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 Bathory.
“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 Ravensbruck.”
“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 she found her true calling as a guard, first at Ravensbruck, 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.”