The Crime of Julian Wells Read Online Free PDF

some fiery pit during those last days in the sunroom? I wondered.
    This question, along with the memory that had just summoned it, added to the feeling of unease that was steadily gathering around me, and which I experienced as a shift in the axis of my life or, more precisely, as a faint, somewhat ghostly color added to a spectrum. It was as if Julian’s death now called my own life into question, threw it off balance, so that I had to confront the stark fact of how little I had known the man I thought I’d known the most.
    On that thought, another memory came to me, this time of Julian and me walking in Grosvenor Square in London. Julian had suddenly stopped and pointed up ahead. “That’s where Adlai Stevenson died,” he said.
    He went on to tell me that Stevenson had been strolling with an acquaintance at the time, feeling old, talking of the war. “How many secrets must have died with him,” Julian said.
    Had secrets died with Julian, too?
    I thought again of the agitation Loretta had noticed in him and that she’d previously described: Julian sleepless, pacing, a man who seemed not so much depressed as hounded. In every way, until that last moment, she told me, Julian had appeared less a man determined to die than one ceaselessly searching for a way to live.
    I reached Lincoln Center a few minutes later and, still curiously unready to go directly to my apartment, sat down on the rim of the circular fountain and watched as the last of those bound for the symphony or the theater made their way across the plaza. It was here I’d met Julian a week after we’d graduated from college. He’d already sent in an application to work at the State Department, and I’d expected him to tell me a little more about the ground-level job he hoped to get, but instead he said, “I want to go somewhere, Philip. Out of the country. And not Europe. Someplace that feels different.”
    “Where do you have in mind?”
    Without the slightest hesitation, he said, “Your father suggested Argentina. He said I should see a country where the political situation is dangerous. Get a feel for what it’s like t o live in a place where everything is at risk.”
    I was, of course, aware that Argentina was still in the midst of very dark political repression, and for that reason, if for no other, it hadn’t been on my “must-see” list.
    “I’m not sure going to Argentina is a good thing,” I said. “Or even a safe one.”
    “Do you always want to play it safe, Philip?”
    “Yes,” I answered.
    “Oh, come on,” Julian said. “You have a month before you start your job.”
    I remained unconvinced.
    “Philip, for God’s sake,” Julian said. “Don’t measure out your life in coffee spoons.”
    His allusion to poor, pathetic J. Alfred Prufrock was clearly meant to shock me into acquiescing to his idea of an Argentine adventure, but now, when I recalled that moment, it was Julian’s energy and self-confidence rather than my hesitation that struck me, the sense that he could walk through a hail of bullets and emerge unscathed. He was rather like Aiden Pyle in The Quiet American , young and inexperienced in anything beyond the well-ordered life of a privileged American. Julian Wells, conqueror of worlds, shielded by his many gifts, destined for greatness. Like his country, invulnerable.
    How quickly all that had changed. All of it. After Argentina.
    I knew that in a novel it would be a woman who caused this change. But Julian hadn’t fallen in love with the woman we’d met there. Even so, her sudden disappearance had turned our Argentine holiday into a bitter experience, one I’d long ago managed to put behind me, but which had lingered in Julian, so that over the years he often returned to it in our conversation. I thought of the map he’d laid on the little table in the sunroom. In his last hours had he been thinking of Argentina again?
    I rose from the fountain and made my way to my apartment.
    It was in a prewar building