The Flanders Panel

“I’m not so sure about that. I know how much that wretch meant to you.” He smiled wryly into space, as if Alvaro’s ghost, rendered inoffensive now, were there. “While we were arguing, I felt my old hatred for him well up in me. It went to my head like one of your hot vodka toddies. It was, my dear, a hatred I don’t recall ever having felt before; a good, solid hatred, deliciously ‘Latin’. I stood up, and I think I lost control, because I hurled abuse at him, using the select vocabulary of a fishwife, which I reserve for very special occasions. At first, he seemed surprised by my outburst. Then he lit his pipe and laughed in my face. He said it was my fault that his relationship with you had ended. That I was to blame for your never having grown up. My presence in your life, which he described as unhealthy and obsessive, had clipped your wings. ”And the worst thing,“ he added with an insulting smile, ”is that, deep down, you’re the one Julia’s always been in love with, because you symbolise the father she never knew… And that’s why she’s in the mess she’s in now.“ Having said that, Alvaro put one hand in his pocket, gave a few puffs on his pipe and peered at me through the smoke. ”Your relationship,“ he concluded, ”is nothing more or less than a case of unconsummated incest. It’s just lucky you’re a homosexual.“”

Julia closed her eyes. Cesar left his final words floating in the air and had retreated into silence. When, ashamed and embarrassed, she’d gathered enough courage to look at him again, he gave a dismissive shrug, as if what he was about to say was not his responsibility.

“With those words, Princess, Alvaro signed his death warrant. He went on smoking in the chair opposite me but, in fact, he was already dead. Not because of what he’d said – after all, his opinion was as valid as anyone else’s – but because of what it revealed to me about myself. It was as if he’d pulled back a curtain which, for years, had separated me from reality. Perhaps because it confirmed ideas that I’d kept locked away in the darkest corner of my mind, never allowing myself to cast the light of reason and logic on them.”

He stopped, as if he’d lost the thread of what he was saying and looked hesitantly at Julia and at Munoz. At last, with an ambiguous smile, simultaneously perverse and shy, he raised his glass to his lips to take a sip of gin.

“I had a sudden inspiration. And then, wonder of wonders, a complete plan revealed itself, just the way it happens in fairy tales. Each and every one of the pieces that had been floating randomly about found its exact place, its precise meaning. Alvaro, you, me, the painting. It fitted in too with my shadow side, with all the distant echoes, the forgotten feelings, the dormant passions. In those few seconds everything was laid out before me, like a giant chessboard on which each person, each idea, each situation found its corresponding symbol in a chess piece, found its exact place in time and space. That was a Game with a capital G, the great game of my life. And of yours. Because it was all there, Princess: chess, adventure, love, life and death. And at the end of it, there you stood, free of everything and everyone, beautiful and perfect, reflected in the bright mirror of maturity. You had to play chess, Julia; that much was certain. You had to kill us all in order, at last, to be free.”

“Good God.”

Cesar shook his head.

“God has nothing to do with it. I can assure you that when I went over to Alvaro and struck him on the back of the neck with the obsidian ashtray that was on the table, I no longer hated him. That was nothing but a rather unsavoury part of the plan. Irritating but necessary.”

He studied his right hand with some curiosity. He seemed to be weighing the capacity to inflict death contained in his long, pale fingers with their manicured nails, which at that moment were holding, with elegant indolence, his glass of gin.

“He dropped like a stone,” he concluded in an objective tone, once he’d finished examining his hands. “He fell without even a groan, with his pipe still clenched between his teeth. Once he was on the floor, I made sure he was well and truly dead with another blow, rather better judged. After all, if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. The rest you know already: the shower and everything else were just artistic touches. Brouillez les pistes, Arsene Lupin used to say. Although Menchu, God rest her, would doubtless have attributed the saying to Coco Chanel. Poor thing.” He drank a sip of gin to Menchu’s memory. “Anyway, I wiped my fingerprints off with a handkerchief and took the ashtray with me, just in case, throwing it into a rubbish bin some miles away. I know I shouldn’t say so, Princess, but for a novice’s my mind worked in an admirably criminal way. Before leaving, I picked up the report on the painting that Alvaro had intended delivering to you, and I typed the address on an envelope.”