The Crime of Julian Wells

25

“The Saturn Turn,” Loretta repeated quietly.

We were seated in a small park near our hotel. It was late in the afternoon and there were few people around. Children were in school and workers were at their jobs. A few older people walked about, along with an occasional mother pushing a stroller. Overall, the scene was quite peaceful, and this allowed my mind to roam rather freely until, for some reason, I hit upon Aeschylus, of all people. It was not a line from any of his plays that came to me, however, but the fact that he had written his own obituary and how odd that obituary was. In it, Aeschylus mentioned nothing of his fame, nothing of his plays, nothing even of his life, except that as a young man he had fought at Marathon. That, it seemed, was the thing of which he was most proud, the one thing about himself that he wanted remembered.

Julian, of course, had left no obituary, much less an explanation of why he had chosen to take his own life. Stranger still, while Aeschylus had proudly noted his fighting at Marathon, Julian had chosen to destroy the last words he’d ever written, as if dreading their meaning.

When she spoke, it was clear that Loretta’s mind was tending in a completely different direction.

“I was just remembering something Julian once said,” she told me. “He had just gotten back from Swaziland, where he’d gone to write an article. We were looking through the photographs he’d taken there. People in terrible conditions, all of them man-made. He looked up from one particularly grim picture and he said, ‘It all comes down to people in the end, Loretta. All the global policies and grand schemes. They all come down to what we do to people, whether we help or harm them.’”

On that thought, I was with Julian again, sitting in Grosvenor Park, peering up at the great eagle that was mounted at the top of the American embassy. He was staring at that eagle when he spoke.

“Ambrose Bierce called diplomacy the art of manufacturing a plausible lie,” he said.

I laughed at this, but Julian didn’t. Instead, his gaze darkened and a shadow settled over him. “To play that trick really well, Philip,” he added, “is a master crime.”

I related this odd exchange to Loretta, who listened to it very carefully, as if combing each word for some telling detail.

“Maybe Julian learned that in Argentina,” I added.

Loretta nodded and touched my hand. “On to El Arabe,” she said.

For the next few days, we turned the small desk in my hotel room into a makeshift research center. Loretta’s Spanish was far better than mine, though neither of us was in any sense fluent. Still, by working together, and despite online translations that were often close to indecipherable themselves, we got the gist of the many articles we found on El Arabe.

Just as Soborov had told us, El Arabe was anything but shy when it came to publicity. He’d been sentenced to ten years for his escuelitas activities and had served seven before being released.

Upon release, he’d moved to the small town near the great falls at Iguazu, an area of Argentina where it is possible not only to see both Paraguay and Brazil but to easily slip across their borders. He had not been shy about stating the obvious:

I wanted to be close to the border in case the little men of Casa Rosada want to try me again on some trumped-up charge. I live here in peace. I do not hurt a cat. I sit on my little porch and I say to the world, “I take the dirty name you call me with pride, for I am El Arabe, and I regret nothing.”

As became clear from the many interviews that Hernando Vilario-which was El Arabe’s real name-had granted in the days following his release, he not only had no regrets, but he was actually proud of what he’d done.

You only have to look at Russia under the Reds to know what men like me saved Argentina from. The people of Argentina should put statues of us in the park, because we are the reason they do not live under the Red flag. Would they like it better under Castro? With the old cars and the falling-down capital and the eight-hour speeches in the hot Havana sun? They should thank men like me, the men who saved them from such a thing. Instead they put us in prison, and we are made to fall on our knees and deny the great thing we did. We stopped the Reds in their tracks, and for this all Argentina should be grateful to us.

He had repeated these pronouncements in almost every interview since his release. He had also appeared on radio and television, and with each appearance, according to one editorial, “he becomes more bold and outrageous. He grows fat on ill repute and displays his crimes like medals.”

As the years passed, less and less notice was paid to him, though he clearly took every opportunity to regain the public eye. Once, he even ran for election in the small district in which he lived. He was soundly beaten, but his campaign of “blood and fire” was vociferous enough to get him yet another brief burst of attention.

After this election, Loretta and I discovered, he had more or less faded from public attention until another series of articles appeared in a paper called Hoy, a small Buenos Aires weekly. They were written by one David Leon, and their tone, though not sympathetic, was curiously tinged with what Loretta called “a little mist of understanding.” Not enough to obscure El Arabe’s deeds, she went on to tell me, but careful to place them within the context of Argentina’s tumult, the raging battles that had rocked the country, the kidnappings and assassinations, the economic instability, all of which had combined, he wrote, “to inject in every vein a liquid, icy fear.”

“This is our man,” Loretta said as she handed me the first of Leon’s articles. “This is the man who can help us meet El Arabe.”

In the photograph on the front page of Leon’s series of articles, Hernando Vilario stood on a large veranda, his back to a sprawling jungle, naked to the waist and staring straight into the camera as if it were a gun. The brutality that came from him seemed the sort that must have been forged in man’s early caves, hard beyond measure, merciless, and without remorse. But to this otherwise dreadful portrait, he had added a string of wooden beads. They hung from his neck, so brightly polished they glinted in the sunlight.

They might have come from anywhere, but the last time I had seen such beads, they had belonged to Marisol.

I didn’t mention this to Loretta, however, because I saw no reason to. Even had I known absolutely that they were the same beads Marisol had worn so many years before, I still had no idea whether El Arabe had violently yanked them from her neck or whether she’d given them to him sweetly, tenderly, her eyes glittering with their shared work, a little gift in appreciative commemoration of their partnership in crime.