“Some people, when they die, bring more than themselves to an end,” Loretta said. “The books I copyedit now are mostly happy talk. Tips on how to avoid thinking about the only things Julian ever thought about.” She shook her head. “Half the time, I feel like a whore.” Her smile carried the dogged effort of a lost cause. “Have you seen the new rewrite of The Great Gatsby for teen readers? It’s sixty-seven pages long, and it seems that Fitzgerald intended the book to have a happy ending.”
She was in her early fifties now, but her eyes were as sparkling as they’d ever been. In Egypt, Flaubert had encountered a woman whose exquisite beauty was marred only by that one bad incisor. I could find no such flaw in Loretta. She wore the beauty of her maturity as she had worn the beauty of her youth- shy;easily, almost unconsciously, and with breathtaking grace. Time would do what time always does, but there would be no Botox in Loretta’s future, no facelifts. She would move through the remaining seasons of her life as easily as she moved through the stages of a single day.
“Julian was an artist,” Loretta said firmly.
An artist, yes, but with a curious obsession.
I thought of how he’d spent his last six years following the Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo’s path through countless dismal towns, sleeping in the same railway stations, eating black bread and cheese, eyeing the vagabond children who had been Chikatilo’s prey, becoming him, as Julian always seemed to do while writing about such villains.
“The last book really took it out of him,” Loretta added. “But it wasn’t just exhaustion.”
“What was it?”
She thought a moment, then said, “He was like a man in a locked room, trying to get out.”
Perhaps, but even so, Julian’s mood hadn’t troubled me, because I’d always thought that studying atrocities and detailing the outrages of serial killers would be a labor he would at some point seek to escape. Perhaps, at last, he was breaking free of all that, for there were times, such as when he described a sunset on the Atlas Mountains or a rainstorm in the Carpathians, when his love of the world cut through the darkness and he seemed, at least briefly, to soar above the grim nature of his subject matter. At such moments his spirits would lift, only to be dragged down again, as if by some invisible weight. Oh, what can you do, I had often thought, what can do you do with such a man?
“I had no inkling he might do what he did,” Loretta said.
Nor had I, though only a week before, Julian had canceled a trip into the city. Two days after that, Loretta had called to say that he’d been unusually agitated. For that reason, she’d been surprised when she’d seen him calmly make his way toward the small pond that bordered the house, even more surprised that he’d climbed into the little boat the two of them had used as a child, and rowed away. A few minutes later she’d noticed the boat drifting toward shore with Julian leaning over the port side, his bare arms dangling in the water.
“I knew instantly that he was dead,” Loretta said. “And that he’d done it to himself.” She took another sip of wine. “But why?”
The tone of her question was quite different from any I’d heard in her voice before. She gave off the air of a person going through someone else’s old papers, looking not for deeds or insurance policies but for the small journal with its cracked leather binding and rusty latch-an item of no value whatsoever, save that it was there, written on some faded page, that the dreadful secret lay.
But had Julian actually had any such dreadful secret? I had no idea. We’d lived very different lives, after alclass="underline" he, the expatriate writer; I, the stay-at-home literary critic, whose primary gift was in dissecting novels that, no matter how awful, were certainly beyond my own creative powers. He’d settled in Paris, if you could call the apartment in Pigalle that he rarely used his permanent residence. But even when I’d met him in Paris, or London, or Madrid, he’d had the air of a man briefly stranded in a railway station. For Julian, the road was home, and he’d trudged down some of the worst ones on earth, writing articles about plague and famine and holocaust in addition to his five books. And his writing had been exquisite. Like Orpheus, he had brought music into hell, and like him, he had died in a world that no longer wished to hear it.
“I sometimes think of him as a fictional character,” Loretta said. “An immortal detective in pursuit of some equally immortal arch villain.” Something in her eyes shattered. “But he will be forgotten, won’t he?”
“Probably,” I answered frankly.
“Each book was like a nail in his coffin,” Loretta said. “Even that first one.”
She meant The Tortures of Cuenca, Julian’s study of a fabled injustice that had been committed in Spain, in 1911. He’d never really returned after that book, save for short periods, during which he would search for his next book or article. After Cuenca, the pattern was always the same. Go away. Write. Return. Go away. Write. Return. I could not recall just how many times he’d left the Montauk farmhouse he and Loretta had inherited, then come back to it out of nowhere and with no advance word, like a body washed up onshore.
“He was already planning the next one, you know,” Loretta said. “In a way, that’s what threw me off, because Julian was the same as always. Sitting in the sunroom, planning his next move.”
“Planning it how?” I asked.
“By studying a map,” Loretta answered. “That’s how he always began working on his next piece, by studying a map of the country he was going to. Then he’d start reading books about the place.”
As a result of that research, there’d always been considerable sweep to Julian’s work, as his friendlier reviewers had sometimes pointed out. No crime floated freely. It was always part of a larger disorder, one fiber sprung from a hideous cloth. In a passage on Henri Landru, for example, he’d managed to connect the serial killer’s murders in Paris to the nearby slaughter on the Somme, and this while writing a curious meditation on one of Gilles de Rais’s blood-spattered minions.
“It was going the way it always had, the circle of Julian’s life,” Loretta said. “Then suddenly he was dead.”
I felt an inner jolt, not only at Julian’s death, but at my own inevitable demise and everyone else’s, the wheel of time, that ceaselessly revolving door that ushers you out and brings the one behind you in, life itself, the killer we can’t catch.
“I keep imagining myself in the boat with him,” I said. “I’m completely silent, but I’m searching for what I could say to him that would change his mind.”
“Do you find the words?” Loretta asked.
I shook my head. “No.”
Loretta cocked her head slightly, the way she did when an idea hit her. “Do you suppose he had a wife somewhere? Or a lover? Someone we should notify?”
The question took me off guard. I’d never considered such a thing.
“I would certainly doubt it,” I answered, though it was conceivable that a rootless man might eventually have sunk secret roots.
“I always hoped that he had someone,” Loretta said. “Some whore in Trieste, if nothing more. Just someone he was growing old with, someone who might comfort him.”
“Then perhaps you should believe he did,” I said.
Loretta’s eyes flashed. “Is that what gets you through the night, Philip?” she asked. “Choosing to believe something, whether it’s true or not?”