The Oldest Confession

by Richard Condon

  He felt contempt for Jean Marie as a man and as a Frenchman, a man who was admittedly guilty and yet lacking in every feeling for that imperative sense of consequence which defined manhood to Corruno. Bourne, whose physical strength, tailoring, and political connections he envied and appreciated, was a human condition which he had not yet entirely solved. There was a preciseness about Bourne’s presentation, he admired Bourne’s prehensile mind, but he was not a serious man. He showed no particular sense of the involvement which swarmed around him. He was unaware of sin; legal or moral or spiritual, yet a man who continued to demonstrate a nice feeling for the imperative sense of consequence.

  He had been looking forward to lunch, but he knew his duty and knew the almost reflexive requirement of all clients following the first session of their own trials: they invariably found it necessary to be reassured that the prosecution did not have a case which needed to be taken too seriously as promising to advance anything unpleasant. He told them all, naturally, that they were not to worry and they, who had sat there while the Fiscal had sewn them up tightly into a shroud of ineluctible reasoning and evidence, would believe him.

  He regarded Bourne patronizingly and, while waiting for the inevitable question, offered Bourne a cigarette, then lighted it for him. He sat down languidly upon the stool in the corner of the cell but when he saw that Bourne intended to remain standing he got quickly to his feet again. Then Bourne sat down on the edge of the bed so Corruno resat himself upon the stool.

  “I want to read your brief before you deliver it.”

  “You what?”

  “Why wasn’t I shown the prosecutor’s brief? You’re a legal technician. What the hell do you know about this case except what I tell you? Do you want to argue from the facts or do you want to do legal embroidery?”

  Corruno sprang to his feet. “Who are you talking to?” he blazed. “I withdraw from the case and I will so advise the president of the court immediately.” He started to leave.

  Bourne put his great hand on Corruno’s chest and pushed him gently up against the wall of the cell. “Think about it. You withdraw from this case and I tell the duchess that you prepared this case entirely upon Jean Marie’s confession to the police and have given me no opportunity of seeing either your brief or the prosecution’s, even though his brief this morning contained statements which, if they have been sworn to, constitute perjury and which, if attacked and exploded, can mean acquittal. Is that the kind of a lawyer you are? You want to withdraw?”

  Corruno stared down at Bourne’s restraining hand and wrist then looked levelly at Bourne. Bourne took his hand away and stepped back. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Corruno stared him down then kept looking at him until the violence gradually left his eyes, leaving them expressionless. “Sit down,” he ordered. Bourne sat on the bed.

  “All right. What testimony?”

  “The servants, Pablo and Josefina Soltes, who have been the body servants of the duchess, our duchess, most of their lives for some reason were working at Muñoz on the day of the murder. Nearly everything else they told the police is a lie. The man says he was in the room with Muñoz, bringing him coffee, when he telephoned me to come to see him at once.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s a lie. He says that Muñoz came out to greet us at the door to the salon after we arrived, another lie. He says that in fifteen or so minutes our violence and shouting were so much that his wife telephoned the police who came immediately. All lies. The timing of all of it can be fixed by the medical examiner’s report and by the time Muñoz’ call came through the switchboard at my hotel and the time recorded at the police station which is directly around the corner from the Muñoz apartment and the time of the police arrival. Everyone of those times will be a matter of record. The only guess will be the medical examiner’s, but it has to work out that his time will fall in with those others because Muñoz had to die between the time he made the call to me and the time the call was made to the police and the arrival of the police.”

  “This is very, very significant evidence if it all will hold together, as you say.” Corruno had become excited. “But why would the servants arrange such a thing? We must have a motive!”

  “I’ve been thinking about it. A lot of things which change people’s lives are done on the spur of the moment. They could have heard him summoning me to a meeting. He spoke with considerable anger. He was certainly in no danger of his life at that moment. I know enough about people to know that he couldn’t have talked to me the way he did, if he knew he were about to be murdered. In that hard and arrogant way of his, not unlike your own, he had no intention of dying for many years, believe me.”

  “I regret my arrogance. It was unprofessional. Please go on.”

  “Let’s say that the servants heard him make the, call, and in one of those evil flashes of amateur criminal inspiration killed him, stole whatever they wanted to steal, called the police, and waited for us to walk in to be arrested for what they had done. I tell you the man literally pushed us into that room with the corpse, locked the door after us, and the police did the rest.”

  “This is all quite worth examining and you may be sure that I will do so most thoroughly. However, I point out that the motives presented by the Fiscal this morning as to why you and your colleague would have killed Muñoz were absolutely impeccable.”

  “Not if the police were to find any of the property of Muñoz in the effects of either the man or the woman.”

  “That is true. But if such a thing were possible it would not seem likely that such a condition would exist almost a month after the murder.”

  “We must insist that they be covered by the police. It would take time for amateurs to sell stuff like that. Don’t you think that if the timing of the calls held water and if they were caught with stolen property that there would be a very strong case against them?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And a substantially weakened case against us?”

  “Perhaps.” Bourne thought of a faceless man named Enrique López. He watched López steal some dark object from the Muñoz apartment. He watched López put the dark object into the pocket of the heavy-set butler, Pablo. He watched the police pounce upon Pablo and his wife almost immediately then he shuddered and felt nausea and forced his mind to fill and fill and fill with the expanding picture of “The Second of May” by Francisco Goya. He could not explain to himself why he had thought of Enrique López. He knew he had been framed. He knew he hadn’t killed Muñoz and that those two servants were the only people who could have killed him, but it struck at him that he was building fright inside this prison and that soon he would begin to agree to anything with his mind to get him out, at bloodying and eviscerating cost to any stranger.

  Off somewhere, later, he heard Corruno say that he would have to locate the Fiscal and the Magistrates wherever they might be lunching at once, that changes in briefs would need to be made and an examination of those servants attended to, then the voice had stopped. He was out of the cell and on his way before Bourne was fully aware that he had gone.

  He sat on the bed, with his back propped up against the wall, concentrating with all of his strength upon something he remembered Eve telling him about what some psychiatrist had told her years and years before. The man had made much of the point of Eve understanding that she had his permission to think any thought she wished to think or any thought which came unexpectely into her mind. He had emphasized very clearly to her that only when a thought found action and consequence by being carried out could a wrong, in any sense, be committed which was of course at direct variance with almost all religious instruction and therefore, Bourne reasoned hopefully, undoubtedly true.

  He stared at the wooden stool, the bucket and the incongruous, small, and brightly colored rug and thought that if he could talk to Jean Marie he would not know what to say any more than he knew what to say to himself in explanation or apology for what had happened. If Eve had held tightly to tha
t cardboard tube which had contained the three paintings by Velázquez, Zurbarán and the Greek while Elek and the porters had been in her room at the hotel, if she had gripped it tightly as she had checked out that morning he wondered if any of this could have happened. Would Cayetano still be alive? Or Elek and Muñoz? Or, when she had reached the airport would Muñoz have telephoned the police to tell the police that she had stolen national treasure and would try to take the paintings through? Then Eve would have been in jail and that would never have done. He could not conceive of her in jail. All at once he remembered her three passports and her three false names and the Colonel Gómez who had remembered her so well that afternoon when he had stopped by to borrow the book from Muñoz. He knew she was free because they thought she might, a distinctly unlikely possibility but to any police anywhere a very good one, that she might somehow lead them to that Goya. It was then that Bourne saw where the slip had been made, where the crime had become something less than his sixteen-year standard of perfect crimes. The fault had been with Francisco Goya betraying the Muñoz family in 1810. If that hadn’t happened Victoriano would have had no interest in Bourne’s work and they would all be free and richer than ever. The trouble with a irrefutable cause like that was, one could not plan around it; a cause had to have an effect.

  Regret was only worry about the past, but he regretted that because of his sense of propriety which had insisted that they regain the loot from Muñoz and had resulted in Jean Marie living atilt with his normal view. For sixteen years, from before the war in the autumn of 1941 when he had decided what he was going to do, when he had begun to plan his first criminal project, interrupted by the war, Bourne had considered prison as a concrete possibility, as sort of a fine for being caught offside. Prison would be the inevitable consequence of incompetence at his work. It belonged in all of his professional thinking because it was a natural component within the problem of each individual crime he would commit and, in a looming sense, a larger component within the complex of his accumulated criminal accomplishments. Now he was in prison. He could find no incompetence which had brought this clear consequence about. He had acquired the paintings from Dos Cortes with considerable skill. The action had been a business matter well executed. The murder of Gustave Elek marked where business had ended and true crime had begun. If he had only understood the meaning of murder the way Eve had understood it. Because he had not committed the murder he could see no connection of the murder to himself and he had bargained with Muñoz so he could accept the thought of prison abstractly because he had taught himself that if and when he had made a mistake prison was the inevitable consequence and he had delivered that prejudgment wholly unaware of his hopeless inability to understand the threat of true sin, murder and the condonement of murder. The essence of his joy in knowing that the Goya would allow him to escape the punishment which he had earned was that he knew that none of it could ever happen again, that he must end his profession because if his moral judgment was faulty at work such as his he would pay for it in the only way one can pay for any lack of criminal judgment, by dying in a prison or under a noose. He thought so deeply and with such focus about himself within this predicament he did not remember to feel sorrow for Cayetano’s silence in a silver box under the ground or for the duchess’s horror of awakening every morning, of driving herself to live throughout the day then to try to sleep when night came. The disadvantage, when he examined it closely, his mind turned upon his guilt, was that prison, a factor which he had treated with scientific consideration for so many years, had somehow overtaken him and that his misunderstood insensitivity to danger, shown in a murder, had brought him there. So do all stumble when they examine history.

  He was notified that the session of the court had been postponed from that afternoon to the following afternoon at three o’clock by order of the President of the Court, at the request of the attorney for the defense.

  At ten twenty that night he was told by a jailer that word had been received from the Office of the Minister of Government that an appointment had been granted to the Duchess of Dos Cortes to see the prisoner at seven o’clock the following evening. His analytical, professorial manner with himself dissolved. He was to see her at last, to have a chance to beg her to believe that he had not known what Victoriano was going to do. She would comfort him and tell him that she understood and that she forgave him for any part he might have had in that terrible affair. She would tell him that he did not need to produce Victoriano to swear that he had done that thing without ever telling Bourne. She would look into his eyes, and smile at him, and forgive him then she would listen attentively and carefully about what she needed to do with the highest officials of government about the Goya and the deal for the Goya so that he could be freed immediately and so that they could all go away from this terrible place of trouble and shame and horror and pain and live happily in kindness to each other.

  At three seventeen peeyem the following afternoon when the court had convened, the President of the Court instructed the Clerk to read the argument for the defense. Jean Marie had obtained a sketch pad through the jailer and worked upon it, held in his lap, concentrating and disregarding the developments of the trial. Bourne having rested better than he had in weeks, regarded the scene with vast calm, listening politely to Corruno’s brief which he had read at noon. The defense brief was shorter than the case which had been presented by the Fiscal, but excellently reasoned, a condition which reflected credit upon Corruno, who had not slept at all the night before as he assembled its new contents and its syntax.

  The defense would prove the improbability and perhaps the impossibility of the defendants’ being able to have caused the death of Victoriano Muñoz and in so doing might assist the police in apprehending the actual person or persons who had committed the murder, an opening which was received gratefully by the press in the rear of the courtroom.

  The defense brief quoted from the brief of the Fiscal as establishing the time of the death of the deceased through the testimony of an expert witness who was to be heard in the court, the medical examiner. The time of the death as so established would be contrasted with the time Dr. Muñoz had made his telephone call to Bourne through the hotel switchboard, with the official police records which would show the time the call had been received summoning them to the scene of the crime and their time of arrival at the scene. In short the defense would reveal, supported by the record, that the time disparities were so great that it would be seen that the murder had occurred between fourteen and sixteen minutes before the defendants could possibly have made the journey from the hotel to the Muñoz residence.

  It would be shown that only Pablo Soltes and his wife Josefina were on the murder premises at the time of the death of Victoriano Muñoz by violence which could reveal the possibility that Pablo and Josefina Soltes had perjured themselves in deposing to the Fiscal and the defense would demand that they be produced to confirm or deny their original statements under oath.

  “Reasonable doubt. At last an about-face for tomorrow’s editions,” the man from France-Soir said to the man from the London Daily Sketch.

  “Reasonable doubt won’t help us sell papers,” he answered. “A conviction on a couple of servants isn’t what the public wants to read. That’s a classical anticlimax.”

  “Not in France.”

  “Well, after all. Your man is French. You have tomorrow’s story all written for you.”

  The Clerk of the Court read where the defense brief usually would have begun under other circumstances, the description of the exemplary character of the defendant Robert Evans Cryder called James Bourne, which would be supported by laudatory character references from officers under whom he had served in the United States Army. It was known that the defendant had been a respected businessman in Madrid, active in charitable enterprises, a valued member of the most distinguished Madrid society, a musician of talent, a respected scholar in the field of Spanish art, and an excellent horseman. Each of these relative
peaks of erudition would be attested to by character witnesses of high station in Spanish life who would testify on the defendant’s behalf on a voluntary basis. The defense would show that there was nothing sinister about the false passport and identity carried by the defendant at the time of his arrest, as claimed by the Fiscal, on the sworn records and statements of the United States Army and following affadavits submitted by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States Government, that the defendant, Robert Evans Cryder, called James Bourne, at the conclusion of World War II in England had been struck upon the head in such a manner as to cause severe injury and amnesia in an omnibus accident from which he had been the sole survivor; and that, in the confusion of the rescue, the passport of an accident victim named James Bourne had been retrieved by Robert Evans Cryder from the wreck and that this would be supported entirely by the record which would also show that since 1945 Robert Evans Cryder had been a resident of London, Paris and Madrid believing himself to be James Bourne.

  As the clerk of the Court read on Bourne looked across at Raphael Corruno-Baenz with greatly freshened respect. In fact, he goggled at the defense attorney who happened to look his way at that moment, to nod in boredom. Bourne had stolen the passport from the bus wreck and had planted his own passport on the nearest corpse. He could not immagine what Eve had told Corruno but it must have been a magnificent performance to get that young man to run every official agency source on the accident right down into the record, and he felt a little giddy that two such artists’ hands had been at work, Corruno’s and Eve’s.

  The Time man told the footless Magnum photographer next to him that they just might see the two defendants sprung. The Magnum man, feeling emasculated without his camera, could not have cared less. He was trying to decide whether he should try to get some shots with a Minox, whether he could get away with it if he did, and if he did get away with it how much money the shots would bring. It was a deadly dull nothing of a trial but that Frenchman was going crazy quietly right before their eyes and some studies of him would sell if he could work fast and if nothing big happened by the last day he would risk it, so he never heard the Time man’s observation and the Time man never knew he hadn’t acknowledged it.