Thomas Cook - The Crime of Julian Wells

“As I told you in my first e-mail, my brother was going to write a book about his experience in Argentina,” Loretta said, clearly in an effort to get me off the hook. “He evidently ran into Hernando Vilario at that time.”

She had already told him a great deal, I knew. In her correspondence with Leon, she’d described Julian’s life and work, how he’d searched for Marisol after the disappearance, contacted both Casa Rosada and the Russians. She’d also told him that Julian was studying a map of Argentina before his death and that he’d circled the very village in which El Arabe now lived. She’d related the details of our talk with Soborov, as well-everything he’d revealed about his interaction with Julian and Julian’s subsequent meeting with El Arabe.

Now, she said, “So, as you know, we’re here because we want to talk to him.”

“As I told you, this is not difficult,” Leon said. “Hernando loves the attention. Especially from Americans. He is a big fan of the American Western. There is a picture of John Wayne in his house. I have already arranged for you to see him. You could fly there or take a bus. It is a long ride by bus, but not a bad trip. You will see our beautiful countryside.”

“We want to be well prepared before we talk to him,” Loretta said, “so we’d appreciate anything you could add that you think we should know.”

“Know?” Leon asked. “He is a monster. This you already know. But he is a monster who is at least without deceit. When he was arrested, he spit in the face of the government. At his trial, he spit at the judges and made no apologies for his escuelitas .”

Leon walked to a metal cabinet and withdrew an ancient carousel projector.

“It was El Arabe’s. He took many pictures,” he said. “He was proud of them. ‘My gift to you,’ he told me.”

Leon walked to the front of the room, pulled down a screen, turned off the room’s overhead light, returned to his seat, and reached for the button that controlled the carousel.

“This will not be easy,” he said.

When the lights went on again, I felt that I had been gutted both spiritually and physically. In fact, mine had been a reaction so visceral that I’d had to hold my stomach and close my throat. At the end of it I was pale and felt that my legs had gone numb beneath me. There is a kind of revulsion that moves you beyond what some men do, to what some men are, and it is that that drains and exhausts you and leaves you with nothing but a need to escape the whole human race.

“So,” Leon said as he turned on the light. “That is El Arabe. Do you still want to meet him?”

“It isn’t a question of wanting to meet him,” I said. “We need to meet him.”

Leon rose, walked to the front of the room, and drew up the screen, all of it done quite thoughtfully, as though he was turning something over his mind.

When he returned to his seat, he folded his hands together on the table, fingers laced, like a man with a pronouncement. “Steel yourselves, then,” he said. “For, no matter what evil you have known before, you have not known such a one as El Arabe.” He turned to Loretta. “It is strange, is it not, that your brother was associated with such a man?”

With Leon’s question, how little I still knew of Julian struck hard. But truth is truth, and the fact remained that the pieces of Julian’s story were still scattered. It was as if Loretta had been right long ago when she’d said that the pebbles Julian had strewn along the forest floor might lead only to more pebbles.

“El Arabe will be expecting you,” Leon said as he turned to me. “Good luck.”

Leon had wished me good luck quite cheerfully, but as Loretta and I left his office I found something final in his good wishes. For it was luck I would need, surely. In fact, it was all I had left, because I’d reached the very end of what I could discover of Julian beyond what was in his books. I had read and reread those books, along with his notes and letters. I had gone to Paris, Oradour, London, Budapest, Cachtice, Rostov, and now Buenos Aires. I had interviewed the slender list of people who seemed to have made a contribution to Julian’s work, his guides and his sources. I had talked to my father and to Loretta and even to myself, surely the three people, other than Marisol, who had most figured in his life. I had done all this, but I still had not cracked the door to my friend’s most secret chamber or gained any notion of why he had rowed out to the center of the pond, nor what I might have said to stop him from what he eventually did.

“So,” I said to Loretta wearily, like an old gumshoe on his way to a final rendezvous, “the last witness.”

Our meeting with Hernando Vilario was not scheduled until the day after our arrival at Iguazu, and so Loretta and I decided to visit the great falls. I’d made the same trip with Julian years ago, the two of us flying out of Buenos Aires on a stormy after shy;noon. We’d stayed in Iguazu a couple of days, then returned to the capital.

A good deal had changed at Iguazu since then, changes no doubt necessary in order to make the place more attractive to tourists. Now a small train took visitors into the jungle that surrounded the falls. As we disembarked, I noticed that they were playing the theme from The Mission, a film whose dramatic opening scene had ended with the startling image of a crucified priest being swept over the Devil’s Throat.

For a time we walked silently through a jungle that was now equipped with cement walkways and steel railings, safe for old people and children.

“The music back at the train reminds me of what Julian said about the difference between tourists and travelers,” I said.

Loretta peered out to where the roiling waters of Iguazu could be heard but not yet seen.

“This is the last time he was a tourist,” I said. “When we got back to Buenos Aires, Marisol was waiting for us. We all went to a restaurant in La Boca and had dinner and wine. Julian had never looked more delighted with his life. Everything had come so easily to him.”

A thought appeared to strike Loretta. “I know you felt rather dull in comparison to Julian. We both did. But were you jealous of him, too?”

It is strange what can be unearthed if the time is right and the inquisitor is dear, and at that moment I felt it rise like a gorge in my throat, the awful truth of things.

“Yes,” I said, and with that admission I felt a crack run through the portrait of my long friendship with Julian. I recalled all the times I might have influenced him, might have taken advantage of his weariness, his long bouts of despair, and even his penury-I might have used all that to nudge him in a different direction. I had even silenced any criticism of his work that might have made it leaner and sharper or reined in the wild sprawl that had sometimes marred his books. He might not have listened, but the fact remained that I had never offered him the slightest direction. With Loretta’s question, I had to wonder if I had done this not because I thought it would do no good, but because I’d preferred him to remain where he was, tucked into a shadowy corner of the literary world, preferred him to remain what he was, a writer whose subject matter would doom him to an inconsequential place. Had I said nothing because I secretly delighted in all the now-darkened lights that had once shone on him, took pleasure in his failure?

“My God, Loretta,” I breathed. “Was I not his friend?”

She saw my eyes glisten as all the many deceiving layers of my feigned friendship fell away.

She drew me into her arms. “Now you are,” she said.

The road to El Arabe led out of the bustling little town that bordered Iguazu and into the deepening jungle that surrounded it, burrowing into the depths in a way that did indeed remind me of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness . Kurtz had gone far upriver, to the Inner Station, as Conrad had so metaphorically called it, deep into the savage heart of things, and there, amid that splendor, created a landscape that in all the world had most resembled hell.