The Oldest Confession

by Richard Condon

  “Here.” Mr. Pickett tried to grab the periodical from her but she swerved away. “Let me have it,” he said. “Page seventy-eight. There. Look at that color reproduction.”

  “Where? Where am I?”

  “Right there. Down in the corner.”

  “Aaaah!”

  “Doesn’t that Velázquez look marvelous?”

  “Marvelous? What did that little son-of-a-bitch do to me? Why didn’t you tell me my hat was practically over my chin? I look like a goddam drunk.”

  “Look here. Read this caption.”

  “Read the caption? I’ll sue the goddam magazine.”

  “No, no. Here. Look. The Pickett Troilus. A painting by Velázquez is called ‘The Pickett Troilus’ in the public prints.”

  “The public prints! A goddam German magazine.”

  “No, no. In both of them.” He scampered to the sofa and scooped up the American picture magazine and broke it open uncannily at exactly the right place for the layout, having clipped the pages together. “The title of the entire goddam article in this one is ‘The Pickett Troilus.’ Did you ever dream of such a gasper? Do you realize what this is going to mean to Arthur Turkus Danielson? I’ll bet right now that he tries to make me sign for a minimum of six pieces a year and a coast-to-coast lecture series. Oh, I tell you! These public relations firms are worth every cent they cost.”

  “I suppose you’re happy and proud about that picture of me?”

  “Lecturing is like the best part of life in Washington, hon. It’s one long cocktail party day after day with all kinds of people pressing up close and asking thousands of questions.”

  “Incidentally, what about Washington? How can you talk about a lecture tour? They’ll hand you your head.”

  “Never mind. It’ll all be handled. I take care of the party and the party takes care of me. I guess I’m entitled to a little sick leave. How would you feel about a lecture tour?”

  Mrs. Pickett sat down in front of the large mirror and began to massage her face again, her neck protruding far forward, her nose almost touching the glass as though she had reached the terminal in progressive myopia in trying to study each pore in her face.

  “Look at these layouts! I wonder if I shouldn’t hop over and show these to the duchess.”

  “Uh-uh.” Mrs. Pickett shook her head vigorously into the mirror.

  “It might cheer her up,” Mr. Pickett said speculatively. “After all they are her paintings and I do feel I owe her something. If she’s kinda down in the dumps because that fighter was killed maybe that’s what I should do.”

  “I wouldn’t, Homer,” Mrs. Pickett said. “I talked to her on the telephone yesterday morning. Nothing in this life’ll ever cheer up that woman.”

  Mr. Pickett sat down on the bed beside his wife’s bench, his weight pulling him down and down into the mattress, until his eyes sank below the level of Mrs. Pickett’s. He cleared his throat. “I know this could sound actually ghoulish in a way, and I certainly wouldn’t say it to anyone else but you, Marianne, but her connection with that bullfighter and the paintings at the same time and the way he was killed just as they announced I had discovered The Pickett Troilus, you might say, you know it could be just the kind of thing which could absolutely make this lecture tour.”

  She thought that over for a moment or two. She stared at him soberly in the mirror. “I suppose you’re right, hon,” she said wrenching a metal curler from her hair. “In fact, now I think about it, I know you’re right. The art jazz is all right for snob appeal in the lectures but that under-a-bush-with-a-toreador stuff is what they really want to hear.”

  “I’ll ask the Press Officer at the Embassy to get me some pictures of both of them,” Mr. Pickett mused. “The newspapers here must have plenty of them.”

  In the four days which had transpired between Cayetano’s death and the equally abrupt passing of Dr. Muñoz, Bourne had tried to accomplish three things all at once. He had searched unceasingly for Muñoz. He had sought, with desperation, to find the duchess. He had done his best to cope with Jean Marie who had fallen into nervous collapse after the attempt in the Sala Goya in the Prado. While he had been away from the hotel he had had Eve telephone the Muñoz flat every half hour. He had driven to the Muñoz apartment every three hours to pound on the apartment door after ringing the bell and himself into a frenzy and eventually to agitate the building porter to the point where the violence could be assuaged, but never undone, by money. He had haunted the outside of the house on Calle Alcalá, pacing like a distraught animal, pleading with and futilely trying to bribe the butler, Pablo. He telephoned Dos Cortes twice a day and had called twice in three days to her farm in Andalusia.

  His huge bulk absorbed alcohol so much per pound then so much more per pound. He talked to himself while he drove from the hotel to Muñoz’, to Alcalá. “What can I tell her? How can I prove it to her? Didn’t know. Gotta see. What am I going to do? Muñoz. Find him and drag him. Muñoz. Where is he? Blanca, Blanca, Blanca.”

  He kept Jean Marie locked in the large suite on the top floor where they had run their drills. When Bourne left him sitting on the edge of the bed with his face in his hands, whimpering, Bourne wanted to run and hide until it could all be over and all of his friends could be well and safe again then he would remember that Blanca could never be either well or whole again and the crazy circle of running and hunting for Muñoz would start all over again so that he could be saved from his guilt and so that when he was saved, he could begin to try to think how he could help again.

  On the morning of the fourth day after that afternoon, Bourne and Eve attended Cayetano’s funeral to look for the duchess. The body had been lying in state on a catafalque in the church of St. Rose de Lima since the morning of the second day. Fourteen thousand people had moved past the bier in twenty-four hours.

  After the requiem high mass had been said the body was carried in its silver casket to the soot-black hearse which would lead the cortege from the church to the railroad station where the coffin would be placed aboard a special train and taken for burial in Sevilla. The bright, blue-domed day, the thousands upon thousands of milling mourners, the overpowering and pervasive odor of the heavy flower pieces, the smiting music, and the desperate fruitlessness of trying to find the chief mourner who wasn’t there worked upon Bourne’s fatigue like a nightmare. He could not connect the long, silver box with the grinning, easygoing Cayetano. In the weary wrangle of his mind he kept seeing a huge cigarette box for the desk of a giant of dreams. He could not transpose himself into the collective grief of the crowd because they were celebrating a formal, respectable, solemn mass grief while his was a frantic thing like a live rat sewn into the stomach of a basket case.

  He moved through the church continuously before, during and after the ceremony, oblivious of the rite, searching for the duchess. At the moment the silver box was being carried down the aisle of the church, she was seated in the Moorish room of the Muñoz apartment waiting for the marqués to arrive, enjoying a discussion about the calamares of Valencia with Cayetano in her memory.

  As Bourne looked for the duchess, Eve followed him, listening to the prayers around her and wishing that she knew how to say them. He ended standing next to the camera crew of the government No-Do newsreel, peering into the crowd as though he himself were a camera. Eve led him off to their car. He sat, heavily and silently, in the front seat. She slipped behind the wheel and leaned forward to open the glove compartment to take out a flask of brandy. She unscrewed the top of it and passed it to Bourne.

  “Thank you,” he said thickly, and took it.

  The crowds were thinning out. It would soon be possible for a pedestrian to move in the direction of choice rather than being taken wherever the crowd wished to move.

  Eve held his left hand in her hand, across her thigh. “Let’s go home now, Jim,” she said and the pleading she tried to control seeped through the words. “Let’s try to rest, sweetheart.”

  “I’d just like
to stop at Muñoz’ for a second.”

  “We’ll call him the minute we get home. It’s the same thing.”

  “No, baby. I have to stop by Muñoz’.”

  “You can’t go on like this, Jim.” The words were infected with hysteria.

  “I’d stop if I could,” he replied dully. “I can’t.”

  A white-helmeted traffic policeman appeared on Eve’s side of the car and asked them politely if they would please move the car along, that this was a difficult morning for traffic. Eve moved the car along the Paseo de Santa María de la Cabeza. Bourne looked glassily at the buildings as they went past, exhausted. The car crossed the Plaza of Charles the Fifth and entered Retiro Park at its southwest corner. Eve drove slowly.

  “Will we be out of this after you find both of them?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will you try to sleep when we get home?”

  “All right.”

  “If we are out of this I am sick trying to think of how we’ll handle Jean Marie.”

  Bourne said, “I thought maybe we could drive to Irún then load him with sedatives. We could hire an ambulance and take him over into Hendaye as a mental case.”

  She swerved the car into a parking space, a nose-in space, and stopped short. “You’ve been thinking about getting out. Oh, Jim. Oh, Jim, I love you!” She picked up his hand and pressed it into her lips.

  His huge, dirty hand took the back of her head and brought it gently to him. He kissed her softly. “My love, my love,” he whispered. “If I can show you once how much I love you!”

  “I know, darling. Really, I know.”

  “The grieving can smother us. Guilt can suffocate us. They keep shoveling it on us. But what must be done has to be done and I’m as proud of you that you understand that as I am ashamed of me that I ever let us come to it.” He held her hand tightly, suddenly. “They would have been married today.” His eyes were bloodshot in front of this new reminder to twist the knife into himself. There was a dirty stubble of beard on his face. The hand which held her was bound at the wrist by a soiled white cuff closed by gold-encrusted, elegant cuff links. The fingernails of the hand had a high, glossy polish over thick lines of black on the ends of each. There was a sweet, sick smell of ruin coming from him. He closed his eyes. “I think maybe I’m going to be able to sleep,” he said thickly. She backed the car into the roadway and they moved off toward the hotel.

  An hour and twenty minutes later, icily awake, he unsnapped the lock of Jean Marie’s suite and told him that Muñoz had called. An electrical change came over the painter. When Bourne came in he had been sitting in a torn bathrobe over fish-white skin; apathetic and unshaven. The announcement that they were going to see Muñoz acted like a shock treatment. “We must kill the little pig,” he suggested brightly. “Where is he? Come, come. Let’s go and kill the little pig.”

  Bourne dragged him into the bathroom, pulled the robe off him and forced him under alternating hot and cold showers, which Jean Marie did not seem to feel. “How can he have the brass to telephone you?” he kept saying, and, “What new kind of doom does he offer us this time?” When they left the hotel, mere minutes later, they were both quite clean but they badly needed shaves. They were in front of the Muñoz building just about twelve minutes after Bourne had taken the Muñoz call. Jean Marie could have been slipping into a relapse. Bourne held his arm, fearing pneumonia and cursing himself for having given him the bath. They moved rapidly from the car, into the hallway, into the waiting elevator. Bourne punched the top-floor button savagely. The lift doors slid closed. “I want you to sit quietly, Jean Marie,” he told the painter. “You have nothing to think about. I’ll handle everything that has to be done.”

  “Sure. Sure. What are you going to do?”

  “First he’s going to sign a paper confessing that he killed Cayetano then I take him to the duchess.”

  Jean Marie started violently. “Cayetano? That young bullfighter? He killed Cayetano?” His conception of the trouble he was in began and ended when he had dropped the picture frame in the Sala Goya of the Prado. Bourne looked at him as though he had stepped out of a time machine from the turn of the last century. Jean Marie pulled at his lapels and the car went up steadily. “What has that killing got to do with us? Is it connected with the Goya? Jim! I’ll never see my wife again. I’ll never see Lalu.” He began to cry helplessly. Bourne shook his head, took a deep breath, and rocked him with a slap across the face. The doors slid open at the top floor of the building. Bourne pushed Jean Marie ahead of him and looked for the doorbell. Pablo opened the door instantly, not waiting for the ring. Bourne neither looked at Pablo, nor did he recognize Josefina. “Dr. Muñoz expects us,” he said. “Take us to him.”

  Pablo led them down the corridor to the high, double doors. He opened one door slightly, let Bourne push his way past and through with Jean Marie behind him. When they were in the salon Pablo closed the door and locked it from his side. He returned slowly along the corridor to take up his station at the front door.

  They stared at the sickeningly battered head and the slumped body. Jean Marie bent over and picked up the bloodstained poker from the floor.

  “My God, my God,” he moaned. “What a terrible mess. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Come on!” Bourne said, wheeling toward the door. They were bewildered to find that they had been locked in. “The door is stuck,” Jean Marie said. “What a time for a door to be stuck.”

  “It’s locked. We’ve been locked in. I don’t know what the hell this is all about, but we’re locked in,” Bourne said dazedly.

  They heard many heavy voices beyond the door, at the end of the hall. The police station was two hundred and eighty feet away on the Calle de Fernando El Santo. They came down the corridor noisily, moving fast. Bourne could hear the key turn in the lock and the lock snap. The police burst into the room, registered its contents in one professional, collective glance then unhesitatingly beat Bourne and Jean Marie senseless with weighted leather billies. The time was five minutes after noon.

  When Eve had been sure that Bourne had fallen into a deep sleep that morning she left on tiptoe out of the apartment for her regular Saturday morning appointment with the obstetrician. She returned to the hotel at twelve twenty-five. Bourne was gone. She called the desk and inquired whether he had left a message, knowing with falling heart that he had taken up his compulsive search again. The desk told her that Señor Bourne had gone out of the hotel in a great rush with Señor Calbert and had left no message.

  She let herself sink down on the edge of the bed while her mind wove patterns of conjecture. She had not seen Jean Marie since Tuesday, four days before, but Bourne had told her that he had grown worse if anything and last Tuesday he had been a reed-voiced, shaking stranger. News must have broken. It had been electric enough news to reactivate Jean Marie, so it must have something to do with money, his panacea and denominator. She never knew the bloodthirsty side of Jean Marie because that was his fantast’s side allowed to be seen by very few but Bourne and scattered astonished prostitutes. He had often mourned that good character when interchanged for bad was not a ball, round on all sides with the weight of its love and dread distributed evenly throughout the mass.

  Eve knew that the departure of the two men would have to be connected with Dr. Muñoz. If the duchess had called Bourne would not have taken Jean Marie with him, and nothing else but Dr. Muñoz could have persuaded both men to leave the hotel.

  By three o’clock she was concerned enough to think of telephoning the Muñoz apartment, but she didn’t. She had her lunch sent up to her terrace and occasionally, as she tried to eat, when she thought she heard Bourne’s car stop in front of the hotel on the street below, she would get up nervously and try to peer down through the treetops, seeing nothing familiar.

  Out of necessity she began to concentrate on the negative aspects of the duchess. She began to convince herself that her husband was so affected by the duchess
’s lot that she, Eve, must hold the duchess’s fate at an arm’s length never to be touched by it. If she began to feel Blanca’s grief for Blanca’s life she would be trapped, she would need to offer up sacrifices to stave off that grief. Her husband was the only sacrifice that grief would accept. She had to be taken if her husband were taken because she could not conceive of living without him. She railed at herself to reject the duchess. She was a housefly whose wings had been pulled off; she was insignificant except to herself; she did not exist where Eve and Bourne existed. She focused her concentration on the naturalism of Blanca’s life: the woman had a record of sadness the way a habitual felon had a record of crime or a baseball player had a batting average. In twenty-nine years she had managed to find nine weeks of complete love. She was predisposed to tragedy and though Eve warned herself that she must deplore this the way women in fashionable restaurants deplore starvation overseas and urge their escorts to put coins into labeled tin collection cans outstretched by other fashionable women, she had need to find strength to protect herself and her husband from allowing themselves to propitiate that grief by giving themselves over to this stricken woman’s terrible predilection.

  She nearly ran, she strode so rapidly toward the bath, stripping her clothes off. She stood under the shower and turned on the full force of cold water. She gasped as it hit her, and kept gasping, but she stayed under it. She stayed under the icy water for nearly five minutes until she felt cold to the bone and had to get out. As she dried herself she felt far away from the duchess’s problems and most dispassionately objective about her husband. She decided she would have to get him out of the country, cutting short his martyrdom, either by persuasion or threats or, if need be, in that ambulance he had summoned up, heavily drugged as he had so patronizingly planned for Jean Marie, to cross the border at Irún as a mental case.