The Fire (27 page)

But the very instant that I did ask those same questions of myself, that was all it took to strike the final, lethal chord of terror up my spine. I was relieved I was still sitting down. My limbic system was wreaking havoc with my visceral reponses; I was drenched in cold sweat.

But I couldn’t help hearing that one particular phrase, like a clash of symbols in my mind – the phrase that pulled everything together in a way that I really couldn’t bear to understand:

Naturally we’ve known Vartan since he was just a boy
…

If the Livingstons had known Vartan Azov since he was a boy – if they’d known him ever since the time when he was Taras Petrossian’s stepson and they’d been involved all that time with Petrossian himself – then this meant that they’d
all
been intimately connected. Even from the very first moment that my father and I had set foot in Russia.

Which meant that
they all
must have been involved in that very Last Game, the one that took my father’s life.

The Game had certainly advanced. In those few words of aside, I’d quickly realized, Rosemary Livingston had not only shown her true colors, but perhaps provided a good deal more than food for thought.

As I served the next three courses – the daube of wild
mushrooms, the poultry with vegetables and spicy greens braised in pan drippings, and the
gâteau au chocolat
thick with brandy-soaked Basque cherries – I hung out like the proverbial fly on the wall and tried to get a better glance at the board I was playing on. I learned a lot, if only through innuendo.

Though Rodo had soon rescued me from the clutches of our hostess and got me back to my more comfortable habitat, raking ashes and serving vittles, I still couldn’t stop the refrain running through my head: that most of those who’d been my mother’s guests only days ago in the Colorado Rockies, had turned out to be somehow intimately connected with one another as well – in a way that suggested they were therefore also suspiciously connected with my father’s death.

This meant that they certainly were all players in the Game.

Now all I needed to grasp was how they were connected with
me.
What role did
I
play? The Sixty-Four-Square Question, as Key might say – and as Rodo, in his own way, had earlier tried to point out. I couldn’t wait to get him alone after closing time, to pump him about the real inception of this gala meal. Whose idea had it been? How was it initially arranged? How had it been set up – replete with all the high-level dignitaries and the
haut
security force?

But despite all those unanswered questions floating in the forefront of my consciousness, there was one thing I was sure that I
had
deciphered, one thing that lay lurking within the deep recesses of my mind.

Something else had happened ten years ago. Something besides my father’s death and besides my mother’s decision to yank me out of school in New York and relocate us both to the Octagon in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains – something that almost seemed like an inexplicable chess move within a larger Game.

For ten years ago, as I now recalled, the Livingston family had pulled up roots in Denver and become our full-time neighbors. They’d moved to their ranch in Redlands, on the Colorado Plateau.

It was after midnight when the Livingstons departed with the last of their guests. Rodo and I were both too exhausted for a lengthy chat. He said he’d like to meet me tomorrow morning and take me somewhere private where we could do a postmortem on what had been going on tonight.

That sounded good to me. A field trip with Rodo would also spare me the ire of the master chefs and Leda – not to mention the dishwashing crew – when they discovered what we’d left them to clean up after tonight.

I was moving the kettles and pans to the larder, where they could be left soaking in water for the next few hours, when I moved the dripping pan and saw those awful burned drippings glommed onto the slate floor underneath. I pointed it out to Rodo.

‘Who set up that spit with the
mouton
?’ I asked him. ‘Whoever it was, they really left a mess. You should have had me do it, or you should have done it yourself. Who’d you send down here as helpers this morning – the Basque Brigade?’

Rodo shook his head sadly at the baked-in black goo. He trickled some water onto it from the pitcher, then sprinkled it with a bit of baking soda.

‘Just a friend,’ he said. ‘I shall correct it tomorrow. Right now I shall retrieve our cell phones. You had best go to bed yourself and get you some sleep.’

This was so unlike my boss – whom the chefs called the Euzkaldun Exterminator – that it fairly took my breath. The real Rodo would have leveled his contempt like an AK-47 assault rifle at anyone for a transgression even half
this bad. He must be slipping after the exertion of tonight, I reasoned.

I myself was nearly slipping into a coma from exhaustion by the time Rodo had returned from the bridge patrol with our cell phones. Once he’d locked the door behind us it was once again the wee hours. Becoming a tradition for me. The footbridge was open, the gumshoes gone, and their carrel and concrete barriers conveniently removed.

We parted at the end of the bridge where Rodo wished me a good night’s sleep and said he’d phone tomorrow and arrange to pick me up. It was after one a.m. when I headed down the alley to my pied à terre overlooking the canal.

When I reached the terrace at the usually shadowy entrance to Key Park, everything was as black as the inside of a wool sock. The streetlamp had burned out, which happened more often than I liked to think. It was too dark to see, so I fumbled for my keys and finally located the right one by touch. But when I opened the door to my hallway there was something wrong. I noticed a dim light that seemed to be glowing at the top of the stairs.

Could I have left a lamp on this morning by mistake?

After all I’d been through these past four days, I had the right to be worried. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Rodo’s number. He couldn’t be more than a block or two away – likely hadn’t even reached his car yet – but there was no answer, so I hung up. I could easily punch Redial if I found something up there that was really wrong.

I crept soundlessly up the stairs until I reached the door to my apartment. It didn’t have a lock of its own, but I always shut it when I left the house. Now it was slightly ajar. And there was no doubt: a lamp was lit inside. I was about to hit Redial when I heard a familiar voice from within.

‘Where have you been, my dear? I’ve been waiting here for you half the night.’

I pushed the door and it swung open. There, seated in my comfy leather chair as if he owned the place, lamplight falling on his coppery curls, a glass of my best sherry in one hand and an open book upon his lap, sat my uncle Slava.

Dr Ladislaus Nim.

Middlegame: The part of the game that follows the opening phase. It is the most difficult and the most beautiful part, where a lively imagination has great opportunity to create wonderful combinations.

– Nathan Divinsky,
The Batsford

Chess Encyclopedia

Nim regarded me with his wry smile, but for only a moment. I must have looked like a complete wreck. As if he’d grasped everything that had happened, he set down his glass and book and came over to me; without a word he enfolded me in his arms.

I had no idea of the real state of my frazzled nerves. But the instant he hugged me the floodgates opened and I found myself sobbing uncontrollably into his sleeve. Frightened as I’d been only seconds ago, I felt it turn to relief. For the first time in as long as I could recall, I found myself under the protection of someone I could trust completely. He stroked my hair with one hand, as if I were his pet, and I began to relax.

My father had nicknamed my uncle ‘Slava,’ a kind of
Russian double entendre – short for Ladislav, the pronunciation of his name, but also the Russian word for a ‘Glory,’ the eight-pointed star that forms a halo in Russian icons for figures like God, the Virgin, or angels.
My
Slava was definitely ensconced in his own aura, replete with a coppery halo of hair. And although now that I was grown, like everyone else I called him Nim, I still thought of him as my guardian angel.

He was the most fascinating person I’d ever known – I think because he’d kept a trait that most of us possess as children, but few of us manage to retain as we grow older. Nim remained fascinating because he was always
fascinated –
by anything and everything. His favorite admonition summed up this philosophy: Whenever I’d wheedled to be amused or entertained as a child, he’d say, ‘Only the boring are bored.’

Whether fascinating or mysterious to others, Nim had been the most stable ingredient in my young life. After my father’s death and the estrangement from Mother that followed my removal from the world of chess, my uncle had given me two important gifts that helped me survive – gifts that were also the means we’d employed all these years to communicate with each other so we didn’t have to speak about the deeper things that clearly we both found so painful: the arts of cooking and of puzzles.

And my intriguing uncle was here just now, tonight, to bestow a third gift – something I’d never expected or sought or even wanted.

But now – cradled in his arms, my sobs subsiding – I felt myself sinking into exhausted oblivion, too weary to ask my many questions, too heavy with fatigue to understand the answer my uncle was here to give me, that ‘gift’ that was about to change everything: the knowledge of my own past.

‘Doesn’t he ever
feed
you, this employer of yours? When was the last time you ate?’ Nim was asking me, irritably.

Despite the caustic tone he was regarding me with grave concern with those strange bicolored eyes – one blue, one brown – that seemed always to look at you and through you at once. His brow furrowed, his elbows propped on my kitchen table, he watched every swallow I took as I tucked into my second helping of the delicious soup he’d prepared from things he’d foraged in my barren kitchen. He’d whipped up this soup to revive me, after I’d apparently blacked out in his arms and he’d laid me out cold on the living room sofa.

‘I guess Rodo and I both overlooked that I haven’t had time to eat much lately,’ I admitted. ‘Things have been so confused these past few days. I think the last real meal I had was what I prepared myself, back in Colorado.’

‘Colorado!’ Nim exclaimed under his breath as he glanced once, quickly, toward the window. Then he lowered his voice further. ‘So that’s where you’ve been. I’ve been hunting you here for days. I’ve been by that restaurant of yours more than once.’

So he was the trench-coated mystery man who’d been lurking around Sutalde.

But suddenly, without warning, Nim had slapped his hand flat on my nearby kitchen counter with a loud
smack
. ‘Cockroach,’ he said, holding up his empty palm with one brow slightly raised as in warning. ‘I noticed one, but there may be others. When you’ve finished your soup, let’s go toss this outside.’

I understood: That empty palm suggested my place was ‘bugged’ in a different fashion, so we couldn’t talk here. My eyes were scratchy from my weeping jag, my head ached from lack of sleep. But hungry or exhausted or not, I understood as well as he did the urgency of our situation. We really needed to speak.

‘I’m pretty tired already,’ I told my uncle with a yawn that I didn’t need to fake. ‘Let’s go right now and get it done. Then I can get back and catch some sleep.’

Pulling my big coffee mug down from its hook over the stove, I ladled it full of the soup. I made a mental note to jot down later the magical meld of flavors Nim had managed to concoct from the dusty tins and paper packets he’d tossed together: a rich, creamy corn chowder laced with curry and lemon juice, sprinkled with toasted coconut, crabmeat, and chopped jalapeño peppers. Astonishing. Once again my uncle had demonstrated what he’d always prided himself on: creating a magical meal just by rummaging through the refuse of an ordinary kitchen cupboard. He’d do Rodo proud.

We slipped on our outdoors coats. I stuck the spoon in my cup and followed him down the darkened steps and into the wet black night. Both the canal towpath below us and the meandering footpath leading into Key Park were black and deserted, so we walked uphill to M Street where the streetlamps always shimmered golden pools of light throughout the night. By unspoken consensus we turned left toward the lighted span of Key Bridge.

‘I’m glad you brought the soup along. You will finish that, please.’ Nim nodded toward the big cup as he tossed his arm across my shoulders. ‘My dear, I’m seriously concerned about your health. You look a wreck. But I’m not nearly as worried about what’s already happened to you – you can explain all that to me later – as I fear what may be
about
to happen. What on earth suddenly possessed you to up and take off for Colorado?’

‘Mother’s birthday party,’ I said between slurps of the fabulous soup. ‘You were invited yourself. Or at least, so you said in your voice message—’

‘My message!’ he said, taking his arm from my shoulder.

‘
Jawohl,
Herr Professor Doktor Wittgenstein,’ I said. ‘You
declined to attend, you were running off to India for a chess tournament. I heard the message on Mother’s machine. We all did.’

‘All!’ cried Nim. He’d stopped cold in his tracks just as we reached the upper corner of Key Park and the entrance to the bridge. ‘Perhaps first, after all, you’d best tell me exactly what did happen in Colorado. Who else was there?’

So there under the streetlamp at the park’s edge, as we heard the clock chime two a.m., I quickly filled in my uncle on the arrival, one by one, of Mother’s mysterious motley crew of birthday invitees and what I’d learned about each. He winced at a few names – principally Basil and Vartan. But he was paying close attention when I told him Lily’s story of the Game, as if he were trying to reconstruct the moves of an important chess match they’d all played years ago. As he likely was.

I’d almost reached the critical parts about our finding the chessboard in the drawer, and what Vartan had revealed to me about the Russian Black Queen and my father’s death, when suddenly my uncle cut in with barely concealed impatience.

‘And what of your
mother
all this while, when all these “guests” were arriving?’ he said. ‘Did she tell you nothing that might have explained her actions? Did she say why she took such a foolish risk to throw this party on her own birth date, despite the obvious dangers? Who else was invited? Who didn’t attend? Good lord – after all those names you’ve just told me, I pray she had the presence not to mention the gift I sent.’

I was still so obliterated due to my deep-sleep deprivation that I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him correctly. Was it possible that he really didn’t know?

‘But Mother was never there at the party at all,’ I told him. ‘It seems she left the house only shortly before I arrived.
She never returned. She simply vanished. We hoped, Aunt Lily and I, that
you
might have some idea where she was.’

I’d never seen this expression on my uncle’s face: He seemed thunderstruck, as if I were speaking some exotic tongue that he simply couldn’t comprehend. At last those bicolored eyes of his focused upon me in the lamplight.

‘Gone,’ he said. ‘This is far worse than I’d conceived. You must come with me. There’s something you really must learn about.’

So he
hadn’t
known Mother was missing.
‘This is far worse than I’d conceived,’
he’d said. But how could it be? Nim always knew everything. If
he
didn’t know, then where
was
my mother?

At this moment, alone with my uncle in Georgetown somewhere between midnight and dawn, I suddenly realized that I felt too deeply depressed even to plumb the depths of my own depression.

Together Nim and I crossed the road to the opposite side of Key Bridge. Then we hiked along the bridge sidewalk till we reached the midpoint, high above the water. Nim motioned for me to sit beside him on the concrete base that supported the celadon bridge railing.

We were sitting in a puddle of milky pink light cast by the lanterns high above us. The eerie glow turned my uncle’s coppery curls to gold. From time to time a car came across the bridge, but the drivers never noticed us seated there, only feet away from them, just behind our protective barrier.

Then Nim glanced down at the cup in my hand. ‘But I see you haven’t finished your soup, though you surely need it. It must be cold by now.’

Obediently I took another spoonful – it still tasted great, so I tilted the cup to my lips and swilled it down.

Then I looked at my uncle, awaiting his revelation.

‘I must begin,’ he informed me, ‘by saying that your mother has always had a mind of her own. A stubborn streak.’

As if that were news to
me
!

‘Only a few weeks ago,’ he went on, ‘shortly before I knew she was planning this mad confrontation that she had the effrontery to call a “birthday party,” I’d sent her an important parcel.’ He paused, then added, ‘A very important parcel.’

I was pretty sure I knew what the contents of that parcel might be. It was likely what was hidden in the lining of my parka right at this very moment. But if Nim was ready to talk, I wasn’t about to interrupt his informative train of thought with such trivia as Vartan Azov’s sewing skills. My uncle might well be the only person who possessed the missing pieces of the puzzle I needed in this most dangerous of all games.

But there was one thing I needed to know.

‘When
exactly did you send this parcel to my mother?’ I asked.

‘It means nothing to ask
when
I sent it,’ said Nim. ‘Only
why.
It’s an object of enormous importance, though not mine to give. It belonged to someone else – I was surprised to receive it. I sent it on to your mother.’

‘Okay, then
why
?’ I asked.

‘Because
Cat
was the Black Queen – the one in charge,’ he said, glancing at me with impatience. ‘I don’t know how much Lily Rad has spilled to all of you, as you told me she did. But her imprudence might well have placed all of us – especially
you
– in terrible danger.’

Nim removed my soup cup and set it on the pavement. Then he took my hands in his as he went on speaking. ‘It was the drawing of a chessboard,’ he told me. ‘Thirty years ago, when your mother first became custodian of the other pieces, that part of the puzzle was missing, though we knew
from a diary that it originally had been captured by the nun who was known as Mireille.’

‘Lily told us about her. Lily said she’d read that diary,’ I told him. ‘She said she claimed she was still alive – that her name was Minnie, and that my mother had somehow replaced her as the Black Queen.’

It took more than an hour for me to fill him in on all that had happened. Knowing Nim’s obsession with detail, I tried to leave out nothing. The puzzles Mother had left me, the phone message with the key, the eight ball, the game in the piano, the card tucked inside the Black Queen, the drawing of the chessboard hidden in the desk, and lastly, Vartan’s revelation of what transpired just before my father’s death and our mutual conviction that his death was no accident.

I realized that my uncle was the only one with whom I’d yet shared what I had deduced from this: the possible existence of a second Black Queen, which might have led to my father’s death.

During this entire time, as he followed each word intently, Nim said nothing and showed no reaction, though I was sure he was taking copious mental notes. When I’d finished everything, he shook his head.

‘Your story only serves to confirm my worst fears, and my conviction that we must find out what has become of your mother. I hold myself responsible for Cat’s disappearance,’ he said. ‘There’s something I’ve never told you, my dear. I believe I must always have been deeply in love with your mother. And it was I myself – long before she ever met your father – who foolishly lured Cat into this most dangerous Game.’

When Nim saw my reaction, he placed his hand on my shoulder.

‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have revealed to you how I felt, Alexandra,’ he said. ‘I assure you that I’ve never shared these
feelings with your mother. But from what you’ve said, she’s surely in danger. If you and I hope to help her, I’ve no choice than to be as honest and direct with you as possible – much as it might go against my cryptographic nature.’ He regarded me with that familiar ironic smile.

I didn’t smile back. Openness was one thing, but I’d just about had it with these post-meridian surprises from every quarter.

‘Then it’s time to decrypt a few things, starting now,’ I told him sharply, making every effort to draw myself out of oblivion. ‘What would these long-suppressed feelings of yours about my mother have to do with her disappearance, much less with the chess set or the Game?’