grew more intense as she peered at it, but the intensity was combined with noticeable dread.

  “Are you sure you want to go to the castle?” I asked cautiously.

  To my surprise she was, so Dimitri drove up the winding road that led to the ruin.

  It was not overwhelmingly large, and as in the case of many such places, the walls had long ago been pulled down. The tower still stood, however, along with an imposing foundation whose broken stones we walked together, the great sweep of the countryside stretching below us as far as we could see.

  It was within these now-crumbled walls that countless agonies had been inflicted upon the countess’s victims, Elizabeth growing steadily more vicious as one year quite literally bled into another. Here she had starved and beaten and burned and slashed the bodies of innumerable innocents, while screaming obscenities so vile they shocked even the blood-spattered minions who helped carry out her tortures.

  At one of Gilles de Rais’s castles, no less a literary figure than Anthony Trollope had paused to reflect upon the screams of the victims, even claiming that they could still be heard, as if sound waves do not dissipate. But dissipate they do, as Julian had pointed out in The Tigress, such that the wintry trees that had gathered around the body of yet another child had remained silent and unhelpful while the magistrate’s men searched for clues, as if they were bribed witnesses into whose snow-encrusted hands the countess had placed a few silver coins.

  “It’s creepy here, don’t you think?” Loretta asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  During the remainder of our walk about the grounds and rubble of Čachtice, Loretta appeared quite thoughtful. She gave no hint of what her thoughts were, however, though I suspected that she was considering the terrible possibility that Julian had, in fact, been turned by Marisol, and thus, for a brief time, might have proved himself a traitor. Still, I didn’t press her. And it was not until we’d returned to the car and were headed toward Irene Jóság that she opened up to me.

  “I remember one day when Julian and I were in that little boat I found him in,” she said. “He’d come home after writing The Tigress but hadn’t started The Commissar. We were talking about when we were children. Our travels. How fearless we were in those days. At one point I said that the things I feared most now were the things everyone feared. Getting old. Getting sick. Dying. I could tell that he didn’t fear any of those things. So I asked him what he was afraid of. He said that he wasn’t afraid of anything anymore. It was the ‘anymore’ that seemed strange to me, because the way he said it, he seemed to be telling me that he’d already confronted the thing he most feared.”

  “And triumphed over it?” I asked.

  Loretta shook her head. “No, only that he’d confronted it.” She glanced up toward the broken towers of Čachtice. “And after that, he was like those ruins. Beyond repair.”

  Beyond repair.

  Since we had no way of pursuing this point, Loretta and I simply continued on, and we reached Irene Jóság’s house about an hour after leaving Čachtice.

  It was very modest, and with all the growth around it, the tall grass and twining vines, it was barely visible from the road.

  “Are you sure this is it?” I asked Dimitri.

  “I am sure,” he answered.

  We got out of the car and approached the house by means of a broken walkway overgrown with weeds and clogged with shrubs that seemed as swollen, as Julian might have written, as bodies in the sun.

  I knocked at the door and heard a shuffle of feet inside the house. Then the door opened, and a very small woman appeared. She was dressed plainly, her hair streaked a yellowish white. Her eyes were startlingly blue, and there was a quickness to them that suggested what I had little doubt was a very high intelligence. She didn’t wear the usual country clothes of Hungary, but a black dress with lace at the sleeves, so that she looked like a Spanish matron. Clearly she’d dressed for the occasion, and I even noticed a touch of blush on her cheeks along with some bright red lipstick that had missed its mark in one corner of her mouth.

  “Ah,” she said in an English whose accent was far more Spanish than Eastern European, “the Americans are arrived.�
��

  She stepped back rather shakily, waved us in, and directed us to chairs in her small living room.

  “You would like something to drink?” she asked.

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  With that, she slowly eased herself into a small wooden chair, and the usual niceties commenced. She asked about our hotel in Budapest but was more interested in my having come from Paris, a city she had romanticized but never seen, and now would never see, which brought us to her various ailments, bad joints and hearing loss, failing eyesight, the travails of old age, a subject that finally turned her mind toward my father.

  “Your father is doing well?” she asked me.

  “Not altogether well, no,” I answered. “The same problems you’ve mentioned. Aches and pains.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It is better to be young.”

  We talked at some length about the work she’d done for the Americans, by way of my father, whom she described as having always been very kind to her. He had acted like a gentleman, without airs, she said, a man capable of speaking quite candidly to a simple clerk. She had either read or been told that “the great George Marshall” had had such qualities, and after the arrogance of the big men at Casa Rosada, my father’s modesty had been much more than simply refreshing. She gave no hint of the somewhat more intimate relationship to which my father had quite clearly alluded, so I made no mention of it either.

  At the end of this tale, she drew in a long breath, then glanced at Loretta. “I did not expect a second guest. This is your lovely wife?”

  I had introduced Loretta at the door, but this appeared to have escaped the old woman’s attention.