Thomas Cook - The Crime of Julian Wells

He had aged quite a bit during the intervening years. Where before his hair had been sprinkled with gray, it had now gone white. His eyes were more webbed and the lines in his long face had deepened. The muted light of Charles de Gaulle Airport added a layer of grayness to his unexpected pallor.

“I was very sad to hear of Julian,” he said as he offered his hand.

“It came as quite a shock.”

“Hmm,” Rene said.

We exchanged a few pleasantries, then Rene led me to his car, and we set off for Paris, where I’d booked a small hotel not far from l’Opera.

It was early in the morning, but I’d slept on the plane, so rather than bid Rene a quick farewell and go up to bed, I asked him to join me for a cup of coffee so that we could begin to discuss whatever itinerary he thought appropriate for my stay.

“I am sorry to say, but there is a delay in getting you into Julian’s apartment,” he informed me. “It is my fault that I did not tell you before, but I did not learn of it until this morning.”

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“The one who owns the building, he has gone from the city for a few days, and I cannot get the key,” Rene said. He shrugged. “I only come to the building to get Julian’s mail. I never have a key to go inside.” He smiled. “Perhaps he was not so good at the keeping house.” He drew a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, thumped one out, and lit it. “But he was a good writer, Julian. Very good.” He seemed at the end of what he knew of Julian. “Always writing. Tap, tap, tap. Day and night.”

“But no one can write twenty-four hours a day,” I said. “He must have gone out from time to time.”

“Sometimes, yes,” Rene said. “Mostly to this little bar, Le Chapeau Noir. In Pigalle.”

“Yes, I remember Julian writing about that place,” I said. “He seems to have gone there quite a lot.”

“It has cheap wine, and Julian was always lacking in the money,” Rene told me. “But, me, I do not like it. It is full of refugees and emigres. Africans and Arabs, people on the run from bad things.”

“What kind of bad things?” I asked.

“Crimes,” Brossard answered. “There were such places in Algiers. Criminals are like chickens, they crowd in upon each other. In a place like Le Chapeau Noir, there is blood on every hand.”

“Except for Julian’s, of course,” I said.

“Except for Julian’s, yes,” Brossard agreed.

“Then why did he choose such a place?” I asked.

“It was near his apartment,” Brossard said. “Perhaps it was the first door that opened to him.” He shrugged. “He was a sad man, Julian. They are often in this way, such people. I saw it early. He was drawn to darkness. This I saw at Oradour.”

“Oradour,” I said as an idea occurred to me. “Since I can’t get into Julian’s apartment, would you mind taking me there?”

“It is only a destroyed village,” Rene said. “But, okay, when do you want to go?”

“Tomorrow morning?”

“So fast? You are not wanting to sleep tomorrow, for the jet lag?”

“No,” I answered. “I’ll be rested by morning.”

“Okay, tomorrow we go to Oradour,” Rene said. He took a draw on his cigarette, then crushed it out. “I remember that Julian, he was not so interested in the Germans. But the Malgre-nous, these interested him.”

He saw that I did not speak a word of French.

“It means ‘despite ourselves.’ The Malgre-nous were from Alsace, these men, but the Germans drafted them. A few were at Oradour, and so they were made to do what they did, as they say, ‘despite themselves.’”

It struck me that this was one of Julian’s abiding themes, the sudden intervention of some event that without warning reveals a previously hidden element of character and by that means leaves a man forever the victim of a dark surprise.

“He talked to a few of them,” Rene continued. “Old men. Dead now.” His smile was wily, a ferret’s grin. “It would be just so in one of those books, no? A thriller? The hero seeks a witness, but when he finds him, this witness is dead?”

“In pulp fiction, yes,” I said. “But about that bar, the one Julian frequented, was there anyone he spent time with?”

Rene thought a moment, then said, “A priest. They spoke Spanish. This man, he was from Argentina. Julian said that he had been to his country during a bad time.”

“The Dirty War, yes,” I said.

Rene nodded. “I remember one night, Julian spoke of a woman he met there. He was very moved by this woman. Julian did not often show his feelings, but this night, I saw that for this one, a pain was left with him.”

“Her name was Marisol,” I told Rene. “She disappeared while Julian and I were in Buenos Aires.”

Rene shrugged. “Lots of women disappeared during that time, no?”

“Yes, but they were kidnapped by the junta,” I told him. “Marisol, on the other hand, wasn’t in the least political.”

Rene laughed at what he seemed to consider my naivete. “Not political? How do you know?”

The question was simple, but it surprised me anyway, for, in fact, I didn’t know whether Marisol had or had not been political. At least, not for sure.

With that recognition, a small crack appeared in the wall of what I’d always assumed about her. True, she’d only once mentioned the situation in Argentina, and even then only generally: Argentina es un pais perdido.

But in what way had she thought it lost? I wondered now.

Marisol had never said.

One thing was clear, however. Although she always listened attentively when Julian spoke, it had been with an air of critical attunement, as if, because he was a privileged American, she should be wary of him and his worldview.

It was a distrust that surfaced one afternoon as we strolled down Calle Florida. Julian had begun to talk about the many far-flung places he hoped to visit in the future, one of which was Calcutta.

“The Black Hole of Calcutta is one of the places I’d like to see,” he said. “I always thought that phrase referred to the city itself, that it was hopeless and impoverished. A pit.”

Marisol listened to him in that highly attentive way of hers, as if seeking to understand not only the words, but what might lie between them, in the manner of a translator always in search of some new idiom or nuance in a language not yet fully mastered.

“But it was really an event,” Julian added. “A mass murder, really.”

Then, with characteristic detail, giving the precise date and location, Julian told us how Indian troops had crammed scores of British subjects into an unventilated room, where they’d died of suffocation or been trampled to death during one long night’s ordeal.

“What did the British do after that?” Marisol asked.

“They decided that the Indians were savages,” Julian answered. “And the subjugation of India became less-”

“Gentle?” Marisol interrupted softly.

I’d never heard her interrupt anyone. It simply wasn’t her style. There was an unmistakable edge in her tone, too, though one so subtle I couldn’t tell if it reflected anything more than the general anticolonialism any young person might have embraced at the time. Certainly it was not enough for me to conclude that Marisol was political in the sense that I’d used the word with Rene, something that would have caused her to be a target of the Dirty War.

Rene was quiet for a time after I related this small exchange to him. Then he said, “Anyway, you were safe. You and Julian, I mean. He made much of this, that despite all that was going on in Argentina, the two of you were safe.”

“Yes, Julian and I were safe,” I said, and thought of the legions of the disappeared, the marches their mothers made each day in the Plaza de Mayo. Still, I could not place the Marisol I’d known-so very quiet and lacking any visible political shy;position-among the ranks of those who’d later been caught up in the Dirty War’s repression. From those clutches, she’d always seemed as safe as Julian and I, and because of that, it had never occurred to me that she might have ended up in some dank cell, bruised and battered and lying in her own excrement, listening, with whatever consciousness remained to her, for the dreadful footfall of her torturer’s approach.