The Crime of Julian Wells

  For a time, no one spoke, and we heard nothing but the woman still fumbling about in the kitchen, along with the occasional bark of a dog or the call of a bird.

  Finally, I said, “So Julian never saw Marisol?”

  El Árabe shook his head. “And this is good, for it was very bad, what had been done to her. Very bad, the torture. Even the ones who live do not recover.”

  Another stark silence followed. Neither Loretta nor I had been able to move, so we were still frozen in place when the woman at last came out onto the veranda, dragging one foot behind her, causing the tray that bore our drinks to jerk as it trembled in her shaking hand. Her head was down, her hair was unkempt and streaked with dull gray. It was long enough to shield her face, but suddenly, with a wildly trembling hand, she drew it back to reveal the only thing I might recognize among the web of wrinkles and behind the drooping eyelids: her startlingly black eyes.

  In a novel, it would have been Marisol, of course, this sadly broken woman. And I would have risen and gathered her into my arms and brought her to some safer, kinder place. There she would have lived out her days, sitting beneath a mango tree, enjoying the breeze from off La Plata. I would have occasionally come back to see her, and at some point she would have recalled Julian in his youth, our bright days in Buenos Aires, and together, as the sun set over the great trees of San Martín, we would have found the small measure of peace this life affords.

  All these sweet, consoling things would have happened in a book, but as Julian knew, life takes a different turn.

  “Maria,” El Árabe said, “say hello to my guests.”

  She gave no response, but merely placed the drinks on the little wooden table in front of us, spilling them slightly as she did so. Then she turned and struggled back into the house.

  When she’d finally disappeared into the shadowy interior of the house, I drew my eyes over to El Árabe.

  “Why was Marisol disappeared?” I asked. “Was she a Montonero?”

  El Árabe shook his head. “No. She was a nothing, just a girl from the Chaco.”

  “Then why was she taken?”

  El Árabe grinned. “It was a mistake, but life, it is full of little twists and turns, no?”

  “That’s not an answer,” I said firmly. “Why was Marisol taken?”

  El Árabe shrugged. “She was betrayed,” he said. “A boy she grew up with in the Chaco. In that orphanage there. They have a picture of those two together, those two indigenes. Marisol and that other flat-nosed peasant.”

  “Emilio Vargas?” I asked.

  El Árabe nodded. “He was a weasel, that Red. And he lied about this girl. She was just a guide or something. But this Vargas, he feeds her to the wolves. Who knows why? Perhaps he is getting even with her because she does not fuck him in the old days. Men are scum in this way. One thing I know, he was there when it was done. Laying it on her himself. Making a big show of it.” He shrugged. “It was Vargas who caused Marisol to be killed. But that is not how Julian saw it. And for that reason he thought himself her murderer.”

  “Why would Julian have felt responsible for what happened to Marisol?” I asked.

  “This he told me, and this I know.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  El Árabe appeared quite amused by the tricks embedded in the scheme of things, and I could see the true cruelty of this man, how he loved, more than anything, to watch a helpless creature dangle.

  “Tell me what Julian told you,” I demanded.

  His smile was a paper cut. “Perhaps you should ask your father.”

  30

  My father?

  This could not be the ending, I thought. In a novel of intrigue it would be too obvious���the story of a son’s quest to find out what he could have done to prevent his friend’s suicide ends up circling back to the father. As a literary route toward dark discoveries this one was way too familiar, trod, as it were, by Oedipus.

  Yet, I could see the question that remained open each time I looked into Loretta’s eyes: What did your father do?

  I had considered what I was going to say to him many times on the flight back home with Loretta. During that time, the stakes had steadily increased for both of us, Loretta needing to know what Julian had discovered, I needing to know the part my father had played in whatever that discovery had been. Life was a warren of secret chambers, I decided, everyone on the plane a harbor for dark things. All the old clichés of spy fiction took on a hard reality: hall of mirrors, nest of vipers. My father had always wanted to be a character in a tale of intrigue. Now he was.

  “He doesn’t have to tell you the truth,” Loretta warned me when we parted at the airport. “He doesn’t have to tell you anything.”

  “I know.”

  “So be careful, Philip,” she added. Her tone was tense and her eyes held a feline sharpness. It was clear how much all this had come to matter to her, our search, now in dead earnest, for Julian’s crime.

  “Because in a way, this is an interrogation,” she added.

  This was true, of course, and if my father chose to remain silent, then the story would end with an ambiguity no novel of intrigue, or even the cheapest thriller, could permit. We would know what happened to Marisol. But we would never know why it had happened, or why Julian had blamed himself for it, or why at the end of his life he’d still been wanting to confess to a crime for which he had long ago pronounced himself guilty.

  But what was Julian’s crime?

  And why had he died without revealing it?

  The answer to those questions now lay with my father.

  He looked much weaker than when I’d last seen him, and in the flesh, rather than on a computer screen, he seemed far more frail.

  “Ah, Philip,” he said. “Welcome home.”

  He was sitting in his chair when I arrived, as upright as possible, and as he watched me settle into the chair that faced him, his mood seemed one of cheerful expectation.

  “So,” he said, “tell me about your adventures.”

  All my life I had wanted him to be eager to hear my tale. All my life I had felt somewhat inadequate for never having one to tell him. Now the one I brought him was incomplete, with missing pieces he alone could provide.

  “Well?” my father said eagerly. “You must surely have some stories.”

  I felt like a man who had reached the final chapter of a book he had been reading for a long time, one of those vast nineteenth-century tomes in which many fates shift and veer, only to reach what in the last pages seems to be their predestined ends.

  “Yes, I do,” I said quietly.

  Then, like a wily cop in a bleak interrogation room, I laid the groundwork for what was to come. I offered a brief summation of the route I’d traveled, through Julian’s books, then on to the places I’d gone and the people I’d met, first René and Oradour, then on to Irene in Budapest and Soborov in Rostov, a trail that finally wound its way back to Argentina, where I’d confronted El Árabe in a little house tucked into a corner of Paraguay near Iguazú Falls.

  The last of my tale had taken me to the brink, but I found that I could not cross it, and only said, “He was a cruel man, El Árabe.”

  “They come out of the woodwork in a place like Argentina during a time like the Dirty War,” my father said. He appeared to grow somber for a moment, then, by act of will, to lift his own heavy spirits. “But you’ve had quite a time of it,” he said. “Travel to exotic locales. Talks with various odd ducks, even a Russian spy. It’s like the books I used to read.”

  “A lot can be learned from those books, I suppose,” I said, rousing myself for another reluctant effort to confront my father. “Deception, for one. False identities and wrong turns. That one may smile and smile and be a villain.” I paused, then added, “That goodness is evil’s best disguise. Julian said that. In fact, it was the last thing he said.”

  My father stared at me silently for a moment, then said with perfect calm, “What do you suppose he meant by that
?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, now moving with small steps toward the trapdoor, the steps beneath it, “but I think it was something he learned in Argentina.”

  “Yes, he did change after that.” His gaze dropped to his hands, then lifted slowly up toward me. “That girl who disappeared.”

  “Marisol,” I said.

  The trapdoor opened and I took one step down.

  “We found out what happened to her, you know,” I told my father. “She was arrested by the junta. She was tortured, then killed.”

  “I thought as much,” my father said.

  “But we never found out why,” I said as I made my slow descent. “She wasn’t political after all. That much is clear. She was just a girl from the country.”

  My father said nothing, but I thought I saw a sad glimmer in his eyes, and with that I made the rest of my journey down.

  “Julian thought it was his fault,” I said. “He blamed himself for her death.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “And when I tried to get that particular answer from El Árabe, he said I should ask you.”

  My father’s body tensed. “Me? Why would he say that?”

  “I don’t know that either,” I told him.

  He looked at me closely. “But you think I know, don’t you, Philip?”

  When I didn’t answer, he sat back slightly, as if some invisible interrogator had pushed him.

  “Do you think I was working for the junta, Philip?” he asked. “That I was one of their agents? Because I’d have to have been one, wouldn’t I, in order to know why Marisol was killed?”

  “I suppose you would have, yes,” I admitted.

  “Is that what you think?” my father demanded sharply.

  “I only know that Julian blamed himself,” I said, “and that when I tried to find out why, El Árabe—”

  “Pointed his finger at me,” my father interrupted. “Yes, you said that, Philip.”

  He was clearly offended, and in the grip of that offense, he lifted his head like a proud but wounded warrior and glared at me.

  “Do you know why she was killed?” I asked flatly.

  “No, I don’t,” my father answered sternly. “How could I?” His eyes sparkled with affront. “I was nothing!” he cried. “You may have some fantasy that I was the puppet master in Argentina and that Julian was—what?—my pawn?” A hot breath blasted from him. “But I was nothing! I have always been nothing. Why else would I have played that silly little trick with Julian?”

  There are moments in life that resemble the sound of wood cracking beneath you, and I had reached such a moment.

  “What trick?” I asked.

  My father seemed caught in a seizure of self-loathing. “Passed over and passed over. Again and again.”

  “What trick, Dad?”

  “The butt of jokes,” my father hissed vehemently.

  “What silly little trick with Julian?” I demanded more firmly.

  “Like some character in a novel,” my father raged on. He paused for a long moment, drew in a smoldering breath, then stared at me coldly. “But life is not a novel, Philip. Do you know why?”

  “Because people die,” I said, paused a single, lethal second, then added, “especially people like Marisol.”

  My father’s expression suddenly turned grave. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “Why do you keep going back to this girl?”

  For the first time, he appeared to glimpse a dark shadow moving toward him, that pale rider we all fear, not the one that brings our death, but the one that brings the truth about our lives.

  “What are you talking about, Philip?” he asked again, and it seemed clear to me that he honestly did not know.

  “Something Julian once said just came back to me,” I answered. “A thought from Thoreau. That although the little boys kill frogs in play, the frogs die in earnest.”

  My father stared at me silently, waiting, with some small but building hint of foreboding in his eyes.

  I leaned forward slightly.

  “Julian wanted to know why Marisol had been arrested,” I said. “He wanted to know what evidence they had that Marisol was anything but a young woman who was just a guide.” I paused, then released the arrow that contained all I knew. “El Árabe told Julian what that evidence was. It had come to Casa Rosada by way of an agent named Emilio Vargas. A double agent, actually, because Vargas was pretending to work for Casa Rosada, but in fact he was working for the Montoneros. He was also a friend of Marisol’s from childhood, from the Chaco. He was under surveillance when Marisol went to him. I saw a picture of them together, but I have no idea why she went to him, because evidently she hadn’t been in touch with him for many years.”

  “Then suddenly she went to him?” my father asked.

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Not long after we met Father Rodrigo,” I answered. “I know it was right after that because in the picture she is wearing a bead necklace that Rodrigo gave her.”

  I could see my father’s mind working desperately, though it seemed less in an effort to get off the road we were on than to move farther down it.

  “Of course,” he said, as if some dark veil had torn. “Of course that’s what she did.”

  For a moment, neither of us spoke. But during that time, though he said nothing, I saw a frightening change come over my father, saw the stony facade crumble, his mask fall away, so that he suddenly looked like what he was, a man in the act of loosening the cord that had bound his soul for so long.

  Finally, my father said, “Julian felt responsible for what happened to Marisol because he was responsible, Philip.” He straightened himself slightly, like a man before the bugle sounds, prepared, as his forebears had been prepared, to receive the blow.

  “And so was I,” he added. He seemed to rethink some painful issue of his own. “I’ve always believed that only the bravest of us have the courage to confront our wrongs.” He stared at me brokenly. “Like Julian did.” He let this final thought rest a moment, then added, “And the time has come for me to confront mine.”

  It had begun with the most innocent of inquiries, my father told me, one made when he and Julian walked the grounds of Two Groves one morning. Julian had come downstairs early and found my father alone at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. With his usual perceptiveness, Julian had found the scene quite sad and pointedly suggested an early morning stroll. With that, the two of them made their way out of the house and into the small orchard that surrounded it. After a few minutes of inconsequential conversation, Julian asked, “Do you think one person can change things?”

  “It was a silly question,” my father told me, “and at first I didn’t take it seriously. It was a young man’s question, and a very naive young man’s at that.”

  But as the talk progressed, Julian’s seriousness became increasingly obvious.

  “He wanted to do something great,” my father said. “To use that shopworn phrase, he wanted to ‘make a difference.’” He shrugged. “Because he knew how my own career had gone, he doubted that he could do anything truly good at, say, the State Department. He wondered if there might be some other way. He was simply exploring things with me, considering different avenues. That’s when I said, ‘Well, perhaps you should become a spy.’”

  To my father’s complete surprise, the idea appeared to catch.

  “Maybe it was the romance of it,” my father said. “Or maybe he truly began to think that somehow, in the secret corridors, he would be able to learn things that would eventually allow him to do some important good in the world.” My father lifted his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “It appealed to me, how much Julian ached to do something good.”

  His gaze suddenly became quite intense. “A man shouldn’t grow old wanting vengeance against his life, but that’s exactly what had happened to me and I knew it. I didn’t want it to happen to Julian. I didn’t want him to be consumed by the raging di
sappointment that was consuming me.”

  It was an anger he had fiercely repressed, of course, though there’d been moments when I’d seen it in the way he grappled with a tangled coat hanger as if it were alive and thwarting him, as if to kill it.

  “I was a little man trapped behind a desk,” my father said, “dreaming my secret-agent dream.”

  “Walter Mitty,” I said softly.

  My father nodded. “And so I suggested Argentina as a place Julian should visit. I did this for the right reasons. I wanted him to see the real world. Get out of the cocoon his intelligence and good looks had provided for him.” He sat back slightly and passed his hand over the blanket that covered his legs. “And given what Julian had said about being a spy, it was also a place where we could play a little game.”

  He stopped and looked at me brokenly.

  “It was never more than a game, Philip,” he said, pleading his case before he’d even made it, “a little boys’ game.”

  He decided to give Julian a harmless cloak-and-dagger assignment, he told me. If Julian liked the taste of the work, then perhaps he could pursue it. And if he didn’t, then it might at least cool his zeal for whatever he thought the life of a secret agent was.

  “Part of that assignment, of course, was to tell no one,” my father said. The sadness in his voice deepened. “We swore this to each other, and clearly Julian kept his promise. Now I am breaking mine.”

  My father had considered several small tasks Julian might carry out while in Buenos Aires. None of them appealed to Julian, however, and so he pressed my father until he finally came up with a mission that had a suggestion of romance in it.

  “Simply because—stupid, stupid—simply because it involved a woman.”

  Here he paused like a man at the jagged edge of a bottomless abyss.

  “Marisol,” I said, and with that word, I pushed him over it.

  My father nodded. “Julian was so young, you see,” he explained in a tone that now seemed stripped of all but regret. “So, in my own stupid way, I thought, What could be more thrilling than a secret assignment involving a young woman?” He seemed now on the brink of his own devastating revelation. “She was just a guide,” he added. “Just a young woman with a job, who wanted . . .”