“You are.”

“May I ask you a rather personal question?”

“Ask and you’ll find out.”

“What did you feel when you finally hit on the correct move, when you knew it was me?”

Munoz thought for a moment.

“Relief,” he said. “I would have been disappointed if it had been someone else.”

“Disappointed to have been wrong about the identity of the mystery player? I wouldn’t want to exaggerate my own merits, but it wasn’t that obvious, my friend. Several of the characters in this story weren’t even known to you, and we’ve been together only a couple of weeks. You had only your chessboard to work with.”

“You misunderstand me,” replied Munoz. “I wanted it to be you. I liked the idea.”

Julia was looking at them, incredulity written on her face.

“I’m so glad to see you two getting along so well,” she said sarcastically. “If you like, later on we can all go out for a drink, pat each other on the back and tell each other what a laugh we’ve all had over this.” She shook her head, as if trying to recover some sense of reality. “It’s incredible, but I feel as if I were in the way here.”

Cesar gave her a look of pained affection.

“There are some things you can’t understand, Princess.”

“Don’t call me Princess! Besides, you’re quite wrong. I understand it all perfectly. And now it’s my turn to ask you a question. What would you have done that morning in the Rastro, if I hadn’t noticed the spray can and the card and I’d just got into that car with its tyre made into a bomb and started the engine?”

“That’s ridiculous.” Cesar seemed offended. “I would never have let you.”

“Even at the risk of betraying yourself?”

“Of course. You know that. Munoz said so earlier. You were never in any danger. That morning everything was planned down to the last detail: the disguise ready in the poky little room with its two separate doors, which I’ve been renting as a storeroom, my appointment with the dealer, a real appointment that I dealt with in a matter of minutes… I got dressed as fast as I could, walked to the alleyway, fixed the tyre, left the card and put the empty spray can on the bonnet. Then I stopped by the woman selling images to make sure she’d remember me, returned to the storeroom and, after a change of clothes and make-up, went off to meet you at the cafe. You have to admit my timing was impeccable.”

“Sickeningly so.”

Cesar gave her a reproving look.

“Don’t be vulgar, Princess.” He looked at her with an ingenuousness that was remarkable for its utter sincerity. “Using ghastly adverbs like that will get us nowhere.”

“Why take such pains to terrify me?”

“It was an adventure, wasn’t it? There had to be a hint of menace in the air. Can you imagine an adventure from which fear is absent? I couldn’t tell you the stories that used to thrill you as a child, so I invented the most extraordinary adventure I could imagine. An adventure that you would never forget as long as you lived.”

“Of that you can be sure.”

“ Mission accomplished, then. The struggle between reason and mystery, the destruction of the ghosts ensnaring you. Not bad, eh? And add to that the discovery that Good and Evil are not clearly delimited like the black and white squares on a chessboard.” He looked at Munoz before giving an oblique smile, as if in reference to a secret to which both were privy. “All the squares, my dear, are grey, tinged by the awareness of Evil that we all acquire with experience, an awareness of how sterile and often abjectly unjust what we call Good can turn out to be. Do you remember Settembrini, the character I so admired in The Magic Mountain ” He used to say that Evil is the shining weapon of reason against the powers of darkness and ugliness.“

Julia was intently watching Cesar’s face. At certain moments it appeared that only half of his face was speaking, the visible half or the half in shadow, the other there only as witness. And she wondered which of the two was more real.

“That morning when we attacked the blue Ford I really loved you, Cesar.”

Instinctively, she addressed the illuminated half of his face, but the reply came from the half that was plunged in shadow:

“I know you did. And that justifies everything. I didn’t know what that car was doing there either. I was as intrigued by it as you were. Perhaps more so, for obvious reasons. No one, if you’ll forgive the rather lugubrious joke, had invited it to the funeral.” He shook his head gently at the memory. “I must say that those few yards, you with your pistol and me with my pathetic poker, and our attack on those two imbeciles, before we found out they were actually Inspector Feijoo’s henchmen” – he gestured as if he couldn’t find words to express his feelings – “were absolutely marvellous. I watched you walking straight at the enemy, brows furrowed, teeth clenched, as brave and terrible as an avenging fury. In addition to excitement, I felt genuine pride. There’s a woman with real character, I thought, admiringly. If you’d been a different kind of person, unstable or fragile, I would never have put you to such a test. But I was sure you would emerge from this a new woman, harder and stronger.”

“Don’t you think the price for that was rather high? Alvaro, Menchu… you yourself.”

Cesar seemed to search his memory, as if it were an effort to remember the person Julia was referring to. “Ah, yes, Menchu,” he said at last, and frowned. “Poor Menchu, caught up in a game that was much too complex for her. Though, if you’ll forgive the immodesty, her case was a brilliant bit of improvisation. When I phoned you first thing that morning, to see how everything had worked out, Menchu answered and said you weren’t there. She seemed in a hurry to hang up, and now we know why. She was waiting for Max to carry out their absurd plan to steal the painting. I knew nothing about it, of course. But as soon as I put the phone down, I knew what my next move should be: Menchu, the painting. Half an hour later I rang the bell, in the guise of the woman in the raincoat.”

At this point, Cesar looked amused, as if trying to get Julia to see the oddly funny side of the situation he was describing.

“Princess,” he continued, arching one eyebrow, “I always told you that you should get one of those spy holes in your door – very useful if you want to know who’s calling. Menchu might not have opened the door to a blonde woman in dark glasses. But all she heard was Cesar’s voice telling her he had an urgent message from you. She had no alternative but to open the door, and she did.” He turned his hands palm up, as if in posthumous apology for Menchu’s mistake. “I imagine that at that moment she thought her plan with Max was about to be ruined, but her concern turned to surprise when she saw a strange woman standing on the doorstep. I just had time to see the startled look in her eyes before giving her a punch in the throat. She died without knowing who her killer was, I’m sure. I shut the door and set about preparing everything. Then – and this I didn’t expect – I heard the sound of a key turning in the lock.”

“Max,” said Julia unnecessarily.

“Indeed. It was the handsome pimp, who, as I learned later, when he told you the whole story at the police station, was making his second call of the morning, in order to take the painting away before Menchu set fire to your apartment. An absolutely ridiculous plan, by the way, but typical of Menchu and that fool.”

“It could have been me at the door. Did you think of that?”

“I must confess that when I heard the key in the lock, I thought it was you.”

“And what would you have done? Punched me in the throat too?”

He looked at her again with the pained expression of one unjustly used.

“Such a question,” he said, looking for an appropriate response, “is both cruel and monstrous.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I don’t know exactly how I would have reacted. But the fact is, I felt lost, and all I could think of was to hide. I ran into the bathroom and held my breath, trying to come up with a way of getting out of there. But nothing would have happened to you. The game would simply have ended halfway through. That’s all.”