The Crime of Julian Wells

16

We left Julian’s place a few minutes later. Rene had obviously found Julian’s apartment depressing. But so had I, and thus, with no reason to linger, I had already returned to my hotel later that afternoon when the phone rang.

“Philip Anders?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Walter Hendricks. Your father asked me to call you. He said that you were investigating a friend of yours.”

Investigating?

Was that truly what I was doing now? I asked myself.

“Your friend was Julian Carlton Wells, I believe?” Hendricks asked.

He had pronounced Julian’s full name in the way of a man reading it from a dossier, but I only said, “Yes.”

“I live in London now,” Hendricks said. “But in the early eighties I was stationed in Buenos Aires. Your father thought I might be of help since I was in charge of the Argentine desk at the time that Mr. Wells became involved with a young woman who worked as a guide for the consulate.”

“Marisol,” I said. “What do you mean by ‘became involved’?”

“Well, at least to the extent that after her disappearance, he inquired about her at Casa Rosada,” Hendricks said.

“Julian went to Casa Rosada? I didn’t know that.”

“It’s a matter of record,” Hendricks said.

“What kind of record?”

“Well, I’m sure you’re aware that dictatorships keep good records on people who visit the seat of government.”

“Yes, of course.”

“They record their names, their addresses, and if a flag is raised, they investigate them.”

“Did Casa Rosada investigate Julian?” I asked.

“No, he wasn’t investigated,” Hendricks said. “But he was noted. Anyone connected to Ms. Menendez would have been noted.”

“Anyone connected with Marisol?” I asked. “Why?”

“Because she had gotten the government’s attention, evidently,” Hendricks replied. “At least enough for them to have done a background check on her.”

“But she seemed so uninvolved in politics,” I said. “She seemed quite innocent, actually.”

Hendricks laughed. “Well, there’s an old line in intelligence work,” he said lightly. “Play the kitten. Conceal the tigress.” He seemed rather like a man who had completed a small task and was now anxious to move on. “In any event, Casa Rosada had a report on Marisol. There was nothing of intelligence value in it. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such reports were compiled during the Dirty War. Marisol’s is no different from the others.”

“May I see it?” I asked cautiously.

“I see no reason why not,” Hendricks said. “But you’d have to come here. It’s not something I could just put in the mail.” He offered a small laugh. “It’s of no importance to anyone, but procedure is a form of paranoia, as I’m sure you know.”

“Of course,” I said. “I could be in London by Monday if that’s convenient for you.”

“Monday is fine,” Hendricks said. “If you’re sure you want to make that effort.”

He seemed genuinely surprised that I would pursue the matter any further.

“You thought I wouldn’t want to see the report?” I asked.

“Frankly, yes,” Hendricks answered.

“Why?”

“Oh, nothing, really,” Hendricks said. “Just something your father said.”

“Which was?”

“That you were the opposite of Julian.”

“In what way?”

“That you had no taste for the ‘cloak-and-dagger’ life,” Hendricks said.

“And Julian did?” I asked.

“Your father seemed to think so,” Hendricks admitted.

“But Julian was just a writer,” I said.

This was clearly a line of conversation that Hendricks had no interest in pursuing. “So, I’ll see you in London, on Monday, right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Meet me in the bar at Durrants Hotel,” Hendricks said, and gave me the address. “Say four in the afternoon?”

“See you on Monday,” I said firmly, then, rather than dwell on my father’s curious comment about Julian, I decided to go out into the Parisian night, where I found a small cafe, took a table outside, and ordered a glass of red wine.

It was a warm summer evening, and given my visit to Julian’s garret earlier in the day, it inevitably reminded me of Buenos Aires, the similar nights I spent there, often at an outdoor cafe, all of us talking about whatever came to mind, but almost never politics. It was the one subject Marisol carefully avoided, though at the time I noticed that Julian often tried to move the topic of conversation in that direction. Why had he done that? I wondered now, and on that thought, I recalled the few occasions when he abruptly canceled meeting me at one place or another, times when I didn’t know where he was, and during which I now imagined him skulking behind some street kiosk, taking pictures of Marisol.

It was an almost comic notion of Julian as a spy, but a tiny shift in perception can sometimes bring about a seismic shift in suspicion, and in thinking through all this, I felt just such a shift and remembered a particular evening when we were all seated at a small cafe.

It was more or less at the corner of Avenida de Mayo and the wide boulevard of 9 de Julio, the obelisk at Plaza de la Republica rising like a gigantic needle in the distance. The night before, one of the junta’s notorious Ford Falcon trucks had screeched to a halt before the obelisk. According to several witnesses, four men had leaped out, seized a young couple who were standing at the monument, thrown them into the back, and then jumped in after them as the truck sped away.

The abduction was so blatant, and occurred in the presence of so many witnesses, that the government had issued a statement decrying the kidnapping, though everyone knew that the government’s own paramilitary thugs had carried it out and that these latest victims of the repression would likely never be seen again.

“But where do they take them?” Julian asked. “I mean, in the middle of a huge city, hundreds of people will see them.”

“And hundreds will say nothing, so some little house in La Boca will do,” Marisol answered in that nonpolitical way of hers, as if it were merely a matter of convenience that such people might disappear into one of Buenos Aires’s most colorful neighborhoods.

“But they have to take them somewhere,” Julian insisted.

“But why to some secret place?” Marisol said. “If they can take them in the middle of a city in the middle of the day, why should they need some cave in a faraway place to put them in?”

She saw that Julian was taken aback by what she said.

“It is before such men have the power that your courage should make you act,” she said. “Once they have the power, your fear will control you.”

“So you would do nothing to find this young man and woman?” Julian demanded, as if now accusing her of complicity in these crimes.

In response, and for the first and only time, Marisol’s eyes flashed with anger, and with the force of a wind she shot forward.

“How would you find these two people, Julian?” she fired back. “Would you take some other man or woman from the street? Would you bring them to some place and torture them or maybe torture their children before their eyes? For, this you would have to do. Do you know why this is true? It is because once a monster has the power, to destroy this monster, you must become a monster, too.”

With that, she sat back and with an unexpected violence drained the last of the wine. “There is no blood in your politics. But down here, it is always blood.”

Julian said nothing as Marisol drew her hands from the table and let them fall into her lap, a gesture that told me she regretted her outburst because it was not how a guide should act.

Yes, Julian said nothing, but now I recalled that something in his eyes had glimmered darkly, as if, deep inside some secret chamber, a door had opened up.

I had taken the photographs of Marisol that I’d found in Julian’s garret with me, and now I drew them from my jacket pocket and looked through them again. The one on top was the one I’d taken, and for a moment, I studied Marisol’s face, her quiet features, her gentle eyes.

Play the kitten, conceal the tigress, I heard Hendricks say, and with those words I drew my gaze away from Marisol’s face and settled it on her hands. To me, they seemed soft and delicate. I could not imagine them with claws.