The Flanders Panel

“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?”