The Fire (33 page)

‘What kept you?’ he asked as we plowed back through the throngs.

‘Cripes,’ I told him. ‘Let’s just do this. I’ll fill you in later.’

Without a further word, we hoofed it to the Georgetown post office two blocks away and just around the corner, and scrambled up the stone steps. Nim provided a defensive blockade as I slipped behind a counter, where I rolled the rest of my stash into the cylinders, sealed them with the tape he’d bought, and made out the labels – one to Aunt Lily, one to Nokomis Key, one each to the post office boxes of Nim and my mother. The one with the original drawing of the chessboard I sent to myself, right here at the Georgetown post office. Then for extra safety, I filled out one of those big yellow cards and signed it, so the post office would hold my mail for me until further notice.

At least this way, I thought, as my uncle and I walked back down the stone steps of the Georgetown post office, no matter what happened to me or to the others, the sacrifice that was made by a dying abbess, two hundred years ago in a Russian prison, would not have been in vain.

I took a hot, soapy shower and washed the three-day-old Colorado dust from my hair in the most elegant marble bathroom I’d ever seen in my life. Then, sporting nothing but the
thick toweling robe that I’d found in the room and the designer swimsuit graciously provided me by the Four Seasons concièrge, I went down to where my uncle said he’d meet me, in the athletic club on the lower floor of the hotel.

First, I did thirty laps in the lane – by reservation only – that Nim had arranged for me in their private lap pool. Then I joined him in the enormous marble Roman Jacuzzi bath, which, if drained, would have comfortably slept fifty fullgrown sumo wrestlers.

I had to concede it to my uncle: Wealth and comfort had their appealing points.

But I knew that if this Game I’d been thrown into was really as dangerous as everyone kept saying, I wouldn’t have much longer to enjoy
anything,
especally if I kept sitting around doing pattycakes here in the steamy water.

As if my uncle had read my mind, he moved across the hot pool to sit on the marble shelf beside me. ‘Given that we don’t know whatever may lie ahead of you just now,’ he said, ‘I thought you could only be assisted in it by being given a hot bath and a decent meal.’

‘Last wish?’ I asked him with a smile. ‘I’ll never forget it. My mind’s working better already, I can tell. And I learned something really important today.’

‘About your boss Boujaron at the copy shop. You told me,’ he said. ‘That does raise some questions, of which we already have many. But there’s something—’

‘No, I discovered something I think is more important than that,’ I said. ‘I learned whom I could trust.’

When he focused his bicolored eyes on me with curiosity, I added, ‘At the post office, and even before, I didn’t have to think for one second before filling out those mailing labels. I knew who could be trusted with copies of the board. Not just you and my mother, who already had it, but Aunt Lily and my friend Nokomis Key, as well.’

‘Ah,’ said Nim. ‘Your friend Key’s first name is Nokomis? So that must explain it.’

‘Explain what?’ I said.

And that quickly, I was getting the uncomfortable feeling again that there was something headed in my direction I really didn’t want to meet up with.

‘While you were bathing, I picked up my messages from last night,’ said Nim. ‘Almost no one knows I’m here – just my caretaker. Yet there was a fax waiting for me here from last night – from one “Selene Luna, Hank Tallchap’s grandmother.”’

I was puzzled for just a moment, then I saw that Nim was smiling, and I got it too. ‘Selene’ and ‘Luna’ both meant ‘moon.’

‘“By the shores of Gitchee Gumee, By the shining Big Sea Waters…”’ I quoted.

‘“Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon
, Nokomis,”’ Nim finished for me. ‘So this friend of yours, does she really resemble Hiawatha’s grandmother from the famous poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow?’

‘Only in how she
thinks
,’ I told him. ‘She could raise a warrior brave single-handed. And you’d be surprised that she knows more about cooking up secret codes than anyone I’ve ever known except
you.
Indian smoke signals, she calls them. So apart from puzzling out how she managed to find me, what was her message?’

‘I confess, for once I was at a loss there, too,’ Nim said. ‘But now that I know who she is, clearly it was encoded for your eyes only.’

He reached over for his toweling robe beside the pool, pulled out the fax, and handed it to me.

It did take a minute. But when I got it, I turned slightly green. How could it be? Nobody had seen that coded message but me!

‘What is it?’ said Nim in alarm, his hand on my shoulder.

I could only shake my head. I couldn’t speak.

Kitty’s had a reversal of fortunes,
it read.
She’s coming back from the Virgin Isles
, s
he leased a luxury car, she’ll be in DC tomorrow. She says you have her number and the rest of her contact info. She’s still in apartment A1.

The message was still the same:
A1
meant it had to do with Russians and a secret room in Baghdad. But the reversal of fortune was definitely the key. I reversed the message in my mind. Instead of DC-LX-VI in Roman numerals, which added to 6-6-6, it would now read: IV-XL-CD, which added to 4-4-4. Three numbers, I noticed, that when multiplied added to 64, the number of squares on a chessboard!

The chessboard provides the key.

And if Kitty-Cat was taking an alternate route to the one she’d left atop that piano in Colorado, it meant that my mother was, possibly even at this very moment, right here in Washington, D.C.!

I’d dawdled here too long. I’d just turned to my uncle to tell him we had to go, and I started to step out of the Roman bath. But just at that moment I was confronted by absolutely the worst thing I could imagine in my wildest dreams. Around the corner came three figures I could hardly visualize together – certainly not in my current state of deshabille, with nowhere to run or hide:

Sage Livingston, Galen March, and my boss, Rodolfo Boujaron.

 

I went out to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head…

– W. B. Yeats, ‘The Song of the Wandering Aengus’

 

Yeats’s Aengus…had the fire in his head that shamans everywhere believe is their source of enlightenment, illuminating visions of other realities. The shamanic journey begins and ends in the mind…

– Tom Cowan,
Fire in the Head

Koryakskoe Rayirin Yayai

(House of the Drum, Land of the Koryak)

Within the yurt, the shaman was drumming softly as the others sat in a circle around the fire and chanted in the beautiful rhythms that Aleksandr had come to love. He sat outside the tent flap and listened. He loved the sounds of the shamans for they tranquilized his thoughts, creating a kind of harmonic that seemed to flow through his body and helped to heal his frayed and damaged nerves.

But often, when these rhythms stopped, the fire would
return: the fire that filled his head with that burning light, that searing pain – not physical, more like something that emanated from within his psyche.

He had no real sense of time yet, either. He was unsure of how long he’d been here – a few days, maybe a week or more – or of how long they’d traveled to reach this place, all that distance across miles of seemingly impenetrable taiga. Toward the end of the journey, when his newly seasoned legs had failed him in the snows, when he’d become too weak to keep up the pace, they’d sent the sled with dogs to bring him the rest of the way.

The dogs were wonderful. He remembered what they were called: Samoyeds. He’d watched them with interest as they’d bounded through the snowy fields before the sled. When they were unleashed from the harness at night, he’d embraced them, and they’d licked his hands and face. Had he had a dog like this when he was young?

But he was no longer that boy, young Sascha, the self he knew best, the only self he really knew at all. He was now a grown man who remembered so little, his past seemed a foreign land, even unto himself. She’d told him his name.

Aleksandr Solarin.

And the woman who’d brought him here – the lovely blond woman who sat beside him now, waiting outside the tent for the others to call them when they were ready for the healing – she was his mother, Tatiana.

Before they’d first set out on this mission, she’d told him what she could about his state. ‘At the beginning,’ she said, ‘you were in a coma, you did not move, you could hardly breathe. The chief shaman, the Etugen, came down from the north to assist in your healing in the mineral waters. She is the one whom the Chukchi call
qacikechca
– “similar to a man” – a female shaman from the aboriginal line, the
enenilit,
those with the spirit, those with great power. But despite all
the strong herbs and skilled techniques the elders had employed to heal your flesh, the Etugen said you would only recover your spirit if you could begin the crossing – the journey from the people of the dead, the Peninelau, to the place of the living – through the effort of your own will.

‘After a very long time, you came to that state that we would call a stupor, although sometimes, for a month or longer, you still moved in and out of consciousness. At last, you’ve become as you are now, aware and conscious, able to eat, walk, read, even speak in several languages – but these are all skills that you possessed in your early youth. We must expect the rest to return more slowly, for you have had a great shock.

‘The Etugen says that yours is not only a wound of the flesh, but of the spirit. It is dangerous to probe this psychic wound while it is still healing – already it comes to you in flashes. You are sometimes attacked by sleeplessness, a kind of seizure of distress or hysteria caused by what may seem irrational fears. But the Etugen believes these fears are real – that we must permit the true cause of your trauma to surface naturally, despite how long it may require and as difficult as it may seem.

‘Then, when your flesh is well enough for you to make the physical part of the journey,’ she added, ‘we will head toward the north, to begin that other journey of healing your soul. For you have lived among the dead, you have the fire in your head – you have passed the tests to become a
hetolatigiu
– “one-looking-into
”
– a prophet shaman.’

But Solarin knew in despair that all he wanted was his life back. As more of his memories returned, bit by bit, the more hopeless he felt at how much he’d really lost of all those intervening blank years. He could not even remember how many of them there were, that he was unble to remember. Bitterest of all to him now, he couldn’t access the contents
of his memory – couldn’t recall those whom he’d loved or hated, cursed or cherished.

Yet there was one thing he
could
remember.

The game of chess.

Whenever he thought of it – especially of one game in particular – the fire began to rise in his head again. He knew that something about that game must be the key to it all: all his lost memory, all the traumas and nightmares, the hopes and fears.

But he knew, too, that just as his mother and the shaman had advised, it was best to watch and wait. For by pressing too hard and fast to grasp those cherished memories, he might be in the greater danger of killing the golden goose and losing it all.

Along their journey to the north, whenever they’d reached a stopping place where they could speak, he would tell his mother whatever he’d been able to remember, some small vapor, something rising like a mist from his past.

For instance, that night when he was a child, when Tatiana had given him a glass of warm milk and put him to bed. He could see his bedroom with the fig tree just outside. It was somewhere near the cliffs and the sea. It was raining. They’d had to flee. This much he’d remembered all on his own. The first memory – a great sense of accomplishment and release.

And now as they went, Tatiana – like a painter filling color into a drawing that was as yet only half-sketched on the canvas – would share more details of whatever she could retrieve for him from this part of his life.

‘That night you recalled is important,’ she told him. ‘It was in late December of 1953 – the night when all our lives changed. That night in the rain, our grandmother Minnie arrived at our house, which lay along a wild, sparsely occupied stretch of coast on the Black Sea. Though part of the Soviet Union, this spot was a sheltered oasis far from
the terrors and purges elsewhere – or so we believed. Minnie brought with her something that our family, across many generations, had always vowed to protect.’

‘I do not recall her,’ said Solarin, though with stirring excitement, for he’d just had another glimmer. ‘But I remember more of that night. Men broke into our house; I ran out and hid on the cliff. I somehow escaped. But you were captured by those men—’ He looked at his mother in shock. ‘I never saw you again until that day at the monastery!’

Tatiana nodded and said, ‘Minnie had chosen that moment to arrive with a treasure she’d spent eight months scouring Russia to locate. For just eight months earlier, Yusuf Stalin – who’d ruled Russia for twenty-five years with a fist of steel – had died. In those ensuing months after his death, the entire world had changed for better or worse: Iraq, Jordan, and England had all gained new young rulers. Russia had developed the hydrogen bomb. And only shortly before that night of Minnie’s arrival at our house, the longtime head of the Soviet secret police – Lavrentii Beria, the most feared and hated man in Russia – was executed before a firing squad. Indeed, Stalin’s death and the vacuum it left was what had prompted Minnie’s frantic eight-month search to excavate as much as she could of the hidden treasure – three valuable gold and silver, bejeweled chess pieces, which she begged us to hide. She believed we were safe to do so, with a boat nearby at your father’s disposal.’

At the mention of the chess pieces, Solarin had felt the fire returning. He struggled to hold it back. There was something else he had to know. ‘Who were those men who captured you?’ he asked, his voice shaking. ‘And how did you manage to disappear for so long?’

Tatiana did not answer directly. ‘It has always been easy to disappear in Russia,’ she said calmly. ‘Millions did so, if rarely by choice.’

‘But if the old regime was dismantled,’ said Solarin, ‘who were those men who were after the treasure? Who captured you? And where did they take you?’

‘The usual place,’ said Tatiana. ‘The Glavny Upravlenie Lagerey, the Main Administration for Camps – “Gulag” for short – those forced labor camps that have existed since the time of the tsars. The “Administration” it refers to is always the secret police, whether called Okhrana under Tsar Nikolas, or under the Soviets the Chekha, the NKVD, the KGB.’

‘You were put into a prison camp?’ Solarin said, astonished. ‘But how in God’s name did you manage to survive all that time? I was only a small boy when they took you!’

‘I should not have survived,’ Tatiana told him. ‘But after little more than a year, Minnie at last discovered where I’d been taken, to a camp in Siberia. A place of desolation. And she bartered for my escape.’

‘She secured your release, you mean?’ said Solarin. ‘But how?’

‘No, my escape,’ said his mother. ‘For if the politburo had ever learned of my release, all of our lives would have remained in danger all these many years. Minnie bought my freedom in another way, and for quite another reason. I have remained here, hidden among the Koryak and Chukchi ever since. Thanks to this, I was not only able to rescue your broken body, but to save you, too, for I hold many powers myself that I’ve acquired over many years from these great masters of the fire.’

‘But how did you rescue me,’ Solarin asked his mother, ‘and what did Minnie give the Soviets – or the Gulag guards – to effect your escape?’

But before the last question was out of his mouth, Solarin knew the answer. In horror he suddenly saw, with the force of brilliant illumination, the glimmering shape that had
hovered at the periphery of his vision all these many months.

‘Minnie gave them the Black Queen!’ he cried.

‘No,’ said Tatiana. ‘Minnie gave them the chessboard. It was I myself who gave them the Black Queen.’