The Crime of Julian Wells by Thomas H. Cook Page A

writing of the book, which I’d advised against. But now, I’m not so sure that that’s the ‘crime’ Julian meant.”
    This last remark clearly connected to something in Loretta’s mind.
    “You know, it’s strange, but for all the dreadful acts Julian wrote about, I don’t think he ever witnessed a crime of any sort.” Her gaze drifted over to one of the great gray stones of the park, children scooting down its smoothly rounded surface. “I wonder how he would have reacted if he’d ever actually seen an atrocity like the one at Oradour.” She looked at me. “Psychologically, he might not have been able to survive it. Primo Levi killed himself, remember? Tadeusz Borowski, too.”
    “But they were the victims of a great crime,” I reminded her. “Not people who had done some awful thing. They didn’t die of guilt. They died because they were unable to bear the suffering they’d seen.”
    “Well, Julian had certainly seen plenty of suffering,” Loretta said. “But I don’t think that was the source of his agitation.”
    “Then what was?” I asked.
    Loretta remained silent for a time, thinking something through. Then she said, “Julian and I were sitting in the yard at Montauk a few days before he died. I looked over at him. Looked closely at his face. There were these deep lines. And his eyes looked sunken. I said, ‘You know, Julian, the crimes you’ve written about are carved into your face.’”
    Loretta was right. Julian’s features did seem to bear the imprint of Cuenca and Oradour, the castle ruins of Brittany and C  achtice, the bleak wastes of the Ukraine.
    “His response was strange,” Loretta said. “He said, ‘No, only the one I’ll never write about.’”
    As if once again on that rainy street, I saw Julian turn up his collar, pull down his hat, and wave me under the awning of a small store on Avenida de la Republique . He’d grasped my arm fiercely, then asked if I’d heard from Marisol.”
    “Do you suppose it could have been Marisol’s disappearance?” I asked. “I mean, he was looking at a map of Argentina, after all.”
    “I suppose that could have been the crime,” Loretta said.
    “But what would keep him from writing about that?” I asked.
    Loretta’s look reminded me of a fictional detective in some old noir classic.
    “Did Julian love her?” she asked.
    “No,” I answered. “He cared for her, certainly. But he didn’t fall in love with her.”
    “Did you?”
    “No,” I said.
    With that answer, I heard Marisol’s voice again: Our time on earth is divvied out like stolen things, a booty of nights and days.
    “But there was something compelling about her,” I added.
    “That Julian saw?”
    “Yes, of course,” I said. “And he did everything he could to find her. But people simply vanished in those days.”
    Vanished, yes, I thought, but why had she vanished? For me, this had always been the mysterious part of Marisol’s disappearance, that it had remained so thoroughly unaccountable. Her body had never been found, and thus it was unlikely that she’d been the victim of an ordinary murder. But neither would she have been a likely target of the country’s political repression. What had she done, after all, except work as a guide and study dress design and occasionally express some opinion about a writer or a style of dance? Of all the people I had ever known, she had seemed to me the most innocent.
    “The thing about Marisol,” I said, “is that she wasn’t at all political. She was smart and ambitious, a hard worker. She had a way about her, a knowingness, but in every other way, there were thousands like her in Buenos Aires at that time.”
    “Thousands who were like her but who didn’t disappear,” Loretta said.
    I nodded. “Yes.”
    With that answer, there seemed little to do but change the subject.
    “Anything more from René?” I asked.
    “Yes,” Loretta said. “An e-mail, if you can believe it. I never met him, but Julian’s