The Oldest Confession Page 3

  They left for Dos Cortes at one twenty ayem to feast on the duchess’s paintings. The duchess and Cayetano drove in a small, white Mercedes two-seater. The others traveled in the Bentley. Bourne drove. Mrs. Pickett fell asleep in the back seat, beside her husband, looking rather pretty.

  They waited for the duchess and Cayetano for nearly fifteen minutes in the great hall after they arrived. The waiting was a burden on Mrs. Pickett who had become extremely sleepy and, through fatigue, slightly irritated. She kept asking her husband if he would for Christ’s sake please stop talking about those goddam paintings, for Christ’s sake? She inquired as to whether either his throat or Dr. Muñoz’ throat ever got sore, that he had been talking steadily and saying nothing for nine goddam hours for Christ’s sake and that she, for one, would be greatly cheered and gratified if he would kindly shut his goddam big expert mouth and go to bed, for Christ’s sake. Her voice had hidden resources of volume so everyone agreed that the duchess and Cayetano must have had a flat tire, that the hour was late, and that they should go up to bed. They made their way up the niagaran staircase with Dr. Muñoz pointing out, en route, a Goya here, a Zurbarán there, a Morales on the curve, a Murillo above it, an El Greco to the right, a Velázquez beyond that, all of them quite invisible, hanging high in the darkness.

  The moment they reached the top of the staircase the duchess and Cayetano entered the great hall below them and called out good night. The others waved back, then went their separate ways, with Dr. Muñoz guiding the Picketts to their apartment knowing that Bourne knew his own way, and with the sunshine-yellow cat Montes leading the entire procession, guiding Dr. Muñoz.

  Bourne was enormously relieved that his two friends had arrived. The plan returned to normal. His internal timing mechanism began to function on its own again, constructing yet other negative possibilities. When he was sure that the Picketts and Dr. Muñoz were bedded down for the night, Bourne relaxed as well as he could in a niche in the stone wall waiting for the duchess and Cayetano to ascend the stairs and retire. He was not impatient. He had many things to weigh and consider. He amused himself thinking of the story he would have for Jean Marie if he could get his work done before Mr. Pickett made his talkative tour of all of the duchess’s paintings in the morning.

  An amateur might have felt that it would be taking needless risk which was nonsense. First off, Mr. Pickett would be so captured by the verisimilitude of the setting, by the legend of the painter, by the monetary worth of the painting, by the proximity of its illustrious companions that he would not be able to judge it objectively or dispassionately. He remembered the surge of elation he had felt when Muñoz had gabbled about how he had succeeded in attracting the great Homer Pickett to view Blanca’s gallery and how Bourne must come and listen to such erudition concerning Spanish art as existed nowhere else in the world. Bourne remembered having registered instantly that if a world authority could be swept into pronouncing Jean Marie’s copy as a masterwork of a great Spanish painter it would remain a masterwork throughout time as it hung in concealment, high in the shadows above the staircase at Dos Cortes. He knew that Mr. Pickett would never once doubt that he was in the presence of an authentic Velázquez. He would take that for granted because it was hanging in the castle of a grandee of Spain. If through some miracle of fifth sight the man did spot it as a fraud he would not, for fear of offending or embarrassing his hostess, have one word to say concerning the suspected fraud. Furthermore, if a man so totally lacked courtesy, sensitivity or gratitude to so expose such a painting as being fraudulent who could prove how long the fraud had hung there? Who knew but what some ancestor of the duke’s, needing a large sum of money, had not sold the whole lot of paintings, substituting copies. That last thought gave Bourne pause for an instant, but he dismissed it quickly as being impossible. To pass the time he began to think about business and what had signaled to bring him here, standing in a niche in stone and darkness.

  One day three years before inside the great cathedral at El Escorial he had noticed masterpieces of art hanging high in the darkness, beyond eye level by twice, beyond the sight of priest or communicant, and disclosed entirely by accident by the huge lights of an American film company which had been producing a film about the Spanish War of Independence of 1810.

  As he watched the monks and the old priests stare up at the countless masterpieces, seeing them for the first time after a lifetime spent within the walls of the cathedral, some of them weeping as the theatrical lights illuminated all of this deathless beauty, Bourne forced himself to think through something which seemed to be just on the rim of his conscious thought for when the movie maker’s lights went out the paintings would disappear again, perhaps forever.

  From that point on, it had been simple to decide what his Spanish project would be, for if one could succeed in substituting an excellent copy of a great master for the master’s original work hanging on some darkened wall, no one would ever have any means of knowing whether the original had been taken or if it had, no means of knowing exactly when it had been taken.

  This consideration led to others such as setting up a suitable Factory, or production facilities to turn out excellent copies under blameless conditions by an utterly trustworthy person. He put that off to the side as being relatively simple compared to the problem of The Market, or how to dispose of such paintings at prices close to their optimum extrinsic worth to a collector who would have to understand that they could never be shown or announced publicly as having been acquired.

  He pored over these problems for a number of months while he managed the hotel and continued his studies of Spanish art. He would muddle absent-mindedly through days of a week nibbling away at his central problem. The Market. He reached one set of conclusions that throughout the world there were any number of instantly lucky men who, wishing to propitiate something which disturbed them vaguely, would seek to endow their community with expensive beauty. In this manner rich museums had sprung up at country crossroads in the United States. Bourne felt, as time went by, that if he could bring a “safe” Sánchez Coello for example to the trustees of such a museum through stiffly correct channels The Market could be created.

  He turned the possibility over and over in his mind together with the large tax advantages the donation of such a work could bring to stiffly correct channels of donation and began to feel that this method could be made workable because if one of the twenty richest men in a country donated a “safe” Coello to earn a tax profit in a most unostentatious manner to a small provincial museum, who was to demand at the museum that the starting point of the most authentic Sánchez Coello be investigated, and if they did who could say for sure on which dark, dark wall high beyond possible view this Coello had last been hung?

  He lost eleven months following this turn then, characteristically, ended by solving the problem of The Market quite differently.

  Below, in the great hall, the duchess had walked briskly into an anteroom beyond a waiting room, across a common room too large to light, with Cayetano following her. They sat opposite each other on benches with high backs set at right angles to a fireplace which held a roaring fire.

  Spain is a walled country where the eyes of the present continually record the manners of the past. The duchess and Cayetano exceeded the past by piling more tradition on tradition. Always, for what the duchess considered very good reasons, she and Cayetano comported themselves as though a large, round duenna sat, stifling belches, within the same room with them.

  Their love for each other had left reason behind. They were monomaniacal. They could feel nothing else, think of little else than being together someday. They were tense and strung-up when they sat across from each other like this, with no one to watch them. They were waiting for something to happen. They expressed with every impulsive move they did not make, with every choked cry of joy that they never uttered, that even though they might need to wait seven minutes this side of death before they were joined as one, body and soul, what they w
ould share, when their moment did come, would be mountainous and holy.

  The clear fact that their pain and sense of suffocation could be ended by one move by the duchess had no meaning to them because they had accepted wholly and forever the reason for their agony and had found it just. Cayetano could almost understand what she had done to them, was doing to them. The pressure of their emotion could cause implosion if one were taken away before the other had been fulfilled.

  They were ecstatically happy, desperate people because the duchess’s seventy-two-year-old husband had chosen to journey through the world in the search for greater and more delectable sins. The duchess, to whom the church was a living thing, had sworn to cherish him until death did them part, while she loved Cayetano operatically.

  They sat in repose before the fire, finding survival in each other’s eyes.

  “Where shall we go when he is dead?” asked Cayetano, looking through the cognac in his glass at the fire.

  “To bed.”

  “Assuredly. Then where?”

  “To London, I think. I have relatives there. We shall have tea with the Queen.”

  “I don’t speak English.”

  “That is fitting for a great matador of bulls.”

  “Luis Miguel speaks English.”

  “He pretends. You do understand, love, that absolutely no one will mind if you don’t speak English? Some of them speak Spanish, after all, and we shan’t go about much. We will go to concerts and to the galleries and late at night before we go to bed I will tell you everything everyone has said.”

  “Then we will go to bed.”

  “Oh, yes.” They were silent for a little while until the duchess decided it would be best to divert such thoughts. “I merely thought it would be quite pleasant to meet the young Queen.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “We are related, you know. Through the Scottish branch of the family.”

  “I see.”

  “Where else would you like to go?” asked the duchess softly, anxious to continue one of their favorite games.

  “Mexico. Yucatan. There are beautiful little islands in the Gulf of Mexico. I have seen them. Yes. After we go to London and have tea with your relative and go to the concerts and the galleries and drink some Scotch whiskey in commemoration of your ancestors on the whiskey side of your family and make love whenever we are alone then we will go to an island near Yucatan which I think by God I will buy tomorrow by cable. No one can take anything away, once we are there.”

  “No one can take away, wherever we go.” The duchess’s voice was decisive, her policy, instantly formed, was firm, and that was that. “Except death and then to be rejoined.”

  “I was thinking of politics, my sweetest, darling, little jailbird.” He smiled at her deliciously, at all of her and then at just a beautiful part of her, at the lobe of her left ear as it reflected the moving color of the fire.

  She purred at him. “You are jealous of Generalissimo Franco?”

  “No.”

  Cayetano thought of the Caudillo in the State Box, draped with flags, at the Plaza de Toros in Madrid or San Sebastian or Sevilla, the crowds cheering him as affectionately as every Spanish crowd has cheered their every chief of state in history, even Ferdinand VII. Twice a year he and the generalissimo exchanged solemn bows across a hundred yards of air as Cayetano brindised to the chief of the Spanish state and as the chief of the Spanish state acknowledged the dedication, with the ineffable graciousness of a politician who does not have to depend on votes. During such afternoons each matador would go to the state box, shake hands with the generalissimo, who was a virile and extremely pleasant man on those occasions, and receive a silver cigarette box, suitably inscribed. Cayetano had more of those silver cigarette boxes than he had cigarettes. These exchanges were Cayetano’s only brushes with politics from one year to the next. He could not and would never be able to comprehend the duchess’s disapproval of the government. He liked Mrs. Franco’s taste in hats. He liked the generalissimo’s darting movement, forward and across, to explain a fine point of the faena of Antonio Ordonez, say, or the dentist-like precision and efficiency of the kill of Rafael Ortega, to a visiting foreign dignitary. The train held Cayetano’s thought for a moment on Ortega. He was at least as emotional as a dentist as he worked the bulls, and Cayetano had always felt he should carry an attaché case in the paseo. But how the man could kill! Ai!

  The people cheered Franco when he arrived and when he departed, particularly on the sombra side; Franco understood and liked bullfighting, after all the man was a Spaniard; and Mrs. Franco wore stunning hats. It was that simple to Cayetano, a simple artisan who earned thirty thousand dollars for an afternoon’s work. However, if Blanca preferred to have a king in that box of state, then she should have a king. She had suffered greatly to have a king there.

  “You are jealous of the king then?”

  He stretched out a little on the bench and touched the tip of her shoe with the tip of his in a small, joshing gesture. “Are there any bulls in the Gulf of Mexico?” she asked.

  “I will not have you talking shop. It can only lead to maudlin praise of my work.”

  “What with my tendency to get arrested and your tendency to get gored, we—”

  “Ah, no. I am adept. I have great art. Ask my manager.”

  “So they tell me.”

  “I am. I have some advertisements from the Digame which I paid for myself as a legitimate business expense which tend to prove this.”

  “Adept enough to have been gored twenty-seven times, twice in the stomach and once in the throat.”

  “My foot slipped.”

  “That is a lot of slips.”

  “In a lifetime!”

  “You are only twenty-seven years old now.”

  “It is a business of some risks. Not many to such an adept, but some. And it is a family business.”

  “Getting arrested is my family business.”

  “Yes. But you overdo it.”

  “For nine hundred years our family’s business has been the monarchy. And we’ve drawn some dandies. What I do has to be done and no one else seems to want to do it.”

  He leaned forward earnestly. His voice had the material texture of loving. “Tell me, my dearest,” he said softly, “why it must be done? What will it change? The same sort of people will continue to be born and persist in dying. I don’t have to understand what you know to be the truth, but I want to understand if I can.”

  She stared at him absently, savoring him, imagining him inside her, knowing exactly what it would be like to be beside him, secure at his side throughout the eternity given to her by God, if she protected God’s love by denying Cayetano’s while God said she must deny. She talked to him softly, as though she were breathing an ecstatic exhaustion into his chest, held by his arms. “I am a desperate woman who will stay desperate until we know it is right that we be together. We wait and we wait. I think I cannot continue to live while I wait for such transcendence for my body and my soul and my heart which sings to you.” She smiled at him, radiantly and suddenly, changing the mood. “When that day arrives I may not be able to assemble enough interest in the cause of the king to remember to mail a letter which could save his life.”

  They fell into silence and took to staring at the future beyond the fire.

  Bourne watched the duchess and Cayetano bow to each other at the top of the staircase and retire to rooms which were situated in opposite directions within the castle. He allowed forty minutes to pass after that. At thirty-seven minutes before dawn, feeling that the preciseness of his calculations might be laughable to anyone not in his business, he left his room with Jean Marie’s copy of the Velázquez, and made an efficient job of the highly technical work of transferring the copy of the painting to the bared frame of the original, repeating precisely the various calesthenics and rigorous positionings he had practiced for over one hundred and fifty hours at his hotel, to succeed in removing the original masterpiece and replacing
it with the copy in twenty-eight minutes, seventeen seconds; eighty seconds less than his best previous time at the exercise.

  He was warmly dressed in a black sweat suit which tied at the wrists and ankles. He wore a black bandanna tied around his forehead at the hairline because it was extremely hot work and it would not have done to have had sweat run into his eyes. He counted to himself through each separate section of the movements. His count accurately represented the passage of individual seconds and the peril of his position in no way pressed him to hasten the cadence. He thought about what he was doing, as he had long ago trained himself.

  It was extremely ticklish kind of work, needing a good deal more than physical strength and coordination. Criminality means a lack of herd discipline, yet in its more demanding strata calls for infantile discipline of the kind utilized by a small boy or a salesman who will work to remember baseball batting averages back to Nap Lajoie. It is greed with a social sense removed because what is there to be taken must be taken by the criminal consistent with his inner resources, eliminating envy, a much smaller sin. Criminality is the grisly, freakish mutation of an artist’s horror of keeping the hours other people keep and enjoying the safety other people enjoy for the sake of safety, which in a sense is why there are so few women abstract creativists, and why one post-office wanted poster shows a woman’s picture out of every thirty-four. The nonorganization man, the abjurer of gray flannel clothing, the comforting agony at rest behind the masochistic mask, all are compounded as practiced by the higher criminal orders.

  The most obedient physical discipline is required. It must be as reflexively responsive as a submarine commander’s, as each man in an experimental rocket crew. It takes innate timing. It must possess, at Bourne’s level, a tactile virtuosity equal to, say, a second-year student surgeon at minimal requirement. The job he undertook that morning called for an acrobat’s sense of balance because, working against severe time limitations, Bourne had to lean half-body forward in complete darkness from a cold, stone niche fifteen feet above the great staircase and manage, with relative silence, to dislocate a frame which had been stiffened into position for several centuries, although even the Spanish must clean their paintings sometime. Furthermore, his feet had to depend upon building of the middle ages; the castle had been constructed sometime in the reign of Alphonso VI by the same architect who had done the walls of Avila, which made the present masonry all too unreliable. However, as this occasion marked the third Spanish master he had stolen from the Duchess de Dos Cortes, it was not as though he were utterly unfamiliar with the working area, in the darkness.