“No, this is Loretta Wells,” I reminded her. “Julian’s sister.”
“Ah, yes,” Irene said. “Julian’s sister. My mind fades, no? Ah, yes, Julian.” She drew her attention over to me. “The reason you have come, as your father told me in his letter. Julian. What a sad young man.”
This seemed as good a segue into the purpose of our visit as any, and so I said, “My father tells me that you worked at Casa Rosada in the early eighties.” I looked at the notes I’d taken during the conversation with my father. “For a Colonel Juan Ramírez?”
Irene nodded. “He was a ladies’ man, Juan,” she said. “Very handsome. He many times wished to take me to his hideaway in Puerto Madero.” She smiled. “He was a true fascist. ‘You do not live with the Reds,’ he said to me. ‘You live under the Reds, or you do not live at all.’ He would have done anything to save Argentina from the Reds. In fact, he did what all fascists do, which is the same as Reds.” She clearly held the two groups in the same disdain. “He was always after the Montoneros. Those he dreams about at night. Killing every one of them. It is for this he lived. He wanted to hunt them down like a fox would hunt a rabbit. With his nose to the ground until he found them. Then he rips them apart.”
“But how did he find them?” I asked.
“Names came to him,” Irene said.
“From informants?”
She nodded. “He had many people, but it was the big fish, a Montonero, who gave him the big names. Where they lived, too, these other Montoneros hiding in their caves. Even the names of their children he gave to Juan.”
“Ramírez turned a high-ranking Montonero?” Loretta asked.
“Yes,” Irene answered. She appeared to see this informant in her mind. “Very tall, but an indigene. He was from the Chaco.”
“Emilio Vargas?” I blurted.
Irene’s eyes widened. “You have heard of this one?”
“Yes,” I said. “He was a Montonero torturer.”
Irene laughed. “This he did to show how bad he was,” she said. “It is sometimes necessary to do this. This shows you hate the enemy, that you are ruthless. When he did this, the others say to themselves, ‘See how he hates. See how much he is with us.’” She laughed again. “Cruelty was his disguise.” Her eyes twinkled with a curious admiration. “But it was only one of his disguises.”
For a moment she looked like a little girl watching shapes change in a funhouse mirror.
“Because he had a disguise for Juan as well,” she added.
“Why would he need another disguise?” I asked.
“Because he was never really turned,” Irene said. “He was always a crazy Montonero.”
“Vargas was a double agent?” I asked.
“Yes,” Irene said. “Juan was suspicious of this. This is why he puts much pressure on Vargas to prove himself. It is what Juan always did. He works like a thumbscrew, tighter, tighter until his people break. For this reason, Vargas tries to give Juan better and better information.”
Her features suddenly grew tense, as if she were afraid that she was being watched even now.
“But it was never good enough for Juan,” she said. “So he always asks Vargas to prove his loyalty. He threatens to cut off Vargas’s ears, cut out his tongue. This he would do if Vargas does not deliver him the goods. And by this he means people.”
“People?” I asked.
“Juan wanted to scare Vargas into giving up a big-time Montonero. So he makes Vargas like a man in the ocean who sees the shark coming toward him. He does not have time to get out of the water, so he takes some smaller man and puts this man between himself and the shark.” She laughed. “Juan loved this game. He said to me, ‘Vargas will pluck out his own eyes and cut off his ears. He will give me the name of this woman by the time I am finished with him.’”
“Woman?” I asked.
Irene nodded. “A real she-devil, this is what Juan called her. She had kidnapped some children of the junta. She would lure them with little candies. There would be a van, and very quick, they were gone, these kids. She was good at this. She sent them back torn and burned. It was very bad. The eyes gone. More than anyone, the big men at Casa Rosada wanted this woman for what she had done to these children. And it was this woman Juan wished to get from Vargas because it would be a big catch for him, and he would get a big promotion if he found her.”
“How did you happen to know so much about what Ramírez was doing?” Loretta asked.
“He wants me in his bed, so he makes himself a big man to me,” Irene answered. “He tells me everything, his many stories of the spies and agents. He does this more when he has too much wine.” Her eyes squeezed together, as if I were a distant object she was trying to bring into focus. “But he was a clever man, Juan. And when the house was on fire, he got out through a little hole.” Her smile was pure contempt. “He speaks only Spanish, and so he goes to Spain. He sits in the park and talks to the old men of the Falange.” An odd defeat settled over her. “There is always a place for such men.”
She paused like one exhausted by history, then continued with what seemed to be considerable effort, determined to complete her tale. “But enough of this,” she said finally. She waved her hand as if to wipe the whole dark era from her mind. “So, Julian. Your father says to me that you want to know what I say to Julian when he comes to Casa Rosada, no?”
“Yes,” Loretta answered quietly.
“Well, he comes to look for this woman,” Irene said. “Excuse me, please, but I do not remember her name.”
“Marisol,” I told her.
Irene glanced toward Loretta, then turned to me. “Julian comes to Casa Rosada to find this Marisol.” She looked at Loretta. “I am sorry to hear of his death. Such a young man. It is always a tragedy when death comes so soon.” With that, Irene turned her attention back to me. “Your father sends Julian to me, but I know nothing of this girl.”
“You knew nothing at all?” I asked. “I thought you might have given him a picture of Marisol with Emilio Vargas. I found it in his room in Paris.”
The old woman shook her head. “No, I do not give Julian such a picture. I go to Juan. I ask about this girl who has disappeared. I can see he knows this girl, but he tells me nothing.”
“I thought he told you everything,” I said.
“This I also think,” Irene said. “But about this one, he is silent.”
“He said nothing at all?” I asked doubtfully.
“He says to me, ‘Irene, to know about this one, this is not for your ears.’ And he will say nothing more about her. He tells me if this American comes again, to tell him to go home and forget about this girl.”
“So who was she?” Loretta asked. “Marisol.”
Irene shrugged. “This Juan never tells me, but I think she is big fish, because after a while, he is very big man at Casa Rosada.” She smiled. “All of this I would have told Julian when he came here, but he did not ask about this girl.
“Julian came here?” Loretta asked.
“Yes,” Irene answered. “Just for one afternoon. We have cold drinks, and talk of the old days.”
“And during that time, Julian didn’t mention Marisol?” I asked.
“No, nothing of this girl.” She looked oddly puzzled that this was the case. “So, I think maybe he knows already what happened to her.”
My lips parted in dark amazement.
“Knew already?” I asked. “But he couldn’t have known.”
“This is how it seems me, yes,” Irene told me. “That he has no more questions about this girl.”
For the first time, Loretta looked skeptical, though she had perhaps been so all along. But now she made no pretense of believing the old woman’s story.
“Then why did he come here?” she asked.
“He comes here to—how I should say?—to say good-bye,” Irene answered. “He wished to thank me for talking with him back in the old time, when he came to Casa Rosada.” She faced Loretta. “He has much troub
le, your brother. There is a heavy weight on him. This I can see. And so I tell him that I know this weight.”
She turned her gaze to an old album that lay on a nearby table. “You can hand this to me, please?” she asked.
I stood, walked over to the table, retrieved the book, and gave it to her.
“There is the bad thing I show to Julian and speak to him about,” she said as she opened the book and began leafing through its ragged pages.
“Ah, here it is,” she said as she motioned Loretta and me to come forward and look at it.
In the photograph, a young woman with a rifle, wearing an Arrow Cross armband, stands beside a priest, staring down at the sprawled bodies of a group of men and women, all of them in civilian clothes.
“That is Father Kun,” she said. “He is a priest, but it is his fantasy to be a soldier. He wears always a gun in his cassock and he lines up the Jews and he draws this gun and he says to us, the ones with rifles, he says, ‘In the name of Christ, FIRE!’” She looked up from the photograph. “And so I did.” She closed the book. “This is my confession, and I tell it to Julian.” She smiled. “He says good-bye. He kisses my hand. He says he goes soon to Rostov.”
“Because that’s where Andrei Chikatilo lived,” I said.
Irene clearly did not recognize the name.
“A Russian serial killer,” I told her.
She shook her head. “Julian says nothing of this killer,” she said. “He is going to Rostov to say also a good-bye to this man from many years before. I know his name from my time in Argentina. He was a Russian agent there.”
“Julian was in contact with a Russian agent while he was in Argentina?” I asked.
“Yes,” Irene said. “This is what he tells to me. He met with this man many times, he says to me. He was a man who knew many secrets from the bad times in Argentina.”
“Who was this Russian?” Loretta asked.
“His name is Mikhail Soborov,” she answered without the slightest hesitation. “Juan had much fear of him.”
“Why?”
She laughed. “Because he is one—as we say here—he is one who knows where the knife is.” She sat back slightly. “Did Julian meet with him in Rostov?”
“I don’t know,” I answered.
Irene shook her head softly and, with that gesture, appeared to slip into some former life. “There was something about Julian that made you wish to speak with him the things you do not speak about with others. When I make my confession to him he tells me that he also has known bad things. He says he is like me.”
“Like you in what way?” I asked.
“In his crime,” Irene answered.
“Murdering innocent people?” I asked.
Irene shrugged. “This I do not know.”
“He said nothing about what this crime was?” Loretta asked.
“No,” Irene answered. “But it had made him tired, I think. He tells me that he wants someday to go home.”
“Home,” Loretta repeated softly.
“Home, yes,” Irene said. “He wants to find peace there.” She smiled softly. “He said there is a pond.”
PART V
The Commissar
22
There is a scene in The Commissar where Julian imagines Chikatilo’s wife—the mother of his children, the woman who had lived with him all the many years during which he had secretly ridden the desolate rails of a crumbling Soviet Union—at the moment she begins to suspect that poor, pathetic Andrei is something other than he seems:
She recalled that cold December day, so near to Christmas, when Yelena Zakotnova had first gone missing. Had she ever seen Yelena walking the streets of the village? In the papers she was a pretty girl, only nine, with dark hair cut short. From a distance, Chikatilo’s wife said to herself, her killer might have thought she was a boy. “Her killer,” she repeated in her mind, now with a chill colder than any winter she’d endured in Shankty, because at the very moment she silently pronounced the words “her killer,” she envisioned Andrei and immediately recalled the spots of blood she’d seen trailing along the side of the house she shared with him, the dim light of that shared bedroom, her empty bed during the long absences of this man, the knife he packed with his black bread and cheese.
I mentioned this scene to Loretta over dinner, then added, “It’s in all Julian’s books. Deceit. The moment when the face of someone you thought you knew changes, and you suspect that there’s something terrible behind the mask.”
“And you’re thinking that Marisol wore this mask,” Loretta said, “that she was the ‘she-devil’ Vargas gave to Ramírez—actually a terror, like La Meffraye, or a tigress, like Countess Báthory.”
During the drive back to Budapest, I’d actually envisioned Marisol in this dreadful role, her eyes glittering in the dark way Julian described the eyes of Countess Báthory.
“There are such women, after all,” I added. “ René mentioned one in Algiers. She was called ‘the Blade,’ and according to him, she scared the hell out of everybody. Marisol would have been even more frightening because she seemed so completely innocent.”
Loretta took a sip from her glass and cast her eyes about the lobby of the hotel.
“So it’s a question of moral betrayal,” I went on. “Marisol presents herself as this simple girl from the Chaco. She claims that all she wants is an opportunity to better herself. By day she quotes Borges and guides Julian and me around Buenos Aires. By night she goes to some dungeon and becomes a monster for the Montoneros.”
Something about this scenario clearly troubled Loretta.
“If any of that is true, then Julian truly had stepped into that world your father warned you about,” Loretta said. “That shadow world. Agents, double agents, triple agents. He wasn’t used to that kind of complexity. But he would have begun to worry about it, don’t you think, if he’d gotten wind of any of what we’ve found out? He’d have begun to ask himself the same questions about her that we’re asking. He would have wanted to know not only where she was but who she was. Because he wouldn’t have been sure of anything anymore. Was she a girl with no politics? Was she a Montonero? He might even have come to think that she could be a double agent working for the junta.”
“Working for the junta?” I asked.
“Working to catch Vargas, or something like that,” Loretta said. “Julian would have begun to consider all kinds of deception.”
All kinds of deception.
With those words, I felt life turn again, and on that turn, Marisol became an ever-changing shape. Could it be, I wondered, that the many faces of female evil that Julian had drawn were merely his multiple attempts to capture the yet more elusive moral nightmare that was Marisol?
I thought all this through for a moment, then said, “But if Marisol worked for the junta, why did she disappear?”
Loretta appeared surprised that I’d taken her latest conjecture seriously. At the same time, she clearly began to considerer such a possibility.
“The most obvious reason would be that her cover was close to being blown,” she answered. “For that reason her ‘handlers’ took her out of the game.”
“So, in this scenario, Marisol was never kidnapped or murdered at all?” I asked.
It was a dark twist that now produced yet another wholly unexpected turn in my mind.
“That would mean that Julian was looking for a woman who had never been kidnapped at all,” I said.
I could scarcely imagine the betrayal he would have felt if he had unearthed such a grim truth about Marisol, how deep it might have been, how thoroughly it might have unraveled him.
The grave effect of that thought must have shown in my features, because I could see it reflected in Loretta’s.
“Of course, we have no idea what Julian finally came to think about Marisol,” she reminded me.
True enough, I thought, and yet I remembered a night when Julian and I were in La Boca. Julian had stopped suddenly in front of one of the neighborho
od’s characteristically bright-colored houses. He gave a slight nod toward the back of the house, where an old car rested near a basement window. Its hood was up, and a set of long black cables ran from its battery down into the cellar.
“That’s one of the places where the junta takes people,” Julian said quietly. “It’s a little torture chamber.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Marisol pointed it out one afternoon,” Julian answered. “She says everyone knows what happens there.”
But had everyone truly known that, I wondered now, or was it only Marisol who’d known?
And had Julian, in some dreadful moment of awful recognition, discovered this grim truth?
There is always a moment when the various elements of a mystery must be gathered together like puzzle pieces and rearranged upon the table, each piece seeking its place in the slowly emerging picture. I knew that it was time for the pieces of my story to arrange themselves for that final “reveal,” but instead of reaching illumination, I faced an even darker world of shifting loyalties and identities, one in which Julian, so young and naive, could easily have been ensnared.
“What are you thinking, Philip?” Loretta asked.
“I was thinking about Julian,” I answered. “That the world had become very dark to him by the time he left Argentina. And that if we keep pursuing this, it may become very dark to us, as well.”
“So, do you want to stop looking?” Loretta asked.
“No,” I answered. “But I don’t know why.”
She reached over and touched my hand. “It’s because curiosity is the hungriest of beasts,” she said. “And so we have no choice but to go on.” Her smile had an element of old tragedies about it. “We’re like Nick and Nora, Philip. Only a much darker version.”
Her touch was soft and warm, and I had not felt such a touch in many years.
“Yes,” I said. “We are.”
23
We arrived in Rostov early in the morning. Our guide, Yuri Kasov, looked to be around fifty, and had served as Julian’s guide and interpreter, as well.