The Oldest Confession

by Richard Condon

  At the Iberia counter she gave the clerk her passport and the baggage checks the porter had given to her and asked, with a dazzling smile, for her large bag. He dragged it out for her at once and, without a word, she carried it to the Ladies’ Room where she took off the dress which had been stained with fear and put on another. She returned to check her bag through again and, with a firm grip on the cardboard tube, passed the guardia at the customs gate and moved across the customs room to the office of the chief of customs.

  Bourne arrived too late to see her. He moved impatiently through the crowds then through the restaurant to the terrace which overlooked the field. As he came up to the wire fence the Iberia Constellation was loading. He looked wildly about to find her, fearing the worst in a terrifying flash, and when he did see her she was halfway up the steps to the plane, carrying the cardboard tube in her hand and chatting pleasantly with an elderly nun who climbed the steep steps slowly ahead of her. She did not look back.

  During his immediately preceding criminal enterprise Bourne had lived in Paris for nearly three years. The assignment he had developed for himself involved an intricately designed and routinely executed insurance company embarrassment which Bourne had decided never to repeat; not because there had not been enough risk, because he in no way appreciated risk, but because it had resembled, far too closely, the kind of dishonesty he had practiced in his father’s firm. To Bourne, the insurance company job had been dishonestly dishonest. The work had taken him four months less than three years and a certain amount of operating capital but, banishing taxes, as he could in his work, he was able to displace his total outlay of twenty-one million francs for the entire period, with a gross profit of ninety-six million francs realized against a risk of twenty to thirty-five years in prison if he had been caught. He had reinvested two-fifths of his profit in annuities with the same insurance company because he was sure that they had learned a massive lesson and would be extremely alert against any semblance of recurrence. The project itself is of no interest in the Spanish connection but the three years it had given him in Paris had brought him friends and a wife. His friends and particularly his wife had turned out much later to have their own friends and connections within the pervasive art world of the city or, to untangle this maze of words, his friends had indirectly lead him to his wife and his wife had taken him to Jean Marie.

  Eve Lewis was what many people might call a reject. While she was working in the market for a fashion magazine in New York it was discovered that she had a tendency to weep without reason in inconvenient circumstances. She had wept once at the rather offhand description of a small boy being sent to camp from Grand Central Station and once at the recollection of a method of fixing dog races with chewing gum. Even though, much later, it was discovered that the tendency was due to her revulsion to drugs and that a doctor had put her on something called dexadrine to enforce weight reduction, it served to mark her with other people as being essentially unstable. Also, she got the shakes regularly, which is to say that she overcompensated for a low resistance to alcohol. Other indications which tend to prove that people like this only get what they ask for by being sensitive, imaginative, creative, frightened and valuable; such as an abortion, a marriage, and a divorce, in that order, set her apart from the more completely adjusted women at the magazine who understood reflexively that there was no need for feeling either rejected or disgraced by either abortion or divorce. They knew, without getting morbid and overwrought about it, that there were pills for sleeping and pills for waking, and pills for in between which removed all excuses for any kind of shakes. The women around her at that time were enlightened, modern women and she was one of those slobs who were just not able to cope, who were most certainly not able to compete, and if a person doesn’t have the spirit or the interest to compete, how can they expect to survive?

  Naturally, when one lived under the world’s greatest standard of living one had to expect the world’s highest cost of living. Wages might not exactly keep up with prices, but The Administration certainly saw to it that credit kept up with prices and when it all resulted in a way of life which had evolved out of world leadership why keep calling the resulting, personal condition debt, or if one had to be old-fashioned and call it debt, why act like there was any disgrace connected with that either? Everyone else lived the same way, but no one could pound that into Eve Lewis’ head.

  She just didn’t have it to survive. Consequently she did what a lot of other rejects had done. Instead of killing herself or going into a convent she let herself out by moving to Europe to live on a year-in-year-out basis.

  At first it had been totally exhilarating to live in Paris because it was, in a sense, like being invisible. She could travel anywhere there and not understand one word that people were saying if she stayed out of the Georges V, Le Calvados, and the Louvre. For weeks she envied people with the good fortune to have to wear hearing aids which they could turn on or off so they could select what they heard and not be made old by gabble. Eve, however, was a natural linguist the way Darrow was a natural trial lawyer and Eisenhower was a natural golfer, which meant that the three of them had to study and work and devote almost all of their waking hours for the realization of their gifts.

  When Eve had first arrived in Paris she had no anticipation that she would one day speak six languages. After four weeks she had met an improbably handsome Polish fashion photographer who spoke no English and had moved in with him on the third floor of a cold-water flat in the Place des Vosges. In four months she had French at a point where she could massage it into perfection, which she did. In seven months she had Polish, which is more difficult.

  Working like this, with one teacher at a time, as good women do, she learned Italian in Rome and Spanish in Spain while working as a feature writer with an American film company on location in Italy and as a stringer and a space-rate “columnist” for the Paris edition of an American paper from Madrid. She learned German working as a publicity representative in Frankfurt which is that part of Germany where the most perfect German is spoken, representing a Chicago public relations firm on a cosmetics account for a former cartel which was now bigger than ever. Each man had, fortunately, been the most exciting thing in her life while she had been with him, which had been the way it should be, and the Spanish language contributor had been, by far, the most acceptable male. She was twenty-six years old; in six years she had Parisian French and bad Polish, but then only Poles would or could ever acknowledge that there was such a thing as good Polish, because the only chance she’ had had to speak it had been with film people. She had Castilian Spanish, Roman Italian which could have been much, much better if the man she had fallen in love with had only been raised in Siena, and German which was high enough to threaten vertigo. Her English was only fair, having been acquired at Julia Richman High School in New York.

  Eve was very clear on being a reject because dozens of friends in the States had taken a great deal of their valuable time to explain to her that she was The Laughable Anomaly, The Impossible Condition, The Citizen Pelican Stuffed Into the System Ortolan. This understanding had once caused her to behave rather extravagantly at gatherings, but Bourne had changed all of that. Bourne had removed that freak feeling just as though it had been done by surgery, completely and forever.

  Her names on passports and other documents had been Lewis, Cryder, Sment, Quinn and Sundeen, one of those being Bourne’s real name and the others being used to transport the three copies of the Spanish masters across the frontier, each on a separate trip through a separate city of entry. Before the second name change, before she knew that he was a criminal and a thief, he had transformed her into a healthy woman, needed and cherished. By the time she had found out about Bourne being a criminal he could do nothing wrong.

  The Avenue de la Motte-Picquet of Paris runs across the foot of the Champs de Mars to the Invalides and is as gloriously bourgeoise as anything either bank of the Seine has to offer. Eve went directly to Jean Mari
e’s studio at Number Eighteen on that street as soon as the cab could bring her from Le Bourget to Paris. Somehow, she jammed herself and the two pieces of luggage into the tiny elevator and, holding the cardboard tube over her head because there was nowhere else to put it, rose like a woman in vaudeville levitation toward the top of the shaft, a millimeter at a time, almost at the speed of a twelve-year-old child growing up, or perhaps at the rate a daisy grows. The ascenseur, to be indigenous, was extremely French as was Jean Marie when she finally reached the top floor and rang the bell.

  The door was flung open. He pulled her inside, leaving the baggage in the corridor outside, and bussed her wetly on the cheek. She made a half-sound meaning to indicate that she had left her luggage behind her which he immediately understood as though she had articulated a full sentence and reopened the door, permitting her to carry the bulky luggage in while he watched her sympathetically. To do this she had to prop the cardboard tube up against the wall inside the door in the semidarkness. He did not touch it at first but cried out, “Is this it? Are they in there? In the name of St. Joseph, Eve, tell me. Are they in there?”

  She closed the door and grinned at him, nodding. He picked up the tube and ran from the foyer toward the studio as Lalu came rushing and shouting through another door.

  Lalu looked like a nursery doll. Her voice was higher than a dog whistle. Eve had to stoop way over to kiss her. “Is it Eve! Was it a good trip? How was Jim? Will you move there soon? Did they like Jean Marie’s painting?” The sounds she made were like a well filled with drunken canaries. She reached up and took Eve’s hand and they trooped into the studio after Jean Marie.

  It was an enormous studio with a half-roof of glass and two enormous windows on the corner of the building. It was the studio befitting a man who had had two of the most successful shows within fourteen months that the art press of Paris could remember seeing. The studio looked out over just about everything formidable south of the Seine. The Ecole Militaire had been placed in the right foreground area. The Hôtel des Invalides was in the left foreground. The Eiffel Tower was in the right background, and there were more roofs in view than most North American pigeons had ever seen. Being March and close to spring, it was raining, but things like rain and cold don’t matter in Paris; an inexplicable condition.

  Eve tried to remember that Lalu was absolutely innocent of the real identity of the project and wished Jean Marie would. He always seemed to be on the verge of giving the entire game away. He had decided to tease her by leaning against the piano indolently and staring. “Why don’t you open it?” she asked.

  “Why? They will be duplicates of the canvases I painted, nothing more, you may be sure.”

  “What do you mean, dear?” Lalu asked.

  “He is teasing,” Eve said. “You see, Jim wasn’t able to sell Jean Marie’s paintings. The man died.”

  “Oh, what a pity! For the man, I mean,” Lalu said.

  The explanation served to remind Jean Marie that he had pleaded not to allow Lalu to know what they were doing and he smiled at Eve appreciatively. Eve smiled back at him feeling happy about the paintings, happy for Bourne, happy for Jean Marie, and happier still to be free, to have been saved from a Spanish prison.

  Jean Marie plumped himself down on a hassock and began to work the top of the tube open. It came off at once. He whistled and made exaggerated movements with his eyebrows which made Eve and Lalu laugh. It was a wonderful moment and she wished very deeply that Bourne could have been there.

  Then she saw the puzzled expression on Jean Marie’s face. She saw him turn the tube upside down and pound at the bottom of it.

  The tube was empty. There was nothing in the tube. There were no paintings; nothing. The tube was empty. It was really empty because Eve took a pair of shears and opened it up. There was nothing in the tube. No Velázquez, no Zurbarán, no Greek; nothing. She was never to forget the look on Jean Marie’s face. He was never to forget the look on hers. There were no paintings, not one painting, in the tube.

  During his second year in Madrid, Bourne had spent one four-day week end each month in Paris, leaving from Barajas on Air France on the two-thirty plane and returning on the one o’clock Iberia from Le Bourget. The hotel ran smoothly in the hands of Señor Elek during these short periods of time. In the seventh month of these visits, the month of his second date with Eve, he had met Jean Marie, husband of Eve’s closest friend, Lalu.

  Jean Marie was a gifted painter who claimed to prefer to copy because he said he had studied art as a business. In the tenth month, the second of their association, Bourne felt that he had prepared the painter sufficiently to reveal his proposal and in twenty minutes an arrangement had been reached.

  They sat on the tiny terrasse of the Café Benito Reyes on Boulevard Malesherbes. Jean Marie and Lalu had lived on Rue Lavoisier at the time, behind an enormous Felix Potin supermarket. Jean Marie ate potato chips and drank chocolate, a filthy habit he had picked up by watching an American named Charles Moses, a French-Italian scholar of the quarter who studied from opening to closing on the terrasse eating and drinking the horrible combination. Bourne watched Jean Marie as though fearful that the man would decide to dunk one of the salty slivers into the sugary, pinkish-brown mass.

  Jean Marie was an exceedingly happy man by digestion, eugenics, metabolism and circumstance. He had been made even more sappily happy by meeting Lalu and had become even more paretically delirious since she had agreed to marry him. They had been married for eight years and joy had expanded, not diminished. He was an average man in all but talent. His talent could have been genius, but his disposition was too good for that. His painting, in any master’s style or his own style, was incredibly good both technically and emotionally. He preferred to paint in any master’s style because it impressed Lalu so, and because it brought in certain money. He freelanced, working in all museums, mostly at the Louvre, although he had just put in four straight months at the Delacroix Museum in the Place Furstenberg. He worked by commission, using six well-established dealers as agents and rendering precisely perfect copies, mostly of Rubens, Picasso, and Da Vinci; almost entirely for tourists from Germany and Sweden.

  Bourne sipped Danish beer and outlined his project to Jean Marie. The painter listened without alarm, nodding frequently, sipping at the chocolate and staring mostly at the traffic which moved about the Place Saint Augustin.

  “That is excellent, my friend,” he nodded when Bourne had finished. “For years I have been trying to think of some way of increasing the apparent values of my business, but one cannot play fast and loose in the Louvre, of course, although I am sure, on the other hand, that one cannot merely walk into a great cathedral in Spain and have one’s own way either.” Jean Marie was a Parisian born and bred and his French was like a beautiful song.

  “You mustn’t give that part of it a thought,” answered Bourne. “All of that is my department and my problem.”

  “I just paint.”

  “Right.”

  “And we divide the profits fifty-fifty.”

  “I have a formula for that.”

  “Does the formula call for an equal division of the profits?”

  “In effect, yes.”

  “Explain to me the effect, if you please.”

  “Do you wish to invest an equal amount of capital with me, as an investment?”

  “I have no capital.”

  “I know that. So, we will divide the net profit equally. Before we divide, I am to be reimbursed in full for all funds necessary to be advanced by me.”

  Jean Marie was dubious. “I’m not sure I like that. Do you have a breakdown of the items which will require capital?”

  “I have.” Bourne took a sheet of accounting paper out of his pocket. Under a marching sequence of columns, neat, identified figures had been set down. Jean Marie studied the sheet for some time. While he read the sheet, Bourne finished the bottle of Danish beer he was drinking and asked Henri, the waiter, to bring another. In good time,
Jean Marie looked up.

  “This is really first class, you know,” Jean Marie said.

  “Thank you.”

  “But why do you have me down here for fifty thousand francs a week beginning next week?”

  “Because beginning right now you will have to devote full time to research on Spanish masters and to planning and to test painting and so forth.”

  Jean Marie grinned. “I don’t work that way. I look and I paint. It all happens very fast. Incidentally, you must make every effort to get absolutely true, fabulously clear color transparencies of whatever we are going to copy.”

  “Consider it done,” Bourne said. “But nonetheless you must stop this professional copying. We’ll want everyone to forget you ever were a copyist.”

  “What will I do with my spare time?”

  “Entertain Lalu.”

  “I do that now.”

  “I mean outside the apartment.”

  “She won’t allow me to spend the money, but I see what you mean. I’ll stop as soon as I finish this Delacroix I’m on which should be in about three days. He worked big, that one. A Goya derivative.”

  “Good. Study how you can disappear as a copyist. Stay away from the museums and your six dealers. Move across the river. The Right Bank is no place for a painter anyway. There is nothing which says you can’t work on your own paintings. After all, why shouldn’t you?”

  Jean Marie rubbed his jaw, then chewed on a quantity of potato chips. “Why shouldn’t I?” He washed the potato chips down with a gulp of lukewarm dreadfully sweet chocolate and Bourne almost gagged.