The Oldest Confession

by Richard Condon

  He inhaled heavily then exhaled slowly, all the way, which is what a sigh is when it functions efficiently, which is to stop life for a fraction of an eternity in anguish. “I don’t know what’s come over me,” he answered. “I wasn’t going to tell you, as though you were the one who shouldn’t know who your enemies are. But you have to know the same way I would have to know if it was me in your place.” He paused in sadness. “It was your friend who told them where it was,” he said. “Your friend, the duchess. I don’t know how she found out, but it was she who told them.”

  Eve sat motionless, absorbing the meaning of what he had said then she stood up slowly. “I told her,” she said. She leaned over and kissed Tense as he sat in the dappling sunshine. “That’s how she found out.” She walked slowly away, along the Ramblas toward the park, clutching the large purse. “I told her.”

  The Clerk of the Court called the next witness, Colonel Gonzalo Gómez, chief of the Customs Service at Barajas.

  The prosecutor launched his line of questioning and the colonel testified, somewhat sullenly, that a superb copy of the Velázquez on exhibition in the court had been brought into Spain by Eve Bourne, wife of the accused called James Bourne. He supplied the date of Mrs. Bourne’s entry and handed over to the court a certified copy of customs records, which established the temporary importation of the copy of the painting by Mary Ellen Quinn as then represented.

  He was asked whether the Customs Service could produce records showing the temporary importation of copies of other paintings such as the Zurbarán and Greco on exhibition in the court. Colonel Gómez produced copies of certificates attesting to such importation at Irún and La Junquera respectively by American citizens named Alicia Sundeen and Thelma Cryder respectively.

  The prosecutor asked Colonel Gómez to read the spelling of the name Cryder from the cutoms department record, which he did. The prosecutor then asked the Clerk of the Court to read the spelling of the name of the accused Robert Evans Cryder to the court, which he did.

  “Thank you. Colonel Gómez, under what name did the wife of the defendant enter Spain at Barajas when she imported the copy of the Velázquez painting?”

  “Under the name of Mary Ellen Quinn.”

  “That was the name on the passport which she submitted. Her photograph, of course, was in that passport.”

  “Yes sir. I have the records and numbers here, sir.” The colonel sounded bitter.

  “Colonel, please tell the court how you became certain that Mary Ellen Quinn, who had presented this passport for entry into Spain, was in truth the wife of the defendant called James Bourne?”

  “I was introduced to Mr. and Mrs. Bourne by Dr. Muñoz.”

  “Where?”

  “At his apartment. I was told they had just been married.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  The Colonel told him.

  “To your knowledge were the customs officers at Irún and La Junquera respectively, shown photographs of the women who had identified themselves as Alicia Sundeen and Thelma Cryder?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Did they identify the photographs?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Will you tell us who these officers identified?”

  “Mrs. James Bourne.”

  “I believe depositions were taken to that effect?”

  “Yes sir.”

  The Clerk of the Court came to the colonel and collected the depositions. The Fiscal nodded benignly to the witness. “Thank you, colonel.”

  “No questions,” Rafael Corruno said. He was not there to defend a woman for illegal entry and there could be no doubt that the copies were in the country so undoubtedly someone had brought them there.

  The President of the Court spoke slowly and clearly. “This court orders the arrest of Mrs. James Bourne, wife of the co-defendant, on the charges of illegal entry, possession of forged papers, and conspiracy.”

  Bourne stared at the floor, breathing heavily, biting his tongue.

  “Proceed,” the president ordered. The Clerk of the Court rose and called Doña Blanca Conchita Hombria y Arias de Ochoa y Acebal, Marquesa de Vidal, Condesa de Ocho Pinas, Vizcondesa Ferri, Duquesa de Dos Cortes. Within a few moments the duchess had made her way into the courtroom.

  “Your name?”

  “Blanca de Dos Cortes, excellency.”

  “What is your age?” The president coughed.

  “Twenty-nine years, my president.”

  “Do you live in Madrid?”

  “Yes, excellency.”

  “Do you know the accused?”

  “Yes, excellency.”

  “Do you swear to tell the truth?”

  “Yes, my president.”

  “Please answer the questions which will be put to you by the Acusador Fiscal.”

  The Fiscal cleared his throat delicately. His fingers, those ropes with separate consciousness, began to worry a ruler while the Fiscal conveyed his extreme esteem for the distinguished witness by clearing his throat twice more and by moving the black, polyangular hat from one side of his desk to the other. Those extra seats and places at the Fiscal’s desk, at the desk of the nonexistent Acusador Privado, and at Corruno’s desk had filled with interested, robed men.

  Jean Marie had stopped his sketching. He stared at the duchess with naked fear. His right hand clutched a blue envelope which he had spoken to Bourne about emptily that morning as they had been marched from the cells to the courtroom. It was a letter from Lalu which told him that she loved him, but that she had been forced to leave Paris because of what had happened and that she knew he would understand that she had to take care of herself. It had been mailed from Paris. He understood without reservation. They had had more time than they had ever dreamed of. So he watched the duchess, fascinated with the doom which had appeared at last, so far from where he had expected to meet it, after promising so very much, so often.

  Bourne stared at the floor and tried to concentrate on counting by sevens.

  “My duchess,” the Fiscal asked, “are the paintings to your left, on exhibit in this court, painted by Zurbarán, El Greco and Velázquez respectively, your property?”

  The duchess blinked her eyes rapidly as though not quite comprehending. “Which part of that question would you like me to answer first?”

  “I am not sure that I understand your request, my duchess. Shall I repeat the question?”

  “No, no. I will try to answer. I believe the paintings are my property, but if they are truly my property they were not painted by Zurbarán, El Greco or Velázquez.” There was a hum in the courtroom as though a large generator had been turned on.

  It was the Fiscal’s turn to blink rapidly. “Pardon, duchess,” he said, “but is not the Velázquez the famous Pickett Troilus?”

  The duchess looked away, baffled, as though she would be willing to change the subject if the Fiscal would. Mrs. Pickett sat up much straighter. The press in the rear of the courtroom became very quiet. They glanced at one another expectantly.

  The president said, “The witness will express herself for the record.”

  “My president, the first and last time Mr. Homer Pickett was a guest at Dos Cortes he positively identified these paintings as having been painted by Zurbarán, El Greco, and Velázquez. He even purported to have discovered the hand of the Dutch painter Rubens in the second copy of the Velázquez. Foreign picture magazines have been filled with the nonsense.”

  A stringer representing thirty-one middle western American dailies, including one Democratic and one independent paper in Chicago, decided he could not wait to hear any more and left the courtroom in a rush. Mrs. Pickett watched him go and knew exactly what outlets he represented because he had interviewed her husband twice at the hotel. She got up and made her way slowly across the legs and knees and feet of the row to the aisle. When she got into the open she began to walk more quickly. When the courtroom door closed behind her she was in the corridor, running through the clumps of waiting witness
es to get to her husband before anyone or anything else could get to him, to convince him, to bully him if she had to, that his back had not been broken politically, artistically and most entirely as the lecturer-critic who would rival Mr. Berenson.

  The representatives of principal competitors of both of the foreign magazines which had published the nonsense in full color sent assistants to telegraph offices with messages suggesting top priority standby. The American competitor of the American magazine which had proclaimed The Pickett Troilus even went so far as to add the words “practice smiling” on the end of his message, confident that he would never be asked to pay for the extra words.

  “Did the witness mention a second copy?” the court asked.

  “Yes, excellency. Mr. Bourne had stolen the first copies and had placed them with second copies.”

  A stout magistrate at the end of the desk to the left of the president scribbled a note and passed it along for consideration. The president read it. “Where are the originals?” he asked, clearly shocked, for the Spanish law and custom on its art treasures was most definite and clear.

  “My late husband, the duke,” the duchess explained, “had the original paintings removed from the walls in 1944 and replaced by the first copies.”

  “Where are the original paintings?”

  “In Japan, excellency.” The duchess was being sincerely cooperative. “They hang in a geisha house in Kobe which was one of my husband’s many business interests.” The AP man reeled at the bonus he would nerve himself up to ask for, then cut it in half, over the art and features this would move in Japan.

  “This was done in 1944? During a war?”

  “Oh yes, excellency, if it had not been for the war none of this could have happened. You see, it was through the war that my husband, himself an extremely highly regarded figure in our government, happened to find M’sieu Calbert, the defendant there, who is the supreme artist who has done both copies of all of these paintings and many more.” The duchess was sweet and patient with the confusion. She treated all inquiries with the unruffled kindness of a teacher in a nursery school.

  “You are saying then, my duchess,” the Fiscal said slowly, hoping perhaps to be contradicted, “that the paintings on exhibit in the court were not painted by Zurbarán, El Greco, or Velázquez, but are instead forgeries executed by the co-defendant, Jean Marie Calbert?”

  “Yes sir.” The Fiscal, as well as everyone else in the forward part of the courtroom, turned to look at Jean Marie who sat in a sick nimbus, staring at the duchess. While all eyes were away from her, the duchess looked into his sunken eyes with her dead ones, and smiled at him in a twisted, vengeful smile which lived for a moment only on one side of her face. Only Jean Marie, Bourne and the duchess were aware that the duchess had struck up the overture to Jean Marie’s doom, she achieved it so casually. Bourne, feeling an instant of panic, darted his glance to Jean Marie’s pale profile. His eyes were closed. His lips were moving silently and just perceptibly. Bourne felt the cold begin in his middle then spread toward his heart and his head, his loins and his feet. He sat up as straight as a West Point plebe dining with upper classmen as the President of the Court continued his questioning of the duchess.

  “The exportation of these paintings to Japan by your late husband, if indeed this be so, is a serious and grave matter. You will please tell the court the fullest background of this occurrence as it happened to the best of your memory.”

  “I will try to remember everything which pertains to this matter, your excellency,” she said. She dropped her head for a moment and swallowed hard. When she spoke her eyes, which seemingly were looking at the president, were looking far, far beyond him at her duty which seemed to hang like some distant star, on the horizon of her days, where she could not avoid seeing it. “In 1942, excellency,” she began, “my late husband became a close friend of Reichsmarschall Goering while he was in Paris as a member of the government commission which was so successful in regaining some of the many great Spanish paintings from the Louvre which Napoleon had looted from us in 1810 to 1812. I might say that painting was not the least of the interests which Reichsmarschall Goering shared with my late husband. In any event, my husband elected to remain in France almost throughout the period of the Nazi occupation. Because he was a known art authority who was greatly admired by the most influential Germans from Herr Hitler down, the then Political Commissar of Paris, a gentleman named Herr Abetz who wished to further the interests of his young mistress, brought a plan which had been developed by the mistress’s husband, who was the defendant Jean Marie Calbert, to my husband.”

  Jean Marie’s lips were moving silently. The nine journalists representing French news outlets were half out of their seats. They exchanged silent glances and somehow, without speaking, effected a truce which said that one would not leave the courtroom without the others knowing of the departure.

  “This plan so delighted my husband, who had an extraordinary contempt for all of mankind and mankind’s works which perhaps was what had attracted Marshal Goering to him in the first place, that he brought it to the Reichsmarschall who ordered it put into execution immediately. It was a simple plan. M’sieu Calbert, the defendant, was to have single access to the Louvre and to seemingly unknown art repositories of French art, and was to be permitted to copy what worthwhile paintings still remained from the alleged allotment which the French had claimed to have shipped to safety, so that eventually those paintings which would be exhibited in the Louvre and other French museums would be copies by M’sieu Calbert while the originals would be shipped back to Germany as culture bonuses among the German High Command where they are today. It was the sort of plan which almost exactly described my husband who had been bred to this kind of depravity. I do not know how or where M’sieu or his wife came by it.

  “M’sieu and Madame Calbert made a considerable amount of money in this way, my late husband told me. I know my husband paid him exceedingly well for copying three Italian masterpieces in the Reichsmarschall’s collection, pieces which were Herr Goering’s deep pride and which my husband undertook to substitute because it pleased him to think of the Germans, or anyone else for that matter, worshipping junk. They hang in a geisha house now which pleased him in a reverse way, of course, because mostly seamen patronize the establishments he owns and the seamen think the paintings are cheap copies and no one ever really looks at them, he told me delightedly. M’sieu Calbert’s work was so remarkably faithful to the work of the original masters, that it was then that my husband conceived of his geisha plan and when the Germans were forced to withdraw from Paris and the Calberts, for a time, might have been in severe personal trouble, my husband gave them a haven at Dos Cortes where M’sieu Calbert copied every painting we owned. Every painting, on every wall, in every house my husband owned now exhibits M’sieu Calbert’s work.”

  The French press could not wait any longer because the Italian and the British press were starting out of the court at top speed. The rear of the courtroom population seemed to rise as one man and fight toward the two relatively small doors toward the corridor and the street.

  “This court is adjourned until ten o’clock tomorrow morning,” the President of the Court said suddenly, standing up. No one seemed to know whether the duchess had completed her testimony for the prosecution, but that was no longer of the moment.

  If the government could have stopped the news stories from going forward they would have done so, but it was all on the public record and the delay of publication could only last as long as all of the foreign journalists could be detained within the country. The duchess was proscribed by her nation, her society and her community. The Fiscal hurried past her, glancing sideways at her as he went, with eyes filled with horror. Even Rafael Corruno Baenz went out of his way not to greet her. She had held the sacred memory of one of Spain’s greatest aristocrats, a proprietor of the nation, up to public ridicule with the irrefutable authority which she alone possessed. The commoners and the soldi
ers, the teachers and the bankers, who had taken over the government, as well as the minuscule of persons who actually owned the country were never to forgive her for that.

  The prisoners were returned to their cells. The duchess sat alone in the box until the courtroom had entirely cleared of people, then she rose and walked absent-mindedly out of the Palace of Justice and into the street to look for her car and driver, thinking only that she must now face Eve Bourne who had held the matching half of the only truth which would ever be left to either of them.

  Jean Marie succeeded in hanging himself just at that time, because the jailer was not there to interfere. He managed it with a bed sheet looped around the bars of the high window in the cell. He stood on the bed with the sheet knotted around his neck and jumped as high in the air as he could go, so that the force of his descent would provide a maximum snap. No one but Jean Marie ever knew whether he died quickly or slowly. The old jailer had been wearied by the emotion of seeing the duchess again so he rested, then he dozed, then he slept, and Jean Marie’s suicide was not discovered until the evening meal was served to the cells at ten o’clock that night and, as Spain is a Catholic country, was greatly deplored.

  The duchess found Eve waiting in the enormous sitting room-bedroom on the third floor of the house, facing the Retiro, the room in which she had explored her own grief so assiduously. The room was reached by an individual elevator, shafted only for it, which opened through a wall panel and which was an invisible door when not in use. When the duke had been alive she had never entered the room in any other way, always keeping the main door to the room bolted because he had been a man who could become ravening, not to say bestial, from reading the financial page of a newspaper or eating a piece of milk toast, for example, and as she had learned in the first year of her marriage, when she had been sixteen, that syphilis was a worrisome, persistent disease and, at that time, very nearly endless in its treatment and cure. It had been an all-round, all-purpose humiliation as well, because it had settled the matter of having children for her, once and for all.