The Oldest Confession Read online

  Jean Marie held up his hand to stop her for a moment and paused to consider the significance of Señor Elek’s uncharacteristic uncarnal attitude. He decided it was very important and said he knew that her husband would see it as very important. Feelings were much more to be trusted than logic, he said, because no one had devised a means to argue with feelings. Had anyone so much as touched the cardboard tube through all of this?

  She explained to Jean Marie that she had been drilled and rehearsed by her husband to treat the cardboard tube as one might regard a rolled-up calendar. It was an inexpensive, unimportant souvenir; that was the shape of the action she was to follow. It had been on the bed. On the way out she had pretended to look around and see if she had forgotten anything, then she had picked up the tube, almost as an afterthought, and had strolled toward the door where the porters had gotten into a Keystone Kop jam-up by each trying to take the baggage through at once and everyone had laughed at it. Someone had taken the tube from her hand during that jam-up. Who had taken it? She couldn’t remember who had taken it.

  We will start again at the moment you felt the tube leave your hands, Jean Marie insisted. You must feel this, now, Eve—you must not think. You are at the door. Where are the porters? They are beside her. No, they were near here, near the door. How far away was the door? Could she reach out and touch the door? No, she had backed away to let them go through. She had backed three paces away. She could not touch the door. Where was the assistant manager? He was—he was standing beside her and talking to her. That was when she felt that he was totally unaware of, and disinterested in, her body. At that moment. She had instinctively pushed her breasts out at him as she felt it, and had reached across his chest to the bureau top to pick up a broken package of cigarettes which she had known to be empty until she needed to reach, but he had remained oblivious to her body. She could feel that now, very strongly. He had taken the cardboard tube from her, as she had reached for the cigarette package, saying something indistinctly about the cab and the front of the hotel. When they had reached the lift the two porters were out of sight.

  Going down in the lift they had chatted about the shocking jewelry store robbery on the Gran Via the day before. She had gone to the cashier and had checked out. Had he walked with her to the cashier, Jean Marie asked. No. How long was he away from her? Was he in sight? No. He was away as long as it took to pay her small bill and go to the cab. He had been standing beside the cab when she came out. The tube had been in his hand. One porter had taken a tip, Señor Elek had handed her the tube—no, he had propped it up against the far door inside the cab. When did she handle the tube again? At the airport. Did she feel it was the same tube? She could not feel anything. She was too frightened to feel anything but dread about the tube, but the tube had never been out of her sight or out of her hands from that instant until she was inside Jean Marie’s studio, so there was only one possible answer. The assistant manager Señor Elek had substituted an empty tube for the real tube. Jean Marie agreed. He felt she was absolutely right; he felt it, too.

  Having cracked the case they ordered lunch. Eve ate scrambled eggs with asparagus tips while Jean Marie explained that the one common course all competing chefs had to prepare for the judges in all international cooking competitions was scrambled eggs, they were that difficult to make well. The scrambled eggs at Lucien’s were so good that Eve ordered the same thing again. Jean Marie had snails and a veal steak. The white wine was cold and supporting. Lucien’s grandfather’s Armagnac was dark and lingering, with the slightest overtone of sweetness. They ate heartily because they felt they had been permitted to return to life again.

  Bourne arrived early the next morning. He had made connections to Barcelona, then to Nice, then to Paris. He was steady and extremely considerate of their anxious feelings.

  The Duque de Dos Cortes died in his sleep in a chair at a café in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, out in the early morning of March 17th, although no one in the area observed St. Patrick’s Day, and it was not until late that night, as the chairs were being taken up after the concert, that the body had been discovered; his posture, even in death, having been so good. The waiter was sure that the old man had died in the early morning because he remembered, when the duchess’s lawyer and the police talked with him later, an American woman tourist pointing at the duke and saying to the waiter, “That old man looks dead,” which the waiter remembered receiving as extremely bad taste.

  It had gotten very busy at the café almost immediately after that when a motion picture company which had been headed by Miss Katherine Hepburn photographed a scene on the terrace of the café not far in the duke’s immediate foreground. He had been a man who would have invested any scene, real or cinematic, with enormous atmosphere, alive or dead. His friends all over the world who saw the movie two, three or four years later depending upon the country they utilized to attend movies, were always surprised and delighted to see the dead, old man rotting away in the background, easily dominating Miss Hepburn’s clasping and unclasping nostrils as she registered that emotion she could register at will. The film company had moved away to some other part of Venice and the concert hour had arrived and, with one thing and another, no one had noticed that the duke was dead until closing time had come around.

  With the help of the police, it took the duchess’s attorneys no time to reconstruct what had happened which was most necessary for the report because they represented, out of Milan, the duchess’s attorneys in Bilbao, and their instructions had been explicit: things must be quick and quiet. The cause of death was clear. The duke had overtaxed himself. He had died of simple exhaustion.

  The facts revealed that he had rented a little boy in Hamburg, contemplating merely one week. Then, instead of going on to Montecatini for baths and rest and massage, he suddenly decided that he would rather spend time with the child. This had meant leaving a large deposit with the boy’s owner, and what seemed to be endless haggling. The owner would cry out that the boy was one of his best earners and that there was no way of knowing what price he should charge on a lease basis. Then when the area of price had seemed to be settled the man had wailed that he had no way of knowing whether or not the duke ever intended to return the boy, and so on and on. Money had settled everything.

  The child spoke only German and the duke’s German was quite poor. The boy had been beautifully trained in his work which, while it makes sense on a piece work basis, was disastrous when stretched out over weeks against the foolishness of a seventy-two-year-old man, no matter how strong, and no one had had the time to instruct the boy differently, the duke having acted so impulsively.

  It had killed the duke, of course. The police and the Milanese attorney had found the grave child on a straight-backed, wooden chair in the duke’s rooms, staring at the Grand Canal, wearing dejected-looking, long, winter underwear, efficient underwear for a northern port like Hamburg in the winter, but out of keeping in Venice in that season.

  They could not find his clothes at first. They had been left by the duke with the concierge so that the child would not be tempted to stray away with the duke’s valuables, a policy which had not been directed against this particular boy but which had been formed by years of experience in many of the great cities of the world.

  They grouped about the boy, asking questions. The hotel manager interpreted the boy’s German. Suddenly, with an expression of disgust at the boy’s answers, the hotel manager lashed out with his open hand, knocking the lad over sideways, over the arm of the chair to the floor. The manager realized the injustice of his action at once. The boy was a child who spoke the way he had been trained to speak, and when he spoke it was to court and woo or go without his food. The manager picked the boy up, righted him on the chair, and apologized briefly.

  The Milan representative charged his firm two hundred and fifty thousand lira for the disposition of the various problems relative to the sad death. He was a young, inexperienced man so he made very little profit. The Milan f
irm charged the duke’s representatives in Bilbao two million eight hundred thousand lira for having sent the young man to Venice and back. The Bilbao law firm, with the sentimentality of the last of many such commissions, billed for fees which were the equivalent in pesetas of twelve million lira, for they after all had had to place a long-distance call from Bilbao to Milan.

  No one objected. It was simply awesomely wonderful that the duke was dead. He was buried at Dos Cortes in the presence of his immediate family and many priests. All wore mourning but no one wept. The family doctor had had to give the duchess strong sedatives before the funeral and during the last rites at the grave to neutralize her tendency to laugh whenever the ceremony directed attention to the casket.

  Bourne arrived at number eighteen Avenue de la Motte-Picquet just too late to see Lalu who had been sent to her mother’s so that Eve and Jean Marie could receive Bourne’s worst, but Bourne seemed to have recovered well. He was almost tender in the way he spoke about the details of the loss with Eve. So much so that she became afraid, to herself, that for the second time in two days she was going to cry. He stayed with routine. He took her back, in patient examination and cross-examination, from number eighteen to the airport and gradually all the way back to the apartment at the hotel in Madrid. When he had finished they all regarded it as confirmed that Señor Elek was the only one who could have made the switch.

  The conclusion amazed Bourne. “Gus has been with that one hotel for sixteen years,” he said. “I don’t mean just working with me. He was a part of that hotel. Besides, I just gave him a twenty per cent increase.”

  “And he was such a sweet, agreeable, childish, little man,” Eve protested.

  Jean Marie shrugged. The period of Naïvete is declared over,” he said. “What do we do now?”

  Bourne told him he hadn’t decided. He promised he would try to have an answer by noon the next day. He and Eve left the studio. Jean Marie began to paint with philosophical detachment, almost cheerfully.

  They sat, Bourne and Eve, on two rented iron chairs in the Tuileries. A beautiful, circular pond amused small boys in front of them; members of the league of the tranquil were all around them. On the left, through the toy arch of triumph, they could see the palace of the Louvre, on the right the Place de la Concorde. There stretched square miles of sky directly overhead, vast because the buildings everywhere were so sensibly low. They held hands. Bourne toyed absent-mindedly with the magnificent emerald ring on Eve’s left hand which he had stolen many years before in Miami.

  “I’ve never been hijacked before,” Bourne murmured to himself.

  “You’ll think of something.” Eve stroked the back of his hand.

  “There is really only one thing to do.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Think it through. You’ve got to think it through.”

  “I have to make Señor Elek talk. I hate it when things work out so there are no alternatives. He’s very proud and and he’s tough and I hate violence.”

  They watched a beautifully rigged ship sail across the pond. “What kind of violence?” Eve asked.

  “I can assure you that a man like Elek will not volunteer information.”

  “I know,” Eve said. “I realize that. But why must one thing lead to another? We’re still in control of our own lives. We don’t have to turn into gangsters because someone has outsmarted us.”

  Bourne sighed. “That’s my father. I hate it but I can’t take it this way. Just the same,” he said, touching her cheek and liking it leaning over to kiss it, “don’t you go worrying about barbarity and one thing leading to another. I’m no strongarm. I hate rough stuff. But this is too much. I mean, I worked a long time on this job and to think of someone watching me plan and sweat and worry and then send a messenger to walk away with everything well, it’s too much. I mean, under any circumstances no one could be expected to hold still for a mocking like that.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Well, think about it.”

  “I have.”

  “All right. Okay, then.”

  “Jim, we’re out of Spain. Why go back? We don’t need money. I have a terrible feeling about our going back to Spain.”

  “We have to, honey.”

  “Balls.”

  “I have to anyway. I couldn’t live with myself.”

  “Señor Elek is just a messenger?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “You mean who. Who hired him? Well, that’s what we have to find out. Personally, I think it was the same man who hired Chern. For all I know it may be Chern.”

  “We certainly don’t have to go to Spain to talk to Chern.”

  “I know. I wired him. He’ll be in Paris tomorrow and we’ll talk it all over with him.”

  “Jim—what kind of violence?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “On Señor Elek.”

  “Maybe violence was a poor choice of word. What comes to me is putting him in some pitch-black place for fifteen or twenty days with plenty of water but no food. That can’t hurt him. Then I ask him. That’s a very disturbing experience and if he doesn’t want to talk and maybe I threaten to repeat the whole thing—well, he should be ready to talk the second time around. And it can’t really hurt him. In fact that kind of abstinence could be good for him in the long run. Gandhi thrived on that kind of a regime. He really did, you know.”

  “You sound miserable and frightened, to me.”

  “Well, it figures. I’m new here with the violence bit.”

  “Please stay that way.”

  “This is my eleventh time at bat. Lucky eleven and the first time in sixteen years that anything missed. I’m supposed to anticipate these things. I could be slipping, letting myself be hijacked. I’ve been trained against that since boyhood.”

  “Was your father a bootlegger along with everything else?”

  He laughed harshly. “Better than that. My father’s principal business was raiding companies, legal hijacking, then milking their cash and throwing them away. In my family, it has always been like counterpunching. I remember one time standing at the Men’s Bar in the Waldorf and hearing a man five feet away telling his friend that Allied Mines and Metals had a book value of six hundred and five million dollars and that the directors were in a fight over how much expansion they should undertake, if any. I never saw him again, and he never saw me at all. I finished my drink and on the way back to the office I developed forty percent of the plan my father used to take that company over. He completed the other sixty per cent in about three days then we called in the lawyers and the press agents who hyena those kind of deals. In seventeen months we controlled Allied’s cash surplus of a hundred and sixty-two million, and the Allied stockholders paid every cent to get it for us. My father made me a partner the way Capone let Dion O’Banion have the North Side of Chicago when people still stole outside the laws of etiquette. Oh, believe me, my father is a master thief, an absolute wonder, and I’m a piker with these silly little Spanish master deals. Pop has stolen millions and they can’t lay a finger on him.”

  He stood up and drew her to her feet. “It’s getting chilly. Let’s charge into La Florida and have an elegant lunch.” He kissed her eyelids. “Your eyes are the color of Paris,” he said, “sort of smoky, bluish-gray.”

  They strolled off across the Rue de Rivoli and went along Castiglione toward Capucines and Rue de Sèze. They lunched elegantly at La Florida including quantities of Chambolle-Musigny ’49. After lunch they stared soulfully at dachshund puppies in a store across the street then, as they walked some more, Eve got to feeling amorous and Bourne always did, so they flagged a cab and sped for the apartment on Rue du Boccador. The concierge stopped them on their way in and their immediate plans had to be postponed. She had a telegram for Bourne from the hotel in Madrid. It said that Señor Elek had been found murdered and inquired when Bourne could be expected to return.

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nbsp; The universe which held the constellation containing the planet Earth was so small it was hardly noticeable. This universe with its stars, planets, and suns was one of many which fitted into other, greater universes like wood atoms into a pipe bowl. All together, they were like grains of sand upon a beach which stretched into infinity.

  Part II

  PARADO

  After the banderillas have been planted the bull is not so sure of his prowess any more. He is only slightly winded but has settled down and begins conserving his energy. He charges in quick, short spurts and pays close attention to his aim.

  A great deal of ritual went into the playacting which followed the funeral of the Duque de Dos Cortes, what with the appreciation of state expressions of sorrow, of Falange expressions of sorrow, of relatives’ expressions of sorrow; the need for acknowledgment of the regrets which poured out of the dale of monarchs at Estoril; the various lawsuits which had been instituted from all over the world by young men and women who claimed shares of the estate; the endless masses which had to be said in Rome, in Madrid, in Seville, in Escorial, at Santiago de Compostela, and by the Archbishop Primate at Toledo; masses which the soul of the duke might have sorely needed; the narcotic proofreading of the linotyped fictions about the great man which were to run serially in a daily paper then appear in book form; the exacting analysis of the estate which had been left to the duchess in its entirety and which required four specialists at law to interpret and to present to her involving the ownership of approximately eighteen per cent of the population of Spain inclusive with farms, mines, factories, breweries, houses, forests, rocks, vineyards and holdings in eleven countries of the world including shares in a major league baseball club in North America, an ice cream company in Mexico, quite a few diamonds in South Africa, a Chinese restaurant on Rue François Ier in Paris, a television tube factory in Manila, and in geisha houses in Nagasaki and Kobe.

  With the estate in her control the duchess lost no time in increasing her own nuisance value to her community. She had irritated the Spanish aristocracy for such a time that she had done her best to step up a program of annoyance each year to make sure that they got what they were looking for. She established four test cooperatives; two in industry and two in agriculture; which earned her the dread name of socialist. The resultant storm was far greater than it had been when she had advocated compulsory education up to the age of twelve years. The Marqués de Altomarches, in a letter to Arriba, the newspaper, stated that had the duchess been a man he would have demanded satisfaction with pistols for this “attempted sacking of Spanish ideals.” As it was he would “disdain her with silence” should they ever have occasion to meet again.