The Fire (28 page)

‘After that unsolicited confession of mine, you’ve the right to ask me anything. And I hope you will,’ my uncle told me. ‘The moment Cat received my packet with that drawing of the chessboard – the final piece of the puzzle, once we could decode it – she must immediately have understood that the Game was once more afoot. However, rather than her consulting with an expert code-breaker like myself, as I’d hoped and expected, she announced she was throwing that mad tea party, and then she disappeared!’

This would explain the ‘why’ of my uncle’s previous comment – why he’d sent my mother that packet with so little fanfare. Clearly he still hoped, ten years after my father’s death, that he could be her cryptographer, her confidant – or perhaps something more.

Could there be some reason why she
hadn’t
turned to him?

‘After Sascha’s death,’ Nim said, reading my mind, ‘Cat never trusted me – never trusted any of us. She felt we’d all betrayed her, betrayed your father, and most of all, betrayed
you.
That’s why she took you away.’

‘How did you all betray me?’

But then I knew the answer. Because of chess.

‘I remember the day it happened, the day she first drew away from us all. It was the day we all realized what a strange little animal we were harboring in our midst,’ Nim said with a smile. ‘But come, let’s walk as I tell you, it will warm us.’

He stood, took me by the hand, and pulled me to my feet, stuffing my empty coffee mug and spoon into his trench-coat pocket.

‘You were only three years old,’ he said. ‘We were at my place on the tip of Long Island, Montauk Point – all of us, as we often were on weekends during the summers. That was the day we discovered, my dear girl, who and what you really were. That was the day that began our estrangement from your mother.’

So we crossed the bridge to Virginia as foggy midnight crept toward rosy dawn. And Ladislaus Nim began his tale…

The Cryptographer’s Tale

The sky was blue, the grass was green. The fountain splashed into the pool at the edge of the lawn, and in the distance beyond the crescent of beach, as far as the eye could see, spread the expanse of little whitecapped waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Your mother was swimming laps, cutting through the waves, as lithe as a dolphin.

On the grassy lawn, Lily Rad and your father sat in lacy white wicker lawn chairs, with a pitcher of iced limeade and two frosty glasses. They were playing chess.

Your father, Sascha – the great grandmaster Aleksandr Solarin – had given up tournament play shortly after he came to America. But he’d still needed a job. There was a special provision that I knew of, a fast track to citizenship for someone gifted in physics, as your father was.

As soon as was practicable, both your parents took
well-paying but unobtrusive jobs with the U.S. government. Then you were born. Cat thought tournament chess too dangerous, especially once they’d had a child; Sascha agreed, though he still coached Lily on weekends, as today.

You’d always seemed fascinated by the board, those little black-and-white pieces on black-and-white squares. Sometimes you even stuck them in your mouth and looked quite proud to have done so.

On this particular day you’d been toddling about the lawn as they two began their play. I’d pulled up my chair so I could observe the game and your mother’s swimming at once. Aleksandr and Lily were so intent that none of us paid much attention when you were suddenly there, clinging to a table leg to hold yourself upright, those large green eyes peering across the board as you watched their play.

I distinctly recall that it was just at move 32 of the Nimzo-Indian Defense. Lily, playing White, had somehow got herself caught between a fork and a pin. Though I’m sure your father could have extricated himself from a similar trap, it was clear that, to her at least, there seemed to be no way forward and no way back.

She’d turned to me for a moment to jest that if I refreshed her limeade glass it might refresh her point of view when, all at once, still clinging to the table, you reached forward with one chubby child’s fist and plucked her Knight from the board. To my complete astonishment, you set it down in position to check your father’s king!

Everyone was silent for a very long moment – dumbstruck was more like it – as we understood what had occurred. But as it slowly sank in, just what the long-range ramifications of such an event might be, the tension around the chessboard built up like that within the interior of a pressure cooker.

‘Cat will be furious,’ Sascha was the first to remark, softly and in a voice completely devoid of all intonation.

‘But it’s incredible,’ said Lily between thin lips. ‘What if it’s not an accident? What if she’s truly a prodigy?’

‘Not
a broccoli,’ little Alexandra announced firmly to the group.

Everyone laughed. Your father plucked you up and set you on his lap.

But once Sascha and Lily had reconstructed that game hours later, as they always did after each such coaching session, they saw that the move made by a three-year-old toddler had been the only viable one that might enable Lily to draw that game.

The lid of the problem had been opened. And there would never be any chance of putting it back shut.

Nim paused and looked down at me in the dim light. I saw we’d reached Rosslyn on the Virginia side of the bridge. It was dark and isolated, with the high-rise office buildings all shut down for the night. Wired as I was, I knew I needed to go home and crawl into bed. But my uncle hadn’t quite finished.

‘Cat came up the lawn after her dip in the sea that day,’ he told me. ‘She was brushing sand from her feet and drying her hair with the edge of her toweling robe. Then she saw us all seated on the lawn around that chessboard, with you – her innocent little daughter in your father’s lap – holding a chess piece in your hand.

‘No one had to say it – Cat knew. She turned on her heel and left us without a word. She would never forgive us for putting you into the Game.’

At last Nim fell silent. I thought it was time to intervene, or at least turn back, so we wouldn’t be out here all night.

‘Now that I know about that larger Game from you and Aunt Lily,’ I said, ‘it certainly explains why Mother didn’t
trust the lot of you. And why she was so afraid for me. But it doesn’t explain the party or her disappearance.’

‘That wasn’t all,’ Nim said.

What wasn’t all?

‘That wasn’t all that was in the parcel I sent to Cat,’ he said, again reading my mind. ‘That card you found – the placard with the picture of a phoenix on one side, a firebird on the other, and some words in Russian. Almost like a calling card someone thought I would recognize. But though it was quite beyond me, there was something else I must show you—’ He eyed me suspiciously. ‘What on
earth
is it now?’

I’m sure I looked like I might black out again, though this time not for lack of food or sleep. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I reached into my pants pocket, pulled out the card, and handed it to my uncle.

‘ ‘Danger – Beware the Fire,’ ‘ I told him. ‘Maybe it meant nothing to you but I can tell you what it means to
me.
That card was given to me just before my father died. How did you get it?’

He bowed his head over it for a long moment there on the darkened pavement. Then he looked up at me with a strange expression and handed the card back to me.

‘I’ve something to show you,’ he said.

He reached into his trench coat and extracted a small leather folder the size of a wallet. He held it carefully in his hand like a relic, looking down at it. Then he opened my hands and placed the leather wallet in them. He kept his hands around mine for a moment, then finally released them.

When I opened the folder, even here in the dim light of Rosslyn, I could make out details of a worn black-and-white photo that was tinted with aquarelles to resemble a color image: It seemed to be a family of four.

Two little boys – perhaps four and eight years old – were
seated on a garden bench. They both wore loose tunics belted at the waist, with knickers; their pale hair fell in loose ringlets. They looked into the camera with uncertain smiles as if they’d never had their picture taken before. Just behind them stood a muscular man with unruly hair and intense dark eyes, looking fiercely protective. But it was the woman who stood beside him that had caused my blood to turn to ice.

‘It’s myself and your father, little Sascha,’ Nim was saying in a choked voice I’d never heard. ‘We’re sitting on the stone seat of our garden in Krym, the Crimea. And those are our parents. It’s the only photo that exists of our family. We were still happy. It was taken not so long before we learned we would have to flee.’

I couldn’t tear my eyes from that image. Fear clutched at my heart. Those chiseled features I could never forget, her white-blond hair even paler than my father’s had been.

Nim’s voice seemed to come through a tunnel thousands of miles long. ‘God knows how it could be,’ he was saying, ‘but I know that only one person could have possessed this photo after all this time, one person who would understand its importance, who could have sent it to me along with that card and the chessboard drawing. Only one.’

He paused and looked at me gravely. ‘What it means, my dear, is that regardless of what I’ve believed all these years – and as impossible as it might seem to me even now – that woman in the photo, my mother, is still alive.’

She certainly
was
alive. I myself could testify.

She was the woman at Zagorsk.

Deux femmes nous ont donné les premieres exemples de la gourmandise:

Ève, en mangeant une pomme dans le Paradis; Proserpine, en mangeant une grenade en enfer.

(Two women have given us the first examples of greed: Eve, in eating an apple in Paradise; Persephone, in eating a pomegranate in Hell.)

– Alexandre Dumas,
Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine

I was awakened by the loud warblings of a male wren just outside my bedroom window. I was familiar with the drill. This same guy showed up each spring, always singing the same old tune. He was hopping around excitedly, trying to convince his spouse to check out a potential nest location just under my eaves where he’d shoved some twigs and grasses into a cubbyhole and was coaxing her to come rearrange the furniture herself, so he could nail down the mortgage before somebody else spotted this prime piece of
real estate – one of the few locales on the canal that roving cats couldn’t get at.

But suddenly, it dawned on me that if this wren was awake, singing his head off, it must already be well past dawn. I sat up in bed to check the time, but my alarm clock was nowhere to be seen. Someone had removed it.

My head was throbbing. How long had I slept? How had I gotten here, into my own pajamas and my own bed? All recollection seemed to have been wiped.

But then yesterday’s events started to trickle back into my addled brain.

Rodo’s strange behavior yesterday, from Euskal Herria to Sutalde. That dinner, ushered in by SS officials and hosted by my least favorite personae on the planet, the Livingstons. Finally, Nim’s unexpected appearance inside my apartment, and our post-midnight stroll across the bridge. When he’d shown me that photo –

The whole thing returned and hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks.

That mysterious blond woman at Zagorsk, the woman who’d tried to warn me – she was my grandmother!

That was the last thing I remembered telling my uncle last night before all went blank. The woman in his weathered family photo was the woman who’d given me that card ten years ago, only moments before my father’s death.

At this particular moment, however, that warbling wren outside jarred me into dealing with more pressing issues. I suddenly recalled that my boss, Rodo, was supposed to phone me this morning to make arrangements to meet him for breakfast, so he could give me whatever urgent information he had left unsaid last night. I’d better phone
him –

But when I glanced around, I saw that my bedroom phone had disappeared, too!

I was about to jump from bed when the bedroom door
swung open. There was Nim with a tray in his hands and a smile on his face.

‘A Russian-Greek bearing gifts,’ he said. ‘I hope you slept well. I took every precaution that you should. Oh, and – my apologies – I laced your soup last night with half a bottle of grappa. Enough fermented grape pulp to ensure that an ox would get a good night’s sleep. You certainly needed it. I barely managed to get you home and upstairs on your own steam
and
make myself a bed on that lumpy sofa. You need to eat this now, though. A good breakfast will help what lies ahead.’

So at least I’d still been conscious last night, despite how unconscious I was right now of what else we may have discussed.

Much as I needed to speak with Rodo – under my nose just now was that steaming pot of coffee and another of hot milk, a tumbler of fresh juice, and a stack of my uncle’s famous buttermilk pancakes along with a crock of sweet butter, a bowl of fresh blueberries, and a beaker of warm maple syrup. It smelled even better than it looked.

Where had Nim found all these ingredients in my barren larder? But I didn’t need to ask.

‘I’ve had a word with Mr Boujaron, your employer,’ Nim told me. ‘He phoned here earlier, but I’d removed the phone from your room. I refreshed his memory of who I was – the principal reference on your contract with him. And I explained that after your taxing week you needed some rest. He came to see the wisdom of giving you the day off work. And he sent over a minion with a few ingredients I’d requested.’

‘It looks like you made him an offer he couldn’t refuse,’ I said with a grin, tucking the big napkin into the neck of my pajama top. It was one of the good damask ones from Sutalde. God bless Nim.

Then I tucked into the wonderful food, as well. My urgent need to hear the rest of Rodo’s story from last
night began to wane. My uncle’s prized flapjacks, as always, had that thin, delicate crust that kept the syrup on the outside, so they never got soggy, and the insides stayed lighter than froth. He’d never disclosed his secret of making them that way.

As I relished this fare, Nim sat on the edge of my bed in silence, gazing out the window until I’d finished my meal and wiped the last bit of maple syrup from my chin. Only then did he speak.

‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, my dear,’ he told me. ‘After our conversation last night on the bridge – once you’d told me you’d actually
seen
the woman in the photo, and she’d given you that card, I could scarcely sleep. By dawn, however, I believe I’d resolved a great deal. Not only what may have motivated your mother to do as she’s done with that party, but more important, I think I’ve discovered the secret behind the appearance of that chessboard, as well as the puzzle of the second Black Queen.’

When Nim saw my alarmed expression, he smiled and shook his head.

‘I swept your place for bugs first thing this morning,’ he assured me. ‘I’ve removed them all. They were amateurs, whoever placed those detection devices – some in the telephones and one in your alarm clock – the first places one would think to look.’ He stood, picked up the breakfast tray, and headed for the door. ‘Happily, we’re now free to speak without further resort to alfresco meals at midnight on Key Bridge.’

‘Maybe these guys
here
were amateurs,’ I said, ‘but the guys last night on the footbridge guarding the restaurant both had Secret Service badges. They were certainly pros. My boss seemed pretty chummy with them, too, though he made sure they couldn’t overhear us when he told me, just before that private dinner, what he knew about the Basque version of the story of the Montglane Service.’

‘And what, precisely, was that?’ Nim had halted at the door.

‘He said he’d tell me the rest this morning,’ I said, ‘but thanks to you and your grappa, I overslept. Last night Rodo gave me the Basque scoop on the
Chanson de Roland;
that in fact it was Basques and not the Moors who’d defeated Charlemagne’s rear guard at the Roncesvalles Pass; that the Moors gave Charlemagne the chess set in thanks; and that he then buried it a million miles from his palace in Aachen, right back in the Pyrenees at Montglane. Rodo told me what Montglane really means: “Mountain of Gleaners.” Then, just before the others arrived, he was explaining about sowing and reaping, and how it related to my birthday being the opposite of my mother’s—’

But I stopped, for Nim’s bicolored eyes had grown cold and faraway. He still stood in the doorway holding my breakfast tray, but suddenly he looked like a different person altogether.

‘Why did Boujaron mention your birth date?’ he demanded. ‘Did he explain?’

‘Rodo said it was important,’ I said, unnerved by his intensity. ‘He said I might be in danger because of it, that I should keep my eyes and ears peeled for clues during last night’s dinner.’

‘But there must have been something more,’ he insisted. ‘Did he say what it might signify for these people?’

‘He told me that the people coming last night
knew
that my birth date was October 4, opposite my mother’s birthday and the party she threw this past weekend. Oh, and then he said something even stranger, that they thought they knew who I really was.’

‘And who was that?’ asked Nim, his expression so grim it almost made me tremble.

‘You’re sure no one can hear us?’ I whispered.

He nodded.

I said, ‘I’m not sure I understood it myself. But Rodo said, for some reason, they imagined that
I
was the new White Queen.’

‘Good Lord, I must be going completely mad,’ Nim said. ‘Or perhaps I’m just growing inattentive as I grow older. But one thing is clear to me now: If Rodolfo Boujaron told you that much, then
someone
knows more than I’d imagined. Indeed, they’ve managed to gather a great deal more insight than I myself had understood until this very moment.

‘But combining what you yourself have told me with what I came to grasp just last night,’ my uncle added, ‘I think I now understand everything. Though it will take some explanation and examination.’

Quel
relief, I thought, at last somebody understands. But it no longer sounded like news I longed to hear.

Nim had insisted that I get dressed and put down another cup or two of his java before he began to fill me in on the epiphanies he’d had since just last night. Now, in my living room, we both sat on the sofa where he’d bedded down last night. The wallet with its weathered photo was propped open between us. Nim touched the image carefully with one fingertip.

‘Our father, Iosif Pavlos Solarin, a Greek sailor, fell in love with a Russian girl and married her – our mother, Tatiana,’ he told me. ‘He built a small fishing fleet on the Black Sea and never wanted to leave. As boys, my brother, Sascha, and I thought our mother to be the most beautiful woman we’d ever seen. Of course, on the isolated tip of the Crimean peninsula where we lived, we hadn’t seen many women. But it wasn’t just her beauty. There was something magical about our mother. It’s hard to explain.’

‘You don’t have to. I made her acquaintance at Zagorsk,’ I reminded him.

Tatiana Solarin. Privately, I could hardly bear to look at this color-tinted photo. Her image alone brought back all the pain of these past ten years. But now that that first question –
Who was she?
– had been answered, it only gave rise to an unstoppable onslaught of further questions.

What had her warning that day really meant?
Danger, Beware the Fire?
Did she know about the Black Queen that we would soon find inside the treasury? Did she know the risk to my father the moment he saw it?

Had my father recognized her on that bleak wintry day at Zagorsk? He must have – after all, she was his mother. But how could she still look the same then, just ten years ago, as she did in this faded photo before me that had been taken when my father and uncle were little boys? Furthermore, if everyone had been assuming she was dead all these years, as Nim assured me, then where had she been hiding? And what – or who – had prompted her to resurface only now?

I was about to find out.

‘When Sascha was six years old and I was ten,’ Nim began, ‘one night at our isolated house on the coast of Krym, there was a terrible storm. We boys were asleep in our room downstairs, when we heard a tapping at the windows and we saw a woman in a long dark cape standing outside in the storm. When we let her in through the window, she introduced herself as our grandmother Minerva, who’d come from a distant land on an urgent mission to find our mother. This woman was Minnie Renselaas. And from the moment she stepped through that window, all our lives were instantly to change.’

‘Minnie – she’s the one that Aunt Lily told us had claimed to be Mireille,’ I said, ‘the French nun who lived forever.’

But I swiftly cursed myself for interrupting, for Nim had something more important to reveal.

‘Minnie told us we must all flee at once,’ he went on. ‘She’d brought with her three chess pieces – a golden pawn, a silver elephant, and a horse. My father was sent ahead through the storm with these pieces, so he could prepare the boat for the rest of our family’s escape. But soldiers arrived at the house before we made our exit, and they captured our mother, while Minnie fled through the upper windows with us children. We hid on the cliffs in the rain until the soldiers were gone, then tried to reach Father’s ship at Sevastopol. But little Sascha couldn’t climb quickly enough. I was sent ahead, alone, to my father at the ship.’

Nim looked at me gravely. ‘I’d reached my father’s ship at Sevastopol. We waited for hours for Minnie and Sascha to arrive. But at last when they didn’t appear, per my father’s promise to Mother, we were forced to depart for America. Many days later, Minnie had to place Sascha in an orphanage so she could return to try to find our mother and rescue her. But all seemed lost.’

It’s true I had known that my father was raised in a Russian orphanage, but he’d always refused to discuss it any further. Now I understood
why.
Mother wasn’t the only one of my parents trying to protect me from the Game.

‘Cat is the only other one who ever knew the rest of our story,’ Nim told me. ‘Sascha and I – who were parted at that moment in Krym – did not know it ourselves until many years later when, thanks to your mother, we met at last and we told it to each other and to her. Father had died shortly after he and I reached America. I’d lost my mother, my brother, and Minnie all in one night, with no way to trace them. As far as I knew until many years later, none of them had survived.’

‘But now we both
know
that your mother is alive,’ I said. ‘I can understand, if she’d been captured and put in prison as you thought, why she might have been incommunicado
all those years. But she was
there
at Zagorsk ten years ago: She gave me this card. And now you think she sent you the chessboard, too. How did she get her hands on it? And why wait so long?’

‘I haven’t all the answers yet,’ Nim admitted. ‘But I do have one answer, I believe. To understand it, you would have to know the famous fable of The Firebird that appears on your card, and what it means to us Russians.’

‘What does the Firebird mean?’ I said, though I thought I had my first inkling.

‘It might explain why my mother still lives, how she survived,’ Nim told me. When I looked surprised, he added, ‘What if Minnie
did
manage to locate our mother after leaving Sascha in that orphanage? What if Minnie found her in prison just as we’d all supposed – about to be sacrificed by the Soviet authorities as another casualty of the Game? What would Minnie have exchanged to secure our mother’s release?’