The Fire (39 page)

But whoever
did
have that card and sent it to Nim, which by his own testimony he had forwarded to my mother, had also sent something else in the same packet.

‘The chessboard,’ I said. ‘Whoever sent it to my uncle
must
have been there that day at Zagorsk. It had to be Taras Petrossian. That’s why they killed him.’

‘No, Xie,’ said Vartan. ‘I sent the chessboard drawing and that card to your uncle myself – just as your mother asked me to do.’

He studied me for a moment, as if unsure whether to proceed.

At last, he said, ‘My stepfather was killed when he sent her the Black Queen.’

Flight/Flying. Transcendence; the release of the spirit from the limitations of matter; the release of the spirit of the dead…access to a superhuman state. The ability of sages to fly or “travel on the wind” symbolizes spiritual release and omnipresence.

– J. C. Cooper,
An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols

‘Please try to pay attention,’ Key admonished me, as we crossed the tarmac from the tiny air depot to board our waiting plane. ‘As our teachers in school used to say, “Some of the information we’re about to give you today
will
be appearing on your exam.”’

A critical download of data might come in handy right now, but I wasn’t about to prompt it by asking more questions. After this morning’s jumble of conflicting reports and information, I’d finally learned to shut up, listen, and keep my opinions to myself.

As we clambered into the plane with the duffel bags from the car, I noticed that I’d never before seen this plane of
Key’s, a vintage, single-engine Bonanza. I knew that when it came to planes she’d always liked antiques. But her tastes in general had run to rough-and-ready bush planes that could remain airborne at 50 mph.

‘New trophy?’ I said, once we three were buckled up and we’d begun taxiing.

‘Nope,’ she told me. ‘The plague of Washington, D.C.: truncated runways. Wherever you land in these parts, you’re always trying to put down atop the proverbial postage stamp. This baby’s a loaner – heavier, with less float than a high-winged plane, so we can land much shorter. It’s fuel-injected though – very fast – so we’ll get there in no time at all.’

Nor did I inquire where
there
was. Not that I lacked curiosity, but after that little foray of ours just now on the back roads, it seemed clear enough that, though Key and Vartan might both be draftees on my mother’s team, Key still didn’t trust him enough to open up and reveal everything she knew.

And I confess, after that bombshell of Vartan’s about the Black Queen, the chessboard, and that placard from Zagorsk, I was awaiting a few elaborations myself. So, bereft of options, I decided to follow the flow.

The Bonanza smelled like old leather and damp dog fur. I wondered where she’d dug this relic up. Key revved the engines; the plane vibrated and shuddered down the runway as if thinking over whether it could really make it; but at the last possible moment it got some loft and suddenly took to the skies with surprising ease. Once we’d attained our altitude, and we were clear of heavy sky traffic, Key flipped a few switches and turned to Vartan and me. ‘Let’s let Otto do the driving, shall we, while we continue our little chat?’ Otto was bush plane lingo for ’Otto-pilot.’

I turned to Vartan. ‘You have our complete attention,’ I informed him sweetly. ‘If I’m not mistaken, when we left off
in our last episode, your stepfather Taras Petrossian was just embracing the Black Queen.’

‘I’d like to explain everything that you both want to know,’ Vartan assured us, ‘but you must understand it will be a very long story, going back ten years or more. There’s no way to say it simply.’

‘That’s okay,’ Key told him. ‘What with fuel stops and all, we’ve got at least twelve hours ahead of us to hear it.’

We both stared at her. ‘That’s arriving in
no
time?’ I protested.

‘I’m a student of Einstein.’ She shrugged.

‘Well,
relatively
speaking,’ I said, ‘where are we
relatively
going, then?’

‘Jackson Hole, Wyoming,’ she told me, ‘to pick up your mom.’

Jackson, as the crow flies, was twenty-two hundred miles away. And since airplanes aren’t crows, as Key had pointed out, they can’t just stop and refuel at the nearest cornfield.

I couldn’t believe this.

Last I had heard, my mother had been headed – at least metaphorically – from the Virgin Islands to Washington, D.C. What in God’s name was she doing at Jackson Hole? Was she still all right? And which zany was it who’d decided we had to take over half a day to fly there in
this
obsolete rattletrap?

I was wondering, in desperation, why I hadn’t thought to bring my parachute – or whether I could bail out at some remote refueling spot and hitch a ride home – when Key interrupted these dire thoughts.

‘Divide and conquer, that’s what it was all about,’ she said, by way of minimal explanation. ‘Your mom may not be much of a chess player, babe, but Cat Velis sure knows how to read the handwriting on the wall. Do you have any
idea
just how long this Game has been under way, how much disruption it caused, before she finally blew the whistle?’

‘Whistle?’ I said, trying to hang on despite this seeming change of direction.

It was Vartan who intervened. ‘What Nokomis says is correct,’ he told me. ‘Your mother has perhaps understood something important, something absolutely critical, that no one else ever before had thought of in twelve hundred years.’

Now I was listening.

‘It’s…I don’t know exactly how to say it,’ Vartan continued. ‘In all these centuries, as it seems, your mother actually may have been the very first in this Game who has understood the true, the real underlying intention, of the Creator—’

‘The
Creator
?’ I practically shrieked. Where on earth was this going?

‘Vartan means the creator of the
chess set,
’ said Key with enormous disdain. ‘His name was al-Jabir ibn Hayyan – remember?’

Sure. I got that
.

‘And exactly what
was
Mr Hayyan’s “true underlying intention”?’ I managed to choke out. ‘I mean, of course, according to this theory of my mother’s you’re both so fond of?’

They looked at me for a very long, drawn-out minute, during which time I could feel the waves of air beneath our wings; I could hear the throb of the single engine humming in hypnotic cadence.

They both seemed to be coming to some unspoken decision.

It was Vartan who broke the ice. ‘Your mother saw that maybe, all along, the Game has been an illusion. That maybe there
is
no Game—’

‘Wait,’ I cut in. ‘You’re saying that people have been getting killed all this time – have been drafted, or have actually
volunteered
to jump into a Game where they knew that they
might
be killed – just for an
illusion
?’

‘People die for illusions every day,’ said Key, our unremitting
philosophe
.

‘But how could so many people think they’re involved in some dangerous Game all this time,’ I said, ‘if it doesn’t exist?’

‘Oh, it exists,’ Vartan assured me. ‘We are all in it. Everyone always
has
been. And the stakes are very high, just as Lily Rad told us. But that’s not what your mother found out.’

I was still waiting.

‘What your mother discovered,’ said Key, ‘is that this “Game” may be a ruse that leads us entirely in the wrong direction. As long as we’re players, we’re still inside the box; we’re victims of our own myopia; we’re black-and-white enemies battling on a board of our own making. We can’t see the Big Picture.’

A ‘ruse’ that killed my father, I thought.

But aloud, I asked, ‘So what exactly
is
this “Big Picture”?’

Key smiled. ‘The Original Instructions,’ she said.

My life just seemed filled to brimming with new discoveries.

The first of these – and in terms of priorities, perhaps the most urgently in need of addressing – was that we were now flying the first leg of a two-thousand-mile journey in a plane that had no bathroom.

This topic came up rather casually when Key broke out the trail mix and electrolyte drinks to provide sustenance for our trip. She cautioned us not to eat or imbibe too much, though, before approaching our first pit stop near Dubuque, wherever
that
was.

I’ll spare the details – only to mention that the logistics seemed to require either the exacting continence that such small-plane pilots are trained for, or else the highly cautious
deployment of an empty pickle jar. Since there wasn’t even a broom closet on this barge where one might find a shred of privacy, I opted, perforce, for the former, and declined the refreshments.

My second discovery, fortunately, was to prove a bit more rewarding.

It was Vartan’s revelation of the real role that had been played by the late Taras Petrossian in this most dangerous, if illusory, Game.

‘Taras Petrossian, the man who became my stepfather, was descended from Armenian ancestors who were situated in Krym for generations, and like all Armenians, in the Black Sea region since ancient times,’ Vartan told us. He added, with a wry smile, ‘When the USSR fell to pieces ten years ago, this placed my stepfather in an unusual and interesting position – at least, from a chess player’s point of view.

‘To understand what I mean, you must know a bit of the background of the land I am speaking of: Krym is not only the birthplace of Alexandra’s father, but this peninsula, almost an island, and the surrounding world, is also a place of many legends. I think it is no accident that a large part of the story I am about to tell you focuses on this location on the Black Sea.’

The Second Grandmaster’s Tale

Over the centuries, Krym has changed rulers many times. In the Middle Ages, it was the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan, and the Ottoman Turks ruled it as well. By the fifteenth century Krym had become the largest slave-trading center on the Black Sea. It did not pass into Russian hands until Potemkin captured it for Catherine the Great, during the Russo-Turkish Wars. Then, in the mid-1800s during the Crimean War, it was fought over by Russia, still trying to
dismantle the Turkish Empire, versus the British and French – all players in the ‘Great Game,’ as it was called. In the following century, Krym was occupied and depopulated by one power or another, through the two world wars. It wasn’t until 1954 that Khrushchev, then Soviet premier, put Krym under the control of Ukraine – which still creates problems today.

Ukrainians can never forget how Stalin created the famine in the thirties, to starve them by the millions, and then killed hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatars, descendants of Genghis, shipping them to exile in Uzbekistan. Ukrainians dislike Russia, and the Russian majority in Krym dislikes being part of Ukraine.

But
no
one much liked the Armenians. Though they were among the earliest Christians from the time of Eusebius – their ancient churches still exist, mostly boarded up, along the Black Sea coast – they were outsiders to all. In more modern times, they often sided with Russia or Greece against the Islamic Turks, which led to many massacres over the past one hundred years. But during such purges, their brand of Christianity was often left unprotected, even by the Russian, Greek, and Roman churches – resulting in Armenian flight from the region.

But this flight – this diaspora, the Greek word for ‘scattering the seeds’ – had actually begun in ancient times, and plays a most critical role in our tale.

It was this aspect of ancient history that would soon prove of great value to Taras Petrossian, as well as to others, as I shall explain:

The Minni were among the oldest of cultures, early traders who occupied the vast Armenian plateau for thousands of years. The mountainous land drops off toward the north to the Black Sea, and in the south it descends to the Mesopotamian lowlands, where the Minni had moved with
ease, over the millennia, down the Tigris and Euphrates into the heart of Babylon, Sumer, and Baghdad.

Three ‘modern’ empires eventually seized this vast plateau land and divided it among themselves. These were the kingdoms of the tsar of Russia, the sultan of Turkey, and the shah of Iran. They met at the center, where rises the seventeen-thousand-foot-high obsidian volcano, Mount Ararat – Koh-i-Noh, the
‘
Mountain of Noah’ – the resting place of the Ark, a sacred spot at the very heart of the ancient world, the crossroads from east to west, from north to south.

Taras Petrossian knew this history very well. And he perceived how a powerful ancient legacy might again be invoked to attain even more enormous powers in modern times.

Taras was young – only in his thirties, handsome, intelligent, and ambitious – when, in the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, bringing his sweeping policies of glasnost and perestroika like two strong breaths of fresh air. They would soon build into a gust that was strong enough to blow away, like dry leaves before a wind, the rotted and crumbling infrastructure of an aging politburo, along with its decrepit ideas and outworn plans.

The USSR swiftly collapsed into dust – but with no new structure to replace it.

Into this void stepped those who had plans of their own, and who often came professionally well situated – or already equipped with the ill-gotten funds – to carry these out. Gangsters and black marketeers provided prepaid ‘protection’; impoverished government officials and bankrupted scientists sold trade secrets and weapons-grade materials; the Chechen mafia created the final master blow, in 1992, by defrauding the Bank of Russia of over $325 million.

And there was also another class of opportunists: those nouveau-oligarch entrepreneurs like Taras Petrossian.

Taras Petrossian married my mother when I was nine
years old. I had already long made news in the chess tournament arena:
WIDOW OF BRAVE RUSSIAN VETERAN REARS PRECOCIOUS CHILD CHESS PRODIGY
– that sort of thing.

Petrossian, through funds obtained from his silent partner, Basil Livingston, had established his chain of fashionable restaurants and exclusive clubs around Russia. My stepfather well understood the desperate appetite of Russians for more than food – for a glimpse of real luxury after so many bleak decades of Soviet rule – and he understood how to market to those appetites. He never contradicted those, for instance, who chose to imagine that he himself was descended from that long line of food purveyors to the tsars, and he always made certain that all of his clubs kept icers of their famous caviar at each table.