Although she used the elevator she had had the footman telephone ahead to send a floor maid to tell Eve that she was on her way up because the sight of death emerging from a secret panel was not calculated to be a pleasant surprise for anyone. The duchess had always seen herself as death holding court; many kinds of death, not all of them as direct as Cayetano’s or her cousin’s. She was Spain’s own vector of catastrophe, she reminded herself as she had grown up. By loving she could maim. By giving she took life; an insight overtaken when she had been very young and her capacity for anguish had seemed romantic.
When she had been a schoolgirl, walled up within the tragedy which had been her family—a father who had become a suicide, a mother who had become a mumbling nun with skin like a baked apple, not to overlook her own saintly husband—she had learned to lean into the perpetual affliction of her life. If the thought of suicide had not disgusted her, if suicide for all others had not been regarded with such cheerful approval by her late husband and if her own death, in any form, did not seem so horrendously passive, she would have undertaken her destruction years past when she had been a schoolgirl who had unschoolgirlish thoughts which conjugated the unpropitious, which had implacably demanded that pain accompany decay. She had sensed long ago that the source of her trouble was that she was too ancient. Victoriano had worn his hoariness as a belled leper goes forth, and with an ineffable sense of design and structure had managed to die of what had made him live. She had, on the contrary, always fought to conceal the headiness of her nine hundred years. She was a grandee of Spain, a cousin of the king as they say, forced to live in part inside the mists of her history where the past was always now, whetting the appetite of pride, well into the mists of history where she was one piece with the men who had written with El Cid and with the hard-mouthed women who had ruled the men until at last she had come to the end of it, an adept at tragedy. She had been toughened to the point where, at last, she lived by it. That was not the case, she knew, with the beautiful and pregnant newcomer to disaster who was waiting for her. The elevator reached the third floor. The duchess knocked softly to announce herself, and opened the door.
Eve sat facing her. Her face was bleak. She was sober. She didn’t speak. The duchess crossed the room and kissed her in a sisterly fashion on the cheek, removed her hat, and sat in a chair facing Eve, within two feet of Eve.
“Would you like some hot tea, my dear?” the duchess asked.
“Yes. Thank you.”
The duchess rang. “I suppose Rafael Corruno, Jaime’s lawyer, will cross-examine me tomorrow, but I can say with a sense of finality that I have finished my work today. We can leave Spain.”
“We?”
“You must leave tonight. As the Fiscal told me they would, the court ordered your arrest today. Do you have an unused passport, that is, a perfectly usuable passport?”
“Yes. My own. My real passport.”
“Fine. You must take the Daimler which carries a royal crest on its radiator. I bought the thing years ago because it uncomplicated traffic at the feria in Sevilla. And a chauffeur and a footman. They will take your passport into the aduanas at Irún then you will simply roll across the bridge. No one would dream of stopping that Daimler.”
She suddenly peered more intently at Eve. “Have you discovered somehow that I had told the government where to find the Goya which would have freed Jaime?”
“Yes.”
“You would have done the same, would you not?”
Eve ran her hand across her eyes then through her hair. She kept her eyes closed when she answered, then opened them. “I suppose I would have,” she said.
“Yes. I know you. You would have. It was a thing which the faithful women have to do, my dear.”
“Will they kill Jim?”
“No.”
“What will happen to him?”
“The timing of the murder which Raphael will present and somewhat support with the records when the defense presents its case beginning tomorrow afternoon will show reasonable doubt, the Fiscal thinks, so Jaime will probably be sentenced to thirty years and a day.”
“There is nothing to be done?”
“No, dear.”
“Months ago,” Eve said slowly, “when we discovered in Paris that the paintings we had stolen from you had been stolen from us, Jim thought of a way to make contact with an organized group of Spanish criminals in case we should need to have means to trace the paintings here. As though it had been an ordinary, simple, clean hijacking operation.”
Two servants came in with the tea things on a great cart. Although Eve had been speaking English which the servants would not have understood, she fell silent. The duchess directed operations crisply and dismissed the people. She poured tea and arranged small pieces of the beautiful food on a plate for Eve, while Eve began to talk again.
“The man told me today that you had told the government where to find the Goya. He said he had meant not to tell me who had told, just that the government had the Goya, killing any chance for a deal, but at last he decided to tell me because he said I must know who my enemies were. I walked away from him believing that, then all at once I knew you had killed Victoriano Muñoz and tonight when you inquired whether or not I would have given the government the Goya had it been Jim who had been so senselessly murdered and Cayetano were on trial, I could understand that it would only make everything more hopeless if I saw you as my enemy because I feel with every sense I have that Jim knows what has happened to all of us and that he understands what had been done and why it was done and that he must love you more now for having helped to make you suffer so much. I love you more now because I was part of the cause of your suffering and now I stand beside you with one-half of what I have left. Since we cannot snap our fingers and stop living I must somehow find peace for you and you must struggle to find peace for me, because we will never be able to find it for ourselves, our eyes have gone for that. I believe our eyes were always blinded, as every living being must be blinded in that way of finding hope for themselves because it must be bound up in loving and no one is allowed to love himself so prodigiously. If we had all begun where we are now, knowing that we can only do for each other and that we can have reason to hope in no other way, Cayetano would be alive and Jim would be free but that can’t be and we are the only two who are left, and truly the only two who know the secret. When I walked toward your house this afternoon, I knew you knew something I didn’t understand because you have known all of these terrible things much longer than me. I knew you had something which you felt compelled to offer to me, the way religion must have been offered when it first began. You didn’t know whether I had been prepared enough to be able to accept it and you had no right to forsee that I would know what it was before you brought it to me. We are in one form, body and soul, that everyone must see and agree, but more than that I am you and you are me and what have we done to each other?”
The dam broke within the duchess. The tears she had sought since the terrible days when she had been very young, the tears which had been denied to her through all of the battering came to her now. She wept helplessly but joyously, released and purified, as Eve sipped at her tea and retreated into her bleakness.
About the Author
Richard Condon was born in New York City. He worked in the movie business for more than twenty years before beginning to write fiction in his forties. The author of twenty-six books, he is best remembered for The Manchurian Candidate and four novels about the Prizzis, a family of New York gangsters. Condon passed away in 1996.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons,
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Copyright © 1958 by Richard Condon
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2773-1
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Richard Condon, The Oldest Confession
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