The droning seemed to go on without pause then after a while the Clerk sat down and everyone suddenly felt wide-awake again and the president adjourned the court until ten o’clock the following morning.
The duchess came to Bourne’s cell, led by the old jailer who had been greatly pleased and greatly honored by her beauty and presence respectively a few years before when she had been remanded to a cell in the building during her trial. They chatted as old friends as they walked along, he walking almost sideways just half a step ahead of her so he could look up at her as they went. Her hair was coming in very black because there was no Cayetano to enjoy it blond. She wore black, and her eyes were dull black.
The old man opened the door of Bourne’s cell then scurried away into darkness. The duchess entered, holding out her hand which Bourne took in both of his and kissed. He looked into her eyes and knew what he saw there the way a patient has sometimes read the eyes of a surgeon. He felt himself shiver. He asked her to sit down. She had not spoken and she had not smiled and when she was seated on the edge of the bed, her long, white hands in graceful repose in her lap, she said, “Eve told me you wanted to see me.”
“Thank you for coming here, Blanca.”
She nodded.
“How is Eve?”
“In good health, I think.”
“I have nearly been out of my mind since Cayetano—”
“I, too.”
“I want to thank you for finding Rafael Corruno-Baenz and persuading him to take this case.”
“I could do no less for you.”
“After what happened that Tuesday I went to your house every three hours like clockwork. I telephoned to Dos Cortes and to the south. I couldn’t find you. I had to speak to you.”
“And now I am here. Or, more to the point, you are here. Speak, Jaime.”
“When Victoriano was alive I tried to find him to bring him to you. I wanted to drag him to you to make him tell you.”
“Victoriano is dead. Whatever you wanted to have him tell me you will have to tell me yourself.”
He had tried not to look at her, but his eyes returned to her eyes. As he looked at this friend, he exploded with talk which healed him as it fell upon both of them. As he talked she offered no comment. She did not relent with any facial expression: mild or strong. He sat beside her and held her left forearm with one great hand gripping her wrist, the other clenching at below the elbow as he tried to give her his anguish but, like a child’s ball set upon a hill, it came back to him.
“I knew nothing about it. I was involved in it in a certain remote way, Blanca, but I never knew what was going to happen. It could not have happened if I had known. Never. I loved Cayetano as I love you. I had no truer friends than you and I have needed so terribly to tell you how I am a part of the cause of your loss, but an unknowing part. Not an innocent part, but I did not know what was going to happen or that Cayetano was in any way involved or that what was going to happen could even touch you or Cayetano. Everything moved in such a way that sometimes I don’t know where it started or where it could have been stopped. I stole those paintings from Dos Cortes, Blanca, but I wasn’t taking anything from you. I know they aren’t important to you and never were. I took some colored canvas down from dark walls, canvases no one ever looked at. But when Victoriano stole the same paintings from me I considered them my property that had been stolen. The thief divested. The thief gulled. The thief self-righteously indignant. The thief at once willing to fall in with the plans of this man he sees as a fool—mind you, Blanca, the man who has gulled him he still sees as a fool, the man who has murdered to get these paintings is still seen as a fool—and then the fool suddenly becomes his master. Eve pounded at me to tell me that I had lost and that if I went along with Victoriano I would be lost, but I wanted my property. The property I had stolen from you.”
He stared at her with agonized and agonizing pleading. She turned her head slowly to regard him with an expressionless stare, waiting for him to complete his confession.
“All I could see were the three paintings I had worked three years to get and which I was determined to have. I could get him the Goya. In theory there was nothing particularly difficult about getting the Goya. The human element is another thing, of course. But to get the Goya I told Victoriano I needed some public diversion, a technical balance within the problem. I couldn’t do both the diversion and the Goya part of it, and so Victoriano undertook the diversion. Blanca, I knew he was already a murderer. I knew he was a disturbed man, even an unbalanced man, but who—how—was there any way in which to—was there any way to anticipate how insane he was, to foresee what he would do? Do you understand what I am saying, Blanca? I tried to know. For three days before we went to take the Goya I tried to find out what the diversion would be, but he had disappeared. The last time I saw him, which was six days before the day everything happened, I demanded to know what the diversion would be and he told me that he was investigating four alternate diversions and that various factors would prove themselves or eliminate themselves by that Saturday. Saturday was three days before it happened. I tried to force him to tell me but he said what he had was too inconclusive and that I had enough on my mind and that he would tell me Saturday. Then he wasn’t there on Saturday. We tried Sunday and Monday, very hard. Tuesday, I went to his house three times and I beat on the doors. I telephoned every hour on the hour Tuesday then it got to be three thirty in the afternoon. and I had to go to the Prado. The point is that if I could have found him and if I could have found out what he intended to do for this obscene diversion it never would have happened. But I didn’t know, Blanca! We went through all the motions with the Goya then Jean Marie funked out. It wasn’t his fault. It was my fault. He was never meant for that kind of work. I left the Prado and the streets were in a state of nightmare, a state of siege from horror. No one walked, everyone ran. In Spain. People were running and weeping with the sun in the sky. It was like the tenth day of a plague. When I got home Eve told me. She told me. Then I told Eve what the diversion was and I knew what Victoriano had done and I had to find you to make you understand that I never knew what was going to happen. I didn’t know what Victoriano was going to do. I couldn’t have known because you know I would have stopped him, but he’s dead now and he can’t tell you that I didn’t know, to stand here before you to clear me so that I can be sure that you believe that I never knew what Victoriano was going to do that day.”
“But I do believe you, Jaime.”
“God bless you.”
“I have known for some time. Not as directly as this, of course. But Victoriano did tell me almost everything before I killed him and I could see that he had used you.” She was composed. She gave the impression of a cooperative friend helping to clear up a misunderstanding. She stood up, disengaging her forearm from his hands which had suddenly gone limp, and patting him on the shoulder.
“I must go now. You have said everything you wanted to say to me? That was all, wasn’t it, Jaime?”
His mind filled again with the liberating vision of the great canvas called “The Second of May” which only he and Eve could ever find and the meaning of the salvation it would bring propped him up, braced him somehow to sit erect and look up at her to say, “That is all. Thank you, Blanca.” With a pure mind which had created a pure sin he saw his hope for the purest kind of punishment, but he sent it back into his own mental darkness, identified as a hope. He wanted to lose that hope where it could be found when he could stand freedom no longer and it had to be found. Until that place in future time he wanted to defer the pure punishment, to suffer the memory of her eyes and the sound of her voice, but he had to defer that hope. It was deferred. It remained in a merciful limbo for two full, dimensional seconds until she told him as she passed out of the cell, “Eve told me where we can find the Goya, Jaime. I think they must have it by now. It will be back in its place in the Prado in the morning.”
She walked down the long, dimly lighted corridor along t
he way she had come and her friend, the old man, gamboled along the passageway to meet her. They chatted like old friends as they walked together, he greatly pleased by the beauty and the presence he had known from years before when she had been remanded to a cell in the building during the trials she had stood while she could not bear to remain at large and in freedom without being held within her lover’s arms.
It was a warm, sunny day. The terrace doors were open at the Bourne apartment of the hotel. A lazy breeze sauntered through the delicious air to the hassock near the center of the room where Eve sat. She started violently when the telephone rang. When she could make herself move, she answered it. Her right knee struck a small tabouret in passing and knocked it over. She almost lost her balance, but she managed to weave through the bright sunlight and pick up the telephone on its sixth ring.
“Hello?” Her voice was as bright as a child movie star’s. It was brighter than the voices of all the salesmen who have ever taken a seven ayem call at a Statler Hotel from the home office.
“Eve? This is Blanca.” The voice had urgency and will.
“Hello, Blanca.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“You must listen to me carefully, Eve.”
“Blanca?”
“They are going to order your arrest this afternoon. If you stay where you are they will arrest you.”
“Arrest me.” Eve made an observation which confirmed what she had heard in Blanca’s sentence.
“If I could come to help, I would, but I am lunching with the people of the prosecution. You must leave the hotel now.”
“I’m drunk.”
“No matter. Do you understand me?”
“Yes. Blanca?”
“Don’t pack anything. Take whatever jewels or small things you feel you have to take, then walk slowly to my house. They will expect you. Do you understand me, Eve?”
“Yes. Blanca. Blanca?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see Jim?”
“Yes.”
“Have you begun to buy him out with the Goya? Is he going to be all right?”
“We can’t talk now, dear. There is no time. You can’t help Jaime if both of you are in prison. Go now, Eve. Start at once. I will be with you and we will talk as soon as I testify this afternoon and you will be safe at my house whether I am there or not. Now, go!” She hung up.
Eve began to move about the room in several directions, bumping into furniture, falling once. She got to her feet uncertainly then pawed about on a closet shelf until she found a large purse, large enough to be standard issue for the visiting nurse service. Clutching the purse, she tacked to the bathroom where she held the towel rack on the wall and let her clothes drop, piece by piece, at a heap at her feet. She moved gingerly across the tiled floor to the tub and the shower, the purse hooked over her left forearm, and she was standing under the cold spray before she remembered it. She tried to bend over it with it to put it on the floor beside the tub, gently, but she almost toppled forward so she had to let it drop heavily. She drew the shower curtain then, clinging to the towel rack inside the tub, as she did.
Her reflexes seemed better when she got out of the shower. She rubbed herself violently with the rough bath towel, bringing a high glow to her firm flesh and perhaps moving the alcohol along faster through her bloodstream. She bound her hair under a kerchief which had been hanging behind the bathroom door. She pulled her clothes on, picking each piece up slowly and squatting, not bending, to get it. She took up the purse last and took it to another room to pack it with all of the instinctive items of value. Working like a computer whose tapes had been punched in advance she packed six of Bourne’s handkerchiefs, three of his cuff links, four pairs of nylon stockings, two nylon panties, a brassière, Bourne’s letters to her, a well-marked road map, her diaphragm and a strangled tube of vaginal jelly, nine small snapshots, two compacts, three lipsticks, two pairs of Bourne’s socks and a cigarette lighter. She hooped four jeweled rings on her fingers, snapped two flashing bracelets on either wrist, started to put on a second necklace then dropped it into her purse. She took all of the money which was in the apartment: three hundred and twenty dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks, six thousand pesetas, seventy-three thousand French francs, a Swiss bankbook, a Tangier bankbook, a New York bankbook, the keys to eight safe deposit vaults and Bourne’s lucky Mexican peso which he always forgot to carry. She put her several passports into the great purse. They were made out variously to Eve Lewis, her own name, together with others borrowed or invented: Evangeline Lewis, as dopey a name as she could remember reading anywhere.
She felt bleary again, all at once. She tottered to the bed and lay face down and concentrated upon remembering Bourne with her body until she believed she could smell him there. Her eyes were as dry as a turtle’s.
The telephone rang again, directly beside her. She answered it brightly again, not as brightly as before because she wasn’t as drunk. The unidentified voice was a London voice. She said, “Hello, Jack,” realizing too late that she had violated his rules. Tense was too absorbed with thinking of how he was going to say what he had to say to notice this breach of etiquette.
“Ducks?”
“Yes, this is Ducks.”
“I want you to meet me. Straight off.”
“All right.”
“You know where Velázquez Street is?”
“Yes.”
“You know the cafés on the walks in the middle?”
“Yes.”
“The one nearest the end toward the Park? The one done in bamboo? Sort of south-seaish? All right?”
“Yes.”
“In ten minutes then. I’ve talked to our friend.”
“Who?”
“My friend. You know, my Spanish business contact.”
“Who?”
“Are you drunk?”
“Yes.”
“Eve, go downstairs now and stand in front of the hotel. I’m directly around the corner at the post office. I’ll be by the hotel with a taxi straight off. All right, love?”
“All right. Jack?”
“Yes, ducks?”
“Have you seen Señor López? You know—your friend?”
“Yes, ducks. Now you go straight down and stand on the pavement in front of that hotel and I’ll tell you all about it. All right, love?”
“Yes, Jack.” She disconnected. She climbed blearily to her feet and balanced unsteadily. She carried the large purse over her left arm and crossed to the small table near the sunny terrace which held the gin and the ice and the small pitcher of water. She held the gin bottle up. There were about two fingers left in it. She made herself a gin on the rocks. She stared out toward nothing as she sipped it and when it was gone she turned to the door and left the apartment for the last time in her life, testing the latch carefully just as though she were sober and not the wife of the managing director of the hotel.
His taxi rolled up as she came through the front door of the hotel. Tense was just as pleased that no doorman was there to remember whom the boss’s wife had gone riding off with. The cab drove to Alcalá then turned right to go up the short hill to the plaza at Puerta Alcalá, swinging halfway around the arch to stop at the Calle de Serrano. Tense dismissed the cab there. After it had moved along, he took Eve’s arm and they walked up the gentle hill toword Velázquez, across from the Retiro, passing the house of the Duchess de Dos Cortes on the way.
In a short time they were seated in the café on the Ramblas. Tense ordered three hot, black coffees but what Spanish he had became snarled up with the waiter’s conception of that language. Eve straightened them out. Tense had her drink two of the cups of coffee while he toyed with his own. When she finished the second cup he switched that for his own full cup and she sipped on as he ordered two more. Occasionally a trolley car would clang, or the brakes of a bus would hiss at them but mostly it was serenely quiet, warm and wondrously clear, with soft sounds embellished by the sou
ghing of the light wind as it combed the trees. Tense sat enjoying her, apprehensive of her reactions when he would be able to phrase what he had to say, but mainly astonished at what this very nearly unknown girl had done to change his hard-eyed objectivity.
“What did Señor López say?” she asked suddenly.
“Oh. Yes. Well, I saw him two nights ago and I mentioned what we had talked about and he seemed to know what I wanted although he didn’t say much but that’s his way. Then a small boy comes to my hotel this morning as I was leaving to cover the trial. The boy had a note for me which says our friend wants to see me. You follow? So I saw our friend.” To punctuate, Tense leaned over and touched Eve’s bare forearm with the tips of his fingers. He had the traditionally shaped fingers of the storybook safe-cracker. They were long, slim and finely sensitive. They were extremely clean. “I have been trying to tell myself how to say this to you, ducks. I like you pretty well, you see. López had bad news, ducks. Very bad news indeed.”
She implored with her gin-flawed eyes. They pled with him to be mistaken. They urged with all of her need, with all of her weariness with endless trouble, to be mistaken.
“The government has got the Goya painting,” Tense said, dropping his eyes. “They won’t need to make any deal any more.”
She made a sound which caught in her throat like a bubble scratched by dryness. She looked away from him quickly as though expecting to see hope and deliverance standing across the street. He took her limp, damp hand in his and held it with love, on the table top.
“They had to find it, you know, ducks, what with every policeman in the country looking for it,” he said lamely.
“How did they find it, Jack?” she asked.