What We Become by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Page B

a reddish glow over the villas on the green hillside. Max Costa, in the same navy-blue jacket and gray flannel trousers he was wearing when he arrived at the hotel (he has only changed his silk cravat for a red necktie with blue polka dots tied in a Windsor knot), comes down from his room and mingles with the other guests enjoying a predinner drink. Although the summer and its crowds have gone, the chess contest has kept the place busy: nearly all the tables in the bar and on the terrace are full. A poster resting on an easel announces the forthcoming game in the Sokolov-Keller duel. Max pauses to study the photographs of the two adversaries. Beneath pale bushy eyebrows of the same color as his hair, which remindsMax of a hedgehog, the Soviet champion’s watery blue eyes gaze suspiciously at the pieces on a chessboard. His round face and coarse features evoke the image of a peasant studying the board in the same way generations of his ancestors might have surveyed a field of ripening grain or clouds passing overhead presaging rain or drought. As for Jorge Keller, he looks almost distracted and dreamy as he gazes at the photographer. Max thinks he can detect a touch of naïveté, as though the young man were looking not at the camera but at someone or something slightly farther off that has nothing to do with chess, but rather with childish dreams or vague fantasies.
    A warm breeze. The murmur of conversation and soft background music. The terrace at the Vittoria is spacious and splendid. Beyond the balustrade is a stunning view over the Bay of Naples, which is beginning to be bathed in a golden light that gradually spreads across the horizon. The headwaiter shepherds Max to a table beside a marble statue of a half-kneeling naked woman peering out to sea. Max orders a glass of cold white wine and glances around him. The atmosphere is one of elegance, as befits the time and place. There are smartly dressed foreign guests, mostly those Americans and Germans who visit Sorrento out of season. The rest are Campanella’s guests, whose travel and hotel expenses he has paid. There are also chess lovers who can afford to pay their own expenses. At a neighboring table, Max recognizes a beautiful movie actress accompanied by a group of people that includes her husband, a producer at Cinecittà. Hovering nearby are two young men who look like local journalists. One has a Pentax camera slung around his neck, and each time he raises it, Max hides his face discreetly behind his hand or turns to look in the opposite direction. It is unconscious, a reflex, that of the hunter careful not to become the hunted. These old gestures, second nature to him now, he had developed instinctively as a professional to minimize risk. In those days, Max Costa was never more vulnerable than when exposinghis face and identity to some detective capable of asking what an experienced con artist, or gentleman thief, as they were referred to euphemistically in another era, was doing in a given place.
    When the journalists move away, Max surveys the scene. On his way down, he was thinking how extraordinarily lucky it would be to spot her at the first attempt, and yet there she is, sitting at a table quite close to his, with a group of other people that does not include young Keller or the girl who was with them. This time she isn’t wearing her tweed hat, and he can see her short, silver-gray hair, which looks completely natural. As she speaks, she tilts her head toward her companions, showing polite interest (a gesture Max recalls with astonishing clarity), occasionally leaning back in her chair and nodding at their conversation with a smile. She is simply dressed, with the same casual elegance as the day before: a dark, flared skirt and a white silk blouse gathered at the waist by a wide belt. She has on a pair of suede loafers and the same wool cardigan draped over her shoulders. She wears no earrings or jewelry, apart from a slender