"Perfectly," said Julia, who was leaning over the board following his explanation. "That means that six out of the ten pieces could not have moved."
"More than six. The black rook on cl couldn't move, since it only moves in a straight line and its three surrounding squares are all blocked. So none of those seven black pieces could have made the last move. And we can also discount the black knight on dl."
"Why?" asked César. "It could have come from squares b2 or e3."
"No, it couldn't. On either of those squares, that knight would have had the white king on c4 in check; in retrograde chess that's what we might call an imaginary check. And no knight, or any other chess piece for that matter, with a king in check is going to abandon that position voluntarily; that's simply impossible. Instead of withdrawing, it would capture the enemy king, thus ending the game. Since such a situation is impossible, we can deduce that the knight on dl could not have moved either."
"That," said Julia, who had kept her eyes glued to the board, "reduces the possibilities to two pieces then, doesn't it?" She put a finger on each of them. "The king and the queen."
"Right. That last move could have been made only by the king or the queen." Muñoz studied the board and gestured in the direction of the black king, without actually touching it. "First, let's analyse the position of the king, which can move one square in any direction. That means he could have arrived at his present position on a4 from b4, b3 or a3 ... in theory."
"Even I can see what you mean about b4 and b3," remarked César. "No king can be on a square next to another king. Isn't that right?"
"Right. On b4 the black king would have been in check to the white rook, king and pawn. And on b3, he'd have been in check to rook and king. Both of which are impossible positions."
"Couldn't he have come from below, from a3?"
"No, never. It would then be in check to the white knight on bl, which, given its position, is clearly not a recent arrival, but must have got there several moves ago." Muñoz looked at them both. "So it's another case of imaginary check showing us that it wasn't the king that moved."
"Therefore the last move," said Julia, "was made by the black queen."
The chess player looked noncommittal.
"That, in principle, is what we must assume," he said. "In terms of pure logic, once we've eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable or difficult it may seem, must be right. Moreover, in this case we can prove it."
Julia looked at him with new respect.
"This is incredible. Like something out of a detective novel."
César pursed his lips.
"I'm afraid, my dear, that's exactly what it is." He looked at Muñoz. "Go on, Holmes," he added with a friendly smile. "We're on tenterhooks."
One corner of Muñoz's mouth twitched humourlessly, a mere polite reflex action. It was clear that all his attention was taken up by the chessboard. His eyes seemed even more deeply sunk in their sockets and there was a feverish gleam in them: the expression of someone absorbed in contemplating imaginary, abstract spaces that only he could see.
"Now," he suggested, "let's look at the possible moves the queen could have made, positioned as she is on square c2. I don't know if you're aware, Julia, that the queen is the most powerful piece in the game. She can move across any number of squares, in any direction, imitating the movement of all the other pieces except for the knight. As we can see, the black queen could have come from four possible squares: a2, b2, b3 and d3. By how, you can see for yourself why she couldn't have come from b3, right?"
"I think so." Julia frowned in concentration. "I presume she would never have left a position where she had the white king in check."
"Exactly. Another case of imaginary check, which discounts b3 as her possible origin. And what about d3? Do you think the queen could have come from there, for example, to avoid the threat from the white bishop on fl?"
Julia considered that possibility for a while. At last her face lit up.
"No, she couldn't, for the same reason as before," she exclaimed, surprised to have reached that conclusion on her own. "On d3, the black queen would have been holding the white king in another one of those imaginary checks, right? That's why she couldn't have come from there." She turned to César. "Isn't this fantastic? I've never played chess in my life."
Muñoz was pointing his pencil at square a2 now.
"It would be another case of imaginary check if the queen had been here, and so we can discount that square too."
"Then it could obviously only have come from b2," said César.
"That's possible."
"What do you mean 'possible'?" César was confused and intrigued at the same time. "It looks obvious to me."
"In chess," replied Muñoz, "very few things can be termed 'obvious'. Look at the white pieces along line b. What would have happened if the queen had been on b2?"
César stroked his chin thoughtfully.
"She would have been under threat by the white rook on b5. That's probably why she moved to c2, to escape the rook."
"Not bad," conceded Muñoz. "But that's only a possibility. Anyway, the reason she moved isn't important to us at the moment. Do you remember what I told you before? Once the impossible has been eliminated, what remains must, of necessity, be right. To sum up, (a) Black has just moved, (b) nine of the ten black pieces on the board could not have moved, (c) the only piece that could have moved was the queen, (d) three of the four hypothetical moves by the queen are impossible. Therefore, the black queen made the only possible move: it moved from b2 to c2, perhaps fleeing from the threat of the white rooks on b5 and b6. Is that clear?"
"Very," said Julia, and César agreed.
"That means," Muñoz went on, "that we've managed to take the first step in this reverse chess game that we're playing. The subsequent position, or rather, the previous position, since we're working backwards, would be this."
"Do you see? The black queen is still on b2, before its move to c2. So now we have to find out what move White made that obliged the queen to do that."
"It must have been the white rook," said César. "The one on b5. The treacherous devil could have come from any square along row 5."
"Possibly," replied Muñoz. "But that doesn't entirely justify the queen's flight."
César blinked, surprised.
"Why not?" His eyes went from the board to Muñoz and back to the board again. "The queen was obviously fleeing the threat from the rook. You yourself said so a moment ago."
"I said that perhaps she was fleeing from the white rooks, but at no point did I say that it was the white rook on b5 that caused the queen to flee."
"I'm lost," confessed César.
"Look closely at the board. It doesn't matter what the white rook now on b5 did, because the other white rook, the one on b6, would already have been holding the black queen in check. Do you see?"
César studied the game again, this time for quite a long time.
"I still don't get it," he said at last, demoralised. He'd drained his gin and lemon to the last drop, while, at his side, Julia was smoking cigarette after cigarette. "If it wasn't the white rook that moved to b5, then all your reasoning collapses. Wherever the piece was, that nasty queen had to move first, because she was in check before ..."
"No," said Muñoz. "Not necessarily. The rook could, for example, have taken another black piece on b5."
Encouraged by that possibility, César and Julia studied the game with new heart. After a few more minutes, César glanced up and gave Muñoz a respectful glance.
"That's right," he said, astonished. "Don't you see, Julia? A black piece on b5 was protecting the queen from the threat posed by the white rook on b6. When that black piece was captured by the white rook, the queen was under direct threat." He looked back at Muñoz for confirmation. "That must be it. There's no other possibility." He looked at the board again, doubtfully. "There isn't, is there?"
"I don't know," Muñoz replied honestly and, when s
he heard that, Julia uttered a desperate "Good God!"
"You've just formulated a hypothesis," he continued, "and when you do that, you always run the risk of distorting the facts to fit the theory, instead of finding a theory that fits the facts."
"What then?"
"Well, that's just it. So far we can only consider as a hypothesis the idea that the white rook took a black piece on b5. We still have to ascertain if there are any other variants and, if so, discount all the impossible ones." The gleam in his eyes grew dim. He seemed more tired and grey as he sketched an indefinable gesture in the air, which was part justification and part uncertainty. The confidence he'd displayed in explaining the moves had disappeared; now he seemed shy and awkward. "That's what I meant," he said, avoiding Julia's eyes, "when I told you I'd run into problems."
"What's the next step then?" asked Julia.
Muñoz regarded the pieces with a resigned air.
"A long, painstaking examination of the six black pieces that are off the board. I'll try to find out how and where each one was taken."
"That could take days," said Julia.
"Or minutes, it depends. Sometimes, luck or intuition lend a hand." He gave a long look at the board and then at the Van Huys. "But there's one thing I'm sure of," he said after a moment's thought. "Whoever painted this picture or thought up the problem, had a very peculiar way of playing chess."
"How would you describe him?" asked Julia.
"Who?"
"The absent player. The one you just mentioned."
Muñoz looked first at the carpet and then at the painting. There was something like admiration in his eyes, Julia thought. Perhaps the instinctive respect a chess player always feels for a master.
"I don't know," he said in a low voice, as if unwilling to be pinned down. "Whoever it was, he was very devious. All the best players are, but this one had something else: a particular talent for laying false trails, for setting all kinds of traps. And he enjoyed doing it."
"Is that possible?" asked César. "Can you really judge the character of a person by the way he behaves when playing?"
"I think you can," replied Muñoz.
"In that case, what do you think of the person who thought up this game, bearing in mind that he did so in the fifteenth century?"
"I'd say"—Muñoz was looking at the painting, absorbed—"I'd say there was something 'diabolical' about the way he played chess."
VI
Of Chessboards and Mirrors
And where is the end?
You'll find that out when you get there.
Ballad of the Old Man of Leningrad
SINCE THEY WERE DOUBLE-PARKED, Menchu had moved over into the driver's seat by the time Julia got back to the car. Julia opened the door of the small Fiat and dropped into the seat.
"What did they say?" Menchu asked.
Julia didn't reply at first; she still had too many things to think about. Staring into the traffic flowing down the street, she took a cigarette out of her handbag, put it to her lips and pressed the automatic lighter in the dashboard.
"There were two policemen here yesterday," she said at last, "asking the same questions as me." When the lighter clicked out, she held it to her cigarette. "According to the man in charge, the envelope was delivered to them that Thursday, first thing in the afternoon."
Menchu's hands were gripping the wheel hard, her knuckles white amongst the glittering rings.
"Who delivered it?"
Julia slowly exhaled.
"According to him, it was a woman."
"A woman?"
"That's what he said."
"What woman?"
"Middle-aged, well-dressed, blonde. Wearing a raincoat and sunglasses." She turned to her friend. "It could have been you."
"That's not funny."
"No, I know it isn't." Julia let out a long sigh. "But it could have been anyone. She didn't give her name or her address, she just gave Álvaro's details as sender. She asked for the fast delivery service. And that was it."
They joined the rest of the traffic. It looked like it was going to rain again and a few tiny drops were already spattering the windscreen. Menchu crunched the gears and wrinkled her nose with displeasure.
"You know, Agatha Christie could have made a blockbuster out of this."
Julia gave a humourless smile.
"Yes. But it has a real death in it." She imagined Álvaro naked and wet. If there was one thing worse than dying, she thought, it was dying grotesquely, with people coming to look at you.
"Poor devil," she said out loud.
They stopped at a pedestrian crossing. Menchu cast a glance at her friend. She was worried, she said, about Julia's being embroiled in such a situation. She too felt uneasy, so much so that she'd broken one of her golden rules and installed Max in her home until things were clearer. Julia should do the same.
"What, install Max in my apartment? No thanks. I'd rather go to rack and ruin on my own."
"Don't start that again. And don't be obtuse." The light changed to green, and Menchu shifted gear and accelerated. "You know perfectly well I didn't mean him. Besides, he's a sweetheart."
"A bloodsucker."
"Well, at least it isn't just my blood he sucks."
"Don't be vulgar."
"Oh, so now it's Sister Julia of the Holy Sacrament."
"And proud of it."
"Look. Maybe Max is what you say he is, but he's also so gorgeous that I get dizzy every time I look at him. The way Madame Butterfly felt about Lieutenant Pinkerton ... in between coughing fits. Or was it Armand Duval?" She swore at a pedestrian crossing the road and, honking indignantly, skidded into a tiny space between a taxi and a bus belching fumes. "But, seriously, I don't think it's a good idea for you to be alone. What if there really is a murderer and he decides to get you?"
Julia shrugged irritably.
"What do you want me to do about it?"
"I don't know. Move in with someone else. I'll make the ultimate sacrifice, if you like. I'll send Max away and you can come and stay with me."
"What about the painting?"
"You can bring it with you and continue working on it at my place. I'll get in plenty of tinned food, coke, dirty videos and booze and we can hole up there, the two of us, like in Fort Apache, until we can get rid of the painting. Oh, and two other things. First, I've taken out extra insurance, just in case."
"What do you mean, just in case? The Van Huys is perfectly safe in my apartment, under lock and key. The security system cost me a fortune to install, remember? It's like Fort Knox, without the gold."
"You never know." It was starting to rain harder, and Menchu switched on the wipers. "The second thing is: don't say a word about all this to Don Manuel."
"Why not?"
"Are you mad? It's just what his little niece, Lola, needs in order to ruin this whole deal for me."
"So far no one has linked the painting with Álvaro."
"Heaven forbid. But the police aren't exactly tactful and they might have got in touch with my client. Or with his bitch of a niece. Oh, well. It's getting horribly complicated. I'm tempted to hand the whole problem over to Claymore's and just take my commission and run."
The rain created a procession of blurred grey images through the windows, so the car seemed surrounded by a strange, unreal landscape. Julia looked at her friend.
"By the way," she said, "I'm having supper with Montegrifo tonight."
"What!"
"You heard. He's got some business he wants to talk to me about."
"Business? He'll probably want to play mummies and daddies too."
"I'll phone and tell you all about it."
"I won't get a wink of sleep until you do. He's obviously guessed that something's going on. I'd stake the virginity of my next three reincarnations on it."
"I told you not to be vulgar."
"And don't you go betraying me. I'm your friend, remember. Your best friend."
"Trust me, and don't driv
e so fast."
"I'll stab you to death if you do. Like José in Mérimée's CARMEN."
"OK. Look, you went through a red light just then. And since the car is mine, I'll have to pay any lines you get."
She glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw that another car, a blue Ford with smoked-glass windows, had jumped the light with them, but it soon disappeared off to the right. She seemed to remember seeing that same car parked—double-parked like them—on the other side of the street when she came out of the courier service. But it was difficult to say for sure, what with the traffic and the rain.
Paco Montegrifo was the sort of man who decides, as soon as he's old enough to make such decisions, that black socks are strictly for chauffeurs and waiters and opts instead for socks of only the darkest navy blue. He was dressed in a made-to-measure suit of dark and impeccable grey, a suit that could have walked straight off the pages of a high-fashion magazine for men. This perfect appearance was topped off by a shirt with a Windsor collar, a silk tie and, peeping discreetly out of his top pocket, a handkerchief. He got up from an armchair in the foyer to greet Julia.
"My word," he said as he shook her hand, his white teeth gleaming in agreeable contrast to his tanned skin, "you look absolutely gorgeous."
That introduction set the tone for the first part of the meal. And he'd expressed his unqualified admiration for the close-fitting black velvet dress Julia was wearing even before they'd sat down at the table reserved for them by the window with a panoramic night-time view of the Palacio Real. From then on, he deployed a repertoire of looks–which managed to be intense but never impertinent–and seductive smiles. After the aperitifs, and while the waiter was preparing the hors d'oeuvres, he began plying Julia with questions that prompted intelligent replies to which he listened with his chin resting on his clasped fingers, his lips slightly parted, and a gratifyingly absorbed expression, which at the same time permitted little gleams of light from the candle flames to sparkle on his perfect teeth.