Checkmate in Amber

by Matilde Asensi

  The crescent moon was still a beautiful sight, reflecting off the waters of the Bodensee - Lake Constance - as I crossed the bumpy tarmac of the Friedrichshafen highway. Heinz breathed a huge sigh of relief when he saw me, like a boy whose parents had forgotten to pick him up at the school gates but had eventually come to their senses. I was sorry to say goodbye to him at Zürich airport a few hours later, once he had given me the small package I had promised to bring back for Amália and Cavalo. He was a genuinely nice guy, that Läufer kid.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I didn’t give the strange glue-paste lining another thought until the next Sunday afternoon, when I went to the Santa María de Miranda monastery to deposit the Krylov canvas in my dungeon. I was just about to leave the cell, with my aunt waiting for me impatiently by the doorway, when what I had found during the robbery suddenly came back to me.

  After a second or two of complete indecision, during which I seriously considered the possibility of just leaving things be and not touching a thing, I made up my mind to stay put and look into it. I went back to where I had stacked the carry tube and pulled out the rolled canvas. The addition of the lining made it unusually thick and, feeling along it carefully with my fingers, I noticed that the two fabrics were not stuck together throughout, but in fact moved against each other freely, like a handbag with its lining. A closer examination made it clear that they were only joined at the edges, and not very consistently at that. It seemed to me that if I just tugged lightly on one of the lining’s corners, the whole thing would come off in my hands with no effort at all. But I couldn’t decide whether to do it or not. I was worried about damaging Krylov’s original and provoking some kind of conflict with our Russian client. So I rolled it up again, put it into its carry tube, and drove back home going over all the pros and cons.

  It just didn’t make any sense. The more I thought about it over dinner, the less I understood why anyone would bother to mend a canvas which was in perfect condition. I kept turning it over in my head, couldn’t get to sleep and, in the end, I got back out of bed halfway through the night, walked into my study and sent Roi a message. I needed him to know what I had found and to give me a nice and simple explanation which would finally stop me fretting about it.

  First thing in the morning, Roi’s reply dropped into my in-tray. He had talked it over with Donna and she, being the expert on these matters, had recommended removing the lining, for two basic reasons. One, because the mere existence of this reinforcement was intrinsically absurd, just as I’d thought, and two, because its sheer absurdity might well make our Russian client suspicious. If it was an amateurish mistake, its removal wouldn’t lower the value of the painting. If anything, it would raise it.

  So I got back in my car and returned to the monastery. My aunt was more than surprised to see me again so soon.

  ‘What are you doing here at this time in the morning?’ she asked me disapprovingly. Despite everything, she was my aunt and I loved her dearly, so I sweetly explained myself.

  ‘I just need to take another look at the stuff I brought over yesterday.’

  ‘Well, don’t expect me to come with you this time, Ana María. In five minutes’ time I have to lead morning prayers.’

  ‘That’s fine - you don’t always have to stay with me when I come here, Tía,’ I replied, delighted. ‘I know the way there like the back of my hand.’

  ‘Very well then,’ she snapped back. ‘If you don’t need me, so much the better for the both of us. Here is the key. Don’t even think about leaving without returning it to me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of walking off with it. I know you’d throw a fit if I did,’ I said and planted a loving kiss on each cheek. Juana was so surprised by this that she just stared at me in confusion for a couple of seconds, not knowing quite how to respond. Then, with supreme dignity, she turned sharply round and strode off towards the church.

  On my way, I greeted various Sisters as they rushed past me, already late for their Liturgy of Lauds. I really did enjoy walking around the monastery on my own, so fresh and so clean, and reeking of history. I wondered how many nuns like these had hurried through these cloisters late for prayers at exactly this time of day - century after century after century. What an extraordinary way of life. But the monastery’s sheer beauty still wasn’t enough to make me understand why someone would choose to lock herself up there and forever turn her back on everything that was great (and awful) outside its walls.

  My hands trembled as I opened up the door of the dungeon, and I had to take a few deep breaths to bring down my heart rate. Crazy, when you think about it. On genuinely dangerous jobs, even at their riskiest moments, my heartbeat stayed absolutely calm and constant, reflecting and reinforcing the sheer cool I needed to make sure that I made the right decisions from start to finish. But here I was, just about to pull one simple bit of fabric off another, and I was as excited and nervous as a kitten.

  On the sixteenth-century Italian walnut table with its pad feet, I spread out a roll of baking paper and the length of muslin, and carefully placed the Krylov canvas face down on top of them. Then, with some Q-Tips dipped in water and a small palette knife, and as quickly as the resinous paste sticking them together allowed me, I began to separate the two fabrics. Even before I finished the job, which took me about ten minutes, it was already obvious that the lining which had cost me a night’s sleep was actually another painting. When I finally finished separating the two and lifted up what had been disguised as just a straightforward repair job, what I saw was a completely different artwork with nothing at all in common with Krylov’s Muzhiks. The light in the dungeon being far too dim for me to take a good look at it, I hurried out into the cloisters looking for daylight, so distracted and focused on the task in hand that I didn’t even think to check whether or not there might an absent-minded nun on the loose. I would have made a strange sight, quick-stepping my way out of the cell, my arms stretched out wide as if crucified, holding the painting open before me.

  An old man with a long beard and a hateful expression on his face, waste-deep in sludge at the bottom of what looked like a well, had his head raised and was staring up in fury, as he was being hauled up by the thick roping tied around his chest. It was a sinister and gloomy scene, crudely composed and pretty badly executed - the work of a clumsy amateur. At the top of the picture, inside an oval-shaped scrolled cartouche, there was an inscription in Hebrew which I couldn’t decipher, and at the bottom right the artist’s name, Erich Koch, and the date, 1949. How strange that somebody had bothered to stick this monstrosity on the back of a work like Krylov’s Muzhiks. Luckily, I had brought my camera with me, and I took a few shots from different angles to send on to Roi.

  I put the Krylov back in the carry tube and placed my strange find in another one that was lying around in the dungeon. I was keen to get home right away so that I could tell the Group about my exploits. ‘Mystery solved,’ I congratulated myself.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  As soon as I got back to my place, I emailed Roi the photos. At ten in the evening, having endlessly checked my inbox every twenty minutes, I stopped waiting for Prince Philibert to show signs of life, switched off the computer and went to have dinner with Ezequiela. She had a weird and unreadable look on her face, but prattled on as usual all through the meal, bringing me up to date on all the village news and gossip. Once we had finished clearing the table, I cut her off in mid-sentence and went to my bedroom. I really felt like curling up in bed with a book - and Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night was calling to me seductively from my bedside table.

  But Ezequiela, it seemed, hadn’t quite managed to get everything off her chest. She suddenly appeared in my doorway with a huge mug of hot milk, which for her was excuse enough to walk straight in and plant herself on the end of my bed.

  ‘Now listen, my dear. I’m about to say something to you that I’ve never said before,’ she began, which immediately set my alarm bells ringing.


  ‘Fine, so don’t start now. I’m sure I’ll manage to survive in happy ignorance.’

  ‘Don’t be so stubborn!’

  I gave in with a sigh.

  ‘OK, fire away then,’ I said, arranging my bedclothes and putting my book aside reluctantly.

  ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s high time that you got married and settled down.’

  ‘Enough! Not another single word!’ I yelled at her, springing up onto my knees and waving my 450-page book in her face. ‘You can go now! Goodnight!’

  ‘Ana María, hold your tongue!’ she yelled back.

  Predictably, I ignored her instructions completely.

  ‘Do you honestly think it’s normal for us to be going at it hammer and tongs at this time of night? The neighbors’ll think we’ve gone crazy!’

  ‘You’re the only one shouting here,’ she complained, turning down the volume suddenly and putting on her deeply-hurt-little-old-lady voice.

  ‘Yeah, sure. You weren’t shouting at all, were you now?’

  ‘Me? Shouting?’ she said with surprise. ‘Certainly not!’

  ‘Ezequiela, you’re driving me crazy here, I swear to God.’

  ‘If you took the trouble to listen, instead of answering back all the time,’ she replied in a dignified and authoritative tone of voice, while smoothing out a non-existent crease from the pillow with the palm of her hand, ‘we wouldn’t always have to end up like this.’

  That was it. I’d had enough.

  ‘Where the hell do you expect us to get to? You walk in here with a hot milk, and suddenly I’m in the middle of the Trojan War.’

  ‘All I wanted to do was have a little talk with you about your biological clock.’

  ‘You’re watching too much television,’ I growled. ‘Biological clock! Where on earth did you pick that one up from?’

  ‘Let me remind you, my dear - you’re about to reach your thirty-fourth birthday. Before you know it, you will no longer be able to have children.’

  ‘Let me remind you: Rosario, my gynecologist, had her first child when she was forty.’

  ‘Oh I see. You have to copy everything your gynecologist does. Very smart.’

  I stopped and took a good look at her for a few moments. There was something going on here that didn’t quite make sense to me. Her chubby receding chin was trembling very slightly and her wetly shining eyes were the give-away. She was on the verge of crying. Without thinking, I reached out to take hold of her hand which was resting on the bedcover.

  ‘What are you really trying to tell me, Ezequiela? What’s up with you? It’s just not like you to come and start yapping about weddings.’

  She gave a deep sigh and slowly met my eyes.

  ‘Next week, it’s my seventieth birthday.’

  ‘I know, sweetheart. On Wednesday.’

  ‘How on earth will you cope when I’m not here anymore?’

  Now we’d got to the heart of the matter.

  ‘Oh come on, Ezequiela, please!’

  She looked at me for a long while with reproachful eyes.

  ‘You have nobody else but me! When I die, you’ll be utterly alone. You don’t even like dogs!’

  ‘Well, I have got Juana,’ I said, and instantly regretted having said it.

  ‘Juana! Hah!’ she spat contemptuously. ‘That …! Do you really not understand? Your aunt is shut up inside that convent, by her own choice. When I’m gone, you’ll be left completely alone in this huge old house with no-one at all to look after you!’ Her tears began to fall and pool in the folds and wrinkles of her face. ‘That’s what scares me most. You have nothing, Ana María, nothing. If only you had a child. God knows I would rather you married a respectable man and properly, in church. But if that’s not what you want, if you don’t want to be tied down to somebody, for goodness’ sake have a child! That’s what I really want as a birthday present.’

  ‘What? You want me to give birth in less than a week?’ I was scandalized. Ezequiela smiled back at me.

  ‘You know what I mean, girl.’

  ‘Look, the one thing I’m sure of is that you’ve still got plenty of years ahead of you and you’re certainly not about to die on your birthday. And can you imagine what they’d say in Ávila if the last Galdeano girl got herself pregnant by some fly-by-night?’

  ‘Let them say what they want! They’ll soon get bored of it.’

  ‘I never realized you were quite so avant-garde.’

  ‘I’m not, not at all,’ she declared emphatically, drying her face with the back of her sleeve. ‘But I cannot bear the idea of you all alone. Promise me that you’ll give it some thought.’

  ‘I will, I promise you. Happy now?’

  ‘Promise me again - and this time look at me in the eyes when you say it.’

  ‘Oh come on, Ezequiela, give me a break here! Can you really see me looking after a baby? Do you really think that being a mother is in my nature? I’ve got no maternal instinct at all, and not the slightest urge to reproduce myself.’

  ‘Promise me.’

  ‘Jesus!’ I shouted out, raising my arms in exasperation. ‘What did I do to deserve all this nagging?’

  ‘Ana María!’

  ‘OK, OK, you got me … I promise,’ I said, looking her in the eyes. ‘I promise that I will give serious thought to the prospect of having a child.’

  Ezequiela smiled triumphantly, just like a small girl who had stamped her feet and thrown tantrum after tantrum until she had ended up getting exactly what she wanted.

  ‘Good girl, well done,’ she declared, stroking my hand. ‘Now you can go back to your book.’

  She got up off the bed, with her satisfied smile still plastered across her face. After making the sign of the cross on my forehead with her right thumb, she gave me a gentle kiss and left the room, quietly closing the door behind her.

  I didn’t have the slightest intention of keeping my promise, but at least I’d got Ezequiela off my back for a while. There was no doubt in my mind at all that she’d come at me again on the subject like a light cavalry flying column, but that was a few more months away now.

  I had terrible nightmares that night, all jam-packed with pudgy drooling babies, like a TV diaper commercial gone viral. They all had rosy skin and curly blonde hair, like little angels. Another problem was that they were all blue-eyed, just like Tía Juana, and in the Galdeano family, nobody had ever had blue eyes. The result, of course, was that I woke up the next day exhausted and in a pretty bad mood, a situation which Ezequiela resolved with her customary skill, by keeping out of my sight and disappearing into some far-flung corner of the house.

  Fastening up the cord of my dressing-gown and yawning until my jaws clicked, I wandered into the study and turned on my computer. Warm sunlight shone in through the windows, and the strong smell of fresh coffee drew me unresisting into the kitchen, while my desktop booted up and began checking my mail. I poured myself a cup and added just a touch of milk and sugar.

  By the time I sat down in front of the screen, Läufer’s decoding algorithm had already put the message I was waiting for in clear: ‘- IRC, #Chess, 09:30h, pass: Govinda. Roi -’. Automatically, I glanced at my watch. It was eight-thirty in the morning. I still had time to go for a run, so I threw on a T-shirt, put on my sweatpants and training shoes and hit the street. With the fresh morning air bringing me to life, I left the walled city through the gate by the church of San Vicente and headed left towards the Adaja Bridge. I still didn’t feel tired, although the deafening noise of traffic was starting to bother me, not to mention the sky clouding over and going greyer by the minute. I reached the Cuatro Postes monument - where it was said that Saint Teresa had been detained as a girl, to prevent her escape into Moorish territory to the south, searching for martyrdom. I stopped there for a moment, still jogging up and down to keep my rhythm going, and took a last look at the view over the city from on high, before heading back the way I came and re-entering the old town through the gate on Calle Conde Don Ram�
�n.

  At the appointed time, all wrapped up in my bathrobe and still drying my hair with a towel, I sat myself down at my desk again and connected to IRC. Once on the Undernet, I routed and re-routed my way around the world as usual, changing my ID as I went. This time my redirect mode sent me through Pensacola and Singapore, and I arrived at #Chess with all my phony data in Mandarin Chinese. I had to reconfigure my keyboard so that I could type in ‘Govinda’ without freezing the PC. As ever, there was Roi, already waiting for the rest of us.

  ‘Good morning, Peón. You slept well, I hope.’

  Just remembering the horde of blue-eyed toddlers that had plagued my dreams sent a shiver down my spine.

  ‘Good morning, Roi. No, as a matter of fact I had a terrible night. Are we all getting together or is it just the two of us?’

  ‘All of us except our broker, Rook. He is already hard at work in the City.’

  The European stock exchanges had recently crashed in one of the worst financial crises in history. So Rook was working overtime trying to recover his losses. But what with runaway Japanese deflation, the devaluation of the Russian rouble and the weakness of the economic recovery in Latin America, most of the big hitters were still reluctant to put their money back into the market.

  ‘So tell me: how is your aunt?’ Roi asked me, rapidly changing the subject. Rook - our Castle - was Roi’s stockbroker in the UK and thinking about the crisis probably put him into a cold sweat.

  ‘The same as ever. Ruling her monastery with a rod of iron.’

  ‘What a fine woman,’ he said, an admiring note in his voice. I had always suspected that something had gone on between Juana and Roi in the past, but unfortunately I’d never been able to confirm my suspicions. ‘Give her a big hug from me next time you see her.’

  ‘I will, I promise.’

  The others soon began to appear online and the meeting quickly got underway. Cavalo and Läufer greeted me warmly and congratulated me on my German success. Läufer was hell-bent on giving everybody a step-by-step account of my ‘brilliant performance’, but luckily Roi stepped in and firmly called him to order. Heinz’s keyboard was still out of whack, of course, and he happily deafened us with his shouting.