Free The Crime of Julian Wells by Thomas H. Cook

blood. For that reason one sensed in her, as I’m sure Julian did, a strange and unconquerable purity.
    “I welcome you to Buenos Aires,” she added with a quick smile.
    Where many of the women of the city wore a crucifix on a gold or silver chain, Marisol wore a simple string of wooden beads. From the beginning, Julian said, there was a no-nonsense quality about her, something steady, down-to-business, and in a way profoundly conservative, a brick in the sturdy wall, as he would later write of those who resist the excesses of revolutionary fervor, that slows the violent winds of change.
    Julian offered his hand. “I’m Julian Wells, and this is Philip Anders.”
    “ Un placer ,” Marisol said as she shook our hands. “I will teach you a little Spanish while you are here.” She gave each of us an evaluating glance. “That is okay?”
    “Absolutely,” Julian told her. “Right, Philip?”
    “Of course.”
    She swept her arm toward the entrance to the hotel. “Come then. There is much to see in Buenos Aires.”
    The day’s tour began with a long walk that took us from Casa Rosada all the way to La Boca, by which Marisol hoped, as she said in one of her rare misuses of English, “to integrate us.”
    She was a woman of extended silences, I noticed, and she said very little as we walked the streets of La Boca, looking at its brightly colored houses. It was as if she understood that quiet observation was the key to knowing a place, perhaps even the key to life. In any event, she was careful to allow space for standing, sitting, seeing, so that we never felt rushed. Nor did she engage in the guidebook patter that can be so annoying. Marisol, as I would come to understand, was a shaded pond, calm and unruffled.
    By evening we had found our way back to the hotel. The restaurant, Marisol said, had a good reputation, though she had never eaten there.
    We took a table outside. It was early evening, that twilight interval between a city’s working day and its nocturnal life.
    “By the way, where are you from?” Julian asked her at one point.
    “I was always moving between Argentina and Paraguay,” Marisol answered. “I crossed this border many times as a child.”
    “Why?” I asked.
    “When my mother died, I was sent to my father in Paraguay,” Marisol answered. “At this moment, my father died, and I was sent to an aunt back in Argentina. When she was also dying, she took me to a priest, and it was this man who cared for me.”
    The priest had lived in a part of northern Argentina that bordered on the Gran Chaco.
    “It is very dry, with nothing, and for many years no one cared about it,” Marisol informed us. “Then they found oil.”
    It was the struggle to possess this oil that had generated the Chaco War, she said, a conflict that had been unimaginably brutal.
    “They died in great numbers, the soldiers,” she said. “So much sickness, and no doctors. You have not heard of it, this war?”
    “No,” Julian answered.
    Marisol didn’t seem surprised. “We are unknown to you, we who live down here,” she said. “To you, we are fallen off the earth.”
    A silence settled over her, both somber and serene, from which emerged what seemed to be the central hope she had for her people, their one quite justified aim.
    “All we want is a fighting chance,” she added softly.
    Then her eyes abruptly brightened and she was our professional guide again.
    “You must have a taste of Argentina,” she said. “Of our wine. It is called Malbec, and the difference in taste between the cheap and the not cheap, it is not so big.” She smiled softly, but it seemed an actress’s smile. “You will like it, I think. But just in case, you should order the cheap one.”
    Only once more during that day did Marisol again leave her role as cheerful, uncomplicated guide. It was in answer to Julian’s question about her feelings concerning the current state of Argentina, then in the final throes of its Dirty War.
    In