The Crime of Julian Wells (9 page)

He said nothing more, but the troubled mood of that earlier conversation returned and seemed to haunt him, and he appeared to be questioning himself rather like a little boy who’d done something wrong.

“Marisol loves Father Rodrigo,” he said.

“Yes, she does,” I said. “I hope he’s not in danger. But who knows? You’re right, they could do anything to a man like Rodrigo.” I looked out over the street. “It’s a lost country, just like Marisol says. Because if it gained power, the left would be just as oppressive as the right is now.”

Julian nodded softly.

“Marisol’s right to stay out of it,” I said. “Because they’re crazy on both sides.”

We sat in silence for a time, Julian’s gaze curiously unsettled, like a man trying to find his way in a dark wood.

Finally, I said, “What’s the matter, Julian?”

He looked at me and his lips parted, but he didn’t speak. Instead, he turned away again, now looking out in the night-bound depths of San Martín.

“Nothing,” he said softly.

I sensed that if I chose to pursue the matter, Julian would probably tell me what was on his mind. But it had been a long day and I was tired.

“Well, I’m heading for bed,” I said.

Julian continued to face the park. “Good night,” he said.

I went to my room and prepared for bed, but just before climbing into it, I glanced out the window, down to the little bar seven flights below. Julian was still sitting, just as he’d been when I left him, still peering out toward San Martín. Even from that distance, I could sense that something was troubling him.

I thought now, I should have gone down to him. If life knew only happy endings, a friend would have done just that. He would have looked down from the window, seen his friend in the shadowy light, understood, if not the cause of his trouble, then at least the fact that the trouble was there. He would have looked at his bed and felt a great need to climb into it. He would have thought of the soft pillows and the caressing sheets. He would have yearned for sleep and dreams and in his bone tiredness, he would have recognized his need for both. But in the end, this friend would have dressed himself and gone back downstairs, taken a seat at his friend’s table and said to him, simply, “Tell me.” He would have done all this because despite his youth and inexperience, he would have understood that sometimes it is simply such a gesture that makes the difference.

I knew that in any view of life designed to put a better face on man, this friend would have known these things and done them.

But I had not.

Now, however, with that scene playing in my mind, the question rose again as to whether Julian had been right in thinking that Father Rodrigo was going to be arrested. Therefore, when I got back to Paris, I decided to see if I could answer it.

12

I dialed the number almost immediately after returning to my hotel in Paris, then waited the usual protracted amount of time it took my father to answer, longer this time than when I’d called him on my first night in Paris.

But at last he appeared on my computer screen, already dressed for bed, though it was late afternoon in New York.

“I can see you very clearly,” I told him.

He smiled. “You, too. It’s really quite amazing.”

We talked about trivial matters for a time, the weather in New York and Paris, a smattering of world and national news, then on to my impression of René and our visit to Oradour-sur-Glane.

At last I said, “Do you remember that when Julian and I were in Buenos Aires we met an old priest named Father Rodrigo?”

“Of course,” my father answered. “You said he’d heard of me. I was surprised by that.”

“Do you have any idea whatever happened to him?”

“Only that when Julian went down to the Chaco, he was no longer there,” my father answered. “But I’m sure Julian told you that.”

“Another of the disappeared,” I said.

“So Julian thought,” my father answered.

“He spoke to you about it?”

“Yes,” my father answered. “Evidently this priest had said some fairly dangerous things when they met. Julian told me what he’d said, but I didn’t see it as all that dangerous. It was common knowledge, after all, that we were more or less in cahoots with the junta.”

“But what else could explain the fact that Rodrigo went missing?” I asked.

“Well, sometimes people vanish of their own accord,” my father told me. “In a place like Argentina at that time, there were many reasons a man might want to make himself scarce.”

“What would have made Father Rodrigo leave Argentina?” I asked.

“Nothing, if he was what he seemed,” my father said.

“A country priest, you mean?”

My father nodded. “Even one with a loose tongue.”

“You’re saying Father Rodrigo might have been more than that?” I asked.

“I’m saying it’s possible that in Argentina at that time such a priest might have been used.”

“By whom?”

“The Montoneros, of course,” my father answered. “Lots of priests were working for the Montoneros.”

He saw that I had no idea what he was talking about.

“They were pretty much finished by the time you went to Argentina,” he explained. “But before the junta, they murdered anyone who opposed them. And if Rodrigo were a Montonero, and he got wind that he had been discovered or was about to be discovered, then he might have found it a very good idea to leave the country.”

“How could he have escaped?” I asked. “He was a poor parish priest.”

“Yes, but if he were a Montonero, they could have financed his departure from Argentina,” my father told me.

“What money would the Montoneros have had?”

“They would have had the millions they got from kidnappings and bank robberies,” my father answered. “One kidnapping alone brought in sixty million dollars. It was the largest ransom ever paid. It’s in the
Guinness Book of Records
.”

“Would Julian have known any of this?” I asked.

“I doubt it,” my father answered. “Why do you ask?”

“Because he seemed to think that Rodrigo was going to be arrested,” I answered. “He told this to Marisol.”

My father suddenly grew very still. “I didn’t know that,” he said quietly, and for a moment looked like a man sitting in a darkened theater, awaiting a film whose story he dreaded.

“He never mentioned it?” I asked. “Not even after he got back from Argentina?”

My father shook his head. “Of course, we rarely talked after that.”

This was true. Julian had but rarely seen my father after Argentina, and even then only at what were more or less public gatherings, Loretta’s wedding, for example, and Colin’s funeral.

“Good people like this Father Rodrigo can be manipulated, Philip,” my father said quietly, like a man considering the treacheries of life.

“But Julian couldn’t have known that Rodrigo might be a Montonero operative,” I said.

“That’s true,” my father said firmly. “The only way he could have had intelligence of that sort was if he had some contact at Casa Rosada.”

“Which, of course, he didn’t,” I said.

“No, of course not,” my father said. “They were absolute evil.” His eyes appeared to see that evil quite clearly. “They tortured people mercilessly.”

I saw that his mood was blackening, so I moved to change the subject.

“You know, it’s interesting to think that Rodrigo might still be alive,” I said, almost lightly. “And if the Montoneros wanted to get him out of Argentina, he could be anywhere.”

Now my mind fixed on the shadowy priest with whom Julian had often been seen at Le Chapeau Noir. “Anywhere at all,” I said, almost to myself.

“Anywhere at all,” my father repeated. The darkness fell upon him again. “It’s a twisted world, Philip,” he said, “the one you’re touching now.”

“At the end of the conversation, my father said that I was getting into a twisted world,” I told Loretta when I called her later that night.

She had listened silently, and when I finished, she took a moment before she spoke.

“Do you think that priest might actually have been a Montonero?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, though I immediately began to consider the possibility. Certainly it was possible that Rodrigo might have gotten carried away with some form of revolutionary theology, agreed to help the Montoneros in some way, and then, with the junta on his trail, found it necessary to flee the country.

I shared this with Loretta, then added as if I half believed it, “He might even be in Paris. Maybe even at this little bar Julian frequented. René said that Julian often talked with a priest there.”

I said this jokingly, as if describing the elements of a potboiler plot, but Loretta’s tone turned serious.

“Your father’s right,” she said. “It is a twisted world.” A pause, then, “Be careful, Philip.”

Some warnings come like the tolling of a bell, and thus it was with Loretta’s.

For that reason, if for no other, I should have heeded what she said to me and thus anticipated the terrors that awaited. But the Saturn Turn twists for all, as Julian had already learned, and so I moved unknowingly ahead.

Part III

The Terror

13

In
The Terror,
Julian’s curious meditation on one of Gilles de Rais’s awful minions, he wrote:

The route to moral horror is never direct. There are always ramps and stairs, corridors and tunnels, the secret chamber forever concealed from those who would be appalled by what they found there.

We all had secret chambers, I thought, though most chambers probably harbored nothing more fearful than some peculiar desire, or if not that, then perhaps simply the sad awareness of a
n inexplicable inadequacy we dared not reveal. Even so, Julian would have been the last I’d have suspected of
having such a
place. At his father’s death, he had been deeply stricken, but he had rallied even from this loss, regained his footing, and proceeded on, his confidence returning with each passing day, so that within a month or so, he seemed once again the boy of old, though
perhaps even more determined to make a mark in the world.

For his spiritual resilience alone, I had admired him. But later, as his life took shape, I had also thought him physically brave. He’d been an intrepid traveler, after all, with the courage to cross fields so foreign he must have thought himself on the moon at times. Rimbaud, stranded in Egypt, had written stinging letters of regret, his pen crying out,
why, oh why, am I here?
I had little doubt that Julian had often found himself floating in some similar sea of strangeness, isolated, friendless, knowing little of the language and customs, short of money, with only history’s most vile miscreants to occupy his mind. It takes courage to roam the world in that way, and roam it Julian certainly had.

But this same physical courage had sometimes struck me as reckless and foolhardy. I’d seen scars on his arms, bruises on his body. He never mentioned these injuries, but on one occasion, I got a hint about how he’d received them.

We were walking in Chueca, at that time one of Madrid’s most dangerous neighborhoods, when two young men staggered out of a bar, headed for the bright lights of Gran Via. On the way, they came across a young gypsy woman crumpled against a building in a common beggarly pose. Normally such people were passed without a nod, but on this occasion, the men stopped to taunt her. “Look at this gitana,” they said. “Can you smell this filthy whore?”

By the time Julian and I reached them, the insults had escalated into a physical assault, one of the men lifting his leg to press the toe of his shoe against the woman’s breast while calling her names—
puta, coño,
and the like.

In Spanish, Julian said, “Leave her alone.”

He said it quietly, but before the man could draw back his foot, Julian rushed forward and plowed into him, and they both went sprawling into the street. I didn’t try to intervene, but neither did the other man’s friend, so Julian and the man simply rolled around for a bit before getting to their feet, the Spaniard muttering curses as he staggered away.

That night, Julian emerged more or less unharmed, and we went on our way. But I suspected that on other occasions he’d done the same and gotten a thorough beating as a result. I idealized those confrontations in a way that ennobled Julian, cast him as a selfless defender of the weak, and yet, at the same time, I sometimes wondered what his motives were. Was he driven to test his courage? Had he decided that the grand work he once dreamed of could only be realized in small acts of self-sacrifice? I knew that martyrdom was sometimes less the product of saintliness than of spiritual ambition, so had Julian from time to time felt the pinch of his own shrunken hope of doing some great work and for that reason lashed out in acts of reckless altruism?

I had no answer to this question, of course. Yet, the more I pondered it, the more I felt that something was buried in Julian, a need, a remorse, something that held the key to him. I had no place to go for an answer, but nevertheless I decided to drop in on Le Chapeau Noir. Perhaps, with a little luck, I might run into the man Julian had spoken with there, the one with whom he appeared to have discussed Marisol.

René was right, as it turned out. Le Chapeau Noir
was indeed a good deal like the sort of place one would find in novels of intrigue
.
In fact, it was less a place than an atmosphere, and even if its shadowy interior were not clouded with cigarette smoke, you would add this smoke to any description of it. You would also include a dim, oddly undulating light that throws this mysterious figure into half shadow, that one into silhouette, by turns revealing or concealing a forehead, a jaw, an eye with a patch, each face broken into puzzle pieces. You would add a random arrangement of wooden tables, and over there, huddled in a corner, you would put two men in linen suits, one with a very thin moustache, the other clean shaven, wearing a panama hat. Snatches of many languages would come at you like bats. Spanish answered by Greek, a hint of German from behind a curtain, Turkish over there, where a man in a red fez drinks tea from a white china cup. To his left, an Englishman in evening dress, come to sample the demimonde after a dazzling night at the embassy. No doubt there’d be an American, too, wearing a dark suit, off in a distant corner, seemingly naive and deceptively trusting, but with a revolver close at hand.

That would be me, I thought, as I slouched, minus the revolver, in a distant corner and silently watched the regulars at Le Chapeau Noir.

René had told me that the place was dead until around midnight, so I’d dutifully showed up at just after twelve. By then, a few of the tables were taken, though hardly by the throng of shady characters I’d anticipated. True, the majority of the customers were foreigners, just as René had described, but of these, only a few looked like thieves or black marketers. There were a few Algerians, but they were off by themselves, closely huddled around a small table. A tight group of East Indians had claimed the far end of the bar, their eyes glancing about rather nervously, though it was unclear whether it was the police or the Algerians they feared. The rest were French or Eastern Europeans, though at one point I thought I heard a bit of German.

Le Chapeau Noir was, of course, a thoroughly landlocked bar, and yet something about it had the moldering dankness of a harbor. I might have thought of Marseille or Naples, but for some reason—perhaps it was the presence of those few North Africans—I found myself associating it in full literary fashion with ancient Cádiz, known by the Phoenicians, an immemorial coastal trading post, populated by every kind of adventurer and deserter, safe haven for the criminal flotsam of two continents; perhaps in all the world, the first true city of intrigue.

I’d come here in hopes of encountering the priest with whom Julian had often been seen in what René called—with his usual melodrama and showy English—“dark conclave.” With a little probing, René had gone on to describe the man and even volunteered to accompany me to the bar, for which I thanked him but declined. I needed to be alone, I thought, to experience Le Chapeau Noir in the solitary way I assumed Julian must first have encountered it. I suppose that I’d come to feel that I needed to see what Julian had seen, talk to the people he’d talked to, go where he’d gone,
become
him in the way he sought to become the great criminals he studied. Such a route is always dangerous, of course, like shooting the rapids of another’s neural pathways. And yet, step by step, I’d come to feel myself drawn—perhaps lured—deeper and deeper into Julian’s mind and character. It was as if I were once again following him into the caves we’d sometimes explored in the hills around Two Groves, Julian always in the lead, beckoning me forward with an “Oh, come on, Philip, what’s to fear?” I dragging reluctantly behind him, refusing to give the answer that came to me: “Everything.”

Suddenly I felt that I was once again trailing after him in just that way, going deeper and into yet more narrow spaces, caverns that were dark and cramped and airless, and in that way not unlike Le Chapeau Noir.

No one spoke to me, of course, but that hardly mattered, because my French was very bad, and so it would have been impossible for me to have a conversation with any of the bar’s clientele, save to inform them that “
le plume est sur la table.”

Even so, I felt that my nights at Le Chapeau Noir provided a feeling for the dispossessed that was akin to Julian’s. For there was something about this bar that gave off an aura of precious things irretrievably lost. For some it had been a homeland, for others, a political ideal. For yet others, it was some romantic dream the intransigent facts of life had indefinitely deferred.

Without telling me, René had been more practical in his research, and he had located the priest Julian had sometimes spoken with at Le Chapeau Noir, a man who had recently been detained for what René called “a document problem.” He was now at liberty, however, and René assured me that he would appear at the bar the following night.

And so he did.

After talking with my father, I’d actually entertained the faint hope that this priest might be Father Rodrigo, a hope encouraged by René’s description of an old man with leathery brown skin, very thin, quite stooped. Such a person might turn out to be Marisol’s beloved priest, now in his eighties, and perhaps, if my father’s vague suggestion turned out to be true, still withdrawing modest sums from God knows how much Montonero money. I imagined him as essentially unchanged, except physically, and therefore, with secular communism now in tatters, still dreamily devoted to some Christian version of the same radical, and to my mind naive, egalitarianism.

But the man I met at Le Chapeau Noir that evening was considerably younger than Rodrigo would have been. He was shorter than Rodrigo, too, and a tad rounder, with dark skin and black hair that had thinned a great deal and which he parted on the left side just above his ear.

“Ah, so you are a friend of Julian,” he said as I approached him.

His accent was predominately Spanish, though there were hints of other lands, which gave the impression that he’d lived somewhat nomadically, his speech now marked with the fingerprints of his travels.

“When I met him, he had just returned from Bretagne,” the man said.

He offered a smile that was rather rueful and suggested that his journey through life had been a difficult one, a smile that ran counter to his eyes.

“Julian noticed that I was drinking Malbec, the wine of Argentina,” the man said. “He came to me and introduced himself.” He thrust out his hand. “I am Eduardo.”

“Philip Anders,” I said, hoping to elicit Eduardo’s last name.

He did not respond, however, and we took our seats at a small table near the back of the bar, Eduardo quick to position himself with his back to the wall, clearly a man long accustomed to keeping an eye on both the front door and the exits.

“We talked first of Cuenca,” Eduardo said. “Julian had spent much time in that part of Spain.” His smile was quite warm, but that warmth ran counter to what he said next. “Years before, when I was young and angry, I had gone to Cuenca to kill a man. He had wronged my sister in Zaragoza. He brought drugs into her life, and they killed her. Everywhere he spread this poison. Pity another’s knife found his heart before mine could. I wanted my face to be the last he saw.” He waved to the barman and ordered a bottle of wine, though not a Malbec. When it came, he poured each of us a round, then lifted his glass. “Do you know the fascist toast?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“It comes from the Spanish Civil War,” Eduardo said. “It was first made in Salamanca. Imagine that? Spain’s ancient seat of learning. In the presence of Miguel de Unamuno, our country’s greatest philosopher. Made by a one-eyed, one-armed general of Franco’s army.” He touched his glass to mine. “Long live death.”

It was not a pleasing toast, but I drank to it anyway.

“He was an interesting man, Julian,” Eduardo said as he set down his drink. “I enjoyed very much talking to him.”

“What did you talk about?” I asked.

Eduardo smiled. “Many things. Julian was very learned. He had read a great deal. But, at the time, he was mostly thinking about evil women.”

I thought of the evil women Julian had written about: La Meffraye, Countess Báthory.

“Yes,” I said, “he wrote about such women.”

“This he did, yes, but the one he spoke of most, this woman he never wrote about,” Eduardo said. “But he was much interested in her and often he spoke of this woman.”

“Who?”

“Her name was Ilse Grese.”

When he saw that I’d never heard the name he said, “She was a guard at Ravensbrück.”

“The concentration camp?”

Eduardo nodded. “Yes.”

Irma Ida Ilse Grese, I found out later, was born in Wrechen, Germany, in 1923. Her father was a dairy worker who joined the Nazi Party early and, presumably, passed his political views on to his young daughter. At fifteen, she quit school as a result of poor grades and because she’d been bullied, particularly for her already fanatical devotion to the League of German Girls, a Nazi youth organization. After leaving school, she worked as an assistant nurse at an SS sanatorium. Later, she tried to apprentice as a nurse but was blocked by the German Labor Exchange, so she worked as a shop girl for a time, then drifted through a series of lowly agricultural jobs until she found her true calling as a guard, first at Ravensbrück, then at Auschwitz, where, given more power than a lowly milkmaid could ever imagine, she added her own peculiar heat to that hell.

“She was very cruel, this woman,” Eduardo went on to say. “Julian told me of the many terrible things she did. How she wore heavy boots and carried a riding crop. She starved her dogs until they were crazed with hunger, he said, and then she set them on her prisoners. She enjoyed their pain. A true monster, this woman.”

“Why did he never write about her?” I asked.

Eduardo shrugged. “Perhaps she was too simple. He said that she was just a thug. It was the other one who had captured him by then. The one he called ‘The Terror.’”

Her real name was Perrine Martin, but she was known as La Meffraye
,
which in French means
“the terror
.
” Julian described her as being an old woman and longtime assistant to the serial killer Gilles de Rais. In his service, she proved herself very adept at procuring young children, despite her vaguely sinister clothing—a long gray robe with a black hood. Her actual involvement in the many murders recounted in Gilles’s trial was, according to Julian’s book, perhaps as much dark fairy tale as truth, but his writing suggested that she possessed demonic qualities well beyond her crimes—chief among them, I remembered now, was her capacity for deception.