“Julian described it in one of his letters,” Loretta said. “He said that it looked like an old man still concealing his crime.” She took a sip of her drink. “Do you think he came upon this hotel by accident?”
I shrugged. “I suspect the bullet holes near the door and around the first-floor windows might have gotten his attention,” I answered. “The manager here speaks English quite well, so I’ve listened to his history of the place. I asked him about the bullet holes. They’re from when the Arrow Cross-the Hungarian fascist party that collaborated with the Nazis-defended the city against the Russians. The Germans had abandoned it by then.”
Loretta reached into her bag and retrieved a single photograph. “I thought you might want to see this,” she said as she handed it to me.
In the photograph, Julian is seated at the little office alcove on the second floor of the Montauk house, a large window behind him, the pond shimmering in the background. He is holding a book whose title I can’t make out, but which seems as battered as the man holding it. His hair is slightly mussed, as it often was in the morning, and he is wearing the blue robe I gave him as a welcome-home gift upon his return from Russia.
“Why this picture?” I asked.
“I thought of it after I talked to you,” Loretta said. “It’s the last picture of Julian. He set up the camera and took it himself.”
“It’s an odd self-portrait,” I said. “Not very flattering.”
“I didn’t know he’d taken it,” Loretta said. “But when I started to put the camera away, I noticed it and printed it out.” She drew the picture from me and looked at it very intently. “It’s a warning, a picture like that: ‘Don’t end up like me.’” She handed the photograph back to me, then looked toward the window, out at the busy street life. “I’ve often thought that if life were fair, we’d be given a picture of where we’ll end up if we continue down the road we’re on.” She turned, and the smile she offered quickly faded. “That might be enough to save us.”
For a time, she was silent, then she said, “So, what’s your theory about Julian at the moment, Philip?”
“I don’t have one,” I admitted.
“I don’t either,” Loretta said. “I simply think Julian was a condemned man, a man who was sentenced to some sort of inner life imprisonment.”
“But for what crime?” I asked.
“That would be the question, wouldn’t it?” Loretta asked. She took another sip from her drink. “The crime of Julian Wells,” she added. “Still unsolved.” She seemed suddenly to shuffle off the weariness of her long flight, perhaps even some part of the long aridity that had marked her life since Colin’s death. “So,” she said, “where do we begin?”
21
All literature skirts the otherwise insurmountable issue of man’s many different languages. Fictional characters roam from country to country miraculously speaking whatever language they encounter. The fictional character is sent from London to Istanbul and gets off the train in a city in which everyone speaks English. Throughout the fictional world, the Tower of Babel ever lies in ruins, so that upon first encounter with an African bushman or a Bedouin trader, all indecipherability vanishes, and our hero immediately engages in a profound discussion of life, death, and eternity, when, in actuality, he would have been struggling to locate the nearest watering hole.
This is to say that it was not within my power or Loretta’s to simply head out of Budapest and locate Irene Josag somewhere in the wilds of Slovakia without assistance. Arrangements had to be made, and several days were required to make them, a time during which Loretta and I strolled the streets of the city, took in its churches and museums and monuments.
By then I’d spoken often enough with the hotel manager to have gained some slight knowledge of the city, at least enough to add a bit of local history to our strolls about the city.
“After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russians were required to take away all the other monuments they’d erected to themselves in Budapest,” I told Loretta. “All the plaques and red stars, everything.” I pointed to a pedestal upon which rested a single pair of boots. “Of course the Hungarians had already beheaded the statue of Stalin. In fact, they cut him all the way down to his boots.”
We turned and walked on for a time, now closing in upon the Danube.
“I remember something Julian once told me,” I said. “He said that a traveler enters the world into which he travels, but a tourist brings his own world with him and never sees the one he’s in.”
“Where did he say this?” Loretta asked.
“In Buenos Aires,” I answered.
She walked on without speaking until she suddenly stopped and said, “Then Julian must, at some point, have no longer thought of himself as a tourist there.”
“But that’s what he was,” I told her, then returned to my meeting with Hendricks, how he’d seemed contemptuous of Julian’s “quixotic” effort to find Marisol. “And in a way, I think Hendricks was right about Julian,” I said. “Because in a sense, he was a tourist. How could he have been anything else?”
“By being drawn into the turmoil,” Loretta answered.
“How might that have happened?”
Her expression was pure collusion, as if we two were now in league, testing the same conjectures, exploring the same possibilities.
“I’ve been thinking of something you said the night you called me and told me you were going to Hungary,” Loretta answered. “It was about the report on Marisol, the fact that she might have been a spy. You mentioned that she hadn’t been with anyone important as a guide but that she might have gotten the idea that you or Julian could have known something.”
“Or someone-namely, my father,” I said.
“Yes,” Loretta said. Her gaze became quite intense. “And I thought, if she actually was a spy, she might have had a completely different idea about Julian. Not as someone who knew something but as someone who might later be in a position to know something.”
“I’m not sure where you’re headed.”
“That she might have thought he had access to information,” she answered. “Or at least that he could gain access to it. Information from your father, for example. And so, for that reason, she might have tried to turn Julian. That’s the term, isn’t it? To ‘turn’ someone?”
“You mean Marisol might have tried to turn Julian into a traitor?”
She saw how unlikely I thought that was.
“It’s the oldest turn there is, Philip,” she reminded me. “As a matter of fact, it goes back to Eve.”
There was Jezebel, too, and Delilah. The list of female deceivers is very long indeed. Could Marisol have been such a woman? If so, her disguise was quite brilliant, for I had no inkling that she was anything other than an admirable young woman, dutiful and striving, who simply wanted a fighting chance.
And yet, the photograph I’d found in Julian’s apartment couldn’t be denied. Marisol seated with Emilio Vargas, leaning toward him, whispering in his ear. Might she have targeted a young man who was naive and inexperienced in the ways of intrigue, one already determined to do some great good in the world, romantic and idealistic, a well-connected young American she could “turn”?
I thought again of the photograph, Marisol’s lips at Vargas’s ear.
Might she have been whispering the name of this young man?
It was only a question, and yet I could almost hear the name she whispered.
Julian, I thought, and on that name, I once again recalled the time he got into an argument with me over some small detail, how uncharacteristically wrong he was, and how, to prove him so, I rushed back to my room to find the evidence. It was just after Father Rodrigo’s departure, and I’d left him with Marisol at a small cafe near San Martin. I’d returned to find them talking very somberly, and at that moment, as I thought now, they had truly looked like two conspirators caught in a moment, to use Rene’s phrase, “of dark conclave.”