The Flanders Panel Read online

  She emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a bathrobe, her wet hair dripping onto her shoulders. Lighting yet another cigarette, she stood in front of the picture while she dressed: low-heeled shoes, a brown pleated skirt and a leather jacket. She gave a satisfied glance at herself in the Venetian mirror and then, turning to the two grave-faced chess players, she winked at them provocatively. Who killed the knight? As she put the photographs and her report into her bag, the phrase kept going round and round in her head as if it were a riddle. She switched on the electronic alarm and turned the key twice in the security lock. Quis necavit equitem. One way or another, it must mean something. She repeated the three words under her breath as she went down the stairs, sliding her fingers along the brass-trimmed banister. She was genuinely intrigued by the painting and its hidden inscription, but there was something else, too: She felt a strange sense of apprehension, the same feeling she'd had when she was a little girl and used to stand at the top of the stairs trying to screw up enough courage to peer into the dark attic.

  "You've got to admit he's a beauty. Pure quattrocento."

  Menchu Roch was not referring to one of the paintings on display in the gallery that bore her name. Her pale, heavily made-up eyes were trained on the broad shoulders of Max, who was talking to someone he knew at the bar of the cafe. Max was six foot tall, with the shoulders of a swimmer beneath his well-cut jacket. He wore his hair long and tied back in a brief ponytail with a dark silk ribbon and he moved with a kind of indolent flexibility. Menchu gave him a long, appreciative look and, with proprietorial satisfaction, sipped her martini. He was her latest lover.

  "Pure quattrocento," she repeated, savouring both the words and her drink. "Doesn't he remind you of one of those marvellous Italian bronzes?"

  Julia nodded half-heartedly. They were old friends, but the ease with which Menchu could lend suggestive overtones to even the most vaguely artistic remark never failed to surprise her.

  "An Italian bronze, one of the originals, I mean, would work out a lot cheaper."

  Menchu gave a short, cynical laugh.

  "Cheaper than Max? I should say." She sighed ostentatiously and bit into the olive in her martini. "Michelangelo was lucky; he sculpted them in the nude. He didn't have to foot their clothes bill courtesy of American Express."

  "No one forces you to pay his bills."

  "That's the whole point, darling," Menchu said, batting her eyelids in a languid, theatrical manner. "That no one forces me to do it, I mean. So you see..."

  She finished her drink, keeping one little finger carefully raised; she did this on purpose, purely to provoke. Menchu was nearer fifty than forty and was of the firm belief that sex was to be found everywhere, even in the most subtle nuances of a work of art. Perhaps that's why she was able to look at men with the same calculating, greedy eye she employed when assessing the potential of a painting. Amongst those who knew her, the owner of Gallery Roch had the reputation of never missing an opportunity to appropriate anything that aroused her interest, be it a painting, a man or a line of cocaine. She was still attractive, although her age made it increasingly difficult to overlook what César scathingly referred to as certain "aesthetic anachronisms". Menchu could not resign herself to growing old, largely because she didn't want to. And, perhaps as a kind of challenge to herself, she fought against it by adopting a calculated vulgarity in her choice of make-up, clothes and lovers. For the rest, in line with her belief that art dealers and antiquarians were little more than glorified rag-and-bone merchants, she pretended a lack of culture that was far from the truth, deliberately bungling artistic and literary references and openly mocking the rather select world in which she conducted her professional life. She boasted about all this with the same frankness with which she had once claimed to have experienced the best orgasm of her life masturbating in front of a catalogued and numbered reproduction of Donatello's David, an anecdote that César, with his refined, almost feminine brand of cruelty, always cited as the only example of genuine good taste that Menchu Roch had ever shown in her life.

  "So what shall we do about the Van Huys?" asked Julia.

  Menchu looked again at the X-ray photos lying on the table between her glass and her friend's coffee cup. She was wearing blue eye shadow and a blue dress that was much too short for her. Julia thought, quite without malice, that twenty years ago Menchu must have looked really pretty in blue.

  "I'm not sure yet," said Menchu. "Claymore's have undertaken to auction the painting exactly as it stands ... We'll have to see what effect the inscription has on its value."

  "Just think what that could mean."

  "I love it. You've hit the jackpot and you don't even realise it."

  "Ask the owner what he wants to do."

  Menchu put the prints back in the envelope and crossed her legs. Two. young men drinking aperitifs at the next table cast furtive, interested glances at her bronzed thighs. Julia fidgeted, a touch irritated. She was usually amused by the blatant way Menchu contrived special effects for the benefit of her male audience, but sometimes the display struck her as unnecessary. She looked at the square-faced Omega watch she wore on the inside of her left wrist. It was much too early to be showing off one's best underwear.

  "The owner's no problem," Menchu explained. "He's a delightful old chap in a wheelchair. And if the discovery of the inscription increases his profits, he'll be only too pleased ... His niece and her husband are a pair of real bloodsuckers."

  Max was still chatting at the bar but, ever-conscious of his duties, he turned round occasionally to bestow a dazzling smile on Julia and Menchu. Speaking of bloodsuckers, Julia said to herself, but decided against putting the thought into words. Not that Menchu would have minded–she showed an admirable cynicism when it came to men–but Julia had a strong sense of the proprieties which always stopped her from going too far.

  Ignoring Max, she said: "It's only two months till the auction. That's not nearly enough time if I have to remove the varnish, uncover the inscription and then revarnish again. Besides, getting together the documentation on the painting and the people in it and writing a report will take time. It would be a good idea to get the owner's permission as soon as possible."

  Menchu agreed. Her frivolity did not extend to her professional life, in which she moved with all the cunning of a trained rat. She was acting as intermediary in the transaction because the owner of the Van Huys knew nothing of the workings of the art market. It was she who had handled the negotiations for the auction with the Madrid branch of Claymore's.

  "I'll phone him tomorrow. His name is Don Manuel Belmonte, he's seventy years old, and he's delighted, as he puts it, to be dealing with a pretty young woman with such a splendid head for business."

  There was something else, Julia pointed out. If the uncovered inscription could be linked to the story of the people in the painting, Claymore's would be sure to play on that to up the asking price.

  "Have you managed to get hold of any more useful documentation?"

  "Very little," Menchu said, pursing her lips in her effort to remember. "I gave you all I had along with the painting. So you're going to have to find out for yourself."

  Julia opened her handbag and took longer than necessary to find her cigarettes. At last, she slowly took one out and looked at her friend.

  "We could ask Álvaro."

  Menchu raised her eyebrows and said at once that the very idea left her petrified, or saltified or whatever the word was, like Noah's wife, or was it Lot's? Anyway, like the wife of that twit who got so fed up with life in Sodom.

  "It's up to you, of course," she said, her voice growing hoarse with expectation. She could sense strong emotion in the air. "After all, you and Álvaro..."

  She left the phrase hanging and adopted a look of exaggerated concern, as she did whenever the topic of conversation turned to the problems of others, whom she liked to think of as utterly defenceless when it came to affairs of the heart.

  Julia held her gaze, unper
turbed, and said only: "He's the best art historian we know. And this has nothing to do with me, but with the painting."

  Menchu pretended to be considering the matter seriously and then nodded. It was up to Julia, of course. But if she was in Julia's shoes, she wouldn't do it. In dubio pro reo, as that old pedant César always said. Or was it in pluvio?

  "I can assure you that as regards Álvaro, I'm completely cured."

  "Some illnesses, sweetie, you never get over. And a year is nothing. As the song says."

  Julia couldn't suppress a wry smile at her own expense. A year ago Álvaro and she had finished a long affair, and Menchu knew all about it. It had been Menchu who, quite unintentionally, had pronounced the final verdict, which went to the very heart of the matter, something along the lines of: In the end, my dear, a married man invariably finds in favour of his legal wife. All those years of washing underpants and giving birth always prove to be the deciding factor. "It's just the way they're made," she had concluded between sniffs, her nose glued to a narrow white line of cocaine. "Deep down, they're sickeningly loyal." Another sniff. "The bastards."

  Julia exhaled a dense cloud of smoke and slowly drank the rest of her coffee, trying to keep the cup from dripping. That particular ending had been very painful, once the final words had been said and the door slammed shut. And it went on being painful afterwards. On the two or three occasions when Álvaro and she had met by chance at lectures or in museums, both had behaved with exemplary fortitude: "You're looking well." "Take care of yourself." After all, they both considered themselves to be civilised people who, quite apart from that fragment of their past, had a shared interest in the world of art. They were, to put it succinctly, mature people, adults.

  She was aware of Menchu watching her with malicious interest, gleefully anticipating the prospect of new amorous intrigues in which she could intervene as tactical adviser. She was forever complaining that since Julia had broken up with Álvaro her subsequent affairs had been so sporadic as to be hardly worth mentioning: "You're becoming a puritan, darling," she was always saying, "and that's deadly dull. What you need is a bit of passion, a return to the maelstrom." From that point of view, the mere mention of Álvaro seemed to offer interesting possibilities.

  Julia realised all this without feeling the slightest irritation. Menchu was Menchu and always had been. You don't choose your friends, they choose you, and you either reject them or you accept them without reservations. That was something else she'd learned from César.

  Her cigarette was nearly finished, so she stubbed it out in the ashtray and smiled wanly at Menchu.

  "Álvaro's not important. What concerns me is the Van Huys." She hesitated, searching for the right words as she tried to clarify her idea. "There's something odd about that painting."

  Menchu shrugged distractedly, as if she were thinking about something else.

  "Don't get worked up about it, love. A picture is just canvas, wood, paint and varnish. What matters is how much it leaves in your pocket when it changes hands." She looked across at Max's broad shoulders and blinked smugly. "The rest is just fairy tales."

  Throughout her time with Álvaro, Julia had thought of him as conforming to the most rigorous of professional stereotypes, a conformity that extended to his appearance and style of dress. He was pleasant-looking, fortyish, wore English tweed jackets and knitted ties, and, to top it all, smoked a pipe. When she saw him come into the lecture hall for the first time–his subject that day had been "Art and Man"–it had taken her a good quarter of an hour before she could actually listen to what he was saying, unable as she was to believe that anyone who looked so like a young professor actually was a professor. Afterwards, when Álvaro had dismissed them until the following week and everyone was streaming out into the corridor, she'd gone up to him as if it were the most natural thing in the world, knowing full well what would happen: the eternal repetition of a rather unoriginal story, the classic teacher-student plot, and Julia had simply assumed this, even before Álvaro, who was on his way out of the door, had turned round and smiled at her for the first time. There was something inevitable about the whole thing–or at least so it seemed to Julia as she weighed the pros and cons of the matter–a suggestion of a deliciously classical fatum, of paths laid by Destiny, a view she'd keenly espoused ever since her schooldays, when she'd translated the brilliant family dramas of that inspired Greek, Sophocles. She hadn't been able to bring herself to mention it to César until much later, and he, who had acted as her confidant in affairs of the heart for years–the first time, Julia had still been in short socks and pigtails–had simply shrugged and, in a calculatedly superficial tone, criticised the scant originality of a story that had provided the most sentimental plots, my dear, for at least three hundred novels and as many films, especially—and here he'd pulled a scornful face–French and American films: "And that, as I'm sure you'll agree, Princess, sheds a new and truly ghastly light on the whole subject." But that was all. César had never gone in for reproachful remarks or fatherly warnings, which, as they both well knew, would never have helped anyway. César had no children of his own, nor would he ever have, but he did possess a special flair when it came to tackling such situations. At some point in his life, César had realised that no one ever learns from anyone else's mistakes and, consequently, there was only one dignified and proper attitude to be taken by a guardian—which, after all, was what he was–and that consisted in sitting down next to his young ward, taking her by the hand and listening, with infinite kindness, to the evolving story of her loves and griefs, whilst nature took its own wise and inevitable course.

  "In affairs of the heart, Princess," César used to say, "one should offer neither advice nor solutions ... just a clean hanky when it seems appropriate."

  And that was exactly what he'd done when it had all ended between her and Álvaro, that night when she'd turned up at César's apartment, like a sleepwalker, her hair still damp, and had fallen asleep with her head on his lap.

  But that had happened long after that first encounter in the corridor at the university, when there were no notable deviations from the anticipated script. The ritual proceeded along well-trodden, predictable paths, which proved, nonetheless, unexpectedly satisfying. Julia had had other affairs, but never before–as she had on the afternoon when, for the first time, she and Álvaro lay down together in a narrow hotel bed–had she felt the need to say "I love you" in quite that painful, heart-wrenching way, hearing herself say the words with joyous amazement, words she'd always refused to say, in a voice she barely recognised as her own, more like a moan or a lament. And so, one morning when she woke up with her face buried in Álvaro's chest, she had carefully brushed the tousled hair from her own face and studied his sleeping profile for a long time, feeling the soft beat of his heart against her cheek, until he too had opened his eyes and smiled back at her. In that moment Julia knew, with absolute certainty, that she loved him, and she knew too that she would have other lovers but never again would she feel what she felt for him. Twenty-eight months later, months she had lived through and counted off almost day by day, the moment arrived for a painful awakening from that love, for her to ask César to get out his famous handkerchief. "The dreaded handkerchief," he'd called it, theatrical as ever, half in jest but perceptive as a Cassandra, "the handkerchief we wave when we say good-bye for ever." And that, in essence, had been their story.

  A year had been enough to cauterise the wounds, but not the memories, memories that Julia had no intention of giving up anyway. She'd grown up quite fast, and that whole moral process had crystallised in the belief–unashamedly drawn from those professed by César–that life is like an expensive restaurant where, sooner or later, someone always hands you the bill, which is not to say that you should deny the joy and pleasure afforded by the dishes already eaten.

  Julia was pondering this now, as she watched Álvaro at his desk, leafing through a book and making notes on white index cards. He'd hardly changed at all physically
, apart from a few grey hairs. His eyes were still calm and intelligent. She'd loved those eyes once, as she had those long, slender hands with their smooth, round nails. She watched as his fingers turned the pages, held his pen, and she heard, much to her discomfort, a distant murmur of melancholy; which, after brief analysis, she decided to accept as perfectly normal. His hands did not provoke in her the same feelings now as then, but they had, nonetheless, once caressed her body. Even his smallest touch, its warmth, had remained imprinted on her skin; the traces had not been erased by other loves.

  She tried to slow the pulse of her feelings. She hadn't the least intention of giving in to the temptations of memory. Besides, that was now a secondary consideration. She hadn't gone there in order to stir up nostalgic longings. So she forced herself to concentrate on her ex-lover's words and not on him. After the first awkward minutes, Álvaro had looked at her thoughtfully, as if trying to assess the importance of what had brought her there again after all this time. He smiled affectionately, like an old friend or colleague, relaxed and attentive, placing himself at her disposal with the quiet efficiency so familiar to her, full of silences and considered remarks uttered in that low voice of his. After the initial surprise, there was only a hint of perplexity in his eyes when Julia asked him about the painting, though not about the hidden inscription, which she and Menchu had decided to keep a secret. Álvaro confirmed that he knew the painter, his work and the historical period well, but that he hadn't known the painting was going to be auctioned or that Julia had been placed in charge of its restoration. In fact he had no need of the colour photographs Julia had brought, and he seemed familiar with the people in the painting. Running his forefinger down the page of an old volume on medieval history to check a date, he was intent on his task and apparently oblivious to the past intimacy which Julia sensed floating between them like the shroud of a ghost. But perhaps he feels the same, she thought. Perhaps from Álvaro's point of view, she too seemed oddly distant and indifferent.