The Fire (50 page)

I suddenly recalled her comment there, about my relations with my mother:
It seems we were mistaken.

Now I saw that it was this vacuous, socialite stance that drew attention away from her true role. And now I understood exactly what role had been intended as hers from birth.

I said, ‘You’re
the
Sage Livingston.’

She smiled coldly, one eyebrow raised in appreciation of my acuity.

Vartan shot me a sideways glance.

I turned to him and explained. ‘I mean
the
“Wise Living Stone.” In Charlot’s story he called it the Philosopher’s Stone, the powder that produces the Elixir of Life. When Sage said she’d been chosen from birth, that’s what she meant – that she was raised from birth to succeed her mother as White Queen. Her parents believed they had regained control of the White Team and the Game after they killed my father and held the chess piece. But somebody else took the reins away without them realizing it. They didn’t know about Galen March and Tatiana – or about your stepfather switching camps. They never understood the real purpose the Service was intended for.’

Sage let out an unladylike snort that drew me up sharply. I noticed that the gun, held in a tighter grip than before, was now pointed at a part of my body that I’d like to keep on ticking.

She said, ‘The real purpose of the Service is
power
. It has never been anything else. It’s completely naive to think otherwise, regardless of what those fools you’ve been listening to may have tried to lead you into believing. I may not be a star chess player, as the two of you are, but I do know what I’m speaking of. After all, throughout my life I’ve been suckled at the nipple of power – real power,
world
power, power that neither of you could even begin to imagine – and I haven’t yet been weaned of it…’

Et cetera.

As Sage ranted on about how she’d been born and bred to suck power through a straw, I was getting more and more frightened by the moment. I could feel Vartan’s tension even from here. It must have been as clear to him as it was to me that Ms. ‘Philosophia de Stone’ here had lost what little bit of a mind she might once have moderately possessed. But neither of us seemed able to figure out how to make a spring for her at ten paces – or even to interrupt her tirade.

And it was becoming even clearer that, for those who were addicted to power, even relative
proximity
to this miserable chess set was like offering them an instant megalomaniac pill. Indeed, Sage seemed to have swallowed a bottleful just prior to her arrival here today.

Furthermore, I realized it was only a matter of time before our girl Sage might suddenly stop worrying about whether pulling the trigger would spoil her bright new manicure. I knew we had to get out of here, and fast. And that we must take our coordinates with us.

But how?

I glanced toward Vartan. His eyes were still on Sage as if he were calculating exactly the same thing. The massive chess queen sat exposed between us upon the table, but even if we grabbed it to use as a weapon, we couldn’t throw it faster than a bullet could reach us. And even if we could over-power her, we could hardly hope to escape those professional hirelings outside with the aid of just that little pearl-handled gun. I had to come up with something. I wasn’t sure I could break through Sage’s ‘diatribe on suckling’ long enough to reason with her, but anything was worth a try.

‘Sage,’ I cut in, ‘even assuming that you
can
collect all these chess pieces, what will you do with them? You’re not the only one looking for them, you know. Where would you go? Where can you hide?’

Sage looked momentarily stunned, as if perhaps she’d never thought that far ahead in designing her castle in the air. I was about to press my point, but the phone on the maître d’s desk near the front door began ringing. Sage kept the gun pointed at me as she took a few steps back amid the tables for a wider view.

Then I noticed the other sound. A soft sound. Something familiar passing just nearby, though it did take a moment before I recognized it myself.

The
whish
of Rollerblades over stone.

It seemed to be moving stealthily past us toward the front, hidden behind that long, high rack that traversed the length of the room, displaying Rodo’s collection of ceramic cider jugs. But even with the relentless din of the phone up there, how long would it be before Leda passed close enough to Sage that she would hear it, too?

From the corner of my eye I could see Vartan start to inch his way forward. Sage swung the gun toward him and he halted.

Just then, as Key would say, all hell broke loose. An awful lot of cider was about to hit the fan.

It all happened in a matter of seconds.

A gallon jug of
Sagardoa
flew out of a large pigeonhole and exploded on the stone floor at Sage’s feet, splattering cider everywhere. Instinctively attempting to preserve her six-hundred-dollar shoes, Sage skittered backward, but as Vartan made to spring at her she halted him again with the pointed gun. At the same moment, another jug flew off the top of the rack, right at her head. Sage quickly ducked behind a nearby table as the jug hurtled by and crashed to the floor beside her.

The avalanche of cider pots moved along the line.
Sagardoa
jugs were flying from high pigeonholes as Sage – crouched behind the table, her elbow braced like a sharpshooter’s –
shot them out of the air like clay pigeons. She took a few potshots at the rack, too, trying to nail her hidden adversary.

At the first shot, Vartan had dragged me down behind our table and toppled it over, spilling the contents – book, valuable papers, chess queen, and Châteauneuf du Pape – upon the stone floor. We hunkered behind it. The crashes and gunshots continued as the phone kept ringing at the far end of the room.

Vartan expressed my thoughts, ‘I don’t know who our savior is behind that wine rack, but he won’t hold her off much longer. We must find a way to get at her.’

I peered out from behind the loose tablecloth. The place reeked of fermented apple mash.

Sage, in her relatively protected position, controlling center board, had managed to reload faster than Annie Oakley. I prayed that she ran out of bullets before Leda ran out of cider. But even if so, I hadn’t much hope, since her heavies outside, on hearing this commotion, would be crashing in here at any instant.

Suddenly, the phone stopped ringing. A deafening silence filled the room. No crashes. No gunshots.

My God, was it all over?

Vartan and I peered over the tabletop just in time to see the door of the restaurant burst open. Sage, on her feet, her profile to us, had turned with a smug little smile to greet her cronies. But instead a blur of white trousers, red sashes, and black berets charged through the door into the room, Rodo leading the pack with his ponytail flying, his phone in his hand, and Eremon just behind him.

In astonishment, Sage’s eyes narrowed, and she leveled her gun at them from across the room.

But around the corner of the cider rack, intervening between Sage and her target, sailed what appeared to be a large copper soup tureen on wheels, three feet across and
held like a shield. It was barreling between the tables right at Sage. Leda launched the kettle aloft just as Sage fired the gun in her direction. The tureen descended, taking Sage down like a bowling pin – but I saw that Leda was knocked off her pins, too, and sitting on the ground. Had she been hit?

While Vartan and the others raced to grab the gun and decommission Sage, I scrambled to make sure Leda was okay, but Eremon beat me to it. He gracefully helped Leda to her feet and gestured to the leaking cider bottle in the rack across the room that the bullet had actually hit. While Vartan secured the gun, a couple of Basque Brigadeers pulled Sage up, yanked off their waist sashes, and bound her hand and foot. Then, as she writhed in furious indignation, still babbling, they dragged her out the door.

Rodo smiled in relief when he saw that we were all okay. I retrieved the diamond bracelet from the mess of broken glass and wine puddles on the floor and handed it to Eremon. He shook his head and tossed it far out the door into the canal.

Rodo was telling me, ‘When the
Cygne
was coming here to work, she noticed some people she recognized, under the wisteria pergola at Key Park. It was La Livingston, who’d come to have me help find you the other day at your uncle’s, and the security men from the morning before the private
boum
at Sutalde. The
Cygne
thought it was suspicious, seeing them together right there, just near your house. So when she got here to work she phoned Eremon and me. We thought it was suspicious, too. By the time you arrived here, she was downstairs preparing the fires for tonight and we were already en route. But she phoned again on my cell phone after she heard the entry of another person up here, crept upstairs, and saw that you were in real danger. She told us your friend was threatening you with a gun and those men were posted outside. We laid our plan – that the
moment we had disarmed the men out there, I would ring the house phone in here. That would be the Swan’s signal to create a distraction inside – to divert La Livingston so she wouldn’t shoot you before we could come through the door.’

‘The Swan “diverted” her all right,’ I agreed, hugging Leda in thanks. ‘And not a moment too soon. Sage was getting an itchy trigger finger, and I was afraid we might inadvertently scratch it. But how did you disarm those guys outside?’

Eremon said, ‘They were derailed by a few
Jota
moves that they were certainly not expecting. E.B. has lost none of his high kicks. These men have now been turned over to Homeland Security of the U.S. government, which is holding them for bearing illegal firearms within the District and for impersonating Secret Service agents.’

‘But Sage Livingston?’ Vartan asked Rodo. ‘She seems mad. And with rather the opposite goal of the one you were espousing to the two of us just last night. What can become of someone like her, who was raised to destroy everything in her path?’

Leda said, ‘I recommend a
very
lengthy shift at some feminist lesbian spiritual retreat in some
very
remote part of the Pyrenees. Think we can arrange it?’

‘I’m certain that we could,’ said Rodo. ‘But there is someone we know who especially wishes to take charge of Sage’s case. I should say,
two
someones, for their own different reasons.
Quod Severis Metes.
I believe, if you think of this, you will understand who they are. For now, you know the combination to my safe. When you’ve finished with those materials, don’t leave them lying about there on the floor, do as you’ve done in the past.’ He winked.

With that, Rodo was out the door, snapping instructions in Basque, left and right, all the way across the footbridge.

Eremon was on his knees,
tsk-tsk-
ing as he checked out Leda’s scruffed legs and bruises from her fall. He stood, put his arm around her shoulders, and accompanied her to the cellar, to ‘help with the heavy logs,’ as he said. I thought there might be hope for something a bit more alchemical there yet.

Vartan and I returned to our place beside the windows where the setting sun now licked the tops of the high-rise buildings across the river, and we started putting away our valuable, dangerous, wine-splashed stash. ‘The combination to his safe?’ he said.

‘Basque mathematics,’ I told him.

I knew that Rodo didn’t have a safe, but he did have a P.O. box up the street, just like mine. The number was 431. He was hinting that the safest route was to get the stuff out of here by mail again, as I’d done before, and worry about the rest later.

I was about to slip
The Books of the Balance
back into its container when Vartan put his hand on my arm. Looking at me with those dark purple eyes, he said, ‘You know, I thought she really might kill you.’

‘I don’t think she wanted to kill me,’ I told him. ‘But she was so completely crazed at losing, in just one day, all her wealth, connections, her access to power – everything she’s ever believed she wanted.’

‘
Believed?’
said Vartan. ‘She sounded to me quite convinced.’

I shook my head, for I thought maybe I’d finally gotten the message.

Vartan said, ‘But who is it who will “take charge of the case” of a person like her, as Boujaron said? Sage was raised to believe she is something like a god. Who could imagine anybody who would want to deal with such a person?’

‘I don’t need to imagine,’ I told him. ‘I already know. It’s my mother and my aunt Lily who will help her.’

Vartan stared at me across the table. ‘But
why
?
’
he said.

‘My mother – even if it
was
in self-defense, or in defense of Lily Rad – did kill Rosemary’s father. And Rosemary was sure that she’d killed
my
father – tit for tat. It appears that Sage herself was raised to be like a tracer bullet, a heat-seeking missile looking for a place to explode. Or to
implode.
She almost did it right here in this room.’

Vartan said, ‘This might explain your mother wanting to help Sage – maybe a kind of atonement. But what of Lily Rad? She never even knew of the Livingstons’ connection with your mother.’

‘But,’ I pointed out, ‘Lily
did
know that her own father was the Black King and her mother the White Queen. She knew the devastation that had swept her own life because of it. She’s known what it feels like to be a pawn within your own family.’

This was what my mother had saved me from.

The Game.

And now I knew exactly what I must do.

I said to Vartan, ‘This book,
The Books of the Balance,
and the secret that al-Jabir hid in the chess set have been waiting more than twelve hundred years for someone to come along and release them from the bottle. I think we’re it. I think it’s time.’

We stood there beside the wall of windows overlooking the canal, filled with the beautiful rosy flamingo flame of the sunset, and Vartan put his arms around me from behind. I opened the wine-spattered book that was still in my hand. Vartan looked over my shoulder as I flipped through the pages until I came to the small illustration of a matrix of three-by-three squares with a number printed in each. They looked familiar.