The Crime of Julian Wells

26

We arrived in Buenos Aires on a clear, bright day, not unlike my first visit. That was many years before, but as the cab made its way down Avenida 9 de Julio, I recalled that time not as something that had vanished, but as a time whose still-obscure events were now adding a fierce purpose to my life. Of course, I also knew that part of that new purpose involved Loretta, who sat beside me, gazing out at the streets of the city.

“You look like you did the first time I saw you,” I told her now.

She looked at me. “Hardly.”

“No, seriously,” I said. “I once read that fear is the last reflex to leave us, but with you, I think it will be curiosity.”

She studied me a moment, then said, “You know, Philip, I think that’s the nicest thing anyone ever said to me.”

We reached the hotel a few minutes later. It was on San Martin, the plaza where Julian and I had often awaited Marisol and down whose wide stairs we had escorted Father Rodrigo to his bus.

“We should take a walk once we’re settled in,” I told Loretta.

“Yes, let’s.”

And so we did.

It was late in the afternoon and the air was turning cool and the shadows in the park were deepening. The lights had already been turned on. Not far away we could see the bus station.

“It’s the same everywhere,” Loretta said. “The orphaned poor gather in train and bus and subway stations. Julian said that he thought they unconsciously hovered near some means of escape.”

Below, I could see the same dusty boys who had huddled in those same littered corners the day we saw Father Rodrigo off to the Chaco, where undoubtedly yet more such children were to be found.

“I gave Julian a copy of The Wretched of the Earth the night he left for Argentina,” Loretta said. “Franz Fanon’s classic. Then I told him something an old African man had once said to a friend of mine. They’d met at one of those desert refugee camps that had cropped up all over Africa. The old man had lived all his life in the bush. He was missing several fingers. He’d amputated them himself, he said, with a machete. He held up the stubs and wiggled them a little in my friend’s face. Then he said, ‘Do not avoid suffering.’ That was the message I had for Julian, that he should not avoid suffering.”

I smiled sadly. “And as it turned out, he didn’t.”

Loretta returned an errant strand of hair to its place. “Just for the record, and because we must surely be near the end of this, I want you to know that I’ve enjoyed being with you, Philip. I’ve enjoyed traveling with you and talking with you and listening to you.”

“I feel the same, of course.”

She laughed. “You know, in a book, this scene would be quite a maudlin moment, don’t you think?”

“Yes, it would,” I said softly. “But in life, those moments are often the best.”

The next morning we ate breakfast, then made our way to the address David Leon had given us for Hoy.

Loretta had gotten in touch with him while we were still in Budapest. She had found their exchanges quite warm, Leon more than willing to speak with us about El Arabe, a man he described as not only a sociopath but one who thought everyone else a sociopath, too.

The oddity in Leon’s description of El Arabe, however, was the fact that he appeared to be extremely intelligent. Soborov had portrayed him as something of a buffoon, capable of low cunning, but little else. Leon’s articles presented a far different assessment, one in which El Arabe seemed much closer to the Mr. Kurtz of Heart of Darkness: keen-minded, resolute, with something curiously immortal in the nature of his malice.

David Leon was younger than I’d expected, a man in his thirties, tall, lean, with jet black hair that almost perfectly matched his glasses. He was dressed in a white shirt, jeans, and an olive green corduroy jacket.

“Good to see you after so many e-mails,” he said to Loretta when we arrived at Hoy, then turned and offered his hand to me. “And you must be Philip?”

I took his hand. “Thanks for seeing us,” I told him.

His office was a cubicle in a sea of cubicles, and so he suggested that we move to a conference room down the hall.

“It is more private there,” he said.

The conference room was also rather small, with a square table, scarred with use, and dotted with coffee rings.

“It is a historical artifact,” Leon said as he ran his fingers on the table. “It belonged to Jose de Costa. He was imprisoned by the junta. A great reporter. One of the disappeared. It was while I was seeking to discover his fate that I came across El Arabe. He knew nothing of Jose, but he spoke of many other things. He is a great river of talk.”

“So it seems,” Loretta said.

We all took seats at the table. I had brought Julian’s old briefcase, and while Loretta and Leon continued to speak, mostly about their earlier correspondence, I took out a paper and pen.

“You are a journalist?” Leon asked me.

“No,” I answered, then started to say that I was a book reviewer, but found that I could no longer describe myself in that way. What was I? For the first time in my life, I didn’t know, an unexpected fact I found curiously exhilarating.

“As I told you in my first e-mail, my brother was going to write a book about his experience in Argentina,” Loretta said, clearly in an effort to get me off the hook. “He evidently ran into Hernando Vilario at that time.”

She had already told him a great deal, I knew. In her correspondence with Leon, she’d described Julian’s life and work, how he’d searched for Marisol after the disappearance, contacted both Casa Rosada and the Russians. She’d also told him that Julian was studying a map of Argentina before his death and that he’d circled the very village in which El Arabe now lived. She’d related the details of our talk with Soborov, as well-everything he’d revealed about his interaction with Julian and Julian’s subsequent meeting with El Arabe.

Now, she said, “So, as you know, we’re here because we want to talk to him.”

“As I told you, this is not difficult,” Leon said. “Hernando loves the attention. Especially from Americans. He is a big fan of the American Western. There is a picture of John Wayne in his house. I have already arranged for you to see him. You could fly there or take a bus. It is a long ride by bus, but not a bad trip. You will see our beautiful countryside.”

“We want to be well prepared before we talk to him,” Loretta said, “so we’d appreciate anything you could add that you think we should know.”

“Know?” Leon asked. “He is a monster. This you already know. But he is a monster who is at least without deceit. When he was arrested, he spit in the face of the government. At his trial, he spit at the judges and made no apologies for his escuelitas.”

Leon walked to a metal cabinet and withdrew an ancient carousel projector.

“It was El Arabe’s. He took many pictures,” he said. “He was proud of them. ‘My gift to you,’ he told me.”

Leon walked to the front of the room, pulled down a screen, turned off the room’s overhead light, returned to his seat, and reached for the button that controlled the carousel.

“This will not be easy,” he said.

When the lights went on again, I felt that I had been gutted both spiritually and physically. In fact, mine had been a reaction so visceral that I’d had to hold my stomach and close my throat. At the end of it I was pale and felt that my legs had gone numb beneath me. There is a kind of revulsion that moves you beyond what some men do, to what some men are, and it is that that drains and exhausts you and leaves you with nothing but a need to escape the whole human race.

“So,” Leon said as he turned on the light. “That is El Arabe. Do you still want to meet him?”

“It isn’t a question of wanting to meet him,” I said. “We need to meet him.”

Leon rose, walked to the front of the room, and drew up the screen, all of it done quite thoughtfully, as though he was turning something over his mind.

When he returned to his seat, he folded his hands together on the table, fingers laced, like a man with a pronouncement. “Steel yourselves, then,” he said. “For, no matter what evil you have known before, you have not known such a one as El Arabe.” He turned to Loretta. “It is strange, is it not, that your brother was associated with such a man?”

With Leon’s question, how little I still knew of Julian struck hard. But truth is truth, and the fact remained that the pieces of Julian’s story were still scattered. It was as if Loretta had been right long ago when she’d said that the pebbles Julian had strewn along the forest floor might lead only to more pebbles.

“El Arabe will be expecting you,” Leon said as he turned to me. “Good luck.”

Leon had wished me good luck quite cheerfully, but as Loretta and I left his office I found something final in his good wishes. For it was luck I would need, surely. In fact, it was all I had left, because I’d reached the very end of what I could discover of Julian beyond what was in his books. I had read and reread those books, along with his notes and letters. I had gone to Paris, Oradour, London, Budapest, Cachtice, Rostov, and now Buenos Aires. I had interviewed the slender list of people who seemed to have made a contribution to Julian’s work, his guides and his sources. I had talked to my father and to Loretta and even to myself, surely the three people, other than Marisol, who had most figured in his life. I had done all this, but I still had not cracked the door to my friend’s most secret chamber or gained any notion of why he had rowed out to the center of the pond, nor what I might have said to stop him from what he eventually did.

“So,” I said to Loretta wearily, like an old gumshoe on his way to a final rendezvous, “the last witness.”