The Crime of Julian Wells (17 page)

27

Our meeting with Hernando Vilario was not scheduled until the day after our arrival at Iguazú, 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 after­noon. We’d stayed in Iguazú a couple of days, then returned to the capital.

A good deal had changed at Iguazú 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 Iguazú 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.

28

The road to El Árabe led out of the bustling little town that bordered Iguazú 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.

I was busily going on about this when Loretta finally stopped me.

“Julian said something about goodness,” she told me. “I hadn’t thought of it before, but it was actually the last thing he said to me.”

She had gone down to the sunroom, where she found him in his chair, with the map of South America spread open on his lap. She asked him what he was doing and he said that he was remembering a place where he learned something about evil.

He had a pen in his hand, she said, the point touching the map, where, as she later saw, he’d circled the village of Clara Vista.

She asked him what it was that he had learned. His answer was surprisingly simple, though ultimately unrevealing. “That goodness is evil’s best disguise,” he said and added nothing else.

“Goodness is evil’s best disguise,” I repeated as we moved ever deeper into the Paraguayan jungle from which El Árabe had made his many cruel pronouncements. I found myself imagining that his house was similar to the ravaged abode of Mr. Kurtz, surrounded by a fence of bare wooden poles topped with dried-out human heads.

El Árabe’s home was not emblematic of the dead soul who lived inside it, however. In fact, it looked more like a small woodland cottage of the sort one might see in more temperate climates. The vines that would otherwise have hung like thick green drapery from the roof had been cut back, and no vegetation crawled up the walls or slithered up the supporting posts of the side porch. For this reason, the cottage appeared curiously European in the way that any sense of wildness had been clipped away.

I could see three wicker chairs and a brightly colored hammock that took up almost the entire width of the porch. The windows were large, and their orange shutters were open; inside I could see unexpectedly feminine curtains, white and lacy, softly undulating in the warm, lazy air.

The house itself was built from concrete blocks, painted to a glossy sheen. There was no front porch, just an earthen walkway leading to a door bordered by an assortment of plants potted in identical terra-cotta pots. A short storm fence stretched around the back of the house. Over the fence, I could see an old woman busy at a clothesline, hanging T-shirts, jeans, and a few oversized dresses with large floral patterns of the type I’d seen on the women in the town.

I glanced toward the front of the house. So the moment has come, I thought. I looked at Loretta. “Ready?”

She nodded. “Ready.”

And thus did we close in upon the Inner Station.

We had gotten only halfway up the dirt walkway that led to the house when the door suddenly swung open and a short, round man stepped out into the bright sun. He was perhaps seventy years old, but with jet black hair, quite obviously dyed, combed straight back and glinting in the sunlight.

“So the Eagle has landed,” he said with a laugh.

He was wearing light blue Bermuda shorts and no shirt, and his nearly hairless belly shook with quick spasms as he laughed. “Welcome to my house. As we say, and I hear often said also in the American movies, ‘
Mi casa es su casa
.’”

With that, El Árabe thrust out his large hand. “I am a great fan of American movies and John Wayne. Come, you will see.” He stepped aside and waved us in. “Please, come, come. I will have my housekeeper make drinks for us. You like mai tai? Margarita?”

I could not imagine having a drink with this man, and yet I could find no way to refuse it. He was my last contact, the end of the line, and if I learned nothing further, I could go no further.

“Whatever you have,” I said, and glanced at Loretta.

“Yes,” she said with a quick smile. “Whatever you have.”

“Ah, good, we shall have drinks, then,” El Árabe said as if he was certain we would refuse them and now felt relieved that we hadn’t. He walked to the window and called out to the old woman in the back, “
Vaya. Los invitados quieren algo de tomar. Margaritas para todos, por favor.
With that he turned back to us. “She is slow, poor thing,” he added sorrowfully. “But in time the drinks will come.” He swept his arm out toward an adjoining veranda. “Out there it is cool. We sit and talk and wait forever for the drinks.” He laughed heartily. “You like my house?”

The living room was small, and El Árabe had decorated its walls with pictures not only of John Wayne but perhaps twenty other American movie stars, their studio photographs in cheap plastic frames. I caught Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Alan Ladd, and John Wayne as I made my way outside.

“No women,” I said to him as I stepped out onto the veranda. “I would have expected, say, Veronica Lake or Ava Gardner.”

El Árabe waved his hand. “I am a man of action,” he said with another broad laugh. “I admire other such men. Men with, what do you call it, the steely stare.” He laughed again. “I would wish to be the strong silent type. The Gary Cooper. But, as you see, I talk too much.” He grinned impishly. “And I am not tall.” He indicated the wicker chairs. “Please, rest. It is a long way from Buenos Aires. Did you fly?”

“Yes,” I answered. “But once in Iguazú, we rented a car.”

“Iguazú, yes,” El Árabe said. “So not a long drive this morning. Was it easy to find your way?”

“There aren’t many roads, so it’s hard to get lost,” I said.

“Not many roads,” El Árabe said. “Not like in America, with the many, many highways.”

“No, not like America,” I said.

Out of the blue, El Árabe asked. “So, my English is good, no?”

“It’s very good,” I told him.

“From the American movies,” El Árabe said. “I watched them when I was a kid. I still watch them. I like to practice all the time my English. But here it is hard. Here there is nothing. I am surrounded by such ignorant ones. They vote always for the Reds.” He leaned back slightly. “Do you speak Spanish?”

“I’m afraid not,” I answered.

His gaze slid over to Loretta. “And you, señora?”

“Only enough to get by,” Loretta said. “My brother spoke it quite well.”

“Your brother, yes,” El Árabe said. “You have come to speak of him. I understand this from Leon. He has died, your brother.”

“Yes,” Loretta said.

“So young,” El Árabe said sympathetically. “Unusual in America. But here, they die like flies. We know death. We know pain. It is never far from us. At night we hear its voice in the undergrowth. There is much devouring one of the other here.” He turned to Loretta. “As your brother knew.”

El Árabe looked like an actor who’d blown a line, and who, in doing so, had skipped ahead in the play, dropping five pages from the script and thus arriving too early at a place too far along.

“Margaritas!” he called, and looked back at us. “She is slow, as I said. But she is good at the few little things she does. In Buenos Aires, they would not tolerate so slow a servant. But here, time has almost stopped, and we move slowly, like the sun.” His grin was rapier thin. “I am also philosopher. I have many thoughts. But no one wishes to hear them.” He laughed. “The world would have to change too much to give me honors. El Árabe is despised. El Árabe is a murderer, a rapist, a torturer.” For the second time, his gaze hardened. “But who did I do these things to, eh? I will tell you. To people who would have done the same to me, to you.” He waved his hand. “Even now, they wear the T-shirts with the face of Che. Who was a murderer, this famous Che, with the movie-star face and the movie-star fame, a man who would have caused the deaths of millions.”

He didn’t wait for this to settle in before he surged on, his eyes fiercely widening as he continued. “And you have read what Castro said to Khrushchev?” His gaze leaped from me to Loretta, then back to me. “You have read this? During the crisis with Cuba? With the missiles? He told that fat old Russian to kill all the Americans. To drop all the bombs. He said he would sacrifice Cuba for such an annihilation.”

He shook his head at the monstrousness of it. “I am what you call ‘small potatoes’ compared to this one who would have killed millions. As Stalin did. And Mao.” He thumped his chest. “I, El Árabe, was never such a killer as these two Reds.”

It would have been a passionate attack on ideological extremism had El Árabe’s own hideous acts not been equally extreme, but I felt it prudent to say nothing about this.

“I gather that you know why we’ve come here,” I said.

El Árabe nodded, then looked at Loretta. “Leon told me about your brother. He said you believed he was perhaps going to write about me in his next book.”

“Perhaps,” Loretta said. “Just before he died, he took out a map of Argentina. He had even circled the name of this village.”

This information seemed not to surprise El Árabe in the least.

“As you see, I am not hard to find,” he said. “I hide from no one. I wish only that those Reds who now stink up the halls of Casa Rosada do not cross the border.” He pointed to an old hunting rifle that leaned against the far wall. “I would fight, but I have nothing but this—what do you call it?—this . . . popgun. Even so, they do not come. Even so, they fear me. Do you know why? Because I know their secrets, these men at Casa Rosada. I know they are not so holy as they say they are. They know my crimes because I have not hidden them. But I know the crimes they hide.”

He smiled in the way of one who could easily prove his point. “Guilt makes men tired and skinny.” He patted his full belly. “I have no such problem.”

A rattle of pots and pans came from the other room.

El Árabe shook his head. “It is hard to think with such commotion,” he said.

I glanced toward the kitchen, where I could see the woman stumbling about, her hands shaking violently.

“She probably has Parkinson’s disease,” I said. “Or something like it.”

El Árabe waved his hand; then his eyes shot over to Loretta. “Your brother had come to me before. Back in the old days. He was looking for a girl. He thought I might know where she was.” He stopped and stared at me sullenly and with such a sense of volcanic violence that I felt a cold streak of genuine fear.

Now he burst into a raucous laugh.

“See what I can do?” he asked. “An old man, and I can still fill a heart with fear.” He laughed again, a great, self-satisfied laugh that shook his belly violently. “With this look, too,” he said and seemed to clamp down upon me with his eyes, so that I felt like little more than a small animal in a steel trap. “This one could really shut them up. Even when they were screaming, it would shut them up.”

He laughed again, and quite suddenly his entire demeanor changed. It was as if a cloud had parted to reveal a wholly different person, one whose every aspect had been clothed in shadow but which now became clear in the light.

“Shall I speak French to you, my American friends?” he asked in perfect English. “Should I speak German?”

The transformation continued, and all the earlier features of his disguise fell away; he was no longer the slick-haired thug but was what he immediately claimed to be.

“Better that I should speak the Spanish of Castile,” he said, “for I am Spanish, and this peasant patois I speak to such a one as that wretch in the kitchen is not my native tongue.”

“I see,” I said quietly.

“As Julian knew, a great spy must be a spy from birth,” El Árabe said. “He must have played a role all his life.”

He was now as refined a worldling as could be imagined in any novel of intrigue. All his boorishness and vulgarity had simply dropped away like pieces of an old costume. Beneath it, there was no swagger, no bravado. I could almost imagine him in evening dress, having brandy and a cigar in the staterooms of Madrid, exactly the sort of suave foreign agent my father had dreamed of being.

“It takes intelligence to play a buffoon, and I fooled them all. Even Julian was fooled by my disguise. But those days are gone and there is no need for me to play this trick.” His laugh was no longer of the belly-jerking sort but was now the soft chuckle of a man in his club. “Julian. You have come to speak of Julian. What a naive young man he was, looking for this girl.” Now his laughter turned cold and mirthless. “He came to me because the Reds had sent him. They had told him I was in charge of many evil things, and so I perhaps might know of this missing girl.” He cocked his head and glanced from one side to the other. “Shall I tell you about your friend, your brother?” he asked. “He was looking for this girl, but shall I tell you what he found?”

Warily I nodded, and Loretta whispered, “Yes, tell us.”

And so he did.