The Crime of Julian Wells

14

Later that night, sleepless in my bed, I remembered Julian during our flight to Buenos Aires, how boyishly excited he was at the time, and how different from the man he later became, isolated and reclusive, the habitue of a Pigalle bar, talking of evil women who brilliantly disguised their vile crimes, with zachem, as Eduardo said, somehow carved into his mind.

Now, recalling the eerie sensation I felt at his mention of this word, I remembered my first meeting with Julian after he returned from France with the completed manuscript of The Terror and, in particular, a remark he made during our conversation, the fact that he considered deception to be life’s cruelest act. El Cepa had deceived his neighbors into believing he was dead. The German soldiers had deceived the villagers of Oradour into believing they were only to have their identities checked. La Meffraye had deceived the children she brought to Gilles de Rais for slaughter.

“So is that your theme, Julian?” I asked him. “Deception?”

I sensed a defensive hardening within him at that moment, a wall going up. He glanced about and looked at his hands before he said, “I often think of something Thoreau wrote, that although children kill frogs in play, the frogs die in earnest.”

Odd though this remark was, it seemed like an opening up, a chance to speak of whatever was so clearly troubling him, but in a moment of supreme insensitivity, I became pedantic.

“Thoreau took that from Plutarch,” I told him in a little show of erudition, “who took it from Bion.”

Julian nodded. “We’re all thieves, I suppose,” he said. “Spies and secret agents.”

“Magicians of manipulation,” Rene said the next morning when we had breakfast together in the hotel dining room. “That’s what Julian called spies and secret agents.”

“He told Eduardo that Buenos Aires had been full of such people when we were there,” I said. “Which it probably was, though Julian couldn’t have known much about such things.”

“Then why does what he said trouble you?” Rene asked. “I can see that it does.”

And he was right. Even now, I suddenly felt a twinge of uneasiness, the sense that I could no longer be certain of what Julian had or had not known about anything.

“It troubles me because Julian seems to have believed that he was betrayed at some point in his life,” I said. “At least that’s what Eduardo told me. And he seemed quite sure of it.”

I related the memory that had returned to me the night before, the vaguely enigmatic conversation I’d had with Julian the day he turned in the manuscript of The Terror, how troubled he looked when he talked briefly about deception as the chief of crimes, the way it seemed to open the door into some darker room.

“He never worked on a book about spies, did he?” I asked. “I mean, for all his talk about spies and agents, he never wrote about them.”

“No, he didn’t,” Rene said. He lit his usual after-breakfast cigarette. “I think he was not so much interested in spies. But, as you say, perhaps in disguise he was interested. We spoke of this from time to time. Deception was something I knew about from my time in Algiers. They were great deceivers, those terrorists in Algeria. I told Julian this. They passed codes during prayers, reciting the Koran but making a mistake. The mistake was the code.” He laughed. “And sometimes even their ailments they used as code. A stomach problem was a man who got scared and had to drop out of a plot. A headache was a new development or maybe some technical matter that had to be figured out before those fucking bastards could blow up the next building or shoot the next policemen.”

He laughed. “Half the time, it seemed like child’s play.”

“Child’s play,” I repeated, struck by the fact that so dangerous an endeavor could be thought of in such a way.

Rene took a long draw on his cigarette. “Child’s play, yes,” he said. “Julian knew this. He even spoke of Mata Hari in this way. That she was just a woman playing a game. Until they shot her, of course. He said once, ‘But it is no longer a game when the bullet strikes.’” He looked at me quite starkly. “Julian believed they do many horrible things, the ones who don’t grow up. Not to grow up, he said, was a kind of crime.”

“What did he mean by that?”

Rene crushed out his cigarette with a violence that seemed to come from something deep within him. “We were talking about Algeria, those girls who planted bombs. I say to him, they were like kids in a playground, those terrorists. Only throwing bombs instead of balls.”

Suddenly, he stopped, and I saw that this memory had brought something abruptly to mind.

“What is it, Rene?” I asked.

With a curious gravity, Rene said, “He looked very strange, Julian. When I said this to him. He looked like maybe this was a truth he knew and which he did not like.”

“What did he say?”

“The thing I told you, that not to grow up was maybe also a crime,” Rene answered.

He sat back, lit another cigarette, and drew in several deep puffs before speaking. “He was a sad fellow, Julian.”

“Maybe he was a classic romantic,” I said. “In his youth, he wanted to change the world.”

Rene shook his head. “No, Julian had clear eyes. Once he said to me, ‘Do you know what love is, Rene? A failure of perspective.’” He shifted slightly. “Such things are not said by romantics.”

I considered how very dark this remark was, the notion that no love could withstand the inquiry of clear minds, love itself a clever deceiver.

“He thought we all dangled in a great web of illusion, didn’t he?” I asked.

Rene nodded.

“Illusions we had to have in order to be happy,” I added.

Rene stared at the tip of his cigarette for a moment, then looked up at me. “These he hid from you, his sad truths.”

A somewhat painful recognition hit me. “Perhaps he thought I was too soft to bear them.”

Rene smiled. “He said to me once, ‘It is not what you tell a friend but what you refrain from telling him that shows your love for him.’”

A single strand broke in the web that I had perhaps long dangled in.

“So Julian would deceive his friend,” I said. “For his own good.”

Rene shrugged, took a final puff of his cigarette. “So,” he said. “He is back now in Paris, the landlord.”

I looked at him quizzically.

“To Julian’s apartment,” Rene explained.

“Oh.”

Rene watched me darkly. “You do not want this key?” he asked. “Perhaps you do not wish to go through Julian’s things?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” I asked.

Rene shrugged. “In a man’s room, there are always secrets. I learned this in Algeria. Always secret things, and some of them, not so nice.”

I waved my hand. “I’m not afraid of anything I might find in Julian’s room. Besides, it’s the reason I came to Paris.”

Rene crushed out his cigarette like a man who’d given his prisoner one last opportunity to avoid a grim fate. “Okay,” he said. “You have made your choice.”

“But, you know, at that moment, I wasn’t sure I truly wanted to go to Julian’s room or go through his things,” I confessed to Loretta when I called her that same night, recounted my conversations with Eduardo and the one I subsequently had with Rene, his final warning, all of it oddly disturbing.

“And yet, at the same time, I can’t stop myself from taking a look inside Julian’s apartment,” I added. “I see him in that boat, and that compelling urge comes over me again, the need to stop him, to find out if there was some way I could have stopped him.”

“You’re like one of those obsessed detectives searching through a cold-case folder,” Loretta said. “Only with you, the file you’re looking through has Julian’s name written on it.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly how I feel. But all this talk of deception, of hiding things from his friends, it’s very disquieting, Loretta.” I smiled, but edgily. “In a thriller it would be others who are trying to keep me from finding things out. They’d be shooting at me or trying to run me down in a car. But in this case, it seems to be Julian who’s covering his tracks.” I considered what I just said, then asked, “Did he ever mention a woman named Ilse Grese?”

“No,” Loretta said.

“He never wrote about her, but he seems to have been quite interested in her,” I said. “She was a guard at Ravensbruck. A very cruel one.”

Loretta said nothing, but I sensed a troubling ripple in her mind.

“He once talked about what he called ‘beautiful beasts,’” she said. “Women who used their beauty or their innocence to deceive people.”

I thought again of Julian’s interest in Ilse Grese and others like her, women who’d committed their crimes partly by means of clever disguises. In The Terror, he had digressed into a discussion of Charlotte Corday, the murderer of Marat, her certainty that by killing one man she had saved a hundred thousand. He’d made similar points about Mata Hari in that same book, with lengthy discourses on women as revolutionaries, assassins, and spies-in every case, deceptive women. Women who had hidden their true motives, often behind masks of beauty, but sometimes behind masks of kindness, simplicity, innocence. Women who, for all their evil, appeared to be no more dangerous than a. .

The name that suddenly popped into my mind stopped me cold.

Marisol.