“So, Watson,” continued Holmes with a chuckle,
“is it not amusing how it sometimes happens
that to know the past, one must first
know the future?”
Raymond Smulfyan
“It’s a real game,” said Munoz. “A bit strange, but perfectly logical. Black was the last to move.”
“Are you sure?” asked Julia.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
They were in Julia’s studio, in front of the picture, which was lit by every available light in the room. Cesar was on the sofa, Julia was sitting at the table and Munoz was standing before the Van Huys, perplexed.
“Would you like a drink?”
“No.”
“A cigarette?”
“No. I don’t smoke.”
A certain embarrassment floated in the air. Munoz seemed ill at ease. He was wearing a crumpled raincoat and had kept it firmly buttoned up, as if reserving the right to leave at any moment, with no explanation. He remained shy, mistrustful. It hadn’t been easy to get him there. When Cesar and Julia first put their proposition to him, the expression on Munoz’s face had required no commentary; he took them for a couple of lunatics. Then he became suspicious, defensive. They must forgive him if he seemed rude, but this whole story about medieval murders and a game of chess painted in a picture was just too bizarre.
And even if what they told him were true, he didn’t really understand what it could possibly have to do with him. After all, he kept saying, as if that way he could establish the necessary social distinctions, he was just an accounts clerk, an office worker.
“But you play chess,” Cesar had said with his most seductive smile. They had gone across the street to a bar and were sitting next to a fruit machine that deafened them at intervals with its monotonous jingle designed to ensnare the unwary.
“So?” There was no defiance in the reply, only indifference. “So do a lot of other people. And I don’t see why I…”
“They say you’re the best.”
Munoz gave Cesar an indefinable look. Julia interpreted it as meaning: Perhaps I am, but that has nothing to do with it. Being the best has no meaning. You could be the best, just as you could be blond or have flat feet, without feeling obliged to prove it to everyone.
“If that were true,” he replied after a moment, “I’d go in for tournaments and such. But I don’t.”
“Why not?”
Munoz glanced at his empty coffee cup and then shrugged his shoulders.
“Because I don’t. You have to want to do that kind of thing. I mean, you have to want to win…” He looked at them as if he wasn’t sure whether or not they would understand what he said. “And I don’t care whether I win or not.”
“So, you’re a theoretician,” remarked Cesar, with a gravity in which Julia detected a hidden irony.
Munoz held his gaze thoughtfully, as if struggling to find a suitable reply.
“Perhaps,” he said at last. “That’s why I don’t think I would be much use to you.”
He started to get up, but was prevented by Julia’s reaching out her hand and placing it on his arm. It was only the briefest of contacts, but it was invested with anxious urgency. Later, when they were alone, Cesar, arching one eyebrow, described it as “supremely feminine, darling; the damsel asking for help, though without overstating her case, and ensuring that the bird doesn’t fly the coop.” He himself could not have done it better; except that he would have uttered a little cry of alarm not at all appropriate in the circumstances. As it was, Munoz had looked down fleetingly at the hand Julia was already withdrawing and let his eyes slide over the table and come to rest on his own hands, with their rather grubby nails, which lay quite still on either side of his cup.
“We need your help,” Julia said in a low voice. “It really is important, I can assure you, important to me and to my work.”
Munoz put his head on one side and looked at her, or, rather, at her chin, as if he feared that looking directly into her eyes would establish between them a commitment he was not prepared to make.
“I really don’t think it would interest me,” he said at last.
Julia leaned over the table.
“Think of it as a game that would be different from any game you’ve played before. A game which, this time, would be worth winning.”
Cesar was growing impatient.
“I must admit, my friend,” he said, his irritation evident in the way he kept twisting the topaz ring on his right hand, “that I find your peculiar apathy incomprehensible. Why do you bother to play chess?”
Munoz thought for a while. Then he looked straight into Cesar’s eyes.
“Perhaps,” he said calmly, “for the same reason that you are homosexual.”
It was as if an icy blast had blown over them. Julia hurriedly lit a cigarette, terrified by the tactless remark, which Munoz had uttered unemphatically and without a hint of aggression. On the contrary, he was looking at Cesar with a kind of polite attention, as if, in the course of a perfectly normal dialogue, he was awaiting the response of a worthy conversational partner. There was a complete lack of malice in that look, Julia thought, even a certain innocence, like that of a tourist who, with the ineptness of the foreigner, unwittingly offends against local custom.
Cesar merely leaned a little towards Munoz, with an interested look on his face and an amused smile on his pale, thin lips.
“My dear friend,” he said gently, “from your tone of voice and the expression on your face, I deduce that you have nothing against what your humble servant here might or might not represent. Just as, I imagine, you had nothing against the white king or against the man you were playing a short while ago at the club. Isn’t that right?”
“More or less.”
Cesar turned to Julia.
“You see, Princess? Everything’s fine; no need to be alarmed. This charming man merely wished to explain that the reason he plays chess is because the game is part of his very nature.” Cesar’s smile grew brighter, kinder. “Something deeply bound up with problems, combinations, illusions. What’s a prosaic checkmate beside all that?” He sat back in his chair and looked at Munoz, who was still observing him impassively. “I’ll tell you: Nothing.” He held out his hands palms uppermost, as if inviting Julia and Munoz to verify the truth of his words. “Isn’t that so, my friend? Just a desolate full stop, an enforced return to reality.” He wrinkled his nose. “To real life, to the routine of the commonplace and the everyday.”
Munoz remained silent for a while.
“It’s funny,” he said at last, screwing up his eyes in a suggestion of a smile that never quite reached his lips, “but I suppose that’s exactly what it is. It’s just that I’ve never heard anyone put it into words before.”
“Well, I’m delighted to be the one to initiate you into the matter,” replied Cesar, not without a certain malice, and with a little laugh that earned him a reproving look from Julia.
Munoz seemed somewhat disconcerted.
“Do you play chess too?”
Cesar gave a short laugh. He was being unbearably theatrical today, thought Julia, as he always was when he had the right audience.
“Like everyone else, I know how to move the pieces. But as a game I can take it or leave it.” He gave Munoz a look of sudden seriousness. “What I play at, my esteemed friend, and it is no small thing, is getting out of the everyday checkmates of life.” He gestured towards both of them with one delicate hand. “And like you, like everyone, I have my own little ways of getting by.”
Still confused, Munoz glanced at the door. The lighting in the bar made him look weary and accentuated the shadows under his eyes, making them appear even more deeply sunk. With his large ears, sticking out above the collar of his raincoat, his big nose and his gaunt face, he looked like a thin, ungainly dog.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s go and see this painting.”
And there they were, awaiting Munoz’s verdict. His initial discomfort at finding himself in a strange place in the presence of a pretty young woman, an antiquarian of uncertain proclivities and a painting of equivocal appearance seemed to disappear as the game of chess in the painting took hold of his attention. For the first few minutes he had studied it without saying a word, standing quite still, his hands behind his back, in exactly the same posture, thought Julia, as that adopted by the spectators at the Capablanca Club as they watched other people’s games unfold. And, of course, that was exactly what he was doing. After some time, during which no one said a word, he asked for paper and pencil, and after a further brief period of reflection, he leaned on the table in order to make a sketch of the game, looking up every now and then to check the position of the pieces.
“What century was it painted in?” he asked. He’d drawn a square on which he’d traced a grid of vertical and horizontal lines that divided it into sixty-four smaller squares.
“Late fifteenth,” said Julia.
Munoz frowned.
“Knowing the date is important. By then, the rules of chess were almost the same as they are now. But up to that point, the way some of the pieces could be moved was different. The queen, for example, used to be able to move only diagonally into a neighbouring square, and then, later on, to jump three squares. And castling was unknown until the Middle Ages.” He left his drawing for a moment to take a closer look at the painting. “If the person who worked out the game did so using modern rules, we might be able to resolve it. If not, it will be difficult.”
“It was painted in what is now Belgium,” Cesar said, “around 1470.”
“I don’t think there’ll be any problem then. Nothing insoluble at any rate.”
Julia got up from the table and went over to the painting to look at the position of the painted chess pieces.
“How do you know that Black has just moved?”
“It’s obvious. You just have to look at the position of the pieces. Or at the players.” Munoz pointed to Ferdinand of Ostenburg. “The one on the left, the one playing Black and looking towards the painter, or towards us, is more relaxed, even distracted, as if his attention were directed at the spectators rather than at the board.” He pointed to Roger de Arras. “The other man, however, is studying a move his opponent has just made. Can’t you see the concentration on his face?” He returned to his sketch. “There’s another way of checking it; in fact, it’s the method to use. It’s called retrograde analysis.”
“What kind of analysis?”
“Retrograde. It involves taking a certain position on the board as your starting point and then reconstructing the game backwards in order to work out how it got to that position. A sort of chess in reverse, if you like. It’s all done by induction. You begin with the end result and work backwards to the causes.”
“Like Sherlock Holmes,” remarked Cesar, visibly interested.
“Something like that.”
Julia had turned towards Munoz, impressed. Until now, chess had been only a game for her, a game with rules marginally more complex than those for Parcheesi or dominoes and requiring greater concentration and intelligence. But from Munoz’s reaction to the Van Huys it was evident that the planes represented in the painting: mirror, room, window – the backdrop to the moment recorded there by Pieter Van Huys, a space in which she herself had experienced the dizzying effects of the optical illusion created by the artist’s skill – presented no difficulties at all for Munoz, who knew almost nothing about the picture and hardly anything about its disquieting connotations. For him, it was a familiar space beyond time and personalities. It was a space in which he appeared to move easily, as if, by making everything else an abstraction, he was able at once to take in the position of the pieces and integrate himself into the game. The more he concentrated on The Game of Chess, the more he shed the perplexity, reticence and awkwardness he’d shown in the bar, and revealed himself as the confident, impassive player she had thought him to be when she saw him at the Capablanca Club. It was as if this shy, grey, hesitant man needed only the presence of a chessboard to recover his confidence and self-assurance.
“You mean it’s possible to play the game of chess in the painting backwards, right back to the beginning?”
Munoz made one of his noncommittal gestures.
“I don’t know about going right back to the beginning… but I imagine we could reconstruct a fair number of moves.” He looked at the painting again as if he’d just seen it in a new light and, addressing Cesar, he said: “I suppose that was exactly what the painter intended.”
“That’s what you have to find out,” replied Cesar. “The tricky question is: Who took the knight?”
“You mean the white knight,” said Munoz. “There’s only one left on the board.”
“Elementary,” said Cesar, adding with a smile, “my dear Watson.”
Munoz ignored this; humour was evidently not one of his strong points. Julia went over to the sofa and sat down next to Cesar, as enthralled as a little girl watching some thrilling performance. Munoz had finished his sketch now and he showed it to them.
“This,” he explained, “is the position of the pieces as they are in the painting.”
“As you see, I’ve given each square a coordinate, to make locating the pieces easier for you. So, seen from the perspective of the player on the right…”
“Roger de Arras,” said Julia.
“Yes, Roger de Arras. Looking at the board from that position, we number the squares on the vertical from one to eight and assign a letter, from a to h, to each of the squares on the horizontal,” he said, pointing to them with his pencil. “There are other more technical classifications, but that might just confuse you.”
“And each symbol corresponds to a chess piece?”
“That’s right. They’re conventional symbols, some black, some white. I’ve made a note, below, of what each one means.”
“That way, even if you know very little about chess, it’s easy to see that the black king, for example, is on square a4, and that on fl, for example, there’s a white bishop. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly.”
Munoz went on to show them some further symbols he’d drawn.
“Now, we’ve looked at the pieces actually on the board, but in order to analyse the game, it’s essential to know which ones are off the board too, the pieces that have already been taken.” He looked at the picture. “What’s the player on the left called?”
“Ferdinand of Ostenburg.”
“Well, Ferdinand of Ostenburg, who’s playing Black, has taken the following white pieces.”
“That is: a bishop, a knight and two pawns. For his part, Roger de Arras has taken the following pieces from his rival.”
“That’s four pawns, one rook and a bishop.” Munoz looked thoughtfully at the sketch. “When you look at the game from that point of view, White would seem to have an advantage over his opponent. But, if I’ve understood correctly, that’s not the problem. The question is who took the white knight. Clearly it must have been one of the black pieces, which may seem to be stating the obvious, but we have to go step by step here, right from the beginning.” He looked at Cesar and Julia as if what he’d said required some apology. “There’s nothing more misleading than an obvious fact. That’s a principle from logic which is equally applicable in chess: what seems obvious doesn’t always turn out to be what really happened or what is about to happen. To sum up: this means that we have to find out which of the black pieces on or off the board took the white knight.”
“Or killed him,” added Julia.
Munoz made an evasive gesture.
“That’s not my business, Senorita.”
“You can call me Julia, if you like.”
“Well, Julia, it’s still not my business.” He looked hard at the paper containing the sketch as if written on it was the script of a conversation of which he’d lost the thread. “I believe you brought me here to tell you which chess piece took the white knight. If by finding that out, the two of you are able to draw certain conclusions or decipher some hieroglyph, that’s fine.” He looked at them with more assurance, as often happened when he’d concluded a technical exegesis, as if he drew some measure of confidence from his knowledge. “That’s up to you. I’m just a chess player.”
Cesar found this reasonable.
“I can’t see anything wrong with that,” he said, looking at Julia. “He makes the moves and we interpret them. Teamwork, my dear.”
Julia was too interested in the whole problem to bother with details about method. She put her hand on Cesar’s, feeling the soft, regular beat of his pulse beneath the skin on his wrist.
“How long will it take to solve?”
Munoz scratched his ill-shaven chin.
“I don’t know. Half an hour, a week. It depends.”
“On what?”
“On a lot of things. On how well I manage to concentrate. And on luck.”
“Can you start right now?”
“Of course. I already have.”
“Go on then.”
But at that moment the phone rang, and the game of chess had to be postponed.
Much later, Julia said she’d known at once what it was about, but she herself acknowledged how easy it is to say such things a posteriori. She also said that it was then she realised how terribly complicated everything was becoming. In fact, as she soon found out, the complications had started long before, tying themselves into solid knots, although at that point the most unpleasant aspects of the affair had not yet emerged. To be strictly accurate, it could be said that the complications began in 1469, when that man with a crossbow, an obscure pawn whose name is lost to posterity, positioned himself by the moat of Ostenburg Castle to wait, with the patience of a hunter, for the man to pass whose death had been bought with the gold coins jingling in his pocket.
At first the policeman didn’t seem too unpleasant, given the circumstances and given that he was a policeman, although the fact that he belonged to the Art Investigation Squad didn’t seem to mark him out much from his colleagues. His professional relationship with the world in which he worked had left him with, at most, a certain affectation in the way he said “Good morning” or “Sit down”, and in the way he knotted his tie. He spoke very slowly and unemphatically and kept nodding unnecessarily. Julia could not decide if it was a professional tic intended to inspire confidence or was part of the pretence that he knew exactly what was going on. He was short and fat, sported a strange Mexican-style moustache and was dressed entirely in brown. As regards art, Inspector Feijoo considered himself, modestly, to be an enthusiast: he was a collector of antique knives.
Julia learned all this in an office in the police station on Paseo del Prado after Feijoo’s description of some of the details of Alvaro’s death. The fact that Professor Ortega had been found in his bathtub with a broken neck, presumably from slipping while taking a shower, was most regrettable. The body had been discovered by the cleaner. But the distressing part – and Feijoo weighed his words carefully before giving Julia a sorrowful look, as if inviting her to consider the tragedy of the human condition – was that the forensic examination had revealed certain disquieting details, and it was impossible to determine with any exactitude whether the death had been accidental or provoked. In other words, there was the possibility – the Inspector repeated the word “possibility” twice – that the fracture at the base of the skull had been caused by a blow from a solid object other than the edge of the bathtub.
“You mean,” Julia said, leaning on the table, “that someone might have killed him while he was taking a shower?”
The policeman adopted an expression doubtless intended to dissuade her from going too far.
“I only mention that as a possibility. The initial inspection and the first autopsy, generally speaking, confirm the theory of accidental death.”
“Generally speaking? What are you trying to say?”
“I’m trying to tell you the facts. There are certain details, such as the type of fracture, the position of the body – technical details I would prefer not to go into – which give rise to some perplexity, to certain reasonable doubts.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I’m almost inclined to agree with you,” he said, the Mexican moustache taking on the form of a sympathetic circumflex. “But if those doubts were confirmed, the situation would look very different: Professor Ortega would have been killed by a blow to the back of the neck. Then, after undressing him, someone could have put him under the shower and turned on the taps, to make it look like an accident. A new forensic study is being carried out to look into the possibility that the dead man was struck twice, not once; a first blow to knock him out and a second to make sure he was dead.” He sat back in his chair, folded his hands and looked at her placidly. “Naturally, that’s only a hypothesis.”
Julia stared at him, like someone who believes herself to be the butt of a practical joke. She couldn’t take in what she’d heard; she was unable to establish a link between Alvaro and what Feijoo was suggesting. A voice deep inside her was whispering that this was obviously a case of the wrong roles being given to the wrong people; he must be talking about someone else entirely. It was absurd to imagine Alvaro, the Alvaro she had known, murdered, like a rabbit, by a blow to the back of the neck, lying naked, his eyes wide open, beneath a shower of icy water. It was stupid, grotesque.
“Let’s assume for a moment,” she said, “that the death wasn’t accidental. Who would have wanted to kill him?”
“That, as they say in the films, is a very good question.” The policeman bit his lower lip in a gesture of professional caution. “To be honest, I haven’t the slightest idea.” He paused and adopted an air intended to convey that he was placing all his cards on the table. “In fact, I’m relying 0n your help to clear up the matter.”
“On my help? Why?”
The Inspector looked Julia up and down with deliberate slowness. He was no longer being nice, and his look revealed a certain crude self-interest, as if he were trying to establish some kind of obscure complicity between them.
“You had a relationship with the dead man… Forgive me, but mine is an unpleasant job,” he said, although, judging by the self-satisfied smile that appeared beneath the moustache, he didn’t seem to be finding his job particularly unpleasant. He put his hand in his pocket and drew out a box of matches bearing the name of a four-star restaurant and, with a gesture intended to be gallant, lit the cigarette Julia had just placed between her lips. “I mean an… um… affair. Is that correct?”
“That’s correct.” Julia exhaled, half-closing her eyes, embarrassed and angry. An affair, the policeman had just said, summing up with great simplicity a piece of her life whose scars were still raw. And no doubt, she thought, that fat, vulgar man, with his ridiculous moustache, was weighing up the quality of the goods. The victim’s girlfriend’s a nice bit of stuff, he’d tell his colleagues when he went down to the canteen for a beer. I wouldn’t mind doing her the odd favour.
But she was more concerned about other aspects of her situation. Alvaro was dead, possibly murdered. Absurd as it might seem, she was in a police station, and there were too many unknowns. And not understanding certain things could prove dangerous.
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… um… 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 Alvaro 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 Alvaro.”
“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, Senorita. 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, Alvaro 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 Alvaro 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 Cesar Ortiz de Pozas.”
The policeman seemed genuinely surprised.
“Don Cesar? 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 Cesar 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 Cesar, 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, Cesar 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, Senorita, 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 trees on the other side of the Paseo, the neoclassical facade 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’t)v half; it was an occupational hazard. Yes, that was all true. But it was also true that someone had sent her Alvaro’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 facade.
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 Alvaro 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, Alvaro, 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.