The Crime of Julian Wells

by Thomas H. Cook

  “I feel the same, of course.”

  She laughed. “You know, in a book, this scene would be quite a maudlin moment, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, it would,” I said softly. “But in life, those moments are often the best.”

  The next morning we ate breakfast, then made our way to the address David Leon had given us for Hoy.

  Loretta had gotten in touch with him while we were still in Budapest. She had found their exchanges quite warm, Leon more than willing to speak with us about El Árabe, a man he described as not only a sociopath but one who thought everyone else a sociopath, too.

  The oddity in Leon’s description of El Árabe, however, was the fact that he appeared to be extremely intelligent. Soborov had portrayed him as something of a buffoon, capable of low cunning, but little else. Leon’s articles presented a far different assessment, one in which El Árabe seemed much closer to the Mr. Kurtz of Heart of Darkness: keen-minded, resolute, with something curiously immortal in the nature of his malice.

  David Leon was younger than I’d expected, a man in his thirties, tall, lean, with jet black hair that almost perfectly matched his glasses. He was dressed in a white shirt, jeans, and an olive green corduroy jacket.

  “Good to see you after so many e-mails,” he said to Loretta when we arrived at Hoy, then turned and offered his hand to me. “And you must be Philip?”

  I took his hand. “Thanks for seeing us,” I told him.

  His office was a cubicle in a sea of cubicles, and so he suggested that we move to a conference room down the hall.

  “It is more private there,” he said.

  The conference room was also rather small, with a square table, scarred with use, and dotted with coffee rings.

  “It is a historical artifact,” Leon said as he ran his fingers on the table. “It belonged to José de Costa. He was imprisoned by the junta. A great reporter. One of the disappeared. It was while I was seeking to discover his fate that I came across El Árabe. He knew nothing of José, but he spoke of many other things. He is a great river of talk.”

  “So it seems,” Loretta said.

  We all took seats at the table. I had brought Julian’s old briefcase, and while Loretta and Leon continued to speak, mostly about their earlier correspondence, I took out a paper and pen.

  “You are a journalist?” Leon asked me.

  “No,” I answered, then started to say that I was a book reviewer, but found that I could no longer describe myself in that way. What was I? For the first time in my life, I didn’t know, an unexpected fact I found curiously exhilarating.

  “As I told you in my first e-mail, my brother was going to write a book about his experience in Argentina,” Loretta said, clearly in an effort to get me off the hook. “He evidently ran into Hernando Vilario at that time.”

  She had already told him a great deal, I knew. In her correspondence with Leon, she’d described Julian’s life and work, how he’d searched for Marisol after the disappearance, contacted both Casa Rosada and the Russians. She’d also told him that Julian was studying a map of Argentina before his death and that he’d circled the very village in which El Árabe now lived. She’d related the details of our talk with Soborov, as well—everything he’d revealed about his interaction with Julian and Julian’s subsequent meeting with El Árabe.

  Now, she said, “So, as you know, we’re here because we want to talk to him.”

  “As I told you, this is not difficult,” Leon said. “Hernando loves the attention. Especially from Americans. He is a big fan of the American Western. There is a picture of John Wayne in his house. I have already arranged for you to see him. You could fly there or take a bus. It is a long ride by bus, but not a bad trip. You will see our beautiful countryside.”

  “We want to be well prepared before we talk to him,” Loretta said, “so we’d appreciate anything you could add that you think we should know.”

  “Know?” Leon asked. “He is a monster. This you already know. But he is a monster who is at least without deceit. When he was arrested, he spit in the face of the government. At his trial, he spit at the judges and made no apologies for his escuelitas.”

  Leon walked to a metal cabinet and withdrew an ancient carousel projector.

  “It was El Árabe’s. He took many pictures,” he said. “He was proud of them. ‘My gift to you,’ he told me.”

  Leon walked to the front of the room, pulled down a screen, turned off the room’s overhead light, returned to his seat, and reached for the button that controlled the carousel.

  “This will not be easy,” he said.

  When the lights went on again, I felt that I had been gutted both spiritually and physically. In fact, mine had been a reaction so visceral that I’d had to hold my stomach and close my throat. At the end of it I was pale and felt that my legs had gone numb beneath me. There is a kind of revulsion that moves you beyond what some men do, to what some men are, and it is that that drains and exhausts you and leaves you with nothing but a need to escape the whole human race.

  “So,” Leon said as he turned on the light. “That is El Árabe. Do you still want to meet him?”

  “It isn’t a question of wanting to meet him,” I said. “We need to meet him.”

  Leon rose, walked to the front of the room, and drew up the screen, all of it done quite thoughtfully, as though he was turning something over his mind.

  When he returned to his seat, he folded his hands together on the table, fingers laced, like a man with a pronouncement. “Steel yourselves, then,” he said. “For, no matter what evil you have known before, you have not known such a one as El Árabe.” He turned to Loretta. “It is strange, is it not, that your brother was associated with such a man?”

  With Leon’s question, how little I still knew of Julian struck hard. But truth is truth, and the fact remained that the pieces of Julian’s story were still scattered. It was as if Loretta had been right long ago when she’d said that the pebbles Julian had strewn along the forest floor might lead only to more pebbles.

  “El Árabe will be expecting you,” Leon said as he turned to me. “Good luck.”

  Leon had wished me good luck quite cheerfully, but as Loretta and I left his office I found something final in his good wishes. For it was luck I would need, surely. In fact, it was all I had left, because I’d reached the very end of what I could discover of Julian beyond what was in his books. I had read and reread those books, along with his notes and letters. I had gone to Paris, Oradour, London, Budapest, Čachtice, Rostov, and now Buenos Aires. I had interviewed the slender list of people who seemed to have made a contribution to Julian’s work, his guides and his sources. I had talked to my father and to Loretta and even to myself, surely the three people, other than Marisol, who had most figured in his life. I had done all this, but I still had not cracked the door to my friend’s most secret chamber or gained any notion of why he had rowed out to the center of the pond, nor what I might have said to stop him from what he eventually did.

  “So,” I said to Loretta wearily, like an old gumshoe on his way to a final rendezvous, “the last witness.”

  27

  Our meeting with Hernando Vilario was not scheduled until the day after our arrival at Iguazú, and so Loretta and I decided to visit the great falls. I’d made the same trip with Julian years ago, the two of us flying out of Buenos Aires on a stormy afternoon. We’d stayed in Iguazú a couple of days, then returned to the capital.

  A good deal had changed at Iguazú since then, changes no doubt necessary in order to make the place more attractive to tourists. Now a small train took visitors into the jungle that surrounded the falls. As we disembarked, I noticed that they were playing the theme from The Mission, a film whose dramatic opening scene had ended with the startling image of a crucified priest being swept over the Devil’s Throat.

  For a time we walked silently through a jungle that was now equipped with cement walkways and steel railings, safe for old people and children.
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br />   “The music back at the train reminds me of what Julian said about the difference between tourists and travelers,” I said.

  Loretta peered out to where the roiling waters of Iguazú could be heard but not yet seen.

  “This is the last time he was a tourist,” I said. “When we got back to Buenos Aires, Marisol was waiting for us. We all went to a restaurant in La Boca and had dinner and wine. Julian had never looked more delighted with his life. Everything had come so easily to him.”

  A thought appeared to strike Loretta. “I know you felt rather dull in comparison to Julian. We both did. But were you jealous of him, too?”

  It is strange what can be unearthed if the time is right and the inquisitor is dear, and at that moment I felt it rise like a gorge in my throat, the awful truth of things.

  “Yes,” I said, and with that admission I felt a crack run through the portrait of my long friendship with Julian. I recalled all the times I might have influenced him, might have taken advantage of his weariness, his long bouts of despair, and even his penury—I might have used all that to nudge him in a different direction. I had even silenced any criticism of his work that might have made it leaner and sharper or reined in the wild sprawl that had sometimes marred his books. He might not have listened, but the fact remained that I had never offered him the slightest direction. With Loretta’s question, I had to wonder if I had done this not because I thought it would do no good, but because I’d preferred him to remain where he was, tucked into a shadowy corner of the literary world, preferred him to remain what he was, a writer whose subject matter would doom him to an inconsequential place. Had I said nothing because I secretly delighted in all the now-darkened lights that had once shone on him, took pleasure in his failure?

  “My God, Loretta,” I breathed. “Was I not his friend?”

  She saw my eyes glisten as all the many deceiving layers of my feigned friendship fell away.

  She drew me into her arms. “Now you are,” she said.

  28

  The road to El Árabe led out of the bustling little town that bordered Iguazú and into the deepening jungle that surrounded it, burrowing into the depths in a way that did indeed remind me of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Kurtz had gone far upriver, to the Inner Station, as Conrad had so metaphorically called it, deep into the savage heart of things, and there, amid that splendor, created a landscape that in all the world had most resembled hell.

  I was busily going on about this when Loretta finally stopped me.

  “Julian said something about goodness,” she told me. “I hadn’t thought of it before, but it was actually the last thing he said to me.”

  She had gone down to the sunroom, where she found him in his chair, with the map of South America spread open on his lap. She asked him what he was doing and he said that he was remembering a place where he learned something about evil.

  He had a pen in his hand, she said, the point touching the map, where, as she later saw, he’d circled the village of Clara Vista.

  She asked him what it was that he had learned. His answer was surprisingly simple, though ultimately unrevealing. “That goodness is evil’s best disguise,” he said and added nothing else.

  “Goodness is evil’s best disguise,” I repeated as we moved ever deeper into the Paraguayan jungle from which El Árabe had made his many cruel pronouncements. I found myself imagining that his house was similar to the ravaged abode of Mr. Kurtz, surrounded by a fence of bare wooden poles topped with dried-out human heads.

  El Árabe’s home was not emblematic of the dead soul who lived inside it, however. In fact, it looked more like a small woodland cottage of the sort one might see in more temperate climates. The vines that would otherwise have hung like thick green drapery from the roof had been cut back, and no vegetation crawled up the walls or slithered up the supporting posts of the side porch. For this reason, the cottage appeared curiously European in the way that any sense of wildness had been clipped away.

  I could see three wicker chairs and a brightly colored hammock that took up almost the entire width of the porch. The windows were large, and their orange shutters were open; inside I could see unexpectedly feminine curtains, white and lacy, softly undulating in the warm, lazy air.

  The house itself was built from concrete blocks, painted to a glossy sheen. There was no front porch, just an earthen walkway leading to a door bordered by an assortment of plants potted in identical terra-cotta pots. A short storm fence stretched around the back of the house. Over the fence, I could see an old woman busy at a clothesline, hanging T-shirts, jeans, and a few oversized dresses with large floral patterns of the type I’d seen on the women in the town.

  I glanced toward the front of the house. So the moment has come, I thought. I looked at Loretta. “Ready?”

  She nodded. “Ready.”

  And thus did we close in upon the Inner Station.

  We had gotten only halfway up the dirt walkway that led to the house when the door suddenly swung open and a short, round man stepped out into the bright sun. He was perhaps seventy years old, but with jet black hair, quite obviously dyed, combed straight back and glinting in the sunlight.

  “So the Eagle has landed,” he said with a laugh.

  He was wearing light blue Bermuda shorts and no shirt, and his nearly hairless belly shook with quick spasms as he laughed. “Welcome to my house. As we say, and I hear often said also in the American movies, ‘Mi casa es su casa.’”

  With that, El Árabe thrust out his large hand. “I am a great fan of American movies and John Wayne. Come, you will see.” He stepped aside and waved us in. “Please, come, come. I will have my housekeeper make drinks for us. You like mai tai? Margarita?”

  I could not imagine having a drink with this man, and yet I could find no way to refuse it. He was my last contact, the end of the line, and if I learned nothing further, I could go no further.

  “Whatever you have,” I said, and glanced at Loretta.

  “Yes,” she said with a quick smile. “Whatever you have.”

  “Ah, good, we shall have drinks, then,” El Árabe said as if he was certain we would refuse them and now felt relieved that we hadn’t. He walked to the window and called out to the old woman in the back, “Vaya. Los invitados quieren algo de tomar. Margaritas para todos, por favor. With that he turned back to us. “She is slow, poor thing,” he added sorrowfully. “But in time the drinks will come.” He swept his arm out toward an adjoining veranda. “Out there it is cool. We sit and talk and wait forever for the drinks.” He laughed heartily. “You like my house?”

  The living room was small, and El Árabe had decorated its walls with pictures not only of John Wayne but perhaps twenty other American movie stars, their studio photographs in cheap plastic frames. I caught Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Alan Ladd, and John Wayne as I made my way outside.

  “No women,” I said to him as I stepped out onto the veranda. “I would have expected, say, Veronica Lake or Ava Gardner.”

  El Árabe waved his hand. “I am a man of action,” he said with another broad laugh. “I admire other such men. Men with, what do you call it, the steely stare.” He laughed again. “I would wish to be the strong silent type. The Gary Cooper. But, as you see, I talk too much.” He grinned impishly. “And I am not tall.” He indicated the wicker chairs. “Please, rest. It is a long way from Buenos Aires. Did you fly?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “But once in Iguazú, we rented a car.”

  “Iguazú, yes,” El Árabe said. “So not a long drive this morning. Was it easy to find your way?”

  “There aren’t many roads, so it’s hard to get lost,” I said.

  “Not many roads,” El Árabe said. “Not like in America, with the many, many highways.”

  “No, not like America,” I said.

  Out of the blue, El Árabe asked. “So, my English is good, no?”

  “It’s very good,” I told him.

  “From the American movies,” El Árabe said. �
��I watched them when I was a kid. I still watch them. I like to practice all the time my English. But here it is hard. Here there is nothing. I am surrounded by such ignorant ones. They vote always for the Reds.” He leaned back slightly. “Do you speak Spanish?”

  “I’m afraid not,” I answered.

  His gaze slid over to Loretta. “And you, señora?”

  “Only enough to get by,” Loretta said. “My brother spoke it quite well.”

  “Your brother, yes,” El Árabe said. “You have come to speak of him. I understand this from Leon. He has died, your brother.”

  “Yes,” Loretta said.

  “So young,” El Árabe said sympathetically. “Unusual in America. But here, they die like flies. We know death. We know pain. It is never far from us. At night we hear its voice in the undergrowth. There is much devouring one of the other here.” He turned to Loretta. “As your brother knew.”

  El Árabe looked like an actor who’d blown a line, and who, in doing so, had skipped ahead in the play, dropping five pages from the script and thus arriving too early at a place too far along.

  “Margaritas!” he called, and looked back at us. “She is slow, as I said. But she is good at the few little things she does. In Buenos Aires, they would not tolerate so slow a servant. But here, time has almost stopped, and we move slowly, like the sun.” His grin was rapier thin. “I am also philosopher. I have many thoughts. But no one wishes to hear them.” He laughed. “The world would have to change too much to give me honors. El Árabe is despised. El Árabe is a murderer, a rapist, a torturer.” For the second time, his gaze hardened. “But who did I do these things to, eh? I will tell you. To people who would have done the same to me, to you.” He waved his hand. “Even now, they wear the T-shirts with the face of Che. Who was a murderer, this famous Che, with the movie-star face and the movie-star fame, a man who would have caused the deaths of millions.”

  He didn’t wait for this to settle in before he surged on, his eyes fiercely widening as he continued. “And you have read what Castro said to Khrushchev?” His gaze leaped from me to Loretta, then back to me. “You have read this? During the crisis with Cuba? With the missiles? He told that fat old Russian to kill all the Americans. To drop all the bombs. He said he would sacrifice Cuba for such an annihilation.”