The Crime of Julian Wells

5

“It wasn’t Julian’s hard work that made him singular,” I said. “Nor was it even the depth of his research. It was the way he made the reader feel the sting of the lash, the blunt force of the truncheon, the point of the knife. His books are the echoing cries of those whom time has silenced. He never turned away from pain, or cheapened it, or added to it the slightest degree of false amelioration. The purpose of an artist is to convey the harder truths so that we may understand them and learn from them and be less baffled by life. This is what Julian did because he was an artist.”

Thus, with a thud, my little talk ended.

The people assembled beneath the white tent Loretta had had erected on the lawn of the Montauk house had listened respectfully, but they were clearly happy I was done. They’d thought me a windbag, I knew, and a boring one at that.

I glanced to the left, where the pond winked in the light, the yellow boat beside it.

I had failed Julian once again.

I recalled Harry’s request for a plug.

“The Commissar, Julian’s study of Andrei Chikatilo, will be published next fall,” I added. “I hope you all will read it.”

I waited a beat, added the required “Thank you,” then stepped away from the lectern.

I was the last to speak, so the people now rose and made their way out of the tent and into the house, where Loretta had food and wine waiting for them. I trailed after the group, but stopped at the entrance of the tent and glanced back toward the lectern. Loretta had placed large photographs of Julian to the right and left of where I’d just spoken. The one to the right was of Julian standing in the snow, the great wall of the Kremlin rising behind him. In the photograph he wore a huge overcoat and an ushanka, a Russian fur cap with large flaps to cover the ears. In one of his letters, Julian had informed me that ushanka meant literally “ear cap.” This had been typical of Julian. He’d known the word for the hippopotamus skin whip with which the Belgians had flayed open the backs of the Congolese, chicotte, and the word for the labyrinthine mines dug in search of water in the Sahara, foggara-words that had given his books a rare authenticity.

“Good job, Philip.”

I turned to find Harry standing next to me, grinning cheerfully, clearly long past our difficult last encounter.

“And thanks for plugging the Russian book,” Harry added. “Loretta finally sent it to me. It’s pretty strange.”

“In what way?” I asked.

“In that Julian focused on Chikatilo’s fantasies,” Harry said. “The way he assumes the part of a patriot when he kills these kids. They were spies. They were traitors. They had to be destroyed to protect Mother Russia.” He glanced toward the house and now clearly wanted to push this unpleasantness aside. “So, you coming?” he asked.

“In a minute,” I said, then turned back toward the front of the tent, my gaze now focused on the photograph to the left of the lectern.

I had no trouble placing the photo, of course. I’d taken it when we were in Buenos Aires, the Rio de la Plata behind him, the two of us about to take a boat to Montevideo with our guide. I’d left Argentina a week later, but Julian had stayed on.

For the first time in a long time, I thought of the grave purpose that had kept Julian in Argentina, the many leads he’d followed, the growing sense of futility as each led nowhere. He had looked everywhere, but had failed to find her. Had he been thinking of that failure while he studied the map of Argentina on that last day? Had he still been thinking of it as he later walked to that little yellow boat?

Loretta had thrown open the windows of the sunroom, and I could hear the white noise of muffled voices, along with the strains of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, which Julian had first heard at Two Groves and he later called the saddest music in the world.

For the next hour or so I mingled with the guests, most of whom were friends of Loretta’s who’d come to pay their respects to her departed brother but hadn’t actually known Julian.

By evening everyone had left, so Loretta and I sat alone, still in the sunroom but no longer in the sun. Loretta lit a few candles. They aged the air to a pale yellow, rather than turning the atmosphere romantic. But this perception, I thought, was actually a misperception, a little elegiac twist of mind.

“Julian liked candles,” she said as she poured herself a scotch. “Scotch for you, too, Philip?”

“No, I still have a little wine,” I said.

While Loretta poured herself a drink, I let my eyes roam the bookshelves that lined the adjoining room, the library she’d built some years before. They were filled with books on every imaginable subject, and in that way they suggested the range of Loretta’s mind. For most of her life she’d worked as a freelance copy editor while taking care of her son, Colin, who had died at sixteen from the degenerative disease he’d been born with and which had slowly removed first his ability to stand, then to walk, then to speak, and at last, to breathe. Her husband had left her not long after Colin’s birth, and after that, she’d moved into the Montauk house.

“Did Harry give you Julian’s latest?” she asked as she took a seat across from me.

“No, but he’s sending it to me.”

Loretta lifted her glass. “Well, to Julian’s last book,” she said.

A thought occurred to me. “Do you have the map?” I asked. “The one Julian was looking at before he died?”

“Of course,” Loretta said.

“May I see it?”

She gave me a quizzical look, then got to her feet, walked over to a nearby table, and drew the map from one of its drawers.

“Argentina, like I said,” she said, handing it to me.

I took the map from her and unfolded it.

“What are you looking for?” Loretta asked.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted.

I did not have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that Julian had focused his attention quite narrowly on a small area of Argentina, the sparsely populated region tucked near the conjoining borders of Paraguay and Brazil, very near the great falls at Iguazu. In pencil, he’d traced a route from the falls to the small village of Clara Vista, which he’d circled, and which lay just across the Paraguayan border. It was a town I’d never heard of and we hadn’t visited it during our trip to Argentina.

“He may simply have been reminiscing,” Loretta said. “It wasn’t all bad, his time in Argentina. He always described Buenos Aires as quite beautiful. And, of course, there was that guide who so impressed him.”

I glanced up from the map and for the first time in many years, said her name.

“Marisol.”

Loretta nodded softly. “By the way, I called Rene today,” she said.

She meant Rene Brossard, who had served in one way or another as Julian’s assistant, first as his French interpreter, then by means of small tasks, collecting his mail and paying the bills on the apartment in Paris during the long periods when Julian was away.

“I’d already told him about Julian, of course,” Loretta said. “But today I told him that I wanted him to have something of Julian’s. Just a little token. His pen.”

“I’m sure Rene will appreciate that.”

“And I have something for you,” Loretta said.

With that, she rose and left the room. I heard her footsteps as she made her way up the stairs to the little room that had been Julian’s office.

She came back down the stairs a few minutes later, carrying an old leather briefcase.

“It was Julian’s one true traveling companion,” she said as she handed it to me. “It went all over the world with him.”

The briefcase was old and discolored, its seams frayed here and there, and it gave off a powerful sense of Julian’s life, how he’d lived it like a man on the run.

“Thank you, Loretta,” I said as I took it from her. “I will treasure it, believe me.”

Later, back at my apartment, I put Julian’s briefcase beside my reading chair, then picked up The Tortures of Cuenca, determined, perhaps as a final act of homage to my best friend’s life and work, to finish it before going to bed.

Under torture, Valero and Sanchez had confessed to killing Jose Grimaldos and destroying his body. Oddly, they’d been unable to designate where his body lay, a fact, as Julian noted, that should have called their confessions into question, but which, in a strange reversal, had served instead as further evidence of their guilt:

Valero and Sanchez had refused to locate the body because the death of Grimaldos had been long and terrible, so the town believed. They had refused because, once unearthed, Grimaldos’s body would reveal what had been inflicted upon it while poor, bullied El Cepa had still lived: a body beaten, slashed, burned, with eyes plucked out and ears cut off, with knees bashed and fingers severed, and every shy;where, everywhere, sliced-away flaps of skin. So runs the imagination, as greater guilt is made certain by the uncertainty of the evidence. By this means, the lack of a body merely deepened the crime of Cuenca, multiplied its offense, and made Grimaldos’s murder yet more cruel, sprouting new snakes from Medusa’s head.

For these many crimes, the prosecuting attorney asked for the death penalty, but the case dragged on through the labyrinthine chambers of the Spanish judicial system, until, in 1918, the accused were at last sentenced, each to eighteen years.

They were released six years later, and two years after that, in the spring of 1926, as Julian wrote, “poor, bullied El Cepa, so long assumed hideously murdered, suddenly appeared.”

He had been living in a nearby village all those many years, and in the final passage of his book, Julian takes his readers from the eagle-eye roost of the Casas Colgadas, over the twining river and scrub brush and the bare rocks of the plain, then eastward, toward the coast, along the shabby roads of rural Spain, on and on, until he brings them to the flowered streets of Valencia and at last into the shadowy interior of a small kiosk, where. .

. . during the last years of his life, El Cepa, the unmurdered, toiled in his tiny, suffocating space, remembering or not the dusty streets of Cuenca, and selling lottery tickets for life’s least deadly game of chance. And thus did he remain, El Cepa, still undead, but locked in the casket of his booth, and with each hot breath, struggling in that darkness to outlive his crime.

I closed the book and recalled that when I’d first read it all those many years ago, I’d found nothing particularly striking in that final passage. For that reason it seemed strange to me that these same stark words now quite inexplicably moved me. For here was Julian’s sense of life’s cruel randomness, life a lottery upon whose uncontrollable outcome everything depended, how because this streetcar stopped on this particular corner at this particular moment, nothing for this particular human being would ever be the same.

But was this all that was to be found at the end of Julian’s first book?

I considered all the books and articles that had followed The Tortures of Cuenca, a life’s work whose dark subject matter I had always laid at the foot of some mental oddity little different from the obsession of stamp collectors or people who grow orchids.

Loretta had once said that Julian’s books always ended like the tolling of a bell. But had that really been his concluding mood? Or was it rather, as it seemed at the end of The Tortures of Cuenca, a sense of life as a grim trickster whose cruel twists and turns none of us can avoid.

I closed the book, then, on impulse opened it again, this time to the dedication Julian had written so many years before: For Philip, sole witness to my crime. I had always thought this entirely tongue-in-cheek. But now, given the life that had subsequently come to my friend, and the terrible way by which he’d ended it, I couldn’t help but wonder if this strange dedication, haunting as it seemed to me now, pointed to some different, darker, and perhaps still-unsolved crime.

I recalled the final passage once again, my mind now focused on its concluding line: to outlive his crime.

In the book’s dedication I’d been singled out as the sole witness to Julian’s crime, but I could think of no such offense, no crime I’d ever witnessed. But had there been one that I hadn’t recognized or discovered, a crime that Julian, too, had struggled to outlive but failed?