The Crime of Julian Wells

by Thomas H. Cook

  It was a failure that struck deep, all the more so given that his own forefathers had been robust men of affairs, both soldiers and diplomats. Portraits of those men now lined the walls of his apartment, men in uniforms and formal dress who with equal courage had faced bullets on the field and bullying at the negotiating table.

  Given the blighted nature of his career, I’d assumed that retirement would be a good thing for my father, but he hadn’t taken to it very well. Certainly, he had not wanted to move to New York, but the last of his old friends had died, and he’d been left alone in his Tidewater house. At last he’d acquiesced to my repeated entreaties for him to move north, where he could enjoy the many diversions of the city, along with the company of his son. Nor did he seem to regret this move, though there were times when the pall of loneliness came over him and he stared out at a skyline he probably found as foreign as the minarets of Cairo.

  “So how are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Good enough,” my father answered.

  I glanced at the array of pill containers that sprouted like sickly orange growths from the top of the small, wooden table beside my father’s chair. It’s not that we grow old, I thought, but that we grow old in decline and discomfort, and these hardships are made worse by the awareness that nothing will improve. No coming days will dawn brighter than the last that dawned, and this sorrow is further deepened by a fear of death—one that I could on occasion see in my father’s eyes. Those same eyes had some years before begun to fail, so he had given up reading spy novels and Westerns for watching movies of the same ilk, John Wayne and Gary Cooper the unlikely heroes of his waning years.

  “Loretta and I talked about Julian, of course,” I said. “She thought he was already planning his next book.”

  “Already at work on the next one?” my father asked. “I thought he’d just come back from Russia.”

  “He had, but rest was never Julian’s thing,” I said. “So, once he’d finished the book on Chikatilo, I suppose he just began to research the next one.”

  “Chikatilo?” my father asked. “Who is that?”

  “A Russian serial killer.”

  My father shook his head. “I don’t know how Julian lived with such people in his head.”

  “For some people, bad things are alluring, I suppose,” I said. “Chekhov went all the way to Sakhalin, and Robert Louis Stevenson—”

  “Well, it’s unhealthy, if you ask me,” my father interrupted with a quick wave of his hand. “Unhealthy to sink into that mire.” He leaned forward and massaged one of his knees. “I remember that first summer when Julian came to stay with us. We fished all day, remember?”

  I nodded. “Loretta stayed with an aunt that summer. In Chicago.”

  “But Julian came to Two Groves,” my father said. His spirit lifted on a memory. “We took long walks in the orchard.”

  It was a fine house, to say the least, set upon substantial acreage, but hardly the Tara of Gone with the Wind that its grand title suggested. Still, Julian had made considerable sport of Two Groves before his visit there. “We come from houses that have addresses,” he would tell some recent acquaintance, “but Philip here comes from TWO GROVES!”

  “Julian saved your life that summer,” my father added.

  I saw him dive cleanly into the water, then swim furiously toward me. I’d tried to swim too far and had exhausted myself. Had Julian not been there, I would most certainly have drowned. Over the years, my father had mentioned this incident many times. Julian, of course, never had.

  “Do you think he would have risen to the top at the State Department?” I asked.

  “Probably not,” my father answered. On that word, his mood abruptly soured. “Well, I should be off to bed now, Philip.”

  He rose with the help of a cane that was itself a part of his regalia, dark wood, with a brass eagle’s head grip. Using it, he stood very erect, and in that proud stance, made his way slowly across the room, I at his side, but careful not to extend my hand or offer any unnecessary physical support. That would come at some point, I knew, but not yet, and as long as my father could make his way without assistance, I let him do so.

  We were halfway down the corridor when he stopped and nodded toward a photograph of his father in his doughboy uniform.

  “Julian noticed that picture,” he said. “It was hanging in the library at Two Groves, and he asked me if my father had ever killed a man. I said he probably had, but that he’d been an artillery officer in the Great War, so he probably never saw the people he killed. I remember that Julian said he thought it must be quite different to kill close up, looking your victim directly in the eye.”

  “He described just that sort of close-up murder once,” I said. “It’s in The Tortures of Cuenca. He has a sister imagine the killing of her brother, how the murderer must have actually felt her brother’s dying breath. On his face, I mean. I remember the phrase he used. He called it ‘the last moist breath of life.’”

  “Moist,” my father whispered. “How would Julian have known that a last breath is moist?”

  He moved forward again before he stopped, turned back and looked at me, a glance that alerted me that I’d unaccountably remained behind.

  “Are you all right, Philip?” he asked.

  “Yes, why?” I asked.

  “You look odd, that’s all.”

  I shook my head. “Not at all,” I assured him. “I was just thinking of Julian, how deeply he sank into the crimes he described.”

  “Julian had a lot of feeling,” my father said, “but too much of it was morbid.”

  He turned and made his way into the bedroom, I now at this side. He was already in his pajamas, and so, after taking off his robe, he eased himself into the bed, all of this done without my assistance, but under my watchful eye.

  My mind was still on Julian. “He was like Mephistopheles,” I said. “He took hell with him wherever he went.”

  My father waved his hand by way of dismissing such literary notions. He had always been impatient with my bookish talk, bookish ways, bookish life, so different from the one he’d sought but never achieved.

  “It’s a pity about Julian,” he said softly and sadly. “No wife. No children. A wasted life in some ways.” He shook his head at the hopeless extent of that waste. “Darkness was the only thing he knew.”

  3

  A man is made by the questions he asks, and I found myself increasingly questioning my father’s statement regarding Julian, that he had known only darkness. For I could remember my friend in the bright days of his youth, when he’d gone full speed at life. Like my father, he’d wished to change the world for the better. He’d known about history’s many horrors, of course, but he hadn’t focused on them. Life had seemed manageable to him then, its evils visible because they were so large: poverty, oppression, and the like. It was against these forces he would take up arms, a young Quixote. He’d been naive, of course, but that had made him genuine. He’d known that he was good, and this had been enough to make him happy.

  When the best man you’d ever known, the one you’d loved the most, and of all the people you’d ever known, the one who’d had the greatest capacity for true achievement, when such a man later trudges to a pond, climbs into a boat, rows a hundred feet out into the water, rolls up his sleeves, and cuts his wrists, are you not called upon to ask what you might have said to him in that boat, how you might have saved him?

  And if you do not ask this question, are you not, yourself, imperiled?

  I would later consider the unsettling tremor I’d felt when I asked myself those very questions. It was as if I’d suddenly felt the bite of a blade, the warmth of my own blood now spilling down my arm.

  Outside the building, the doorman was leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette. “Rain’s stopped,” he said.

  I stepped from beneath the awning and looked into a quickly clearing sky. There were wisps of dispersing clouds, and here and there the flicker of a star, a rare sight in
Manhattan.

  “Yes, it’s quite nice now,” I said. “I think I’ll walk.”

  “They’ve already warned me,” the doorman whispered with a sly wink and something vaguely sneering in his voice.

  “Warned you?” I asked as if he’d just heard a sinister aside.

  “About me smoking,” the doorman explained. “The board don’t like it when I smoke.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  He laughed. “But I do it out in the open, so the union says I can smoke if I want to.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “Well, good night.”

  I walked to Broadway, then turned south, a route I’d taken many times, so the sights of this section of the world’s longest street were familiar to me. And yet I felt that something had been minutely altered, and that this change had occurred in some part of me that I’d thought impenetrable since my wife’s death, a wound I’d covered with a thick scar tissue that nothing had pierced until now.

  Clearly Julian’s death, the dread manner and heartbreaking loneliness of it, had opened me up both to questions and to memories, one of which came to me now.

  We were in Greece, where Julian had come across the case of Antonis Daglis, the otherwise nondescript truck driver who had murdered several prostitutes. For Julian, such ordinary murderers were of no interest. Tracing their crimes, he said one day while we drank ouzo in an Athens taverna, was like following a shark through murky waters, dully recording that it ate this fish, then that one. It was evil he was after, I could tell, some core twist in the scheme of things.

  In the end, Julian found nothing to write about in Greece, but while in the country, we wandered through various remote areas, notably the Mani. He was reading the great travel writer Patrick Fermor at the time, and one night, as we tented on a rocky cliff overlooking the Aegean, he told me about a funeral Fermor had attended in the same area. At the funeral, the dead man’s soul had been commended to the Virgin Mary in strict Christian fashion, but a coin had also been placed in his coffin as payment to Charon for ferrying the dead man’s soul across the Styx. To this incident Julian added a comment that now echoed through my mind: All excavations lead to hell.

  Had Julian been clawing toward some fiery pit during those last days in the sunroom? I wondered.

  This question, along with the memory that had just summoned it, added to the feeling of unease that was steadily gathering around me, and which I experienced as a shift in the axis of my life or, more precisely, as a faint, somewhat ghostly color added to a spectrum. It was as if Julian’s death now called my own life into question, threw it off balance, so that I had to confront the stark fact of how little I had known the man I thought I’d known the most.

  On that thought, another memory came to me, this time of Julian and me walking in Grosvenor Square in London. Julian had suddenly stopped and pointed up ahead. “That’s where Adlai Stevenson died,” he said.

  He went on to tell me that Stevenson had been strolling with an acquaintance at the time, feeling old, talking of the war. “How many secrets must have died with him,” Julian said.

  Had secrets died with Julian, too?

  I thought again of the agitation Loretta had noticed in him and that she’d previously described: Julian sleepless, pacing, a man who seemed not so much depressed as hounded. In every way, until that last moment, she told me, Julian had appeared less a man determined to die than one ceaselessly searching for a way to live.

  I reached Lincoln Center a few minutes later and, still curiously unready to go directly to my apartment, sat down on the rim of the circular fountain and watched as the last of those bound for the symphony or the theater made their way across the plaza. It was here I’d met Julian a week after we’d graduated from college. He’d already sent in an application to work at the State Department, and I’d expected him to tell me a little more about the ground-level job he hoped to get, but instead he said, “I want to go somewhere, Philip. Out of the country. And not Europe. Someplace that feels different.”

  “Where do you have in mind?”

  Without the slightest hesitation, he said, “Your father suggested Argentina. He said I should see a country where the political situation is dangerous. Get a feel for what it’s like to live in a place where everything is at risk.”

  I was, of course, aware that Argentina was still in the midst of very dark political repression, and for that reason, if for no other, it hadn’t been on my “must-see” list.

  “I’m not sure going to Argentina is a good thing,” I said. “Or even a safe one.”

  “Do you always want to play it safe, Philip?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Oh, come on,” Julian said. “You have a month before you start your job.”

  I remained unconvinced.

  “Philip, for God’s sake,” Julian said. “Don’t measure out your life in coffee spoons.”

  His allusion to poor, pathetic J. Alfred Prufrock was clearly meant to shock me into acquiescing to his idea of an Argentine adventure, but now, when I recalled that moment, it was Julian’s energy and self-confidence rather than my hesitation that struck me, the sense that he could walk through a hail of bullets and emerge unscathed. He was rather like Aiden Pyle in The Quiet American, young and inexperienced in anything beyond the well-ordered life of a privileged American. Julian Wells, conqueror of worlds, shielded by his many gifts, destined for greatness. Like his country, invulnerable.

  How quickly all that had changed. All of it. After Argentina.

  I knew that in a novel it would be a woman who caused this change. But Julian hadn’t fallen in love with the woman we’d met there. Even so, her sudden disappearance had turned our Argentine holiday into a bitter experience, one I’d long ago managed to put behind me, but which had lingered in Julian, so that over the years he often returned to it in our conversation. I thought of the map he’d laid on the little table in the sunroom. In his last hours had he been thinking of Argentina again?

  I rose from the fountain and made my way to my apartment.

  It was in a prewar building with high ceilings, one of the few such buildings whose upper floors still provided a view of Central Park. Once there, I dropped into a chair and let my gaze roam among the shelves of books that stood across from me until my attention was drawn to where Julian’s books were arranged chronologically, beginning with The Tortures of Cuenca.

  I drew the book from the shelf, opened it, and read the book’s dedication: For Philip, sole witness to my crime.

  The “crime,” I always thought, was Julian’s decision to write about what had happened in Cuenca, an effort I disparaged at the time because I could see no need to retell a story already well known. It would be a crime to waste his time on such a book, I told him, advice he’d obviously not taken, and of which his dedication had been meant to remind me.

  I’d read this dedication many times, of course, always with a knowing smile, but now it returned me to the brief few days Julian and I had spent together in Cuenca. We’d met in Madrid, where Julian had been living, doing odd jobs, picking up the first of his many languages. We’d then driven around Spain for several days before reaching the town. Our month in Argentina was more than a year behind us by then, but Julian was still laboring under the effects of what he’d experienced there, all of which I’d expected to dissipate in time.

  We’d arrived at Cuenca about midday, strolled the town’s streets, then taken a table at a small café on the village square. Though a matter of dark renown in Spain, neither of us had ever heard of the crime that had occurred there some seventy years before. As I later discovered, it was briefly mentioned in the guidebook I’d bought in the airport before leaving New York, a book I’d intended to read on the flight but hadn’t. In any event, an English-speaking former magistrate had given us the details, an old man who’d claimed to have seen the actual figures in the story—the guards, the prisoners, even the prosecutor.

  “No one thought anything about the crime of C
uenca,” he said. “I mean, that it would take so strange a turn.”

  The old man had then gone through the details of what had happened there, a story he told quite well but from which he drew a somewhat banal conclusion.

  “So you see, it’s quite possible for a person to disappear,” he said.

  I glanced at Julian and saw that he was deep in thought. “Yes,” he said quietly, “It’s quite possible.”

  The old man glanced about the village square, his gaze captured by a group of unruly teenagers, all of them speaking in loud voices, heedless of the disturbance they caused.

  “Vivíamos mejor cuando vivía Franco,” he said, almost to himself, reverting to Spanish. “We lived better when Franco lived.” With that he rose, bid us a polite good-bye, and left.

  Seconds later, I noticed that Julian’s attention was focused on two Guardia Civil lounging at the entrance to one of the town’s official buildings, tall and dark, wearing their curiously winged black caps. It was such men as these who’d carried out the tortures of Cuenca, and for a moment Julian simply stared at them quietly.

  Then, quite suddenly, a thought appeared to seize him.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  We paid the bill, then rose, and moved along the town’s dusty streets. The evening shade was descending, the first lights coming on.

  “Someone once said to me that it’s not what a man feels before he first wields the whip,” Julian said as we closed in on the road that let out of the town, “it’s what he feels after it.” He stopped and looked at me. “But it’s really what the person being whipped feels that matters. Guilt is a luxury, Philip.”