Thomas Cook - The Crime of Julian Wells

We were sitting on a bench behind the great library on Fifth Avenue when I posed that very question. It was winter, and we were both wrapped in our overcoats. It had snowed the day before, and the bare limbs of the trees were laced in white. Julian remained silent for a long time before explaining why he hadn’t identified any of the German soldiers. “They deserve to be forgotten,” he said, as if shielding the murderers had been one of the book’s metaphorical devices. “It’s the innocent who deserve to be remembered.”

“But don’t you think the perpetrators need to be remembered, too?” I asked.

He turned to me and something in his eyes told me that this was a subject that pained him.

“What would be the point of telling some little boy that on a particular day, in a particular place, his father was complicit in a terrible crime?” he demanded. “What good would come of it?”

“But otherwise the father would get away with it,” I answered. “And a man who does a terrible thing should be identified.”

Julian gave no response, so I hammered home the point.

“Like whoever killed Marisol,” I added because the unsolved crime of her disappearance suddenly occurred to me. “He got away with it.”

One of Julian’s gloved hands wrapped around the other. “Yes,” he muttered.

He seemed so abruptly moved by the mention of Marisol that I quickly added, “You did your best to find her, Julian.”

Then, to change the subject, I glanced at the book peeking out from the pocket of his coat.

“What are you reading?” I asked. He drew the book from his pocket and I looked at the title, quite surprised by what I saw.

“Eric Ambler, I see. So, you’re reading spy fiction now?”

“It helps to pass the time,” Julian said.

“Betrayal and false identities,” I said jokingly. “People who are not what they appear. Thrilling stuff,” I added with a laugh, “but not the stuff of great literature.”

“You might be surprised,” Julian said softly. “Life is a shadow game, after all.”

I absently opened the book and saw that he’d underlined its most famous line. “It’s not who fires the shot,” I read, “but who pays for the bullet.”

He removed the book from my hands and returned it to his pocket. “It helps to pass the time,” he repeated. “And I don’t read Borges anymore.”

Borges, I thought, and felt the dust of the Chaco settle over us once again, a place I’d never seen, but which our guide had called home.

Borges.

A sure sign, I knew, that Julian’s mind remained on Marisol.

In the great tales, she is always beautiful, of course, the one whose loss torments a man. Since Helen walked the ramparts of Sparta and equally dazzled the men of two opposing armies, we have given little value, in literature at least, to a plain-looking girl.

That is not to say that Marisol was plain, but simply to say that she was by no means a dazzling Helen or a fiery Antigone. She was Cordelia, the loyal daughter of King Lear, quiet, modest, motionless at her center, a pendulum at rest.

She came into the lobby of the hotel like a small breeze off the pampas, the sort that barely moves the grasses.

“I am Marisol,” she said in her softly accented English. “I am pleased to meet with you.” Her eyes were black, but striking, and her skin brown, but with a golden undertone, so that in a certain light, as Julian once observed, she seemed carved from a muted amber.

A week before, my father had contacted the American consulate in Buenos Aires, and someone in that office had recommended Marisol as a guide. She was fluent in English, according to the consulate, and others had been satisfied with her services. With a slightly comic edge, my father had added that Marisol had been properly vetted by the consulate, which meant, of course, that she was no female Che Guevara.

On that first morning, she wore a dark gray skirt that fell just below the knee, with a matching jacket. Her blouse was white, with a tailored collar, and she wore it open at the throat. The shoes were black and well polished, with a modest, businesslike heel. But such gestures toward urbanity did not conceal the depth of her indigenous roots. These were in the oval shape of her eyes and the width of her nose and the black panther sheen of her hair. Europe had made no invasion of her blood. For that reason one sensed in her, as I’m sure Julian did, a strange and unconquerable purity.

“I welcome you to Buenos Aires,” she added with a quick smile.

Where many of the women of the city wore a crucifix on a gold or silver chain, Marisol wore a simple string of wooden beads. From the beginning, Julian said, there was a no-nonsense quality about her, something steady, down-to-business, and in a way profoundly conservative, a brick in the sturdy wall, as he would later write of those who resist the excesses of revolutionary fervor, that slows the violent winds of change.

Julian offered his hand. “I’m Julian Wells, and this is Philip Anders.”

“ Un placer ,” Marisol said as she shook our hands. “I will teach you a little Spanish while you are here.” She gave each of us an evaluating glance. “That is okay?”

“Absolutely,” Julian told her. “Right, Philip?”

“Of course.”

She swept her arm toward the entrance to the hotel. “Come then. There is much to see in Buenos Aires.”

The day’s tour began with a long walk that took us from Casa Rosada all the way to La Boca, by which Marisol hoped, as she said in one of her rare misuses of English, “to integrate us.”

She was a woman of extended silences, I noticed, and she said very little as we walked the streets of La Boca, looking at its brightly colored houses. It was as if she understood that quiet observation was the key to knowing a place, perhaps even the key to life. In any event, she was careful to allow space for standing, sitting, seeing, so that we never felt rushed. Nor did she engage in the guidebook patter that can be so annoying. Marisol, as I would come to understand, was a shaded pond, calm and unruffled.

By evening we had found our way back to the hotel. The restaurant, Marisol said, had a good reputation, though she had never eaten there.

We took a table outside. It was early evening, that twilight interval between a city’s working day and its nocturnal life.

“By the way, where are you from?” Julian asked her at one point.

“I was always moving between Argentina and Paraguay,” Marisol answered. “I crossed this border many times as a child.”

“Why?” I asked.

“When my mother died, I was sent to my father in Paraguay,” Marisol answered. “At this moment, my father died, and I was sent to an aunt back in Argentina. When she was also dying, she took me to a priest, and it was this man who cared for me.”

The priest had lived in a part of northern Argentina that bordered on the Gran Chaco.

“It is very dry, with nothing, and for many years no one cared about it,” Marisol informed us. “Then they found oil.”

It was the struggle to possess this oil that had generated the Chaco War, she said, a conflict that had been unimaginably brutal.

“They died in great numbers, the soldiers,” she said. “So much sickness, and no doctors. You have not heard of it, this war?”

“No,” Julian answered.

Marisol didn’t seem surprised. “We are unknown to you, we who live down here,” she said. “To you, we are fallen off the earth.”

A silence settled over her, both somber and serene, from which emerged what seemed to be the central hope she had for her people, their one quite justified aim.

“All we want is a fighting chance,” she added softly.