In Barcelona
It was nine o'clock on a night of late August.
The restaurant of the Maison Dorée in the Plaza Cataluña at Barcelona looks across the brilliantly-lighted square from the south side. On the pavement in front of it and of its neighbour, the Café Continental, the vendors of lottery tickets were bawling the lucky numbers they had for sale. Even in this wide space the air was close and stale. Within, a few people left over in the town had strayed in to dine at tables placed against the walls under flamboyant decorations in the style of Fragonard. At a table Hillyard was sitting alone over his coffee. Across the room one of the panels represented a gleaming marble terrace overlooking a country-side bathed in orange light; and on the terrace stood a sedan chair with drawn curtains, and behind the chair stood a saddled white horse. Hillyard had dined more than once during the last few months at the Maison Dorée; and the problem of that picture had always baffled him. A lovers' tryst! But where were the lovers? In some inner room shaded from the outrage of that orange light which never was on sea or land? Or in the sedan chair? Or were their faces to be discovered, as in the puzzle pictures, in the dappling of the horse's flanks, or the convolutions of the pillars which supported the terrace roof, or the gilded ornamentations of the chair itself? Hillyard was speculating for the twentieth time on these important matters with a vague hope that one day the door of the sedan chair would open, when another door opened—the door of the restaurant. A sharp-visaged man with a bald forehead, a clerk, one would say, or a commercial traveller, looked round the room and went forward to Hillyard's table. He went quite openly.
The two men shook hands, and the new-comer seated himself in front of Hillyard.
"You will take coffee and a cigar?" Hillyard asked in Spanish, and gave the order to the waiter.
The two men talked of the heat, the cinematograph theatres at the side of the Plaza, the sea-bathing at Caldetas, and then the sharp-faced man leaned forward.
"Ramon says there is no truth in the story, señor."
Hillyard struck a match and held it to his companion's cigar.
"And you trust Ramon, Señor Baeza?"
Lopez Baeza leaned back with a gesture of unqualified assent.