“Was this the only place Julian had?” I asked Rene, hoping that perhaps somewhere on earth Julian had found a less gloomy place to live.
“The only one I know about,” Rene answered. He glanced about, clearly repulsed by the bleakness of the room.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
He looked at the squat metal filing cabinet I indicated and shrugged.
I was not amused by Rene’s indifference, so I ignored him and walked over and opened the cabinet’s only drawer.
In a novel it would be Julian’s “secret chamber” I found inside the drawer, and in a single, riveting instant, everything would be revealed, and I would subsequently return to New York knowing what I should have known to save Julian from himself.
But life holds its trump cards more closely to the vest, and what I found was five folders, each identified by a location: Cuenca, Oradour, Brittany, C?Cachtice, Rostov, places that like dark magnets had irresistibly drawn Julian to them. A sixth file lay beneath the others, but without an identifying label.
I turned to Rene. “You don’t have to stay while I go through this,” I told him.
Rene plopped down in one of the room’s two chairs. “I can wait.”
“Okay,” I said, and with that I took the folders over to the desk and turned the switch on the small lamp I found there, though I expected that Rene had already arranged for the electricity to be turned off, since Julian had been gone for well over a month by then. But the light came on and in its dim glow I opened the first of the files.
There were mostly photographs Julian had taken in and around Cuenca of the various locations he would later describe in his book, pictures of its dusty plaza, the bridge, the roads that led out of the town, along with various municipal buildings. There was one of the two of us, as well. It had been taken by a passerby, and in the picture Julian was curiously focused, his gaze drawn, as I now recalled, to the Guardia Civil officer who was standing a few feet away talking to a well-dressed American whom we had encountered only minutes before. It was the only photograph with either of us in it, and I could find no reason, save sheer accident, that it had been included with the others. It was also the only picture Julian had failed to identify in his usual way by writing the name of the place on the back.
The photographs in the file marked “Oradour” were of the same sort, all of them taken at the site of the massacre and clearly meant to jog Julian’s memory as he wrote. I had not gone with Julian to the town, so there could be no pictures of the two of us there. Nor were there any photographs of Julian himself or of Rene, who had accompanied him there several times during the years he’d been writing his book on the massacre. Instead, there was a photograph of a man in his midseventies, dressed in the clothes of a rural laborer and standing beside a horse-drawn cart, with a grove of trees behind him. It was not a particularly striking picture; it was slightly out of focus and no attempt had been made to frame it in an interesting way.
Following Oradour and his work in Bretagne, Julian had gone to Hungary, where he’d spent a considerable amount of time in the area over which the castle of Countess Bathory loomed. In the file marked “Cachtice,” as in the others, there were only pictures, and as before, most were of the castle ruins in which her crimes had been committed. But there were also views of the landscape that fell away on every side from the castle mount, and of the small villages that dotted the area, from which many of Elizabeth’s victims had been drawn. The only difference in this case was that he had included four portraits that he’d evidently photocopied from various sources; one of them I recognized as the countess, and the other three Julian had identified on the back of the photocopies. The first portrait was of Dorottya Szentes, called “Dorka,” according to Julian’s note. The others were identified as Ilona Joo and Janos Ujvary, known as “Ficko.” All had been accomplices in the crimes, and on the back of each photocopy Julian had noted their punishments. Dorka and Ilona had each had their fingernails ripped out before being burned alive. Ficko had simply been beheaded.
The fourth file contained exactly what I expected, a short stack of photographs of what were obviously the train and railway stations where Andrei Chikatilo had identified his victims, usually teenage runaways, both boys and girls, of which a collapsing Soviet Union had provided a continuous supply.
Julian had not identified the fifth file, but given what I found inside, its label instantly occurred to me: Argentina.
Marisol was in each of the photographs I found inside this file, and in each she was the same age she’d been during our time in Buenos Aires, her hair the same length, and she was even wearing, in one of the photographs, the same clothes she’d worn on the day she first met us.
None of the photographs was the sort normally taken by tourists. Save for one, they were all black-and-white and appeared to have been shot from a considerable distance, no doubt by someone who did not want to be seen, and clearly without Marisol’s knowledge.
The exception, in color and quite the sort one would expect from a tourist, was a picture I’d taken in San Martin. In the photograph Marisol was seated next to Father Rodrigo. The two of them appeared to be locked in an intense conversation. Rodrigo had his hand in the air, his finger pointed upward, as if making a crucial point. I had taken it as Julian and I closed in upon them and had only gotten it developed after returning home. When I showed it to Julian, he peered at it for a long time, then said simply, “May I have this?” I’d given it to him, of course, and had never seen it again until now.
I had no idea who might have taken the remaining pictures.
In the first, Marisol is alone, this time in the Plaza de Mayo, the Casa Rosada behind her. In the picture she stares off to the right. Her expression is curiously troubled, and anxiety shows in her posture, suggesting that she might have been waiting for someone who had not appeared.
The second photograph shows Marisol on what is clearly a different day. It is raining and she is drawing in her umbrella as she prepares to board a bus.
In the third photograph Marisol is sitting with a young man near the entrance to Recoleta. His features are indigenous, like Marisol’s. But his hair is black and curly, and even though he is sitting, it is obvious that he is quite tall. He is wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and something in his manner seems wary. Marisol is leaning toward him, the black beads Father Rodrigo had given her hanging loosely from her throat. Her lips are at the young man’s ear, parted slightly, so that she is clearly speaking. When I turned it over, I found a typed inscription: Marisol Menendez y Emilio Vargas.
“Look at these,” I said to Rene.
He stepped over and looked at the pictures I’d spread out before him.
“I took that one,” I told him, “but I don’t know where the others came from. The young woman is Marisol. She was our guide in Argentina, the young woman who disappeared.”
“Ah,” Rene said softly. “Pretty, but not my type.” He smiled. “Too small. Not enough meat. Who is the guy?”
“Someone named Emilio Vargas,” I said. “At least that’s what it says on the back of the picture.”
Rene continued to stare at the pictures. “They look like surveillance photographs,” he said. “They remind me of the old days in Algiers.” He took out a cigarette and lit it. “There are eyes upon these two.”
“Police surveillance, you mean,” I said.
“Police, army, intelligence operatives,” Rene said. “What’s the difference?” He smiled, but rather mirthlessly, like one recalling a memory that still troubled him. “There was a young woman in Algiers,” he said. “Her name was Khalida. It means ‘eternal’ in Arabic, but it didn’t turn out to be so with this girl.” Something in Rene’s eyes shifted to the dark side. “By what you call coincidence, one of our men-”