The Oldest Confession

by Richard Condon

  “You thought that you would deserve what would happen, whatever happened. You felt such guilt under my gaze that your guilt expected punishment.”

  “Blanca—I only knew that when you saw these three paintings you would reach the conclusion that I had stolen them from you. I decided at once that you had taken this unusual means to question me about the paintings and I could not fathom why you insisted upon dwelling upon the idiotically unimportant point of whether or not I had taken Mrs. Pickett to the corrida last week.”

  “Not last week. Last Tuesday.”

  He licked his lips to dry them, but his tongue was dry. “Stealing paintings such as these would be a most serious charge,” he said staring at the intense patches of light on the walls and trying to will her mind away from talking about that afternoon. She turned with his glance slowly, seeming to move out of politeness rather than an appreciation of art.

  “You stole these paintings from me?” She seemed utterly surprised. She rose from her chair and walked close to the Zurbarán to study it intently for a moment. “Why!” she exclaimed, “this is a painting from Dos Cortes!” She sidled along the wall to the Velázquez. “Upon my word I believe this one is The Pickett Troilus!”

  “The—what was that, Blanca?”

  She wheeled to gape at him. “You stole these from me?”

  “Is that not what you had decided?”

  “To tell the truth, Victoriano, I have had so many things on my mind that I have never thought of these paintings at all and I have been sitting here for some time. Did you say you stole them from me?”

  “I have nothing more to say.”

  The duchess walked to consider the Greco, her back to the marqués. “If I were to turn and look at you,” she said, “I know I would find your face set into that stupidly stubborn look you used when you were a boy and had been outwitted and bewildered, that hopeless look which means that you have decided that you will say nothing more even if it were to mean your salvation.”

  “I am sorry, Blanca,” he answered stiffly.

  She walked to the fireplace and took up a poker from among the fire irons. “I know, for example, that even if I were to swing this iron back and crash it with all my force into the bone of your lower leg then to swing it back again and bring it with even more force to crush your kneecap, that even then you would not talk about this matter of the paintings because you have set your mind and that is the way you are.”

  “That is the way I am,” Dr. Muñoz answered simply.

  “Then I am helpless.”

  “I do not know entirely what you wish to learn from me but as regards those paintings I have closed my voice.”

  “I plead with you,” she said languidly looking closely at the brushwork of the Greco, the marqués ten feet behind her.

  “Forgive me. I cannot.”

  The duchess sighed and strolled to the long table which stood against the far wall. It was ancient and possessed Spanish history in its joints. She slid the drawer of the table open and removed a pair of shears. They were long and heavy.

  “Your resolve batters me,” the duchess said. “I am helpless in the face of your will power.” She turned with the heavy shears in her hand.

  “Thank you, Blanca,” Dr. Muñoz said briskly, if not indulgently. “I am happy that you can see it as it is. Now, cut these cords with those shears, my dear, my circulation is growing sluggish. We will speak of this no more. The incident will be our secret.”

  She walked across his gaze, which followed her. She pulled a leather-backed chair out from the wall and dragged it to a place directly in front of the El Greco which was hung in a direct line with the marqués’ vision. She stepped up daintily to stand upon the chair saying, “I have known of the iron nature of your character since you were a little boy, Victoriano. I know I cannot cope with it. I admit defeat.”

  “Why are you standing on that chair?”

  She raised the points of the closed shears over her head, bringing them close to the face of the central saint in the painting. “I am going to destroy these paintings,” she said with detachment.

  “Blanca!” he screamed. “No! Stop! Blanca! That is the work of El Greco, the great and immortal El Greco!”

  She lowered the shears. “Will you answer all of my questions?” she asked.

  “Yes. Please step down. Put the shears back in that table drawer, please. You cannot know what this does to me.”

  “Can you mean that your iron resolve has melted?”

  “Yes. Step down, Blanca.”

  “How can I be sure? Perhaps I should destroy just one painting to demonstrate my sincerity.” She made as if to turn toward the canvas again.

  “Blanca I have completely changed my mind! Please step down. Now. Step down, Blanca.”

  She stepped down. She walked slowly to the great table, opened the drawer and returned the heavy shears to their place.

  “Who would have dared to think that you would ever have relented?” she asked and sat in the chair next to the marqués, crossing her legs. “You are really very, very chivalrous you know, Victoriano, to have changed your steely resolve so quickly, a position from which wild horses could not have dragged you.”

  He fought not to look at her. His free right hand dragged at his collar. “I am always happy to advise you,” he said. “Surely you know that. I value your friendship highly.”

  “Who stole the paintings for you? You have neither the intelligence nor the character to accomplish such a thing.” He flushed with fear because the charade was over. He had known her for such a long time, through many reactions, in several circumstances when she had been parted from something she had honored, loved, or valued. He began to breathe heavily, but he could not look into her eyes.

  “That is true. I did not steal the paintings. Your friends obliged me—Mr. and Mrs. James Bourne.” As he said the names he wished he had not said them.

  She struck heavily at the arm of his chair with the poker in her hand, splintering the wood as he drew his right hand away. “Don’t lie to me! Don’t lie more than you have to me!”

  “It was not a lie. It is most difficult to believe but it is true. He is a professional thief. She is his wife. She brought the copies to him from Paris where Calbert painted them. He never knew I was interested. My own participation, quite unknown to him, was to bring Expert Pickett along on the last foray to verify the copies.”

  She had grown very pale. She closed her eyes and did not seem to breathe. “I feel sick,” she said. She had been balancing herself on a thin, high wire above the crocodile mouth of catatonia. The wire seemed to have been heated white-hot, sending shocking pain through her. She felt herself toppling as the crocodile grinned then all at once she was able to steady herself upon her hatred and her desire for what was right which was only as thick for grasping and steadying as one line of printing which said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The future became as clear to her as it had once been seen by an old gypsy woman who had told her own fortune with a pack of Tarot cards, had paused to peer through the light of a kerosene lamp in the woodshed of a farmhouse, confirmed what she had seen and cut her own throat. While the duchess groped for the railing which would support her, Dr. Muñoz, who loved her on his own terms, spoke quietly. “It was an impersonal thing, Blanca,” he said. “When Bourne met you he had no way of knowing how dear you are or that he would come so quickly to love you and respect you deeply. Try to see him in a different word because thief is a word which can trap you. He had worked everything out on scale drawings with time and motion studies and a thorough investigation of how he would market the paintings after he had acquired them. Why, he spent just over three years on this one project of overtaking those masters. Some time after he had settled in Madrid he had discovered the paintings of Dos Cortes in a book. Then, afterward, he asked if he might meet you, if he might see the paintings. He played the role of an art lover most effectively, but he wanted to test his paper plans against the actual condition
s at the castle. This man, I tell you this, Blanca, and plead that you believe me, would never have been able to bring himself to hurt you. To him, these were paintings hung too high in semidarkness on a wall in a house which was seldom lived in, and not any part of you. Not in any way any part of you. He stole those paintings from that house and I had them stolen from him.”

  Muñoz felt free for what he had said. He felt that he wished he could be alone now and analyze what he had said because something in those words or the way he had felt when he had said those words had well, not lifted his spirits, but had made him feel good enough—good enough to be a friend of Blanca de Dos Cortes. He saw at once that he had caused himself to have pride in himself and it was an enormous discovery. He saw, running parallel to that astounding, cosmic fact, that he had never explored that area of his life but that he had only used a pride, which was a word and perhaps rightfully confused with the pride that is self-respect, with pride in his family. Supported by the cords around his small body, he literally let himself go into this new, stunning sensation. He could not think of what he might do for Blanca next. Blanca was the key to pride in himself, the start of what could be many rewarding experiments. Pride was his word. It was Spain’s own word. After so many years this new revelation of pride had been given to him. He was charged to learn exactly what it could mean. He wished he could be alone, that Blanca would go now, so that he could get to work and run down the sound answers. He thought it was some form of telepathy when she started to talk again.

  “I’m sure you’re very proud of yourself for having said that. You have as much pride as any man I have ever known or read about, Victoriano. To me it is unnatural, but I do not pretend to have your view.” She spoke slowly. She had just lost her last two friends whom she had loved. They were dead. She had mourned for them for a moment and now she must return to her tasks and get her work done. “Your pride is based entirely upon the past which to me, and I say only to me perhaps, is an unpleasantness like having a picnic in a cemetery.”

  He wanted to cry out that she was wrong. That may have been the case but that she misunderstood the boundaries of his feeling. “Nonetheless,” she went on, “no form of this protective pride, the touchy, face-losing-face-saving kind has any place between you and me. That has been acknowledged throughout our lives.”

  “I agree, Blanca. I have never feared that you would scorn me.”

  She burst with the bitter words. “Then why didn’t you say you wanted those paintings from me! Did you believe I would have refused you? You know that I know that Spanish painters are a great part of your most abnormal life but if I had known that you had needed them like this!” She stared at him in despair but he would not look into her eyes. “You could have had them for use in your lifetime. And you know that! Why did you want them stolen from me?”

  “I needed them. I needed to use them to do something.”

  “What did you need which they would trade for? What did you have to have which no one had the power to give you, but which you decided you would have to take, no matter what pain you caused? What was it? Tell me what it was, Victoriano.”

  “The attack upon the Mamelukes in the Puerta del Sol.” His voice was quiet but it had filled him with great pride. The first kind of pride, the pride in his family. If he could only regain for a moment that thrilling pride of self so that he could compare them, just for the moment, then later sit before the fire and think about it.

  “‘The Second of May’? The Goya?”

  “Yes.”

  “From the Prado?”

  “Yes. For my family. I wanted to possess that symbol for the honor of my family for what that man and that day had done to my family.” He drew his voice down into decorum. “Essentially, Blanca, we have spoken of the condition many times.”

  “I know.” She drew her hand across her eyes and he looked up at her lovely face quickly as she did so, fearing no risk, then looked away. She had been the good friend of his life. She had never ceased to protect him. No matter where she had always defended him and now—he could not grasp what had made him want to cry out piteously—the light had gone out in her eyes. Her soul had died. He looked at her hands, reposed in her lap against the black of her mourning, as she spoke to him, almost absent-mindedly.

  “Two things were repeated over and over, until I had to do something about them. He was dead. There is that word ‘forever,’ which you used. He is dead forever. God gave me a way to return to him. I wanted to stay there, but two things, little things, stopped me.”

  “Forgive me, Blanca. Please forgive me.”

  “The Seine was eleven silver lakes, to him, caught between the bridges. The air in London was wet, he said, and it washed the past away. Madrid was the center of the universe and therefore not as important to lovers as Sevilla where no one needed to be so self-conscious. He was dead. The first lever which began to pry me out of my mind and memory was the wonder of why you would take Mrs. Pickett anywhere and, of all places, to a corrida. The other came to me from a radio which was in a car which passed under my window on the Alcalá. I heard it because it said his name. His name came up to my ears and the radio said that he had died at the very instant that the Goya had been stolen from the Prado. The Goya you have always said that someday you would possess.” She looked at him sadly and with pity. “You didn’t get it, did you, Victoriano?”

  “No. I didn’t get it. Or rather Bourne didn’t get it. Almost. I almost had it, but I didn’t get it.”

  “It must be a bitter disappointment to you.”

  “Well, nothing else really interests me very much.”

  “You’ll never have another chance.”

  “No. I suppose not.”

  “You killed Cayetano to draw attention away from the activity at the Prado?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, Blanca. That was the way it was.”

  “Who else was with Bourne?”

  “The French copyist.”

  “M’sieu Calbert?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to telephone them now and tell them to come here. At once.”

  “What good will that do? What can a lot of talking accomplish?”

  “Do as I say.” She pushed the telephone across the low table, stopping it at his free hand. “Was Mrs. Bourne connected with the Prado operation?” the duchess asked.

  “No. But if she had been, instead of that—”

  “Call Bourne.”

  The marqués took up the receiver of the telephone and put it on the table. He dialed the hotel number. He picked up the receiver again and held it to his head. “Señor Bourne, please,” he said into the telephone. He waited. “Jim? Victoriano Muñoz here.” He flinched while a gabble of furious voice escaped from the instrument. His face colored and hardened. “All right,” he said sharply, “if you want to talk so much come over here. Immediately. And bring Calbert with you.” The crackling, furious, distant voice continued but the marqués slammed the receiver into its cradle. “They botched everything, after I gave them everything they asked for, and now they are the ones who are angry,” he said indignantly. “This is really too much, I must say.”

  The duchess stood up. He sat there as though being tied to a chair in his own house were a natural thing.

  “Am I to remain trussed up like this while those men come over here to whatever pointless discussion you have in mind?”

  “Thank you for calling, Victoriano,” she said.

  “Not at all,” he replied and unconsciously his eyes lifted and he looked directly into hers and he saw what he had done and understood it for the first time.

  “Goodbye. God have mercy on you.” She struck him heavily across the crown of his skull with the heavy iron poker. There was a popping sound. She hit him twice more, swinging slowly. She dropped the poker from her gloved hand to the floor beside him. The exhausted cat Montes did not awaken. She turned away from the man-into-corpse as formally as a movement in a folk dance and walked to the window which led to the
terrace. She opened the catch in the door and went out upon the balcony to look down over the wall. She stared down impassively at the Calle Amador de los Ríos. In ten minutes or so, Bourne’s car turned into the street on two wheels from the Calle de Fernando El Santo to stop directly in front of the entrance to the Muñoz building.

  The duchess went back into the Moorish room, closing the door of the terrace carefully behind her, paying no attention whatsoever to the body which was slumped in a mess tied to the chair. She moved the telephone to the other side of the table and dialed.

  “Police? Police, come quickly, come quickly,” she said into the telephone. “Dr. Muñoz, the Marqués de Villalba, is being murdered! The men are still in there. Quickly! Number four Calle Amador de los Ríos. Dr. Muñoz.”

  She replaced the telephone and moved swiftly out of the room and along the corridor. As she crossed the foyer, Pablo held the door open for her. “It is done,” she said. “The others will be here shortly.”

  She left the apartment. Pablo closed the door. She went down the stairway quietly just as Bourne and Jean Marie reached the top floor in the elevator, needing to pick her way with great care because she was blinded by the tears in her eyes.

  Homer Pickett fairly burst into his suite at the Palace Hotel waving a copy of a different picture magazine in each hand and grinning rapturously at his wife who had been rubbing a product called Splendor into her face.

  “Both of them! Both of them!” he cried out. “And both in color! ‘The Pickett Troilus.’ They both say it, just like that. I’m bigger than Berenson right now. All I need to do is follow up this advantage and I tell you, Marianne, I’ll stay bigger than Berenson.”

  Mrs. Pickett walked to him rapidly, curlers in her hair over a smart, black sheath dress by Balmain. “My God, Homer, did they run any of those pictures of me?”

  “I’ll say they did. Well, the German magazine did anyway.”

  “The German magazine!” She took both magazines away from him and threw the American magazine on the sofa, seven feet away. “Well what the hell good is that? Who reads the German magazine except a lotta goddam Germans?” She flipped through the pages rapidly. “Where? Where is it?”