“I know what you mean,” remarked Munoz. He had not moved from his position, and his hands were still in the pockets of his crumpled raincoat. At one corner of his mouth, the vague smile had appeared again, indefinable and distant.

“You do, do you?” exclaimed Julia. “What do you know about it?”

She clenched her fists indignantly, holding in the breath that echoed in her ears like that of an animal at the end of a long run. But Munoz did not react, and Julia noticed that Cesar gave him a quiet look of gratitude.

“I was right to choose you,” he said. “And I’m glad I did.”

Munoz didn’t respond. He simply glanced around at the paintings, the furniture, the objects in the room and nodded slowly, as if he were drawing mysterious conclusions. After a few moments he indicated Julia with a lift of his chin.

“I think she deserves to know the whole story.”

“So do you, my dear,” added Cesar.

“Yes, I do. Although I’m here only in the role of witness.”

There was no note of censure or menace in his words. It was as if the chess player were maintaining some absurd neutrality. An impossible neutrality, thought Julia, because, sooner or later, there will come a point when words will run out and we’ll have to make a decision.

However, numbed by a sense of unreality she couldn’t shake off, she felt that that moment still seemed far off.

“Let’s begin, then,” she said, and when she heard herself speak, she found with unexpected relief that she was regaining her lost composure. She gave Cesar a hard look. “Tell us about Alvaro.”

Cesar nodded.

“Yes, Alvaro,” he repeated in a low voice. “But first I should mention the painting.” A look of sudden annoyance crossed his face, as if he’d neglected some point of elementary courtesy. “I haven’t asked if you’d like a drink or anything… Unforgivable of me. Would you like something?”

No one replied. Cesar went over to the old oak chest he used as a drinks cabinet.

“The first time I saw that painting was when I was in your apartment, Julia. Do you remember? They’d delivered it a few hours before, and you were like a child with a new toy. For almost an hour I watched while you studied it in minute detail, explaining to me the techniques you thought you’d use to make it, and I quote, the most beautiful piece of work you’d ever done.” As he spoke, Cesar selected a narrow tumbler of expensive cut glass and filled it with ice, gin and lemon juice. “I was surprised to see you so happy, and the truth is, Princess, I was happy too.” He turned round with the glass in his hand and, after a cautious taste, seemed satisfied with it. “But what I didn’t tell you then… Well, even now it’s hard to put into words. You were delighted with the beauty of the image, the balance of the composition, the colour and the light. I was too, but for different reasons. That chessboard, the players and the pieces, the lady reading by the window, aroused a dormant echo of my old passion. Believing it to be completely forgotten, I felt it return like a bolt from the blue. I was simultaneously feverish and terrified, as if I’d felt the breath of madness on my cheek.”

Cesar fell silent, and the half of his mouth lit by the lamp curved into a wickedly intimate smile, as if he now found special pleasure in savouring that memory.

“It wasn’t just a matter of chess,” he continued, “but a deep, personal sense of the game as a link between life and death, between reality and dream. And while you, Julia, were talking about pigments and varnishes, I was barely listening, surprised by the tremor of pleasure and exquisite anguish running through my body as I sat next to you on the sofa and looked not at what Pieter Van Huys had painted on that Flemish panel but at what that man, that genius, had in mind while he was painting.”

“And you decided that you had to have it.”

Cesar looked at Julia with an expression of ironic reproof.

“Don’t oversimplify things, Princess.” He took a brief sip of his drink and smiled at her as if begging her indulgence. “What I decided, very suddenly, was that it was absolutely vital that I give full rein to my passion. It’s not for nothing that one lives as long as I have. Doubtless that’s why I understood at once, not the message, which, as we discovered later, was in code, but the certain truth that the painting contained some fascinating and terrible enigma. Think of it: perhaps the enigma would, at last, prove me right.”

“Right?”

“Yes. The world is not as simple as people would have us believe. The outlines are vague; it’s the details that count. Nothing is black and white; evil can be a disguise for good or beauty and vice versa, without one thing necessarily excluding the other. A human being can both love and betray the object of that love without diminishing the reality of his or her feelings. You can be father, brother, son and lover all at the same time; victim and executioner… You can choose your own examples. Life is an uncertain adventure in a diffuse landscape, whose borders are continually shifting, where all frontiers are artificial, where at any moment everything can either end only to begin again or finish suddenly, for ever and ever, like an unexpected blow from an axe. Where the only absolute, coherent, indisputable and definitive reality is death. Where we are only a tiny lightning flash between two eternal nights, and where, Princess, we have very little time.”

“What has that got to do with Alvaro’s death?”

“Everything has to do with everything else.” Cesar raised a hand, asking for patience. “Besides, life is a succession of events that link with each other whether one wants them to or not.” He held his glass up to the light and peered at the contents as if the rest of his thought process might be found floating there. “Then -I mean that day, Julia -I decided to find out everything I could about the painting. And, like you, the first person I thought of was Alvaro. I never liked him, neither when you were together nor afterwards, with the important difference that I never forgave the wretch for having made you suffer the way he did…”

“That was my business,” Julia said, “not yours.”

“You’re wrong. It was mine too. Alvaro had occupied a position that I never could. In a way…” he hesitated for a moment and gave a bitter smile, “he was my rival. The only man capable of taking you away from me.”

“It was all over between him and me. It’s absurd to relate the two things.”

“Not that absurd. But let’s not discuss it further. I hated him, and that’s that. Naturally, that isn’t a reason to kill anyone. If it were, I can assure you I wouldn’t have waited so long before doing it. This world of ours, the world of art and antiquities, is a very small one. Alvaro and I had had professional contact now and then; it was inevitable. Our relationship could not be termed friendly, of course, but sometimes money and self-interest make strange bedfellows. The proof is that, when faced by the problem of the Van Huys, you yourself went straight to him. So I also went to see him and I asked him to write a report on the painting. I didn’t expect him to do it for the love of art, of course. I offered him a reasonable sum of money. Your ex, God rest him, was always an expensive boy. Very expensive.”

“Why didn’t you say anything to me about this?”

“For various reasons. The first was that I didn’t want to see you start a relationship with him again, not even professionally. You can never guarantee that there aren’t some embers still burning beneath the ashes. But there was something else. The painting had to do with very personal feelings.” He pointed to the ivory chess set on the card table. “It had to do with a part of me that I believed I had renounced for ever, a corner of myself to which no one was allowed access, not even you, Princess. That would have meant opening the door to matters that I would never have had the courage to discuss with you.” He looked at Munoz, who was holding himself aloof from the conversation. “I imagine our friend here could enlighten you on the subject. Isn’t that right? Chess as a projection of the ego, defeat as a frustration of libido and other such deliciously murky things. Those long, deep moves diagonally across the board that the bishops make.” He ran the tip of his tongue round the edge of his glass and shuddered slightly. “Oh, well. I’m sure old Sigmund would have had plenty to say on the subject.”