The Crime of Julian Wells (15 page)

23

We arrived in Rostov early in the morning. Our guide, Yuri Kasov, looked to be around fifty, and had served as Julian’s guide and interpreter, as well.

“No problem,” he assured us by phone. “I do everything.”

True to his word, he subsequently made all the plans necessary to get Loretta and me to Rostov-on-Don, which, despite its rustic name, turned out to be a bustling city of more than a million.

At the airport, Yuri whisked us off to a surprisingly modern hotel, where we treated him to dinner. Loretta struck up a curiously intense interrogation that began with Yuri’s first meeting with Julian, progressed through Julian’s research, and moved rapidly until she reached her intended point.

“Do you remember Julian meeting a man named Mikhail Soborov?” Loretta asked. “He lives here in Rostov, I believe.”

“Yes, I went with him to this man,” Yuri answered in an English that became more offbeat by the minute. “At first beginning they are trying to speak Spanish, but the old man, he was no longer to speak it.” His smile betrayed a carefully honed cleverness. “I never have expect that Julian to look for such a one as Mikhail Soborov.”

“Such a one?” Loretta asked.

“Old-time KGB,” Dimitri answered.

“What did they talk about?” Loretta asked.

“I don’t know,” Dimitri said. “They will not talk in front of me. Once Julian, he is said something in Spanish, and the old man, he is getting up and push me out of the room and close the door.”

Why? I wondered, but there was no point in asking, since the conversation moved to other topics until the meal came to an end.

But the notion of Julian having some secret conversation with a Russian agent continued to trouble me, and later that night, tossing sleeplessly in my bed, I decided to take a walk.

Outside the hotel, the charmless streets of Rostov swept outward toward the distant Don, a river that did indeed, as Sholokhov said in the title of his famous novel, flow quietly to the sea.

It was mostly a cheerless place, architecturally boring, yet its streets had been walked by an extraordinary number of Russia’s great literary figures. Pushkin had a boulevard named after him; Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn had also spent time in Rostov; and a young Gorky had worked on its docks. A city with such rich literary history appealed to me, of course, but I saw little evidence that it had done the same for Julian. In
The Commissar,
he had painted it as a warren of all but indistinguishable streets, a gray labyrinth fed by a gray stream, through which Chikatilo, “the Red Ripper,” had made his way like a blind horse, sensing corners, alleys, and dead ends, and always, always, the presence of a waylaid child.

It was the route of this devouring monster that Julian had relentlessly followed. He had written of Chikatilo’s birth in the tiny village of Yablochnoye, a little boy whose mother had filled his mind with tales of the Great Famine, including the hideous story that Chikatilo’s own brother had been kidnapped and eaten by neighbors. Meticulously, Julian had detailed the emergence of this wounded boy into a biologically complete but inwardly crippled adult, a man who married and became the father of two children by the time he took a teaching job in Novoshakhtinsk, the one from which he was later dismissed amid charges of child molestation.

Julian had spent time in both those places, as was clear from
The Commissar,
but it was in Shakhty (Russian for “mine shaft,” as Julian pointed out) that he had stayed the longest, as if attempting to unearth what it was about this grim little town that finally tempted Chikatilo to commit his first murder.

She was only nine years old, and Chikatilo lured her to an old house that he’d bought for the purpose; thus it was a crime, as Julian wrote in one of his stark phrases, “as premeditated by his reason as it was preordained by his madness.”

It was the blood of this child that Chikatilo’s wife found in the snow in front of her own house and that generated the suspicions she would harbor for decades, little noises that continually sounded like a footfall outside her window.

But loyal wife that she was, Fayina kept her silence as the years passed and the body count rose in towns and villages along railway lines, riverbanks, and the many forests of the Don.

It was here, in Rostov, that Chikatilo had killed two women in Aviator Park, then gone on to kill again in Novoshakhtinsk and from there back to Shakhty, then back to Rostov, where yet another body was found in Aviator Park.

Julian had pointed out Andrei Chikatilo’s extraordinary recklessness, the careless abandon with which he murdered, the public arenas that were both his killing fields and his dumping grounds, as if he had come to believe, as all madmen do, that he was in league with the sun and the moon, protected by the elements themselves, shrouded by fog and veiled by rain, perhaps feeling the added pleasure of believing that in all the world he would be the last person suspected of his crimes.

In fact, Chikatilo’s only precaution, though Julian came to doubt that even this was a conscious act of evasion, was that he’d finally begun to enlarge the murderous circle that had earlier enclosed him, killing outside Moscow, then in Revda, Zaporizhya, Krasny Sulin, and as far afield as Leningrad.

Julian had visited every murder site, his book made clear, but it was here, in Rostov, that he’d lived during most of his time in Russia, and it was here that he’d written a good deal of it while holed up in a small apartment off Ulyanovskaya Street.

I knew the address because I’d written him many e-mails, encouraging him in his research and subject matter, always adding that one day I thought his accomplishment would be clear. I never knew how he received my encouragement because he never once responded to it. Rather, his next communication would detail some new idiom he’d learned or some new author, usually Russian, whom he’d discovered.

Late in the evening I came to the little street where Julian had lived for many years. It was quite dark by then, but Rostov’s reliable street lamps offered sufficient light for me to see the windows on the third floor. How many times Julian must have stood at those windows, I thought, stood and stared cheerlessly out over this deeply foreign city.

The expatriate is well established in literature, of course, but usually the portrayal is romantic—Lord Byron in Italy, for example. One sees the desolate exile less often, and yet when I considered Julian’s time in Rostov, I thought of Ovid’s banishment to bleak, impoverished Tomis. “My punishment,” love’s great poet wrote, “is the place.” It was unimaginable to me that Rostov and Shakhty and Revda had not been similar punishments for Julian, and had I begun to write about him when I returned to my room later that night, I would certainly have made some comparison between his life in Rostov and Ovid’s in Tomis, how isolated Julian must have felt in Russia, and how incalculably alone. The difference was that Julian’s exile was
­
self-imposed—thus another sign that he had inflicted some strange punishment upon himself by living in desolate places and filling his mind with torture and murder, by choosing as his sole companions the great demons of the world. In that way, too, I supposed, he wasn’t just a good man, but a great one, not just an artist, but one whose art had imposed exile and solitude. Ovid had been forced to live in dreadful Tomis, after all, while Julian, at least, had chosen it.

I said this to Loretta the next morning, and in response she glanced out over the spare little dining room our hotel provided, most of the tables occupied, the air filled with the soft Slavic murmur of the other guests.

“This must have been the loneliest place Julian ever lived,” she said. “With no one who spoke English. Or any other language he knew.”

At Loretta’s mention of Julian’s languages, I found myself thinking of the first one he’d learned, Spanish, then of the first country in which he had encountered it.

I thought of Julian and Marisol in a sun-drenched Buenos Aires. But now Marisol was less fixed in my mind, an identity that had been in continual revision, first as businesslike guide, then as spy, then as an Argentine version of La Meffraye, working either for the Montoneros or the junta, but equally evil in either capacity.

It was no doubt my continual reimagining of Marisol that took me back to a particular moment only a few days before I left Buenos Aires. It was my only time alone with her, and she seemed curiously preoccupied. It didn’t surprise me when she said, “There are days when one falls out of love with one’s life.”

“Months and years, if you’re not lucky,” I told her.

“Why do you say this?”

“Because it happened to my father. He regrets everything.”

“And you?”

“My regret is not with anything I’ve done,” I told her. “But sometimes I’m not altogether happy with what I am.”

“What makes you unhappy in this way?”

“Well, it’s mostly the fact that I don’t have any talent,” I answered. “I don’t sing or act or play a musical instrument. I’ve read the great books, but I couldn’t write even a bad one. Julian, on the other hand, has talent in great abundance.” Then, for the first time, I gave full voice to the truth. “I would like to be more like him.”

She glanced away, as if from a subject she didn’t want to discuss. “And what is Julian?”

I found that I had no answer for her, and this surprised me, the fact that I couldn’t pin Julian down, that something about him remained in flux, unsettled.

“He is very smart,” Marisol said, then looked out into the traffic. “This much is true.” She turned to face me. “But he is like his country. He isn’t finished yet. And in many ways, he is still a little boy.”

She added a quick smile to this last remark, so that it seemed not a criticism of “his country” but a curiously affectionate statement instead. For that reason, I let it pass and went on to another subject. But now, sitting at a breakfast table in Rostov, it returned to me insistently, and I related the exchange to Loretta.

“Still a little boy,” Loretta said. “You know what’s clear when a woman says that about a man? That she knows she’s superior to him.” She seemed briefly to consider Marisol with an added complexity she was still struggling to grasp. Finally she said, “Do you know the moment when Sherlock Holmes realizes that Irene Adler has seen through his disguise?”

I had never read Conan Doyle, so I said, “No, I don’t know any of those stories.”

“There is a moment when their eyes lock, Holmes and Irene Adler, and at that moment, the great detective knows, without doubt, that this one woman has fooled him.”

I
imagined Julian in the shock of that recognition, coldly aware that he’d been played for a fool.

“You know,” I said, “if Julian ever found out that he was fooled by Marisol, fooled into believing that she was this innocent girl from the Chaco when she was something different, a spy, a torturer, a double agent, it would have wounded his self-confidence, his entire sense of himself.”

Loretta nodded. “Yes, it would have.”

“Would he have sought revenge?” I asked.

Loretta considered my question for a time before she spoke.

“You’ve stumbled upon another turn, you know,” she said. “The idea that when Julian was looking for Marisol, it wasn’t in order to find out what had happened to her or even who she really was.” Her gaze revealed something menacing. “Because he already knew.”

I immediately grasped where she was headed.

“And so he went looking for Marisol because he intended to . . . ,” I said, then stopped because I felt compelled to resist saying what had come into my mind.

I could have resisted it, almost on principle, but I would have had to ignore Loretta’s eyes, how very intense they were, filled with the sudden dread that rises when you sense that you are closing in upon a horrible truth.

“Because he intended to kill her,” I said. I felt a shudder. “Was that his crime?”

I saw Loretta entertain this possibility, then just as quickly reject it.

“But how could that have been Julian’s crime?” she asked. “Because he said that you witnessed his crime, remember?” She smiled at the wrong turn my latest conjecture had made. “Julian murder Marisol?” She smiled in utter confidence of the next thing she said. “Surely, Philip, you did not see that.”

24

Mikhail Soborov’s residence was more of a cottage than a house, and it was in an area that was mostly rural, a part of the Ukraine that had once blossomed with small, independent farmers, the famed kulaks that Stalin had so despised and all but exterminated through planned famine. Julian had made the point that Chikatilo was beaten for bedwetting and for almost every other offense, but the Great Famine was the traumatic event in the Rostov Ripper’s life; its tales of cruelty and cannibalism were ones to which the young Andrei responded not with horror or repulsion, but with a vicarious throb of pleasure and excitement that surely must have flooded his soul with dark surprise.

There was nothing at all surprising about Mikhail Soborov, however. In fact, he looked so much the way I expected that in a book he would have been a caricature of the boisterous, big-bellied Slav, hard-drinking and jolly, a Russian version of Falstaff.

“Thanks for talking to us,” I said as I took the hand he quite cheerfully offered.

The old man laughed robustly. “In old days, I would have hidden in the woodshed,” he said, “or had you killed en route.”

“In that case, I’m pleased that things have changed,” I said.

“Oh, yes, they have changed,” Soborov said with an air of jollity that now struck me as somewhat false, something other than Santa Claus underneath the bright red coat. “In those days my ideals were young, and a man takes on the look of the god he worships, is that not so?”

Rather than wait for me to answer, he turned swiftly to Loretta. “Now, here we have one who has not been aged by disenchantment,” he said as he took Loretta’s hand and gallantly kissed it. “Now, please. We shall have vodka, the three of us.”

But before reaching for the vodka, he cast a hard look at Yuri. “We don’t need extra set of ears,” he said sternly, and with that closed the door in his face.

When he turned back to us, he was frowning. “They say we are free now in Russia to say what we wish, but I do not trust such ‘guides’ as this one who comes here with you.”

“Why would they want an agent with us now?” I asked Soborov once we’d taken seats in his small living room.

“Because repression is a snake that grows back its head,” Mikhail answered in a way that clearly closed the subject. “So, what did Julian tell you about me?”

“Nothing at all,” I answered. “I learned about you from Irene, as I said in my letter.”

“Irene, yes,” Soborov said. “You know that in Budapest, during the war, she shot Jews in hospital beds, no?”

“My father hinted at something like that,” I answered. “And when we met her, she showed us a picture. It was quite sad. She feels—”

“Guilt, yes,” Soborov interrupted. “Julian once called it the false consolation of those not really harmed.”

“What an unforgiving thing to say,” I told him.

“For most, time wears guilt away, like wind and water,” Soborov said, “but perhaps time more forgiving than should be, yes?”

“Perhaps,” I said, since I could think of nothing else.

Soborov peered at me closely. “We never meet, you and I?”

“No,” I answered. “At least, I don’t think so.”

Soborov laughed. “Too bad. You might have learned one of our tricks.”

I looked at him quizzically.

“How to make meeting look not planned,” Soborov said. “This how it looks with Julian and me. I am just a man at next table. I rise to leave, but I leave keys on table. Julian picks up keys and gives to me. I take keys and say to him that I am like Borges. Blind, like old poet.” He laughed. “Code is passed, just like in movies.” He looked at me with an almost impish expression. “Too much like in movies, yes?” He waved his hand as if dismissing the subject, and with that gesture, his features became more serious. “This not how I meet Julian, of course.”

“How did you meet him?” I asked.

The old man smiled widely. “You always in big hurry, you Americans, but we have not yet had vodka.”

With that he left the room, then returned to it a few seconds later with the glasses and a bottle encased in a square of ice.

“Do you know what we say in Russia?” he asked.

We shook our heads.

“That drink only second most important thing in life,” Soborov said. “Of first importance is breathe.” He laughed loudly. “You get it, yes?”

We nodded.

He poured each of us a glass, then offered his toast. “To peace.”

We touched our glasses, and with that the old man sat down in a large chair opposite us.

“So, to Julian,” he said. “Because you are Americans, I will tell you quickly. He came to Soviet consulate. He was looking for girl. She had disappeared and he was looking for her. He gets nothing from Casa Rosada, and so he comes to us.” His smile was that of an old man being mischievous. “The Reds.” He shrugged. “We did not know where this woman is, but perhaps we know someone who does.” He appeared briefly reluctant to say more and waved his hand. “Ah, what difference does it make now?”

With this Soborov clapped his hands together.

“All right, then,” he said. “So. Have you ever heard of the Dogo Córdoba?”

I had no idea what this was and said so.

“It is dog,” Soborov told me. “Especially bred in Argentina.” He leaned forward and rubbed his hands together vigorously. “It is fighting dog that is famous for not to back down. The Dogo Córdoba bred to endure great pain. They are champions in the dogfights.”

“What does this have to do with Julian?” Loretta asked.

“Because this is where we send him,” Soborov answered. “To a dogfight.”

I could scarcely imagine Julian at such an event, but by then there were many aspects to Julian’s life that were equally hard to imagine.

“They illegal, these fights,” Soborov continued, “but there are places, hidden places, or maybe not hidden, but protected by police.” His smile was incongruously warm. “And we know what Argentine police doing in other places, no? Things that make dogfights look like country dance.” He drew out a handkerchief and swabbed his neck, as if he had returned to the heat and humidity of an Argentine summer. “It was July,” he said. “Very hot.” Now he turned to Loretta. “They very secretive, of course, the people who go to Dogo Córdoba fights. It is like a secret society. Important people in Argentina come to these special fights. High in government. But also thugs, and of these thugs there is one we keep eye on. He is called El Árabe.”

“The Arab?” I asked.

“That is what he is called, yes,” Soborov said. “Because he is brown, almost like the peasants. He was very low sort of fellow. He had not much intelligence, but low cunning, this he had much. In this way, like Stalin. He had worked himself into a good job running whole network of
escuelitas
. We knew that some of our people were in his custody, but we did not know where they were. El Árabe was very hard man, maybe impossible to break, we thought, even under stress. But he had weakness.” He laughed at the nature of this weakness, then revealed it. “He was like little child when it comes to Americans. A young man like Julian would attract his attention. This is what we think. A young American. Smart. Good-looking. Maybe with money, maybe from good family. We know that such a one would appeal to El Árabe.”

Loretta looked as if suddenly struck by a cold breeze. “You tried to recruit Julian as a spy?”

“Not at first, because we think maybe he is spy, or maybe he is ‘spy who comes in from cold.’” He laughed. “Either way we wish to keep eye on him.”

Soborov paused to take another sip of vodka.

“There was Dogo Córdoba fight in little town outside Buenos Aires,” Soborov continued. “In pampas, but not far from city. We know El Árabe will be there because he is great lover of these fights. Can you believe this? After day of torture, this is what he does in order to relax, watch dogs tear each other apart.”

He looked at Loretta.

“And so we send your brother there,” he told her. “We give him money and he bet like rich man, and this, too, we know, will catch eye of El Árabe.”

Now his gaze returned to me.

“I was Julian’s ‘handler,’” he said, “and so I go with him there because I want to see if he makes contact and report to my superiors if this American has talent for deception we might later use.” His face soured. “It was dreadful place, where we went that night. Very dreadful place.”

Soborov described the event, how it had been conducted in the sweltering interior of a large shed, the dogs brought in on chains and lashed to the sides of a circular pit whose walls were made of corrugated tin, unpainted and splattered with the blood of previous combats. The crowd was washed with sweat and beer and they screamed to the dogs and across the pit to one another, yelling taunts and bragging about their picks of the night, waving money and sometimes knives.

“It is from hell, this scene,” Soborov said, “and at center of pit, there is El Árabe, with his black hair plastered down, yelling at dogs, laughing, and drinking beer.”

I recalled a scene in
The Commissar,
a moment when Julian has Chikatilo dream of being a pit master at an orgy of torture, moving about with a riding crop, dressed in a red jacket and high black boots, orchestrating the terrible performance as he strides from ring to ring.

“Julian has been shown photographs of this stupid little bastard,” Soborov went on, “and he make it his business to get near him, waving money like the others, but speaking only good American English, which catches ear of El Árabe.”

In my mind, I saw this “stupid little bastard” turn at the sound of Julian’s voice, his gaze drinking in this young American as if he were a movie star.

“I am across pit, but I see El Árabe speak to Julian, and Julian speak back, then El Árabe turn back to pit and give signal with a big wave of hand for fight to begin.”

What happened after that was a fierce struggle between two Dogo Córdobas, white dogs, Soborov told us, and so the blood that swept over their spinning flanks and dripped from their mouths and coated their teeth and ran down their throats was vivid red.

“The Dogo Córdoba is extinct now,” Soborov said at the end of this description of the fight, “because so many die in the pit and because they become so unstable, cannot be with another dog without killing it. Because of this they disappear.” He offered a rueful smile. “Life cannot be sustained by ferocity alone.” He explained: “I hear this and I like it.”

He was silent for a time, as if his last remark had come to him unexpectedly and was still resonating through his own long memory.

“Anyway, Julian meet El Árabe many times after this,” Soborov said, “in the bars and in dance halls of the tango. He is good at pretending friendship. He can make anyone believe he loves them.” He shrugged. “Once he say to me, ‘All you can offer to those who love you is the pretense that you love them back.’”

Even for Julian, this struck me as an infinitely sad pronouncement, and to avoid its sting I rushed ahead.

“Did you help him find out what happened to Marisol?” I asked.

“No,” Soborov said, “but I think perhaps El Árabe did, because Julian must have discovered something very bad. I believe this because he suddenly change. He has been a good-looking young man; then overnight he is old and looks like one who has, as we say, crossed the Styx. He still has this look when I see him last.” His gaze darkened. “A very bad man, El Árabe. Very bad. He feels no guilt, this man. Even after the junta fall, he offers no apology for his little schools. To this day, he is sometimes on television in Argentina, regretting nothing, saying that he enjoyed every minute of it.”

“Did he go to prison?” Loretta asked.

“For few years,” Soborov said. “Then he is released and after that he is home to his village near Iguazú.”

I recalled the town Julian had circled on the map he was looking at on the day he died. “Clara Vista?”

Soborov nodded. “He lives there still, makes interviews, laughs in the faces of those who still seek the disappeared.”

He let this settle in. Then, as if trying to lighten the atmosphere, he smiled quite brightly and said, “By the way, did Julian ever finish the book on Chikatilo?”

“Yes,” I answered. “It’ll be published next year. He called it
The Commissar
, and it’s the most thorough account of Andrei Chikatilo yet written.”

“Good,” Soborov said. “He was a hard worker, Julian. This much can be said of him, and it is not a small thing. I would like to receive a copy of this book when it is published.”

“I’ll make sure you do,” I promised him.

Soborov smiled. “So, have I said to you what you wished to know about Julian?”

“Not really,” Loretta answered bluntly.

Soborov was clearly surprised by this answer.

“Irene said that when Julian came to see her a few years ago, he already knew what happened to Marisol,” Loretta added. “You’re saying that it was this El Árabe who told him?”

Soborov nodded. “Who else could? He was Julian’s last contact in Argentina.”

“When Julian came here, did you talk about Argentina?” Loretta asked.

“Yes,” Soborov said. “We talked of the dogs, and of that girl, the one who disappeared. He said that he found her.”

“Found her?” I asked. “He found Marisol?”

“Yes,” Soborov answered. “It was the Arab who led him to her, but he did not tell me how.”

“Did Julian say anything about who Marisol was or might have been?” Loretta asked.

Soborov looked puzzled. “Might have been?”

“A Montonero, for example.”

Soborov shook his head.

“What did he say about her?” Loretta asked.

Soborov considered his answer for a moment, then said, “He said only that a trick is played upon her.”

“What kind of trick?” I asked.

Soborov took a surprisingly casual sip from his glass. “He was always speaking in . . . what is the word when it is about a little thing, but it is really about big things . . . what is the word for speaking in this way?”

“Metaphorically?” I asked.

“That is it, yes,” Soborov said. “Not really about one thing, about many things.” Now he shrugged. “So when I ask him what is this trick, he does not answer me directly. It is something he cannot speak about, he tell me.” He put down his glass. “So all I know is that he has a name for this trick.” His smile bore the weight of the dark view of things he seemed to have glimpsed in Julian’s eyes at that long-ago moment. “It is called ‘the Saturn Turn.’”