The Oldest Confession

by Richard Condon

  The Oldest Confession

  Richard Condon

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  FOR MY DARLING EVELYN

  AND

  FOR MAX

  WITH LOVE

  Contents

  Part I LEVANTADO

  Part II PARADO

  Part III APLOMADO

  Part I

  LEVANTADO

  The bull is fresh and believes himself prepared for anything. He knows his strength and has great confidence in his ability to conquer anything in the ring. He lunges at the cape with unbelievable speed.

  The small hotel on Calle de Marengo stood back-to-back with a German restaurant whose cooks and kitchens had been flown from Berlin to Madrid by the late Luftwaffe. Prior to that the hotel had been headquarters for the Soviet General Staff in the river of blood of only twenty years before. To those of a romantic turn, like James Bourne, these conditions should have made the hotel seem endemically sinister but the warm press of spring helped to shoo away the sachet of old death. It was still there however but, like a touch of insanity in a well-to-do family, never mentioned.

  Off the main hall, in the American Bar, sat Dr. Victoriano Muñoz, Marqués de Villalba; Representative and Mrs. Homer Quarles Pickett (R., Ill.); a bullfighter named Cayetano Jiminez; James Bourne, the American who leased and operated the hotel; and Doña Blanca Conchita Hombria y Arias de Ochoa y Acebal, Marquesa de Vidal, Condesa de Ocho Pinas, Vizcondesa Ferri, Duquesa de Dos Cortes.

  Dr. Muñoz carried his cat, Montes, with him as he always did. Muñoz was a tree to the cat. It climbed him continuously when the climbing mood came upon it. It rested upon him, anywhere upon him, when resting suited it. The marqués had named this cat after the pasodoble El Gato Montes. Montes, a topaz cat, was the doctor’s only real confidant.

  The duchess was an intense, formidably prejudiced woman of memorable, sensual beauty and suspended youth, a tribal yo-yo on a string eight hundred years long, whose pale, blond hair was dark at the root.

  In seven years she had spent two years in prisons as the most reckless partisan of Spain’s royal pretender. In his name she had breached the peace, resisted the law, inveighed against Franco, the Falange, and Communism. The Pretender is said to have written to her with considerable urgency from Portugal commanding that she cease and desist in her alarums against the Caudillo and she is said to have replied by return mail that when he commanded her from Spanish soil she would obey, and not until. She had not seen her husband for three years, by his choice. The duchess was twenty-nine years old.

  Cayetano Jiminez, whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been bullfighters and whose great-great-grandfather had been a British rifleman who had entered Spain sin pasaporte with Wellington at Badajoz, had golden-red hair and milky skin. He was a tall man, not beside James Bourne, but certainly when next to Dr. Muñoz he seemed quite long. The illusion of even greater length came from his slimness which was a good thing because when he fought bulls he went in close, without tricks, and that was no business for a plump man.

  Tourists might be confused by the duchess’s blondness and Cayetano’s golden redness, but the Picketts at least looked quite typically Spanish. She was angularly thin and black with olive skin and large, dark passionate eyes which were then sticky from the sound of her husband’s voice and from four absinthe frappés. The bones of her shoulders and back seemed exhausted from having to hold up her large breasts. She was nearly twenty-five years younger than her husband.

  Homer Pickett was a billowing man with a census of chins, very red lips and a highly pitched voice. He looked like a receiver of stolen goods or a jolly undertaker, anything in a category at once sedentary and abnormal. His hands touched and fondled his person endlessly, from ear lobe to kneecap, as he talked. He was a prodigious talker. He spoke Castilian Spanish, as did Mrs. Pickett. He could also speak Galician and Catalan, and if the Basque language could have been learned by an adult, Mr. Pickett would have learned Basque. He was between fifty and fifty-five years old.

  Representative and Mrs. Pickett, he a prize of Dr. Muñoz’ who had read in that morning’s paper of the Picketts’ presence in Madrid, had met these four new friends exactly fifty-five minutes before. Dr. Muñoz was an art lover, the duchess an art enthusiast, and Bourne an art student, in his way. Cayetano Jiminez was there because the duchess was there.

  Mr. Pickett was a world authority on the graphic art of Spain. When he spoke of Morales or Murillo or Valdés Leal with the frequently emotional and always interstitial information he could bring to these subjects, it made Dr. Muñoz narrow his eyes suddenly to keep back the mist which always filled them in the presence of Spain’s beauty and made Cayetano Jiminez, a person of clearly defined interests, seem to drink in the duchess’s image and breathe more heavily. As Mr. Pickett spoke the duchess would stare at him with protuberant eyes and keep wetting her lower lip with the soft underside of her tongue.

  It was not all reverential talk they exchanged. In fact a great deal of the talk concerned contemporary Spanish painters and was pure gossip, much of it delicious. To this part of the feast it was Mr. Pickett who brought the appetite.

  Victoriano Muñoz, behind thick lenses and under a third-rate mustache, wearing a tightly fitting suit over his small body which seemed martyred to the broad chocolate stripes over the blue material, and flashing that tiny tic at the corner of his mouth which, like the lock of a dam, released white moisture which he was continually wiping away, resembled a schoolmaster of an older time. His family had lost most of its enormous fortune, the basis of which had been twenty per cent of the Peruvian gold yield of Francisco Pizarro, by too public an alliance with Joseph Bonaparte. They had been that kind of Spaniard. Although the duchess for example would not recognize a title conferred by any Bonaparte, Dr. Muñoz still held a souvenir from the French in that he could, if he chose, which he most certainly did not as he bitterly resented his family’s past mistake in loyalties, call himself Comte de la Frontière. His consuming interest was the art of Spain. Representative Pickett was one of his heroes. James Bourne was the other.

  His warm devotion to Bourne, an innkeeper and a foreigner, was one of the most discussed puzzles of fashionable Madrid. Because of Dr. Muñoz, Bourne was accepted by everyone in Spanish society. In return, Bourne discussed the Spanish masters with the marqués who was dismayed, awed, excited, fulfilled and engrossed by Bourne’s knowledge.

  Bourne spoke to the marqués in the form of a lecture or seminar. Otherwise, under any other condition of their meeting or association, Bourne rarely spoke to him directly. He could feel his laughter turn rancid when Muñoz joined in; feeling uneasiness over how long and how well he could continue to conceal his distaste for the doctor. Lack of talk itself was not indicative of aloofness with Bourne. It was a great effort, or he made it seem to be, for Bourne to speak. The duchess and Cayetano Jiminez were perhaps the only exceptions to this rule of silence. He could be nearly garrulous with them.

  Bourne either learned by listening or did not bother to listen at all, remembering instead all that he had been unable to understand throughout his life, remaining silent, chewing upon the statement of this fact, staring at the memory of that dream, awaiting some sign of recognition, some association of the words with reality, a sargasso sea obscured by bulbous fronds.

  He was very tall; more than six feet four inches tall, a compactly muscular man whose elegant clothes and nervous grace made him seem slender. He had a huge head, though, and small features like cinders stuck in suet. Bourne always sat uncommonly still; uncommon at least for nearly everyone else of that decade, a monument to his own nerves which bayed like bloodhounds at the moon of his ambitions.

  Bourne thought of himself as a crimina
l the way others might think of themselves as lawyers or doctors. In countries where men are introduced as, for example, Engineer di Giorgio or Accountant Scheffler, Bourne to himself would have been simply Criminal Bourne. He had never been arrested. Excepting for his wife and his French associate, Jean Marie, Bourne was not known as a criminal to anyone else and most particularly was he unknown to the police or any other criminals. His account books, kept as meticulously as though he expected any day to have to justify his income tax returns to an examiner, showed that he had earned by criminal methods the multiple currency equivalent of seven hundred and twelve thousand dollars over a period of sixteen years through efficiently executed crime in Pasadena, California; London, England; Des Moines, Iowa; Paris, France; and in the Federal District of Mexico, among other places.

  He had had the hotel in Madrid under operating lease for three and one-half years and had been so patient in the development of this Spanish criminal project, patience having been one of his strongest professional points, that he had been invited to play with the Danne String Quartet, a pool of gifted amateurs of great family, in charity concerts at the Royal Palace; he had twice been invited to enjoy the festival of Our Lady of Rocio on the horses of Don Eduardo Miura; he was considered to be the closest friend of the great Cayetano Jiminez and was favored by the duchess as were perhaps two dozen Spaniards, most of whom were of great age. It was all part of Bourne’s exquisite sense of composition.

  Michelangelo had said that the successful completion of a great mosaic must rest upon the infinite design in the placement of a single tile. One could relate the developmental side of Bourne’s crimes to that of the work of any fine artist. He assembled his tiles under demanding standards. He was willing to consume time and capital and to spend weeks at a time away from a new wife of only nine and three-quarter months while he considered the infinite design of his tasks. He did not assign himself to steal property only because it was marked by vulgar display as worth stealing.

  Bourne breathed the same air with his victims. He did not sentimentalize. His crimes were indigenous. In moving to Spain he had not known in advance what it was he had come to steal. Bourne always waited for a worthy object to present itself to him. This was not difficult for, by prearrangement and somehow connected with his romanticism, Bourne had always arranged to move among riches.

  His counters were in full play as he sat trying to listen to Representative Pickett talk ravenously of Ferrer Bassa, a Spanish primitive painter. Bourne fastened his concentration upon the duchess with the friendliest kind of detachment.

  It was only nine o’clock in the evening, maybe a little later. It would be two hours to dinnertime, maybe a little longer.

  Congressman Pickett could not remember where he had last seen Ferrer Bassa’s work exhibited. The duchess merely said, “Jaime will know. Jaime?” Bourne heard his name and at once pulled the plastic covers off his expression.

  “Yes, Blanca, darling?”

  “Where are the Ferrer Bassas, sweet?”

  “The altarpieces?”

  “Yes, darling.”

  “Oh. At Pedralbes. You know. The convent near Barcelona.”

  “Thank you, darling. Do continue, Mr. Pickett.”

  Pickett shifted quite smoothly into the genius of Bernardo Martorell. It took rather a few words to do but each one was spoken with such authority that everyone listened closely, or seemed to be listening.

  Mrs. Pickett looked the most attentive, but she was the most experienced at listening to her husband. She focused her eyes on the bridge of his nose and leaned forward slightly in excited interest, her mouth the tiniest bit opened. With this tribute she freed herself.

  Her mind wandered out of the world of art and entered another to consider the gallantry of a man whom she admired beyond all others because after his wife had spent three weeks away from him in a Florida resort he had met her at the Newark Airport on her return with a private ambulance so that he could welcome her warmly and pleasure them both behind an ejaculating siren at seventy-three miles an hour across the Pulaski Skyway and the Jersey Flats. She mulled over it as one of the greatest compliments a woman had ever been paid.

  “You would be astonished, my dear duchess,” Congressman Pickett was saying, “how much Berenson knows about your own neoclassical school. It is astonishing, you know. I mean to say I can, of course, converse in his field. That is, I am familiar with something of Titian. I have, as a matter of pure fact, been trapped into lecturing for several hours on the Italians in a dreary unconvincing sort of way, haven’t I, Marianne?” Mrs. Pickett nodded like The Hanging Judge. “But I mean to say, compared to Berenson in my field, I was as ignorant in his as—well, as some popular art critic, I suppose. Spain is my field. I mean, all of it. I mean I do excel with the Spanish quite a few light years beyond Berenson because, naturally, it is my field where it is not his. You see what. I mean, doctor?”

  “I see what you mean. Yes. But I want to assure you with all the power at my command, Mr. Pickett, I am not interested in Italian painters or in such people who choose to be interested in them. I intend no rudeness by this, please. Mr. Pickett, please clear up one point for me. The Velázquez ‘The Conde Duque of Olivares on a White Horse’ which is now in the Metropolitan in New York—”

  “Yes, doctor?”

  “It was acquired for over two hundred thousand dollars in 1952.”

  “Yes, doctor.”

  “Who sold it to them?”

  “Uh. Why—uh. Now that you mention it, I—was it—uh?—”

  The duchess coughed slightly. The cat Montes leaped from Muñoz’ lap to his left shoulder but no one batted an eye except Mrs. Pickett who looked as if she’d like to swipe at the cat’s chops with the Ojen bottle. Cayetano pressed Bourne’s thigh with his knee. Bourne understood the gesture if not the existence of any question. “Yes, Blanca? Am I missing something?”

  “Sweet, who sold the Duque of Olivares on a white horse to the New York museum?”

  “You mean the name of the agent?”

  “No, no, my dear Jaime,” Dr. Muñoz said. “Who owned the painting?”

  “Well, it had been bought by the seventh Earl of Elgin in Paris in 1806. Most people thought it was a copy with variations of the Prado portrait. I saw it in ’45 at the present Earl of Elgin’s place in Fifeshire. They found out it was no copy, all right, when it was cleaned up for an Edinburgh Festival. Good heavens, any of us could have told them that. The pentimenti around the hat and the face gave the whole thing away. I rather think that Olivares realized that the white horse caught the eye rather than the rider and had the color altered. Nor can one blame him.”

  “Whew! Man, what a talker. You just never stop, do you, Jaimito?” Cayetano shook him by the nape of the neck laughing. Bourne grinned back at him, but the vault of his lower face had been resealed. His mind left them again. He began to go through the steps of the problem again, leading away from his objective to explore once again each contingency which might, but which undoubtedly would not, arise.

  The thought of Spanish masterpieces floating about in foreign lands, being bought and sold with no Spanish hope for control, launched the duchess upon a virulent attack upon the efficiency, aims, progress, permanent collections, influence or lack of it and general shortcomings of the Instituto de Cultura Hispanica, a cultural arm of the Foreign Office and a source of abiding pride to Generalissimo Franco. She chopped away in fine detail, as Dr. Muñoz and Congressman Pickett formed the other sides of the triangular argument.

  As she spoke with delicate eloquence and heated partisan fervor Cayetano stared at her. His hands clenched his napkin, annoyed nut dishes, twisted his watch band or played with his necktie. They were long-fingered hands with wire-haired backs. The nails had been bitten so low into the fingers that each finger end was stumpy and bald, each having the expression of blind men.

  He watched her, missing no move and hearing no word. His eyes addressed her with the intensity of demand which they were ac
customed to use only to address the statues of the Virgin in the chapels of the bull rings in Madrid, Caracas, Seville, Mexico City or anywhere else like that near eternity. Before he knew what or why, he felt Bourne tap him, as the others stood up. The group left the hotel to move diagonally across the street through the gentling night to the frontón.

  Victoriano Muñoz, carrying the topaz cat Montes like a baby in arms, walked most earnestly beside Mr. Pickett, nodding in continuing understanding as Mr. Pickett fussed at the garments of the Spanish masters with unrelieved syntax.

  Bourne gave support to Mrs. Pickett who told him that the bartender at the hotel was in love with her, she believed, and had been serving her double absinthes. She smiled hazily up at Bourne and asked him if he knew just how much of an aphrodisiac absinthe was. He replied that he had had no experience with that sort of thing.

  Cayetano walked slowly beside the duchess, twenty yards behind the others. They seemed to have nothing to say which was not being said by the gift of their presence to each other. Their fingertips, as they walked side-by-side, just touched, so that they might swing away from each other at any sudden appearance of vulgarity.

  They were walking slowly and without any interest in their destination to the frontón because Mrs. Pickett had begun to express her ideas and opinions about bullfights. The duchess had looked to Bourne as though she might become ill, so Bourne had turned the conversation to pelota and Mrs. Pickett had insisted upon seeing it played.

  Inside the frontón the noise was so abusive that the slumbrousness of the instant past seemed unreal. The sound of the crowd was the sound of a pet shop in a fire. The smoke of cigars and cigarettes, some of it years old, settled in billows like damp organdy.

  The party climbed to seats in the eleventh row and settled down to the sound of the ball hitting the walls with the sound of a nightstick hitting a shinbone, and to watch the small players make the giant gestures of throwing the ball from the long baskets as Van Gogh might have tried to throw off despair only to have it bound back at him from some crazy, new angle.