The Crime of Julian Wells (20 page)

“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 café, 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.”

He eased back into his chair and, with that movement, seemed to deflate.

“It’s a classic play, Philip,” he told me. “The trick is to make sure that the one you give up is as innocent as a child, one who can be devoured like Saturn devoured his children, without their ever knowing why.” He paused, then added, “That’s why, as a ploy, it’s called the Saturn Turn.”

These two little boys, my father and my best friend, had played a lethal trick, but Marisol had died in earnest.

“Julian never forgave himself,” I told my father “He was good in that way. He thought only of the consequences of his acts, never of their intention.”

“I hope you can forgive me, Philip,” my father said.

“I do,” I assured him. “But as Julian must have known, it’s Marisol who can’t.”

When he gave no response to this, I said, “But then it’s always like that, isn’t it? You said so yourself.”

I was surprised that I felt neither ire nor bitterness as I quoted him: “It’s always the little people, too small for us to see, the little, dusty people, who pay for our mistakes.”

I left him a few minutes later, expecting to face the night alone, but to my immense relief, I found Loretta waiting in the lobby of my building.

“It’s a lovely evening,” she said. “How about a walk through the park?”

We left the building and headed out into the night. She could see that I was shaken, but she asked no questions, and thus left it to me to decide when and where to speak.

We had already walked some distance into the park and taken a seat on one of its benches before I did.

“One night I came upon Julian and my father at Two Groves,” I began. “They were alone for a long time in the study. It was very late and I’d gone upstairs to bed. But later I came down again and
found them there, talking. They both looked rather surprised, and a little jarred, by my sudden appearance. They waved me in and
we all talked a while, and I went back up to bed soon after. But it was in their eyes, Loretta. Conspiracy.” I drew in an unsteady breath. “It was just a game,” I said, then in a sudden rush, I related everything that my father had just told me. “He and my father promised each other never to mention Argentina. Like little boys with their blood oaths. And so he never did.” I shrugged. “And I suppose that’s what he couldn’t bear any longer, the fact that he had this crime bottled up inside him and couldn’t release it.”

Loretta looked doubtful. “That’s why he never confessed? Because he promised your father?”

Her question stopped me cold. No, of course not, I thought. Julian would not have held to such a childish oath. Nor would my father have cared if he’d broken it. After all, my father had just confessed his own complicity in Julian’s crime.

So why had Julian never confessed, and why had he chosen death over that confession?

I recalled how, in light of his own father’s death, Julian said that a little boy required a hero, someone he could look up to, someone who could guide him. Later still, he had concealed the identities of the men who massacred the villages of Oradour. When I asked him why he’d done this, his answer was simple. What would be the good, he asked, of telling some little boy that on a particular day in a particular place his father had been complicit in a great crime?

Had I been that little boy?

“No, Julian didn’t confess because of me,” I said to Loretta. “He didn’t confess because I was still a little boy to him.”

Then I told her how I’d reached this conclusion, the fact that Julian must have been profoundly influenced by his own father’s death, how he must have come to think of my father as central to my life, how he’d known that he could not confess his crime without revealing my father’s complicity in it. He had protected me as he’d protected the children of the soldiers who massacred the villagers of Oradour. It was all of a piece, I told her.

At the end of this, Loretta simply stared at me doubtfully.

“It’s all too neat, Philip,” she said. “And it’s all too simple. That’s natural, of course, because when a man you love kills himself, you want it to be about one thing. Just one thing you could have changed. But for some people, it’s not one thing. It’s everything.” She looked at me pointedly. “Julian killed himself because he was like Marisol,” she told me, “the victim of a Saturn Turn.”

When she saw I didn’t understand this, she continued.

“His simple goodness turned on him,” she said. “Life used it against him in the same way Vargas used Marisol’s innocence against her.” She shrugged. “The meek never inherit the earth, Philip.”

I thought of poor, benighted Swaziland, Africa’s last kingdom. Julian had gone there some years before, then written an article about the conditions he’d found, how, while their king ordered fleets of luxury cars and flew about in a private jet, the people lay on their stomachs lapping water from fetid pools, picked chicken heads and pig’s feet from the dumping grounds of the nearest abattoir, and brought this muck back home to cook in battered pails—a people whose life expectancy was thirty-one. In the final passage of his essay, Julian had written of the red-dirt townships and the plywood shanties, the motionless pools of poisoned water, the mud hovels and rusty sheds, where life comes for the people of Swaziland, as it has always come for the truly innocent, “with a knife in its hand.”

As Loretta had now made it clear, that same life, fixed in a Saturnine gaze, had at last come for Julian.

“I don’t want to be alone tonight, Loretta,” I confessed.

If she’d had the smallest hesitation, the look in her eyes would have betrayed it. But I saw only that she’d grasped the full meaning of what I’d said.

“Perhaps not ever,” she said.

I knew that it was not an ending Jane Austen would have written, orchestrated by the peal of marriage bells, all happiness assured, but even so, I took Loretta’s hand.

“Perhaps not ever,” I repeated.

She smiled. “Do you know what you would have said to him if you’d been in the boat?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Not yet,” I told her.

But by the time we reached home, I did.

After

He folds the map and puts it on the table beside his chair. Beyond the window, he sees the flat gray waters of the pond. The boat, its yellow paint long faded, rests beneath a weeping birch.

He rises, walks to the window, and looks out.

In the distance, a small breeze rustles the leaves of the birch and skirts along the green lawn and gently rocks the purple irises that grow beside the water. He has seen so many grasses, so many flowers. The lavender fields of France, the cloudberries of the Urals with their little orange petals, the feather grasses of the pampas swaying like dancers.

He will miss these things.

He considers the act, then its consequences.

He will make it clean.

There will be no fuss.

He turns and gives a final glance at the map. He has studied so many maps. He thinks of the water bearers of the world, almost always women, hauling their jerry jars to the river or the lake. His mind is like those jars, worn and dusty, scarred by use, but still able to hold its heavy store of memory.

And yet there is something he forgot.

He walks to the small desk in the corner, opens the notebook, and tears out the top sheet. He folds it carefully, without hurry, then sinks it deep into his pocket.

It is disturbance you must look for, the old trackers told him. Not prints. Not trails. But disturbance in the spear grass, a sense of reeds askew. Those will lead you to the one you seek.

He looks about the room for any hint of such disturbance, finds none, and with that assurance, walks to the door, then passes through it, and moves out onto the lawn. He feels the breeze whose movement he had sensed before, cool upon his face, a pressure on his shirt, a gentle movement in his hair.

He hears a bird call, glances up, and sees a gull as it crosses the lower sky. When was it he first saw the sunbirds of the Sudan, their sun-streaked, iridescent feathers?

He shakes his head. It doesn’t matter now.

He draws down his gaze and with a steady stride makes his way to the boat. It is heavy, and he has been weakened, though less by his final work than by this final decision.

But the decision has been made.

The boat is weighty but he pulls it into the water. What was the lightest he ever knew? Oh yes, it was made of bulrushes. And what was the other word for bulrushes? Oh yes, it was
tule.

The boat rocks violently as he climbs in, but he rights himself, grabs an oar, and pushes out into the water.

How far to go?

The center of the pond. Far enough that he will appear small and indistinct in the distance so that she cannot tell what he is doing, nor get to him before he can complete the task.

Seventy feet from shore now. Perhaps eighty. He has not rowed in a long time. Even now his arms are aching. But that will be over soon. He knows that he has grown weak in the Russian wastes, but he is surprised by just how weak he is. Or has his secret always worked upon him like a withering disease?

One hundred feet out from shore.

Enough.

He takes the paper from his pocket, unfolds it, and reads what he has written.

“It’s your final dark conclusion, isn’t it?” I ask. “And it was going to be the first line of your next book.”

He turns to face me. His features bear the mark of life’s many cruel tricks.

“Because there is no answer to our
zachem,
” I add.

He nods.

“Write it,” I tell him softly. “Go home and write it.”

He remains silent, still.

“The world has plenty of noise, Julian, but not many voices.”

He watches me steadily.

“And because there are so few, each one matters.”

I lean toward him, hoping for more persuasive words. When none comes to me, I shrug. “That’s my argument. The simple fact that we need people who remind us of the darkness.”

His smile is slight and, like everything else, difficult to read, impossible to know.

“That is your job, Julian,” I add. “And you need to do it.”

With a curiously resolved movement, the renewal of some almost vanished strength, Julian returns the paper to his pocket and once again takes up the oars. I know, because I know him, that he is thinking of his book.

The wind touches the far trees. On the near bank, a dragonfly shoots over the still waters.

I follow the soft beat of the oars.

Second by second, the house grows nearer.

Even so, I cannot be sure that he will make it home.

For life, as Julian knew and his life and words and crime declared, is, at last, a Saturn Turn.