The Crime of Julian Wells Read online

  “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 Iguazú. 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 René today,” she said.

  She meant René 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 René 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 José 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 everywhere, 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?

  PART II

  The Eyes of Oradour
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br />   6

  ”I can’t stop thinking about Julian,” I told Loretta.

  She’d come into the city as she always did on the anniversary of her son’s death. He’d loved Central Park, and during the earlier stages of his illness, before he’d been confined to a wheelchair, they’d sometimes come here to sit and watch passersby, and even from time to time, when he’d still been able to do it, to stroll around the pond, as Loretta and I were now doing.

  “It feels like I’m always in the presence of an unquiet ghost,” I added as we walked over to a nearby bench and sat down.

  “Well, he was unquiet, that’s for sure,” Loretta said. “Usually he came home quite tired, but this time was different. It was as if some vicious little animal were clawing around inside him.”

  I glanced out into the park, where scores of strollers were making their way along its deeply shaded paths. “My mind keeps bringing things to the surface. Little bits of memory that swirl and coalesce and pick up other little bits.”

  She clearly saw the troubling aspect of this. “What little bits?” she asked.

  “That dedication in his first book, for example,” I said. “That I was the ‘sole witness’ to his crime.” I shrugged. “I don’t remember witnessing any crime. I thought he meant his writing of the book, which I’d advised against. But now, I’m not so sure that that’s the ‘crime’ Julian meant.”

  This last remark clearly connected to something in Loretta’s mind.

  “You know, it’s strange, but for all the dreadful acts Julian wrote about, I don’t think he ever witnessed a crime of any sort.” Her gaze drifted over to one of the great gray stones of the park, children scooting down its smoothly rounded surface. “I wonder how he would have reacted if he’d ever actually seen an atrocity like the one at Oradour.” She looked at me. “Psychologically, he might not have been able to survive it. Primo Levi killed himself, remember? Tadeusz Borowski, too.”

  “But they were the victims of a great crime,” I reminded her. “Not people who had done some awful thing. They didn’t die of guilt. They died because they were unable to bear the suffering they’d seen.”

  “Well, Julian had certainly seen plenty of suffering,” Loretta said. “But I don’t think that was the source of his agitation.”

  “Then what was?” I asked.

  Loretta remained silent for a time, thinking something through. Then she said, “Julian and I were sitting in the yard at Montauk a few days before he died. I looked over at him. Looked closely at his face. There were these deep lines. And his eyes looked sunken. I said, ‘You know, Julian, the crimes you’ve written about are carved into your face.’”

  Loretta was right. Julian’s features did seem to bear the imprint of Cuenca and Oradour, the castle ruins of Brittany and Cachtice, the bleak wastes of the Ukraine.

  “His response was strange,” Loretta said. “He said, ‘No, only the one I’ll never write about.’”

  As if once again on that rainy street, I saw Julian turn up his collar, pull down his hat, and wave me under the awning of a small store on Avenida de la Republique. He’d grasped my arm fiercely, then asked if I’d heard from Marisol.”

  “Do you suppose it could have been Marisol’s disappearance?” I asked. “I mean, he was looking at a map of Argentina, after all.”

  “I suppose that could have been the crime,” Loretta said.

  “But what would keep him from writing about that?” I asked.

  Loretta’s look reminded me of a fictional detective in some old noir classic.

  “Did Julian love her?” she asked.

  “No,” I answered. “He cared for her, certainly. But he didn’t fall in love with her.”

  “Did you?”

  “No,” I said.

  With that answer, I heard Marisol’s voice again: Our time on earth is divvied out like stolen things, a booty of nights and days.

  “But there was something compelling about her,” I added.

  “That Julian saw?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “And he did everything he could to find her. But people simply vanished in those days.”

  Vanished, yes, I thought, but why had she vanished? For me, this had always been the mysterious part of Marisol’s disappearance, that it had remained so thoroughly unaccountable. Her body had never been found, and thus it was unlikely that she’d been the victim of an ordinary murder. But neither would she have been a likely target of the country’s political repression. What had she done, after all, except work as a guide and study dress design and occasionally express some opinion about a writer or a style of dance? Of all the people I had ever known, she had seemed to me the most innocent.

  “The thing about Marisol,” I said, “is that she wasn’t at all political. She was smart and ambitious, a hard worker. She had a way about her, a knowingness, but in every other way, there were thousands like her in Buenos Aires at that time.”

  “Thousands who were like her but who didn’t disappear,” Loretta said.

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  With that answer, there seemed little to do but change the subject.

  “Anything more from René?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Loretta said. “An e-mail, if you can believe it. I never met him, but Julian’s description didn’t suggest a man who’s ever been computer savvy.” She looked somewhat puzzled. “He wasn’t at all surprised by Julian’s death. That he killed himself. René likes to use English phrases. He said Julian was ‘a burned-out case.’”

  Suddenly, I felt somewhat like one myself, a man who’d lost his wife to disease and his friend to suicide, both irreplaceable, a childless man whose father would soon be passing, a man with a small apartment who practiced a dying profession.

  I tried to shrug off the darkness that settled over me with these thoughts. “So, what else did René say?”

  “He wanted to know what he should do with Julian’s stuff,” Loretta answered. “Whatever he had in his apartment.”

  The thought of René rifling through Julian’s possessions struck me as profoundly wrong. Should it not be someone else, someone close to Julian, who did this? These were the personal possessions of a very private person, after all, a man I’d loved and whose work I’d admired and with whom I’d traveled some small portion of the world.

  “Would you mind if I did it?” I asked Loretta.

  She leaned back slightly. “You mean go to Paris?”

  I nodded. “René will just throw everything into the garbage,” I said. “And somehow that just doesn’t seem the right end for Julian’s things.”

  Loretta smiled softly. “You truly loved him, didn’t you?” she asked.

  A fierce emotion stirred in me.

  “I did, yes,” I said. “And more than anything, Loretta, I wish I could have been with him in that little boat.”

  “I’m going to Paris,” I told my father the next day.

  The two of us were sitting at the small breakfast table over morning coffee.

  “I need to go through Julian’s things,” I added.

  It surprised me that in response to this, my father abruptly sank directly back to his own past.

  “I never got to travel much in my job,” he said quietly, then drew in a long breath and released it slowly, “but I did find myself at the Nile Hotel once. In Kambala. Idi Amin was still in power in those days.”

  Something in his recollection of that time clearly pained him, but he faced it bravely and went on.

  “Everybody knew that Amin had several suites in the hotel,” he said. “Some were for his whores. Others were torture chambers.”

  It was the latter rooms he appeared to visualize now, and I found myself seeing them, too: walls splattered with dried blood, a straight-back chair, a naked lightbulb hanging from a black cord, a metal table fitted with drains. Hell is not other people, I thought, in opposition to Sartre’s famous line; it is what we do to other people.

  “I was at the hotel when he put Archbishop Luw
um on trial there,” my father continued. “I tried to get my superiors to intervene, but they said it was none of our affair, and besides, dreadful as Amin was, he was no different from others. ‘The Africans don’t have presidents,’ one of them told me. ‘They have chiefs.’ Mobutu said that, too, by the way, as justification for his own slaughters.” He shrugged. “Well, Amin charged Luwum with smuggling guns, if you can believe that, and tried him out in the open, African-style, in the courtyard of the hotel. He’d filled the place with his rabble of soldiers. They were drinking whiskey and chewing khat, and they kept screaming, ‘Kill him! Kill him!’ Luwum just stood there, not saying a word, just staring that fat, whoremongering Kakwa thug right in the eye.” His gaze intensified and bore into me. “That’s what Julian should have looked for and written about, Philip,” he said. “Men like Luwum. Men who were doing some good in the world.”He shrugged. “Julian’s tragedy is that he only looked at the dark side, and it weakened him and made him sick.”

  My father had never indicated such qualms about Julian’s work, so it had never occurred to me that he thought it so misdirected.

  “In my opinion, it’s the good people who deserve to be written about,” he added softly.

  This called into question the whole of Julian’s work, how relentlessly dark it had been. I recalled an article on bastinado he’d once written, the beating of the feet, its different names, falanga, falaka, where and when it had been practiced, and with what instruments. He’d even meticulously described the physical structure of the feet, the large number of small bones, the nerves that cluster in the soles, how painful it must be to suffer such assault.

  My father shrugged. “But that was Julian,” he said in a way that made it clear he had no intention of dwelling further on the grim nature of his books. “So you’ll be going away.”