In August 1979, the International University Sports Federation awarded the right to hold the Universiada'81 to the city of Jaca. The 24th of february 1981 the fireworks over the ski slopes of La Jacetania marked the begining of the Games. The olympic flame could not have arrived at a murkier moment. The Soviet delegation came at the event eighty-strong, including fifty competitors who crushed all-comers with nineteen medals. Then the disappearance of the journalist Sergei Shachin leapt onto the front pages. When the Soviet delegation realised he was missing they went straight to the police, claiming he had been kidnapped or suffered an accident. Meanwhile, María Pilar Izuel, one of the first female taxi drivers in Spain was being hired in Canfranc to make a trip to France.

«He was carrying a blue bag and wore a three quarter length coat with a leather collar, jeans, black boots or shoes, he had no hat so you could see his unkempt hair. We scarcely exchanged a few words: he told me that he liked the scenery very much. His bearing, at all times, was very calm and correct. We spoke in french, a language of which his command was less than perfect.»

According to the FBI, the global art market is worth around ten billion dollars a year, and ranks third, behind only drug and arms trafficking, in the volume of illegal trading.

Interpol divide the perpetrators of these thefts into three categories: compulsive collectors, second-hand art dealers and networks of professional criminals. In that final category we find René Alphonse Van den Berghe, better known as Erik The Belgian.

Erik the Belgian (born in Nuiville, Belgium, in 1940) is one of the most famous art thieves in Europe. Very well-known in Aragón for the pillaging to which he subjected the cathedral of Rosa de Isábena in 1979, this real-life twentieth-century pirate carried out his criminal campaign against Spanish heritage between 1977 and 1982, committing more than sixty robberies and helping himself to more than six thousand objects. The Belgian was in the habit of leaving a bottle of champagne and two empty glasses at the scene of the crime: «to drink a toast to love and beauty.»

Was he hoping to find an area of desert to stand in for Monument Valley? Or a Cistercian abbey? Or did he just want to be alone? Who knows, but what we do know is that by the time a red sun, seeming to melt over the horizon, was filling the whole western half of the sky, Ford found himself sat on a hillside rock, not far from a village in the province of Huesca by the name of Sena, smoking, drinking and chatting with a goatherd.

The conversation started in Spanish:

- Buenas tardes. Si se ha perdido yo puedo orientarle.

Ford replied:

- I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

The rest of the exchange took place in English:

- No problem, I understood you perfectly. In fact I happened to be born in Milwaukee, almost fifty years ago.