The Flanders Panel (19 page)

The Venetian mirror and the painted mirror framed Julia in an imaginary space, blurring the boundaries between the two surfaces. The golden light wrapped itself about her too as, very slowly, almost resting one hand on the green cloth of the painted table and taking great care not to upset the chess pieces laid out on the board, she leaned towards Roger de Arras and kissed him gently on the cold corner of his mouth. And when she turned, she caught a gleam, the insigne of the Golden Fleece on the vermilion velvet doublet of the other player, Ferdinand Altenhoffen, the Duke of Ostenburg, whose eyes were staring at her, dark and unfathomable.

By the time the clock on the wall struck three, the ashtray was full of cigarette ends and her cup and the coffeepot stood almost empty among sundry books and papers. Julia sat back in her chair and stared up at the ceiling, trying to put her ideas in order. To banish the ghosts encircling her, she’d turned on all the lights, and the boundaries of reality were slowly returning, gradually fitting back again into time and space.

There were, she concluded, other, more practical, ways of asking the question; there was another point of view, doubtless the correct one, if Julia bore in mind that she was more of a grown-up Wendy than an Alice. In order to approach things from that angle, all she had to do was close her eyes and open them again, look at the Van Huys as she would at any other picture painted five centuries ago and then pick up pencil and paper. And that’s what she did, after drinking down the last of the now cold coffee. At that time of night, she thought, not feeling in the least sleepy and more afraid of sliding down the slippery slope of unreason than of anything else, it would be no bad thing to set about reordering her ideas in the light of recent events. So she began to write:

I.           Painting dated 1471. Game of chess. The mystery: What really happened between Ferdinand Altenhoffen, Beatrice of Burgundy and Roger de Arras? Who ordered the death of the knight? What has chess got to do with this? Why did Van Huys paint the picture? Why, after painting the inscription
Quis necavit equitem,
did he paint over it? Was he afraid they might murder him too?

II.            I tell Menchu about my discovery. I go to Alvaro. He already knows all about the painting; someone has consulted him about it. Who?

• II.Alvaro is dead. Dead or murdered? Obvious link with the painting, or perhaps with my visit and my research. Is there something somebody doesn’t want me to know? Did Alvaro find out something important I don’t know about?
  
• V.         An unknown person (possibly the murderer or murderess) sends me the documents compiled by Alvaro. What was it that Alvaro knew that other people believe to be dangerous? What does that other person (or persons) want me to know, and what does he or she not want me to know?
  
• . A blonde woman takes the envelope to Urbexpress. Is she linked with Alvaro’s death or merely an intermediary?
  

VI.           Although we are both investigating the same thing, Alvaro dies and I (for the moment) do not. Does the person want to facilitate my work, or guide it towards something, and if so, what? Does it concern the painting’s monetary value? Or my restoration work? Or the inscription? Or the chess problem? Or is it a matter of finding out or not finding out certain historical facts? What possible link can there be between some one in the twentieth century and someone in the fifteenth?

• II.             Fundamental question (for the present): Would a hypothetical murderer benefit by an increase in the price of the painting at auction? Is there more to the painting than I have so far uncovered?
  
• III.Is there a possibility that the whole thing has nothing to do with the value of the painting, but with the mystery of the chess game it depicts? Munoz’s work. Chess problem. How can that possibly cause a death five centuries later? That’s not only ridiculous; it’s stupid. (I think.)
  

IX.          

She remembered something Munoz had said the first time he saw the Van Huys, and she began to reconstruct it on paper. He’d talked about the different levels in the painting. An explanation of one of them might help her understand the whole thing.

Level 1. The scene within the painting. A floor in the form of a chessboard on which the people are placed.

Level 2. The people in the painting: Ferdinand, Beatrice, Roger.

Level 3. The chessboard on which two people are playing a game.

Level 4. The chess pieces that symbolise the three people.

Level 5. The mirror that reflects a reverse image of the game and of the people.

She looked at the result, drawing lines between the different levels and managing only to establish disquieting links. The fifth level contained the four previous levels, the first was linked to the third, the second to the fourth. It formed a strange figure turned in upon itself.

In fact, she said to herself while studying the curious diagram, it seemed a complete and utter waste of time. The only thing those links demonstrated was that the painter who created the picture had a brilliantly devious mind. It did nothing to help clear up Alvaro’s death. Five hundred years after
The Game of Chess
had been painted, he had either slipped in the bath or someone else had made him slip. Whatever the result of all those arrows and boxes, neither Alvaro nor she could be contained in the Van Huys, whose creator could not possibly have foreseen their existence. Or could he? A disquieting question surfaced in her mind. Confronted by a collection of symbols, like that painting, was it up to the viewer to attribute meanings to it, or were the meanings there already, from the very moment of its creation?

She was still drawing arrows and boxes when the phone rang. She jumped, startled, looking at the phone on the carpet, unsure whether to answer it or not. Who could be phoning her at half past three in the morning? None of the possible replies to that question set her mind at rest, and the phone rang four more times before she moved. She went slowly over to it, suddenly feeling that it would be much worse if it were to stop ringing before she found out who was calling. She imagined herself spending the rest of the night curled up on the sofa, looking in terror at the phone, waiting for it to ring again. She hurled herself on it with something approaching fury.

“Hello?”

The sigh of relief that escaped her must have been audible to Munoz, who interrupted his explanations to ask if she was all right. He was terribly sorry to phone her so late but he felt he was justified in waking her. He himself was quite excited about it; that’s why he’d taken the liberty of calling. What? Yes, exactly. Five minutes ago the problem suddenly… Hello? Was she still there? He was telling her that it was now possible to ascertain, absolutely, which piece had taken the knight.

Who Killed the Knight?

The white pieces and the black pieces seemed to represent Manichean divisions between light and dark, good and evil, in the very spirit of man himself.
G. Kasparov

“I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it… I suddenly realised that what I was analysing was the only possible move.” Munoz put his pocket chess set down on the table, smoothed out his original sketch, now crumpled and heavily annotated, and placed it beside the set. “Even then, I couldn’t believe it. It took me an hour to go over it all again, from start to finish.”

They were in an all-night bar-cum-supermarket, sitting by a large window that gave them a clear view of the broad, empty avenue. There was hardly anyone there, a few actors from a nearby theatre and half a dozen night birds, male and female. A security guard in paramilitary uniform was standing next to the electronic security gates at the entrance, yawning and looking at his watch.

“Now,” said the chess player, pointing first at the sketch and then at the small chessboard, “have a look at this. We managed to reconstruct the last move made by the black queen, from b2 to c2, but we didn’t know what the previous move by White was that forced her to do that… Remember? When we looked at the threat from the two white rooks, we decided that the rook on b5 could have come from any of the squares on 5; but that couldn’t explain why the black queen fled, since she would already be in check by another white rook, the one on b6. Maybe, we said, the rook had captured another black piece on b5. But which piece? That’s where we got stuck.”

“And which piece was it?” Julia was studying the board. Its geometrical black-and-white design was no longer unfamiliar, but one in which she could move about as if in familiar territory. “You said you could find out which it was by studying the pieces off the board.”

“And that’s what I did. I studied the pieces one by one, and I reached a surprising conclusion.

“Which piece could the rook on b5 have taken?” Munoz looked at the board with his insomniac eyes, as if he genuinely didn’t know the answer. “It wasn’t a black knight, since both are still on the board. It wasn’t the bishop either, because square b5 is white and the black bishop that can move along the white diagonal hasn’t as yet left its original position. It’s still there on c8 with its two escape routes blocked by pawns that have not yet come into play.”

“Perhaps it was a black pawn,” suggested Julia. Munoz shook his head.

“That took me longer to reject as a possibility, because the position of the pawns is the most confusing thing about this game. But it couldn’t have been any of the black pawns because the one on a5 came from c7. As you know, pawns capture by moving one square diagonally forwards, and that one presumably captured two white pieces on b6 and a5. As regards the other four black pawns, they were obviously miles away when they were captured. They would never have been anywhere near b5.”

“Then it must have been the black rook. The white rook must have taken it on b5.”

“No, that’s impossible. Given the arrangement of the pieces around a8, it’s obvious that the black rook was captured there, on its original square, without ever having moved. It was taken by a white knight -although in this case it doesn’t much matter which piece it was captured by.”

Julia looked up from the board, disoriented.

“I don’t get it. That discounts all the black pieces. Which piece did the white rook take on b5 then?”

Munoz gave a half-smile, which was not in the least bit smug; he merely seemed amused by Julia’s question, or perhaps by the answer he was about to give.

“The fact is it didn’t take any. Now don’t look at me like that. Your painter Van Huys was also a master when it came to laying false trails. It turns out that nothing was captured on square b5.” He crossed his arms and leaned over the small board, suddenly silent. Then he looked at Julia and laid one finger on the black queen. “If the last move by White wasn’t a threat to the black queen by the rook, that means that a white piece must have moved and thus discovered the check by the white rook on the black queen. I mean a white piece that was either on square b4 or b3. Van Huys must have had a good laugh, knowing that anyone trying to solve the riddle was bound to be fooled by that ruse with the two rooks.”

Julia nodded slowly. A few words from Munoz were all it took to make a corner of the board, apparently static and unimportant, suddenly fill with infinite possibilities. There was something truly magical about his ability to guide other people through the complex black-and-white labyrinth to which he possessed the hidden keys. It was as if he were able to orient himself by means of a network of connections flowing beneath the board and giving rise to impossible, unsuspected combinations which he had only to mention for them to come to life, to become so obvious that you were amazed not to have noticed them before.

“I see,” she said, after a few seconds. “That white piece was protecting the black queen from the rook. And, by moving away, it left the black queen in check.”

“Exactly.”

“And which piece was it?”

“Perhaps you can work it out for yourself.”

“A white pawn?”

“No. One was captured on a5 or b6 and the other one is too far away. It couldn’t have been any of the others either.”

“Well, frankly, I haven’t got a clue then.”