“Really?”
Hendricks nodded. “As a matter of fact, he sometimes reminded me of what Trotsky said about Czar Nicholas.”
“Which was?”
“That he should have been a kindly neighborhood grocer or something of that sort,” Hendricks said. “A simple tradesman, invisible to history. But your father not only wanted to change the world, he wanted to do it by means of derring-do.” He laughed. “In C Building, he was the resident Walter Mitty.”
The resident Walter Mitty.
That was both the saddest and truest thing anyone had ever said about my father, that he had lived his life behind a desk while watching spy movies and reading spy books and dreaming of the romantic secret-agent life he would never have.
To think of my father in such a way pained me, so I turned the conversation away from him.
“So, the report on Marisol,” I said as a reminder of why I’d come to London.
“Marisol, yes,” Hendricks said. “I have to say that I am a bit curious as to why you’re so interested in your friend’s quixotic effort to find this young woman.”
“Was it quixotic?” I asked.
“I would call it that, yes,” Hendricks answered flatly. “He was trying to find someone he didn’t know much about in a country about which he knew even less. He had no connections in Argentina and no authority to conduct any sort of inquiry into this young woman’s whereabouts. And yet, he felt that he could simply and quite brazenly walk into Casa Rosada and ask whatever questions he liked.” He shook his head gravely. “Such a little boy.”
I recalled something Julian had said many years before. I’d been talking about Mussolini, how amazingly childlike he’d been, his love for mounting white horses and prancing about, his comical strut. The whole story had seemed to darken Julian’s mood, his voice very serious when he said, “He wasn’t funny to the Ethiopians.” With that, he’d shaken his head softly, then added, “Men with power shouldn’t be little boys.”
Hendricks’s gaze took on an added seriousness. “How could he have possibly expected anyone in authority to tell him anything? Not only where Marisol was or what had happened to her, but who she was?”
“Who she was?” I asked by way of directing the conversation back to her.
Hendricks smiled. “Nowadays they’d call her a ‘person of interest,’” he said.
“To Casa Rosada,” I added.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because she was evidently working for a well-known Montonero named Emilio Vargas,” Hendricks answered matter-of-factly.
I tried to conceal my surprise. “Julian had a picture of Marisol with him,” I said. “Where would he have gotten it?”
“Perhaps he was more successful at Casa Rosada than I thought,” Hendricks answered with a shrug. “Anyway, as to Vargas. He was called ‘the Hook.’ It was his method of choice. To hang people on meat hooks.”
I remembered an atrocity Julian had once mentioned, an entire Balkan village rounded up and loaded onto trucks, then transported to the local abattoir, where every man, woman, and child was put through all the stages of animal slaughter. He had described the process so vividly and with such detail that I’d finally skipped ahead.
“Vargas was as vicious as they come,” Hendricks said. “Names were given to him and he had those people kidnapped. Their children, too, sometimes. Torturing them was Vargas’s specialty. He would have justified it, of course. And it’s true, there are people who can’t be broken by torture. But when they see their children, naked, strapped to a bed beside a small electric generator. .” He stopped. “I’m sure you get the picture.”
I nodded.
“He operated a torture farm in the Chaco,” Hendricks added.
“That’s where Marisol was from,” I told him.
Hendricks nodded. “Yes. I saw that when I read the report.”
“What happened to Vargas?” I asked.
“He was shot eventually,” Hendricks answered. “It was quite clear that before he died, he’d been rather badly treated.”
“What does that mean?”
“That he’d been tortured for a long time,” Hendricks said. “Missing some important parts, if you know what I mean.” A smile slithered onto his face. “He deserved every cut, if you ask me.”
“Where was he found?”
“Floating in the Plata,” Hendricks answered.
“I can’t imagine Marisol having anything to do with a man like that,” I said.
“Then how do you explain the picture?” Hendricks asked. “I don’t know how Julian got that picture, but I do know this: Casa Rosada had come to suspect that Marisol was a spy for Vargas and that she was primarily trying to find information while working as a guide for the American consulate.”
I had briefly imagined Marisol in this cloak-and-dagger role, skulking in the shadows of the consulate, pressing her ears against a door or her eyes to a keyhole.
“Of course, that might only have been her cover,” Hendricks added.
He saw that I didn’t understand this.
“It’s called the double take,” Hendricks explained. “The agent allows herself to be revealed as a little, insignificant operative in order to conceal the fact that she is actually a very important one. So you have to look again. Hence, the double take.”
“But there’s no evidence that Marisol was. .” My question trailed off.
“No, but there was an intelligence report on her,” Hendricks answered. “It didn’t say a lot, but it didn’t have to, because what it says emphatically just by existing is that Marisol was a person of considerable interest to Casa Rosada.” He shrugged. “As I’m sure you know, Buenos Aires was a nest of vipers in those days. On both sides, people were being tortured, killed. For most people in the world, politics is not a game.”
There was more than a hint of condescension in Hendricks’s last remark, the implication that in Argentina Julian and I were playing hopscotch in a torture chamber.
Hendricks placed his briefcase on the table. “Was Julian political?” he asked.
“Political,” I repeated. “Do you mean was he an idealist, some kind of an ideologue?”
“Those two are very different,” Hendricks said.
“In what way?”
“An idealist is a man with blinders,” Hendricks answered. “An ideologue is a man who’s blind.” He looked at me gravely. “Which was Julian?”
“I’m not sure he was either one,” I said. “I don’t think he had time to be before. .”
“Before what?”
“Before Marisol disappeared,” I said. “And after that, as you know, he did nothing but look for her.”
Hendricks nodded. “Look for her, yes.”
Now his eyes gave off the sense of a man who’d seen too much and who regarded those who hadn’t as little more than children.
“Who did this friend of yours think he was, hmm?” he asked. “Some superhero? The type your father dreamed of being?” He looked at me as if the bloom of youth were still on my cheeks. “Grow up, please.”
He paused a moment, then leaned forward in a way that was decidedly avuncular.
“Do you know what real warriors say about a fictional creation like Rambo?” he asked. “That he would be dead in five minutes. But that during the course of those fateful five minutes, his bullshit heroics would kill every soul under his command.”
He watched me for a moment, like a man looking for a hidden motive; then he leaned forward and looked at me as though certain of one thing: that for all my privilege, all my expensive education, I could still stand another lesson.
“You cannot know a people if you do not share their pain,” he said, “and Julian knew nothing about what was going on in Argentina. He was just a tourist who happened to stick his toe into a river of blood.”
He drew an envelope from his briefcase.
“Be glad you’ve lived a cautious life, Philip,” he said. “Because the reckless die young.” The envelope slid toward me. “And they kill young, too.”