The Flanders Panel

The shriek of a trumpet, heart-rending and solitary. Miles Davis on the record player and the room in darkness apart from the light shed by a small table lamp placed on the floor to illuminate the painting. The ticking of the clock on the wall and the slight metallic click each time the pendulum reached its farthest point to the right. Next to the sofa, on the carpet, was a smoking ashtray and a glass containing the last drops of ice and vodka, and on the sofa sat Julia, hugging her knees, a lock of hair falling over her face. She was looking straight ahead, her pupils dilated, staring at the painting without really seeing it, focused on some imaginary point beyond the surface, between the surface and the landscape glimpsed in the background, halfway between the two chess players and the lady sitting next to the window.

She’d lost all notion of time, feeling the music drift slowly through her brain with the fumes from the vodka and conscious of the warmth of her bare thighs and knees against her arms. Sometimes a trumpet note would rise up amongst the shadows and she would move her head slowly from side to side, following the rhythm. Ah, trumpet, I love you. Tonight, you are my one companion, faint and nostalgic as the sadness seeping from my soul. The sound floated through the dark room and through that other brightly lit room, where the two chess players continued their game, and out through Julia’s window, open to the gleam of the lamps lighting the street below. Down to where someone, in the shadow cast by a tree or a doorway, was perhaps gazing up, listening to the music emanating from that other window too, the one painted in the picture, out into the landscape of soft greens and ochres in which you could just see, painted with the finest of brushes, the minuscule grey spire of a distant belfry.

V The Mystery of the Black Lady

I knew by now that I had visited

his evil homeland, but I did not know

the rules of combat.

G. Kasparov

In respectful silence and perfect stillness, Octavio, Lucinda and Scaramouche were watching them with painted porcelain eyes from behind the glass of their case. Cesar’s velvet jacket was dappled with harlequin diamonds of coloured light from the stained-glass window. Julia had never seen her friend so silent and so still, so like one of the statues, in bronze, terracotta and marble, scattered here and there amongst the paintings, glass figures and tapestries in his shop. In a way, both Cesar and Julia seemed to blend with the decor, which was more suited to the motley scenery of a baroque farce than to the real world in which they spent most of their lives. Cesar looked especially distinguished – a dark red silk cravat at his neck, a long ivory cigarette holder between his fingers – and he had assumed, in the multicoloured light, a particularly classical, almost Goethian pose, his legs crossed, one hand resting with studied negligence over the hand holding his cigarette, his hair white and silky in the halo of red, blue and golden light pouring through the window. Julia was wearing a black blouse with a lace collar, and her Venetian profile was reflected in a large mirror along with jumbled ranks of mahogany furniture and mother-of-pearl chests, Gobelin tapestries and canvases, twisted columns supporting chipped Gothic carvings and the blank, resigned face of a naked bronze gladiator, his weapons beside him, raising himself up on one elbow while he awaited the verdict, the thumbs up or thumbs down, of some invisible, omnipotent emperor.

“I’m frightened,” Julia said, and Cesar responded with a gesture that was half-solicitous, half-impotent, a small sign of magnanimous and futile solidarity, of a love conscious of its limitations, the kind of elegant expressive gesture an eighteenth-century courtier might make to a lady whom he worships at the precise moment that he sees, at the end of the street along which both are being carried in a funeral cart, the shadow of the guillotine.

“Are you sure you’re not exaggerating, my dear? Or being a bit premature? No one has yet proved that Alvaro didn’t just slip in the bath.”

“What about the documents?”

“That, I must admit, I can’t explain.”

Julia put her head to one side, and her hair brushed her shoulder. Her mind was full of disquieting images.

“This morning when I woke up I prayed that it was all just a dreadful mistake.”

“Perhaps it is,” said Cesar. “As far as I know, it’s only in films that policemen and pathologists are honourable and infallible. In fact, I believe they’re not that even in films any more.”

He gave a sour, reluctant smile. Julia was looking at him without really listening to what he was saying.

“Alvaro, murdered… Can you believe it?”