The Oldest Confession

by Richard Condon

“Wha’?”

  “It’s only fair that I call him off. And I’ve done a note for Señor López.”

  “You’re right.” He swung himself awake, getting his legs out of the bed and his torso upright. His face looked like a used dumpling. It was squashed and bloated and seamed in all of the places where it should not have been. It wasn’t so much that he looked old. He looked sick. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said, as though apologizing for this new face which he had not yet seen himself.

  “I know,” she said, and went on writing.

  “Whatta you mean, you know? You slept like a snake inna warm pail.”

  She didn’t answer. Suddenly he decided not to brook her not answering. “Answer me! I asked you a question. What the hell is the matter with you?”

  She turned rapidly in her chair and moved out of it at him crying, “What the hell is the matter with YOU, you foolish, doomed man?” She came out so fast, like a good, rough fighter from a corner of the ring, that he flinched at the ferocity of her action because he had hardly heard her words. Her ferocity contrasted markedly with the way, in spite of her destructive manner, her terrible anger and her near hysteria, she could keep her voice down, and the way, in spite of his demonstrated anxiety, he could maintain the low level of his own voice when he answered. It was the empty politeness of people who had died more slowly than other people by living their lives in hotels.

  Her voice clawed at him. “Don’t tell me you can’t sleep! You will not dare to tell me you can’t sleep you grotesque son-of-a-bitch because you know why you can’t sleep and you’ve become too spineless to change it.” The words were bitter and her voice had pain that was worse than pain because it contained the realization that she could not respect the man she must love, and that of the two, from man to woman, respect was the greater need.

  “What’s the matter, baby? I don’t understand,” he said, but he understood. He knew that the unit of contempt had displaced the unit of regard and that only he could make the exchange again.

  “Let’s talk some more about you with your dowdy clichés like ‘honest dishonesty’ and your father the immoral money-changer. Does your father work with murderers?”

  “Now, just a minute, Eve. I’ve spent nearly three years on this project and I have a ri—”

  “You invested a lot of money, too, didn’t you?”

  “You’re goddam right I invested money. A helluva lot of money and I have a ri—”

  “You fool. Balls to you, you square!” She turned her back on him and went back to her chair, back to the desk. She put her face in her hands. “You know, Jim, I don’t know what to do. I can’t stay here. I can’t go. I thought I understood you. I really believed that the only way you could find some kind of dignity for your starving, resentful soul was by stealing. I—I believed that and I thought you believed it. And I thought I understood you when you talked about no right and no wrong and the unlikely possibilities of relative morality and all jargon like that, the way you talk. But you’re just a cheap merchant with his hand in the till. You’re just your father’s son grubbing out money and keeping a double set of books who would even bargain with a murderer for an edge.”

  He forgot the hotel whisper. “What the hell do you think this is, Gilbert and Sullivan? The Pirates of Penzance? Would you enjoy thirty years in prison?” he shouted.

  “Don’t shout. You know better. Then use your head. You’re a smart man, Jim. You’re one of the smartest men anyone ever knew. Use your head. Get Lalu to Switzerland or to Greece. One cable will do that. Hire a ship or a row-boat at Malaga and we’ll be in Tangier. Then we’ll join Lalu wherever she is or Jean Marie will join her, and we’ll go anywhere we want to go in the world. This man can’t touch us, outside Spain, and he’d be afraid to touch us inside Spain. If I can think of that to get away, do you possibly think you can possibly sell me that you didn’t think of it?”

  “Yeah. I thought of it.”

  “Then who is singing the Pirates of Penzance? Who crumbles then under the fear of thirty years in a Spanish prison?”

  “Ahhhh, for Christ’s sake, Eve,” he said. “I’m entitled to get those three paintings back. I worked and I have to get paid, one way or another. I don’t blame you for feeling queasy. You’re a woman. I will never blame you if you want to get out, and I’ll get you out and you’re right, he can’t touch you once you get out. And now that we have everything right out in the open, I want you to go. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you.”

  “What do you think is happening to me now, my darling? You look at me and tell me that I’m upset and that you cannot understand why I am upset. You understand! But you understand money more! You need money more than you need me and that is what is happening to me.” She slammed her hand down upon the top of the desk. “Muñoz killed Elek. He killed! He threw a knife into the throat of Señor Elek and he stopped his life with it. But you are not intimidated, you are fearless. You cannot be pulled down and stained by this; you are aloof. You want your merchandise returned to you, and what does it matter if there is a little blood on it?” She stared at him piteously. “Jim, Jim, Jim!”

  She went to him and clutched his upper arms, her body away from him, the top of her head pressed into his chest. She did not weep but keened tonelessly over the death of her joy.

  Cayetano Jiminez sat, drinking beer and recalling paradise, in the citron sunlight on the terrace of the outdoor café opposite the great mosque-synagogue-church in Córdoba, talking earnestly with the manager of his career from the beginning, a rumpled, bald, sad man who had managed his late uncle, killed at Santander the year before Cayetano had started.

  “A lifetime is enough to give any profession,” he said gravely. “You cannot tell me I have not spent all my life with the bulls.”

  “No.”

  “Also, you have my two brothers. Curro looks very good. Better than I did at nineteen.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to get married. It is my right.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is no business for married men, especially happily married men.”

  “No.”

  “I took my alternativa in Madrid during San Isidro eleven years ago, so it is the neat and complete thing to finish in Madrid during San Isidro, so give me your blessing.”

  “You have my blessing wherever you go,” the sad, small man answered, “but you belong with the bulls.”

  Bourne paid the cab driver then walked unhurriedly from the pavement of the Paseo del Prado to the columned entrance of the Museo de Pinturas. He nodded to the guard at the door on entering and walked directly forward to the staircase which ascended to a point opposite the entrance to the Sala Velázquez one floor above.

  As he moved slowly along he remembered the pleasant shock which had engulfed him on the day when he had seen the Prado for the first time. It had been like the discovery of a new world. It was the perfect hall of paintings; not perhaps so inclusive of all schools of painting as the National Gallery in London or the Louvre in Paris, he thought, but in its own distinctive way, as a gallery of superb paintings brought together by a group of collectors with individual taste, it had no equal in the world. It had begun in the eighteenth century as a museum of natural history. Maria Isabella of Braganza, queen to Ferdinand VII, had turned it into a gallery for royal pictures. Gradually the great paintings of Spain had been added from the Royal Palace in Madrid, from the Escorial and the Casita del Principe, then La Granja, Aranjuez, and in legacies from the great families.

  Bourne entered the Sala Goya; octagon in shape, well-lit from the ceiling and smelling of furniture polish and floor wax. He stopped walking in front of “The Second of May,” but did not look at it until he had checked the stop watch in his hand and had noted the ensuing time against a column of figures representing other time trials over the same course. He stared up at the enormous canvas; eight feet high by eleven feet wide; with its six dead showing and hundreds to come, with its action of desperation; knives into
French Mamelukes, split Zouave over white horse’s rump, baggy red pants and turbans against peasants who needed haircuts badly, only two men’s blood and one horse’s blood focusing the composition of the picture. He turned about and walked away from it the way he had come, nodding, in passing, at two guards as he went.

  At the curb of the Paseo del Prado he consulted his stop watch again, set down the numbers on a sheet of paper in his small, clear hand, then hailed a taxi.

  There was no more light in that room than there is in a womb. Eve sat up in the great bed and, groping, took Bourne by the shoulders in her powerful hands, and shook him. “Jim! Stop it! Stop it!” She took a clump of his hair and wrenched it, then shook his head with it.

  “Aaaah!” He bolted up. “Eve! My God! What is it?” She snapped on the light. He stared around the room. She slapped him with her full force across the mouth and knocked him back into the candy-pink linen which covered the headboard. “What did you do to Chern?” she demanded to know. “You tell me, Jim! What did you do to Chern?”

  “I–I–I—” He let the words fall back into his throat. His right hand pushed at the dirty stubble on his chin. It gripped his cheeks to keep his face from falling apart. His eyes were not nice to look at. She hit him again.

  “What did you do to Chern?”

  She had hit him very hard. He seemed dazed.

  “Talk to me! Tell me!” Her voice was brutally harsh.

  “I locked him in the cellar at Boccador.”

  “You locked—”

  “You remember we were talking in the Tuileries? We were talking about what we should do to make Elek talk?”

  “When did you lock him in?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t—the day you went to London. Yes. I can’t get him out. Muñoz. They’ll take Lalu.”

  “We’ve got to get him out.”

  “I can’t think any more. Jean Marie is a painter and he isn’t supposed to think, but he thinks. I’m the planner, but you think of everything. If I could sleep, I could think.”

  “He’s been locked in for nine days.”

  “Nine days.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I can’t figure. I’m in a fog. I can’t figure it.”

  “We’ve got to get him out.”

  “I know. But I can’t get him out. I can’t call some casual friend. I can’t call the police. Lalu is absolutely no good for this.”

  “Why can’t you call the police?”

  “He has plenty of water. Nine days isn’t much only he didn’t do anything and he shouldn’t be in there.”

  “We’ve got to get him out.” She hit him on the thigh with her balled fist with all the force she could muster, with a vicious, punishing, chopping club. He grunted sharply, then to increase his own sense of pain and her own tangible anxiety he said, “He was terribly frightened when I put him in there. Something happened to him in the war. Rats and the dark. I never heard a man so scared as Chern. I got him down there and he—” Bourne could not allow himself to finish the sentence, watching his wife’s face.

  “Call the Paris police,” she snapped.

  “Now, just a minute, Eve—”

  “Are you looking for murder? If you keep looking you’ll find it.”

  “The police will trace the call. An international call is the easiest thing for them.”

  “Ah, Jim. You’ll tell them that you’re the managing director of this hotel. You’ll say that you’ve just opened a letter which could not have been left by accident on your desk in your office at this hotel and which tells of a man being locked in the cellar at 97 Rue du Boccador in Apartment 3 for nine days without food. They’ll ask you your name and you’ll tell them your name and anything else they want to know except what you have to conceal.”

  “They’ll have us by the throat with the apartment. My God, Eve, we live there.”

  “The apartment is in my name. In my old true name. That girl has disappeared and no one living can find her, including herself.”

  “Do you think Chern is going to dust off his clothes, thank the police for their service and refuse to divulge how he happened to be shut up there? The Paris police know their business. They’ll climb him until he’ll be happy to tell them how he got there.”

  “Chern lives, like you, for money.”

  “Eve, for crissake—”

  “Shut up. Chern won’t tell them the time or press any charge or admit they found him there until he presses you to find out how much money you have for him to make up for the inconvenience.”

  “Eve, please, don’t say things like—”

  “Don’t touch me, you money-simple merchant. Call the French police!”

  Bourne didn’t move, then breathing heavily he leaned across the huge bed and took up the telephone.

  Teresita, the night hotel operator, answered. He told her to call the Palais de Justice in Paris, office of the chief of detectives. The recurring lack of sleep, his wife’s savage grief, the hollowness he felt inside himself, the indulgence of searching across a continent for an instrument of contrition, all must have dulled him because he forgot the lesson he would have taken and underscored under any other circumstances; the lesson contained in his betrayal by his senior, executive employee, Señor Elek.

  Teresita told him she would call Paris immediately, then call him right back. He hung up to wait; to sit on the side of the bed, his back to Eve, his bearlike hulk hunched over in despair.

  Teresita, having disconnected with Bourne, immediately dialed 34-78-92 which was the telephone at the new apartment of Dr. Muñoz. The marqués answered with the first ring. Teresita explained what Señor Bourne had told her to do. Dr. Muñoz thanked her sincerely for the service she had done and told her that when she awoke the following evening to go to work a handsome reward would be awaiting her in her mother’s hands. She suggested that if he preferred to leave the reward in her mother’s hands would he please seal it in an envelope, or if it was all the same to him would he leave such an envelope with the waiter, Jorge, at the Café Werba on the Calle de Bravo Murillo. He agreed with pleasure he said, and would attend the waiter, Jorge. She thanked him. Dr. Muñoz then suggested that she call him again in ten minutes then ring Señor Bourne as though she had called Paris then connect him with Señor Bourne. She told him she would do that. He reminded her to be sure to show the long-distance call in her log, in fact later on in the morning perhaps she could call Paris so that Paris charges would eventually come through. She said she would.

  Teresita waited ten minutes, then she called Dr. Muñoz, then she rang Señor Bourne.

  Bourne spoke into the phone using his middle belly-tone voice, a timbre employed throughout the world by public relations experts and confidence men. “’Allo?”

  “I have your Paris call, Señor Bourne.”

  “Thank you.”

  “’Allo?” Dr Muñoz came on, using a high-pitched voice. “Le palais de justice ici.”

  “’Allo?” Bourne answered. “Je veux vous faire savoir un crime, s’il vous plaît.”

  “Un moment, m’sieu,” Dr. Muñoz replied. He put his hand over the telephone mouthpiece and sat very still in the overstuffed chair, looking very strange under his cloth mustache cultivator. The cat Montes tried to walk across the taut telephone wire from the receiver to Muñoz’ ear, but he fell, grabbing at the wire with his forepaws, swinging like a trapezist for a moment then dropping to the floor. Muñoz counted to fifteen, took the telephone up toward his face again, then reconsidered and counted up to forty-five, then released his hand from the mouthpiece and spoke, this time in a deeper voice.

  He came on as Detective Sergeant Orcel. Bourne, with his good citizen’s voice, dutifully reported the case. Dr. Muñoz took down his full name and address with grave grunts, utilizing a real pencil, real paper, and real writing. He thanked Bourne. Bourne thanked him. He told Bourne, “Je serai sans doute forcé de vous déranger encore, mais alors peut-être pas,” and hung up. Then Bourne hung up. He
felt greatly relieved. After a little while he slept for the first time in many nights. His wife held a small towel to her face as she lay on her side along the edge of the bed as she wept silently. She would not let him find a pillow stained with her tears.

  Early the following afternoon, upon the long, dark-wood Moorish table of Dr. Muñoz, Bourne unrolled the large sheets of architectural paper which contained his own precise diagrams of the Sala Goya, the Goya floor at the Prado, and the street floor leading to the Paseo. His jacket was off, his sleeves were rolled up; a pencil was stuck behind his ear. He seemed too large to be a grocery clerk, too immaculate to be a shipping-room boy, so he most resembled an advertising agency account executive ready to pitch. Dr. Muñoz helped this illusion with his air of stifled eagerness, as though he were a prospective client whose packaged twenty-five-cent cancer inducer was about to be forced upon a nation. The cat Montes, a taffy sculpture, sat erectly and listened with the expression of a junior executive who will go far. Bourne sat on the corner of the table, swinging one leg, boyishly and informally, facing Muñoz, friendly and relaxed. The marqués gave him his complete attention, pince-nez glittering. It was a moment replete with tranquilizers.

  “I’ve given your whole proposition a good deal of thought, Victoriano,” Bourne said judiciously, “and I personally think it makes one helluva lot of sense to talk about the fee structure before we get down to the brass tacks of talking about the job.” He spoke English because he felt much more solid and square in English.

  “The fee?” Muñoz was baffled. “The fee is your freedom.”

  “I know that you know that we have the necessary know-how, Victoriano,” Bourne said. “And I tell you this flatly. We will not undertake the project without payment. I mean that.”

  Muñoz shrugged. “I could never pay your prices, Jaime. I’m not a poor man but I’m not in your class either.”

  “That remains to be seen. And I’d like to point out that no matter how you look at it the risks on this kind of thing are very great. I mean that.”

  “If you are saying that you might decide not to do this job because the fee wasn’t right, believe me, my friend, the risks would be one bloody awful lot greater,” the marqués said earnestly. “Prison must be a godawful thing for men of our age.”