The abduction was so blatant, and occurred in the presence of so many witnesses, that the government had issued a statement decrying the kidnapping, though everyone knew that the government’s own paramilitary thugs had carried it out and that these latest victims of the repression would likely never be seen again.
“But where do they take them?” Julian asked. “I mean, in the middle of a huge city, hundreds of people will see them.”
“And hundreds will say nothing, so some little house in La Boca will do,” Marisol answered in that nonpolitical way of hers, as if it were merely a matter of convenience that such people might disappear into one of Buenos Aires’s most colorful neighborhoods.
“But they have to take them somewhere,” Julian insisted.
“But why to some secret place?” Marisol said. “If they can take them in the middle of a city in the middle of the day, why should they need some cave in a faraway place to put them in?”
She saw that Julian was taken aback by what she said.
“It is before such men have the power that your courage should make you act,” she said. “Once they have the power, your fear will control you.”
“So you would do nothing to find this young man and woman?” Julian demanded, as if now accusing her of complicity in these crimes.
In response, and for the first and only time, Marisol’s eyes flashed with anger, and with the force of a wind she shot forward.
“How would you find these two people, Julian?” she fired back. “Would you take some other man or woman from the street? Would you bring them to some place and torture them or maybe torture their children before their eyes? For, this you would have to do. Do you know why this is true? It is because once a monster has the power, to destroy this monster, you must become a monster, too.”
With that, she sat back and with an unexpected violence drained the last of the wine. “There is no blood in your politics. But down here, it is always blood.”
Julian said nothing as Marisol drew her hands from the table and let them fall into her lap, a gesture that told me she regretted her outburst because it was not how a guide should act.
Yes, Julian said nothing, but now I recalled that something in his eyes had glimmered darkly, as if, deep inside some secret chamber, a door had opened up.
I had taken the photographs of Marisol that I’d found in Julian’s garret with me, and now I drew them from my jacket pocket and looked through them again. The one on top was the one I’d taken, and for a moment, I studied Marisol’s face, her quiet features, her gentle eyes.
Play the kitten, conceal the tigress, I heard Hendricks say, and with those words I drew my gaze away from Marisol’s face and settled it on her hands. To me, they seemed soft and delicate. I could not imagine them with claws.
Part IV
17
We must imagine a little girl looking up from her manacled hands, seeing a woman approach, and believing in that instant that she is surely saved. For this woman is the mistress of the castle, she whose delicate white fingers hold authority over the secret chambers of Cachtice. With a gesture, she can open every barred door, pull down all the ropes and chains, order Ficko to the gallows and Dorottya to the pyre for what they have done: stripped her naked, forced her onto this sticky straw mat, and placed the manacles on her wrists and ankles, crimes for which she knows they will now be punished. It is beautiful Elizabeth she sees enter her cell, approach her, and, after a short pause and with a gaze no innocent should ever face, bid Ficko fetch her whip.
It was not Julian’s words that awakened me, but my visualization of what the passage described: I’d seen Countess Bathory in her gown, weighted with jewels, her fingers sprouting precious stones, drawing nearer to me, her deception so perfect and so humbling. I’d glanced down, like one presented to royalty.
I was not prone to nightmares. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time one had shaken me from sleep. But this one had been extraordinarily vivid, and I’d felt the manacles around my wrists, the gummy straw beneath my feet.
In memory, I thought the scene was much longer and more detailed, but in one of Julian’s surprises, as I saw when I found the passage in the book, he had cut it short, then gone into a brief meditation on the added horror, as he supposed it, of being tortured by a woman rather than a man, the ordeal intensified, he said, by a horrifying turn in which humanity’s oldest vision of female comfort is suddenly and terrifyingly reversed.
Rene arrived at the hotel just after nine, looking quite rested, clearly a man who never did battle with himself or questioned his past deeds, even the dark ones he’d probably committed in Algeria.
“You look like Julian,” he said when I joined him at the little outdoor cafe not far from my hotel. “In the morning, he looked like a man who’d spent his night being chased by dogs.”
“This happened often?” I asked.
“Many nights, yes,” Rene answered. “Nightmares.” He lit his breakfast cigarette, though I suspected it was not his first of the day. There’d probably been one when he rose, one before he shaved and one after, one before he dressed, one on the way out into the morning light. “Julian had terrible ones.”
“I had a nightmare of my own last night,” I told him. “It had to do with Julian’s book The Tigress. The scene where we see the countess through one of the girls’ eyes, a girl she is about to torture and murder.”
“Julian was always doing that,” Rene said absently. “Putting himself in the place of the victim.” He glanced toward the street and seemed to lose himself in the traffic, until he said, “Perhaps he did not like to live in his own skin.” He shrugged. “But we can live only in the one we have, no?”
The question was so rhetorical I felt no need to answer it.
“Last night, I got a call from a man in London,” I told him. “He had a file on Marisol. He implied-well, a bit more than implied-that Marisol was something more than a guide.”
Rene blew a column of smoke out of the right side of his mouth. “Perhaps a dangerous woman? We had one in Algeria. She was called ‘the Blade,’ and we feared her more than any of the men.”
“Feared that she would do to you what you did to Khalida?” I asked cautiously.
“Algeria was a bad place, and in such places, bad things happen,” Rene said. He looked at the lit end of his cigarette like one considering an ember from hell. “She was a torturer and an assassin, this one. These things she did, as you say in English, ‘by night.’” He smiled as if admiring of her cunning. “By day, she was an ordinary woman. A teacher in a school.” His smile widened and became more cutting. “She deceived everyone. Only her lover knew. And he was as bad as she was. They were-what do you say-‘partners in crime’?”
I thought of the pictures of Marisol that Julian had placed in that unmarked file, Marisol looking entirely unaware, going about her business, except when she was with Emilio Vargas. In that picture she had looked quite intense. Had she lived a secret life? I wondered, with Emilio Vargas her partner?
I left Paris by way of Gare du Nord the next morning. On the high-speed train it was a journey of a little more than two hours, a pleasant ride through the French countryside, then under the channel and on to London. On the way, I thought of nothing but Marisol, though it was one particular memory that triumphed over all the rest.