Thomas Cook: The Crime of Julian Wells

The beating lasted for several minutes, El Arabe said, with long pauses during which the woman was left to hang in the sun. Through it all Julian sat in the stillness of the truck, staring through its dusty windows as the whips sang in the air, along with the cries of the woman and the laughter of the men.

“She was covered in blood by the time I got back to the truck,” El Arabe told us. “She was hanging down so low her long hair almost touched the ground, and her back, legs, and arms were raw. The whips almost skinned her.”

But it was what El Arabe saw inside the truck that chilled the air around me as I listened. He had passed the bloody girl who slumped almost to the ground, her wounds now boiling in the noonday sun, and given the scene hardly any notice. He had, after all, attended many such sessions. Nor had he paid any mind to the second woman, also naked and filthy, who was at that very moment being led out by two other men. He had noticed the commissar strolling toward the broken-down corral, but that had had no interest for him, since he had already ascertained Marisol’s whereabouts. It was Julian, and only Julian, upon whom El Arabe, with an unexpected feeling, had fixed his attention.

“He was sitting exactly where I’d left him a half hour before,” El Arabe told us. “He said only, ‘Was this done to Marisol?’”

From the corner of my eye, I saw a terrible question form on Loretta’s lips. “Had it been?” she asked.

El Arabe nodded. “And worse,” he said. “But I did not tell this to Julian. I told him she was simply brought here and shot. It would have been a bad thing to tell him more than this. He was blaming himself. He was saying it was his fault she was dead. I could not tell him more. This would have made it worse for him. So I told him only that she was dead. ‘They dumped her,’ I said to him. ‘She is dust.’”

Julian had gone quiet, El Arabe told us.

“Pain can make men wail like women,” he said. “But in Julian, there was only silence. He was alive, but he was dead. I took him back to Buenos Aires. All the way, he did not speak. I left him at his hotel. He never came to me again.”

For a time, no one spoke, and we heard nothing but the woman still fumbling about in the kitchen, along with the occasional bark of a dog or the call of a bird.

Finally, I said, “So Julian never saw Marisol?”

El Arabe shook his head. “And this is good, for it was very bad, what had been done to her. Very bad, the torture. Even the ones who live do not recover.”

Another stark silence followed. Neither Loretta nor I had been able to move, so we were still frozen in place when the woman at last came out onto the veranda, dragging one foot behind her, causing the tray that bore our drinks to jerk as it trembled in her shaking hand. Her head was down, her hair was unkempt and streaked with dull gray. It was long enough to shield her face, but suddenly, with a wildly trembling hand, she drew it back to reveal the only thing I might recognize among the web of wrinkles and behind the drooping eyelids: her startlingly black eyes.

In a novel, it would have been Marisol, of course, this sadly broken woman. And I would have risen and gathered her into my arms and brought her to some safer, kinder place. There she would have lived out her days, sitting beneath a mango tree, enjoying the breeze from off La Plata. I would have occasionally come back to see her, and at some point she would have recalled Julian in his youth, our bright days in Buenos Aires, and together, as the sun set over the great trees of San Martin, we would have found the small measure of peace this life affords.

All these sweet, consoling things would have happened in a book, but as Julian knew, life takes a different turn.

“Maria,” El Arabe said, “say hello to my guests.”

She gave no response, but merely placed the drinks on the little wooden table in front of us, spilling them slightly as she did so. Then she turned and struggled back into the house.

When she’d finally disappeared into the shadowy interior of the house, I drew my eyes over to El Arabe.

“Why was Marisol disappeared?” I asked. “Was she a Montonero?”

El Arabe shook his head. “No. She was a nothing, just a girl from the Chaco.”

“Then why was she taken?”

El Arabe grinned. “It was a mistake, but life, it is full of little twists and turns, no?”

“That’s not an answer,” I said firmly. “Why was Marisol taken?”

El Arabe shrugged. “She was betrayed,” he said. “A boy she grew up with in the Chaco. In that orphanage there. They have a picture of those two together, those two indigenes. Marisol and that other flat-nosed peasant.”

“Emilio Vargas?” I asked.

El Arabe nodded. “He was a weasel, that Red. And he lied about this girl. She was just a guide or something. But this Vargas, he feeds her to the wolves. Who knows why? Perhaps he is getting even with her because she does not fuck him in the old days. Men are scum in this way. One thing I know, he was there when it was done. Laying it on her himself. Making a big show of it.” He shrugged. “It was Vargas who caused Marisol to be killed. But that is not how Julian saw it. And for that reason he thought himself her murderer.”

“Why would Julian have felt responsible for what happened to Marisol?” I asked.

“This he told me, and this I know.”

“What did he tell you?”

El Arabe appeared quite amused by the tricks embedded in the scheme of things, and I could see the true cruelty of this man, how he loved, more than anything, to watch a helpless creature dangle.

“Tell me what Julian told you,” I demanded.

His smile was a paper cut. “Perhaps you should ask your father.”

My father?

This could not be the ending, I thought. In a novel of intrigue it would be too obvious???the story of a son’s quest to find out what he could have done to prevent his friend’s suicide ends up circling back to the father. As a literary route toward dark discoveries this one was way too familiar, trod, as it were, by Oedipus.

Yet, I could see the question that remained open each time I looked into Loretta’s eyes: What did your father do?

I had considered what I was going to say to him many times on the flight back home with Loretta. During that time, the stakes had steadily increased for both of us, Loretta needing to know what Julian had discovered, I needing to know the part my father had played in whatever that discovery had been. Life was a warren of secret chambers, I decided, everyone on the plane a harbor for dark things. All the old cliches of spy fiction took on a hard reality: hall of mirrors, nest of vipers. My father had always wanted to be a character in a tale of intrigue. Now he was.

“He doesn’t have to tell you the truth,” Loretta warned me when we parted at the airport. “He doesn’t have to tell you anything.”

“I know.”

“So be careful, Philip,” she added. Her tone was tense and her eyes held a feline sharpness. It was clear how much all this had come to matter to her, our search, now in dead earnest, for Julian’s crime.

“Because in a way, this is an interrogation,” she added.

This was true, of course, and if my father chose to remain silent, then the story would end with an ambiguity no novel of intrigue, or even the cheapest thriller, could permit. We would know what happened to Marisol. But we would never know why it had happened, or why Julian had blamed himself for it, or why at the end of his life he’d still been wanting to confess to a crime for which he had long ago pronounced himself guilty.

But what was Julian’s crime?

And why had he died without revealing it?