The Crime of Julian Wells (12 page)

18

It was around noon when I arrived in London, several hours before I was scheduled to meet Hendricks at Durrants, the small hotel he’d recommended because it was near the American embassy. Durrants had often been used by American officials during the war, a time, spy novelists often pointed out, when the line between the good guys and the bad guys was clearly drawn.

London had changed considerably since my last visit, the influx of immigrants having put its mark on such places as Oxford Street, where Middle Eastern men now smoked hookahs in sidewalk cafés and women strolled about in full burkas. These were changes that gave the city a deeper sense of intrigue, or so it seemed. For I couldn’t be sure that my present view of London as a place of plots and counterplots came from the actual changes I noted in the city itself or from the troubling details that were emerging from Julian’s life—especially the preoccupation with betrayal that marked both his books and his conversation.

Durrants was on a side street not far from Hyde Park. By the time I got there, one of London’s famous drizzles had settled in, along with a touch of fog. Beyond the bar’s small windows, I could see black umbrellas sprouting like dark flowers on the street.

“You must be Philip.”

I turned from the window to see a man standing at my table.

“Walter Hendricks,” he said. “I trust your father is well?”

“As well as can be expected,” I told him.

“For a man his age, you mean,” Hendricks said with a knowing grin. “And mine, too, for that matter.”

Hendricks, however, appeared far less frail than my father. In fact, there was something rough-and-tumble about him, a sense that he could still handle other men with a sure hand. His accent was Southern, of the type that held the soft twang of the Appalachians rather than the rounded
o
’s of the Tidewater. Here was one whose ancestors had fought under Lee, rather than beside him, I thought, men who staggered back from Pickett’s charge to hear their general’s apology while trying hard not to notice that there was no blood on his sleek lapels.

“I would have expected you and Julian to have gone on the grand tour after college,” he said as he sat down opposite me. “Argentina always seemed to be an odd choice.” He smiled quite warmly. “‘The dusty places,’ your father used to call them. He had a soft spot for the people of those regions.” His smile grew into a soft chuckle. “I told him that he should spend some time in Timbuktu, where even the food tastes like dirt.”

“I’m sure he would have loved a posting like that,” I said in defense of my father. “To face that kind of reality.”

Hendricks’s laughter trailed away. “Not for long,” he said with the certainty of one who’d experienced such places. “No one likes that kind of reality for long.”

He glanced about the bar. “Have you ever been here?”

“No.”

He smiled. “Well, my guess is that many a plot was hatched in this place,” he said. We were sitting at a small, round table clearly meant to accommodate drinks only. “It wouldn’t surprise me if Reilly, Prince of Spies, once sat right in this corner, at this little table, and wondered if it might be possible to have Lenin assassinated.”

Even in such casual conversation, Hendricks’s eyes remained penetrating, the gaze of a man to whom one should not lie.

“I love history,” he added. “It’s the reason I retired to London, the sheer history of the place. I read history all the time. Probably as much as your father reads spy novels. He seemed to live in books back then.” He laughed. “He was reading
The Thirty-Nine Steps
the day I met him.”

“He doesn’t read now,” I said. “He watches old movies. Black-and-white mostly. From the forties.”

“Yes,” Hendricks said. “That would be his type.” His smile bore the usual indulgence that men of the world accord their dreamier compatriots, and in it I saw the most that was likely ever given to my father by the sturdier and far less idealistic souls who’d pulled the strings at Foggy Bottom. “Stories about lone heroes. That was what he wanted to be, I think.”

“But instead he lived his life behind a desk,” I said.

Hendricks nodded. “That’s true,” he admitted. “But I’m not sure your father would have functioned very effectively beyond a desk.”

“Really?”

Hendricks nodded. “As a matter of fact, he sometimes reminded me of what Trotsky said about Czar Nicholas.”

“Which was?”

“That he should have been a kindly neighborhood grocer or something of that sort,” Hendricks said. “A simple tradesman, invisible to history. But your father not only wanted to change the world, he wanted to do it by means of derring-do.” He laughed. “In C Building, he was the resident Walter Mitty.”

The resident Walter Mitty.

That was both the saddest and truest thing anyone had ever said about my father, that he had lived his life behind a desk while watching spy movies and reading spy books and dreaming of the romantic secret-agent life he would never have.

To think of my father in such a way pained me, so I turned the conversation away from him.

“So, the report on Marisol,” I said as a reminder of why I’d come to London.

“Marisol, yes,” Hendricks said. “I have to say that I am a bit curious as to why you’re so interested in your friend’s quixotic effort to find this young woman.”

“Was it quixotic?” I asked.

“I would call it that, yes,” Hendricks answered flatly. “He was trying to find someone he didn’t know much about in a country about which he knew even less. He had no connections in Argentina and no authority to conduct any sort of inquiry into this young woman’s whereabouts. And yet, he felt that he could simply and quite brazenly walk into Casa Rosada and ask whatever questions he liked.” He shook his head gravely. “Such a little boy.”

I recalled something Julian had said many years before. I’d been talking about Mussolini, how amazingly childlike he’d been, his love for mounting white horses and prancing about, his comical strut. The whole story had seemed to darken Julian’s mood, his voice very serious when he said, “He wasn’t funny to the Ethiopians.” With that, he’d shaken his head softly, then added, “Men with power shouldn’t be little boys.”

Hendricks’s gaze took on an added seriousness. “How could he have possibly expected anyone in authority to tell him anything? Not only where Marisol was or what had happened to her, but who she was?”

“Who she was?” I asked by way of directing the conversation back to her.

Hendricks smiled. “Nowadays they’d call her a ‘person of interest,’” he said.

“To Casa Rosada,” I added.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because she was evidently working for a well-known Montonero named Emilio Vargas,” Hendricks answered matter-of-factly.

I tried to conceal my surprise. “Julian had a picture of Marisol with him,” I said. “Where would he have gotten it?”

“Perhaps he was more successful at Casa Rosada than I thought,” Hendricks answered with a shrug. “Anyway, as to Vargas. He was called ‘the Hook.’ It was his method of choice. To hang people on meat hooks.”

I remembered an atrocity Julian had once mentioned, an entire Balkan village rounded up and loaded onto trucks, then transported to the local abattoir, where every man, woman, and child was put through all the stages of animal slaughter. He had described the process so vividly and with such detail that I’d finally skipped ahead.

“Vargas was as vicious as they come,” Hendricks said. “Names were given to him and he had those people kidnapped. Their children, too, sometimes. Torturing them was Vargas’s specialty. He would have justified it, of course. And it’s true, there are people who can’t be broken by torture. But when they see their children, naked, strapped to a bed beside a small electric generator . . .” He stopped. “I’m sure you get the picture.”

I nodded.

“He operated a torture farm in the Chaco,” Hendricks added.

“That’s where Marisol was from,” I told him.

Hendricks nodded. “Yes. I saw that when I read the report.”

“What happened to Vargas?” I asked.

“He was shot eventually,” Hendricks answered. “It was quite clear that before he died, he’d been rather badly treated.”

“What does that mean?”

“That he’d been tortured for a long time,” Hendricks said. “Missing some important parts, if you know what I mean.” A smile slithered onto his face. “He deserved every cut, if you ask me.”

“Where was he found?”

“Floating in the Plata,” Hendricks answered.

“I can’t imagine Marisol having anything to do with a man like that,” I said.

“Then how do you explain the picture?” Hendricks asked. “I don’t know how Julian got that picture, but I do know this: Casa Rosada had come to suspect that Marisol was a spy for Vargas and that she was primarily trying to find information while working as a guide for the American consulate.”

I had briefly imagined Marisol in this cloak-and-dagger role, skulking in the shadows of the consulate, pressing her ears against a door or her eyes to a keyhole.

“Of course, that might only have been her cover,” Hendricks added.

He saw that I didn’t understand this.

“It’s called the double take,” Hendricks explained. “The agent allows herself to be revealed as a little, insignificant operative in order to conceal the fact that she is actually a very important one. So you have to look again. Hence, the double take.”

“But there’s no evidence that Marisol was . . .” My question trailed off.

“No, but there was an intelligence report on her,” Hendricks answered. “It didn’t say a lot, but it didn’t have to, because what it says emphatically just by existing is that Marisol was a person of considerable interest to Casa Rosada.” He shrugged. “As I’m sure you know, Buenos Aires was a nest of vipers in those days. On both sides, people were being tortured, killed. For most people in the world, politics is not a game.”

There was more than a hint of condescension in Hendricks’s last remark, the implication that in Argentina Julian and I were playing hopscotch in a torture chamber.

Hendricks placed his briefcase on the table. “Was Julian political?” he asked.

“Political,” I repeated. “Do you mean was he an idealist, some kind of an ideologue?”

“Those two are very different,” Hendricks said.

“In what way?”

“An idealist is a man with blinders,” Hendricks answered. “An ideologue is a man who’s blind.” He looked at me gravely. “Which was Julian?”

“I’m not sure he was either one,” I said. “I don’t think he had time to be before . . .”

“Before what?”

“Before Marisol disappeared,” I said. “And after that, as you know, he did nothing but look for her.”

Hendricks nodded. “Look for her, yes.”

Now his eyes gave off the sense of a man who’d seen too much and who regarded those who hadn’t as little more than children.

“Who did this friend of yours think he was, hmm?” he asked. “Some superhero? The type your father dreamed of being?” He looked at me as if the bloom of youth were still on my cheeks. “Grow up, please.”

He paused a moment, then leaned forward in a way that was decidedly avuncular.

“Do you know what real warriors say about a fictional creation like Rambo?” he asked. “That he would be dead in five minutes. But that during the course of those fateful five minutes, his bullshit heroics would kill every soul under his command.”

He watched me for a moment, like a man looking for a hidden motive; then he leaned forward and looked at me as though certain of one thing: that for all my privilege, all my expensive education, I could still stand another lesson.

“You cannot know a people if you do not share their pain,” he said, “and Julian knew nothing about what was going on in Argentina. He was just a tourist who happened to stick his toe into a river of blood.”

He drew an envelope from his briefcase.

“Be glad you’ve lived a cautious life, Philip,” he said. “Because the reckless die young.” The envelope slid toward me. “And they kill young, too.”

19

In literature, the unopened envelope occupies a privileged place. Most famous, perhaps, is the one Angel does not find in
Tess of the
d’Urbervilles,
and the lack of its discovery causes a deeper tragedy to unfold.

As I began to read it, I couldn’t help wonder if a further tragedy might also unfold in the report Hendricks had given me.

It was seventeen pages long. It had originally been written in Spanish, but Hendricks had gone to the trouble of having it translated.

The first pages were dully biographical. They recounted the date and place of Marisol’s birth, the deaths of her parents, her subsequent border crossings from Argentina to Paraguay, and her final settlement at age six, now an orphan, in the charge of Father Rodrigo, whose parish “presided over various charitable affairs within the region of Gran Chaco.”

On page 3, Marisol arrives in Buenos Aires. She is fourteen years old, the recipient of a small scholarship at a Catholic academy, one arranged by Father Rodrigo “as a result of her intelligence and ambition.” Marisol continues in this school for the next four years, chalking up impressive grades and glowing testimonials from the nuns, who find her dutiful, obedient, and “quick to take advantage of any opportunity to please.” She studies English more assiduously than any other subject.

On page 9, Marisol graduates from the academy, then begins to take courses at a vocational school that focuses on various aspects of what the report calls “clothing.” While at the school, she focuses on design.

To support herself, Marisol takes several jobs, all of the sort traditionally opened to the penniless. For a time she is a waitress, but she also serves as an usher at the opera house and as a clerk in its gift shop. She works as a tour guide at one of the city’s art museums. While working at the museum, her proficiency in English is noticed, and she makes a little extra money by leading English-speaking tours.

Throughout this time in her life, Marisol continues to take courses at the vocational school. In this way, she is like hundreds of other young women in the city. But now, and for the first time, something ominous appears in the report: “Subject makes contact with the American consulate in Buenos Aires and is employed as a guide.”

I knew that it did not take much to fall under the eye of the junta, but Marisol’s work as a guide struck me as so unlikely to yield useful information that it would hardly have been worth it for them to keep track of her, much less bother to kidnap and “disappear” her. I found no evidence that she’d made any effort to cozy up to any particular person, some high civilian or military official she might seduce, and from whom, during an evening of sex-hazed pillow talk, she might garner a bit of useful intelligence. In fact, she had never even served as a guide to anyone who could have been remotely considered a conduit for vital information.

The final two pages of the report provided both a chronology that succinctly recorded the previous events and a complete list of the people to whom Marisol had been recommended by the consulate, along with their professions, and their reasons for being in Argentina. Almost all of them were businessmen or people connected in one form or another to cultural exchange. Among the people for whom Marisol had served as a guide, there were no military personnel listed, no diplomats, no high officials from any government. Instead, Marisol appeared to have spent most of her time escorting members of various religious organizations who moved in steady caravans through whatever region was perceived rich in desperate souls, along with low-level representatives from a few small charities. It was such modest figures who made up Marisol’s list of clients, hardly the sort that might interest a spy.

So if she had indeed been a Montonero operative, what information had she brought to Vargas, I wondered, and from whom had she received it? The answer was that her information would have been of little value and she herself of little importance as a spy.

Such is what any Casa Rosada agent would have seen on first glancing at Marisol.

But what might he have seen, I wondered, if he’d done a double take?

The Skype screen flickered slightly, but I could see my father quite clearly. He was wearing a burgundy robe with a velvet lapel, and it struck me that he looked much more like some retired CIA chief than a lowly State Department functionary. Because of that, I wondered if he might sometimes still be captured by the Walter Mitty fantasies Hendricks had mentioned, a man who, in his private moments, assumed an imaginary role far more important than any he’d ever actually had.

“I spoke to your friend, Hendricks,” I told my father. “He thinks that Marisol might have been a Montonero operative of some sort.”

I half expected my father to laugh at this, but instead he only nodded.
“Well, it can be seductive,” he said. “The world of intrigue.”

I took him through the details of my talk with Hendricks, Casa Rosada’s suspicions that Marisol was a spy who had kept her ears open while working for the American consulate. Then I added the odder supposition that she might have been a far more important figure, her lowly guide job merely a mask.

“What might she have been?” he asked.

“She seems to have been associated with a very bad guy,” I said. “His name was Emilio Vargas. He was from the Chaco
,
like Marisol.”

My father didn’t seem at all surprised by what to me still seemed an outrageous conjecture.

“It’s easy to get caught up in a revolution,” he said in his most worldly tone. “It’s a very heady business. Especially for the young. You start to imagine yourself a Mao or a Lenin, the savior of your country.”

I recalled what Harry had said about Julian’s book on Chikatilo, how he’d gone to some lengths to detail the killer’s elaborate fantasies, the serial killer and sexual psychopath as savior of Mother Russia.

“It has a terrible allure, being part of a secret army,” my father added. “It’s possible that Marisol could have been swept into something like that. Youth is a minefield, after all. Even Julian was attracted to the idea of being a secret agent.”

This was true, of course. Even before our trip to Argentina, he mentioned “secret gears,” which I took to mean some sort of intelligence work. But he appeared to drop any interest in such a life after Argentina.

“What part of that sort of work interested him?” I asked.

“Deception,” my father answered matter-of-factly. “Disinformation, that sort of thing. Playing psychological games. He thought himself quite clever, you know.”

“Very clever, yes,” I said.

“He thought he would be best at winning someone’s confidence,” my father added. “Particularly in a one-on-one situation.”

I thought of the times I arrived at the exact time and place of rendezvous only to find Julian and Marisol already waiting for me, sitting at some little table, their glasses half-empty, so it was obvious that they’d been there for quite a while.

“Hendricks gave me the report Casa Rosada had on Marisol,” I said. “It makes it pretty clear that Marisol never had contact with anyone who would been of interest to the Montoneros while she worked as a guide for the American consulate.”

I stopped cold as the thought hit me, worked it through, then stated it.

“No one except for me, that is,” I told my father. “And Julian.”

“Why would the Montoneros have had any interest in you or Julian?” my father asked.

“Because we were connected to you, Dad,” I answered.

My father said nothing, but I could see his mind turning this over.

“We would have been the perfect targets, wouldn’t we?” I asked. “If Marisol had actually been a spy.”

“But how would she have known that you and Julian were connected to me?” my father asked.

“Well, for one thing, she heard Father Rodrigo mention you,” I answered. “And beyond that, I once heard Julian describe you as something of a mentor. As a matter of fact, he even suggested that you were a little higher up in the department than you were.”

“Did he?” my father asked softly.

“Yes, and I also remember him telling her about our house,” I added. “He described it pretty grandly, so she might have gotten the idea that you were quite powerful, the center of an influential circle.”

“How ironic,” my father said quietly. “Since I was never anything but—”

“Julian had a picture of Marisol with Emilio Vargas,” I interrupted. “Where would he have gotten it?”

“From someone in Casa Rosada, I suppose,” my father answered. He appeared to run a curious possibility through his mind. “He might have gotten it from my contact there.”

“You had a contact in Casa Rosada?” I asked, surprised that he’d even lightly touch such cloak-and-dagger operations.

“She was only a clerk,” my father added quickly. “She’s in her eighties now.”

“So no longer a Casa Rosada functionary, of course.”

“Not for many years,” my father said.

“Where is she now?”

“Why do you want to know that, Philip?”

“Because this contact of yours might have some idea of who Marisol was, what she was doing,” I answered. “She might know if any of this is true about her, that she was . . . a deceiver.”

My father drew in a long, slow breath. “She went back to Hungary,” he said. “You should be aware that hers was not a clean record. You’ve probably never heard of the Maros Street hospital massacre.”

It occurred in Budapest, he went on to tell me, a peculiarly monstrous incident during the last-ditch effort by the collaborationist Arrow Cross to annihilate the few Jews not yet deported from Hungary. Having taken control of the city in the wake of the retreating Germans, the men of the Arrow Cross Party went on a rampage, and among the victims were the most helpless of the city’s remaining Jews. The poorhouse on Alma Street was attacked, as well as the hospital on Városmajor. But it was the patients, doctors, and nurses at the Jewish hospital on Maros Street who suffered the full brunt of Arrow Cross cruelty, a full day of slaughter that included torture and murder.

“My contact played a part in it,” my father said at the end of this narrative. “She never denied this. At least that was to her credit.”

“What happened to her after she left Casa Rosada?”

“She returned to Budapest,” my father answered. “She got a job with the American consulate.”

“Her reward for being a spy?” I asked.

My father didn’t answer, but I saw the answer in his eyes, all the dirty little deals he’d known about but never approved of, the ratlines and secret bombings and clandestine overthrows.

“Do you know where she is?” I asked.

“She retired and moved into a small town in what is now Slovakia.”

I was surprised that my father knew this, as he could tell from my expression.

“We were . . . friends briefly,” he told me. “Your mother died long before.”

“I see,” I said.

“We met in a restaurant on one of my few trips to Buenos Aires,” he added. “Each time I went there, I saw her. It was never love.” He shrugged. “But she worked in Casa Rosada, and so I . . .”

“Played the secret agent?” I asked.

My father nodded with the sadness of one who had run out of fantasies, a Walter Mitty no longer inclined to daydream.

“Foolish,” he said softly. “It was all very foolish.”

For a moment he seemed lost in thought. Then, quite suddenly, like one who sensed himself rather under surveillance, he said, “Anyway, since she was my only contact, I sent Julian to her when he was looking for Marisol.”

“It was you who sent him to Casa Rosada?” I asked, surprised that he’d never mentioned this.

“It was a fool’s errand,” my father said. “But he seemed desperate to find this young woman. She’d gotten under his skin somehow. He was really quite determined. I thought my contact might help him solve the mystery of her disappearance.”

“Would she talk to me, this contact of yours?” I asked.

“I’m sure she would,” my father said. “For old times’ sake, as they say.”

“Who did this woman work for?”

“A colonel by the name of Ramírez,” my father answered. “Juan Ramírez. He ran a few of the junta’s
escuelitas
.”

He saw that I didn’t understand the word.

“The ‘little schools,’” my father said. “There were a great many of them in Argentina at that time. They were places where the enemies of Casa Rosada were taken to be reeducated. That is to say, where they were tortured.” He appeared to consider his next move with a strange seriousness. “I could write to her if you like. I’m sure she’d been willing to talk to you.”

“Yes, do that,” I said. “I’ll follow up with a letter of my own.” I reached for a paper and pen. “What’s her name, your contact?”

“Irene.”

“And her last name?”

“Jóság,” my father answered. “It’s Hungarian, of course. It means ‘goodness.’”

Goodness.

How bright a word, I would later realize, to have given so dark a new direction to my tale.