Julia looked at the envelope and then at César, perplexed and incredulous.
"It doesn't matter what value it reaches," she murmured, pronouncing the words with some difficulty. "You can't sell a stolen painting, not even abroad."
"That depends to whom and how," replied César. "When everything's ready–let's say in a few months–the painting will come out of its hiding place in order to appear, not at public auction, but on the black market for works of art. It will end up hanging, in secret, in the luxurious mansion of one of the many millionaire collectors in Brazil, Greece or Japan, who hurl themselves like sharks on such valuable works, either in order to resell them or to satisfy private passions to do with luxury, power and beauty. It's also a good long-term investment, since in certain countries there's a twenty-year amnesty on stolen works of art. And you're still so deliciously young. Isn't that marvellous? Anyway, you won't have to worry about that. What matters now is that, in the next few months, while the Van Huys embarks on its secret journey, the bank account of your brand-new Panamanian company, opened two days ago in another worthy Zurich bank, will be richer to the tune of some millions of dollars. You won't have to do anything, because someone will have taken care of all those worrying transactions for you. I've made quite sure of that, Princess, especially as, regards the vital loyalty of that person. A loyal mercenary, it must be said. But as good as any other; perhaps even better. Never trust disinterested loyalties."
"Who is it? Your Swiss friend?"
"No. Ziegler is an efficient, methodical lawyer but he doesn't know much about art. That's why I went to someone with the right contacts, with no scruples whatsoever and expert enough to move easily in that complicated subterranean world. Paco Montegrifo."
"You're joking."
"I don't joke about money. Montegrifo is a strange character, who, it should be said, is a little in love with you, although that has nothing to do with the matter. What counts is that he is simultaneously an utter villain and an extraordinarily gifted individual, and he'll never do anything to harm you."
"I don't see why not. If he's got the painting, he'll be off like a shot. Montegrifo would sell his own mother for a watercolour."
"Undoubtedly, but he can't do that to you. In the first place, because Demetrius Ziegler and I have made him sign a quantity of documents that have no legal value if made public, since the whole matter constitutes a flagrant breach of the law, but which are enough to show that you have nothing whatsoever to do with all this. They'll also serve to implicate him if he talks too much or plays dirty, enough for him to have every police force in the world after him for the rest of his life. I'm also in possession of certain secrets whose publication would damage his reputation and create serious problems for him with the law. To my knowledge, Montegrifo has, amongst other things, on at least two occasions undertaken to remove from the country and sell illegally objects that are designated part of our national heritage, objects that came into my hands and which I placed in his as intermediary: a fifteenth-century reredos attributed to Pere Oiler and stolen from Santa Maria de Cascalls in 1978 and that famous Juan de Flandes that disappeared four years ago from the Olivares collection. Do you remember?"
"Yes, I do. But I never imagined that you..."
César shrugged indifferently.
"That's life, Princess. In my business, as in all businesses, unimpeachable honesty is the surest route to death from starvation. But we weren't talking about me, we were talking about Montegrifo. Of course, he'll try to keep as much money for himself as he can; that's inevitable. But he'll remain within certain limits that won't impinge upon the minimum profit guaranteed by your Panamanian company, whose interests Ziegler will guard like a Dobermann. Once the business is finished, Ziegler will automatically transfer the money from the limited company's bank account to another private account, whose number only you will have. He will then close the former in order to cover our tracks, and destroy all other documents apart from those referring to Montegrifo's murky past. Those he will keep in order to guarantee you the loyalty of our friend the auctioneer. Though I'm sure that, by then, such a precaution will be unnecessary ... By the way, Ziegler has express instructions to divert a third of your profits into various types of safe, profitable investments in order both to launder that money and to guarantee you financial security for the rest of your life, even if you decide to go on the most lavish of spending sprees. Take any advice he gives you, because Ziegler is a good man whom I've known for more than twenty years: honest, Calvinist and homosexual. He will, of course, be equally scrupulous about deducting his commission plus expenses."
Julia, who had listened without moving a muscle, shuddered. Everything fit perfectly, like the pieces of some incredible jigsaw puzzle. César had left no loose ends. She gave him a long Jook, and walked about the room, trying to take it in. It was too much for one night, she thought as she stopped in front of Muñoz, who was watching her impassively. It was perhaps too much even for one lifetime.
"I see," she said, turning back to César, "that you've thought of everything. Or almost everything. Have you also considered Don Manuel Belmonte? You may think it a trifling detail, but he is the owner of the painting."
"I have considered that. Needless to say, you could always suffer a praiseworthy crisis of conscience and decide not to accept my plan. In that case, you have only to inform Ziegler and the painting will turn up in some suitable place. It will upset Montegrifo but he'll just have to put up with it. Then, everything will remain as before: the scandal will have increased the painting's value, and Claymore's will retain the right to auction it. But should you take the sensible path, there are plenty of arguments to salve your conscience: Belmonte gets rid of the painting for money, so, once you've excluded the painting's sentimental value, there remains its economic worth. And that's covered by the insurance. Besides, there's nothing to stop you from anonymously donating whatever compensation you consider appropriate. You'll have more than enough money to do so. As for Muñoz..."
"Yes," said Muñoz, "I'm curious to know what you have in store for me."
César gave him a wry look.
"You, my dear, have won the lottery."
"You don't say."
"Oh, but I do. Foreseeing that the second white knight would survive the game, I took the liberty of linking you, on paper, with the company, with twenty-five per cent of the shares, which will, amongst other things, permit you to buy yourself some new shirts and to play chess in the Bahamas if you fancy it."
Muñoz raised a hand to his mouth and what remained of his cigarette. He looked at it briefly and very deliberately dropped it on the carpet.
"That's very generous of you," he said.
César looked at the dead stub on the floor and then at Muñoz.
"It's the least I can do. I have to buy your silence in some way, and, besides, you've more than earned it. Let's just say it's my way of making up for the nasty trick I played on you with the computer."
"Has it occurred to you that I might refuse to participate in all this?"
"Of course. You are, after all, an odd sort. But that's not my affair any more. You and Julia are now associates, so you can sort it out between you. I have other things to think about."
"That leaves you, César," said Julia.
"Me?" He smiled–painfully, Julia thought. "My dear Princess, I have many sins to purge and little time to do it in." He indicated the sealed envelope on the table. "There you have a detailed confession, explaining the whole story from start to finish, apart, of course, from our Swiss arrangement. You, Muñoz and, for the moment, Montegrifo, come out of it clean. As for the paintíng, I explain its destruction in great detail, along with the personal and sentimental reasons that drove me to it. I'm sure that after a learned examination of my confession, the police psychiatrists will happily label me a dangerous schizophrenic."
"Do you intend going abroad?"
"Certainly not. The only thing that makes having a place to go to d
esirable is that it gives you an excuse to make a journey. But I'm too old for that. On the other hand, I don't much fancy prison or a lunatic asylum. It must be rather awkward with all those well-built, attractive nurses giving you cold showers. I'm afraid not, my dear. I'm fifty years old and no longer up to such excitement. Besides, there is one other tiny detail."
Julia looked at him gravely.
"What's that?"
"Have you heard"–César gave an ironic smile–"of something called acquired something or other syndrome, which seems to be horribly fashionable these days? Well, I am a terminal case. Or so they say."
"You're lying."
"Not at all. That's what they called it: terminal, like some gloomy Underground station."
Julia closed her eyes. Everything around her seemed to fade away, and in her mind all that remained was a dull, muffled sound, like that of a stone falling into a pool. When she opened them again, her eyes were full of tears.
"You're lying, César. Not you. Tell me you're lying."
"I'd love to, Princess. I assure you I'd like nothing better than to tell you that it's all been a joke in the worst possible taste. But life is quite capable of playing such tricks on one."
"How long have you known?"
César brushed the question aside with a languid gesture of his hand, as if time had ceased to matter to him.
"Two months, more or less," he said. "It began with the appearance of a small tumour in my rectum. Rather unpleasant."
"You never said anything to me."
"Why should I have? If you'll forgive the indelicacy, my dear, I've always felt my rectum was strictly my business."
"How much longer have you got?"
"Not much. Six or seven months, I think. And they say the weight simply falls off you."
"They'll send you to a hospital then. You won't go to prison. Nor even to a lunatic asylum, as you put it."
César shook his head calmly.
"I won't go to any of those places, my dear. Can you imagine anything more horrible when dying of something so vulgar? Oh, no. Definitely not. I refuse. I at least claim the right to give my exit a personal touch. It must be dreadful to take with you as your last image of this world an intravenous drip hanging over your head, with your visitors tripping over your oxygen tank." He looked at the furniture, the tapestries and the paintings in the room. "I prefer to give myself a Florentine death, amongst all the objects that I love. A discreet, gentle exit is better suited to my tastes and my character."
"When?"
"In a while. Whenever you two are kind enough to leave me alone."
Muñoz was waiting in the street, leaning against the wall with his raincoat collar turned up. He seemed absorbed in secret thoughts, and when Julia appeared at the door and came over to him, he didn't at first look up.
"How's he going to do it?" he asked.
"Prussic acid. He's got a flask of it that he's had for ages." She smiled bitterly. "He says a bullet would be more heroic, but it would leave him with an unpleasantly surprised look on his face. He prefers to die looking his best."
"I understand."
"There's a telephone box near here, around the corner." She looked at Muñoz absently. "He asked us to give him ten minutes before calling the police."
They set off along the pavement side by side, beneath the yellow light of the street lamps. At the end of the deserted street, the traffic lights were changing from green to amber to red. The light illuminated Julia's face, marking it with deep, fantastic shadows.
"What do you think you'll do now?" asked Muñoz. He spoke without looking at her, keeping his gaze fixed on the ground ahead of him. She shrugged.
"That depends on you."
Then Julia heard Muñoz laugh. It was a profound, gentle laugh, slightly nasal, that seemed to bubble up from deep inside him. For a fraction of a second, she had the impression that it was one of the characters in the painting, and not Muñoz, who was laughing at her side.
"Your friend César is right," Muñoz said. "I do need some new shirts."
Julia ran her fingers over the three porcelain figurines–Octavio, Lucinda and Scaramouche–that she was carrying in her raincoat pocket, along with the sealed envelope. The cold night air dried her lips and froze the tears in her eyes.
"Did he say anything else before you left him alone?" asked Muñoz.
"'Nec sum adeo informis ... I'm not so very ugly. I saw myself recently, reflected in the waters along the shore, when the sea was calm.'" It was just like César to quote Virgil when she turned at the door to take in at a glance the chiaroscuro drawing room, the dark tones of the old paintings on the walls, the faint gleam, filtered by the parchment lampshade, on the surface of the furniture, the yellowing ivory, the gold on the spines of the books. And César standing against the light in the middle of the room, his features impossible to make out; a clear, slim silhouette like the effigy on a medal or an antique cameo, his shadow falling, almost brushing Julia's, feet, on the red and ochre arabesques of the carpet. And the chimes that sounded at the same instant she closed the door, as if it were the stone slab of a tomb. It was as if everything had been foreseen long before, and each of them had conscientiously performed the role assigned in the play that had finished on the chessboard at that exact hour, five centuries after the first art, with the mathematical precision of the black queen's final move.
"No," she murmured in a low voice, feeling the image moving slowly off, sinking into the depths of her memory. "No, he didn't really say much else."
Muñoz looked up, like a thin, ungainly dog sniffing the dark sky above their heads, and he smiled with wry affection.
"It's a pity," he said. "He'd have made an excellent chess player."
The sound of her footsteps echoes in the empty cloister, beneath the vaulted roof already plunged in shadow. The final rays of the setting sun fall almost horizontally, filtered through the stone shutters, staining red the convent walls, the empty niches, the ivy leaves turned yellow by the autumn curling about the capitals of the columns, the monsters, warriors, saints, mythological beasts that support the grave, Gothic arches surrounding the garden invaded by weeds. The wind howls outside, warning of the cold northern weather that always precedes winter, whirling up the side of the hill, where it shakes the branches of the trees and draws from the gargoyles and the eaves of the roof the boom of centuries-old stone; it sets the bronze bells in the tower swaying and, above them, a creaking, rusty weathervane points obstinately south, a south that is perhaps luminous, distant and inaccessible.
The woman dressed in mourning stops by a mural eaten away by time and damp. Only a few fragments of the original colours remain: the blue of a tunic, the ochre outline of a figure; a hand cut off at the wrist, one index finger pointing up at a nonexistent sky, a Christ whose features meld into the crumbling plaster of the wall; a ray of sun or of divine light, with no origin or destination, suspended between heaven and earth, a segment of yellow light absurdly frozen in time and space, which the years and the weather have gradually worn away, until one day it will be extinguished or erased, as if it had never even been there. And an angel with no mouth and a frown like that of a judge or an executioner, of whom one can only make out, amongst what remains of the paint, a pair of wings stained with lime, a fragment of tunic and the vague shape of a sword.
The woman dressed in mourning lifts the black veils that cover her face and looks for a long time into the eyes of the angel. For eighteen years she has stopped here every day at the same hour and she sees the ravages of time gnawing away at what remains of that painting. She has watched it disappear little by little, as if afflicted by a leprosy that tears off lumps of flesh, that blurs the figure of the angel, so that it blends with the dirty plaster of the wall, with the damp that causes the colours to blister, that cracks and fragments the images. Where she lives there are no mirrors. They are forbidden by the order she entered, or that perhaps she was obliged to enter. Like the painting on the wail, her memory contains
more and more blanks. She has not seen her own face for eighteen years, and for her that angel, who doubtless once possessed a beautiful face, is the only external reference to the effect of passing time on her own features: peeling paint instead of wrinkles, blurred outlines instead of ageing skin. In the occasional moments of lucidity that arrive like waves licking the sands of a beach, moments to which she clings, desperately trying to fix them in her confused, ghost-ridden memory, she seems to recall that she is fifty-four years old.
From the chapel comes a chorus of voices, the sound muffled by the thickness of the walls, voices singing the praises of God before going to the refectory. The woman dressed in mourning has permission not to attend certain services and at that hour they allow her to walk alone, like a dark, silent shadow, in the deserted cloister. A long rosary of dark wooden beads hangs from her belt, a rosary she has not touched for some time. The distant religious singing becomes confused with the whistling of the wind.
When she starts walking again and reaches the window, the dying sun is just a bright smudge of red in the distance, beneath leaden clouds coming from the north. At the foot of the hill there is a broad grey lake that glitters like steel. The woman rests her thin, bony hands on the ledge of a lancet window—again, as on every evening, her memories pitilessly return–and she feels how the cold from the stone rises up her arms and approaches, slowly, dangerously, her worn-out heart. She is seized by a terrible fit of coughing that shakes her fragile body undermined by the damp of so many winters, tortured by seclusion, solitude and intermittent memories. She no longer hears the songs from the chapel or the sound of the wind. Now it is the sad, monotonous music of a mandolin that emerges from the mists of time, and the harsh autumnal horizon vanishes before her eyes to form, as if in a painting, another landscape: a gentle undulating plain and in the distance, silhouetted against the blue sky as if painted by a fine brush, the slender outline of a belfry. And suddenly she seems to hear the voices of two men sitting at a table, the echo of laughter. And she thinks that if she turns round, she will see herself sitting on a stool with a book in her lap, and that when she looks up, she will see the gleam of a steel gorget and an insigne representing the Golden Fleece. And an old man with a grey beard will smile at her while, brush in hand, he paints on an oak panel, with the quiet skill of his profession, the eternal image of that scene.