The Crime of Julian Wells (16 page)

Part VI

The Saturn Turn

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 Árabe,” 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 Árabe.

Just as Soborov had told us, El Árabe 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 Iguazú, 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 Árabe, and I regret nothing.”

As became clear from the many interviews that Hernando Vilario—which was El Árabe’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 Árabe’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 Árabe.”

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 Árabe 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.

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 Martín, 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 Árabe, 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 Árabe, 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 Árabe 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 José 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 Árabe. He knew nothing of José, 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 Árabe 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 Árabe.

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 Árabe’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 Árabe. 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 Árabe.” 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 Árabe 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,
Č
achtice, 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.”