The Oldest Confession

by Richard Condon

  Bourne listened carefully to the report. The principal problem was that the Castellana Hilton had stolen one of their best English-speaking telephone operators, so Bourne went with Señor Elek into their common office and called the manager of the Hilton.

  “Walter—Jim Bourne.” He listened with restrained politeness to the polite greeting. His hand would have been shaking if he did not have firm surfaces and objects to hold on to. Twenty hours more and they would be in the clear. He must do everything at half speed. He must welcome as much routine as possible. He must be deliberate about every move for only twenty hours more. “Listen, Walter, this is the first and last time I’m going to discuss this with you. As a matter of fact I’m entirely surprised that I have to mention it at all.” There was a pause while Walter made clear that he didn’t know what Bourne was talking about. “Walter—Walter—listen to me. Either you stop stealing switchboard operators from me after we spend six weeks training them or I’ll reply in kind.” There was another pause. “What do I mean? I mean I own this hotel, I’m not an employee and if I think it’s necessary to embarrass you by hiring away your entire key desk crew and the reception men, on a contract basis, I’ll do it if it costs me ten thousand dollars. Can I make it any clearer than that, Walter?” He stared up at Señor Elek and shook his head. He kept trying to decide whether he should waste time giving Eve a cover story if the merchandise should be turned up at the airport. Or, if they were discovered, if Eve were discovered, that is, perhaps he should work backward through the duchess to arrange clemency. No, it wouldn’t do. Eve would have to—no. “Walter, if you say it was a mistake, it was a mistake because I know that you know that I mean what I say. Thank you, Walter.”

  He put the receiver into the cradle softly and spoke to Señor Elek. “How much does Walter pay his third conserje on day duty? We have to make him understand.” Señor Elek told him at once, to the peseta. Bourne rubbed his chin and thought about it. “That’s a little more than I thought. Well, offer him the number two spot on the night desk here at no increase. He’ll make his own increase.”

  “What about Isidro?”

  “His wife is French and her mother is sick so I arranged through a friend of mine to get Isidro the second day spot at the Elysée Parc in Paris. If he needs any help with the exit permit we’ll want to help out all we can. I meant to tell you about that.” He left the office, crossed the hall and entered the creaking cage of the elevator.

  Señor Elek followed him out. He spoke to the chief reception clerk. “Isidro is going to be second man on the day shift at the Elysée Parc in Paris. Hombre! He’ll make his fortune!” The chief clerk grinned happily at the news. Both the men seemed as pleased as though it had happened to them, but Spain is two hundred years behind the rest of the West in everything.

  Eve was in six twenty-seven, the two-room suite in the luxury line of the building. Carrying the cardboard tube, Bourne let himself in with a passkey. Eve sat in a chair faced to the door.

  “Did you get it?” she yelped and threw herself at him. He caught her without an effort, held her over his head for an instant then kissed her with much ardor.

  He put her back into the chair and held the tube in his hands like an infantry sergeant demonstrating a rifle to a new recruit. “This is the new tube,” he said. “It looks exactly like the others, but it will hold all three paintings—the Velázquez we just got, the Zurbarán from the time before, and the El Greco from the first time out. The Zurbarán and the Greco surround the inside lining. The Velázquez goes in the way it always did. All three of them leave the country together and we cut the risks by two-thirds.”

  “And if I’m caught we lose them all at once.”

  “I didn’t plan it for you to get caught. I planned it for you to take all three paintings through.”

  “That’s all right with me.”

  “Thank you, darling. Now the action tomorrow is simplicity itself. You walk directly to the chief of customs, holding the tube out ahead of you, as though you were taking it for granted that he would want to take it from you. Smile as you walk in toward him and have the scarf slide off your shoulders just as you have rehearsed it. He won’t take the tube. It is very important that he does not take the tube because it weighs more than four times as much as the first tube weighed and anyone can remember things they don’t have to think about.”

  “What will I do if he does take it?”

  “You mean if he starts to take it. You’ll be holding it. Think of it as a baton in a relay race. If he reaches for it you drop it into your other hand and you undo the top. You slide the Velázquez out, just as though it were the copy he had seen when you brought it through from Paris. You do this very slowly while you talk very rapidly about Spain and what this trip meant to you. If he still seems to want to look at the painting you tell him that you met a man in Sevilla. You met a Spaniard. You have never experienced anything like it. That should do it.”

  “And if that doesn’t do it shall I grab him by the pants and moan?”

  “Only if you have to,” Bourne said pretending that she had not made a joke. “I’m not afraid of his seeing the painting. Jean Marie’s copy was amazingly close to this one. He saw the copy and knew it was a good copy and he probably doesn’t know anything about art anyway but I don’t want him holding that tube. He knows every smuggler’s dodge there is, except the ones I’ve developed for this which are, after all, more psychological than physical, because that’s his business. If he hefts that tube, you’re sunk.”

  “We’re sunk.”

  “That’s not the way it works and you know it. If one of us gets the door locked behind him he’ll need all the help on the outside he can get.”

  “I was only kidding.”

  “I know you were. Now—what the hell have you got that goddam dress on for?”

  She seemed astonished by the question. “I thought you’d want to celebrate. I thought we’d go out to the Villa Rosa and live a little.”

  She was wearing a white evening dress which is not a good color for a big woman. The material was satin which overaccents a lush woman. Bourne’s eyes had become cold and unpleasant. He was sweating lightly. His forehead shone.

  “You did, hey?”

  “Jim, we’ve been married for almost ten months and I see you for two days at a time when I do see you!”

  The words of recrimination released all of the tension Bourne had been bottling inside himself and he began to speak in a flat, tight voice. After so much enforced silence it seemed to come out in spite of himself.

  “If we are seen together, as sure as night follows day, one of us or both of us will eventually be sentenced to live in a Spanish prison. The customs chief will remember you. We designed it that way. My people in the hotel will remember you and they most certainly know me. If and when the people who once owned these paintings are made to realize that copies have been substituted for them, a relentless search will begin to find the criminals who are responsible. Police are most thorough everywhere. Sooner or later they will talk to that chief of customs. Sooner or later they will trace you to this hotel. If they fix on me as being the only one you’ve spent any time with in Madrid, or in Spain for that matter, I’ll be their man. Spaniards will never give up as far as Diego Rodríguez da Silva y Velázquez is concerned. He is a very important part of their national honor.”

  He slammed his hand down on the top of the bureau. His movements were spasmodic as he worked on himself toward a wider area where he could launch greater tensions.

  “What the hell is there to celebrate? We have three pieces of Spanish national treasure in a hotel room. They’re still in Spain. When we get them out of the country the work just begins. Where can you sell national treasure? Where would you sell the Liberty Bell if you could get it out of Philadelphia to Mexico? Where would you sell the British crown jewels or the body of Lenin? Do you have an answer? Could you conceive of an answer to that if you thought for forty years? I have the answer. Only I have the
answer. You don’t know and Jean Marie doesn’t know. He is the factory. You are the delivery girl. I designed the project, I stole the paintings, I invested the capital, I take the risks, and only I can dispose of the paintings! You are a delivery girl, nothing else, nothing more! You are the least important, most easily replaceable person in the entire silly, childish business.”

  Although Bourne was allowing himself to get more and more recklessly excited and disturbed his voice never rose above that same even tone, two tones below the sound of polite conversation. He glared and he gestured and once or twice he seemed to threaten violence but his voice remained at the same low pitch. He stumbled backward into a chair then covered his face with his hands. She poured him a large shot of whiskey and made him take it, but he did not look up at her. She put an ice cube in a towel and began to rub the back of his neck. He sipped the whiskey slowly. He grasped her free hand and began to kiss it softly. She leaned over and kissed his temple, his cheek and the top of his head while she whispered “my darling, my darling,” over and over again.

  The night stumbled toward dawn. A single pair of heels, one block away, made sharp, clear, shaved noises. They lay in the darkness motionless, as though if they moved time might start again and pull them toward five illuminated minutes at Barajas at ten thirty-five in the morning when they might be separated forevermore. Bourne lay on his back, swallowing air hungrily, his stomach rising and falling like an exhausted prizefighter’s. Eve lay on her side, touching him with her body, with her breasts, with her stomach and with the inside of her thigh, her breath coming just as hard as she stared into the darkness imagining the outline of the side of his face, feeling the wiry hairs of his chest with her soft underarm while her fingers held his far shoulder.

  He tried to lift his arm to reach a cigarette on the night table beside the bed. Her hand blocked his. She drew it away slowly, stopping for an instant to rest on his stomach then, feeling him strain to breathe, dragged it inch by inch across his chest, freeing his hand. He found the cigarette package and the matches. He rested again then slowly got two cigarettes to his mouth. As he lighted them she saw his face. It was like a marble mask. He passed one cigarette to her, exhaling smoke heavily.

  She pulled an ash tray on her bare stomach. They smoked the cigarettes in silence. When they had put the cigarettes out in the ash tray she slid it off her stomach and lowered it sightlessly to the floor.

  His mouth was soft and her mouth opened to take the kiss as though they had never kissed and needed it to live. She felt his hands, his hips. She gathered him closer then closer then closer to her. Her hips cradled him. She surged. She stared into a sun and cried out.

  A giant hand, so big it spanned the course of comets, rose up and plucked a star out of the sky, then another, and another. Each night the hand returned and took more stars. The nights grew blacker and longer, but no one noticed for no one looked up any more.

  The duchess’s eyes burned but she continued to knit. When she was alone she knitted most of the night.

  Mrs. Pickett slept soundly. She lay on top of the bedspread, wearing a slip. Through some oversight she still had her shoes on. Mr. Pickett sat at the hotel desk writing with a four-color French ball-point pen on the thin sheets of the hotel stationery. The writing was so small that it seemed as though thousands and thousands of letters covered the page in four different colors because Mr. Pickett wrote in italics by using contrasting colors to make the particular points of emphasis he required. He put the pen down and began to read the letter through, right from the top. The Pickett Troilus was on its way to world fame.

  Dr. Muñoz slept on his back with his hands, lightly folded, reposing on his flat stomach. His upper lip was covered with the white, greased cloth which tied at the back of his head and which nourished his mustache. He smiled slightly while he slept, or seemed to.

  Cayetano climbed out of the bed and began to dress slowly. The girl spoke to him and he answered her politely. She pulled at his arm, but he disengaged himself, patted her cheek and continued dressing.

  Bourne was in a staff meeting with the chefs and the chief steward, projecting the bimonthly supplies order when Victoriano Muñoz telephoned, twenty minutes after Eve had left for the airport with the cardboard tube. Muñoz had found a new apartment on Calle Fortuny and he wanted Bourne to come to tea the following week to see it, after he had had a chance to settle et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

  Bourne thanked him and told him he would be delighted to accept although of course he knew that Victoriano would understand that they were beginning to move into the tourist season and that the pressure of hotel demands could force him to change his plans at the last moment. This threatened to lead into an interminable conversation with Bourne reduced to repeating the word yes and rolling his eyes pitiably at the chef and the chief steward, but he was thinking about Eve’s peril.

  After he had hung up he forced himself to write down the note of the appointment with Muñoz, then stood up impulsively, told the two men to complete the work without him and left the room to break all of his own rules by driving to the airport.

  Earlier that morning Eve had dressed and packed then had kissed Bourne with zest, then with more than zest because they had decided that once the paintings were safe in Paris and the job over, he would come to Paris to get her and then bring her back to Madrid, officially, as his wife. They had gone through the tiresome but necessary inspection to make sure that the corridor outside the room was clear then Bourne had kissed her again and departed, telling her that everything was going to be all right, that she was not to worry about a thing. She had smiled at him indulgently and had patted his cheek as he slipped through the doorway.

  Nor did she worry. Bourne had thought of everything, she was confident of that. It would be more intelligent to feel some kind of goose-pimples about the next hour or so of her life, she thought, but she felt no more than if she were to move through customs with an undeclared package of cigarettes because of the way he had briefed her. She telephoned for a porter and a taxi.

  Two porters came up for the luggage which seemed odd because she had told the operator that she had only two pieces. Not only the two porters but the assistant manager, Señor Elek of the four high buttons, was there to serve.

  Bourne managed to come around the corner of the corridor, sailing with that comical self-confidence of a managing director in his own hotel, to bid Miss Quinn a polite good morning in Spanish through her opened door and sail on. The attendance of the three employees startled him as well, but for a different reason. He had let time and usage convince him that only he appreciated how excitingly beautiful she was. He suddenly realized, feeling both alarmed and thrilled, that it was possible that she was beautiful enough to cause the chef, the barber, the doorman, and everyone else employed in the hotel, to want to help her with her bags if they thought they could get away with it.

  The two porters put Eve into a cab, but only one porter would take a tip. The other one just grinned, shook her hand, backed away and disappeared. Señor Elek handed her the cardboard tube, wished her a formidably pleasant journey and a quick return so that the hotel would not be too long without the endowment of her grace and beauty, instructed the driver to take her to the Barajas Airport, slammed the cab door, and she was off. Nine seconds later, as the cab turned into Alcalá and started toward the Plaza de la Independencia, the fear began to set in.

  The feeling started in her stomach. First it was nausea, then it was like hardening concrete which rose in a column and jammed in her throat. She felt feverish. She pushed the cardboard tube involuntarily and it fell to the floor with a rattle.

  The cab turned off Alcalá because of a detour caused by street construction into Calle Velázquez. Each time they passed a cross street she would look up and read that threatening word; Velázquez at Villanueva, Velázquez at Jorge Juan. She leaned forward to ask the driver if he did not know a quicker way to Barajas. To humor her he turned right at the next intersection, at th
e corner of Velázquez and Goya. She closed her eyes. She tried counting slowly to herself to blank her mind of the fear then she tried humming while she counted.

  At Plaza de Manuel Becerra, the driver took a short cut along Cartagena to Avenida de America. After that they bowled along past the city line. By that time she was wet with perspiration. She wore a light brown dress and the stains of the sweat were clear in dark, circular designs on that nearly mild spring day. She began by thinking that such an ugliness would repel the chief of customs when she was under orders to attract him and ended by imagining that she would bleed in the same wet designs when she panicked and they found her out and, as she ran away, had to shoot her.

  Her hands were shaking badly. As the cab rounded the traffic circle to turn off to the airport approach, she fumbled with her purse and somehow separated a hundred peseta note from the others. She dropped it on the seat beside her. When the cab pulled up at the porters’ building she got out, managed to say Air Iberia to Paris, then stood stock-still while the driver and porter took her two pieces of luggage down. She realized that the silent driver was standing beside her waiting to be paid. “It is on the seat,” she said. “What is on the seat, señora?” the driver asked. She turned as abruptly as a drilling soldier and walked off to the check-in shack. The driver made a sound after her to stop her, then he thought he understood what she might have meant. He looked into the cab and saw the hundred peseta note on the seat then was happy not to think about the problem any more.

  Eve walked directly past the Iberia desk where the porter was weighing her bags, and handed the porter her ticket envelope without stopping. She walked past TWA and BEA, past the Information Desk, past the newsstand, past the Ladies’ Room and into the bar. She asked for a double gin and when it came she sipped it slowly and stared at the floor. As she drank her second double gin the porter found her and explained that the ticket agent would have to see her passport. She thanked him and gave him a ten peseta tip from the change on the bar. Her hand didn’t shake.