The Crime of Julian Wells Read Online Free PDF Page A

the questions he asks, and I found myself increasingly questioning my father’s statement regarding Julian, that he had known only darkness. For I could remember my friend in the bright days of his youth, when he’d gone full speed at life. Like my father, he’d wished to change the world for the better. He’d known about history’s many horrors, of course, but he hadn’t focused on them. Life had seemed manageable to him then, its evils visible because they were so large: poverty, oppression, and the like. It was against these forces he would take up arms, a young Quixote. He’d been naive, of course, but that had made him genuine. He’d known that he was good, and this had been enough to make him happy.
    When the best man you’d ever known, the one you’d loved the most, and of all the people you’d ever known, the one who’d had the greatest capacity for true achievement, when such a man later trudges to a pond, climbs into a boat, rows a hundred feet out into the water, rolls up his sleeves, and cuts his wrists, are you not called upon to ask what you might have said to him in that boat, how you might have saved him?
    And if you do not ask this question, are you not, yourself, imperiled?
    I would later consider the unsettling tremor I’d felt when I asked myself those very questions. It was as if I’d suddenly felt the bite of a blade, the warmth of my own blood now spilling down my arm.
    Outside the building, the doorman was leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette. “Rain’s stopped,” he said.
    I stepped from beneath the awning and looked into a quickly clearing sky. There were wisps of dispersing clouds, and here and there the flicker of a star, a rare sight in Manhattan.
    “Yes, it’s quite nice now,” I said. “I think I’ll walk.”
    “They’ve already warned me,” the doorman whispered with a sly wink and something vaguely sneering in his voice.
    “Warned you?” I asked as if he’d just heard a sinister aside.
    “About me smoking,” the doorman explained. “The board don’t like it when I smoke.”
    “Oh,” I said.
    He laughed. “But I do it out in the open, so the union says I can smoke if I want to.”
    “Yes, of course,” I said. “Well, good night.”
    I walked to Broadway, then turned south, a route I’d taken many times, so the sights of this section of the world’s longest street were familiar to me. And yet I felt that something had been minutely altered, and that this change had occurred in some part of me that I’d thought impenetrable since my wife’s death, a wound I’d covered with a thick scar tissue that nothing had pierced until now.
    Clearly Julian’s death, the dread manner and heartbreaking loneliness of it, had opened me up both to questions and to memories, one of which came to me now.
    We were in Greece, where Julian had come across the case of Antonis Daglis, the otherwise nondescript truck driver who had murdered several prostitutes. For Julian, such ordinary murderers were of no interest. Tracing their crimes, he said one day while we drank ouzo in an Athens taverna, was like following a shark through murky waters, dully recording that it ate this fish, then that one. It was evil he was after, I could tell, some core twist in the scheme of things.
    In the end, Julian found nothing to write about in Greece, but while in the country, we wandered through various remote areas, notably the Mani. He was reading the great travel writer Patrick Fermor at the time, and one night, as we tented on a rocky cliff overlooking the Aegean, he told me about a funeral Fermor had attended in the same area. At the funeral, the dead man’s soul had been commended to the Virgin Mary in strict Christian fashion, but a coin had also been placed in his coffin as payment to Charon for ferrying the dead man’s soul across the Styx. To this incident Julian added a comment that now echoed through my mind: All excavations lead to hell.
    Had Julian been clawing toward