The Flanders Panel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Read Free Book Online Page A

- waiting for the bell announcing the arrival of a customer.
    “Hello, Cesar.”
    “Hello, Princess.”
    Cesar was over fifty - Julia had never managed to extract a confession from him as to his exact age - and he had the smiling, mocking blue eyes of a mischievous child whose greatest pleasure lies in defying the world in which he has been forced to live. He had white, immaculately waved hair - she suspected he’d been dyeing it for years now - and he was still in excellent shape, apart from a slight thickening about the hips. He always wore beautifully cut suits, of which the only criticism might be that they were, strictly speaking, a little daring for a man his age. He never wore a tie, not even on the most select social occasions, opting instead for magnificent Italian cravats knotted at the open neck of a shirt, invariably silk, that bore his entwined initials embroidered in blue or white just below his heart. He had a breadth and degree of culture Julia had never met elsewhere and was the most perfect embodiment of the saying that amongst the upper classes extreme politeness is merely the most highly refined expression of one’s scorn for others. Within Cesar’s social milieu, a concept that might have been expanded to include Humanity as a whole, Julia was the only person who enjoyed that politeness, knowing that she was safe from his scorn. Ever since she’d been able to think for herself, Cesar had been for her an odd mixture of father, confidant, friend and confessor, without ever being exactly any of those things.
    “I’ve got a problem, Cesar.”
    “Excuse me, but in that case,
we
have a problem. Tell me all about it.”
    And Julia told him, omitting nothing, not even the hidden inscription, a fact that Cesar acknowledged with a slight lift of his eyebrows. They were sitting by the stained-glass window, and Cesar was leaning slightly towards her, his right leg crossed over his left, one hand, on which gleamed a valuable topaz set in gold, draped nonchalantly over the Patek Philippe watch he wore on his other wrist. It was that distinguished pose of his, by no means calculated (although it may once have been), that so effortlessly captivated the troubled young men in search of exquisite sensations, the painters, sculptors, fledgling artists whom Cesar took under his wing with a devotion and constancy which, it must be said, lasted much longer than his sentimental relationships.
    “Life is short and beauty transient, Princess.” Whenever Cesar adopted his confidential tone, dropping his voice almost to a whisper, the words were always touched with a wry melancholy. “And it would be wrong to possess it for ever. The beauty lies in teaching a young sparrow to fly, because implicit in his freedom is your relinquishment of him. Do you see the subtle point I’m making with this parable?”
    As she’d openly acknowledged once before when Cesar, half-flattered and half-amused, had accused her of making a jealous scene, Julia felt inexplicably irritated by all those little sparrows fluttering around Cesar, and only her affection for him and her rational awareness that he had even‘ right to lead his own kind of life, prevented her giving voice to it. As Menchu used to say, with her usual lack of tact: “What you’ve got, dear, is an Electra complex dressed up as an Oedipus complex, or vice versa…” Menchu’s parables, unlike Cesar’s, tended to be all too explicit.
    When Julia had finished recounting the story of the painting, Cesar remained silent, pondering what she’d said. He didn’t seem surprised - in matters of art, especially at his age, very little surprised him - but the mocking gleam in his eyes had given way to a flicker of interest.
    “Fascinating,” he said at last, and Julia knew at once that she would be able to count on him. Ever since she was a child that word had been an incitement to complicity and adventure on the trail of some secret: the pirate treasure hidden in the drawer