Thomas Cook - The Crime of Julian Wells

For a moment he seemed lost in thought. Then, quite suddenly, like one who sensed himself rather under surveillance, he said, “Anyway, since she was my only contact, I sent Julian to her when he was looking for Marisol.”

“It was you who sent him to Casa Rosada?” I asked, surprised that he’d never mentioned this.

“It was a fool’s errand,” my father said. “But he seemed desperate to find this young woman. She’d gotten under his skin somehow. He was really quite determined. I thought my contact might help him solve the mystery of her disappearance.”

“Would she talk to me, this contact of yours?” I asked.

“I’m sure she would,” my father said. “For old times’ sake, as they say.”

“Who did this woman work for?”

“A colonel by the name of Ramirez,” my father answered. “Juan Ramirez. He ran a few of the junta’s escuelitas .”

He saw that I didn’t understand the word.

“The ‘little schools,’” my father said. “There were a great many of them in Argentina at that time. They were places where the enemies of Casa Rosada were taken to be reeducated. That is to say, where they were tortured.” He appeared to consider his next move with a strange seriousness. “I could write to her if you like. I’m sure she’d been willing to talk to you.”

“Yes, do that,” I said. “I’ll follow up with a letter of my own.” I reached for a paper and pen. “What’s her name, your contact?”

“Irene.”

“And her last name?”

“Josag,” my father answered. “It’s Hungarian, of course. It means ‘goodness.’”

Goodness.

How bright a word, I would later realize, to have given so dark a new direction to my tale.

When I later located Irene Josag’s village on a map, I saw that it was quite near to Cachtice, where the Bloody Countess had lived and in whose looming castle she had carried out her many torture-murders, her life and crimes the subject of Julian’s fourth book, The Tigress .

The countess was born in Nyirbator, Hungary, in 1560, the daughter of one of that country’s ruling families, and according to Julian, nothing in her early life suggested the monster she would become. Rather, she was quite studious, and by the time of her marriage, she had mastered Latin, German, and Greek, and had read a great deal in science and astronomy-learning that Julian portrayed as part of her perfect disguise.

At the age of fifteen, she married the son of another equally favored family, and in 1575, the presumably happy couple took up residence at Varanno, a small palace, before moving to a larger one at Sarvar, and finally to the castle that was her wedding gift, the looming, often fogbound Cachtice.

The war to defend Europe against the Ottoman encroachment would last until 1606, and during all that time it fell to Elizabeth not only to manage but to defend her holdings against the ever-threatening Ottomans. This she did with great skill and vigor. But it was not all she did, for although the outer walls of Cachtice remained strong, something was crumbling inside them; it was during this period that loneliness began to weather Elizabeth’s carefully constructed edifice and, in that weathering, reveal what lay beneath. With her husband at his studies in Vienna, Elizabeth now, for the first time in her life, had real power, that is to say, power on the scale of a man’s. She was the lady of the estate, her authority absolute, and like Ilse Grese at Ravensbruck, she began to wield a whip.

It was a weapon she could use with complete impunity, as it turned out, because her husband had by then become chief commander of Hungarian troops in the western war against the Ottoman Empire, a campaign that removed him for months at a time. Thus, with no one to stay her hand, she began first to berate and then to slap her servants, each attack fueling the next, until at last she drew blood and later found that where this drop had fallen on her cheek, the flesh beneath had seemed to bloom. In the blood of servants, she had miraculously discovered youth’s eternal fountain.

More of this restorative blood was easy to find, of course, and in the coming months and years, Elizabeth found plenty of it. Enough first to taste, then to sip, then to drink. Enough first to dot her finger, then to cover her face, then to coat her body.

But even the walls of Cachtice were not thick enough to hide what was going on there. The first rumors began to circulate as early as 1602, and by 1604, when Elizabeth’s husband died, they could no longer be dismissed, for they were not rumors of infidelity or even of odd sexual practices, both of which were common among the nobility of the time.

It was a Lutheran minister who finally raised his voice so loudly that the authorities were forced to hear it. Even then, however, they were slow to act, and it was not until 1610 that an investigation was ordered, which resulted in Elizabeth’s being caught in the act of beheading a teenage girl.

Elizabeth, being of such high birth, was put under house arrest, where she remained until her death in 1614.

During those intervening years, the investigation continued and more than three hundred victims were discovered, Julian reported, though the exact number of young girls who lost their lives in the secret chambers of Cachtice could never be known.

Julian had not been reticent to detail the horrors of Cachtice. There’d been whippings and mutilations. Elizabeth had bitten off parts of her victims’ faces and other body parts. She’d taken some of the girls out into the snow and watched them freeze to death. She’d performed surgery and other medical procedures upon them as well. She’d observed the stages of starvation before death. She’d used needles and hot irons. There seemed no end to her cruel ingenuity.

But in Julian’s account, the countess’s crimes, horrible as they were, were in some sense less cruel than her deceits, her great show of piety, her many gifts to the Church, the changing aspects of her mask. For Julian, it seemed, of all creatures great and small, it was the chameleon that should be most feared, particularly-I thought of both the Terror, La Meffraye, and the Tigress, Countess Bathory-when deceit took the shape of a woman.

On the map, a jagged road led from the countess’s castle to what I imagined to be the far more modest abode of Irene Josag, and I found myself imagining Julian driving down it, bleary-eyed from another sleepless night, his head spilling over with the horrors of Cachtice.

I could have simply corresponded with Irene Josag, of course, but by then I’d come to think of myself as something of a detective, and in that guise I entertained the hope that by actually talking to her I might learn something that would clear up the great bramble I’d stumbled into, a thicket of intrigue in which identities changed as well as motives, where I could no longer tell what Marisol had been or whether Julian had ever guessed that she was something other than she seemed.

“You’ll miss Paris,” Loretta said when I told her that I was heading for Hungary. “Everyone does.”

I told her that I was going to Hungary because my father had given me the name of someone who was at Casa Rosada when Julian was in Argentina. Now I added, “Julian went to Casa Rosada looking for Marisol.”

“Why would he have gone there?” Loretta asked. “I thought Marisol had nothing to do with politics.”

“That’s not so clear anymore,” I said, then related what Hendricks had told me in London, along with my subsequent conversation with my father, the result being that I was now quite uncertain about who Marisol had been.

“So she might have been anything,” Loretta said at the end of my account.