The Crime of Julian Wells

22

There is a scene in The Commissar where Julian imagines Chikatilo’s wife-the mother of his children, the woman who had lived with him all the many years during which he had secretly ridden the desolate rails of a crumbling Soviet Union-at the moment she begins to suspect that poor, pathetic Andrei is something other than he seems:

She recalled that cold December day, so near to Christmas, when Yelena Zakotnova had first gone missing. Had she ever seen Yelena walking the streets of the village? In the papers she was a pretty girl, only nine, with dark hair cut short. From a distance, Chikatilo’s wife said to herself, her killer might have thought she was a boy. “Her killer,” she repeated in her mind, now with a chill colder than any winter she’d endured in Shankty, because at the very moment she silently pronounced the words “her killer,” she envisioned Andrei and immediately recalled the spots of blood she’d seen trailing along the side of the house she shared with him, the dim light of that shared bedroom, her empty bed during the long absences of this man, the knife he packed with his black bread and cheese.

I mentioned this scene to Loretta over dinner, then added, “It’s in all Julian’s books. Deceit. The moment when the face of someone you thought you knew changes, and you suspect that there’s something terrible behind the mask.”

“And you’re thinking that Marisol wore this mask,” Loretta said, “that she was the ‘she-devil’ Vargas gave to Ramirez- shy;actually a terror, like La Meffraye, or a tigress, like Countess Bathory.”

During the drive back to Budapest, I’d actually envisioned Marisol in this dreadful role, her eyes glittering in the dark way Julian described the eyes of Countess Bathory.

“There are such women, after all,” I added. “ Rene mentioned one in Algiers. She was called ‘the Blade,’ and according to him, she scared the hell out of everybody. Marisol would have been even more frightening because she seemed so completely innocent.”

Loretta took a sip from her glass and cast her eyes about the lobby of the hotel.

“So it’s a question of moral betrayal,” I went on. “Marisol presents herself as this simple girl from the Chaco. She claims that all she wants is an opportunity to better herself. By day she quotes Borges and guides Julian and me around Buenos Aires. By night she goes to some dungeon and becomes a monster for the Montoneros.”

Something about this scenario clearly troubled Loretta.

“If any of that is true, then Julian truly had stepped into that world your father warned you about,” Loretta said. “That shadow world. Agents, double agents, triple agents. He wasn’t used to that kind of complexity. But he would have begun to worry about it, don’t you think, if he’d gotten wind of any of what we’ve found out? He’d have begun to ask himself the same questions about her that we’re asking. He would have wanted to know not only where she was but who she was. Because he wouldn’t have been sure of anything anymore. Was she a girl with no politics? Was she a Montonero? He might even have come to think that she could be a double agent working for the junta.”

“Working for the junta?” I asked.

“Working to catch Vargas, or something like that,” Loretta said. “Julian would have begun to consider all kinds of deception.”

All kinds of deception.

With those words, I felt life turn again, and on that turn, Marisol became an ever-changing shape. Could it be, I wondered, that the many faces of female evil that Julian had drawn were merely his multiple attempts to capture the yet more elusive moral nightmare that was Marisol?

I thought all this through for a moment, then said, “But if Marisol worked for the junta, why did she disappear?”

Loretta appeared surprised that I’d taken her latest conjecture seriously. At the same time, she clearly began to considerer such a possibility.

“The most obvious reason would be that her cover was close to being blown,” she answered. “For that reason her ‘handlers’ took her out of the game.”

“So, in this scenario, Marisol was never kidnapped or murdered at all?” I asked.

It was a dark twist that now produced yet another wholly unexpected turn in my mind.

“That would mean that Julian was looking for a woman who had never been kidnapped at all,” I said.

I could scarcely imagine the betrayal he would have felt if he had unearthed such a grim truth about Marisol, how deep it might have been, how thoroughly it might have unraveled him.

The grave effect of that thought must have shown in my features, because I could see it reflected in Loretta’s.

“Of course, we have no idea what Julian finally came to think about Marisol,” she reminded me.

True enough, I thought, and yet I remembered a night when Julian and I were in La Boca. Julian had stopped suddenly in front of one of the neighborhood’s characteristically bright-colored houses. He gave a slight nod toward the back of the house, where an old car rested near a basement window. Its hood was up, and a set of long black cables ran from its battery down into the cellar.

“That’s one of the places where the junta takes people,” Julian said quietly. “It’s a little torture chamber.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Marisol pointed it out one afternoon,” Julian answered. “She says everyone knows what happens there.”

But had everyone truly known that, I wondered now, or was it only Marisol who’d known?

And had Julian, in some dreadful moment of awful recognition, discovered this grim truth?

There is always a moment when the various elements of a mystery must be gathered together like puzzle pieces and rearranged upon the table, each piece seeking its place in the slowly emerging picture. I knew that it was time for the pieces of my story to arrange themselves for that final “reveal,” but instead of reaching illumination, I faced an even darker world of shifting loyalties and identities, one in which Julian, so young and naive, could easily have been ensnared.

“What are you thinking, Philip?” Loretta asked.

“I was thinking about Julian,” I answered. “That the world had become very dark to him by the time he left Argentina. And that if we keep pursuing this, it may become very dark to us, as well.”

“So, do you want to stop looking?” Loretta asked.

“No,” I answered. “But I don’t know why.”

She reached over and touched my hand. “It’s because curiosity is the hungriest of beasts,” she said. “And so we have no choice but to go on.” Her smile had an element of old tragedies about it. “We’re like Nick and Nora, Philip. Only a much darker version.”

Her touch was soft and warm, and I had not felt such a touch in many years.

“Yes,” I said. “We are.”