The Flanders Panel (31 page)

“We always do.”

Belmonte gave her a conspiratorial smile.

“I hadn’t planned to be accompanied by Johann Sebastian today, but I decided to evoke him in your honour. It’s the French Suite No. 5, and you’ll notice that this composition consists of two halves, each of which is repeated. The tonic note of the first half is G and it ends in the key of D. All right? Now listen. Just when it seems that the piece has finished in that key, that trickster Bach suddenly makes us jump back to the beginning, with G as tonic again, and then slides back again to D. And, without our knowing quite how, that happens again and again. What do you think?”

“I think it’s fascinating.” Julia was following the musical chords intently. “It’s like a continuous loop. Like those paintings and drawings by Escher, in which a river flows along, then becomes a waterfall and inexplicably goes back to the beginning. Or the staircase that leads nowhere, only back to the start of the staircase itself.”

Belmonte nodded, satisfied.

“Exactly. And it’s possible to play it in many keys.” He looked at the empty rectangle on the wall. “The difficulty, I suppose, is to know where to place oneself in those circles.”

“You’re right. It would take a long time to explain, but there is something of that going on in the painting. Just when it seems the story has ended, it starts again, but goes off in another direction. Or apparently in another direction. Because perhaps we never actually move from the spot we’re in.”

Belmonte shrugged.

“That’s a paradox to be resolved by you and your friend the chess player. I lack the necessary information. As you know, I’m only an amateur. I wasn’t even capable of guessing that the game could be played backwards.” He gave Julia a long look. “Unforgivable of me really, considering what I’ve just said about Bach.”

Julia pondered these new and unexpected interpretations. Threads from a ball of wool, she was thinking. Too many threads for one ball.

“Apart from the police and me, have you had any other visits recently from anyone interested in the painting? Or in chess?”

The old man took a while to reply, as if trying to ascertain what lay behind the question.

“Neither the one nor the other. When my wife was alive, people often came to the house. She was more sociable than me. But since I was widowed I’ve kept in touch with only a few old friends. Esteban Cano, for example. You’re too young to have known him when he was a successful violinist. But he died, two years ago now. The truth is that my small circle of friends has gradually been disappearing.” He gave a resigned smile. “There’s Pepe, a good friend. Pepin Perez Gimenez, retired like me, who still goes to the club and drops by from time to time to have a game of chess with me. But he’s nearly seventy and gets terrible migraines if he plays for more than half an hour. He was a great chess player once. And there’s my niece.”

Julia, who was taking out a cigarette, stopped. When she moved again, she did so very slowly, as if any excited or impatient gesture might cause what she’d just heard to vanish.

“Your niece plays chess?”

“Lola? Yes, very well.” The old man gave an odd smile, as if he regretted that his niece’s virtues did not extend to other areas of her life. “I taught her to play myself, years ago; but she outgrew her teacher.”

Julia was trying to remain calm. She forced herself to light her cigarette calmly and exhaled two slow clouds of smoke before she spoke again. She could feel her heart beating fast.

“What does your niece think about the painting? Did she approve of you selling it?” A shot in the dark.

“She was very much in favour of it. And her husband was even keener.” There was a bitter note in the old man’s voice. “No doubt Alfonso has already worked out on which number of the roulette wheel he’s going to place every last cent he gets from the Van Huys.”

“But he hasn’t got it yet,” Julia pointed out.

The old man held her gaze and a hard light appeared in his pale, liquid eyes, but it was rapidly extinguished.

“In my day,” he said with unexpected good humour and only placid irony in his eyes now, “we used to say you shouldn’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.”

“Has your niece ever mentioned anything mysterious about the painting, about the people in it or the game of chess?”

“Not that I remember. You were the first one to talk about that. For us, it had always been a special painting, but not extraordinary or mysterious.” He looked thoughtfully at the rectangle on the wall-“Everything seemed very obvious.”

“Do you know if, before or at the time when Alfonso introduced you to Menchu Roch, your niece was negotiating with someone else?”

Belmonte frowned. That possibility seemed to displease him greatly.

“I certainly hope not. After all, the painting was mine.” The expression on his face was astute and full of a knowing mischief. “And it still is.”

“Can I ask you one more question, Don Manuel?”

“Of course.”

“Did you ever hear your niece and her husband talk about consulting an art historian?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t recall them doing it, and I think I’d remember something like that.” Suspicion had resurfaced in his eyes. “That was Professor Ortega’s job, wasn’t it? Art history. I hope you’re not trying to insinuate…”

Julia realised she’d gone too far, so she produced one of her best smiles.

“I didn’t necessarily mean Alvaro Ortega, but any art historian. It’s not such an odd idea that your niece might have been curious to know the value of the painting, or to find out its history.”

Belmonte looked at the backs of his freckled hands with a reflective air.

“She never mentioned it. And I think she would have, because we often talked about the Van Huys. Especially when we used to replay the game the people in the painting are playing. We played it forwards, of course. And do you know something? Although White appears to have the advantage, Lola always won with Black.”

She walked aimlessly about in the fog for almost an hour, trying to put her ideas in order. The damp air left droplets of moisture on her face and hair. She passed the Palace Hotel, where the doorman, in top hat and gold-braided uniform, was sheltering beneath the glass canopy, wrapped in a cloak that made him look like someone out of nineteenth-century London, in keeping with the fog. All that was missing, she thought, was a horse-drawn carriage, its lantern dimmed by the grey mist, out of which would step the gaunt figure of Sherlock Holmes, followed by his faithful companion, Watson. Somewhere in the murk the sinister Professor Moriarty would be watching. The Napoleon of crime. The evil genius.

Lately she seemed to have come across far too many people who played chess. And everyone had excellent reasons for their links with the Van Huys. There were too many portraits inside that wretched painting.

Munoz: he was the only person she’d met
since
the mystery began. When she couldn’t sleep, when she was tossing and turning in her bed, he was the only one she did not connect with the nightmare images. Munoz was at one end of the ball of wool and all the chess pieces, all the other characters, were at the other. But she couldn’t even be sure of him. She had indeed met him
after
the mystery began, but
before
the story had gone back to its starting point and begun again in a different key. It was impossible even to know with absolute certainty that Alvaro’s death and the existence of the mystery player were part of the same movement.

She stopped, feeling on her face the touch of the damp mist wrapped about her. When it came down to it, the only person she could be sure of was herself. That was all she had to go on with, that and the pistol she still carried in her bag.

She made her way to the chess club. There was sawdust in the hallway, umbrellas, overcoats and raincoats. It smelled of damp, of cigarette smoke, and had the unmistakable atmosphere of places frequented exclusively by men. She greeted Cifuentes, the director, who rushed obsequiously to meet her, and, as the murmurs provoked by her appearance in the club died down, searched amongst the chess tables until she spotted Munoz. He was concentrating on a game, sitting motionless as a sphinx, with one elbow on the arm of his chair, his chin resting on the palm of that hand. His opponent, a young man with thick glasses, kept licking his lips and casting troubled glances at Munoz, as if he were afraid that at any moment the latter might destroy the complicated king’s defence which, to judge by his nervousness and his look of exhaustion, it had cost him an enormous effort to construct.

Munoz seemed his usual calm, absent self; rather than studying the board, his motionless eyes seemed to be merely resting on it. Perhaps he was immersed in those daydreams of which he had spoken to Julia, a thousand miles away from the game taking place before his eyes, while his mathematical mind kept weaving and unweaving infinite, impossible combinations. Around them, a few onlookers were studying the game apparently with more interest than the players themselves. From time to time, they mumbled comments or suggested moving this or that piece. What seemed clear, given the tension around the table, was that they expected Munoz to make some decisive move that would sound the death knell of the young man in glasses. That justified the nervousness of the latter, whose eyes, magnified by the lenses, looked at his adversary like a slave in the amphitheatre at the mercy of the lions, pleading for clemency from an omnipotent emperor in purple.

At that moment, Munoz looked up and saw Julia. He stared at her for several seconds as if he didn’t recognise her, then came to slowly, with the look of someone waking from a dream or returning from a long journey. His face brightened as he made a vague gesture of welcome. He glanced back at the board, to see if things there were still in order, and, not hastily or as if he were merely improvising, but as the conclusion of a long reasoning process, moved a pawn. A disappointed murmur arose around the table, and the young man in glasses looked across at him, first with surprise, then like a prisoner whose execution has been cancelled at the last moment, and then with a satisfied smirk.

“That makes it a draw,” remarked one of the onlookers.

Munoz, who was getting up from the table, shrugged.

“Yes,” he replied, without looking at the board. “But if I’d moved bishop to queen 7 it would have been checkmate in five moves.”

He went over to Julia, leaving the others to study the move he’d just mentioned. Discreetly indicating the group around the table, Julia said in a low voice:

“They must really hate you.”

Munoz put his head on one side and his expression could as easily have been interpreted as a distant smile or a look of scorn.

“I suppose so,” he replied, picking up his raincoat. “They tend to gather like vultures, hoping to be there when someone finally tears me limb from limb.”

“But you let yourself be beaten… That must be humiliating for them.”

“That’s the least of it,” he said, but there was no smugness or pride in his voice, just a kind of objective contempt. “They wouldn’t miss one of my games for anything.”

Opposite the Prado, in the grey mist, Julia brought him up to date regarding her conversation with Belmonte. Munoz heard her out without comment, not even when she told him about the niece’s interest in chess. He seemed indifferent to the damp weather as he walked slowly along, listening carefully to what Julia said, his raincoat unbuttoned and the knot of his tie half undone as usual, his head bent and his eyes fixed on the scuffed toes of his shoes.

“You asked me once if there were any women who play chess,” he said at last. “And I told you that, although chess is essentially a masculine game, there are some reasonable women players. But they are the exception.”

“The exception that proves the rule, I suppose.”

Munoz frowned.

“No. You’re wrong there. An exception doesn’t prove anything; it invalidates or destroys any rule. That’s why you have to be very careful with inductive reasoning. What I’m saying is that women
tend
to play chess badly, not that
all
women play chess badly. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Which doesn’t detract from the fact that, in practice, women have little stature as chess players. Just to give you an idea: in the Soviet Union, where chess is the national pastime, only one woman, Vera Menchik, was ever considered to have reached grand master level.”

“Why is that?”

“Maybe chess requires too much indifference to the outside world.” He paused and looked at Julia. “What’s this Lola Belmonte like?”

Julia considered before answering.

“I don’t know how to describe her really. Unpleasant. Possibly domineering. Aggressive. It’s a shame she wasn’t there when you were with me the other day.”

They were standing by a stone fountain crowned by the vague silhouette of a statue that hovered menacingly above their heads in the mist. Munoz ran his hands over his hair and looked at his damp palms before rubbing them on his raincoat.

“Aggression, whether externalised or internalised,” he said, “is characteristic of many players.” He smiled briefly, without making it clear whether he considered himself to fall outside that definition or not. “And the chess player tends to be someone who’s frustrated or oppressed in some way. The attack on the king, which is the aim in chess, that is, going against authority, would be a kind of liberation from that state. From that point of view the game could be of interest to a woman.” The fleeting smile crossed his lips again. “When you play chess, people seem very insignificant from where you’re sitting.”

“Have you detected something of that in our enemy’s games?”

“That’s a difficult question to answer. I need more information. More moves. For example, women tend to show a predilection for bishop mates.” Munoz’s expression grew animated as he went into details. “I don’t know why, but those pieces, with their deep, diagonal moves, possibly have the most feminine character of all the pieces.” He gestured as if he didn’t give much credence to his words and were trying to erase them from the air. “But until now the black bishops haven’t played an important role in the game. As you know, we have lots of nice theories that add up to nothing. Our problem is just the same as it is on a chessboard: we can only formulate imaginative hypotheses, conjectures, without touching the chess pieces.”