The Flanders Panel

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  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 Álvaro 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.

  Muñoz: 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. Muñoz 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 Álvaro'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 Muñoz. 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 Muñoz, 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.

  Muñoz 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 Muñoz 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, Muñoz 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.

  Muñoz, 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."

  Muñoz 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. Muñoz 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."

  Muñoz 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. Muñoz 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." Muñoz'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."

  "Have you come up with any hypotheses? Sometimes you give the impression that you've reached conclusions that you don't want to tell us about."

  Muñoz tilted his head a little, as he always did when confronted by a difficult question.

  "It's a bit complicated," he replied after a brief pause. "I have a couple of ideas in my head but my problem is just what I've been saying. In chess you can't prove anything until you've moved, and then it's impossible to go back."

  They started walking again, between the stone benches and the blurry hedges. Julia sighed gently.

  "If someone had told me that one day I'd be tracking a possible murderer with the help of a chessboard, I'd have said he was stark, staring mad."

  "I told you before that there are many links between chess and police work." Muñoz's hand moved chess pieces in the void. "Even before Conan Doyle, there was Poe's Dupin method."

  "Edgar Allan Poe? Don't tell me he played chess too."

  "Oh, yes, he was a very keen player. There was an automaton known as Maelzel's Player which almost never lost a game. Poe wrote an essay about it around 1830. To get to the bottom of the mystery he developed sixteen analytical approaches and concluded that there must be a man hidden inside the automaton."

  "And is that what you're doing? Looking for the hidden man?"

  "I'm trying to, but that doesn't guarantee anything. I'm not Poe."

  "I hope you succeed. It would certainly be to my advantage. You're my only hope."

  Muñoz shrugged and said nothing for a while.

  "I don't want you to get your hopes up," he said after they'd walked on a little further. "When I began playing chess, there were times when I felt sure I couldn't lose a single game. Then, in the midst of my euphoria, I was beaten, and that failure set my feet firmly back on the ground." He screwed up his eyes as if he could make out someone ahead of them in the fog. "There's always someone better than you. That's why it's useful to keep yourself in a state of healthy uncertainty."

  "I find it terrible, that uncertainty."

  "You have reason to. However fraught a game becomes, each player knows that it's a bloodless battle. After all, he consoles himself, it is only a game ... But that's not so in your case."

  "And you? Do you think he knows about your role in this?"

  Muñoz looked evasive again.

  "I don't know if he knows who I am. But he must know that there's someone capable of interpreting his moves. Otherwise, the game would make no sense."

  "I think we should pay Lola Belmonte a visit."

  "I agree."

  Julia looked at her watch.

  "Since we're near my place, why don't you come up for coffee? Menchu's staying with me, and she should be awake by now. She has a few problems."

  "Serious problems?"

  "So it seems, and last night she was behaving very strangely. I'd like you to meet her ... Especially now."

  They crossed the avenue, dazzled by car headlights.

  "If I find out that Lola Belmonte is behind this whole thing," Julia said unexpectedly, "I'll kill her with my bare hands."

  Muñoz looked at her, surprised.

  "Assuming that my theory of aggression is correct," he said, and she saw that he was observing her with new respect, "you'd make an excellent player if you ever decided to take up chess."

  "I already have taken it up," Julia replied, peering rancorously at the shadows drifting by her in the fog. "I've been playing for some time now, and I don't enjoy it one bit."

  She put her key in the security lock and turned it twice. Muñoz was waiting by her side on the landing. He'd taken off his raincoat and folded it over his arm.

  "It'll be a mess," she said. "I didn't have time to tidy up this morning."

  "Don't worry. It's the coffee that matters."

  Julia went into the studio and raised the large ceiling blind. The foggy brightness from outside slipped into the room, dusting the air with a grey light that left the farthest corners of the room in shadow.

  "Still too dark," she said and was about to switch on the light when she saw the look on Muñoz's face. With a sudden feeling of panic, she followed the direction of his gaze.

  "Where have you put the painting?" he asked.

  Julia didn't reply. She felt as though something had burst inside her, deep inside, and she stood utterly still, her eyes wide, staring at the empty easel.

  "Menchu," she murmured finally, feeling as if everything were spinning about her. "She warned me about this last night, only I couldn't see it."

  Her stomach contracted and she felt the bitter taste of bile in her mouth. Absurdly, she glanced at Muñoz and then ran towards the bathroom, but, feeling faint, stopped and leaned against the doorway of her bedroom. That was when she saw Menchu. She was l
ying on her back on the floor at the foot of the bed. The scarf that had been used to strangle her was still around her neck. Her skirt was pulled grotesquely up to her waist, and the neck of a bottle had been thrust into her vagina.

  XII

  Queen, Knight, Bishop

  I'm not playing with lifeless black and white

  pawns. I'm playing with flesh-and-blood human beings.

  E. Lasker

  THE JUDGE didn't order the body to be taken away until seven o'clock, by which time it was dark. All afternoon the house had been filled with the comings and goings of policemen and court officials, with flashlights flickering in the hallway and in the bedroom. At last, they carried Menchu out on a stretcher, zipped up inside a white plastic cover, and all that remained of her was the silhouette drawn in chalk on the floor by the indifferent hand a policeman, the one who'd been driving the blue Ford when Julia drew her pistol on him in the Rastro.

  Inspector Feijoo was the last to leave; he'd stayed on for nearly an hour to complete the statements made earlier by Julia and Muñoz, and also by César, who had come as soon as he heard the news. The policeman, who'd never been near a chessboard in his life, was patently bewildered. He kept looking at Muñoz as if at some bizarre animal, but nodded with wary gravity at the latter's technical explanations, every now and then turning to César and Julia as though wondering whether this were just some huge practical joke concocted by the three of them. Occasionally, he jotted down notes, tugged at his tie and gave another uncomprehending glance at the typewritten characters on the card found by Menchu's body. Muñoz's interpretation of the symbols had merely succeeded in giving Feijoo a splitting headache. What really interested him, apart from the oddness of the whole situation, were details about the quarrel Menchu and her boyfriend had had the previous evening. This was because–as policemen sent to investigate had reported back during thé afternoon–Máximo Olmedilla'Sánchez, twenty-eight years old, single and a male model by profession, was nowhere to be found. Furthermore, two witnesses, a taxi driver and the porter in the building opposite, had seen a young man answering his description leaving Julia's building between twelve and twelve-fifteen that day. According to the pathologist's first report, Menchu Roch had been strangled, from the front, having first been dealt a mortal blow to the throat, between eleven and twelve. The detail of the bottle in the vagina–a large bottle of Beefeater gin, almost full–to which Feijoo made repeated and extremely crude reference (revenge for all that chess nonsense his three interviewees had thrown at him), he interpreted as concrete evidence, in the sense that everything pointed to a crime of passion. After all, the murdered woman–he'd frowned and put on a suitably grave face, making it clear that people generally get what they deserve–was, as both Julia and César had just explained, not a person of irreproachable sexual morality. As to how this murder was linked to the death of Professor Ortega, the connection was obvious, given the disappearance of the painting. He ventured a few more explanations, listened attentively to the replies that Julia, Muñoz and César gave to his further questions, and finally said good-bye, after arranging to see them at the police station the following morning.