The Fire (19 page)

But men, whether savage or civilized, must eat.
– Alexandre Dumas,
Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine

To know how to eat is to know enough.

– Basque saying

Washington, D.C.

April 7, 2003

At 10:30 on Monday morning i was maneuvering rodo’s Volkswagen Touareg through the misty drizzle of rain, up River Road, headed for Kenwood just north of the District and my boss’s palatial villa, Euskal Herria
– ‘
the Basque Land.’

I was the designated driver to make sure the raw vittles arrived intact. Per Rodo’s commands left on my house phone, I’d already picked up the iced crustaceans from Cannon Seafood in Georgetown and the fresh veggies from Eastern Market on Capitol Hill. They’d be washed, scraped, chopped, diced, minced, shredded, mandolined, or
mouli
’d under Rodo’s private supervision by his own resident staff of culinary
sous-slaves, in preparation for tonight’s ’hush-hush’ dinner at Sutalde.

But though I’d managed to get some sleep and Leda had delivered some fresh hearth-brewed coffee to my doorstep this morning, my nerves were still so raw it took every effort just to be sure that
I
arrived intact.

As I drove up the slick, winding road with windshield wipers slapping against the blur of water, beside me on the passenger seat I grabbed a handful of gooseberries from the small wooden box I’d filched, intended for tonight’s fixings, and I popped them into my mouth, washed down by some of Leda’s syrupy java. My first fresh food in days. I realized it was also the first time in four days I’d been left alone to think, and I had plenty of food for thought.

The one thought I couldn’t stop going over and over in my mind was, as Key might say: Too many cooks spoil the broth. I knew that this bouillabaisse of unlikely coincidences and conflicting clues contained too many potentially lethal ingredients to allow easy digestion. And there were too many folks dishing up more by sleight of hand.

For instance, if the Livingstons and Aunt Lily were all acquainted with Taras Petrossian, the organizer of that last chess tourney where my father was killed, why had no one at dinner – including Vartan Azov – deigned to mention the detail they all surely must have known: that this same chap they’d left recently deceased in London was Vartan’s stepfather?

And if everyone who’d been involved in the past had been endangered or even killed – including Lily’s family and my own – why would she spill the beans about this Game in front of Vartan and Nokomis Key? Did Lily think they were players, too? And what about the Livingston family and Galen March, who’d all been invited to my mother’s, as well? Just how dangerous were they?

But regardless of who the players were or what the Game was, I now realized that there were a few captured pieces of the puzzle I was holding in
my
hand only. In chess we refer to this as ‘material advantage.’

First, as far as I knew, I was the only person – except my late father – who’d discovered that there might be not just one, but two Black Queens of the Montglane Service. And second, other than the mystery person who’d left that
Washington Post
on my doorstep, I might also be the only one who’d connected that jeweled chess set created in Baghdad twelve hundred years ago with events unfolding there right now – or any of it with that other dangerous Game.

But when it came to the Game, I now knew one thing beyond doubt: Lily was mistaken back in Colorado when she’d said we needed a master plan. By my lights it was too early in the Game for strategy. Not when we were still in the opening moves – ‘the Defense’ – as Lily herself had said.

In any chess game, though you need a wide-angle view of the board – the big picture, a long-range strategy – as the game progresses, the landscape will quickly change. To keep your balance, to be able to land on your feet, you must never let the long view distract your attention from those immediate threats always lurking nearby, those close encounters in an ever-shifting sea, with dangerous actions and defensive or aggressive counteractions lapping about you at every side. These require tactics.

This was the part of the game I knew best. This was the part of the game I loved: the part where everything was still potential, where elements like surprise and risk would pay off.

As I swung the Touareg through the big stone gates of Kenwood, I knew exactly where that kind of danger might lie closest at this very moment, where those tactical maneuvers
might soon come in handy: less than three hundred yards away up the hill at villa Euskal Herria.

I’d forgotten until I entered Kenwood that this week was the Cherry Blossom Festival in D.C., where each year hundreds of thousands of tourists packed the National Mall to snap photos of the reflecting pool with its mirror images of Japanese cherry trees.

But the little-known cherry trees in Kenwood had apparently been discovered only by the Japanese. Hundreds of Japanese tourists were already here, moving like wraiths through the rain beneath dark umbrellas along the grassy, winding creek. I drove uphill beside them through the astonishing cathedral of black-branched cherry trees, so old and gnarled that they seemed to have been planted a hundred years ago.

At the top of the hill, when I rolled down the window at Rodo’s private gates to punch in my intercom code, mist swirled into the car like damp smoke. It was permeated with a heady aroma of cherry blossoms that made me a little dizzy.

Through the fog beyond the high iron gates I could see acres of Rodo’s beloved
xapata,
the Basque trees that yield abundant black cherries for Saint John’s Day each June. And beyond in the mist, floating above the sea of cherry trees in frothy magenta bloom, lay the sprawling villa Euskal Herria with its Mediterranean tiled roof and vast terraces. Its shutters painted a brilliant
rouge Basque,
the color of cow’s blood, and the flamingo-pink stucco walls dripping with vermillion bougainvillea, it was all like something from a Fauve painting. Indeed, everything about Euskal Herria had always seemed illusory and strange – especially here so close to Washington, D.C. It seemed to have been dropped from the skies of Biarritz instead.

When the gates swung open, I drove around the circle
drive to the back side of the house where the kitchens, with their wall of French windows, were located. On a clear day, from the enormous tiled terrace, you could see the entire valley beyond. Rodo’s silver-haired concierge, Eremon, was already awaiting me there with his crew to unload the car – half a dozen muscular lads all clad in black, with bandannas and
txapelas,
dark berets: the Basque brigade. While Eremon helped me down from the Touareg, they wordlessly set to their task of unloading boxes of fresh produce, eggs, and iced seafood.

I always found it interesting that Rodo – who’d grown up like a wild goat on the Pyrenees passes; whose family crest included a tree, a sheep, and some pigs; who still raked fires for a living and composted his own crops – today maintained a lifestyle involving multiple villas, a permanent staff of servants, and a full-time concierge.

The answer was simple: They were all Basques so they weren’t really employees, they were brothers.

According to Rodo, Basques were brothers regardless of what language they spoke – French, Spanish, or Euskera, the Basque tongue. And regardless of where they came from – one of the four Basque provinces belonging to Spain or one of the three that are part of France – they think of the Basque regions as a single country.

As if to reinforce this important point, just above the French windows a favorite, if private, Basque maxim had been set in hand-painted tiles into the stucco wall:

EUSKERA MATHEMATICS

4 + 3 = 1

Eremon and I entered the enormous kitchen through the wall of French windows and the brigade started efficiently unloading the crates across the room.

We found Rodo, his back to us, his compact, muscular body bent with intensity over the stove, stirring something with a big wooden spoon. Rodo’s long dark hair, normally brushed up from his neck like a horse’s mane to tumble over his collar, was today pulled back into a ponytail – with his customary red beret instead of a chef’s toque, to keep it from the food. He was dressed in his usual whites – slacks, open-throat shirt, and espadrilles tied with long ribbons about the ankles – a costume usually worn on festive occasions with the bright red neck kerchief and waist sash. This morning it was covered with a big white butcher’s apron.

Rodo did not turn when we entered. He was breaking a large bar of bitter Bayonnais chocolate into pieces and dropping them into the double boiler as he stirred. I assumed this meant that tonight we’d taste his specialty, a version of
Txapel Euskadi: Beret Basque,
a cake he filled with dark liquid chocolate and cherries preserved in liquor. My mouth was watering already.

Without looking up from his task, Rodo muttered, ‘So! The
neskato geldo
returns from dancing
Jota
all night with the prince!’ His favorite little cinder girl, he was calling me. ‘
Quelle surprise!
Back to the kitchen to rake the ashes! Ha!’

‘It wasn’t exactly a
Jota
I was dancing out there
,
’ I assured him,
Jota
being one of those ebullient Basque dances Rodo loved so much, with high kicks, everyone arms akimbo, leaping off the floor. ‘I almost got snowed in, in the middle of nowhere. I had to drive through a blizzard to get here in time to help with this unannounced
boum
of yours tonight. I might have been killed!
You’re
the one who ought to be grateful!’

I was fuming, but there was method in my fulminations. When it came to dealing with Rodo, I knew from experience that one had to fight fire with fire. And whoever tossed the first match into the fat usually came out on top.

But maybe not this time.

Rodo had dropped his spoon in the chocolate pot and turned to Eremon and me. His stormy black brows were drawn together like a brewing thundercloud as he waved his hand frenetically in the air.

‘So! The
hauspo
believes that it is the
su
!’ he cried: The bellows thinks it’s the fire. I couldn’t believe I always put up with this. ‘Please do not forget who gave you a job! Do not forget who rescued you from—’

‘The CIA,’ I finished for him. ‘But maybe you deserve a job at that
other
CIA – the Central Intelligence Agency? Or how could you possibly have guessed that I’d left to attend a party? Perhaps you can explain why I had to race back so fast?’

This put Rodo off balance for only an instant. He quickly recovered and, with a snort, he snatched off his red beret and threw it dramatically onto the floor – a favorite technique whenever he was at a loss for words, which wasn’t often.

This was followed by a torrent in Euskera of which I could pick up just a few words. It was directed with urgency toward the dignified, silver-haired concierge Eremon, just beside me, who’d said nothing at all since we’d entered.

Eremon nodded in silence, then walked over to the stove, turned off the gas, and removed the wooden spoon that Rodo had forgotten there in the chocolate pot. It looked a mess. After carefully placing it on the spoon holder, the concierge crossed back to the French windows that led outside. There he turned, as if expecting me to follow.

‘I must take you back right now for the
geldo
,’ he said, referring to the embers, apparently to prepare them for tonight’s cooking. ‘Then, after the men have finished cleaning the food, Monsieur Boujaron says he himself will return with the car and bring everything so you can help for tonight’s private dinner.’

‘But why me?’ I said, turning to my boss for an explanation. ‘Who on earth
are
these “dignitaries” tonight, that there’s all this subterfuge? Why’s no one allowed even to see them except you and me?’

‘No mystery,’ Rodo said, evading my question. ‘But you are late for the work. Eremon will explain anything you may need to know en route.’ He vanished from the kitchen in a huff, shutting the inner door behind him.

My audience with the master now seemed to be at an end. So I followed the stately concierge out onto the terrace and got into the car on the passenger side, while he drove.

Perhaps it was my imagination, or only my limited knowledge of the Basque tongue, but I was fairly sure that I’d picked up two words that had run together in Rodo’s recent diatribe. And if I was right, these specific words wouldn’t make my mind rest any easier. Not at all.

The first was
arisku,
a word Rodo used all the time around the ovens: It meant ‘danger.’ I couldn’t fail to recall that same word printed in Russian on a cardboard plaque that still lay, even now, in my pocket. But the second Basque word that had followed on its heels,
zortzi,
was even worse – though it didn’t mean ‘beware the fire.’

In Euskera,
zortzi
means ‘eight.’

As Eremon maneuvered the Touareg down River Road back into Georgetown, he never removed his eyes from the road nor his hands from the wheel, deploying the noncity dexterity of a driver who’d been negotiating hairpin mountain turns all his life – as likely he had. But that fixated attentiveness wasn’t going to stop me from what I knew I had to do right now: pump him for information – as Rodo had evasively promised – for ‘anything I needed to know en route.’

I’d been acquainted with Eremon, of course, for as many years as I’d been apprenticed to Monsieur Rodolfo Boujaron.
And though I knew much less of the consigliere than I knew of the don, there was one thing I did know: Eremon might play the silver-haired dignitary and chief factotum around Rodo’s baronial estate. But away from his official job, Eremon was a dyed-in-the-wool Basque with all the implied traits. That is, he had an off-the-wall sense of humor, an appreciative eye for the ladies (especially Leda), and an inexplicable taste for
Sagardoa –
that god-awful Basque apple cider that even the Spaniards can’t drink.