“The Arab?” I asked.
“That is what he is called, yes,” Soborov said. “Because he is brown, almost like the peasants. He was very low sort of fellow. He had not much intelligence, but low cunning, this he had much. In this way, like Stalin. He had worked himself into a good job running whole network of escuelitas. We knew that some of our people were in his custody, but we did not know where they were. El Árabe was very hard man, maybe impossible to break, we thought, even under stress. But he had weakness.” He laughed at the nature of this weakness, then revealed it. “He was like little child when it comes to Americans. A young man like Julian would attract his attention. This is what we think. A young American. Smart. Good-looking. Maybe with money, maybe from good family. We know that such a one would appeal to El Árabe.”
Loretta looked as if suddenly struck by a cold breeze. “You tried to recruit Julian as a spy?”
“Not at first, because we think maybe he is spy, or maybe he is ‘spy who comes in from cold.’” He laughed. “Either way we wish to keep eye on him.”
Soborov paused to take another sip of vodka.
“There was Dogo Córdoba fight in little town outside Buenos Aires,” Soborov continued. “In pampas, but not far from city. We know El Árabe will be there because he is great lover of these fights. Can you believe this? After day of torture, this is what he does in order to relax, watch dogs tear each other apart.”
He looked at Loretta.
“And so we send your brother there,” he told her. “We give him money and he bet like rich man, and this, too, we know, will catch eye of El Árabe.”
Now his gaze returned to me.
“I was Julian’s ‘handler,’” he said, “and so I go with him there because I want to see if he makes contact and report to my superiors if this American has talent for deception we might later use.” His face soured. “It was dreadful place, where we went that night. Very dreadful place.”
Soborov described the event, how it had been conducted in the sweltering interior of a large shed, the dogs brought in on chains and lashed to the sides of a circular pit whose walls were made of corrugated tin, unpainted and splattered with the blood of previous combats. The crowd was washed with sweat and beer and they screamed to the dogs and across the pit to one another, yelling taunts and bragging about their picks of the night, waving money and sometimes knives.
“It is from hell, this scene,” Soborov said, “and at center of pit, there is El Árabe, with his black hair plastered down, yelling at dogs, laughing, and drinking beer.”
I recalled a scene in The Commissar, a moment when Julian has Chikatilo dream of being a pit master at an orgy of torture, moving about with a riding crop, dressed in a red jacket and high black boots, orchestrating the terrible performance as he strides from ring to ring.
“Julian has been shown photographs of this stupid little bastard,” Soborov went on, “and he make it his business to get near him, waving money like the others, but speaking only good American English, which catches ear of El Árabe.”
In my mind, I saw this “stupid little bastard” turn at the sound of Julian’s voice, his gaze drinking in this young American as if he were a movie star.
“I am across pit, but I see El Árabe speak to Julian, and Julian speak back, then El Árabe turn back to pit and give signal with a big wave of hand for fight to begin.”
What happened after that was a fierce struggle between two Dogo Córdobas, white dogs, Soborov told us, and so the blood that swept over their spinning flanks and dripped from their mouths and coated their teeth and ran down their throats was vivid red.
“The Dogo Córdoba is extinct now,” Soborov said at the end of this description of the fight, “because so many die in the pit and because they become so unstable, cannot be with another dog without killing it. Because of this they disappear.” He offered a rueful smile. “Life cannot be sustained by ferocity alone.” He explained: “I hear this and I like it.”
He was silent for a time, as if his last remark had come to him unexpectedly and was still resonating through his own long memory.
“Anyway, Julian meet El Árabe many times after this,” Soborov said, “in the bars and in dance halls of the tango. He is good at pretending friendship. He can make anyone believe he loves them.” He shrugged. “Once he say to me, ‘All you can offer to those who love you is the pretense that you love them back.’”
Even for Julian, this struck me as an infinitely sad pronouncement, and to avoid its sting I rushed ahead.
“Did you help him find out what happened to Marisol?” I asked.
“No,” Soborov said, “but I think perhaps El Árabe did, because Julian must have discovered something very bad. I believe this because he suddenly change. He has been a good-looking young man; then overnight he is old and looks like one who has, as we say, crossed the Styx. He still has this look when I see him last.” His gaze darkened. “A very bad man, El Árabe. Very bad. He feels no guilt, this man. Even after the junta fall, he offers no apology for his little schools. To this day, he is sometimes on television in Argentina, regretting nothing, saying that he enjoyed every minute of it.”
“Did he go to prison?” Loretta asked.
“For few years,” Soborov said. “Then he is released and after that he is home to his village near Iguazú.”
I recalled the town Julian had circled on the map he was looking at on the day he died. “Clara Vista?”
Soborov nodded. “He lives there still, makes interviews, laughs in the faces of those who still seek the disappeared.”
He let this settle in. Then, as if trying to lighten the atmosphere, he smiled quite brightly and said, “By the way, did Julian ever finish the book on Chikatilo?”
“Yes,” I answered. “It’ll be published next year. He called it The Commissar, and it’s the most thorough account of Andrei Chikatilo yet written.”
“Good,” Soborov said. “He was a hard worker, Julian. This much can be said of him, and it is not a small thing. I would like to receive a copy of this book when it is published.”
“I’ll make sure you do,” I promised him.
Soborov smiled. “So, have I said to you what you wished to know about Julian?”
“Not really,” Loretta answered bluntly.
Soborov was clearly surprised by this answer.
“Irene said that when Julian came to see her a few years ago, he already knew what happened to Marisol,” Loretta added. “You’re saying that it was this El Árabe who told him?”
Soborov nodded. “Who else could? He was Julian’s last contact in Argentina.”
“When Julian came here, did you talk about Argentina?” Loretta asked.
“Yes,” Soborov said. “We talked of the dogs, and of that girl, the one who disappeared. He said that he found her.”
“Found her?” I asked. “He found Marisol?”
“Yes,” Soborov answered. “It was the Arab who led him to her, but he did not tell me how.”
“Did Julian say anything about who Marisol was or might have been?” Loretta asked.
Soborov looked puzzled. “Might have been?”
“A Montonero, for example.”
Soborov shook his head.
“What did he say about her?” Loretta asked.
Soborov considered his answer for a moment, then said, “He said only that a trick is played upon her.”
“What kind of trick?” I asked.
Soborov took a surprisingly casual sip from his glass. “He was always speaking in . . . what is the word when it is about a little thing, but it is really about big things . . . what is the word for speaking in this way?”
“Metaphorically?” I asked.
“That is it, yes,” Soborov said. “Not really about one thing, about many things.” Now he shrugged. “So when I ask him what is this trick, he does not answer me directly. It is something he cannot speak about, he tell me.” He put down his glass. “So all I know is that he has a name for th
is trick.” His smile bore the weight of the dark view of things he seemed to have glimpsed in Julian’s eyes at that long-ago moment. “It is called ‘the Saturn Turn.’”
PART VI
The Saturn Turn
25
“The Saturn Turn,” Loretta repeated quietly.
We were seated in a small park near our hotel. It was late in the afternoon and there were few people around. Children were in school and workers were at their jobs. A few older people walked about, along with an occasional mother pushing a stroller. Overall, the scene was quite peaceful, and this allowed my mind to roam rather freely until, for some reason, I hit upon Aeschylus, of all people. It was not a line from any of his plays that came to me, however, but the fact that he had written his own obituary and how odd that obituary was. In it, Aeschylus mentioned nothing of his fame, nothing of his plays, nothing even of his life, except that as a young man he had fought at Marathon. That, it seemed, was the thing of which he was most proud, the one thing about himself that he wanted remembered.
Julian, of course, had left no obituary, much less an explanation of why he had chosen to take his own life. Stranger still, while Aeschylus had proudly noted his fighting at Marathon, Julian had chosen to destroy the last words he’d ever written, as if dreading their meaning.
When she spoke, it was clear that Loretta’s mind was tending in a completely different direction.
“I was just remembering something Julian once said,” she told me. “He had just gotten back from Swaziland, where he’d gone to write an article. We were looking through the photographs he’d taken there. People in terrible conditions, all of them man-made. He looked up from one particularly grim picture and he said, ‘It all comes down to people in the end, Loretta. All the global policies and grand schemes. They all come down to what we do to people, whether we help or harm them.’”
On that thought, I was with Julian again, sitting in Grosvenor Park, peering up at the great eagle that was mounted at the top of the American embassy. He was staring at that eagle when he spoke.
“Ambrose Bierce called diplomacy the art of manufacturing a plausible lie,” he said.
I laughed at this, but Julian didn’t. Instead, his gaze darkened and a shadow settled over him. “To play that trick really well, Philip,” he added, “is a master crime.”
I related this odd exchange to Loretta, who listened to it very carefully, as if combing each word for some telling detail.
“Maybe Julian learned that in Argentina,” I added.
Loretta nodded and touched my hand. “On to El Árabe,” she said.
For the next few days, we turned the small desk in my hotel room into a makeshift research center. Loretta’s Spanish was far better than mine, though neither of us was in any sense fluent. Still, by working together, and despite online translations that were often close to indecipherable themselves, we got the gist of the many articles we found on El Árabe.
Just as Soborov had told us, El Árabe was anything but shy when it came to publicity. He’d been sentenced to ten years for his escuelitas activities and had served seven before being released.
Upon release, he’d moved to the small town near the great falls at Iguazú, an area of Argentina where it is possible not only to see both Paraguay and Brazil but to easily slip across their borders. He had not been shy about stating the obvious:
I wanted to be close to the border in case the little men of Casa Rosada want to try me again on some trumped-up charge. I live here in peace. I do not hurt a cat. I sit on my little porch and I say to the world, “I take the dirty name you call me with pride, for I am El Árabe, and I regret nothing.”
As became clear from the many interviews that Hernando Vilario—which was El Árabe’s real name—had granted in the days following his release, he not only had no regrets, but he was actually proud of what he’d done.
You only have to look at Russia under the Reds to know what men like me saved Argentina from. The people of Argentina should put statues of us in the park, because we are the reason they do not live under the Red flag. Would they like it better under Castro? With the old cars and the falling-down capital and the eight-hour speeches in the hot Havana sun? They should thank men like me, the men who saved them from such a thing. Instead they put us in prison, and we are made to fall on our knees and deny the great thing we did. We stopped the Reds in their tracks, and for this all Argentina should be grateful to us.
He had repeated these pronouncements in almost every interview since his release. He had also appeared on radio and television, and with each appearance, according to one editorial, “he becomes more bold and outrageous. He grows fat on ill repute and displays his crimes like medals.”
As the years passed, less and less notice was paid to him, though he clearly took every opportunity to regain the public eye. Once, he even ran for election in the small district in which he lived. He was soundly beaten, but his campaign of “blood and fire” was vociferous enough to get him yet another brief burst of attention.
After this election, Loretta and I discovered, he had more or less faded from public attention until another series of articles appeared in a paper called Hoy, a small Buenos Aires weekly. They were written by one David Leon, and their tone, though not sympathetic, was curiously tinged with what Loretta called “a little mist of understanding.” Not enough to obscure El Árabe’s deeds, she went on to tell me, but careful to place them within the context of Argentina’s tumult, the raging battles that had rocked the country, the kidnappings and assassinations, the economic instability, all of which had combined, he wrote, “to inject in every vein a liquid, icy fear.”
“This is our man,” Loretta said as she handed me the first of Leon’s articles. “This is the man who can help us meet El Árabe.”
In the photograph on the front page of Leon’s series of articles, Hernando Vilario stood on a large veranda, his back to a sprawling jungle, naked to the waist and staring straight into the camera as if it were a gun. The brutality that came from him seemed the sort that must have been forged in man’s early caves, hard beyond measure, merciless, and without remorse. But to this otherwise dreadful portrait, he had added a string of wooden beads. They hung from his neck, so brightly polished they glinted in the sunlight.
They might have come from anywhere, but the last time I had seen such beads, they had belonged to Marisol.
I didn’t mention this to Loretta, however, because I saw no reason to. Even had I known absolutely that they were the same beads Marisol had worn so many years before, I still had no idea whether El Árabe had violently yanked them from her neck or whether she’d given them to him sweetly, tenderly, her eyes glittering with their shared work, a little gift in appreciative commemoration of their partnership in crime.
26
We arrived in Buenos Aires on a clear, bright day, not unlike my first visit. That was many years before, but as the cab made its way down Avenida 9 de Julio, I recalled that time not as something that had vanished, but as a time whose still-obscure events were now adding a fierce purpose to my life. Of course, I also knew that part of that new purpose involved Loretta, who sat beside me, gazing out at the streets of the city.
“You look like you did the first time I saw you,” I told her now.
She looked at me. “Hardly.”
“No, seriously,” I said. “I once read that fear is the last reflex to leave us, but with you, I think it will be curiosity.”
She studied me a moment, then said, “You know, Philip, I think that’s the nicest thing anyone ever said to me.”
We reached the hotel a few minutes later. It was on San Martín, the plaza where Julian and I had often awaited Marisol and down whose wide stairs we had escorted Father Rodrigo to his bus.
“We should take a walk once we’re settled in,” I told Loretta.
“Yes, let’s.”
And so we did.
It was late in the afternoon and the air was turning cool and the shadows in
the park were deepening. The lights had already been turned on. Not far away we could see the bus station.
“It’s the same everywhere,” Loretta said. “The orphaned poor gather in train and bus and subway stations. Julian said that he thought they unconsciously hovered near some means of escape.”
Below, I could see the same dusty boys who had huddled in those same littered corners the day we saw Father Rodrigo off to the Chaco, where undoubtedly yet more such children were to be found.
“I gave Julian a copy of The Wretched of the Earth the night he left for Argentina,” Loretta said. “Franz Fanon’s classic. Then I told him something an old African man had once said to a friend of mine. They’d met at one of those desert refugee camps that had cropped up all over Africa. The old man had lived all his life in the bush. He was missing several fingers. He’d amputated them himself, he said, with a machete. He held up the stubs and wiggled them a little in my friend’s face. Then he said, ‘Do not avoid suffering.’ That was the message I had for Julian, that he should not avoid suffering.”
I smiled sadly. “And as it turned out, he didn’t.”
Loretta returned an errant strand of hair to its place. “Just for the record, and because we must surely be near the end of this, I want you to know that I’ve enjoyed being with you, Philip. I’ve enjoyed traveling with you and talking with you and listening to you.”