The Flanders Panel

Feijoo hesitated before nodding. He knew him, he said, through his work. But he did not know that Julia and Cesar were friends.

“Well, now you know.”

“Yes, now I know.”

The policeman tapped his pen on the desk, suddenly uncomfortable, and with good reason. As Julia learned the following day from Cesar, Inspector Casimiro Feijoo was far from being a model police officer. His professional relationship with the world of art and antiques allowed him to supplement his police salary at the end of each month. From time to time, when a consignment of stolen goods was recovered, some of it would disappear through the back door. Certain trusted intermediaries participated in these operations and gave him a percentage of the profits. And, it being a small world, Cesar was one of them.

“Anyway,” said Julia, who still knew nothing of Feijoo’s background, “I suppose having two witnesses proves nothing. I could have sent the documents to myself.”

Feijoo merely nodded, but his eyes betrayed a greater degree of caution, as well as a new respect, which, as Julia understood later on, had a purely practical basis.

“The truth is,” he said at last, “this whole business seems very odd.”

Julia was staring into space. From her point of view, it was no longer merely odd; it was beginning to take on a sinister edge.

“What I don’t understand is who could possibly be interested in whether I got those documents or not.”

Biting his lower lip again, Feijoo took a notebook from a drawer, his moustache appeared flaccid and preoccupied. He was obviously less than enthusiastic to find himself embroiled in this matter.

“That,” he murmured, reluctantly making his first notes, “that, Senorita, is another very good question.”

She stood on the steps of the police station, aware that the uniformed man guarding the door was watching her with some curiosity. Beyond the trees on the other side of the Paseo, the neoclassical facade of the Prado Museum was lit by powerful spotlights concealed in the nearby gardens, amongst the stone benches, statues and fountains. It was raining, a barely perceptible drizzle, but enough for the lights of the cars and the relentless green-to-amber-to-red of the traffic lights to be reflected on the asphalt surface of the road.

Julia turned up the collar of her leather jacket and walked along listening to her footsteps echoing in the empty doorways. There wasn’t much traffic; only now and then did the headlights of a car illuminate her from behind, casting a long, narrow shadow that stretched out ahead of her and then shifted to one side, became shorter, faltering and fitful, as the noise of the car overtook her, leaving her shadow crushed and annihilated against the wall, whilst the car, reduced to two red dots and their mirror image on the wet asphalt, disappeared.

She stopped at a traffic light. Waiting for it to change to green, she searched the night for other greens and found them in the fleeting signs of taxis, in other winking traffic lights along the avenue, in the distant blue, green and yellow neon sign on the roof of a glass skyscraper whose topmost windows were still lit, where someone was cleaning or perhaps still working even at that late hour. The light changed to green and Julia crossed over and began looking for reds, easier to find at night in a big city. But the blue flash of a police car passing in the distance interposed itself, so far off that Julia couldn’t hear the siren. Red car lights, green traffic lights, blue neon, blue flash… that, she thought, would be the range of colours you’d need to paint this strange landscape, the right palette to execute a painting she could entitle, ironically, Nocturne, to be exhibited at the Roch Gallery even though Menchu would doubtless have to have the title explained to her. Everything would have to be in appropriately sombre tones: black night, black shadows, black fear, black solitude.

Was she really afraid? In other circumstances, the question would have been a good topic for academic discussion, in the pleasant company of friends, in a warm, comfortable room, in front of a fire, with a bottle of wine. Fear as the unexpected factor, fear as the sudden, shattering discovery of a reality which, though only revealed at that precise moment, has always been there. Fear as the crushing end to ignorance or as the disruption of a state of grace. Fear as sin.