In the photograph, a young woman with a rifle, wearing an Arrow Cross armband, stands beside a priest, staring down at the sprawled bodies of a group of men and women, all of them in civilian clothes.
“That is Father Kun,” she said. “He is a priest, but it is his fantasy to be a soldier. He wears always a gun in his cassock and he lines up the Jews and he draws this gun and he says to us, the ones with rifles, he says, ‘In the name of Christ, FIRE!’” She looked up from the photograph. “And so I did.” She closed the book. “This is my confession, and I tell it to Julian.” She smiled. “He says good-bye. He kisses my hand. He says he goes soon to Rostov.”
“Because that’s where Andrei Chikatilo lived,” I said.
Irene clearly did not recognize the name.
“A Russian serial killer,” I told her.
She shook her head. “Julian says nothing of this killer,” she said. “He is going to Rostov to say also a good-bye to this man from many years before. I know his name from my time in Argentina. He was a Russian agent there.”
“Julian was in contact with a Russian agent while he was in Argentina?” I asked.
“Yes,” Irene said. “This is what he tells to me. He met with this man many times, he says to me. He was a man who knew many secrets from the bad times in Argentina.”
“Who was this Russian?” Loretta asked.
“His name is Mikhail Soborov,” she answered without the slightest hesitation. “Juan had much fear of him.”
“Why?”
She laughed. “Because he is one-as we say here-he is one who knows where the knife is.” She sat back slightly. “Did Julian meet with him in Rostov?”
“I don’t know,” I answered.
Irene shook her head softly and, with that gesture, appeared to slip into some former life. “There was something about Julian that made you wish to speak with him the things you do not speak about with others. When I make my confession to him he tells me that he also has known bad things. He says he is like me.”
“Like you in what way?” I asked.
“In his crime,” Irene answered.
“Murdering innocent people?” I asked.
Irene shrugged. “This I do not know.”
“He said nothing about what this crime was?” Loretta asked.
“No,” Irene answered. “But it had made him tired, I think. He tells me that he wants someday to go home.”
“Home,” Loretta repeated softly.
“Home, yes,” Irene said. “He wants to find peace there.” She smiled softly. “He said there is a pond.”
Part V
22
There is a scene in The Commissar where Julian imagines Chikatilo’s wife-the mother of his children, the woman who had lived with him all the many years during which he had secretly ridden the desolate rails of a crumbling Soviet Union-at the moment she begins to suspect that poor, pathetic Andrei is something other than he seems:
She recalled that cold December day, so near to Christmas, when Yelena Zakotnova had first gone missing. Had she ever seen Yelena walking the streets of the village? In the papers she was a pretty girl, only nine, with dark hair cut short. From a distance, Chikatilo’s wife said to herself, her killer might have thought she was a boy. “Her killer,” she repeated in her mind, now with a chill colder than any winter she’d endured in Shankty, because at the very moment she silently pronounced the words “her killer,” she envisioned Andrei and immediately recalled the spots of blood she’d seen trailing along the side of the house she shared with him, the dim light of that shared bedroom, her empty bed during the long absences of this man, the knife he packed with his black bread and cheese.
I mentioned this scene to Loretta over dinner, then added, “It’s in all Julian’s books. Deceit. The moment when the face of someone you thought you knew changes, and you suspect that there’s something terrible behind the mask.”
“And you’re thinking that Marisol wore this mask,” Loretta said, “that she was the ‘she-devil’ Vargas gave to Ramirez- shy;actually a terror, like La Meffraye, or a tigress, like Countess Bathory.”
During the drive back to Budapest, I’d actually envisioned Marisol in this dreadful role, her eyes glittering in the dark way Julian described the eyes of Countess Bathory.
“There are such women, after all,” I added. “ Rene mentioned one in Algiers. She was called ‘the Blade,’ and according to him, she scared the hell out of everybody. Marisol would have been even more frightening because she seemed so completely innocent.”
Loretta took a sip from her glass and cast her eyes about the lobby of the hotel.
“So it’s a question of moral betrayal,” I went on. “Marisol presents herself as this simple girl from the Chaco. She claims that all she wants is an opportunity to better herself. By day she quotes Borges and guides Julian and me around Buenos Aires. By night she goes to some dungeon and becomes a monster for the Montoneros.”
Something about this scenario clearly troubled Loretta.
“If any of that is true, then Julian truly had stepped into that world your father warned you about,” Loretta said. “That shadow world. Agents, double agents, triple agents. He wasn’t used to that kind of complexity. But he would have begun to worry about it, don’t you think, if he’d gotten wind of any of what we’ve found out? He’d have begun to ask himself the same questions about her that we’re asking. He would have wanted to know not only where she was but who she was. Because he wouldn’t have been sure of anything anymore. Was she a girl with no politics? Was she a Montonero? He might even have come to think that she could be a double agent working for the junta.”
“Working for the junta?” I asked.
“Working to catch Vargas, or something like that,” Loretta said. “Julian would have begun to consider all kinds of deception.”
All kinds of deception.
With those words, I felt life turn again, and on that turn, Marisol became an ever-changing shape. Could it be, I wondered, that the many faces of female evil that Julian had drawn were merely his multiple attempts to capture the yet more elusive moral nightmare that was Marisol?
I thought all this through for a moment, then said, “But if Marisol worked for the junta, why did she disappear?”
Loretta appeared surprised that I’d taken her latest conjecture seriously. At the same time, she clearly began to considerer such a possibility.
“The most obvious reason would be that her cover was close to being blown,” she answered. “For that reason her ‘handlers’ took her out of the game.”
“So, in this scenario, Marisol was never kidnapped or murdered at all?” I asked.
It was a dark twist that now produced yet another wholly unexpected turn in my mind.
“That would mean that Julian was looking for a woman who had never been kidnapped at all,” I said.
I could scarcely imagine the betrayal he would have felt if he had unearthed such a grim truth about Marisol, how deep it might have been, how thoroughly it might have unraveled him.
The grave effect of that thought must have shown in my features, because I could see it reflected in Loretta’s.
“Of course, we have no idea what Julian finally came to think about Marisol,” she reminded me.
True enough, I thought, and yet I remembered a night when Julian and I were in La Boca. Julian had stopped suddenly in front of one of the neighborhood’s characteristically bright-colored houses. He gave a slight nod toward the back of the house, where an old car rested near a basement window. Its hood was up, and a set of long black cables ran from its battery down into the cellar.
“That’s one of the places where the junta takes people,” Julian said quietly. “It’s a little torture chamber.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Marisol pointed it out one afternoon,” Julian answered. “She says everyone knows what happens there.”