Lately she seemed to have come across far too many people who played chess. And everyone had excellent reasons for their links with the Van Huys. There were too many portraits inside that wretched painting.

Munoz: he was the only person she’d met since the mystery began. When she couldn’t sleep, when she was tossing and turning in her bed, he was the only one she did not connect with the nightmare images. Munoz was at one end of the ball of wool and all the chess pieces, all the other characters, were at the other. But she couldn’t even be sure of him. She had indeed met him after the mystery began, but before the story had gone back to its starting point and begun again in a different key. It was impossible even to know with absolute certainty that Alvaro’s death and the existence of the mystery player were part of the same movement.

She stopped, feeling on her face the touch of the damp mist wrapped about her. When it came down to it, the only person she could be sure of was herself. That was all she had to go on with, that and the pistol she still carried in her bag.

She made her way to the chess club. There was sawdust in the hallway, umbrellas, overcoats and raincoats. It smelled of damp, of cigarette smoke, and had the unmistakable atmosphere of places frequented exclusively by men. She greeted Cifuentes, the director, who rushed obsequiously to meet her, and, as the murmurs provoked by her appearance in the club died down, searched amongst the chess tables until she spotted Munoz. He was concentrating on a game, sitting motionless as a sphinx, with one elbow on the arm of his chair, his chin resting on the palm of that hand. His opponent, a young man with thick glasses, kept licking his lips and casting troubled glances at Munoz, as if he were afraid that at any moment the latter might destroy the complicated king’s defence which, to judge by his nervousness and his look of exhaustion, it had cost him an enormous effort to construct.

Munoz seemed his usual calm, absent self; rather than studying the board, his motionless eyes seemed to be merely resting on it. Perhaps he was immersed in those daydreams of which he had spoken to Julia, a thousand miles away from the game taking place before his eyes, while his mathematical mind kept weaving and unweaving infinite, impossible combinations. Around them, a few onlookers were studying the game apparently with more interest than the players themselves. From time to time, they mumbled comments or suggested moving this or that piece. What seemed clear, given the tension around the table, was that they expected Munoz to make some decisive move that would sound the death knell of the young man in glasses. That justified the nervousness of the latter, whose eyes, magnified by the lenses, looked at his adversary like a slave in the amphitheatre at the mercy of the lions, pleading for clemency from an omnipotent emperor in purple.

At that moment, Munoz looked up and saw Julia. He stared at her for several seconds as if he didn’t recognise her, then came to slowly, with the look of someone waking from a dream or returning from a long journey. His face brightened as he made a vague gesture of welcome. He glanced back at the board, to see if things there were still in order, and, not hastily or as if he were merely improvising, but as the conclusion of a long reasoning process, moved a pawn. A disappointed murmur arose around the table, and the young man in glasses looked across at him, first with surprise, then like a prisoner whose execution has been cancelled at the last moment, and then with a satisfied smirk.

“That makes it a draw,” remarked one of the onlookers.

Munoz, who was getting up from the table, shrugged.

“Yes,” he replied, without looking at the board. “But if I’d moved bishop to queen 7 it would have been checkmate in five moves.”

He went over to Julia, leaving the others to study the move he’d just mentioned. Discreetly indicating the group around the table, Julia said in a low voice:

“They must really hate you.”

Munoz put his head on one side and his expression could as easily have been interpreted as a distant smile or a look of scorn.

“I suppose so,” he replied, picking up his raincoat. “They tend to gather like vultures, hoping to be there when someone finally tears me limb from limb.”

“But you let yourself be beaten… That must be humiliating for them.”

“That’s the least of it,” he said, but there was no smugness or pride in his voice, just a kind of objective contempt. “They wouldn’t miss one of my games for anything.”

Opposite the Prado, in the grey mist, Julia brought him up to date regarding her conversation with Belmonte. Munoz heard her out without comment, not even when she told him about the niece’s interest in chess. He seemed indifferent to the damp weather as he walked slowly along, listening carefully to what Julia said, his raincoat unbuttoned and the knot of his tie half undone as usual, his head bent and his eyes fixed on the scuffed toes of his shoes.

“You asked me once if there were any women who play chess,” he said at last. “And I told you that, although chess is essentially a masculine game, there are some reasonable women players. But they are the exception.”

“The exception that proves the rule, I suppose.”

Munoz frowned.

“No. You’re wrong there. An exception doesn’t prove anything; it invalidates or destroys any rule. That’s why you have to be very careful with inductive reasoning. What I’m saying is that women tend to play chess badly, not that all women play chess badly. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Which doesn’t detract from the fact that, in practice, women have little stature as chess players. Just to give you an idea: in the Soviet Union, where chess is the national pastime, only one woman, Vera Menchik, was ever considered to have reached grand master level.”

“Why is that?”

“Maybe chess requires too much indifference to the outside world.” He paused and looked at Julia. “What’s this Lola Belmonte like?”

Julia considered before answering.

“I don’t know how to describe her really. Unpleasant. Possibly domineering. Aggressive. It’s a shame she wasn’t there when you were with me the other day.”

They were standing by a stone fountain crowned by the vague silhouette of a statue that hovered menacingly above their heads in the mist. Munoz ran his hands over his hair and looked at his damp palms before rubbing them on his raincoat.

“Aggression, whether externalised or internalised,” he said, “is characteristic of many players.” He smiled briefly, without making it clear whether he considered himself to fall outside that definition or not. “And the chess player tends to be someone who’s frustrated or oppressed in some way. The attack on the king, which is the aim in chess, that is, going against authority, would be a kind of liberation from that state. From that point of view the game could be of interest to a woman.” The fleeting smile crossed his lips again. “When you play chess, people seem very insignificant from where you’re sitting.”

“Have you detected something of that in our enemy’s games?”

“That’s a difficult question to answer. I need more information. More moves. For example, women tend to show a predilection for bishop mates.” Munoz’s expression grew animated as he went into details. “I don’t know why, but those pieces, with their deep, diagonal moves, possibly have the most feminine character of all the pieces.” He gestured as if he didn’t give much credence to his words and were trying to erase them from the air. “But until now the black bishops haven’t played an important role in the game. As you know, we have lots of nice theories that add up to nothing. Our problem is just the same as it is on a chessboard: we can only formulate imaginative hypotheses, conjectures, without touching the chess pieces.”