I Confess

by Johannes Mario Simmel

  I wrote on the pad, "Give me the morphine."

  "Right away, Mr. Chandler. Right away. But first I must make a few things clear to you. My plan to appropriate your money ..."

  "The morphine, pleaser

  "You mustn't be impatient, Mr. Chandler. If you are,

  it's only going to take longer. So—^let's see now The

  plan to appropriate your money came to me right away, naturally, just as soon as you asked me for the false papers. It was my intention to blackmail you. Our dear Yolanda—you'll forgive me if I say 'our'—^was perfectly willing to help me. Later on, however, she turned out to be a dud. Which I regret. For her sake."

  Again he looked in the direction of the window, then back at me. "She was supposed to blackmail you. In the sleeping car. According to my plan we should have been in possession of the money that night... .'* >

  "The morphine, PLEASE!"

  "Yes, Mr. Chandler, I'm getting around to it. Yolanda

  didn't blackmail you; instead she used the papers I had given her to escape with you. She did explain to me yesterday, when I found her here in Vienna, that it had not been her intention to deceive me, and I am almost inclined to believe her. For who can really understand a woman? Capricious, moody, cowardly ... and we mustn*t overlook love. I think you have made an impression on my wife, Mr. Chandler. And who could blame her for wanting to escape, with you, from me?"

  Escape. Escape with me. From him. It had been her intention, no doubt about it. But this too belonged in the category of things I hadn't understood. I had taken her fear for jealousy. Now I could see clearly. But now it was too late.

  "But now it is too late," Mordstein said slowly. "When I heard nothing from Yolanda for such a long time, I became very uneasy. That's why I came to Vienna. And I found my fears justified. One should never depend on a woman."

  The morphine. The morphine. "Please, Mordstein, I implore you...."

  "We have finally arrived at the morphine, Mr. Chandler." He took one of the glass ampules, sawed off the end with a small file and drew the contents into the syringe, held it up to the light, adjusted the plunger, then he said, "But first we have a small matter to attend to. Give me the ticket for the package in Munich."

  I didn't move.

  "Did you understand me?"

  I nodded.

  "And?"

  "No," I v^ote on the pad. I could see Yolanda turn away from the window.

  "Mr. Chandler," Mordstein said pleasantly, "if you don't give me the ticket I shall spray the contents of this ampule into the room, which would be a great pity. So ... what do you say?"

  I shook my head.

  He pressed the plunger down and a thin sflvery spray shot into the air out of it in a pretty arc.

  Two steps, and Yolanda was at my side. Her face was dead, burned out. Suddenly she looked ancient "Give him the money, Jimmy. It's no use.'*

  I had the feeling that every tooth in my head was being pulled. My body doubled up and I vomited. It didn't soil the bed very much. Only a little yellow bile trickled out of my mouth. Yolanda wiped it away. I could see Mordstein file off a second ampule and refill the syringe.

  "There were twelve ampules in the box," he said. •'Now we have only eleven. If you don't make up your mind soon, there will be only ten." He held the syringe up to the light. Yolanda stood beside me, her shoulders sagging, motionless. Her eyes were open wide, the pupils as small as pinheads.

  *Wen, Mr. Chandler?"

  "Jimmy, please!"

  I shook my head.

  Yolanda groaned, as if someone had kicked her in the stomach.

  With the contents of the fourth ampule on the carpet, I gave up. "Where is the ticket?" asked Mordstein who had understood without words that Fd had it. I wrote down where I kept it. He walked over to the baroque desk and found it in one of the smaU side drawers. Then he came back to me. Yolanda held one fist pressed against her mouth as he filed off the fifth ampule and drew the contents into the syringe. For the first time in three days I was able to move. Little by little I stretched out my right arm.

  "Yes, yes," said Mordstein. "Just one more thing, Mr. Chandler. Where is the receipt for the rest of the money?"

  Again I lay motionless. "You must have left the second half of the sum somewhere in Germany."

  I didn't move.

  ^'Very well then," and now there were only five ampules.

  "Stop!" I said. It was the first word I had spoken m three days, and my voice sounded strange. "Wait! It's in my atta . . . atta . . . atta . . ." My jaw fell open. I babbled like a baby.

  "In your attache case?" he said helpfully and nodded. He opened it, looked through it and found the ticket from the Augsburg baggage check. "Is that the receipt for the entire sum?"

  I nodded.

  *'Of course I don't believe you," he said, ''but since you're coming with us to Germany, I'm not risking very much. I can report you in Germany just as easily."

  He pocketed the two tickets. With them a hundred thousand marks had changed owners. Actually it hadn't taken long. It had cost me fifteen minutes and five ampules of morphine. Mordstein picked up the syringe and lifted my arm. "There," he said. "Now everything's settled. I'm glad you were so sensible and saw things my way."

  He was not a sadist. He wasn't torturing me for pleasure. He stuck the needle into my arm and activated the plunger. Ten minutes later I was sleeping as if dead and the pain was gone. The morphine was effective.

  21

  I can't remember anymore when Yolanda proposed to me for the first time that we kill Mordstein. But I do remember that she was the one who suggested it although I had

  -I

  also been carrying the thought in my mind. It was she, though, who had concrete ideas on how to go about it.

  We began to talk about her plan four or five days after the scene just described. I had stayed in bed two more days during which the pain left me completely and I regained some of my strength. Mordstein visited us once to find out how I was doing. It had been agreed that we leave Vienna as soon as I felt strong enough for the trip. Mordstein brought along a second box of morphine ampules which he said was a present. He accepted seven thousand schillings for the first box.

  "Everything's ready," he told me. "Well go to Munich by car."

  "Whose car?"

  "Mine. I drove to Vienna.*'

  He elaborated further. It was his intention to drive me as far as Salzburg. There I was to get out and cross the German border by train, from Salzburg to Freilassing where he and Yolanda would be waiting for me. "I don't want to risk being seen with you," he explained, "just in case they arrest you at customs."

  "Why should they arrest me? I'U be traveling with false papers."

  "There could be a warrant at the border with a description of you."

  I could see his point.

  "That's why Yolanda will travel with me as my wife. With her old papers. If anything happens, we don't know. each other. If all goes well, we'll meet again an hour later in Freilassing."

  "And if I don't turn up?"

  He smiled. "Then, Mr. Qiandler, you've either been arrested or tried to escape. If you've been arrested, everything is in order, and I won't hold it against you. If you've tried to escape, the border guard gets an anonymous phone call that you are somewhere around, who you are, what you look like and a description of your papers. You won't get far."

  "No," I said, trying to think all the while whether I really had no chance of getting far. "And on the way back?"

  "On the way back you can do whatever you Uke. YouTl be alone. I'm not returning to Austria."

  "And Yolanda?"

  "Yolanda stays with me."

  Strangely enough, it was these last words of his that influenced Yolanda and myself, independently of each other, to a series of ideas which in the end cost Mordstein his life. We acted from quite different motives. My main impetus was financial as well as fears for my personal safety. K he really succeeded in getting hold of both money packages, t
hen I was penniless except for the first installment. And even of that I couldn't be certain. He might still betray me one of these days, if only out of jealousy. One couldn't know what a man, who had obviously managed to maintain anything but a normal relationship with Yolanda, might do if roused. Besides, I hated Mordstein. This reason rated third place, but it was there. I hated him for the way he had held out on me with the morphine, and I also hated him—and this surprised me—because he seemed to have complete control over Yolanda, I hated him because she was, to all appearances, subservient to him. I would never have thought that Yolanda meant so much to me.

  As for Yolanda, her motives for killing Mordstein were more complex. She tried to explain them to me during the days preceding our departure. Her relationship to me had changed since Mordstein had appeared on the scene. Now she treated me rather as if I were a psychiatrist to whom she could tell the worst and most secret things without a trace of shame. During those days one might say I was Yolanda's soul-doctor. She needed someone to whom she could unburden herself after the many years of silence. I already knew, roughly, the worst of all she had wanted to spare me—now I found out the details.

  She came from a wealthy, upper-middleclass family.

  Her father had been a Rhineland industrialist, her mother came from a less wealthy but impeccable country gentry set. Yolanda's early childhood had been orderiy, under the supervision of a French bonne. Her father was away a great deal on business trips, her mother was the extremely popular central figure of an active social life. In the morning Yolanda would be brought in to see her as she breakfasted, in the evening she came in to kiss Yolanda goodnight. She often had on shiny dresses and smelled deliciously of expensive perfume. Yolanda kissed her with a feeling of jealousy and the assurance that she had the most beautiful mother in the world. At the age of six she was sent to boarding school.

  It was an expensive, exemplary institution. All the students, without exception, came from wealthy homes. The school was run by Ursuline nuns. The girls wore uniforms, slept in large dormitories and were allowed in the huge park that surrounded the buildings only in the company of an adult or in groups.

  At first Yolanda was very unhappy. She missed her bonne terribly, she was lonely and felt abandoned. The girls in her class were aloof. At night they whispered to each other, Yolanda couldn't understand what they were saying and felt excluded. During the daily walks she walked alone, always last, while the others marched gaily pn ahead, arm in arm.

  This was the reason why she soon felt drawn to Sister Benvenuta who taught rehgion. Sister Benvenuta was friendly, gentle and rosy-cheeked. She spoke with a muted, soothing voice about Jesus Christ and his sufferings on earth, and to Yolanda it seemed as if the nun must have known the Savior personally. She talked about his life with such sincerity, it moved you to tears and almost broke your heart. Yolanda listened to her, spellbound. These were her first hours of peaceful joy in the new, inimical world into which she had been cast. She awoke every morning with a feeling of cautious anxiety over this new happiness and looked upon everyone who

  threatened to disturb it with hatred and enmity. Because of Sister Benvenuta and her so obvious love for Jesus Christ, Yolanda provoked a murderous fight with a fat, forward girl called Maud.

  Maud, with her sharp eyes and even sharper tongue, was the bad girl of the class. Wherever she turned up, there was trouble. She had the worst marks and practically always had to stay after school. In Sister Benven-uta's class her behavior was shameless. She chattered and giggled and was the disturbing focal point of a steadily growing opposition. Several times Yolanda challenged her about her behavior and exhorted her to behave herself.

  "My, but you're dumb!" Maud said cynically. "You don't really beheve the nonsense Benni tells us." She always called Sister Benvenuta "Benni."

  "It is not nonsense! It's the truth!"

  Maud laughed. "Oh yes? Benni's lying! Easter rabbit! Santa Claus. The Christ child . . . nonsense! Every bit of it. When you're older, you'll find out. I could tell you quite different things."

  "I don't want to hear different things." Yolanda's voice sounded strangely harsh, even to her. "But let me tell you one thing—if you act up again in her class, you'll be sorry!"

  "Are you planning anything?"

  "Yes I am."

  And Maud laughed.

  In the next rehgion class she did her best to be her worst. After class Yolanda fell upon her and began to beat her up. Maud put up a good fight. The other girls stood around in a circle and watched Yolanda and Maud rolling around on the smoothly waxed floor of the classroom, tearing each other's hair, kicking, scratching, spitting. It was an impressive fight and it didn't end until Sister Benvenuta came back, attracted by the noise in the classroom.

  Sister Benvenuta, already irritated by Maud's behavior during class, asked sharply—her rosy face dark with an-

  ger—what the fight had been about. Maud was sUent. The other girls were silent. Yolanda, pleased with the role of someone who accepts punishment and suffers for a beloved, also had nothing to say. Her head high, and with a deep feeUng of satisfaction, she Ustened to Sister Ben-venuta say that both she and Maud were to be punished. Maud was not to leave her room the following Sunday when there was to be an outing; Yolanda was given the task of decorating the school's small chapel with fresh flowers. Sister Benvenuta didn't know that she was giving Yolanda a punishment that delighted her. She knew nothing of Yolanda's attachment to her, of the love she was suppressing, that at night, in her bed, Yolanda was congratulating herself on the good fortune that had come to her at last—she was to decorate the altar on which stood a statue of the Savior; she would bring flowers to the man whom her beloved teacher worshiped and with whom she quite evidently had a deep, inner relationship.

  With a feeling of joy Yolanda saw the other girls leaving on the following Sunday. She went to work at once. She poUshed the brass on the altar until it gleamed like gold, then she gathered the most beautiful flowers she could find in the flower garden. She worked for hours, until she was hot, her cheeks fiery red and beads of perspiration had formed on her forehead. When she was done, she breathed a deep sigh of joyful reUef and the altar was bright with brass and flowers.

  Yolanda stepped back. The white Savior was stretching out his hands to her as if in blessing and his eyes looked into hers so lovingly, Yolanda's senses were aroused. She could feel the hot blood rushing to her head. She felt dizzy. And at that moment it came to her, hke an enlightenment—she wanted to kiss the Savior. She wanted to throw her arms around the cold stone and press it to her so that he, the silent miracle worker, the son of God, would know of her secret love of which even Sister Benvenuta knew nothing.

  Then she couldn't think anymore, her body acted on its

  own volition. In a paroxysm of hunger for love, for tenderness, she cUmbed onto the ahar, stepped on the white damask cloth with her little sandals and lifted her arms. In a motion of ultimate passion she threw them around the Savior's white body and closed her eyes. This was happiness, this was bliss!

  Sister Benvenuta, who just at this moment entered the chapel, saw a scene that drove the blood of shame to her cheeks. To her the little girl's action seemed so depraved, so indescribably lascivious, that she tried to explain away her quite inadmissable reaction to her Mother Superior as a result of her momentary confusion. For Sister Benvenuta in* seconds overcame the sense of paralysis which had overwhelmed her at sight of Yolanda embracing the Savior and rushed forward. With one hand she wrenched Yolanda down from the altar, with the other she struck her a cruel blow in the face.

  "You sinful child!" she cried in a trembling voice. "May God punish you for such blasphemy!"

  22

  Yolanda's father, hastily called in, settled the scandal with a few diplomatic words, his natural charm and a considerable financial contribution "for the poor." Yolanda was not expelled. There was a formal reconciliation between her and Sister Benvenuta, but it was Yolanda's father who treated the wh
ole matter in a way that left her profoundly unhappy. To the end she tried to explain to him that she hadn't meant to do anything bad, on the contrary, her intentions had been sacred. He thought her violent efforts to make him understand what she had done were intended

  to reassure him and laughed at her. The whole incident didn't worry him in the sUghtest. All "the little white sisters" were, * according to him, hysterical and unpredictable, and little girls had to be naughty sometimes. That was perfectly natural. And anyway, Yolanda had promised never to do it again. Two weeks later he was making a joke of it at his club. "Just imagine, there she goes, the Uttle thing, climbing up the altar to smooch with the Savior! Wild! Cost me five hundred marks, hahaha! Waiter^ another whiskey."

  But as far as his visit was concerned, his daughter's assurances soon bored him. He looked at his watch. His plane for Diisseldorf left in an hour; he had to hurry. "My child, of course I understand you. Everything's all right. You be a good girl now, and you've promised me you will be, haven't you?"

  "Yes, Papa." (You don't understand a thing. Who are you anj^way? I don't know you. You're a stranger.) "Give Mama my love." (Another stranger. Where is she anyway? On the Riviera. Where is the Riviera? I don't know. Only that it's far away. Why isn't she here? Why do they leave me alone all the time?)

  "So goodbye, darUng." Father and daughter had reached his parked car. He gave her a fleeting kiss, the chauffeur saluted with a touch of irony, Yolanda nodded absent-mindedly, the car drove away. Nothing left but a cloud of dust.

  Yolanda began to walk back to the school building along the gravel path, her shoulders sagging. Suddenly she was startled by a girl who jumped out at her from the shrubbery. It was Maud. She was smiling. "Nice car," she said.

  Yolanda nodded. They walked on together, side by side.