César merely leaned a little towards Muñoz, 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."
César 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." César'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 Muñoz, who was still observing him impassively. "I'll tell you: Nothing." He held out his hands palms uppermost, as if inviting Julia and Muñoz 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."
Muñoz 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 César, not without a certain malice, and with a little laugh that earned him a reproving look from Julia.
Muñoz seemed somewhat disconcerted.
"Do you play chess too?"
César 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 Muñoz 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, Muñoz 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 Muñoz'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.
Muñoz 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," César 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." Muñoz 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 César, visibly interested.
"Something like that."
Julia had turned towards Muñoz, 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 Muñoz'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 Muñoz, 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?"
Muñoz 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 César, he said: "I suppose that was exactly What the painter intended."
"That's what you have to find out," replied César. "The tricky question is: Who took the knight?"
"You mean the white knight," said Muñoz. "There's only one left on the board."
"Elementary," said César, adding with a smile, "my dear Watson."
Muñoz ignored this; humour was evidently not one of his strong points. Julia went over to the sofa and sat down next to César, as enthralled as a little girl watching some thrilling performance. Muñoz 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."
Muñoz 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." Muñoz 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 César 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.
Muñoz made an evasive gesture.
"That's not my business, Señorita."
"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."
César 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 César's, feeling the soft, regular beat of his pulse beneath the skin on his wrist.
"How long will it take to solve?"
Muñoz 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 Álvaro'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 Álvaro 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 Álvaro, the Álvaro 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 on 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. Álvaro 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.
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