The Flanders Panel

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Her whole body was tense, alert, on the defensive. She looked at Feijoo, who was now neither compassionate nor kindly. It was a question of tactics, she said to herself. Trying to remain calm, she decided that there really wasn't any reason the Inspector should be considerate towards her. He was just a policeman, as clumsy and coarse as the next one, merely doing his job. Anyway, she thought, as she tried to see the situation from his point of view: she was all he had, the only lead, the dead man's ex-girlfriend.

  "But that's ancient history," she said, letting the ash from her cigarette fall into the pristine ashtray full of paper clips that Feijoo had on his desk. "We stopped seeing each other over a year ago ... as I'm sure you know."

  The Inspector put his elbows on the desk and leaned towards her.

  "Yes," he said, almost confidentially, as if his tone were irrefutable proof that they were old acquaintances now and that he was entirely on her side. "But you did have a meeting with him three days ago."

  Julia managed to conceal her surprise and merely looked at the policeman with the expression of someone who's just heard an exceptionally foolish remark. Naturally, Feijoo had been making enquiries at the university. Any secretary or porter could have told him. But neither was it something she needed to hide.

  "I went to ask for his help on a painting I'm restoring." She found it odd that the policeman wasn't taking notes, but assumed that was part of his method: people speak more freely when they think their words are disappearing into thin air. "As you are apparently well aware, we talked for nearly an hour in his office. We even arranged to meet later, but I never saw him again."

  Feijoo was turning the box of matches round and round.

  "What did you talk about, if you don't mind my asking? I'm sure you'll understand and forgive such an ... urn ... personal question. I assure you it's purely routine."

  Julia regarded him in silence while she pulled on her cigarette and then she shook her head slowly.

  "You seem to take me for some kind of idiot."

  The policeman looked at her through lowered eyelids but he sat a little straighter.

  "I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean."

  "I'll tell you what I mean," she said and stubbed out her cigarette hard in the little pile of paper clips, indifferent to the pained look with which he followed her gesture. "I have no objection whatsoever to answering your questions. But, before we go on, I want you to tell me if Álvaro slipped in the bath or not."

  Feijoo seemed to be caught off guard. "I have no firm evidence ..."

  "Then this conversation is unnecessary. If you think there is something suspicious about his death and you're trying to get me to talk, I want to know right now whether I'm being questioned as a possible suspect. Because, in that case, either I leave this police station at once or I get a lawyer."

  The policeman raised his hands in conciliatory fashion.

  "That would be a bit premature." With a lopsided smile, he shuffled in his seat as if he were once again looking for the right words. "The official line, as of this moment, is that Professor Ortega had an accident."

  "And what if your marvellous pathologists decide otherwise?"

  "In that case"–Feijoo waved his hand vaguely–"you will be considered no more suspicious than any of the other people who knew the deceased. You can imagine the list of candidates..."

  "That's the problem. I can't imagine anyone wanting to kill Álvaro."

  "Well, that's your opinion. I see it differently: suspended students, jealous colleagues, angry lovers, intransigent husbands ..." He ticked these off with one thumb on the fingers of the other hand and stopped when he ran out of fingers. "No. The thing is, and I'm sure you'll be the first to recognise this, your testimony will be extremely valuable."

  "Why? Are you putting me in the category of angry lovers?"

  "I wouldn't go that far, Señorita. But you did see him only hours before he, or someone else, fractured his skull."

  "Hours?" This time Julia really was disconcerted. "When did he die?"

  "Three days ago. On Wednesday, between two in the afternoon and midnight."

  "That's impossible. There must be a mistake."

  "A mistake?" the Inspector's expression had changed. He was looking at Julia with open distrust now. "Certainly not. That's the pathologist's verdict."

  "There must be a mistake. An error of twenty-four hours."

  "Why do you think that?"

  "Because on Thursday evening, the day after my conversation with him, he sent me some documents I'd asked him for."

  "What sort of documents?"

  "About the history of the painting I'm working on."

  "Did you receive them by post?"

  "No, by messenger, that same evening."

  "Do you remember the name of the company?"

  "Yes. Urbexpress. And it was on Thursday, around eight o'clock. How do you explain that?"

  The policeman emitted a sceptical sigh from beneath his moustache.

  "I can't. By Thursday evening, Álvaro Ortega had already been dead for twenty-four hours, so he couldn't have sent them. Someone..." - Feijoo paused briefly to allow Julia time to take in the idea–"someone must have done it for him."

  "Someone? But who?"

  "The person who killed him, if he was killed that is. The hypothetical murderer. Or murderess." He looked at Julia with some curiosity. "I don't know why we always immediately assume it was a man who committed a crime." Then he had an idea. "Was there a letter or a note accompanying the documents supposedly sent by Álvaro Ortega?"

  "No, just the documents. But it is logical to think he sent them. I'm sure there's been some mistake."

  "There's no mistake. He died on Wednesday, and you received the documents on Thursday. Unless the company delayed delivery..."

  "No, I'm sure about that. It was dated the same day."

  "Was there anyone with you that evening?"

  "Two people: Menchu Roch and César Ortiz de Pozas."

  The policeman seemed genuinely surprised.

  "Don César? The antiques dealer on Calle del Prado?"

  "The same. Do you know him?"

  Feijoo hesitated before nodding. He knew him, he said, through his work. But he did not know that Julia and César were friends.

  "Well, now you know."

  "Yes, now I know."

  The policeman tapped his pen on the desk, suddenly uncomfortable, and with good reason. As Julia learned the following day from César, Inspector Casimiro Feijoo was far from being a model police officer. His professional relationship with the world of art and antiques allowed him to supplement his police salary at the end of each month. From time to time, when a consignment of stolen goods was recovered, some of it would disappear through the back door. Certain trusted intermediaries participated in these operations and gave him a percentage of the profits. And, it being a small world, César was one of them.

  "Anyway," said Julia, who still knew nothing of Feijoo's background, "I suppose having two witnesses proves nothing. I could have sent the documents to myself."

  Feijoo merely nodded, but his eyes betrayed a greater degree of caution, as well as a new respect, which, as Julia understood later on, had a purely practical basis.

  "The truth is," he said at last, "this whole business seems very odd."

  Julia was staring into space. From her point of view, it was no longer merely odd; it was beginning to take on a sinister edge.

  "What I don't understand is who could possibly be interested in whether I got those documents or not."

  Biting his lower lip again, Feijoo took a notebook from a drawer. His moustache appeared flaccid and preoccupied. He was obviously less than enthusiastic to find himself embroiled in this matter.

  "That," he murmured, reluctantly making his first notes, "that, Señorita, is another very good question."

  She stood on the steps of the police station, aware that the uniformed man guarding the door was watching her with some curiosity. Beyond the tr
ees on the other side of the Paseo, the neoclassical façade of the Prado Museum was lit by powerful spotlights concealed in the nearby gardens, amongst the stone benches, statues and fountains. It was raining, a barely perceptible drizzle, but enough for the lights of the cars and the relentless green-to-amber-to-red of the traffic lights to be reflected on the asphalt surface of the road.

  Julia turned up the collar of her leather jacket and walked along listening to her footsteps echoing in the empty doorways. There wasn't much traffic; only now and then did the headlights of a car illuminate her from behind, casting a long, narrow shadow that stretched out ahead of her and then shifted to one side, became shorter, faltering and fitful, as the noise of the car overtook her, leaving her shadow crushed and annihilated against the wall, whilst the car, reduced to two red dots and their mirror image on the wet asphalt, disappeared.

  She stopped at a traffic light. Waiting for it to change to green, she searched the night for other greens and found them in the fleeting signs of taxis, in other winking traffic lights along the avenue, in the distant blue, green and yellow neon sign on the roof of a glass skyscraper whose topmost windows were still lit, where someone was cleaning or perhaps still working even at that late hour. The light changed to green and Julia crossed over and began looking for reds, easier to find at night in a big city. But the blue flash of a police car passing in the distance interposed itself, so far off that Julia couldn't hear the siren. Red car lights, green traffic lights, blue neon, blue flash ... that, she thought, would be the range of colours you'd need to paint this strange landscape, the right palette to execute a painting she could entitle, ironically, Nocturne, to be exhibited at the Roch Gallery even though Menchu would doubtless have to have the title explained to her. Everything would have to be in appropriately sombre tones: black night, black shadows, black fear, black solitude.

  Was she really afraid? In other circumstances, the question would have been a good topic for academic discussion, in the pleasant company of friends, in a warm, comfortable room, in front of a fire, with a bottle of wine. Fear as the unexpected factor, fear as the sudden, shattering discovery of a reality which, though only revealed at that precise moment, has always been there. Fear as the crushing end to ignorance or as the disruption of a state of grace. Fear as sin.

  However, as she walked amongst the colours of the night, Julia was quite incapable of considering her present feeling an academic question. She had, of course, experienced other minor manifestations of the same thing. The speedometer needle pushing up beyond the limit, whilst the landscape glides rapidly by to left and right and the intermittent white line down the middle of the road looks like a swift succession of tracer bullets, as in war films, being swallowed up by the voracious belly of the car. Or the sense of emptiness, of bottomless blue depths when you dive off the deck of a boat into the deep sea and swim, feeling the water slip over your bare skin and knowing with unpleasant certainty that your feet are far from any kind of terra firma. Even those intangible fears that form part of oneself during sleep and set up capricious duels between reason and the imagination, fears which a single act of will is almost always enough to reduce to memory or forgetting merely by opening one's eyes to the familiar shadows of the bedroom.

  But this new fear, which Julia had only just discovered, was different. New, unfamiliar, unknown until now, touched by the shadow of Evil with a capital E, the initial letter of everything that lies at the root of suffering and pain. The kind of Evil that was capable of turning on a shower tap over the face of a murdered man. The Evil that can only be painted in the dark colours of black night, black shadows and black solitude. Evil with a capital E, Fear with a capital F and Murder with a capital M.

  Murder. It was only a hypothesis, she said to herself as she watched her shadow. People do slip in bathtubs, fall downstairs, jump traffic lights and die. Pathologists and policemen were sometimes too clever by half; it was an occupational hazard. Yes, that was all true. But it was also true that someone had sent her Álvaro's report when he'd already been dead for twenty-four hours. That was no hypothesis; the documents were in her apartment, in a drawer. And that was real.

  She shuddered and looked behind to see if anyone was following her. And although she didn't really expect to, she did in fact see someone. It was hard to ascertain whether he was following her or not, but someone was walking along some fifty yards behind her, a silhouette illuminated at intervals as it crossed the pools of light that spilled through the leaves of the trees and blazed on the museum façade.

  Julia looked straight ahead as she continued on her way. Every muscle was filled by the imperious need to run, the feeling she had as a child when she crossed the dark entryway of her building, before bounding up the stairs and ringing the doorbell. But the logic of a mind accustomed to normality intervened. Running away simply because someone was walking in the same direction, fifty yards behind her, was not only unreasonable, but ridiculous. Even so, she thought, walking calmly along a badly lit street with, at her back, a potential assassin, however hypothetical, was not just unreasonable; it was suicidal. The debate between these ideas occupied her mind for a few moments, during which she relegated fear to a reasonable place in the middle distance and decided that her imagination might be playing tricks on her. She breathed deeply, looking back out of the corner of her eye and making fun of her own fear. And at that moment she saw that the distance between her and the stranger had grown a few yards shorter. She felt afraid again. Perhaps Álvaro really had been murdered, and it was the person who killed him who had later sent her the documents on the painting. That would establish a link between The Game of Chess, Álvaro, Julia and the presumed or possible killer. You're up to your neck in this, she said to herself, and could no longer find any reason to laugh at her own disquiet. She looked about for someone she could approach for help, or simply link arms with and ask him to take her away from there. She also considered going back to the police station, but that presented a problem: the stranger stood in her way. A taxi, perhaps. But no little green for-hire sign, no green of hope, appeared. She noticed how dry her mouth was, so dry her tongue kept sticking to the roof of her mouth. Keep calm, she told herself, keep calm, you idiot, or you really will be in trouble. And she did manage to regain some composure, just enough to start running.

  The shriek of a trumpet, heart-rending and solitary. Miles Davis on the record player and the room in darkness apart from the light shed by a small table lamp placed on the floor to illuminate the painting. The ticking of the clock on the wall and the slight metallic click each time the pendulum reached its farthest point to the right. Next to the sofa, on the carpet, was a smoking ashtray and a glass containing the last drops of ice and vodka, and on the sofa sat Julia, hugging her knees, a lock of hair falling over her face. She was looking straight ahead, her pupils dilated, staring at the painting without really seeing it, focused on some imaginary point beyond the surface, between the surface and the landscape glimpsed in the background, halfway between the two chess players and the lady sitting next to the window.

  She'd lost all notion of time, feeling the music drift slowly through her brain with the fumes from the vodka and conscious of the warmth of her bare thighs and knees against her arms. Sometimes a trumpet note would rise up amongst the shadows and she would move her head slowly from side to side, following the rhythm. Ah, trumpet, I love you. Tonight, you are my one companion, faint and nostalgic as the sadness seeping from my soul. The sound floated through the dark room and through that other brightly lit room, where the two chess players continued their game, and out through Julia's window, open to the gleam of the lamps lighting the street below. Down to where someone, in the shadow cast by a tree or a doorway, was perhaps gazing up, listening to the music emanating from that other window too, the one painted in the picture, out into the landscape of soft greens and ochres in which you could just see, painted with the finest of brushes, the minuscule grey spire of a distant belfry.

  V
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  The Mystery of the Black Lady

  I knew by now that I had visited

  his evil homeland, but I did not know

  the rules of combat.

  G. Kasparov

  IN RESPECTFUL SILENCE and perfect stillness, Octavio, Lucinda and Scaramouche were watching them with painted porcelain eyes from behind the glass of their case. César's velvet jacket was dappled with harlequin diamonds of coloured light from the stained-glass window. Julia had never seen her friend so silent and so still, so like one of the statues, in bronze, terracotta and marble, scattered here and there amongst the paintings, glass figures and tapestries in his shop. In a way, both César and Julia seemed to blend with the décor, which was more suited to the motley scenery of a baroque farce than to the real world in which they spent most of their lives. César looked especially distinguished–a dark red silk cravat at his neck, a long ivory cigarette holder between his fingers–and he had assumed, in the multicoloured light, a particularly classical, almost Goethian pose, his legs crossed, one hand resting with studied negligence over the hand holding his cigarette, his hair white and silky in the halo of red, blue and golden light pouring through the window. Julia was wearing a black blouse with a lace collar, and her Venetian profile was reflected in a large mirror along with jumbled ranks of mahogany furniture and mother-of-pearl chests, Gobelin tapestries and canvases, twisted columns supporting chipped Gothic carvings and the blank, resigned face of a naked bronze gladiator, his weapons beside him, raising himself up on one elbow while he awaited the verdict, the thumbs up or thumbs down, of some invisible, omnipotent emperor.

  "I'm frightened," Julia said, and César responded with a gesture that was half-solicitous, half-impotent, a small sign of magnanimous and futile solidarity, of a love conscious of its limitations, the kind of elegant, expressive gesture an eighteenth-century courtier might make to a lady whom he worships at the precise moment that he sees, at the end of the street along which both are being carried in a funeral cart, the shadow of the guillotine.