The Fire (17 page)

Charlot’s mounting revulsion and horror were nearly overwhelming. But he knew he must bring these emotions under control until he could learn precisely where Haidée was. He glanced at Kauri, then nodded toward a man in a striped kaftan, standing just beside them in the throng.

‘Sire,’ Kauri addressed the man in Arabic, ‘my master is a trader for a prominent sugar plantation in the New World. Women are needed in our colonies, both for slave breeding and for childless planters. My master is sent hither to acquire good breeding stock. But we are unfamiliar with custom at auctions in these parts. Perhaps you would be so kind as to enlighten us as to your procedures. For we’ve overheard that this auction today might contain a high quality of both black and white gold.’

‘You have overheard quite correctly,’ said the other, seemingly pleased to know something that these strangers were ignorant of. ‘These lots today are directly come from the recently deceased Sultan Mulay Suliman’s personal household at the palace, the choicest of flesh. And yes, both procedure and prices often go very differently here than in other slave markets – even than at Marrakech, the largest slave market in Morocco, where five or six thousand humans are sold per year.’

‘Different? How so?’ asked Charlot, his anger at this fellow’s callousness beginning to restore a bit of his strength.

‘In the Western trade, like at Marrakech,’ the man said, ‘you’ll find that strong healthy males are in greatest demand to ship to plantations like yours in the European colonies – while for export to the East, eunuch youths bring the highest prices, for they’re favored as concubines by wealthy Ottoman
Turks. But here in Fez boys between five and ten years may bring no more than two or three hundred dinars each, although young
girls
of that age bring more than double that amount. And a girl that’s reached the age to breed – if she’s attractive, pubescent, and yet still a virgin – might command something like the value of fifteen hundred dinars, more than one thousand French livres. As these girls are the choicest and most highly sought after here, if you have the money you won’t have long to wait. They will always be sold first, just after the children.’

They thanked the man for his information. Charlot, in despair at these words, had taken Kauri by the shoulder and now began to propel him to the edge of the crowd so they might quickly gain a better view of the auction platform.

‘How can we possibly do it?’ Kauri whispered to Charlot. For it was clear that it was now too late ever to procure such an enormous sum, even if they knew how.

Just as they cleared the crowd, Charlot said beneath his breath, ‘There is one way.’

Kauri looked at him with open, questioning eyes. Yes, there was one way, as they both knew, that they could acquire so large a sum quickly, regardless of what such a decision might cost them in the end. But did they really have a choice?

There was no time to think further. Almost as if the hand of fate had grasped him, Charlot felt the terror grasp his spine. He looked back toward the platform with a jolt to see the slender form that he knew was Haidée, her nakedness now covered only by her long, loose abundance of hair, as – with a string of other young girls, chained to one another by a silver cuff attached to the left wrist and ankle of each – she was herded up onto the platform.

As Kauri stood guard, blocking the view of the others, Charlot huddled beneath his own robe as if merely pulling off his outer djellaba. But with one hand he reached beneath
his underlying kaftan and removed the Black Queen from her leather pouch so he could see her. Unsheathing his sharp
bousaadi,
he scraped away a bit of the charcoal. Then from the soft, pure gold, he prized out a single, costly stone. It fell into his hand – an emerald the size of a robin’s egg. He put the Black Queen back in her pouch, untied the bag from his waist, tossed back his djellaba, and handed the pouch to Kauri.

With the smooth stone still clutched in his palm Charlot, all alone, walked to the front of the crowd to stand directly beneath the platform of those naked and terrified women. But when he looked up he saw only Haidée. She was looking down at him with no fear, with enormous trust.

They both knew what he must do.

Charlot might have lost his vision, but he knew beyond a doubt that this was right.

For he knew that Haidée was the new White Queen.

Every Greek state had its prytaneum… On this hearth there burned a perpetual fire. The prytaneum was sacred to Hestia, the personified goddess of the hearth… The question still remains, why was so much importance attached to the maintenance of a perpetual fire?…Its history goes back to the embryo state of human civilization.

James George Frazer,
The Prytaneum

Washington, D.C.

April 6, 2003

My taxi dropped me on M Street in the heart of Georgetown just as the Jesuit church bells at the end of the block were calling out the end of Sunday night.

But Rodo had left so many unanswered messages on my cell phone to start up the fires that, exhausted as I was, and although I knew Leda would cover for me, I’d already decided not to go home. Instead I would go to the kitchens only a block from where I lived to prepare the new fire for the week, as usual.

To say I was exhausted was the understatement of the millennium. Getting out of Colorado had not gone exactly as planned.

By the time the Livingstons had departed our dinner Friday night, the rest of us were already completely wiped out. Lily and Vartan were still on London time. Key said she’d been up before dawn and needed to get home and get some shut-eye, too. And what with the emotional traumas and psychic bruising I’d been subjected to from the very moment of my arrival on that Colorado mountaintop, my mind was by now so cluttered with potential moves and countermoves that I couldn’t see the board for the pieces.

Lily, glancing around at our haggard faces, suggested that it was time to call it a night. We’d readjourn first thing in the morning, she said, when we’d be in a better state to construct a strategy.

According to her idea, this would consist of activity on multiple fronts: She herself would sleuth to learn more about Basil Livingston’s activities within the chess world, and Vartan would milk his Russian contacts to discover what he could about the suspicious death of Taras Petrossian. Nokomis would ferret out what possible escape routes my mother might have taken after departing the lodge in Four Corners, to see if she could pick up her trail, while I was assigned the thankless task of contacting my elusive uncle to learn what he might know about her disappearance and what ‘gift’ he had sent her, as he’d said in his mysterious message. We all agreed that finding my mother was top priority – that I’d phone Key on Monday to find out what she’d learned.

Key was on the phone with her crew, checking the status of Lily’s car that they’d sent off to Denver on a trailer. That was when the news broke that there would be a change in our plans.

‘Oh no,’ she said, regarding me with a grim expression as
she held the phone to her ear. ‘The Aston Martin got to Denver just fine, but there’s a blizzard headed our way from the north. It’s already in southern Wyoming. It should hit here before noon tomorrow. Cortez airport has shut down for the weekend, along with everything else.’

I’d been in this boat before, so I knew the drill. Although this was only Friday and my return flight to D.C. wasn’t scheduled until Sunday, if a blizzard dumped enough snow here tomorrow I could still miss my connection at Denver. Worse yet, and beyond contemplation, we might all be stranded here in the mountains for days with one bed among us, living on a diet of flash-dried food. So we’d have to depart the mountaintop first thing in the morning – the three of us with Zsa-Zsa and the luggage – well before the snows hit, and make the five-hundred-mile trek through the Rockies in my rental car, which could be dropped at the Denver airport.

Upstairs, I assigned Aunt Lily and her companion Zsa-Zsa the only real bed – my mother’s brass bed, tucked into one of the semiprivate alcoves on the octagonal balcony. They were both fast asleep before they even hit the mattress. Vartan helped me pull out futons and sleeping bags, and he offered to help me clean up the after-dinner mess.

My houseguests must have observed that our accommodations here at Mother’s octagon were primitive. But I’d neglected to mention that the lodge only sported one small bathroom – on the ground floor under the stairway – with no shower, only a claw-footed tub and a big, old-fashioned iron sink. As I knew from long experience, that was where we’d have to do the dinner dishes, too.

On Key’s way out, she glanced in the open bathroom door where Vartan – his cashmere sleeves shoved above his elbows – was swirling dishes around in the sink and rinsing them off in the tub. He passed a wet plate out the door for me to dry.

‘Sorry we can’t recruit you – no room,’ I said, motioning to the cramped space.

‘There’s nothing sexier than seeing a strong man slaving over a sink of hot, sudsy dishes,’ Key informed us with a wide grin.

I laughed, as Vartan pulled a grimace.

‘Now, no matter how much fun this is, you two,’ she said, ‘please don’t stay up all night playing in the bubbles. You’ve got a rough road ahead of you tomorrow.’

Then she vanished into the night.

‘This actually
is
fun,’ Vartan told me as soon as she’d gone. He was now passing cups and glasses out the door. ‘I used to help my mother like this in Ukraine when I was little,’ he went on. ‘I loved to be in the kitchen and smell the bread baking. I helped with everything – grinding coffee and shelling peas – you couldn’t ever get me to leave. The other children said I was fastened to my mother’s – how do you say it? – her apron ties? I even learned to play chess on the kitchen table, while she cooked.’

I admit I had trouble visualizing the arrogant, ruthless boy chess wizard of my last acquaintance as this self-described mama’s boy. Stranger yet was the disparity in our cultures that instantly leapt to mind.

My mother could build a fire. But when it came to cooking, she could barely dip a tea bag in hot water. The only kitchens I’d known as a child were far from cozy: a two-burner hot plate in our apartment in Manhattan, versus my uncle Slava’s huge old wood-burning ovens and walk-in fireplace at his mansion on Long Island, where you could cook for a cattle drive – though being such a recluse, he never did. And my chess upbringing itself could hardly be described as idyllic.

‘Your kitchen life sounds wonderful to somebody like me, a chef,’ I told Vartan. ‘But who taught you chess?’

‘That was my mother, too. She got me a little chess set
and taught me to play – I was very tiny,’ he told me, passing the last of the silverware through the door. ‘It was just after my father was killed.’

When Vartan saw my shocked reaction, he reached out and wrapped his wet hands over mine as I still held the silverware in the dishcloth.

‘I’m sorry – I thought everyone knew,’ he explained hastily. Taking the silverware from my hands, he set it down. ‘It’s been in all the chess columns ever since I made grandmaster. But my father’s death was nothing like yours.’

‘What
was
it like?’ I said. I felt like weeping. I was ready to drop to the floor from exhaustion. I couldn’t think straight. My father was dead, my mother was missing. And now this.

‘My father was killed in Afghanistan when I was three,’ Vartan was explaining. ‘He was conscripted there as a soldier at the height of the war. But he hadn’t served for long, so my mother could receive no pension. We were very poor. That’s why eventually she did it.’

Vartan’s eyes were trained upon me. He’d taken my hands in his again, and now he pressed them tightly. ‘Xie, are you listening to me?’ he said in a tone I hadn’t heard before – so urgent it was almost a command to pay attention.

‘Let’s see,’ I said. ‘You were poor, your father was shot in the line of duty. So far am I tracking?’ But then I
did
snap to. ‘That’s why who did
what
?’ I said.

‘My mother,’ said Vartan. ‘It was several years before she understood how good I was at chess – how good I
could
be. She wanted to help me in any way she could. I found it hard to forgive her, but I knew that she did what she thought was right by marrying him.’

‘Marrying who?’ I said, though I had grasped it before he said it.

Of course. The man who’d managed the chess tourney where my father was killed, the man who was Basil
Livingston’s partner in crime, the man who was snuffed out himself by the Siloviki two weeks ago in London. It was none other than Vartan Azov’s own stepfather…

‘Taras Petrossian.’

Needless to say, Vartan and I didn’t get much sleep before dawn. His checkered Soviet childhood made my father’s – at least, what little I knew of it myself – seem cheery by comparison.

The crux of it was, Vartan had resented and disliked the new stepfather he’d acquired at the age of nine, but was reliant upon him for the sake of his mother’s comfort and Vartan’s own chess education and training. After Vartan attained his GM ranking – after his mother died, and Petrossian was in self-imposed exile outside Russia – Vartan had little to do with the man. That is, not until this past chess tournament two weeks ago in London.

Still – why had he mentioned nothing about this relationship to us when we were discussing strategies earlier? If it was in ‘all the chess columns,’ did Lily already know?

Now, as we sat side by side deep in the pillows beside the waning light of the fire, I found myself too exhausted to protest or even to speak, but still too distraught to adjourn upstairs and try to get some sleep. Vartan had poured us some brandy from the sideboard. As we sipped it, he reached over and rubbed my neck with one hand.

‘I’m sorry. I thought you must know all this,’ he told me as gently as possible, kneading my tense neck tendons. ‘But if we are indeed involved in that larger Game, as Lily Rad said, I believe that you and I have too many coincidences in our lives
not
to join forces.’

Starting with a few suspicious family murders,
I thought. But I said nothing.

‘I would like to begin this spirit of cooperation,’ Vartan
told me with a smile, ‘by offering you my skill at something I do even better than I play chess.’

He slipped his hand from my neck to beneath my chin and tilted my face up to his. I was about to protest when he added, ‘This skill is something else that my mother taught me when I was quite small. Something I believe you will need before we leave here tomorrow morning.’

He got up and went into the mudroom, returning with my big down-filled parka, which he tossed in my lap. Then he headed to the piano. I sat up in the cushions in alarm as he opened the lid and reached inside. He extracted the drawing of the chessboard, which in my stupor I had somehow completely forgotten.

‘You
had
planned to take this with you, hadn’t you?’ Vartan inquired. When I nodded, he added, ‘Then you should be grateful your parka is thick enough to conceal it in all that down. And thank heaven that my mother taught me how to sew!’

I’d made this grueling ten-hour drive often, but even so, all day Saturday I was wrangling with the steering wheel, barely outpacing the snapping winds of the incoming storm. Though I did have the comfort of some extra thermal padding from the drawing of a two-hundred-year-old chessboard hidden inside the down filling of my parka. And the added comfort of my last-minute decision to grab the pillow bag stuffed with that chess set and place it in my rucksack. Just in case there was some further message I’d overlooked.

Just as the blizzard hit Denver, I dropped Lily’s entourage and luggage at the front door of the Brown Palace and let the doorman take the car. We got our first meal of the day at the Ship’s Tavern just before the restaurant closed. We agreed that we would all touch base later in the week. And I grabbed a few hours of sleep myself, crashing on the sofa
in Lily’s suite. As it turned out, that would be the last food and sleep I would have for twenty-four hours.

Now at midnight in Georgetown, as I descended the steep flight of stone steps and crossed the wooden footbridge over the glassy, shimmering canal, I could see Rodo’s world-famous restaurant – Sutalde, The Hearth – there on the low bluff below me, overlooking the river.

Sutalde was unique even for a place steeped in history like Georgetown. Its weathered stone buildings dating from the 1700s were among the earliest still standing in Washington, D.C., and they were seeping with charisma.

I unlocked the front door to the restaurant and switched off the burglar alarm. Though the interior lights were on automatic dousers, I never bothered to turn them on when I came into Sutalde, even so late at night. Across the vast room, where the original barn doors had once been, was a wall of many-paned windows overlooking the canal and the river. As I moved among the damask-draped tables, ghostly in the gloom, I had a panoramic view of the pale celadon green sweep of Key Bridge, illuminated by its tall, slender lanterns all the way across the river. On the far shore, the lights of the high-rise buildings of Rosslyn were reflected in the glittering midnight waters of the wide Potomac.

From those windows to the maître d’s desk, extending the length of the room’s left wall, ran a rack that stood nearly as tall as I and displayed handmade jugs of Basque cider from every province. It provided a corridor of sorts so that waiters and my boss’s favorite diners could get to their destinations without being forced to navigate the forest of tables. Rodo was quite proud of it all – the cider, the display, and the touches of privacy and class it provided. I ducked around the rack and descended the curving flight of stone steps to the kitchens. Here was the magical stone dungeon created by Rodolfo Boujaron, where most evenings
privileged diners, if they had nothing but time on their hands and
beaucoup d’argent,
could watch through an enormous glass wall as their prix fixe eight-course meal was prepared over flames and hot embers by scurrying staff and award-winning master chefs.

Beside the great stone ovens I found Leda the Lesbian sitting on the high chair we used for monitoring the fires. She seemed calm and relaxed, reading a book while smoking her traditional hand-rolled Turkish cigarette in its black lacquered holder and sipping a Pernod pastis, her favorite drink.