“Our men?” I interrupted.
“A cop, like me,” Rene answered casually, then continued. “Anyway, he took a picture outside the Milk Bar Cafe a few minutes before the bombing. Khalida was in this picture, standing a few feet from the door, looking nervous.” He tapped the face of Emilio Vargas in the photograph. “Like this one. You can see it in his eyes. He is not at rest, this fellow. His mind is busy. With Khalida, we thought she was this way because she knew about the bomb, that she was maybe a lookout, waiting for the man who was to bring it, but it turned out to be a boy she was waiting for, a boy her father didn’t like.” He shrugged. “But it was too late before we found this out.”
That outcome seemed to strike Rene as one of life’s cruel turns, a twist in events that had swept poor innocent Khalida into the maelstrom of the Algerian revolt.
Rene laughed, but dryly. “In those days, we did what we did to whoever we thought deserved it.” He laughed again, no less humorlessly. “Revolution is not a kind mother to its children.”
“What happened to Khalida?” I asked.
“We followed her,” Rene answered. “We thought maybe she would lead us to the big boss. But this girl, she goes to the casbah to buy vegetables; then she goes home with her little basket. She lives with her stupid father, who fills her mind with the massacre at Setif, how the Pieds-Noirs must all be killed, the usual ‘Allahu Akbar’ bullshit.”
“She told you what her father said to her?” I asked.
“Not for a while,” Rene answered with a casual shrug of the shoulders. “But like I said, we did what we did. And by the time we finished, it was too late for little Khalida.” He picked up the picture of Marisol and Emilio Vargas and looked at it closely. “Their hands are touching.”
I glanced at the photograph, and it was true. On the bench between them, they’d rested their hands in such a way that their fingers touched.
Rene continued to stare at the picture. “Betrayal is like a landslide in your soul, no?” he said. “After it, you cannot regain your footing.” When I gave no response to this, he looked at me. “Perhaps this boy was Marisol’s lover,” he said. “It is an old story, no? The secret lover. It would have made Julian very jealous, no?”
I shook my head. “Not at all, because Julian was never in love with Marisol,” I said. “You’ve read too many bodice rippers, Rene.”
He was clearly puzzled by the phrase. “Bodice rippers?”
“Romance novels,” I explained.
Rene dutifully drew out his notebook and added the phrase to it. “Very good,” he said with small laugh. “I like the English language.” His lingering smile coiled into a grimace. “The people, not so much.”
16
We left Julian’s place a few minutes later. Rene had obviously found Julian’s apartment depressing. But so had I, and thus, with no reason to linger, I had already returned to my hotel later that afternoon when the phone rang.
“Philip Anders?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Walter Hendricks. Your father asked me to call you. He said that you were investigating a friend of yours.”
Investigating?
Was that truly what I was doing now? I asked myself.
“Your friend was Julian Carlton Wells, I believe?” Hendricks asked.
He had pronounced Julian’s full name in the way of a man reading it from a dossier, but I only said, “Yes.”
“I live in London now,” Hendricks said. “But in the early eighties I was stationed in Buenos Aires. Your father thought I might be of help since I was in charge of the Argentine desk at the time that Mr. Wells became involved with a young woman who worked as a guide for the consulate.”
“Marisol,” I said. “What do you mean by ‘became involved’?”
“Well, at least to the extent that after her disappearance, he inquired about her at Casa Rosada,” Hendricks said.
“Julian went to Casa Rosada? I didn’t know that.”
“It’s a matter of record,” Hendricks said.
“What kind of record?”
“Well, I’m sure you’re aware that dictatorships keep good records on people who visit the seat of government.”
“Yes, of course.”
“They record their names, their addresses, and if a flag is raised, they investigate them.”
“Did Casa Rosada investigate Julian?” I asked.
“No, he wasn’t investigated,” Hendricks said. “But he was noted. Anyone connected to Ms. Menendez would have been noted.”
“Anyone connected with Marisol?” I asked. “Why?”
“Because she had gotten the government’s attention, evidently,” Hendricks replied. “At least enough for them to have done a background check on her.”
“But she seemed so uninvolved in politics,” I said. “She seemed quite innocent, actually.”
Hendricks laughed. “Well, there’s an old line in intelligence work,” he said lightly. “Play the kitten. Conceal the tigress.” He seemed rather like a man who had completed a small task and was now anxious to move on. “In any event, Casa Rosada had a report on Marisol. There was nothing of intelligence value in it. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such reports were compiled during the Dirty War. Marisol’s is no different from the others.”
“May I see it?” I asked cautiously.
“I see no reason why not,” Hendricks said. “But you’d have to come here. It’s not something I could just put in the mail.” He offered a small laugh. “It’s of no importance to anyone, but procedure is a form of paranoia, as I’m sure you know.”
“Of course,” I said. “I could be in London by Monday if that’s convenient for you.”
“Monday is fine,” Hendricks said. “If you’re sure you want to make that effort.”
He seemed genuinely surprised that I would pursue the matter any further.
“You thought I wouldn’t want to see the report?” I asked.
“Frankly, yes,” Hendricks answered.
“Why?”
“Oh, nothing, really,” Hendricks said. “Just something your father said.”
“Which was?”
“That you were the opposite of Julian.”
“In what way?”
“That you had no taste for the ‘cloak-and-dagger’ life,” Hendricks said.
“And Julian did?” I asked.
“Your father seemed to think so,” Hendricks admitted.
“But Julian was just a writer,” I said.
This was clearly a line of conversation that Hendricks had no interest in pursuing. “So, I’ll see you in London, on Monday, right?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Meet me in the bar at Durrants Hotel,” Hendricks said, and gave me the address. “Say four in the afternoon?”
“See you on Monday,” I said firmly, then, rather than dwell on my father’s curious comment about Julian, I decided to go out into the Parisian night, where I found a small cafe, took a table outside, and ordered a glass of red wine.
It was a warm summer evening, and given my visit to Julian’s garret earlier in the day, it inevitably reminded me of Buenos Aires, the similar nights I spent there, often at an outdoor cafe, all of us talking about whatever came to mind, but almost never politics. It was the one subject Marisol carefully avoided, though at the time I noticed that Julian often tried to move the topic of conversation in that direction. Why had he done that? I wondered now, and on that thought, I recalled the few occasions when he abruptly canceled meeting me at one place or another, times when I didn’t know where he was, and during which I now imagined him skulking behind some street kiosk, taking pictures of Marisol.
It was an almost comic notion of Julian as a spy, but a tiny shift in perception can sometimes bring about a seismic shift in suspicion, and in thinking through all this, I felt just such a shift and remembered a particular evening when we were all seated at a small cafe.
It was more or less at the corner of Avenida de Mayo and the wide boulevard of 9 de Julio, the obelisk at Plaza de la Republica rising like a gigantic needle in the distance. The night before, one of the junta’s notorious Ford Falcon trucks had screeched to a halt before the obelisk. According to several witnesses, four men had leaped out, seized a young couple who were standing at the monument, thrown them into the back, and then jumped in after them as the truck sped away.