“Yes, my captain.”
“Do you realize that you are the only man in the company who cries out yes, my captain after every sentence I utter? No! Don’t answer. I am going to have a bit of breakfast. I suggest you get the surgeon to this man with some efficient restoratives. You will call me when the man has been refreshed which will not be later than fifteen minutes.”
“Yes, my captain.”
Good God, the captain thought as he strolled down the hall in the opposite direction, the man must be in love with me. He walked toward his breakfast slowly knowing it would be at least forty-five minutes before he would be summoned.
Bourne was awake again. He felt packed in ice and it seemed as though his head had come to a point. He had the illusion of his vision being fantastically keen, which couldn’t be so because the same captain was sitting directly in front of him, obscuring most of what could be seen.
“You fell asleep,” the captain said.
“No wonder,” Bourne answered.
“Before you fell asleep you were saying that you felt we would be more inclined to make a deal with you after you had been acquitted of the charge of the murder of Victoriano Muñoz because the remaining charges, not being what might be called capital charges, would be more easily overlooked by us in return for your returning the Goya. I think that is substantially what you said.”
“Yes. That’s about what I’ve been thinking.” He felt like a length of heavy rubber being stretched for hundreds of miles by two planes, each pulling in the opposite direction, each determined not to let go of their end of him. He liked the feeling. His visual clarity was phenomenal. He thought of it as his 6D process.
“Well, I am afraid you will not be acquitted of that murder and this is why. I work backward now. Victim killed with an iron poker. Only Calbert’s finger prints on the poker. Next, you and Calbert in locked room with the victim at time of death fixed by the medical examiner.” He held up his finger next to his nose. “A locked room. Your connection with the victim in two separate crimes—the Dos Cortes robberies and the theft of the Goya plus the death of Jiminez, bless him, and the hotel employee Elek have been confessed to by your associate Señor Calbert. All this while you will be before the court after having been unmasked as a passport forger and an ersatz identity. My dear chap, I don’t know what you know about our prosecutors in Spain, but I can tell you that they are very keen fellows indeed and that they will wrap you like a small package and deliver you to the executioner.”
Bourne smiled wistfully; ruefully. “If he does, goodbye Goya.”
“Irrestible force, your execution. Immovable object, the Goya. I am merely suggesting that you might like to trade your life and Calbert’s life for a painting which no matter where you have it you will never see again.”
“Captain, you know your business. When I make a deal I’ll make it with you.”
“And I, Señor Bourne, when I make a deal I’ll make it with you. How about now?”
“I want to talk to the Duchess de Dos Cortes.”
“Why?”
“I have to—I want to ask her myself if she will be kind enough to find a lawyer for our defense. I wouldn’t know where to start to find a lawyer I can trust, and I trust her to know a lawyer I can trust.”
“You may be right. She has had more experiences than most duchesses with lawyers and jails.” He stood up. He patted Bourne warmly on the back. “I’ll see what I can do. I think you got the point.” He walked to the door of the room with Bourne’s limitless eyes following him. He opened the door, thought of something and turned around. “You did get the point, didn’t you, Señor Bourne?”
“The Goya,” Bourne rasped.
“Very good, Señor Bourne. You’ll get your lawyer.” He closed the door just as both airplanes, on either side of the continent, let go of the huge, stretched rubber strip which was Bourne at the same time. He slammed into himself from all sides and collapsed on the side of a mountain.
The duchess was ten minutes late for her teatime appointment with Eve, an exemplary action in Madrid, which brought her into Eve’s great, crooning embrace at twenty minutes to six, or while Bourne and Jean Marie were still unconscious at the Cárcel de Carabancheles. She wore black, she had removed the rubies, and she had added a tiny veil which covered the expressions she might have, on the upper part of her face. Both women wept for a time, truly each for the other simultaneously as they wept for self, then the duchess sat down abruptly and Eve sorted tea things.
“The police called me this afternoon,” the duchess said. “My cousin, Victoriano Muñoz, has been murdered.”
Eve dropped the empty teacup she held and made an anguished cry.
“Eve! Darling, what is it? I didn’t mean to upset you. I had forgotten that you knew him.”
“I—we met at your party,” Eve said.
“It’s all quite shattering. Violence upon violence. Both of them men of mine, you might say.”
“It’s shocking. Shocking.”
“It is far more shocking than you think, Eve. I was summoned by the police to identify the paintings which were hung on his wall. They were my paintings. He had stolen them from Dos Cortes.”
“Ah!”
“Is Jaime here? Pablo tells me he had come to the house again and again.”
“No. He isn’t here.” Eve picked up the cup again, her mind still. She set the cup on a saucer and filled it with hot tea. “I had thought he would be back by now. He will be. Any moment. I’m sure.” It had happened. Eve, who had thought that she could pull Bourne along with her, stumbling through the stench of unclean bats in the cavern, running through the darkness ahead of a doom, knew it had happened and that he had found the faceless wall he sought and had found someone’s death between his fingers as she had known he would find it. She fell vertically into a chair. All the life he had poured into her was escaping from her as though through unstoppable holes in the ends of her fingers; escaping like gas when she held the fingers straight up and escaping like water when she let the fingers fall. It was all over and nothing in the world could threaten her ever again or make her feel that it could have importance.
She sat and she stared and she remembered Bourne in streaks of light which waited for her sight, as the duchess sat remembering Cayetano, each tenderly justified; both ransacked. The tea grew cold.
The telephone rang. Eve, nearest to it, did not hear it. The duchess looked at her wrist watch then rose to answer it as if by appointment. She listened, she spoke, and she listened. She said she would inform Mrs. Bourne and hung up.
“Eve. Eve, dearest.”
Eve looked up at her.
“That—a friend who is quite powerful in government called to say—to tell me—to ask me to tell you that Jaime has been arrested with M’sieu Calbert for my cousin’s murder.”
Eve did not speak. She sat up straighter.
“Jaime wants to see me. Why?”
“He will tell you, I am sure.”
“I will call the Minister himself.” She went to the telephone and with quick movements dialed a number. She spoke a name into the telephone. She waited, then she began to speak again in a low, rapid voice. Her voice became more and more insistent, then the sentences became shorter, then she repeated only one word: “No? No? No?” widely spaced. She hung up.
“No one may see him,” she said. “I don’t understand it. That was the Minister. He has done far more difficult things for me in the past.”
Eve was at the mahogany bar at the corner of the room. She poured two moderate drinks into two large inhalers. The duchess walked slowly across the room to join her.
“He will have the best lawyer in Spain, of course,” the duchess said aggressively. “I will see to that this evening. The lawyer I’ll get for him will be able to go in and out of those cells at Carabancheles like a turnkey.” She sipped the brandy and openly appraised Eve’s haggardness. She did not feel as exultant as she had thought she would feel, but she felt stronger and less lo
nely as she watched Eve empty of reasons for living.
The government released the story for world-wide publication Monday morning. Pictures of the accused went out with the general information about Bourne and Jean Marie, who was identified as a famous French painter. As edition after edition moved, the Paris papers ran pictures of Lalu Calbert, found in Bordeaux, who was tearfully mystified but sure it was all an enormous mistake, who then suddenly disappeared, the French stringers and correspondents were alerted to look for her in Madrid, at the jail or at the trial.
Since the Associated Press sold color art and photos to about two hundred Japanese papers on a very lucrative basis they needed a color angle fast so The Pickett Troilus became The Velázquez Curse for about four days tacked on to a story which said the great Spanish master who had painted only for Spain had loused up this particular painting good on his deathbed warning all foreigners to lay off. It was called King Tut’s Tomb copy in the trade and always sold well so what started out to be a mere merchandising convenience for the Japanese market developed into a really worth-while world-wide sale, particularly to the United States roto outlets and South American dailies because not only was it an art story and therefore one with class for the former but it spelled out a whole Spanish angle for the Latin-American outlets.
Sam Gourlay of The Populace, London, squandered an overseas telephone call to talk to Eve from Fleet Street coppering the bet by having the conversation monitored by his office tape recorder, but his questions were gentle, generous, general and innocuous. Mainly he seemed to want to know if there had been any evidence which might indicate that this case was in any way linked with the alleged international art traffic which, it was stated in police circles, was controlled by Jack Tense, Britain’s Master Criminal. Straight-faced, Eve went along with the paper’s basic policy. She said that if Spanish masterpieces had indeed been stolen from the castle at Dos Cortes and the Marqués de Villalba had been murdered as a result it must be the work of some gang of international criminals because her husband, a respected businessman and pillar of society in Madrid whose reputation was more than impeccable was innocent and that she, wife of the accused, would be grateful for anything The Populace might do to prove her husband’s innocence. Gourlay asked her if she would face Jack Tense if The Populace were to send him to Spain and she replied that she would do anything which could be seen to serve the cause of her husband’s vindication and freedom. Sam said he felt he could get something real juicy out of that and he hoped it would help her in every way, because it would certainly build readership for Jack’s next series.
Feature writers, magazine people, extra men for syndicates, mail, wire and telephone, stringers covering for the important American news magazines and the Milan weeklies which had abandoned active coverage in Spain, began to appear in Madrid. They looted every nook and cranny of the story, but none of them saw the prisoners. Eve and the duchess were stilled barred as well from seeing Bourne. Paris Match submitted a petition signed by the entire French press corps fruitlessly in an effort to see the man the London and Glasgow papers called “Kithless Calbert,” Jean Marie being without attendant kin. Some of the new people began by camping in the lobby of the hotel to bushwhack Eve or tried to push their way into the duchess’s vestibule but they were disposed of by silent policía armada within ten minutes after the complaints had been received, causing very little outcry over the freedom of the press.
The No-Do government newsreel shot for Spain and also serviced the National Broadcasting Company, the Columbia Broadcasting System, Movietone, British and French Gaumont and the French Pathé reels which was more a matter of monopoly than keen salesmanship. This was redistributed to keys in Europe and on a second-run basis to South America and Asia providing work for planes, people, ticket takers, and workers in film raw stock factories. The scenes photographed showed the outside of the Cárcel de Carabancheles on a sunny day when it looked the most like a glove manufacturing plant, the duchess alighting from her Pegaso and walking rapidly across the pavement behind a high muffler and dark glasses into her house, and close shots of copies of the Velázquez, the Zurbarán and the Greco which were always explained vividly by the beaming Representative Pickett of Illinois and his delightful young wife in several languages.
Mr. Pickett got more over-all space out of the murder than any other element in it; more than the outside of the jail, more than El Greco, more than the murder weapon, more than the building porter at the Calle Amador de los Ríos, more even than Mrs. Pickett mainly because he was so articulate and available.
He encountered one small squall when a Republican committeeman from Illinois telephoned all the way from the western part of the state and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing when he knew goddam well that Congress was in session. Pickett fired right back that he was cementing U.S.-Spanish relations and that he was proving that there was someone in politics who knew just a little something about how the great Spanish people felt about their great painters, for Christ’s sake, and what the hell was this poison pen talk like he didn’t know Congress was in session? The boys knew goddam well how sick he was and how he was taking a lot of goddam chances with his health right now in order to make sure that this murdering renegade Bourne didn’t bring the entire Spanish-American accord right down on their goddam heads. “Did you ever hold office, you silly son-of-a-bitch?” Mr. Pickett yelled. “Do you know the first goddam thing about practical politics? I tell you one goddam thing you’ll know, you silly son-of-a-bitch, you’ve made one good, solid, lifetime enemy out of Homer Pickett!” He slammed the phone down from shoulder height then crumbled into the chair beside it and mewed at Marianne, sounding like an utterly different person perhaps forty years or so younger than the one who had just belched smoking terror and reprisals into the phone.
“I hate to talk like a longshoreman,” he almost wailed, “but its the only language they seem to understand. That ridiculous Al Burgerfolz! I tell you, hon, if it takes my last dollar I’m going to have that one drummed out of the party before he gets some idea that he’s going to use his last dollar first. Oh, how I hate roaring like a lumberjack with all those operators listening in. How I absolutely detest and despise having to justify what is just about the best job of diplomatic front work being done today throughout Europe.”
“Ah, the hell with him,” Mrs. Pickett said. “No matter what he wants to do to you now he can’t make it stick. Not any more he can’t.”
The duchess’s life went through an unusual metamorphosis at this time. All at once, she began to cultivate the leading figures of the government most of whom she had rocked with anathema for most of her adult life. She held open house in Madrid. Invitations went out. She spent most of the mornings on the telephone, right up until two o’clock when she had to dress for lunch, with the cabinet, their wives, their under-secretaries and their wives, the ambassadors and their wives plus visiting prelates from Argentina. Beginning at eight every evening her salon would be populated for the cocktail hour. The duchess crackled and charmed and shocked and titillated very nearly every guest just as though she had always admired and envied each one of them.
At the dinner party following the fourth reception she had succeeded in having the rule reversed which said that neither Bourne nor Jean Marie could have visitors. She also made a fast friend of the Acusador Fiscal who would try the case for the state.
The warden arranged for Eve to see Bourne in a large, square room which was empty except for two chairs. Two guardias brought Bourne in, then left them alone. They sat in the chairs and looked at each other. She offered him a cigarette which he refused. She put them back in her purse without taking one for herself.
“It happened just about the way you said it would,” he said.
“That doesn’t matter.”
He felt the value of what she had given him, all at once, as a boy sees the value of the dead bird in his hand which he has just shot. In turn, he had bequeathed to her an anvil of memory, an anch
or for a desert. He took her face between his hands and kissed her with longing and regret for what he had not given her. He pulled his chair directly beside her chair, he facing east and she facing west, and spoke almost inaudibly directly next to her ear in an effort to comfort her without comforting the German microphones which he was sure had been sowed in the room.
“We’re going to get out of this. I mean it. They are frantic about losing the Goya. They’re going to make a deal.” He watched her. She turned her head and stared at him, not understanding but trusting. “Don’t answer,” he said. “Wherever you can just nod. Okay?” She nodded.
“Blanca. Here. Soon.”
She nodded.
“We have to go high up. Only one we know they won’t double-cross. Okay?” She nodded.
He stood up, moving his chair back to the face-to-face position, and sat down. He held her hands. “No more of this kind of work, afterwards. You can safely quote me that I have decided to retire. We’ll open a bookstore in Sweden or a hotel in Switzerland. I’ve been damned near out of my mind I’ve been so scared and that’s no way to earn a living.”
She leaned forward and entwined her arms around his neck. She rested in his arms, at peace, puzzling the dichotomy of being doomed and blessed for knowing where she belonged. The guards came in and announced regretfully that the visit was over.
Jack Tense called Eve the following morning without mentioning his name but letting his voice identify him and, in his professional fashion, asked her if she expected to be at the airport for lunch that day. Before she could answer he told her it was a very good restaurant and so crowded that “nobody is able to remember seeing nobody.” He said at two o’clock she might run into someone with news from home then he hung up as though the telephone booth had begun to fill up with hostile police and troops.
The Oldest Confession Page 25