Thomas Cook - The Crime of Julian Wells

At one of Gilles de Rais’s castles, no less a literary figure than Anthony Trollope had paused to reflect upon the screams of the victims, even claiming that they could still be heard, as if sound waves do not dissipate. But dissipate they do, as Julian had pointed out in The Tigress, such that the wintry trees that had gathered around the body of yet another child had remained silent and unhelpful while the magistrate’s men searched for clues, as if they were bribed witnesses into whose snow-encrusted hands the countess had placed a few silver coins.

“It’s creepy here, don’t you think?” Loretta asked.

“Yes,” I said.

During the remainder of our walk about the grounds and rubble of Cachtice, Loretta appeared quite thoughtful. She gave no hint of what her thoughts were, however, though I suspected that she was considering the terrible possibility that Julian had, in fact, been turned by Marisol, and thus, for a brief time, might have proved himself a traitor. Still, I didn’t press her. And it was not until we’d returned to the car and were headed toward Irene Josag that she opened up to me.

“I remember one day when Julian and I were in that little boat I found him in,” she said. “He’d come home after writing The Tigress but hadn’t started The Commissar. We were talking about when we were children. Our travels. How fearless we were in those days. At one point I said that the things I feared most now were the things everyone feared. Getting old. Getting sick. Dying. I could tell that he didn’t fear any of those things. So I asked him what he was afraid of. He said that he wasn’t afraid of anything anymore. It was the ‘anymore’ that seemed strange to me, because the way he said it, he seemed to be telling me that he’d already confronted the thing he most feared.”

“And triumphed over it?” I asked.

Loretta shook her head. “No, only that he’d confronted it.” She glanced up toward the broken towers of Cachtice. “And after that, he was like those ruins. Beyond repair.”

Beyond repair .

Since we had no way of pursuing this point, Loretta and I simply continued on, and we reached Irene Josag’s house about an hour after leaving Cachtice.

It was very modest, and with all the growth around it, the tall grass and twining vines, it was barely visible from the road.

“Are you sure this is it?” I asked Dimitri.

“I am sure,” he answered.

We got out of the car and approached the house by means of a broken walkway overgrown with weeds and clogged with shrubs that seemed as swollen, as Julian might have written, as bodies in the sun.

I knocked at the door and heard a shuffle of feet inside the house. Then the door opened, and a very small woman appeared. She was dressed plainly, her hair streaked a yellowish white. Her eyes were startlingly blue, and there was a quickness to them that suggested what I had little doubt was a very high intelligence. She didn’t wear the usual country clothes of Hungary, but a black dress with lace at the sleeves, so that she looked like a Spanish matron. Clearly she’d dressed for the occasion, and I even noticed a touch of blush on her cheeks along with some bright red lipstick that had missed its mark in one corner of her mouth.

“Ah,” she said in an English whose accent was far more Spanish than Eastern European, “the Americans are arrived.”

She stepped back rather shakily, waved us in, and directed us to chairs in her small living room.

“You would like something to drink?” she asked.

“No, thank you,” I said.

With that, she slowly eased herself into a small wooden chair, and the usual niceties commenced. She asked about our hotel in Budapest but was more interested in my having come from Paris, a city she had romanticized but never seen, and now would never see, which brought us to her various ailments, bad joints and hearing loss, failing eyesight, the travails of old age, a subject that finally turned her mind toward my father.

“Your father is doing well?” she asked me.

“Not altogether well, no,” I answered. “The same problems you’ve mentioned. Aches and pains.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It is better to be young.”

We talked at some length about the work she’d done for the Americans, by way of my father, whom she described as having always been very kind to her. He had acted like a gentleman, without airs, she said, a man capable of speaking quite candidly to a simple clerk. She had either read or been told that “the great George Marshall” had had such qualities, and after the arrogance of the big men at Casa Rosada, my father’s modesty had been much more than simply refreshing. She gave no hint of the somewhat more intimate relationship to which my father had quite clearly alluded, so I made no mention of it either.

At the end of this tale, she drew in a long breath, then glanced at Loretta. “I did not expect a second guest. This is your lovely wife?”

I had introduced Loretta at the door, but this appeared to have escaped the old woman’s attention.

“No, this is Loretta Wells,” I reminded her. “Julian’s sister.”

“Ah, yes,” Irene said. “Julian’s sister. My mind fades, no? Ah, yes, Julian.” She drew her attention over to me. “The reason you have come, as your father told me in his letter. Julian. What a sad young man.”

This seemed as good a segue into the purpose of our visit as any, and so I said, “My father tells me that you worked at Casa Rosada in the early eighties.” I looked at the notes I’d taken during the conversation with my father. “For a Colonel Juan Ramirez?”

Irene nodded. “He was a ladies’ man, Juan,” she said. “Very handsome. He many times wished to take me to his hideaway in Puerto Madero.” She smiled. “He was a true fascist. ‘You do not live with the Reds,’ he said to me. ‘You live under the Reds, or you do not live at all.’ He would have done anything to save Argentina from the Reds. In fact, he did what all fascists do, which is the same as Reds.” She clearly held the two groups in the same disdain. “He was always after the Montoneros. Those he dreams about at night. Killing every one of them. It is for this he lived. He wanted to hunt them down like a fox would hunt a rabbit. With his nose to the ground until he found them. Then he rips them apart.”

“But how did he find them?” I asked.

“Names came to him,” Irene said.

“From informants?”

She nodded. “He had many people, but it was the big fish, a Montonero, who gave him the big names. Where they lived, too, these other Montoneros hiding in their caves. Even the names of their children he gave to Juan.”

“Ramirez turned a high-ranking Montonero?” Loretta asked.

“Yes,” Irene answered. She appeared to see this informant in her mind. “Very tall, but an indigene. He was from the Chaco.”

“Emilio Vargas?” I blurted.

Irene’s eyes widened. “You have heard of this one?”

“Yes,” I said. “He was a Montonero torturer.”

Irene laughed. “This he did to show how bad he was,” she said. “It is sometimes necessary to do this. This shows you hate the enemy, that you are ruthless. When he did this, the others say to themselves, ‘See how he hates. See how much he is with us.’” She laughed again. “Cruelty was his disguise.” Her eyes twinkled with a curious admiration. “But it was only one of his disguises.”

For a moment she looked like a little girl watching shapes change in a funhouse mirror.

“Because he had a disguise for Juan as well,” she added.

“Why would he need another disguise?” I asked.

“Because he was never really turned,” Irene said. “He was always a crazy Montonero.”