Thomas Cook - The Crime of Julian Wells

Without telling me, Rene 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 Rene called “a document problem.” He was now at liberty, however, and Rene 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 Rene’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 Bathory.

“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 Ravensbruck.”

“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 Ravensbruck, 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.

Still, it was for murder that she was arrested and to which she later confessed, giving some of the most graphic and horrifying testimony of Gilles de Rais’s trial. After that, she was imprisoned in Nantes, where, presumably at a very old age, she died. Thus her story ended, at least as far as Julian had followed it in his book.

“This woman who was a terror,” Eduardo said, “Julian had a big interest in her.”

“He did, yes,” I agreed. “But in the book he sometimes seemed less concerned with her crimes than in the clever way she disguised herself.”

Eduardo laughed. “A nice old grandmother, yes. You are right, it was in this that Julian found her true evil. This is what he said to me. Before the crime, there was the disguise.”

“Disguise,” I repeated softly, and with that word recalled something Julian had written in his book on La Meffraye, the telling phrase he’d used, how the woman’s kindness, simplicity, devotion, and humility were nothing more than serrated notches in the blade she held.

Eduardo seemed to glimpse the dark and unsettling recollection that had suddenly come into my mind. “It sometimes caused me to wonder if perhaps someone had deceived Julian in his youth,” he said. “Could this be so? Was there such a one?”

“Not that I know of,” I said, then added what seemed to me an ever-deepening truth. “But I suppose there’s a lot about Julian that I don’t know.”

We talked on for a time, and as we did, it became clear that Julian had shared a great deal with Eduardo: his early life, his father’s death, the great emptiness he’d felt at this loss, and how, from then on, he believed that to kill a father was to a kill a son. He had also related a few stories about his travels with Loretta and his days at Two Groves.