Thomas Cook - The Crime of Julian Wells

Finally, my father said, “Julian felt responsible for what happened to Marisol because he was responsible, Philip.” He straightened himself slightly, like a man before the bugle sounds, prepared, as his forebears had been prepared, to receive the blow.

“And so was I,” he added. He seemed to rethink some painful issue of his own. “I’ve always believed that only the bravest of us have the courage to confront our wrongs.” He stared at me brokenly. “Like Julian did.” He let this final thought rest a moment, then added, “And the time has come for me to confront mine.”

It had begun with the most innocent of inquiries, my father told me, one made when he and Julian walked the grounds of Two Groves one morning. Julian had come downstairs early and found my father alone at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. With his usual perceptiveness, Julian had found the scene quite sad and pointedly suggested an early morning stroll. With that, the two of them made their way out of the house and into the small orchard that surrounded it. After a few minutes of inconsequential conversation, Julian asked, “Do you think one person can change things?”

“It was a silly question,” my father told me, “and at first I didn’t take it seriously. It was a young man’s question, and a very naive young man’s at that.”

But as the talk progressed, Julian’s seriousness became increasingly obvious.

“He wanted to do something great,” my father said. “To use that shopworn phrase, he wanted to ‘make a difference.’” He shrugged. “Because he knew how my own career had gone, he doubted that he could do anything truly good at, say, the State Department. He wondered if there might be some other way. He was simply exploring things with me, considering different avenues. That’s when I said, ‘Well, perhaps you should become a spy.’”

To my father’s complete surprise, the idea appeared to catch.

“Maybe it was the romance of it,” my father said. “Or maybe he truly began to think that somehow, in the secret corridors, he would be able to learn things that would eventually allow him to do some important good in the world.” My father lifted his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “It appealed to me, how much Julian ached to do something good.”

His gaze suddenly became quite intense. “A man shouldn’t grow old wanting vengeance against his life, but that’s exactly what had happened to me and I knew it. I didn’t want it to happen to Julian. I didn’t want him to be consumed by the raging disappointment that was consuming me.”

It was an anger he had fiercely repressed, of course, though there’d been moments when I’d seen it in the way he grappled with a tangled coat hanger as if it were alive and thwarting him, as if to kill it.

“I was a little man trapped behind a desk,” my father said, “dreaming my secret-agent dream.”

“Walter Mitty,” I said softly.

My father nodded. “And so I suggested Argentina as a place Julian should visit. I did this for the right reasons. I wanted him to see the real world. Get out of the cocoon his intelligence and good looks had provided for him.” He sat back slightly and passed his hand over the blanket that covered his legs. “And given what Julian had said about being a spy, it was also a place where we could play a little game.”

He stopped and looked at me brokenly.

“It was never more than a game, Philip,” he said, pleading his case before he’d even made it, “a little boys’ game.”

He decided to give Julian a harmless cloak-and-dagger assignment, he told me. If Julian liked the taste of the work, then perhaps he could pursue it. And if he didn’t, then it might at least cool his zeal for whatever he thought the life of a secret agent was.

“Part of that assignment, of course, was to tell no one,” my father said. The sadness in his voice deepened. “We swore this to each other, and clearly Julian kept his promise. Now I am breaking mine.”

My father had considered several small tasks Julian might carry out while in Buenos Aires. None of them appealed to Julian, however, and so he pressed my father until he finally came up with a mission that had a suggestion of romance in it.

“Simply because-stupid, stupid-simply because it involved a woman.”

Here he paused like a man at the jagged edge of a bottomless abyss.

“Marisol,” I said, and with that word, I pushed him over it.

My father nodded. “Julian was so young, you see,” he explained in a tone that now seemed stripped of all but regret. “So, in my own stupid way, I thought, What could be more thrilling than a secret assignment involving a young woman?” He seemed now on the brink of his own devastating revelation. “She was just a guide,” he added. “Just a young woman with a job, who wanted. .”

“A fighting chance,” I said.

My father drew in a long breath, then continued.

“It was just a little exercise in deceit,” he said. “It had nothing to do with Marisol.”

My father could see that I had no idea where he was going with this.

“The idea was for Julian to try his hand at acting,” he told me, “like Loretta on the stage. Julian was to test himself, to see how good he was at. .” His eyes took on a terrible sense of his own foolishness. “To spy, you must make the target trust you and believe you. You must be able to make a lie credible, so your target will accept the lie you tell.”

“And Julian’s target was Marisol,” I said.

My father nodded. “Because she was innocent, you see. She wasn’t in the least political. She’d been vetted by the consulate. They knew she was just a simple country girl. And so it was safe.”

“What was safe?”

“It was safe to deceive her.”

Julian was to pick his time, my father said, and pass on a bit of information, something she would find doubtful but which he would make her believe.

For Philip, sole witness to my crime.

I recalled the meeting with the old priest, Julian’s remark about the likelihood of his being arrested, then the far more intense conversation I’d later come upon, Julian and Marisol in that little outdoor cafe, Julian animated, Marisol grave. I never knew the substance of what had passed between them. Now I did.

“Julian told Marisol that he had information about Father Rodrigo, didn’t he?” I asked. “That he was going to be arrested. Not just a suspicion, but actual information from the consulate, as if he were a secret agent.”

My father’s sad smile held nothing but the dreadful fact of his own great miscalculation.

“Yes,” he said. “And I’m sure that Julian had no idea that she would tell anyone. It was just a game.” He shook his head despairingly. “Little boys. We didn’t think that she would tell anyone other than Rodrigo, and that would not have mattered. What was the worst that could happen? She would believe a harmless lie and nothing would happen to anyone.”

“But she told Emilio Vargas.”

My father nodded. “Evidently, yes.”

“She loved that old priest, and so she went to someone she thought could help him,” I said.

My father lifted his arms and gripped the arms of his chair. “An old friend from her childhood, apparently,” he said. “Someone she thought she could trust as much as. .”

“Julian?”

My father looked like what he was, a man confronting the wrong Julian had faced so many years before.

“Until you mentioned this man, Vargas, I’d never heard of him,” he said. “But now that you’ve told me about him, I know exactly what happened because I’ve known other men in his situation. You have to deflect attention away from yourself. And because you are a traitor, you have to give up someone else as a traitor. When Marisol went to him and told him what Julian had said, he saw his chance. He could finger her as a ‘source’ at the American consulate, say that she’d come to him as a fellow Montonero, and then he could turn her over to Casa Rosada.”