Free The Crime of Julian Wells by Thomas H. Cook Page B

he was not, and perhaps even her indigenous facial features.
    “Do you suppose she really isn’t political?” he asked. “That business of having only two bad things to choose from?”
    “That’s what she said.”
    “But coming from that poor background, she must hate the junta,” Julian said.
    “Yes, but maybe she’s one of those people who look within themselves for a way out of oppression,” I told him. “That’s why they get on boats and sail to new worlds.”
    Julian hesitated briefly, then said, “If someone like Marisol doesn’t have a fighting chance, then something’s very wrong, Philip.”
    I smiled. “You’ll fix that when you’re secretary of state,” I assured him.
    I’d meant this only half jokingly for at that moment it seemed quite possible.
    “That’s not for me,” Julian said. “It’s all politics. Your father knows that. He’s had plenty of experience with it. You want to do good, but the policy is evil, and you must serve the policy.”
    “What then?” I asked. “You have to do something with your life.”
    “Something behind the scenes, I guess,” Julian said. “The secret gears.”
    “The secret gears?” I asked, rather amused by how vague, yet adventurous it seemed. “You mean dark alleys and notes slipped into drop boxes? That’s the work of spies, Julian.”
    “I suppose it is,” Julian said. “But it would be better than an office at Foggy Bottom.”
    “It would also be more dangerous,” I reminded him.
    “More dangerous, yes,” Julian agreed. “But only for me.”
    And with that, he laughed.

9
    “Laughed?” Loretta asked when I told her this.
    It was the day I was to leave for Paris, and she’d insisted on taking me to the airport. She’d arrived late in the afternoon, dressed in a dark green pants suit and looking so surprisingly rested that I’d have sworn she’d spent time in a spa.
    “Laughed, yes,” I told her. “So I didn’t take him seriously.”
    She was seated by the window, the park to her back, the light quite bright, so that she was half in silhouette. “Julian would have made a good spy,” she said. “That’s clear from his books, how good he was at integrating information, making connections, seeing the big picture.”
    “That’s true,” I said. “He did that in The Eyes of Oradour . In one passage you’re not even in France. He takes you to the sarcophagi of Cozumel, describes how small the people of that island were, and from there to how small all the Indians of South America must have seemed to the likes of Cortés and Pizarro.”
    “It’s a great skill, putting such details together,” Loretta said. “And of course the clandestine part of it would have appealed to Julian when he was a young man, the secret devices.”
    Like one seated in a dark movie house, I unexpectedly imagined Julian as precisely that, a figure in a rainy alleyway, dressed in a trench coat, the brim of his hat pulled low, smoking a Gauloise as he waited for his beautiful female contact.
    No, that would not have been it, I thought.
    Julian would have been waiting for something else.
    But what?
    On the heels of that question, a strange anxiety swept down upon me, and as if from a great height, I saw Julian lean over the side of the boat and make those two horrible motions, and then a circle of blood sweep out from the boat, deep and red, flowing out and widening until the whole pond was a deep, thick, impene­trable red.
    Loretta’s voice suddenly brought me back.
    “I have something for you,” she said, then reached into her pocket, drew out a photograph, and handed it to me. “It was in Julian’s notebook. The one I gave him the morning he died. I found this picture tucked inside, so I think he must have been thinking of that first trip.”
    In the photograph Julian and Marisol were posed before the Obelisk, a place we’d often used as a point of rendezvous. It was around noon, the sun directly overhead so that it hardly cast a shadow.