The Crime of Julian Wells

13

In The Terror, Julian’s curious meditation on one of Gilles de Rais’s awful minions, he wrote:

The route to moral horror is never direct. There are always ramps and stairs, corridors and tunnels, the secret chamber forever concealed from those who would be appalled by what they found there.

We all had secret chambers, I thought, though most chambers probably harbored nothing more fearful than some peculiar desire, or if not that, then perhaps simply the sad awareness of an inexplicable inadequacy we dared not reveal. Even so, Julian would have been the last I’d have suspected of having such a place. At his father’s death, he had been deeply stricken, but he had rallied even from this loss, regained his footing, and proceeded on, his confidence returning with each passing day, so that within a month or so, he seemed once again the boy of old, though perhaps even more determined to make a mark in the world.

For his spiritual resilience alone, I had admired him. But later, as his life took shape, I had also thought him physically brave. He’d been an intrepid traveler, after all, with the courage to cross fields so foreign he must have thought himself on the moon at times. Rimbaud, stranded in Egypt, had written stinging letters of regret, his pen crying out, why, oh why, am I here? I had little doubt that Julian had often found himself floating in some similar sea of strangeness, isolated, friendless, knowing little of the language and customs, short of money, with only history’s most vile miscreants to occupy his mind. It takes courage to roam the world in that way, and roam it Julian certainly had.

But this same physical courage had sometimes struck me as reckless and foolhardy. I’d seen scars on his arms, bruises on his body. He never mentioned these injuries, but on one occasion, I got a hint about how he’d received them.

We were walking in Chueca, at that time one of Madrid’s most dangerous neighborhoods, when two young men staggered out of a bar, headed for the bright lights of Gran Via. On the way, they came across a young gypsy woman crumpled against a building in a common beggarly pose. Normally such people were passed without a nod, but on this occasion, the men stopped to taunt her. “Look at this gitana,” they said. “Can you smell this filthy whore?”

By the time Julian and I reached them, the insults had escalated into a physical assault, one of the men lifting his leg to press the toe of his shoe against the woman’s breast while calling her names-puta, cono, and the like.

In Spanish, Julian said, “Leave her alone.”

He said it quietly, but before the man could draw back his foot, Julian rushed forward and plowed into him, and they both went sprawling into the street. I didn’t try to intervene, but neither did the other man’s friend, so Julian and the man simply rolled around for a bit before getting to their feet, the Spaniard muttering curses as he staggered away.

That night, Julian emerged more or less unharmed, and we went on our way. But I suspected that on other occasions he’d done the same and gotten a thorough beating as a result. I idealized those confrontations in a way that ennobled Julian, cast him as a selfless defender of the weak, and yet, at the same time, I sometimes wondered what his motives were. Was he driven to test his courage? Had he decided that the grand work he once dreamed of could only be realized in small acts of self-sacrifice? I knew that martyrdom was sometimes less the product of saintliness than of spiritual ambition, so had Julian from time to time felt the pinch of his own shrunken hope of doing some great work and for that reason lashed out in acts of reckless altruism?

I had no answer to this question, of course. Yet, the more I pondered it, the more I felt that something was buried in Julian, a need, a remorse, something that held the key to him. I had no place to go for an answer, but nevertheless I decided to drop in on Le Chapeau Noir. Perhaps, with a little luck, I might run into the man Julian had spoken with there, the one with whom he appeared to have discussed Marisol.

Rene was right, as it turned out. Le Chapeau Noir was indeed a good deal like the sort of place one would find in novels of intrigue. In fact, it was less a place than an atmosphere, and even if its shadowy interior were not clouded with cigarette smoke, you would add this smoke to any description of it. You would also include a dim, oddly undulating light that throws this mysterious figure into half shadow, that one into silhouette, by turns revealing or concealing a forehead, a jaw, an eye with a patch, each face broken into puzzle pieces. You would add a random arrangement of wooden tables, and over there, huddled in a corner, you would put two men in linen suits, one with a very thin moustache, the other clean shaven, wearing a panama hat. Snatches of many languages would come at you like bats. Spanish answered by Greek, a hint of German from behind a curtain, Turkish over there, where a man in a red fez drinks tea from a white china cup. To his left, an Englishman in evening dress, come to sample the demimonde after a dazzling night at the embassy. No doubt there’d be an American, too, wearing a dark suit, off in a distant corner, seemingly naive and deceptively trusting, but with a revolver close at hand.

That would be me, I thought, as I slouched, minus the revolver, in a distant corner and silently watched the regulars at Le Chapeau Noir.

Rene had told me that the place was dead until around midnight, so I’d dutifully showed up at just after twelve. By then, a few of the tables were taken, though hardly by the throng of shady characters I’d anticipated. True, the majority of the customers were foreigners, just as Rene had described, but of these, only a few looked like thieves or black marketers. There were a few Algerians, but they were off by themselves, closely huddled around a small table. A tight group of East Indians had claimed the far end of the bar, their eyes glancing about rather nervously, though it was unclear whether it was the police or the Algerians they feared. The rest were French or Eastern Europeans, though at one point I thought I heard a bit of German.

Le Chapeau Noir was, of course, a thoroughly landlocked bar, and yet something about it had the moldering dankness of a harbor. I might have thought of Marseille or Naples, but for some reason-perhaps it was the presence of those few North Africans-I found myself associating it in full literary fashion with ancient Cadiz, known by the Phoenicians, an immemorial coastal trading post, populated by every kind of adventurer and deserter, safe haven for the criminal flotsam of two continents; perhaps in all the world, the first true city of intrigue.

I’d come here in hopes of encountering the priest with whom Julian had often been seen in what Rene called-with his usual melodrama and showy English-“dark conclave.” With a little probing, Rene had gone on to describe the man and even volunteered to accompany me to the bar, for which I thanked him but declined. I needed to be alone, I thought, to experience Le Chapeau Noir in the solitary way I assumed Julian must first have encountered it. I suppose that I’d come to feel that I needed to see what Julian had seen, talk to the people he’d talked to, go where he’d gone, become him in the way he sought to become the great criminals he studied. Such a route is always dangerous, of course, like shooting the rapids of another’s neural pathways. And yet, step by step, I’d come to feel myself drawn-perhaps lured-deeper and deeper into Julian’s mind and character. It was as if I were once again following him into the caves we’d sometimes explored in the hills around Two Groves, Julian always in the lead, beckoning me forward with an “Oh, come on, Philip, what’s to fear?” I dragging reluctantly behind him, refusing to give the answer that came to me: “Everything.”

Suddenly I felt that I was once again trailing after him in just that way, going deeper and into yet more narrow spaces, caverns that were dark and cramped and airless, and in that way not unlike Le Chapeau Noir.

No one spoke to me, of course, but that hardly mattered, because my French was very bad, and so it would have been impossible for me to have a conversation with any of the bar’s clientele, save to inform them that “le plume est sur la table.”

Even so, I felt that my nights at Le Chapeau Noir provided a feeling for the dispossessed that was akin to Julian’s. For there was something about this bar that gave off an aura of precious things irretrievably lost. For some it had been a homeland, for others, a political ideal. For yet others, it was some romantic dream the intransigent facts of life had indefinitely deferred.

Without telling me, Rene had been more practical in his research, and he had located the priest Julian had sometimes spoken with at Le Chapeau Noir, a man who had recently been detained for what Rene called “a document problem.” He was now at liberty, however, and Rene assured me that he would appear at the bar the following night.

And so he did.

After talking with my father, I’d actually entertained the faint hope that this priest might be Father Rodrigo, a hope encouraged by Rene’s description of an old man with leathery brown skin, very thin, quite stooped. Such a person might turn out to be Marisol’s beloved priest, now in his eighties, and perhaps, if my father’s vague suggestion turned out to be true, still withdrawing modest sums from God knows how much Montonero money. I imagined him as essentially unchanged, except physically, and therefore, with secular communism now in tatters, still dreamily devoted to some Christian version of the same radical, and to my mind naive, egalitarianism.

But the man I met at Le Chapeau Noir that evening was considerably younger than Rodrigo would have been. He was shorter than Rodrigo, too, and a tad rounder, with dark skin and black hair that had thinned a great deal and which he parted on the left side just above his ear.

“Ah, so you are a friend of Julian,” he said as I approached him.

His accent was predominately Spanish, though there were hints of other lands, which gave the impression that he’d lived somewhat nomadically, his speech now marked with the fingerprints of his travels.

“When I met him, he had just returned from Bretagne,” the man said.

He offered a smile that was rather rueful and suggested that his journey through life had been a difficult one, a smile that ran counter to his eyes.

“Julian noticed that I was drinking Malbec, the wine of Argentina,” the man said. “He came to me and introduced himself.” He thrust out his hand. “I am Eduardo.”

“Philip Anders,” I said, hoping to elicit Eduardo’s last name.

He did not respond, however, and we took our seats at a small table near the back of the bar, Eduardo quick to position himself with his back to the wall, clearly a man long accustomed to keeping an eye on both the front door and the exits.

“We talked first of Cuenca,” Eduardo said. “Julian had spent much time in that part of Spain.” His smile was quite warm, but that warmth ran counter to what he said next. “Years before, when I was young and angry, I had gone to Cuenca to kill a man. He had wronged my sister in Zaragoza. He brought drugs into her life, and they killed her. Everywhere he spread this poison. Pity another’s knife found his heart before mine could. I wanted my face to be the last he saw.” He waved to the barman and ordered a bottle of wine, though not a Malbec. When it came, he poured each of us a round, then lifted his glass. “Do you know the fascist toast?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“It comes from the Spanish Civil War,” Eduardo said. “It was first made in Salamanca. Imagine that? Spain’s ancient seat of learning. In the presence of Miguel de Unamuno, our country’s greatest philosopher. Made by a one-eyed, one-armed general of Franco’s army.” He touched his glass to mine. “Long live death.”

It was not a pleasing toast, but I drank to it anyway.

“He was an interesting man, Julian,” Eduardo said as he set down his drink. “I enjoyed very much talking to him.”

“What did you talk about?” I asked.

Eduardo smiled. “Many things. Julian was very learned. He had read a great deal. But, at the time, he was mostly thinking about evil women.”

I thought of the evil women Julian had written about: La Meffraye, Countess Bathory.

“Yes,” I said, “he wrote about such women.”

“This he did, yes, but the one he spoke of most, this woman he never wrote about,” Eduardo said. “But he was much interested in her and often he spoke of this woman.”

“Who?”

“Her name was Ilse Grese.”

When he saw that I’d never heard the name he said, “She was a guard at Ravensbruck.”

“The concentration camp?”

Eduardo nodded. “Yes.”

Irma Ida Ilse Grese, I found out later, was born in Wrechen, Germany, in 1923. Her father was a dairy worker who joined the Nazi Party early and, presumably, passed his political views on to his young daughter. At fifteen, she quit school as a result of poor grades and because she’d been bullied, particularly for her already fanatical devotion to the League of German Girls, a Nazi youth organization. After leaving school, she worked as an assistant nurse at an SS sanatorium. Later, she tried to apprentice as a nurse but was blocked by the German Labor Exchange, so she worked as a shop girl for a time, then drifted through a series of lowly agricultural jobs until she found her true calling as a guard, first at Ravensbruck, then at Auschwitz, where, given more power than a lowly milkmaid could ever imagine, she added her own peculiar heat to that hell.

“She was very cruel, this woman,” Eduardo went on to say. “Julian told me of the many terrible things she did. How she wore heavy boots and carried a riding crop. She starved her dogs until they were crazed with hunger, he said, and then she set them on her prisoners. She enjoyed their pain. A true monster, this woman.”

“Why did he never write about her?” I asked.

Eduardo shrugged. “Perhaps she was too simple. He said that she was just a thug. It was the other one who had captured him by then. The one he called ‘The Terror.’”

Her real name was Perrine Martin, but she was known as La Meffraye, which in French means “the terror.” Julian described her as being an old woman and longtime assistant to the serial killer Gilles de Rais. In his service, she proved herself very adept at procuring young children, despite her vaguely sinister clothing-a long gray robe with a black hood. Her actual involvement in the many murders recounted in Gilles’s trial was, according to Julian’s book, perhaps as much dark fairy tale as truth, but his writing suggested that she possessed demonic qualities well beyond her crimes-chief among them, I remembered now, was her capacity for deception.

Still, it was for murder that she was arrested and to which she later confessed, giving some of the most graphic and horrifying testimony of Gilles de Rais’s trial. After that, she was imprisoned in Nantes, where, presumably at a very old age, she died. Thus her story ended, at least as far as Julian had followed it in his book.

“This woman who was a terror,” Eduardo said, “Julian had a big interest in her.”

“He did, yes,” I agreed. “But in the book he sometimes seemed less concerned with her crimes than in the clever way she disguised herself.”

Eduardo laughed. “A nice old grandmother, yes. You are right, it was in this that Julian found her true evil. This is what he said to me. Before the crime, there was the disguise.”

“Disguise,” I repeated softly, and with that word recalled something Julian had written in his book on La Meffraye, the telling phrase he’d used, how the woman’s kindness, simplicity, devotion, and humility were nothing more than serrated notches in the blade she held.

Eduardo seemed to glimpse the dark and unsettling recollection that had suddenly come into my mind. “It sometimes caused me to wonder if perhaps someone had deceived Julian in his youth,” he said. “Could this be so? Was there such a one?”

“Not that I know of,” I said, then added what seemed to me an ever-deepening truth. “But I suppose there’s a lot about Julian that I don’t know.”

We talked on for a time, and as we did, it became clear that Julian had shared a great deal with Eduardo: his early life, his father’s death, the great emptiness he’d felt at this loss, and how, from then on, he believed that to kill a father was to a kill a son. He had also related a few stories about his travels with Loretta and his days at Two Groves.

By then I’d learned a few things about Eduardo, as well, most notably that he had never been a priest but had used that disguise, along with false papers, to move more or less undetected throughout Europe. Those movements had interested Julian, he said, and he had questioned him about them quite relentlessly. It was during those conversations that Eduardo had inquired about Julian’s earliest travels. In response, Julian had first described the happy journeys he’d taken with his father and Loretta; then, quite reluctantly, according to Eduardo, he had at last spoken of Argentina.

“It was not a happy place for Julian,” Eduardo told me. “He told me that Buenos Aires was a place that swarmed with agents and secret agents.”

“That’s true,” I said. “The Dirty War was still going on when we were there.”

Eduardo nodded. “Julian said a bad thing happened there. It was to a woman he knew.”

“Our guide, yes,” I said. “While we were in Buenos Aires, she disappeared. She was never found.”

“And Julian loved this woman?” Eduardo answered.

“No,” I answered. “At least not romantically. But he cared for her.”

Eduardo looked puzzled. “Then there was perhaps another woman in his life?”

“Not one he ever spoke of,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“Because Julian seemed like a man betrayed,” Eduardo said.

“In what way?” I asked.

“In the way of one who cannot forget his betrayal,” Eduardo said. “For most men, it is a woman who leaves this stain. Perhaps this was not so with Julian.”

He was silent for a moment, clearly thinking of Julian. At last he said, “Julian told me that on the walls of Russian prison cells, the prisoners of the gulag had written one word more than any other. It was not what you would expect it to be, this word. It was not mother or father or God.” He seemed once again to be with my old friend, peering into the gravity of his face. “It was zachem.”

“What does zachem mean?” I asked.

“It means ‘why.’” Eduardo answered. His gaze became quite quizzical, but with a somberness that deepened it. “I think this was written also in Julian’s mind. And that it was written there by betrayal.”