The Fire (11 page)

With Alexander Solarin, Cat and I escaped from Algeria by sea, pursued by a dreadful storm, the Sirocco, that nearly tore our ship apart. During months of boat repairs on an island, we read the diary of the nun Mireille, which enabled us to solve some of the mystery of the Montglane Service. When our ship was ready, we three crossed the Atlantic by sea and arrived in New York.

There we discovered we had not left all the villains behind in Algeria, as we’d hoped. A group of scoundrels lay in wait – my mother and my uncle among them! And another six pieces had been hidden in those
jammed drawers
in a secretary in my family’s apartment. We defeated the last of the White Team and captured these extra six pieces.

At my grandfather’s house in Manhattan’s Diamond District, we all assembled: Cat Velis, Alexander Solarin, Ladislaus Nim – all of us players on the Black Team. Only one was missing, Minnie Renselaas herself, the Black Queen.

Minnie had left the Game. But she’d left something behind as a parting gift for Cat: the last pages of the nun Mireille’s diary, which revealed the secret of the marvelous chess set. It was a formula that, if solved, could do far more than
create or destroy civilizations. It could transform both energy and matter and much, much else.

Indeed, in Mireille’s diary she stated that she had worked alongside the famous physicist, Fourier, in Grenoble to solve the formula herself, and she claimed she had succeeded in 1830, after nearly thirty years. She possessed seventeen pieces – more than half of the set – as well as the cloth, embroidered with symbols, that had once covered the board. The bejeweled chessboard itself had been cut into four pieces and buried in Russia by Catherine the Great. But the Abbess of Montglane, herself imprisoned in Russia soon thereafter, had secretly drawn it from memory on the lining of her abbatial gown, in her own blood. This drawing Mireille also now possessed.

But though Mireille had only had seventeen pieces of the Montglane Service back then, we ourselves now had twenty-six, including those of the opposing team and others that had been buried for many years, as well as the cloth that covered the board – perhaps enough to solve the formula, despite its clear dangers. We were only missing six of the pieces and the board itself. But Cat believed that by hiding the pieces for once and all where no one could ever find them, she could stop this dangerous Game.

As of today, I believe we’ve learned she was mistaken.

When Lily had finished her story, she looked drained. She arose, leaving Zsa-Zsa sacked out like a wet sock in the pile of pillows, and she crossed the room to the desk where the soiled piece of fabric lay open to expose its illustrated chessboard, a painting that we now understood had been drawn, nearly two hundred years ago, in abbatial blood. Lily ran her fingers over the strange array of symbols.

The air in the room was filled with the rich scent of bubbling beef and wine; you could hear the log cracking from time to time. For a very long time, nobody spoke.

At last, it was Vartan who broke the silence.

‘My God,’ he said, his voice low, ‘what this Game has cost you all. It is hard to imagine that such a thing ever existed – or that it might really be happening again. But I don’t understand one thing: If what you say is true – if this chess service is so dangerous; if Alexandra’s mother already owns so many pieces of the puzzle; if the Game has begun again and White has made its first move, but nobody knows who are the players – what would she gain by inviting so many people here today? And do you know what is this formula she spoke of?’

Key was looking at me with an expression suggesting she might already know.

‘I think the answer may be staring us in the face,’ said Key, speaking for the first time. We all turned to look at her, as she sat there beside the piano.

‘Or at least, it’s cooking our dinner,’ she added with a smile. ‘I may not know much about chess, but I do know a lot about calories.’

‘Calories?’ said Lily in astonishment. ‘Like the kind you
eat
?’

‘There’s no such thing as a calorie,’ I pointed out. I thought I could see where Key might be going with this.

‘Well, I’m sorry, but I beg to differ,’ said Lily, patting her waist. ‘I’ve packed on a few of those nonexistent “things” in my time.’

‘I’m afraid I do not understand,’ Vartan chimed in. ‘We were talking about a dangerous game of chess where people were killed. Now are we discussing food?’

‘A calorie isn’t food,’ I said. ‘It’s a unit of thermal measure. And I think Key here may have just resolved an important problem. My mother knows that Nokomis Key is my only friend here in the valley, and that if I ever had a problem she’d be the first and
only
one I would turn to, to help resolve
it. That’s Key’s job, she’s a calorimetrician. She flies into remote regions and studies the thermal properties of everything from geysers to volcanoes. I think Key’s right. That’s why my mother built this fire: as a big, fat, calorie-laden clue.’

‘Excuse me,’ said Lily. Looking more than exhausted, she went over and swept Key aside. ‘I need to recline for a moment on some of my thermal properties. What on
earth
are you two talking about?’

Vartan looked lost as well.

‘I’m saying that my mother is underneath that log – or at least, she
was,
’ I told them. ‘She must have had the tree placed here months ago, on removable props, so when she was ready she could exit through the stone air shaft under the floor and light the fire from below. I think the shaft may vent to a cave just downhill.’

‘Isn’t that a rather Faustian exit?’ said Lily. ‘And what does it have to do with the Montglane Service or the game of chess?’

‘It has
nothing
to do with it,’ I said. ‘This isn’t about a chess game – that’s the whole point, don’t you see?’

‘It has to do with the formula,’ Key pointed out with a smile. This was, after all, her area of expertise. ‘You know, the formula you told us the nun Mireille worked on in Grenoble, with Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier. The same Fourier who was also the author of
The Analytic Theory of Heat.
’

When our two brilliant grandmasters sat there like lumps, staring at us with blank expressions, I figured it was time to clarify.

‘Mother didn’t invite us all here and then leave us in the lurch because she was trying to make a clever defense in a chess game,’ I told them. ‘As Lily said, she’s already made
her
move by inviting us here and leaving that piece of cloth right where she hoped Lily might find it.’

I paused and looked Key in the eye. How right she was
– it was time to get cooking, and all those clues Mother had left now seemed to fall into place.

‘Mother invited us here,’ I said, ‘because she wants us to collect the pieces and solve the formula of the Montglane Service.’

‘Did you ever discover what the formula was?’ Key repeated Vartan’s question.

‘Yes, in a way – though I’ve never believed it myself,’ said Lily. ‘Alexandra’s parents and her uncle seemed to think it possible that it was true. You may judge for yourselves from what I’ve already told you. Minnie Renselaas claimed it was true. She claimed she was leaving the Game because of the formula created two hundred years ago. She claimed that she, herself, was the nun Mireille de Remy who’d solved the formula for the elixir of life.’

Hexagram 50: The Vessel

The Vessel means making and using symbols as fire uses wood. Offer something to the spirits through cooking it… This brightens the understanding of the ear and eye and lets you see invisible things.

– Stephen Karcher,
Total I Ching

I hid the drawing of the chessboard inside the piano and shut the lid until we could figure out what to do with it. My compadres were unloading their luggage from Key’s car, and Lily had just taken Zsa-Zsa outside in the snow. I stayed indoors to finish cooking our dinner. And to think.

I’d raked the ashes and stuffed more kindling beneath the huge log. As I stirred the
Boeuf Bourguignonne,
the liquid bubbled away in the copper kettle hanging from its hook above the fire. I added a splash of burgundy and stock to thin the broth.

My mind was bubbling pretty actively, too. But instead of clarifying something within my mental vessel, the bubbling seemed only to have congealed into a lumpy mass at the
bottom of the pot. After hearing Lily’s tale and its outcome, I knew I had too many ingredients interacting with one another. And each new idea only seemed to ignite more questions.

For instance, if there really was such a powerful formula as this longevity elixir that some nun had been able to solve nearly two hundred years ago, then why hadn’t anyone done it since – namely my parents? While Lily had indicated that she’d never believed the whole story herself, she claimed that the others
had.
But Uncle Slava and my parents were all professional scientists. If their team had put together so many pieces of the puzzle, why would they hide them instead of trying to solve it themselves?

But it seems, as Lily told us, that no one knew where the pieces of the Montglane Service had been buried and who had buried them. As the Black Queen, my mother was the only one who knew to which of the four she’d assigned each piece for hiding. And my father alone, with his prodigious chess memory, was the one she allowed to know where the pieces were actually hidden. Now that my father was dead and my mother was missing, the trail was cold. The pieces could likely never be found again.

Which led to my next question: If Mother really wanted us to solve this formula now, thirty years later – and if she was passing the torch to me, as all indications seemed to suggest – then why had she hidden all the pieces so no one could ever find them? Why had she failed to include some kind of map?

A map.

On the other hand, maybe Mother
had
left a map, I thought, in the form of the drawing of that chessboard and those other messages I’d already retrieved. I touched the chess piece that still lay concealed in my pocket: the Black Queen. Too many clues pointed to this one piece. Especially
Lily’s story. Somehow
she
must tie it all together. But how? I knew I needed to ask Lily one more critical –

I heard tramping and voices in the mudroom. I hung my soup ladle on an overhead hook and went to help with the bags. I instantly wished I hadn’t.

Lily had picked up Zsa-Zsa from the snow, but couldn’t get back inside. Key wasn’t exaggerating when she’d mentioned on the phone my aunt’s pile of designer luggage: valises were piled everywhere, even blocking the inner door. How had they ever fit all this into one simple Aston Martin?

‘How did you bring all this over from London? The
Queen Mary
?’ Key was asking Lily.

‘Some of these can’t go up the spiral stairs,’ I pointed out. ‘But we can’t leave them here.’

Vartan and Key agreed to haul only those that Lily had designated as most critical up the stairs. They’d remove the excess bags to the spot of my choosing: under the billiard table, where no one would trip over them.

The moment they’d departed the mudroom with the first load, I crawled over the piles of bags, pulled Lily and Zsa-Zsa inside, and shut the outer doors.

‘Aunt Lily,’ I said, ‘you told us that no one but my father knew where each of the pieces was hidden. But we
do
know a few things. You know which pieces you buried or hid yourself, and Uncle Slava does, too, with his own. If you could remember which pieces your team was missing at the end, then we’d only have to figure out my parents’ two parts of the puzzle.’

‘I was only given two of the pieces myself to hide,’ Lily admitted. ‘That leaves twenty-four pieces for the others. But only your mother knows if they each got eight. For the six missing pieces, I’m not sure after all these years that my memory is perfect. But I think I recall that we were missing four White pieces: two silver pawns, a Knight, and the
White King. And the two Black pieces were a gold pawn and a Bishop.’

I paused, not certain that I’d heard correctly.

‘Then…the pieces that Mother captured and that you all buried or hid included everything else except those six?’ I said.

If Vartan’s story was true, there was one piece that
must
have been missing from the cache they’d buried thirty years ago. He’d seen it, alongside my father, at Zagorsk. Hadn’t he?

Vartan and Key were coming back down the spiral stairs at the end of the room. I couldn’t wait – I had to know now.

‘Your team possessed the Black Queen?’ I asked her.

‘Oh yes, that was the most important piece of them all, according to Mireille’s diary,’ said Lily. ‘The Abbess of Montglane took it to Russia herself, along with the chessboard she’d cut into parts. The Black Queen was in the possession of Catherine the Great, then seized by her son Paul on the empress’s death. Finally it was passed to Mireille by Catherine’s grandson, Emperor Alexander of Russia. Cat and I found it among Minnie’s cache in that Tassili cave.’

‘Are you sure?’ I asked her, my voice weakening along with my grip on the situation.

‘How could I forget, with all those bats in that cave?’ said Lily. ‘My memory might not be perfect about the
missing
pieces, but I held the Black Queen in my own hands. It was so important, I feel sure your mother must have buried that piece herself.’

My temples were throbbing again, and I felt that same churning in my stomach. But Key and Vartan had just arrived for another haul of bags.

‘You look as if you’ve just seen the proverbial ghost,’ Key said, regarding me strangely.

She could say that again. But it was a real one: the ghost
of my dead father at Zagorsk. My suspicions were back in full gear. How could Vartan’s and Lily’s versions of the Black Queen both be true? Was this part of my mother’s message? One thing was sure: The Black Queen in my pocket wasn’t the only one ‘behind the eight ball.’

As I was thinking this over, my ears were assaulted by the deafening clamor of the fire-engine bell ringing just above the front door. Vartan stared up at it in horror. Some visitor, undaunted at the prospect of having his hand bitten off by the bear outside, had reached into its maw and twisted our unique front-door chime.

Zsa-Zsa started yapping hysterically at the noisy bell. Lily retreated with her into the lodge.

I shoved aside a few bags and stood on tiptoe to peer out through the eagle’s glass eyeballs. There on our doorstep was a massed gaggle of folks in hooded parkas and furs. Though I couldn’t see faces, their identities weren’t to be a mystery for long: Across the snowy expanse I glimpsed with sinking heart the BMW parked just beside my car. It was sporting vanity plates that read SAGESSE.

Vartan, from behind, whispered in my ear. ‘Is it someone you know?’

As if anyone we
didn’t
know well would ever make the trek to this place.

‘It is someone I’d like to
forget
I know,’ I told him, sotto voce. ‘But it does seem to be someone who’s been invited.’

Sage Livingston wasn’t a girl who might graciously accept cooling her heels on the front doorstep, especially if she’d arrived with an entourage. With a sigh of resignation I threw open the doors. I was in for yet another unpleasant surprise.

‘Oh no – the Botany Club.’ Key took the words out of my mouth.

She meant the botanically named Livingstons,
all
of them – Basil, Rosemary, and Sage – a family of whom Key liked
to quip: ‘If they’d had more children, they’d have called them Parsley and Thyme.’

But in my youth, they’d never seemed much of a joke. Now they were one more puzzle on my mother’s invitation list.

‘Darling! It’s been truly
forever
!’ gushed Rosemary, as she swept into our constricted mudroom before the rest.

Sporting dark glasses and swathed in her extravagant, hooded lynx cape, Sage’s mother looked even more youthful than I’d remembered. She briefly enfolded me in her cloud of endangered animal skins and bussed me with an ‘air kiss’ at either cheek.

She was followed by my old archnemesis, her flawlessly perfect ash-blond daughter, Sage. Sage’s dad, Basil, due to the clear constrictions of our broom-closet entry chamber, lagged with another man just outside the door – no doubt our ‘new neighbor’ – a craggy, sun-leathered chap in jeans, sheepskin jacket, western boots, and hand-blocked Stetson. Alongside the haughty Basil with his silvery sideburns and haute couture Livingston women, our new arrival seemed somewhat out of place at this ball.

‘Aren’t we expected to come inside?’ Sage demanded by way of cheery greeting, though it was the first time we’d laid eyes on each other in years.

She glanced past her mother toward the inner doors where Key stood, and raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow as if astonished she should find
her
here. There’d been little love lost over the years between Nokomis Key and Sage Livingston, for a variety of reasons.

No one seemed about to remove wet togs or to introduce me to our external guest. Vartan parted the wall of hanging coats and furs, stepped over some luggage, and addressed Rosemary with a charm I didn’t know chess players possessed.

‘Please permit me to remove your wrap,’ he offered in that
soft voice I’d always regarded as sinister. Under these close conditions, I realized it might be interpreted slightly differently in a boudoir.

Sage herself, a longtime collector of designer men as well as clothes, shot Vartan a meaningful look that might bring a bull elephant to its knees. He didn’t seem to notice, but offered to take her coat as well. I introduced them. Then I squeezed past this intimate threesome, heading outside to greet the two men. I shook hands with Basil.

‘I thought you and Rosemary were out of town and couldn’t make it,’ I mentioned.

‘We changed our plans,’ Basil replied with a smile. ‘We wouldn’t have missed your mother’s first birthday party for the world.’

And just how did he know that it was?

‘So sorry, we seem to be here earlier than expected,’ Basil’s companion said as he peered into the luggage-and-coat-jammed entryway.

He had a warm gravelly voice and was much younger than Basil, perhaps in his mid-thirties. Pulling off his leather gloves, he tucked them beneath his arm and took my hand in both of his. His palms were firm and calloused from hard work.

‘I’m your new neighbor, Galen March,’ he introduced himself. ‘I’m the person your mother convinced to buy Sky Ranch. And you must be Alexandra. I’m so glad Cat invited me today so I could meet you. She’s told me a good deal about you.’

And nothing at all about you,
I thought.

I thanked him briefly and headed back to help clear a path for the new arrivals.

Things just got stranger and stranger. I knew Sky Ranch well. Well enough to wonder why anyone would ever dream of buying it. It was the last and only private parcel in these parts. Over twenty thousand acres, with a price tag of at
least fifteen million dollars, it spread across mountaintops between the reservations, national forest, and our family lands. But it was all bleak rock high above timberline, with no water and air so thin you couldn’t raise herds or grow crops. The land had sat idle for so many decades that locals called it Ghost Ranch. The only buyers who could afford it today were those who could exploit it in other ways – ski areas or mineral rights. And these wouldn’t be the sort that my mother would ever welcome to her neighborhood, let alone to her birthday party.

Mr Galen March’s story deserved investigation, but not right now. Since I couldn’t postpone the inevitable forever, I invited Basil and Galen to enter. With the men in my wake, I elbowed my way through the mudroom past Vartan Azov and the doting Livingston ladies, grabbed up a few more valises for Key to stash beneath the billiard table, and went back inside to stir my pot of stew.

No sooner had I set foot inside than I was confronted by Lily.

‘How do you know these people? Why are they here?’ she hissed.

‘They were invited,’ I told her, mystified by her closed expression. ‘Our neighbors, the Livingstons. I was only expecting their daughter, Sage – you heard the message. They used to be social muckety-mucks back East, but they’ve lived out here for years. They own Redlands, their ranch just near here, on the Colorado Plateau.’

‘They own a good deal more than that,’ Lily informed me under her breath.

But Basil Livingston had just arrived to join us. I was about to introduce him when Basil surprisingly bowed over Lily’s hand. When he stood, his distinguished face seemed also to have taken on a tight mask.

‘Hello, Basil,’ said Lily. ‘What brings
you
so far from
London? As you see, Vartan and I had to leave rather suddenly ourselves. Oh, and tell me, were you able to continue the chess tournament after the dreadful death of your colleague, Taras Petrossian?’