The Crime of Julian Wells

15

It struck me as quite strange that late in the night when I thought of Marisol again, it was not Argentina that came to mind but a scene in The Terror, one I later looked up to make sure I’d remembered it correctly.

La Meffraye stands beside a forest woodshed, watching as a small boy skips playfully down a narrow, overgrown path. She is carrying a basket filled with baked goods, and as the boy draws near, she uncovers them just enough to release their fragrance into “the famished air.” She does not let go of the cloth, however, but holds it-“with fingers not yet talons”-ready to cover the cakes, and in that gesture make it plain that she will offer none of her sweets to this little boy. For a single, heart-stopping instant, the cloth remains as suspended as her goodness, for this is the first of La Meffraye’s potential victims. She wavers as the boy grows near, thinking now that it is only a game, that she will offer the sweet, but the boy will refuse. She convinces herself that this is true, and with that conviction she draws back the cloth and stretches out her hand and offers a sweet, which the boy immediately takes. At that moment, it is life itself that appears to betray La Meffraye by concealing the moral precipice even as she approaches it, a deception that continues until the instant of her fall.

The passage was primarily about La Meffraye, of course, but rereading it I found myself putting Julian in the place of the little boy she coaxes to his death. It was a nightmare scenario that had no doubt been generated by Loretta’s mention of “beautiful beasts” and probably would have tormented me all night had I not finally escaped into a book I’d been asked to review. To my great relief, it was something entirely the opposite of Julian’s dark tomes, sweet and light and at last uplifting, something completely forgettable, about a blind schoolteacher and a talking dog.

“When can we get into Julian’s apartment?” I asked Rene the next morning when we met at the tiny breakfast room where the hotel served its far from well-heeled guests weak coffee and an even worse bread.

It was the bread Rene eyed suspiciously. “I would not have thought it possible to find bad bread in Paris,” he said. “Perhaps it comes from England?” He stirred a coffee he also appeared to find far from his liking. “We can go today.”

I took a sip of coffee. “This morning?”

“If you wish,” Rene said.

“I presume Julian’s things are still there?”

“Where else would they be?” Rene said. “It is on Rue Saint-Denis, as you must know.” He smiled. “Julian was always near the prostitutes, but I don’t think he enjoyed their pleasures.”

“You obviously think he should have,” I said. “Why?”

Rene considered my question for a moment, then lifted his right hand and curled his fingers into a fist. “When you are with your wife, your children, even your friends, you are like this,” he said. “But when you are with a whore, you are like this.” He opened his hand like one freeing a caged bird. “You can say to her the truths you hide from others. That you hate your life, that your friends are stupid, that your work destroys you, that you are a joke to yourself.” A vague sorrow swam into his eyes. “Julian understood this. ‘With the fallen,’ he said to me once, ‘you can be fallen, too.’” He drew his fingers once again into a fist. “But even so, Julian was always like this, clenched, holding on to himself.”

Rene’s observation was like him, I thought, a tad over-the-top, and yet I couldn’t help but wonder if it truly might be the thing that Julian held within the tightly curled fist of himself that had finally drawn the blade across his veins.

We arrived at Julian’s apartment an hour later. Rene had arranged for the owner of the building to leave the key with an old woman who lived on the first floor. She was North African, and I could see that Rene immediately regarded her with suspicion, as if he were still in Algiers, where every woman carried a bomb in her basket.

“Okay, we can go up now,” he said as he ushered me toward the stairs. “But be careful. As we say, ‘Napoleon pissed here.’ You cannot trust the wood.”

Despite my earlier reservations, I now felt a curious anticipation as I mounted the stairs, a sense that I was coming nearer to Julian. For it was to this one space on earth that, after all his many and extended travels, he had always been drawn back.

So why, I asked myself, as I stepped inside it, did it feel so lost and cheerless, so devoid of the homey quality one associates with decades of living in a space? In this room I’d expected to glimpse at least some small aspect of the devotion I thought Julian must have had for his work. Instead, I saw only evidence of his loneliness and isolation. There were no pictures to brighten the room’s dim light, nor even so much as a calendar by which he might have recorded an upcoming rendezvous. There was no radio or television. Evidently, he did not listen to music either while he worked or to relax when his work was done.

What I found was a garret five floors above a dismal street. It had small windows kept tightly shuttered for so long that I had trouble prying them open. When I did, the light revealed the full austerity of the room, the iron bed, the small wooden desk, no element of which was in the least unexpected. Julian had lived like a monk, and on that thought I remembered the day we visited Mont Saint-Michel. We had climbed the stairs to its uppermost tower, where the monks had once sat exposed to the frigid winds of the Normandy coast. In that icy, windswept scriptorium, they’d spent their lives copying manuscripts, using small metal rods to break the ice-encrusted ink, and in this one, almost as uncomfortable and psychologically no less isolated, Julian, the secular anchorite, had written his dark books.

The materials he used in his research filled the bookshelves that covered almost every wall. There were probably around five hundred books, most of them about the eras during which the crimes he studied had taken place. There were books on Spain when the crime of Cuenca had occurred, and on the rest of Europe, particularly Germany and France, at the time of Oradour. Several shelves were devoted to his study of La Meffraye, and he had grouped a number of biographies of Elizabeth Bathory together, along with general histories of Hungary at the time of her crimes, though there were far fewer research materials having to do with her case. One bookcase held works that dealt with Andrei Chikatilo, interspersed with books on Russia during the time of the killer’s life span, the dark age of Stalinism.

“Was this the only place Julian had?” I asked Rene, hoping that perhaps somewhere on earth Julian had found a less gloomy place to live.

“The only one I know about,” Rene answered. He glanced about, clearly repulsed by the bleakness of the room.

“What’s in there?” I asked.

He looked at the squat metal filing cabinet I indicated and shrugged.

I was not amused by Rene’s indifference, so I ignored him and walked over and opened the cabinet’s only drawer.

In a novel it would be Julian’s “secret chamber” I found inside the drawer, and in a single, riveting instant, everything would be revealed, and I would subsequently return to New York knowing what I should have known to save Julian from himself.

But life holds its trump cards more closely to the vest, and what I found was five folders, each identified by a location: Cuenca, Oradour, Brittany, C?Cachtice, Rostov, places that like dark magnets had irresistibly drawn Julian to them. A sixth file lay beneath the others, but without an identifying label.

I turned to Rene. “You don’t have to stay while I go through this,” I told him.

Rene plopped down in one of the room’s two chairs. “I can wait.”

“Okay,” I said, and with that I took the folders over to the desk and turned the switch on the small lamp I found there, though I expected that Rene had already arranged for the electricity to be turned off, since Julian had been gone for well over a month by then. But the light came on and in its dim glow I opened the first of the files.

There were mostly photographs Julian had taken in and around Cuenca of the various locations he would later describe in his book, pictures of its dusty plaza, the bridge, the roads that led out of the town, along with various municipal buildings. There was one of the two of us, as well. It had been taken by a passerby, and in the picture Julian was curiously focused, his gaze drawn, as I now recalled, to the Guardia Civil officer who was standing a few feet away talking to a well-dressed American whom we had encountered only minutes before. It was the only photograph with either of us in it, and I could find no reason, save sheer accident, that it had been included with the others. It was also the only picture Julian had failed to identify in his usual way by writing the name of the place on the back.

The photographs in the file marked “Oradour” were of the same sort, all of them taken at the site of the massacre and clearly meant to jog Julian’s memory as he wrote. I had not gone with Julian to the town, so there could be no pictures of the two of us there. Nor were there any photographs of Julian himself or of Rene, who had accompanied him there several times during the years he’d been writing his book on the massacre. Instead, there was a photograph of a man in his midseventies, dressed in the clothes of a rural laborer and standing beside a horse-drawn cart, with a grove of trees behind him. It was not a particularly striking picture; it was slightly out of focus and no attempt had been made to frame it in an interesting way.

Following Oradour and his work in Bretagne, Julian had gone to Hungary, where he’d spent a considerable amount of time in the area over which the castle of Countess Bathory loomed. In the file marked “Cachtice,” as in the others, there were only pictures, and as before, most were of the castle ruins in which her crimes had been committed. But there were also views of the landscape that fell away on every side from the castle mount, and of the small villages that dotted the area, from which many of Elizabeth’s victims had been drawn. The only difference in this case was that he had included four portraits that he’d evidently photocopied from various sources; one of them I recognized as the countess, and the other three Julian had identified on the back of the photocopies. The first portrait was of Dorottya Szentes, called “Dorka,” according to Julian’s note. The others were identified as Ilona Joo and Janos Ujvary, known as “Ficko.” All had been accomplices in the crimes, and on the back of each photocopy Julian had noted their punishments. Dorka and Ilona had each had their fingernails ripped out before being burned alive. Ficko had simply been beheaded.

The fourth file contained exactly what I expected, a short stack of photographs of what were obviously the train and railway stations where Andrei Chikatilo had identified his victims, usually teenage runaways, both boys and girls, of which a collapsing Soviet Union had provided a continuous supply.

Julian had not identified the fifth file, but given what I found inside, its label instantly occurred to me: Argentina.

Marisol was in each of the photographs I found inside this file, and in each she was the same age she’d been during our time in Buenos Aires, her hair the same length, and she was even wearing, in one of the photographs, the same clothes she’d worn on the day she first met us.

None of the photographs was the sort normally taken by tourists. Save for one, they were all black-and-white and appeared to have been shot from a considerable distance, no doubt by someone who did not want to be seen, and clearly without Marisol’s knowledge.

The exception, in color and quite the sort one would expect from a tourist, was a picture I’d taken in San Martin. In the photograph Marisol was seated next to Father Rodrigo. The two of them appeared to be locked in an intense conversation. Rodrigo had his hand in the air, his finger pointed upward, as if making a crucial point. I had taken it as Julian and I closed in upon them and had only gotten it developed after returning home. When I showed it to Julian, he peered at it for a long time, then said simply, “May I have this?” I’d given it to him, of course, and had never seen it again until now.

I had no idea who might have taken the remaining pictures.

In the first, Marisol is alone, this time in the Plaza de Mayo, the Casa Rosada behind her. In the picture she stares off to the right. Her expression is curiously troubled, and anxiety shows in her posture, suggesting that she might have been waiting for someone who had not appeared.

The second photograph shows Marisol on what is clearly a different day. It is raining and she is drawing in her umbrella as she prepares to board a bus.

In the third photograph Marisol is sitting with a young man near the entrance to Recoleta. His features are indigenous, like Marisol’s. But his hair is black and curly, and even though he is sitting, it is obvious that he is quite tall. He is wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and something in his manner seems wary. Marisol is leaning toward him, the black beads Father Rodrigo had given her hanging loosely from her throat. Her lips are at the young man’s ear, parted slightly, so that she is clearly speaking. When I turned it over, I found a typed inscription: Marisol Menendez y Emilio Vargas.

“Look at these,” I said to Rene.

He stepped over and looked at the pictures I’d spread out before him.

“I took that one,” I told him, “but I don’t know where the others came from. The young woman is Marisol. She was our guide in Argentina, the young woman who disappeared.”

“Ah,” Rene said softly. “Pretty, but not my type.” He smiled. “Too small. Not enough meat. Who is the guy?”

“Someone named Emilio Vargas,” I said. “At least that’s what it says on the back of the picture.”

Rene continued to stare at the pictures. “They look like surveillance photographs,” he said. “They remind me of the old days in Algiers.” He took out a cigarette and lit it. “There are eyes upon these two.”

“Police surveillance, you mean,” I said.

“Police, army, intelligence operatives,” Rene said. “What’s the difference?” He smiled, but rather mirthlessly, like one recalling a memory that still troubled him. “There was a young woman in Algiers,” he said. “Her name was Khalida. It means ‘eternal’ in Arabic, but it didn’t turn out to be so with this girl.” Something in Rene’s eyes shifted to the dark side. “By what you call coincidence, one of our men-”

“Our men?” I interrupted.

“A cop, like me,” Rene answered casually, then continued. “Anyway, he took a picture outside the Milk Bar Cafe a few minutes before the bombing. Khalida was in this picture, standing a few feet from the door, looking nervous.” He tapped the face of Emilio Vargas in the photograph. “Like this one. You can see it in his eyes. He is not at rest, this fellow. His mind is busy. With Khalida, we thought she was this way because she knew about the bomb, that she was maybe a lookout, waiting for the man who was to bring it, but it turned out to be a boy she was waiting for, a boy her father didn’t like.” He shrugged. “But it was too late before we found this out.”

That outcome seemed to strike Rene as one of life’s cruel turns, a twist in events that had swept poor innocent Khalida into the maelstrom of the Algerian revolt.

Rene laughed, but dryly. “In those days, we did what we did to whoever we thought deserved it.” He laughed again, no less humorlessly. “Revolution is not a kind mother to its children.”

“What happened to Khalida?” I asked.

“We followed her,” Rene answered. “We thought maybe she would lead us to the big boss. But this girl, she goes to the casbah to buy vegetables; then she goes home with her little basket. She lives with her stupid father, who fills her mind with the massacre at Setif, how the Pieds-Noirs must all be killed, the usual ‘Allahu Akbar’ bullshit.”

“She told you what her father said to her?” I asked.

“Not for a while,” Rene answered with a casual shrug of the shoulders. “But like I said, we did what we did. And by the time we finished, it was too late for little Khalida.” He picked up the picture of Marisol and Emilio Vargas and looked at it closely. “Their hands are touching.”

I glanced at the photograph, and it was true. On the bench between them, they’d rested their hands in such a way that their fingers touched.

Rene continued to stare at the picture. “Betrayal is like a landslide in your soul, no?” he said. “After it, you cannot regain your footing.” When I gave no response to this, he looked at me. “Perhaps this boy was Marisol’s lover,” he said. “It is an old story, no? The secret lover. It would have made Julian very jealous, no?”

I shook my head. “Not at all, because Julian was never in love with Marisol,” I said. “You’ve read too many bodice rippers, Rene.”

He was clearly puzzled by the phrase. “Bodice rippers?”

“Romance novels,” I explained.

Rene dutifully drew out his notebook and added the phrase to it. “Very good,” he said with small laugh. “I like the English language.” His lingering smile coiled into a grimace. “The people, not so much.”