The Flanders Panel

“It’s no coincidence,” she said, picking up a powerful magnifying glass before going over to the painting. “If the knight Van Huys painted in 1462 accompanied by the Devil is Roger de Arras, that means that, nine years later, the artist chose the theme of his coat of arms as the main clue in a painting in which, supposedly, he represented his death, given the floor of the room in which he placed his subjects is chequered in black and white. That, as well as the symbolic nature of the painting, confirms that the chess player in the centre is Roger de Arras. And the whole plot does, indeed, revolve around chess.”

She knelt down in front of the painting and peered through the magnifying glass at the chess pieces on the board and on the table. She also looked carefully at the round convex mirror on the wall in the upper left-hand corner of the painting, which reflected the board and the foreshortened figures of both players, distorted by perspective.

“Cesar.”

“Yes, love.”

“How many pieces are there in a game of chess?”

“Urn… two times eight, so that’s sixteen of each colour, which, if I’m not mistaken, makes thirty-two.”

Julia counted with one finger.

“The thirty-two pieces are all there. You can see them really clearly: pawns, kings, queens and knights… Some on the board, others on the table.”

“Those will be the pieces that have already been taken.” Cesar had knelt down by her and was pointing to one of the pieces not on the board, the one Ferdinand of Ostenburg was holding between his fingers. “One knight’s been taken; only one. A white knight. The other three, one white and two black, are still in the game. So the Quis necavit equitem must refer to that one.”

“But who took it?”

Cesar frowned.

“That, my dear, is the crux of the matter,” he said, smiling exactly as he used to when she was a little girl sitting on his knee. “We’ve already found out a lot of things: who plucked the chicken and who cooked it. But we still don’t know who the villain was who ate it.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“I don’t always have brilliant answers to hand.”

“You used to.”

“Ah, but then I could lie.” He looked at her tenderly. “You’ve grown up now and are not so easily deceived.”

Julia put a hand on his shoulder, as she used to when, fifteen years before, she’d ask him to invent for her the story of a painting or a piece of porcelain. There was an echo of childish supplication in her voice.

“But I need to know, Cesar.”

“The auction’s in less than two months,” said Menchu. “There’s not much time.”

“To hell with the auction,” said Julia. She was looking at Cesar as if he held the solution in his hands. Cesar gave another slow sigh and brushed lightly at the carpet before sitting down on it, folding his hands on his knees. His brow was furrowed and he was biting the tip of his tongue, as he always did when he was thinking hard.

“We have some clues to begin with,” he said after a while. “But having the clues isn’t enough; what’s important is how we use them.” He looked at the convex mirror in the painting, in which both the players and the board were reflected. “We’re used to believing that any object and its mirror image contain the same reality, but it’s not true.” He pointed at the painted mirror. “See? We can tell at a glance that the image has been reversed. The meaning of the game on the chessboard is also reversed, and that’s how it appears in the mirror as well.”

“You’re giving me a terrible headache,” moaned Menchu. “This is all too complex for my feeble encephalogram. I’m going to get myself a drink.” She poured herself a generous measure of Julia’s vodka, but before picking up the glass, she took out of her pocket a smooth polished piece of onyx, a silver tube and a small box, and set about preparing a thin line of cocaine. “The pharmacy’s open. Anyone interested?”

No one answered. Cesar seemed absorbed in the painting, indifferent to everything else, and Julia merely gave a disapproving frown. With a shrug, Menchu bent over and took two short, sharp sniffs. She was smiling when she stood up, and the blue of her eyes seemed more luminous and absent.

Cesar moved closer to the Van Huys, taking Julia by the arm, as if advising her to ignore Menchu.

“We’ve already fallen into the trap,” he said, as if only he and Julia were in the room, “of thinking that one thing in the picture could be real, whereas another might not be. The people and the board appear in the picture twice, once in a way that is somehow less real than the other. Do you understand? Accepting that fact forces us to place ourselves inside the room, to blur the boundaries between what is real and what is painted. The only way of avoiding that would be to distance ourselves enough to see only areas of colour and chessmen. But there are too many inversions in between.”

Julia looked at the painting and then, turning round, pointed to the Venetian mirror hanging on the wall on the other side of the studio.