The Flanders Panel (21 page)

“So that’s what it was all about,” he said in a low voice, matching his step to Julia’s.

“Yes.” She was walking along with her head bent, absorbed in thought. Taking her hand out of the pocket of her leather jacket she brushed her hair from her face. “Now you know the whole story. You have every right to, I suppose. You’ve earned it.”

He looked straight ahead, reflecting on that recently acquired right.

“I see,” he murmured.

They walked unhurriedly, side by side. It was cold. The narrower, more enclosed streets still lay in darkness and the light from the street lamps illuminated only segments of the wet asphalt, making it gleam like fresh varnish. Gradually the shadows grew less intense as a leaden dawn broke slowly at the far end of the avenue where the outlines of the buildings, silhouetted against the light, were shading from black into grey.

“Is there any particular reason,” asked Munoz, “why you’ve kept this part of the story from me until now?”

She looked at him out of the corner of her eye before replying. He seemed interested, in a vague way, but not offended. He was gazing absently at the empty street ahead of them, his hands in his raincoat pockets and his collar turned up.

“I thought you might prefer not to get involved.”

“I see.”

As they turned the corner they were greeted by a noisily churning refuse collector, and Munoz helped her squeeze past the empty bins.

“What do you think you’ll do now?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Finish the restoration work, I suppose. And write a long report about its history. Thanks to you, I might even get to be a bit famous.”

Munoz was listening distractedly, as if his thoughts were elsewhere.

“What’s happening with the police investigation?”

“Assuming there was a murderer, they’ll find him eventually. They always do.”

“Do you suspect anyone?”

Julia burst out laughing.

“Good heavens, no!” She frowned as she considered the possibility. “At least I hope not.” She looked at Munoz. “I imagine that investigating a crime that might not be a crime is very like what you did with the picture.”

Munoz’s lips curved into a half-smile.

“It’s all a question of logic, I suppose,” he replied. “And that might be something that’s common to both chess players and detectives.” Julia couldn’t tell if he was serious or only joking. “Apparently Sherlock Holmes played chess.”

“Do you read detective novels?”

“No. Although the books I do read are somewhat like that.”

“What for example?”

“Books on chess, of course. As well as books on mathematical puzzles, logic problems, things like that.”

They crossed the deserted avenue. When they reached the opposite pavement, Julia gave her companion another furtive glance. He didn’t look like a man of extraordinary intelligence, and she doubted that things had gone well for him in life. Walking along with his hands in his pockets, his rumpled shirt collar showing and his large ears protruding above his old raincoat, he looked exactly like what he was, an obscure office worker, whose only escape from mediocrity was what chess offered him, a world of combinations, problems and solutions. The oddest thing about him was the gleam in his eyes that was quite simply extinguished the moment he looked away from a chessboard, and his way of bowing his head as if he had a heavy weight on the back of his neck, tilting his head forwards, perhaps to allow the outside world to slip by without encroaching on him any more than was absolutely necessary. He reminded her a little of the pictures of prisoners of war she’d seen in old documentaries, trudging along with their heads down. He had the unmistakable air of someone defeated before the battle has even started, of someone who, when he opens his eyes each morning, awakens only to failure.

Yet there was something else. When Munoz was explaining a move, following the twisted thread of the plot, there was in him a fleeting spark of something solid, even brilliant. As if, appearances to the contrary, there was in him the pulse of some extraordinary talent, logical, mathematical or whatever, that lent a certain assurance and undeniable authority to his words and gestures.

She realised that she knew nothing about him except that he played chess and was an accounts clerk. But it was too late now to get to know him better. His task was over and they would be unlikely to meet again.

“We’ve had an odd sort of relationship,” she said.

“In chess terms, it’s been a perfectly normal relationship,” he replied. “Two people, you and me, brought together for the duration of a game.” He smiled again in that diffuse way that meant nothing. “Call me if you ever want another game.”

“You baffle me,” she said spontaneously, “you really do.”

He looked at her, surprised, not smiling any more.

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I.” Julia hesitated slightly, unsure of her ground. “You seem to be two different people, so shy and withdrawn sometimes, with a kind of touching awkwardness. But as soon as anything to do with chess comes up, you’re astonishingly assured.”

“So?” His face inexpressive, Munoz seemed to be waiting for the rest of her argument.

“Well, that’s it really,” she stammered, a bit embarrassed by her lack of discretion. “I suppose all this is slightly absurd at this hour of the morning. I’m sorry.”

He had a prominent Adam’s apple, visible above the unbuttoned neck of his shirt, and he was in need of a good shave. His head was tilted slightly to the left, as if he were considering what she’d just said. But he didn’t seem in the least bewildered.

“I see,” he said, and made a movement with his chin as if to indicate that he had understood, although Julia was unable to establish exactly what he had understood. He looked past her as if hoping that someone would approach, bringing a forgotten word. And then he did something that Julia would always remember with astonishment. Right there, in half a dozen phrases, uttered as dispassionately and coldly as if he were discussing some third party, he summarised his whole life for her, or that’s what Julia thought he did, without pauses or inflections and with the same precision he employed when commenting on moves in a chess game. And only when he’d finished and fallen silent did the vague smile return to his lips, in apparent gentle mockery of himself, of the man he had just described and for whom, deep down, he felt neither compassion nor disdain, only a kind of disillusioned, sympathetic solidarity.

Julia just stood there, not knowing what to say, asking herself how the devil a man of so few words had been capable of explaining everything about himself so clearly. She had learned of a child who used to play chess in his head, staring up at his bedroom ceiling, whenever his father punished him for neglecting his studies; and about women capable of dissecting, with the meticulous skill of a watchmaker, the inner mechanisms that drive a man; and of the solitude that came in the wake of failure and the absence of hope. Julia had no time to take it in, and at the end, which was almost the beginning, she wasn’t sure how much of it he’d actually told her and how much of it she’d imagined for herself, supposing that Munoz had done anything more than just bow his head and smile like a weary gladiator, indifferent about the direction, up or down, of the thumb that would decide his fate. When he stopped talking - if, that is, he ever really spoke - and the grey light of dawn lit half his face, Julia knew with total clarity just what that small area of sixty-four black and white squares meant to this man: a miniature battlefield on which was played out the mystery of life itself, of success and failure, of the terrible, hidden forces that rule the fates of men.

She understood this, as well as the meaning of that smile that never quite settled on his lips. She slowly bowed her head, while he looked up at the sky and remarked how cold it was. She offered her pack of cigarettes; he accepted, and that was the first and almost the last time she saw Munoz smoke. They walked on until they reached Julia’s building. At that point it seemed that Munoz would depart for good. He held out his hand to shake hers and say good-bye, but Julia had seen a small envelope, about the size of a visiting card, stuck in the little grid next to her bell. When she opened it and looked at the card it contained, she knew that Munoz could not leave, not just yet, that a few other things, none of them good, would have to happen before they could let him do so.

“I don’t like it,” said Cesar, and Julia noticed that the fingers holding his ivory cigarette holder were trembling slightly. “I really don’t like the idea that there’s some madman out there, playing at being the Phantom of the Opera.”

As if those words were a signal, all the clocks in the shop started to chime, one after the other or simultaneously, in tones that varied from a gentle murmur to the grave bass of the heavy wall clocks. But the coincidence failed to make Julia smile. She looked at the Bustelli figure of Lucinda, absolutely still inside the glass case, and felt as fragile as it looked.

“I don’t like it either. But I’m not sure we have any choice.”

She looked away from the porcelain figure and across at the Regency table on which Munoz had set out his pocket chess set, once again reproducing the positions of the pieces in Van Huys’s chess game.

“If I ever get my hands on the swine…” Cesar muttered, casting a distrustful eye at the card Munoz was holding by one corner, as if it were a pawn he was not yet sure where to place. “It’s beyond a joke.”

“It’s no joke,” said Julia. “Have you forgotten about poor Alvaro?”

“Forgotten him?” Cesar put the cigarette holder to his lips and blew out smoke in short, nervous puffs. “I wish I could!”

“And yet,” said Munoz, “it does make sense.”

They looked at him. Munoz, unaware of the effect of his words, remained leaning on the table over the chessboard, with the card between his fingers. He hadn’t taken his raincoat off, and the light coming through the stained-glass window lent a blue tone to his unshaven chin and emphasised the dark circles under his weary eyes.

“My friend,” said Cesar, in a tone that was somewhere between polite incredulity and ironic respect, “I’m glad
you
can make some sense out of all this.”

Munoz shrugged, ignoring Cesar’s comment. He was clearly concentrating on the new problem, on the hieroglyphics on the small card:

Rb3?… Pd7 - d5+

Munoz looked at them for a moment longer, comparing them with the position of the pieces on the board.

“It seems that someone” - and with that word “someone” Julia shivered, as if, nearby, an invisible door had been opened - “is interested in the game of chess being played in the picture.” He half-closed his eyes and nodded, as though in some obscure way he could intuit the motives of the mystery player. “Whoever he is, he knows the state of the game and knows too, or thinks he does, that we’ve successfully solved its secret by means of retrograde analysis. Because he proposes playing on, continuing the game from the current position of the pieces as they stand in the picture.”

“You’re joking,” said Cesar.

There was an uncomfortable silence, during which Munoz glared at Cesar.

“I never joke,” he said at last, as if he’d been considering whether or not this was worth explaining. “And certainly not about chess.” He flicked the card with his index finger. “That, I can assure you, is exactly what he’s doing: continuing the game from the point where the painter left off. Look at the board.”

“See,” said Munoz, pointing to the card. “That Rb3 means that White should move the rook currently on b5 to b3. I take the question mark to mean that he’s suggesting we make this move. So we can deduce from that that we’re playing White and our opponent is Black.”

“How appropriate,” remarked Cesar. “Suitably sinister.”

“I don’t know whether it’s sinister or not, but it’s what he’s doing. He’s saying to us: ‘I’m playing Black and I’m inviting you to move that took to b3.” Do you understand? If we agree to play, we have to move as he suggests, although we could choose a better move. For example, we could take that black pawn on b7 with the white pawn on a6. Or

the white rook on b6…“ He stopped, absorbed, his mind plunged automatically into considering the various possibilities offered by the move he’d just mentioned. Then he blinked and returned with a visible effort to the real situation. ”Our opponent takes it as read that we accept his challenge and that we’ve moved our white rook to b3, to protect our white king from a possible sideways move to the left by the black queen and, at the same time, with that rook backed up by the other rook and the white knight, threatening the black king on a4 with check. I deduce from this that he likes taking risks.“

Julia, who was following Munoz’s explanations on the board, felt sure she detected in his words a hint of admiration for the unknown player.

“What makes you say that? How can you know what he does or doesn’t like?”

Munoz shrugged and bit his lower lip.

“I don’t know,” he replied after a brief hesitation. “Even‘ person plays chess according to who he is. I believe I explained that once before.” He placed the card on the table next to the chessboard. “
Pd7 - d5+
means that Black now chooses to play by advancing the pawn he has on d7 to d5, thus threatening the white king with check. That little cross next to the figure means check. In other words, we’re in danger.