The Oldest Confession

  “That is all quite true, as you say it,” Dr. Muñoz told him. “However, I was rather proud of the way I wangled the great Homer Quarles Pickett to Dos Cortes to give his solemn judgment on all three copies never realizing he would exceed himself to the point of finding a bit of Rubens in the Velázquez.”

  “That was really droll,” Jean Marie said. “My God. That was really comical.”

  “Killing Señor Elek—now that was really droll, if you appreciate the droll,” Eve said. The marqués pretended not to have heard her, but he flushed. He decided he had to answer her. “I killed him because he gave me reason to kill him. He tried to blackmail me.”

  “You would have killed him anyway,” she said with a harsh voice.

  He stared at her. His face hardened. “That is true,” he said.

  “I don’t want to discuss that now,” Bourne said loftily. “You have the paintings. The dream of your life hangs in a locked room. The affair is finished. There are no loose ends. There are only blank walls for those of us whom you have cheated while the others do not even know that their property has been stolen. The risk has been run, the deed is done. You not only have your paintings, but you are safe.”

  “And all done rather cleverly I thought.”

  “Indeed, cleverly. Brilliantly.”

  “It is good of you to say that.”

  “Not at all. Then—not because of vanity but as a part of the plan from its beginnings, because you telephoned me to come here for tea not forty minutes after my wife had left for the airport thinking she had the three paintings in that tube. Why? That is incomprehensible to me.”

  “Entirely. I have never been so baffled,” Jean Marie said. “Did you really think you could not be killed and the paintings taken from you?”

  “You hear, Jim?” Eve asked. “A theoretical murderer is here with us. We are making progress as I said we would. Theory and practice. Interest is the trigger. Cause and effect.”

  “I cannot agree with you less, M’sieu Calbert,” Dr. Muñoz interrupted enthusiastically. “You people are not suited for killing. You are all thought, no passion. You would have contempt for a man who would kill for anything he could just as well steal if he put his mind to it. Am I not right, Jaime?”

  “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “I think you are wrong,” Jean Marie said slowly. “There is a lot of money involved here. I think I could kill you if I had a plan. And I may get a plan.”

  “No, no,” the marqués rejoined good-naturedly. “Your wife is implicated here. You don’t know whether or not I would have given some lawyer or some banker the entire story with all the evidence in a sealed envelope and that sort of thing to be opened in the event of my unnatural death et cetera, et cetera. And, furthermore, you will never see these paintings again. They will come down when you leave today and where they go no one but I will know and that is not one of the things anyone could make me reveal. No, I am master here and Mrs. Bourne knew it long before you men knew it. There is nothing you can do but study hard what I am about to instruct you.”

  “What do you want us to do?” Bourne asked Muñoz.

  “There is one more painting I must have.”

  “Ah.”

  “I do this for my family. Please see that. It is not for myself. I am content to live here within a mile of the greatest Spanish painters in the world, but the injustice done to my family is another matter entirely. We go back beyond Pedro of Aragon. We are a very old and extremely important line which has been cruelly and unnecessarily humiliated.”

  “What is the other painting?”

  “I must tell you in my way.” He paused to insure against interruptions. “If it may be said that my family fell from their high places on any particular date, that day must be the second of May in eighteen hundred and eight. On the second of May, the Spanish people decided to resist the forces of Marshal Murat, the Napoleonic commander, and under him Colonel Grouchy and Captain LaGrange. We, my family that is, had decided to cast our lot with Napoleon and his brother which we did only, I most solemnly assure you, to help Spain. You know what Godoy was. Ferdinand was as stupid as his father and as vicious as his mother. We were rich and powerful. We needed no privileges Napoleon could give. What we did was a deeply patriotic thing. I have been over every single document again and again which attests to every motivation of my family at that time, until my head swims. What we did we did to bring Spain to Europe.” He was pleading with them for understanding and for retroactive approval. “We did what we did to make Spain a modern country, abreast or ahead in the march of new commerce, of new expansion, of new bases of world power and if it would have meant accelerating our country’s dying, with the rest of the world, it would have accelerated her living far more.”

  Bourne seemed to have encountered an enormous immovable fact; a huge, melon-shaped, rank-smelling, pulpy fact which he could neither climb over nor walk around; yet a fact so dismaying that he could not believe it as it stood before him, not merely overwhelming him, but threatening him.

  “Do you mean,” he asked Muñoz slowly, “are you telling us that, is this painting which you say you must have, could that painting be Goya’s ‘Dos de Mayo,’ which is now in the Museo de Pinturas del Prado?” Bourne had taken each word out of his disbelief as deliberately as a housewife unpacks a paper sack filled with grocery items.

  “Mon dieu! Get the handcuffs!” Jean Marie moaned.

  Dr. Muñoz acknowledged neither the dazed question nor the outburst. He went on. “The painter Goya was the key factor in my family’s humiliation. He had become a police informer for Ferdinand. He continued as an informer for Joseph Bonaparte. When the French left he became an informer for Arthur Wellesley.”

  “Arthur Wellesley?” Jean Marie asked blankly.

  “The English general. Later the Duke of Wellington. Crashing bore.”

  “Oh. Yes.” Jean Marie stared at Eve and shrugged.

  “When Ferdinand returned to the Spanish throne, Goya had used up all trust,” Muñoz said. He had informed on all sides for all sides. The king moved to prosecute him. He bargained to save himself with a dossier he claimed to have assembled on my family. A deal was made. They let him leave the country and he went to die in Bordeaux and my family was stripped.”

  “Victoriano?”

  “Yes, Jaime?”

  “Are you going to tell me that you want Goya’s ‘The Second of May’?”

  “Yes.” Muñoz nodded. He was calm, reasonable, even judicious in his manner.

  “The painting is in the Prado.”

  “I know that.”

  “It is eight feet high and eleven feet wide.”

  “I certainly know the painting. You surely aren’t going to give me a short talk on Goya’s painting, are you?”

  “It can’t be done. That’s what I am giving you this short talk on. It is impossible to do. Do you understand me? Victoriano, it cannot be done.”

  “Jaime, please! You haven’t even thought about it.”

  “I don’t have to think about it!”

  Eve put her hand on her husband’s forearm. “Jim, don’t bargain. He’s crazy and he’s a murderer, and there’s nothing he can do to us.”

  “What do you mean, Eve?” Jean Marie said quickly.

  “We’ll tie him up and be out of the country before he can find a traffic cop. And when his servants untie him he’ll think twice about throwing away these paintings.”

  “She’s right, Jim,” Jean Marie said to Bourne. Bourne looked calmly at Muñoz for the answer.

  “She’s right as far as she goes, M’sieu Calbert,” Dr. Muñoz said patiently, “but to give you a convincing demonstration of my sincerity, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll have your wife arrested tonight by the French police, which I had intended to do all along if any of you attempted to leave the country.”

  “I tell you to leave my wife out of this, Muñoz. If a minute of my wife’s life is disturbed I will make you very sorry.”

&nbs
p; “But, sir!” Dr. Muñoz protested. “That will be too late! Your wife will already be in prison. I have been able to arrange with some very important friends in our Ministry of Security here to ask the Sureté in Paris to detain Madame Calbert for questioning by Spanish experts with regard to other mysteries caused by the disappearance of great pieces of French art twelve years ago.”

  Jean Marie sat quietly, everyone watching him. He gulped the cognac and poured more. He turned toward Bourne, staring at his chest, not his eyes or face and said, “Tell your wife to stop her talking. Is she trying to hound Lalu? We must do what he says and stop all this talking and talking. It is my wife who is threatened.”

  Everyone seemed to stand at once. Dr. Muñoz said, “You run along now. I know you are tired and that you have a great deal of thinking to do. Please call upon me for any help I can possibly give, and let’s have lunch very soon to talk things over.” He shepherded them along the corridor. “Don’t do anything foolish, I implore you. Spanish law is inordinately severe on charges like these. I did not exaggerate when I outlined my frank interest and intentions. Who wants to die, I ask you that? Particularly in a dungeon.”

  He slipped ahead of them and opened the front door. They passed out of the apartment silently. They did not wait for the lift to come, but descended the stairs, passing from his view.

  The duchess was splendidly naked in a square, sunny room in a graceful building which watched the sea from the outskirts of Jerez de la Frontera. She had a red rose in her blondined hair, her feet were propped up on the bedstead at the foot of the bed and she was laughing like an alto saxophone. She was the incarnation of the great tart of all the world; generous, lewd, safe, irresistible and unresisting. Cayetano sprawled across her and the bed, as naked as money, talking rapidly and interrupting his own talk with grins, flashes of teeth, and bolts and bursts of laughter. He shifted his position, north by northeast, bracketing her beautiful head with his elbows and staring deep, deep down into her eyes. She stopped laughing but she still smiled; for carnal is as carnal does. It was a different smile and it sent electrical jolts into his thighs and shooting up into the floor of his belly. Her eyes closed to slits until just glitter came out of them. She stared up at him, not speaking, and dared him to do again what he thought he had not had the strength to do. Her hands moved under him. Her breasts which had waited so long for all of this and more of this and more than this, for the over and over and over and over of the lifetime of this and more than this, pushed up at him. Her hips rubbed his hips. He stopped grinning. She stopped smiling. Her mouth loosened from its moorings in propriety and fell open; lush, wet and suggestively soft. Her long legs fell from their place on the bedstead and sought him. She made a glorious sound.

  The next evening Jean Marie walked the short distance from the hotel to the General Post Office and called Lalu in Paris from a telephone booth because his experience with all past telephone operators in hotels had convinced him that it would be madness to expect privacy in a telephone conversation from one’s own room. He spoke his especially soft, musical French into the telephone within the booth and told Lalu that Bourne’s friend had liked his work very well and that he had offered so much money for a portrait of himself that Jean Marie had decided to stay on in Madrid to paint it. No, he would not say how much over the telephone. He would be in Madrid for at least a month. The weather was beautiful. It was not Paris, but it was an enchanting city. Even she would love it. He liked it himself. He wanted her to come to Madrid. Never mind the expense! Lalu, darling! Stop fretting about the expense! Little cabbage, the fee for this one portrait would be the biggest fee he had ever made. Little mouse, the tour of the European dealers had been an enormous success, as he had written to her. Sacré bleu! He wanted her to have a change. Alors! Would she visit her aunt in Bayonne if she would not come to Madrid? Would she please stop this constant resistance about expense? He should not have telephoned? A letter would have said what he had wanted to say much better and be much, much cheaper? All right! That was enough! He was no longer suggesting, he was commanding. She would get out of Paris before tomorrow evening and she would visit her aunt in Bayonne until he told her to go back to Paris. No, nothing more! He hung up feeling very proud of her. He had a wife who looked after his substance. No frivolous waster, his Lalu, like others such as Eve Bourne with her two new dresses since arriving in Madrid, having a trunk full of perfectly good dresses as it was. Lalu knew the value of money.

  He squared his shoulders and made his way out of the building, then crossed to sit upon the ramblas to drink a coffee and watch the lively crowds; not as lively as in Paris, but very lively; and the pretty girls, who while not as pretty as the girls in Paris, were very pretty. They floated past like noisy flowers talking harshly and incessantly from their rifled Spanish throats, some with happiness like a newly struck match in their faces, others busy upon the deep study of their own pride in its visible extension. They walked their backs, shoulders, throats, chins and eyebrows as the people of other nations might walk their dogs or children for a short while through a soft, warm and gentling evening which shuffled a packet of endless hours and dealt them out toward the next day. The incessant and harsh voices of the women, the rudeness of the trolley bells, the shrill repetition of the word lotería over and over, like identical lush flowers upon invisible wallpaper, the boasting horns of the valorous cars, the rake and rapping of the men’s high, hard heels upon the pavement, and the endless, multiple octaves of talk, talk, talk upon his ears soothed Jean Marie, who was very much a city man, and more and more allowed him to shift the new problem presented by Dr. Muñoz to Bourne. Jean Marie explained himself to himself as only a student of what could be seen and felt. Bourne was the thinker. Bourne was the man in the present who coped with the future, but he was irritable at having begun to think of Muñoz again. It bothered him. It spoiled the evening.

  At long last, made possible by rehearsals of a lifetime in sidewalk cafés, he finished the tiny cup of coffee and crossed the Paseo de Calvo Sotelo to walk slowly up the medium hill of Calle Alcala. When he reached the hotel he found Bourne far back in the corner of the room marked American Bar, sitting at a table and sipping on a whiskey. Jean Marie sat down beside him, motioning the waiter away.

  “You figuring everything out?” he asked.

  “I was thinking how much I hate to be handled like an amateur, not to say a chump. The risks are so heavy in this business that it is an absolute law that the price has to be right.”

  “Can the painting be stolen?”

  “I think so. I must think more about it.”

  “You think now he will pay us to get the Goya for him?”

  “He wants that Goya more than salvation. As you saw he is not less than insane in that area. No matter how much he threatens I’m not going to do this piece of work for nothing.” He worked on the whiskey for a moment. “We’ll wait a few days then we’ll talk with Victoriano some more. We’re not being unreasonable, you know. Right is right, and he’s got to be made to see that.”

  “See what?”

  “We are entitled to an equity in this transaction! He thinks we can get the Goya. And maybe we can. I won’t say yes, I won’t say no, but I will say absolutely to the man who will put his name on the dotted line and guarantee a fair fee for our labor and for the risk we will run.”

  “Sign? He’ll never sign. What are you talking about?”

  “He wants the Goya so much that he won’t move on any threats if I tell him we can get it. He’ll listen to reason. If we get him that Goya I want those three paintings back, free and clear. That’s what we came to Spain to get and that’s what we’re going to get.”

  “I think he’ll agree,” Jean Marie said. “I feel that the way you feel it.”

  “Yes. I do, too.”

  “And you know what else I think? I think after we get those three paintings back that he should be killed. I know you’re against that kind of thing, and, for that matter, so am I, of course. But
he’s unpredictable because he’s crazy. We don’t want to have to try to go through life expecting that one to drop police on us from every rooftop. Seriously, Jim. I think he should be killed.”

  “Yes,” Bourne said. “I do, too.”

  The next morning Eve was awake and out of bed when Bourne opened his eyes in the calamine blue room with sharp white carpets and the doric-formed, lemon-chrome drapes which stood as frivolous, tall sentinels on either side of an enormous opera-pink bed. Months before, awaiting Eve’s arrival, Bourne had had the room redone down to matchboxes. Jean Marie had composed the colors, Bourne had allotted the spatial elements and the over-all effect reduced Eve’s size to the size she had cherished since she had been a child, to the daintiest, most feminine, and helpless illusion of the sometimes useful, most times useless ancient illusion of a woman. When viewed by the chambermaid the bed seemed as big as a badminton court, but when their large frames lay across it, the bed seemed a normal size. Bourne was as big as a mausoleum and he had always maintained that on Olympus the cupids would have played handball up against her fine behind.

  Eve sat at a severely practical dove-white table containing just about as much blue as the breath of frost, writing with a ball-point pen which was one end of the world’s most vulgar, mail-order, long, white, furry feather, a wedding present from two nuns to whom she had once loaned five thousand lira at an airport in Milan after they had learned they had left their purses in Turino.

  Bourne felt himself being pulled out of the hopelessly deep well of delayed sleep by a rope of light and sound which was fastened tightly around his forehead.

  “Whatta you doing?” Bourne asked thickly.

  “Writing to Jack Tense.”