The Crime of Julian Wells

21

All literature skirts the otherwise insurmountable issue of man’s many different languages. Fictional characters roam from country to country miraculously speaking whatever language they encounter. The fictional character is sent from London to Istanbul and gets off the train in a city in which everyone speaks English. Throughout the fictional world, the Tower of Babel ever lies in ruins, so that upon first encounter with an African bushman or a Bedouin trader, all indecipherability vanishes, and our hero immediately engages in a profound discussion of life, death, and eternity, when, in actuality, he would have been struggling to locate the nearest watering hole.

This is to say that it was not within my power or Loretta’s to simply head out of Budapest and locate Irene Josag somewhere in the wilds of Slovakia without assistance. Arrangements had to be made, and several days were required to make them, a time during which Loretta and I strolled the streets of the city, took in its churches and museums and monuments.

By then I’d spoken often enough with the hotel manager to have gained some slight knowledge of the city, at least enough to add a bit of local history to our strolls about the city.

“After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russians were required to take away all the other monuments they’d erected to themselves in Budapest,” I told Loretta. “All the plaques and red stars, everything.” I pointed to a pedestal upon which rested a single pair of boots. “Of course the Hungarians had already beheaded the statue of Stalin. In fact, they cut him all the way down to his boots.”

We turned and walked on for a time, now closing in upon the Danube.

“I remember something Julian once told me,” I said. “He said that a traveler enters the world into which he travels, but a tourist brings his own world with him and never sees the one he’s in.”

“Where did he say this?” Loretta asked.

“In Buenos Aires,” I answered.

She walked on without speaking until she suddenly stopped and said, “Then Julian must, at some point, have no longer thought of himself as a tourist there.”

“But that’s what he was,” I told her, then returned to my meeting with Hendricks, how he’d seemed contemptuous of Julian’s “quixotic” effort to find Marisol. “And in a way, I think Hendricks was right about Julian,” I said. “Because in a sense, he was a tourist. How could he have been anything else?”

“By being drawn into the turmoil,” Loretta answered.

“How might that have happened?”

Her expression was pure collusion, as if we two were now in league, testing the same conjectures, exploring the same possibilities.

“I’ve been thinking of something you said the night you called me and told me you were going to Hungary,” Loretta answered. “It was about the report on Marisol, the fact that she might have been a spy. You mentioned that she hadn’t been with anyone important as a guide but that she might have gotten the idea that you or Julian could have known something.”

“Or someone-namely, my father,” I said.

“Yes,” Loretta said. Her gaze became quite intense. “And I thought, if she actually was a spy, she might have had a completely different idea about Julian. Not as someone who knew something but as someone who might later be in a position to know something.”

“I’m not sure where you’re headed.”

“That she might have thought he had access to information,” she answered. “Or at least that he could gain access to it. Information from your father, for example. And so, for that reason, she might have tried to turn Julian. That’s the term, isn’t it? To ‘turn’ someone?”

“You mean Marisol might have tried to turn Julian into a traitor?”

She saw how unlikely I thought that was.

“It’s the oldest turn there is, Philip,” she reminded me. “As a matter of fact, it goes back to Eve.”

There was Jezebel, too, and Delilah. The list of female deceivers is very long indeed. Could Marisol have been such a woman? If so, her disguise was quite brilliant, for I had no inkling that she was anything other than an admirable young woman, dutiful and striving, who simply wanted a fighting chance.

And yet, the photograph I’d found in Julian’s apartment couldn’t be denied. Marisol seated with Emilio Vargas, leaning toward him, whispering in his ear. Might she have targeted a young man who was naive and inexperienced in the ways of intrigue, one already determined to do some great good in the world, romantic and idealistic, a well-connected young American she could “turn”?

I thought again of the photograph, Marisol’s lips at Vargas’s ear.

Might she have been whispering the name of this young man?

It was only a question, and yet I could almost hear the name she whispered.

Julian, I thought, and on that name, I once again recalled the time he got into an argument with me over some small detail, how uncharacteristically wrong he was, and how, to prove him so, I rushed back to my room to find the evidence. It was just after Father Rodrigo’s departure, and I’d left him with Marisol at a small cafe near San Martin. I’d returned to find them talking very somberly, and at that moment, as I thought now, they had truly looked like two conspirators caught in a moment, to use Rene’s phrase, “of dark conclave.”

As if it were a surveillance photograph, I saw Julian at the instant he suddenly caught me in his eye, his expression not unlike that of a little boy caught in a disreputable act.

Had I caught him? I wondered now.

And had the “crime” he’d long ago claimed that I had witnessed been his treason?

There are times when no alternate route presents itself, so that your only choice is to continue down the road you’re on. Now that road led out of Budapest.

By the time I took it, I’d secured the service of a guide. His name was Dimitri, and he was quite young and eager, utterly unlike Rene. On the way to Irene Josag’s village, he spoke of his great love of English, how assiduously he read the great writers of that language. He was astonishingly impressed to learn that I was a critic and that Loretta was the sister of what he called a “real writer,” though he was quick to admit, not without apology, that he’d never heard of her brother.

“What is again the name of your brother?” he asked as he pulled out a small notebook.

“Julian Wells.”

“I am sorry to say that I have not read his books,” Dimitri told her, “but I am certain that I will very soon search for them.”

Loretta promised to send him some of Julian’s books when she returned to the States, and when we stopped for lunch, Dimitri responded by gathering her a bundle of wildflowers.

After that we drove on, now through a countryside that felt increasingly dense.

“There’s Cachtice,” I said when it came into view. “Countess Bathory’s torture chamber.”

Loretta’s gaze grew more intense as she peered at it, but the intensity was combined with noticeable dread.

“Are you sure you want to go to the castle?” I asked cautiously.

To my surprise she was, so Dimitri drove up the winding road that led to the ruin.

It was not overwhelmingly large, and as in the case of many such places, the walls had long ago been pulled down. The tower still stood, however, along with an imposing foundation whose broken stones we walked together, the great sweep of the countryside stretching below us as far as we could see.

It was within these now-crumbled walls that countless agonies had been inflicted upon the countess’s victims, Elizabeth growing steadily more vicious as one year quite literally bled into another. Here she had starved and beaten and burned and slashed the bodies of innumerable innocents, while screaming obscenities so vile they shocked even the blood-spattered minions who helped carry out her tortures.

At one of Gilles de Rais’s castles, no less a literary figure than Anthony Trollope had paused to reflect upon the screams of the victims, even claiming that they could still be heard, as if sound waves do not dissipate. But dissipate they do, as Julian had pointed out in The Tigress, such that the wintry trees that had gathered around the body of yet another child had remained silent and unhelpful while the magistrate’s men searched for clues, as if they were bribed witnesses into whose snow-encrusted hands the countess had placed a few silver coins.

“It’s creepy here, don’t you think?” Loretta asked.

“Yes,” I said.

During the remainder of our walk about the grounds and rubble of Cachtice, Loretta appeared quite thoughtful. She gave no hint of what her thoughts were, however, though I suspected that she was considering the terrible possibility that Julian had, in fact, been turned by Marisol, and thus, for a brief time, might have proved himself a traitor. Still, I didn’t press her. And it was not until we’d returned to the car and were headed toward Irene Josag that she opened up to me.

“I remember one day when Julian and I were in that little boat I found him in,” she said. “He’d come home after writing The Tigress but hadn’t started The Commissar. We were talking about when we were children. Our travels. How fearless we were in those days. At one point I said that the things I feared most now were the things everyone feared. Getting old. Getting sick. Dying. I could tell that he didn’t fear any of those things. So I asked him what he was afraid of. He said that he wasn’t afraid of anything anymore. It was the ‘anymore’ that seemed strange to me, because the way he said it, he seemed to be telling me that he’d already confronted the thing he most feared.”

“And triumphed over it?” I asked.

Loretta shook her head. “No, only that he’d confronted it.” She glanced up toward the broken towers of Cachtice. “And after that, he was like those ruins. Beyond repair.”

Beyond repair.

Since we had no way of pursuing this point, Loretta and I simply continued on, and we reached Irene Josag’s house about an hour after leaving Cachtice.

It was very modest, and with all the growth around it, the tall grass and twining vines, it was barely visible from the road.

“Are you sure this is it?” I asked Dimitri.

“I am sure,” he answered.

We got out of the car and approached the house by means of a broken walkway overgrown with weeds and clogged with shrubs that seemed as swollen, as Julian might have written, as bodies in the sun.

I knocked at the door and heard a shuffle of feet inside the house. Then the door opened, and a very small woman appeared. She was dressed plainly, her hair streaked a yellowish white. Her eyes were startlingly blue, and there was a quickness to them that suggested what I had little doubt was a very high intelligence. She didn’t wear the usual country clothes of Hungary, but a black dress with lace at the sleeves, so that she looked like a Spanish matron. Clearly she’d dressed for the occasion, and I even noticed a touch of blush on her cheeks along with some bright red lipstick that had missed its mark in one corner of her mouth.

“Ah,” she said in an English whose accent was far more Spanish than Eastern European, “the Americans are arrived.”

She stepped back rather shakily, waved us in, and directed us to chairs in her small living room.

“You would like something to drink?” she asked.

“No, thank you,” I said.

With that, she slowly eased herself into a small wooden chair, and the usual niceties commenced. She asked about our hotel in Budapest but was more interested in my having come from Paris, a city she had romanticized but never seen, and now would never see, which brought us to her various ailments, bad joints and hearing loss, failing eyesight, the travails of old age, a subject that finally turned her mind toward my father.

“Your father is doing well?” she asked me.

“Not altogether well, no,” I answered. “The same problems you’ve mentioned. Aches and pains.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It is better to be young.”

We talked at some length about the work she’d done for the Americans, by way of my father, whom she described as having always been very kind to her. He had acted like a gentleman, without airs, she said, a man capable of speaking quite candidly to a simple clerk. She had either read or been told that “the great George Marshall” had had such qualities, and after the arrogance of the big men at Casa Rosada, my father’s modesty had been much more than simply refreshing. She gave no hint of the somewhat more intimate relationship to which my father had quite clearly alluded, so I made no mention of it either.

At the end of this tale, she drew in a long breath, then glanced at Loretta. “I did not expect a second guest. This is your lovely wife?”

I had introduced Loretta at the door, but this appeared to have escaped the old woman’s attention.

“No, this is Loretta Wells,” I reminded her. “Julian’s sister.”

“Ah, yes,” Irene said. “Julian’s sister. My mind fades, no? Ah, yes, Julian.” She drew her attention over to me. “The reason you have come, as your father told me in his letter. Julian. What a sad young man.”

This seemed as good a segue into the purpose of our visit as any, and so I said, “My father tells me that you worked at Casa Rosada in the early eighties.” I looked at the notes I’d taken during the conversation with my father. “For a Colonel Juan Ramirez?”

Irene nodded. “He was a ladies’ man, Juan,” she said. “Very handsome. He many times wished to take me to his hideaway in Puerto Madero.” She smiled. “He was a true fascist. ‘You do not live with the Reds,’ he said to me. ‘You live under the Reds, or you do not live at all.’ He would have done anything to save Argentina from the Reds. In fact, he did what all fascists do, which is the same as Reds.” She clearly held the two groups in the same disdain. “He was always after the Montoneros. Those he dreams about at night. Killing every one of them. It is for this he lived. He wanted to hunt them down like a fox would hunt a rabbit. With his nose to the ground until he found them. Then he rips them apart.”

“But how did he find them?” I asked.

“Names came to him,” Irene said.

“From informants?”

She nodded. “He had many people, but it was the big fish, a Montonero, who gave him the big names. Where they lived, too, these other Montoneros hiding in their caves. Even the names of their children he gave to Juan.”

“Ramirez turned a high-ranking Montonero?” Loretta asked.

“Yes,” Irene answered. She appeared to see this informant in her mind. “Very tall, but an indigene. He was from the Chaco.”

“Emilio Vargas?” I blurted.

Irene’s eyes widened. “You have heard of this one?”

“Yes,” I said. “He was a Montonero torturer.”

Irene laughed. “This he did to show how bad he was,” she said. “It is sometimes necessary to do this. This shows you hate the enemy, that you are ruthless. When he did this, the others say to themselves, ‘See how he hates. See how much he is with us.’” She laughed again. “Cruelty was his disguise.” Her eyes twinkled with a curious admiration. “But it was only one of his disguises.”

For a moment she looked like a little girl watching shapes change in a funhouse mirror.

“Because he had a disguise for Juan as well,” she added.

“Why would he need another disguise?” I asked.

“Because he was never really turned,” Irene said. “He was always a crazy Montonero.”

“Vargas was a double agent?” I asked.

“Yes,” Irene said. “Juan was suspicious of this. This is why he puts much pressure on Vargas to prove himself. It is what Juan always did. He works like a thumbscrew, tighter, tighter until his people break. For this reason, Vargas tries to give Juan better and better information.”

Her features suddenly grew tense, as if she were afraid that she was being watched even now.

“But it was never good enough for Juan,” she said. “So he always asks Vargas to prove his loyalty. He threatens to cut off Vargas’s ears, cut out his tongue. This he would do if Vargas does not deliver him the goods. And by this he means people.”

“People?” I asked.

“Juan wanted to scare Vargas into giving up a big-time Montonero. So he makes Vargas like a man in the ocean who sees the shark coming toward him. He does not have time to get out of the water, so he takes some smaller man and puts this man between himself and the shark.” She laughed. “Juan loved this game. He said to me, ‘Vargas will pluck out his own eyes and cut off his ears. He will give me the name of this woman by the time I am finished with him.’”

“Woman?” I asked.

Irene nodded. “A real she-devil, this is what Juan called her. She had kidnapped some children of the junta. She would lure them with little candies. There would be a van, and very quick, they were gone, these kids. She was good at this. She sent them back torn and burned. It was very bad. The eyes gone. More than anyone, the big men at Casa Rosada wanted this woman for what she had done to these children. And it was this woman Juan wished to get from Vargas because it would be a big catch for him, and he would get a big promotion if he found her.”

“How did you happen to know so much about what Ramirez was doing?” Loretta asked.

“He wants me in his bed, so he makes himself a big man to me,” Irene answered. “He tells me everything, his many stories of the spies and agents. He does this more when he has too much wine.” Her eyes squeezed together, as if I were a distant object she was trying to bring into focus. “But he was a clever man, Juan. And when the house was on fire, he got out through a little hole.” Her smile was pure contempt. “He speaks only Spanish, and so he goes to Spain. He sits in the park and talks to the old men of the Falange.” An odd defeat settled over her. “There is always a place for such men.”

She paused like one exhausted by history, then continued with what seemed to be considerable effort, determined to complete her tale. “But enough of this,” she said finally. She waved her hand as if to wipe the whole dark era from her mind. “So, Julian. Your father says to me that you want to know what I say to Julian when he comes to Casa Rosada, no?”

“Yes,” Loretta answered quietly.

“Well, he comes to look for this woman,” Irene said. “Excuse me, please, but I do not remember her name.”

“Marisol,” I told her.

Irene glanced toward Loretta, then turned to me. “Julian comes to Casa Rosada to find this Marisol.” She looked at Loretta. “I am sorry to hear of his death. Such a young man. It is always a tragedy when death comes so soon.” With that, Irene turned her attention back to me. “Your father sends Julian to me, but I know nothing of this girl.”

“You knew nothing at all?” I asked. “I thought you might have given him a picture of Marisol with Emilio Vargas. I found it in his room in Paris.”

The old woman shook her head. “No, I do not give Julian such a picture. I go to Juan. I ask about this girl who has disappeared. I can see he knows this girl, but he tells me nothing.”

“I thought he told you everything,” I said.

“This I also think,” Irene said. “But about this one, he is silent.”

“He said nothing at all?” I asked doubtfully.

“He says to me, ‘Irene, to know about this one, this is not for your ears.’ And he will say nothing more about her. He tells me if this American comes again, to tell him to go home and forget about this girl.”

“So who was she?” Loretta asked. “Marisol.”

Irene shrugged. “This Juan never tells me, but I think she is big fish, because after a while, he is very big man at Casa Rosada.” She smiled. “All of this I would have told Julian when he came here, but he did not ask about this girl.

“Julian came here?” Loretta asked.

“Yes,” Irene answered. “Just for one afternoon. We have cold drinks, and talk of the old days.”

“And during that time, Julian didn’t mention Marisol?” I asked.

“No, nothing of this girl.” She looked oddly puzzled that this was the case. “So, I think maybe he knows already what happened to her.”

My lips parted in dark amazement.

“Knew already?” I asked. “But he couldn’t have known.”

“This is how it seems me, yes,” Irene told me. “That he has no more questions about this girl.”

For the first time, Loretta looked skeptical, though she had perhaps been so all along. But now she made no pretense of believing the old woman’s story.

“Then why did he come here?” she asked.

“He comes here to-how I should say? — to say good-bye,” Irene answered. “He wished to thank me for talking with him back in the old time, when he came to Casa Rosada.” She faced Loretta. “He has much trouble, your brother. There is a heavy weight on him. This I can see. And so I tell him that I know this weight.”

She turned her gaze to an old album that lay on a nearby table. “You can hand this to me, please?” she asked.

I stood, walked over to the table, retrieved the book, and gave it to her.

“There is the bad thing I show to Julian and speak to him about,” she said as she opened the book and began leafing through its ragged pages.

“Ah, here it is,” she said as she motioned Loretta and me to come forward and look at it.

In the photograph, a young woman with a rifle, wearing an Arrow Cross armband, stands beside a priest, staring down at the sprawled bodies of a group of men and women, all of them in civilian clothes.

“That is Father Kun,” she said. “He is a priest, but it is his fantasy to be a soldier. He wears always a gun in his cassock and he lines up the Jews and he draws this gun and he says to us, the ones with rifles, he says, ‘In the name of Christ, FIRE!’” She looked up from the photograph. “And so I did.” She closed the book. “This is my confession, and I tell it to Julian.” She smiled. “He says good-bye. He kisses my hand. He says he goes soon to Rostov.”

“Because that’s where Andrei Chikatilo lived,” I said.

Irene clearly did not recognize the name.

“A Russian serial killer,” I told her.

She shook her head. “Julian says nothing of this killer,” she said. “He is going to Rostov to say also a good-bye to this man from many years before. I know his name from my time in Argentina. He was a Russian agent there.”

“Julian was in contact with a Russian agent while he was in Argentina?” I asked.

“Yes,” Irene said. “This is what he tells to me. He met with this man many times, he says to me. He was a man who knew many secrets from the bad times in Argentina.”

“Who was this Russian?” Loretta asked.

“His name is Mikhail Soborov,” she answered without the slightest hesitation. “Juan had much fear of him.”

“Why?”

She laughed. “Because he is one-as we say here-he is one who knows where the knife is.” She sat back slightly. “Did Julian meet with him in Rostov?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.

Irene shook her head softly and, with that gesture, appeared to slip into some former life. “There was something about Julian that made you wish to speak with him the things you do not speak about with others. When I make my confession to him he tells me that he also has known bad things. He says he is like me.”

“Like you in what way?” I asked.

“In his crime,” Irene answered.

“Murdering innocent people?” I asked.

Irene shrugged. “This I do not know.”

“He said nothing about what this crime was?” Loretta asked.

“No,” Irene answered. “But it had made him tired, I think. He tells me that he wants someday to go home.”

“Home,” Loretta repeated softly.

“Home, yes,” Irene said. “He wants to find peace there.” She smiled softly. “He said there is a pond.”