Thomas Cook: The Crime of Julian Wells

“You got much money now, cono,” El Arabe cried over the noise of the crowd. “You should be careful you don’t lose it.”

Julian laughed. “How would I lose it?”

“Not lose, maybe. Someone take it. Not everyone is a brother. Not in this bad place.”

Julian swayed slightly, as if drunk. “It doesn’t look so bad here.”

El Arabe wagged his finger. “Very bad. Very bad people in this place. You maybe not go back to Buenos Aires tonight.”

“I have to. I have no place to stay.”

“You stay with me. I protect you. Morning, you go back to Buenos Aires.” He threw his arm over Julian’s shoulder. “You safe with me. Brothers, no?”

Julian’s head lolled to the left. “Too much beer.”

El Arabe laughed. “We go home now,” he said.

I imagined them almost as comic characters in a melodrama, the tall young American and the squat little Argentine, a drunken Don Quixote and a malignant Sancho Panza struggling toward the old truck where El Arabe had already caged the few dogs that had survived the fights-“quick killers,” as he called the ones that emerged from their struggles with treatable rather than fatal wounds.

In the truck, Julian had fallen asleep, or pretended to, and I saw him slumped in the dusty darkness, his body jerking with the bump and sway of the road.

“Okay, we are home now,” El Arabe said. He opened the door and drew Julian out into the weedy driveway of his house. “You never sleep in hammock before, no? You like it. Very good. Stars. Cool air.”

Either passed out or feigning unconsciousness, Julian had slumped into the hammock that hung on the wide porch of El Arabe’s house, arisen groggily the next morning, reached for his money, and found it missing.

“I know what you look for,” El Arabe said with a loud laugh. “You think maybe I steal money from you, no?” He reached into the pocket of his soiled jeans and pulled out a roll of cash. “I keep it for you. We are brothers, no? We do not steal from each other.” He laughed again. “Maybe from others we steal, and maybe to others we do bad things, but I do nothing bad to Pilgrim, and Pilgrim, he does nothing bad to El Arabe.”

Thus was sealed a bond that deepened over the next few weeks as both Julian and El Arabe continued to perfect their roles, playing off each other with such skill that there were times when the subtext of deception seemed almost to disappear, nights of less drinking and more talk, which at last brought them each the long-sought moment.

“It’s all just a way of forgetting,” Julian said quietly. He took out a cigarette and lit it. “All this drinking.” He drew in a long breath and released it slowly. “It is because of a woman. She is missing.”

“You will find another,” El Arabe said. “You must think of something else.”

“I can’t.”

Then, in a sudden burst that El Arabe found either absolutely brilliant if meant to deceive him or absolutely stupid if it was real, Julian had revealed everything: how he had met Marisol, her work as a guide, how she had later disappeared, his long effort to find her, how he’d gone first to Casa Rosada, then to the Russians, who had set him up to meet El Arabe, all of it in a cataract of impassioned narrative that had finally impressed El Arabe in its anguished sincerity.

El Arabe remained silent for a time, then quite softly he said, “It is possible this one you spoke of, this missing woman, it is possible she is still alive, no?”

“No, it’s not possible,” Julian said. “We both know what happens to these women.”

“Not to all, maybe,” El Arabe said. “Maybe some of them are kept.”

“Kept?”

El Arabe shrugged. “To some men, it is a waste to kill such a woman,” he said. “Better to keep her for a while.”

Julian’s gaze glimmered with hope. “Keep her where?”

El Arabe smiled. “They are called ‘escuelitas.’” He offered Julian a look that could not have been mistaken. “Perhaps she is still at one of these places. Do you wish I look for her?”

“Yes.”

“And if I find her, do you wish to go to this place?”

“Yes,” Julian answered. “Yes, I want to go there.”

Time passed, and during that time Julian had revealed ever-deeper confidences. He had come to Argentina, he said, in search of a life’s work. Such had been his chief hunger when he came here, he told El Arabe, a furious need to do some great good work, a need his host had found both naive and comical. But Julian’s sincerity had won El Arabe over. He’d been a fool, but a lovable fool, a man who wanted to help the ones who live in the dust. More than anything, he now sought Marisol.

“Because you fuck her, no?” El Arabe asked. “Those little indigenes, they fuck hard and fast.”

“I never touched her.”

El Arabe laughed. “You think she is so innocent, this woman?” He drained the last beer of the evening. “Maybe not so innocent, my friend. If she was so innocent, she would not have disappeared.”

“No, she was absolutely innocent,” Julian insisted. “There was no reason for her to have been taken. She wasn’t involved in politics. All she wanted. . and she said this to me. . all she wanted was a fighting chance.”

“If this is so, I will find her for you,” El Arabe said.

It took him only a week to find the escuelita to which Marisol had been taken, and though she was no longer there, he felt certain that by talking to the commissar of the camp, he would be able to find her.

And he did.

“Okay, so we go there tomorrow,” El Arabe said.

“Where is it?” Julian asked,

“There is a dog farm on the pampas. They breed there the Dogo Cordoba. They have also a barn and stalls. This they have made into an escuelita.”

They left Buenos Aires the next morning, driving first along the wide boulevards, then out into the suburbs, and finally down a dirt road to a location El Arabe called El Sitio, which means only “the place.”

It was a farmhouse of sorts, though it was unclear whether it had once been occupied or whether it had been constructed only for its current purpose. Its windows were boarded up and left unpainted, which made the structure seem like an immense crate. It had a corrugated roof that was streaked with rust.

“They keep them here,” El Arabe said with a crude smile, “the ones they are educating.”

The heat inside this building was stifling, of course, and so, El Arabe explained with a wink and a grin, there was no need for the women to have clothes.

Julian remained in the truck, El Arabe said, while he went in search of the commissar, who was in a nearby shed where preparations for “the day’s lessons” were under way. Those preparations involved hooks and ropes and the fetching of the commissar’s favored whip, a chicotte, made of rhinoceros hide and imported from the Congo.

From his place inside the truck, Julian had a clear view of the farmhouse and the line of upright wooden poles, each fitted with handcuffs, that stood to the side of it, and toward which, while El Arabe discussed the whereabouts of Marisol with the commissar, a naked woman was pushed and shoved and prodded by two men in green uniforms, each wielding a chicotte .

I could only imagine Julian’s thoughts at that moment, how he must surely have realized that the same outrage had been committed upon Marisol. Naked and caked in her own filth, she must have been led to those same poles, cuffed and left to bake in the sun, while the men took their lunch break under the nearby trees. Like the woman he watched from the interior of El Arabe’s truck, Marisol must have waited as the minutes passed and the men leisurely smoked their cigarettes, then rose and came toward her, as these men now did toward this unknown woman, slapping their chicottes against their dusty brown boots and, as the whipping commenced, beginning to laugh.