“No,” Loretta said.
“He never wrote about her, but he seems to have been quite interested in her,” I said. “She was a guard at Ravensbruck. A very cruel one.”
Loretta said nothing, but I sensed a troubling ripple in her mind.
“He once talked about what he called ‘beautiful beasts,’” she said. “Women who used their beauty or their innocence to deceive people.”
I thought again of Julian’s interest in Ilse Grese and others like her, women who’d committed their crimes partly by means of clever disguises. In The Terror, he had digressed into a discussion of Charlotte Corday, the murderer of Marat, her certainty that by killing one man she had saved a hundred thousand. He’d made similar points about Mata Hari in that same book, with lengthy discourses on women as revolutionaries, assassins, and spies-in every case, deceptive women. Women who had hidden their true motives, often behind masks of beauty, but sometimes behind masks of kindness, simplicity, innocence. Women who, for all their evil, appeared to be no more dangerous than a. .
The name that suddenly popped into my mind stopped me cold.
Marisol.
15
It struck me as quite strange that late in the night when I thought of Marisol again, it was not Argentina that came to mind but a scene in The Terror, one I later looked up to make sure I’d remembered it correctly.
La Meffraye stands beside a forest woodshed, watching as a small boy skips playfully down a narrow, overgrown path. She is carrying a basket filled with baked goods, and as the boy draws near, she uncovers them just enough to release their fragrance into “the famished air.” She does not let go of the cloth, however, but holds it-“with fingers not yet talons”-ready to cover the cakes, and in that gesture make it plain that she will offer none of her sweets to this little boy. For a single, heart-stopping instant, the cloth remains as suspended as her goodness, for this is the first of La Meffraye’s potential victims. She wavers as the boy grows near, thinking now that it is only a game, that she will offer the sweet, but the boy will refuse. She convinces herself that this is true, and with that conviction she draws back the cloth and stretches out her hand and offers a sweet, which the boy immediately takes. At that moment, it is life itself that appears to betray La Meffraye by concealing the moral precipice even as she approaches it, a deception that continues until the instant of her fall.
The passage was primarily about La Meffraye, of course, but rereading it I found myself putting Julian in the place of the little boy she coaxes to his death. It was a nightmare scenario that had no doubt been generated by Loretta’s mention of “beautiful beasts” and probably would have tormented me all night had I not finally escaped into a book I’d been asked to review. To my great relief, it was something entirely the opposite of Julian’s dark tomes, sweet and light and at last uplifting, something completely forgettable, about a blind schoolteacher and a talking dog.
“When can we get into Julian’s apartment?” I asked Rene the next morning when we met at the tiny breakfast room where the hotel served its far from well-heeled guests weak coffee and an even worse bread.
It was the bread Rene eyed suspiciously. “I would not have thought it possible to find bad bread in Paris,” he said. “Perhaps it comes from England?” He stirred a coffee he also appeared to find far from his liking. “We can go today.”
I took a sip of coffee. “This morning?”
“If you wish,” Rene said.
“I presume Julian’s things are still there?”
“Where else would they be?” Rene said. “It is on Rue Saint-Denis, as you must know.” He smiled. “Julian was always near the prostitutes, but I don’t think he enjoyed their pleasures.”
“You obviously think he should have,” I said. “Why?”
Rene considered my question for a moment, then lifted his right hand and curled his fingers into a fist. “When you are with your wife, your children, even your friends, you are like this,” he said. “But when you are with a whore, you are like this.” He opened his hand like one freeing a caged bird. “You can say to her the truths you hide from others. That you hate your life, that your friends are stupid, that your work destroys you, that you are a joke to yourself.” A vague sorrow swam into his eyes. “Julian understood this. ‘With the fallen,’ he said to me once, ‘you can be fallen, too.’” He drew his fingers once again into a fist. “But even so, Julian was always like this, clenched, holding on to himself.”
Rene’s observation was like him, I thought, a tad over-the-top, and yet I couldn’t help but wonder if it truly might be the thing that Julian held within the tightly curled fist of himself that had finally drawn the blade across his veins.
We arrived at Julian’s apartment an hour later. Rene had arranged for the owner of the building to leave the key with an old woman who lived on the first floor. She was North African, and I could see that Rene immediately regarded her with suspicion, as if he were still in Algiers, where every woman carried a bomb in her basket.
“Okay, we can go up now,” he said as he ushered me toward the stairs. “But be careful. As we say, ‘Napoleon pissed here.’ You cannot trust the wood.”
Despite my earlier reservations, I now felt a curious anticipation as I mounted the stairs, a sense that I was coming nearer to Julian. For it was to this one space on earth that, after all his many and extended travels, he had always been drawn back.
So why, I asked myself, as I stepped inside it, did it feel so lost and cheerless, so devoid of the homey quality one associates with decades of living in a space? In this room I’d expected to glimpse at least some small aspect of the devotion I thought Julian must have had for his work. Instead, I saw only evidence of his loneliness and isolation. There were no pictures to brighten the room’s dim light, nor even so much as a calendar by which he might have recorded an upcoming rendezvous. There was no radio or television. Evidently, he did not listen to music either while he worked or to relax when his work was done.
What I found was a garret five floors above a dismal street. It had small windows kept tightly shuttered for so long that I had trouble prying them open. When I did, the light revealed the full austerity of the room, the iron bed, the small wooden desk, no element of which was in the least unexpected. Julian had lived like a monk, and on that thought I remembered the day we visited Mont Saint-Michel. We had climbed the stairs to its uppermost tower, where the monks had once sat exposed to the frigid winds of the Normandy coast. In that icy, windswept scriptorium, they’d spent their lives copying manuscripts, using small metal rods to break the ice-encrusted ink, and in this one, almost as uncomfortable and psychologically no less isolated, Julian, the secular anchorite, had written his dark books.
The materials he used in his research filled the bookshelves that covered almost every wall. There were probably around five hundred books, most of them about the eras during which the crimes he studied had taken place. There were books on Spain when the crime of Cuenca had occurred, and on the rest of Europe, particularly Germany and France, at the time of Oradour. Several shelves were devoted to his study of La Meffraye, and he had grouped a number of biographies of Elizabeth Bathory together, along with general histories of Hungary at the time of her crimes, though there were far fewer research materials having to do with her case. One bookcase held works that dealt with Andrei Chikatilo, interspersed with books on Russia during the time of the killer’s life span, the dark age of Stalinism.