The Flanders Panel Read Free

them - but were treated with a delicacy that integrated the marks of time with the work.
    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 Cesar 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