The Crime of Julian Wells

by Thomas H. Cook

  That would be me, I thought, as I slouched, minus the revolver, in a distant corner and silently watched the regulars at Le Chapeau Noir.

  René had told me that the place was dead until around midnight, so I’d dutifully showed up at just after twelve. By then, a few of the tables were taken, though hardly by the throng of shady characters I’d anticipated. True, the majority of the customers were foreigners, just as René had described, but of these, only a few looked like thieves or black marketers. There were a few Algerians, but they were off by themselves, closely huddled around a small table. A tight group of East Indians had claimed the far end of the bar, their eyes glancing about rather nervously, though it was unclear whether it was the police or the Algerians they feared. The rest were French or Eastern Europeans, though at one point I thought I heard a bit of German.

  Le Chapeau Noir was, of course, a thoroughly landlocked bar, and yet something about it had the moldering dankness of a harbor. I might have thought of Marseille or Naples, but for some reason—perhaps it was the presence of those few North Africans—I found myself associating it in full literary fashion with ancient Cádiz, known by the Phoenicians, an immemorial coastal trading post, populated by every kind of adventurer and deserter, safe haven for the criminal flotsam of two continents; perhaps in all the world, the first true city of intrigue.

  I’d come here in hopes of encountering the priest with whom Julian had often been seen in what René called—with his usual melodrama and showy English—“dark conclave.” With a little probing, René had gone on to describe the man and even volunteered to accompany me to the bar, for which I thanked him but declined. I needed to be alone, I thought, to experience Le Chapeau Noir in the solitary way I assumed Julian must first have encountered it. I suppose that I’d come to feel that I needed to see what Julian had seen, talk to the people he’d talked to, go where he’d gone, become him in the way he sought to become the great criminals he studied. Such a route is always dangerous, of course, like shooting the rapids of another’s neural pathways. And yet, step by step, I’d come to feel myself drawn—perhaps lured—deeper and deeper into Julian’s mind and character. It was as if I were once again following him into the caves we’d sometimes explored in the hills around Two Groves, Julian always in the lead, beckoning me forward with an “Oh, come on, Philip, what’s to fear?” I dragging reluctantly behind him, refusing to give the answer that came to me: “Everything.”

  Suddenly I felt that I was once again trailing after him in just that way, going deeper and into yet more narrow spaces, caverns that were dark and cramped and airless, and in that way not unlike Le Chapeau Noir.

  No one spoke to me, of course, but that hardly mattered, because my French was very bad, and so it would have been impossible for me to have a conversation with any of the bar’s clientele, save to inform them that “le plume est sur la table.”

  Even so, I felt that my nights at Le Chapeau Noir provided a feeling for the dispossessed that was akin to Julian’s. For there was something about this bar that gave off an aura of precious things irretrievably lost. For some it had been a homeland, for others, a political ideal. For yet others, it was some romantic dream the intransigent facts of life had indefinitely deferred.

  Without telling me, René had been more practical in his research, and he had located the priest Julian had sometimes spoken with at Le Chapeau Noir, a man who had recently been detained for what René called “a document problem.” He was now at liberty, however, and René assured me that he would appear at the bar the following night.

  And so he did.

  After talking with my father, I’d actually entertained the faint hope that this priest might be Father Rodrigo, a hope encouraged by René’s description of an old man with leathery brown skin, very thin, quite stooped. Such a person might turn out to be Marisol’s beloved priest, now in his eighties, and perhaps, if my father’s vague suggestion turned out to be true, still withdrawing modest sums from God knows how much Montonero money. I imagined him as essentially unchanged, except physically, and therefore, with secular communism now in tatters, still dreamily devoted to some Christian version of the same radical, and to my mind naive, egalitarianism.

  But the man I met at Le Chapeau Noir that evening was considerably younger than Rodrigo would have been. He was shorter than Rodrigo, too, and a tad rounder, with dark skin and black hair that had thinned a great deal and which he parted on the left side just above his ear.

  “Ah, so you are a friend of Julian,” he said as I approached him.

  His accent was predominately Spanish, though there were hints of other lands, which gave the impression that he’d lived somewhat nomadically, his speech now marked with the fingerprints of his travels.

  “When I met him, he had just returned from Bretagne,” the man said.

  He offered a smile that was rather rueful and suggested that his journey through life had been a difficult one, a smile that ran counter to his eyes.

  “Julian noticed that I was drinking Malbec, the wine of Argentina,” the man said. “He came to me and introduced himself.” He thrust out his hand. “I am Eduardo.”

  “Philip Anders,” I said, hoping to elicit Eduardo’s last name.

  He did not respond, however, and we took our seats at a small table near the back of the bar, Eduardo quick to position himself with his back to the wall, clearly a man long accustomed to keeping an eye on both the front door and the exits.

  “We talked first of Cuenca,” Eduardo said. “Julian had spent much time in that part of Spain.” His smile was quite warm, but that warmth ran counter to what he said next. “Years before, when I was young and angry, I had gone to Cuenca to kill a man. He had wronged my sister in Zaragoza. He brought drugs into her life, and they killed her. Everywhere he spread this poison. Pity another’s knife found his heart before mine could. I wanted my face to be the last he saw.” He waved to the barman and ordered a bottle of wine, though not a Malbec. When it came, he poured each of us a round, then lifted his glass. “Do you know the fascist toast?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “It comes from the Spanish Civil War,” Eduardo said. “It was first made in Salamanca. Imagine that? Spain’s ancient seat of learning. In the presence of Miguel de Unamuno, our country’s greatest philosopher. Made by a one-eyed, one-armed general of Franco’s army.” He touched his glass to mine. “Long live death.”

  It was not a pleasing toast, but I drank to it anyway.

  “He was an interesting man, Julian,” Eduardo said as he set down his drink. “I enjoyed very much talking to him.”

  “What did you talk about?” I asked.

  Eduardo smiled. “Many things. Julian was very learned. He had read a great deal. But, at the time, he was mostly thinking about evil women.”

  I thought of the evil women Julian had written about: La Meffraye, Countess Báthory.

  “Yes,” I said, “he wrote about such women.”

  “This he did, yes, but the one he spoke of most, this woman he never wrote about,” Eduardo said. “But he was much interested in her and often he spoke of this woman.”

  “Who?”

  “Her name was Ilse Grese.”

  When he saw that I’d never heard the name he said, “She was a guard at Ravensbrück.”

  “The concentration camp?”

  Eduardo nodded. “Yes.”

  Irma Ida Ilse Grese, I found out later, was born in Wrechen, Germany, in 1923. Her father was a dairy worker who joined the Nazi Party early and, presumably, passed his political views on to his young daughter. At fifteen, she quit school as a result of poor grades and because she’d been bullied, particularly for her already fanatical devotion to the League of German Girls, a Nazi youth organization. After leaving school, she worked as an assistant nurse at an SS sanatorium. Later, she tried to apprentice as a nurse but was blocked by the German Labor Exchange, so she worked as a shop girl for a time, then drifted through a series of lowly agricultural jobs until s
he found her true calling as a guard, first at Ravensbrück, then at Auschwitz, where, given more power than a lowly milkmaid could ever imagine, she added her own peculiar heat to that hell.

  “She was very cruel, this woman,” Eduardo went on to say. “Julian told me of the many terrible things she did. How she wore heavy boots and carried a riding crop. She starved her dogs until they were crazed with hunger, he said, and then she set them on her prisoners. She enjoyed their pain. A true monster, this woman.”

  “Why did he never write about her?” I asked.

  Eduardo shrugged. “Perhaps she was too simple. He said that she was just a thug. It was the other one who had captured him by then. The one he called ‘The Terror.’”

  Her real name was Perrine Martin, but she was known as La Meffraye, which in French means “the terror.” Julian described her as being an old woman and longtime assistant to the serial killer Gilles de Rais. In his service, she proved herself very adept at procuring young children, despite her vaguely sinister clothing—a long gray robe with a black hood. Her actual involvement in the many murders recounted in Gilles’s trial was, according to Julian’s book, perhaps as much dark fairy tale as truth, but his writing suggested that she possessed demonic qualities well beyond her crimes—chief among them, I remembered now, was her capacity for deception.

  Still, it was for murder that she was arrested and to which she later confessed, giving some of the most graphic and horrifying testimony of Gilles de Rais’s trial. After that, she was imprisoned in Nantes, where, presumably at a very old age, she died. Thus her story ended, at least as far as Julian had followed it in his book.

  “This woman who was a terror,” Eduardo said, “Julian had a big interest in her.”

  “He did, yes,” I agreed. “But in the book he sometimes seemed less concerned with her crimes than in the clever way she disguised herself.”

  Eduardo laughed. “A nice old grandmother, yes. You are right, it was in this that Julian found her true evil. This is what he said to me. Before the crime, there was the disguise.”

  “Disguise,” I repeated softly, and with that word recalled something Julian had written in his book on La Meffraye, the telling phrase he’d used, how the woman’s kindness, simplicity, devotion, and humility were nothing more than serrated notches in the blade she held.

  Eduardo seemed to glimpse the dark and unsettling recollection that had suddenly come into my mind. “It sometimes caused me to wonder if perhaps someone had deceived Julian in his youth,” he said. “Could this be so? Was there such a one?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said, then added what seemed to me an ever-deepening truth. “But I suppose there’s a lot about Julian that I don’t know.”

  We talked on for a time, and as we did, it became clear that Julian had shared a great deal with Eduardo: his early life, his father’s death, the great emptiness he’d felt at this loss, and how, from then on, he believed that to kill a father was to a kill a son. He had also related a few stories about his travels with Loretta and his days at Two Groves.

  By then I’d learned a few things about Eduardo, as well, most notably that he had never been a priest but had used that disguise, along with false papers, to move more or less undetected throughout Europe. Those movements had interested Julian, he said, and he had questioned him about them quite relentlessly. It was during those conversations that Eduardo had inquired about Julian’s earliest travels. In response, Julian had first described the happy journeys he’d taken with his father and Loretta; then, quite reluctantly, according to Eduardo, he had at last spoken of Argentina.

  “It was not a happy place for Julian,” Eduardo told me. “He told me that Buenos Aires was a place that swarmed with agents and secret agents.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “The Dirty War was still going on when we were there.”

  Eduardo nodded. “Julian said a bad thing happened there. It was to a woman he knew.”

  “Our guide, yes,” I said. “While we were in Buenos Aires, she disappeared. She was never found.”

  “And Julian loved this woman?” Eduardo answered.

  “No,” I answered. “At least not romantically. But he cared for her.”

  Eduardo looked puzzled. “Then there was perhaps another woman in his life?”

  “Not one he ever spoke of,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because Julian seemed like a man betrayed,” Eduardo said.

  “In what way?” I asked.

  “In the way of one who cannot forget his betrayal,” Eduardo said. “For most men, it is a woman who leaves this stain. Perhaps this was not so with Julian.”

  He was silent for a moment, clearly thinking of Julian. At last he said, “Julian told me that on the walls of Russian prison cells, the prisoners of the gulag had written one word more than any other. It was not what you would expect it to be, this word. It was not mother or father or God.” He seemed once again to be with my old friend, peering into the gravity of his face. “It was zachem.”

  “What does zachem mean?” I asked.

  “It means ‘why.’” Eduardo answered. His gaze became quite quizzical, but with a somberness that deepened it. “I think this was written also in Julian’s mind. And that it was written there by betrayal.”

  14

  Later that night, sleepless in my bed, I remembered Julian during our flight to Buenos Aires, how boyishly excited he was at the time, and how different from the man he later became, isolated and reclusive, the habitué of a Pigalle bar, talking of evil women who brilliantly disguised their vile crimes, with zachem, as Eduardo said, somehow carved into his mind.

  Now, recalling the eerie sensation I felt at his mention of this word, I remembered my first meeting with Julian after he returned from France with the completed manuscript of The Terror and, in particular, a remark he made during our conversation, the fact that he considered deception to be life’s cruelest act. El Cepa had deceived his neighbors into believing he was dead. The German soldiers had deceived the villagers of Oradour into believing they were only to have their identities checked. La Meffraye had deceived the children she brought to Gilles de Rais for slaughter.

  “So is that your theme, Julian?” I asked him. “Deception?”

  I sensed a defensive hardening within him at that moment, a wall going up. He glanced about and looked at his hands before he said, “I often think of something Thoreau wrote, that although children kill frogs in play, the frogs die in earnest.”

  Odd though this remark was, it seemed like an opening up, a chance to speak of whatever was so clearly troubling him, but in a moment of supreme insensitivity, I became pedantic.

  “Thoreau took that from Plutarch,” I told him in a little show of erudition, “who took it from Bion.”

  Julian nodded. “We’re all thieves, I suppose,” he said. “Spies and secret agents.”

  “Magicians of manipulation,” René said the next morning when we had breakfast together in the hotel dining room. “That’s what Julian called spies and secret agents.”

  “He told Eduardo that Buenos Aires had been full of such people when we were there,” I said. “Which it probably was, though Julian couldn’t have known much about such things.”

  “Then why does what he said trouble you?” René asked. “I can see that it does.”

  And he was right. Even now, I suddenly felt a twinge of uneasiness, the sense that I could no longer be certain of what Julian had or had not known about anything.

  “It troubles me because Julian seems to have believed that he was betrayed at some point in his life,” I said. “At least that’s what Eduardo told me. And he seemed quite sure of it.”

  I related the memory that had returned to me the night before, the vaguely enigmatic conversation I’d had with Julian the day he turned in the manuscript of The Terror, how troubled he looked when he talked briefly about deception as the chief of crimes, the way it seemed to open the door into some darker room.

  “He nev
er worked on a book about spies, did he?” I asked. “I mean, for all his talk about spies and agents, he never wrote about them.”

  “No, he didn’t,” René said. He lit his usual after-breakfast cigarette. “I think he was not so much interested in spies. But, as you say, perhaps in disguise he was interested. We spoke of this from time to time. Deception was something I knew about from my time in Algiers. They were great deceivers, those terrorists in Algeria. I told Julian this. They passed codes during prayers, reciting the Koran but making a mistake. The mistake was the code.” He laughed. “And sometimes even their ailments they used as code. A stomach problem was a man who got scared and had to drop out of a plot. A headache was a new development or maybe some technical matter that had to be figured out before those fucking bastards could blow up the next building or shoot the next policemen.”

  He laughed. “Half the time, it seemed like child’s play.”

  “Child’s play,” I repeated, struck by the fact that so dangerous an endeavor could be thought of in such a way.

  René took a long draw on his cigarette. “Child’s play, yes,” he said. “Julian knew this. He even spoke of Mata Hari in this way. That she was just a woman playing a game. Until they shot her, of course. He said once, ‘But it is no longer a game when the bullet strikes.’” He looked at me quite starkly. “Julian believed they do many horrible things, the ones who don’t grow up. Not to grow up, he said, was a kind of crime.”

  “What did he mean by that?”

  René crushed out his cigarette with a violence that seemed to come from something deep within him. “We were talking about Algeria, those girls who planted bombs. I say to him, they were like kids in a playground, those terrorists. Only throwing bombs instead of balls.”