The Fire (46 page)

Everyone knows,
my father had told me ever since I was small,
that if one of your positions is threatened, you have two choices of a response: either to defend or to attack. But there is another option no one ever thinks of: to ask the pieces for their own opinion of the situation that they find themselves in.

This made enormous sense to a child. He meant that, although each
position
you find yourself in might have its strong or weak points in terms of attack or defense of the overall board, when it came to the
pieces
, the situation was completely different. For a chess piece, such strengths and weaknesses are part and parcel of its very nature, of its persona. They are its modus operandi, both the freedom and the limitations of how that piece moves around within its seemingly closed black-and-white world.

Once my father had pointed this out, I could quickly see, for instance, that when a queen was threatening a knight, the knight couldn’t threaten the queen back. Or when a rook is attacking a bishop, the bishop’s in no position to attack the rook. Even the queen, the most powerful piece on the board, can’t afford to pause very long on an oblique square that’s smack in the oncoming path of a lowly pawn, or she’ll get nailed. Each piece’s weakness – in terms of its natural limitations, of how it could be
trapped or attacked – was also its strength when it was attacking someone else.

What my father liked was to find situations where you could exploit these innate traits in concert, in an aggressive all-out tactical bombardment – a true revelation to a fearless six-year-old child, and one that I hoped I could use today. I’d always been more of a close-in, hand-to-hand tactical player anyway. And I knew – just in order to
tie
with Vartan Azov – I definitely needed a few more surprises.

After what seemed a
very
long time, I glanced up. Vartan was looking at me with a strange expression.

‘Astonishing,’ he said. ‘But why haven’t you said it?’

‘Why haven’t you moved?’ I wanted to know.

‘All right,’ he agreed. ‘So I shall then make the only move that’s open to me.’

Vartan reached out with one long fingertip and toppled his king. ‘You failed to mention that you had me in checkmate,’ he told me.

I stared at the board. It took me a full fifteen seconds to find it.

‘You didn’t see it?’ he asked in amazement.

I was in a kind of giddy shock. ‘I guess I need a little more coaching before I jump back into the big time,’ I admitted.

‘Then how did you do it?’ he asked.

‘It’s a strange technique of looking at the game that my father taught me when I was little,’ I said. ‘But it seems sometimes to backfire, once it gets inside
my
synapses.’

‘Whatever it is,’ Vartan said with a widening grin, ‘I think you had better teach this “technique” to
me.
It’s the only time in my life that I never really saw it coming.’

‘I didn’t either,’ I confessed. ‘And when I lost that last game to you in Moscow, it was the same thing –
Amaurosis
Scacchistica
. I’ve never wanted to discuss it with anyone, but I admit that wasn’t the first time it happened.’

‘Xie, listen to me,’ Vartan said, coming around the table to take my hands. He pulled me to my feet. ‘Every player knows that chess blindness can strike anybody, anywhere, and at any time. Each time it happens, you curse yourself. But it’s a mistake ever to believe that it’s some special curse from the gods that was reserved just for
you
. You had already left the game before you were able to discover that on your own.

‘Now,’ he told me, ‘I want you to look at this board. What you did just now was very strong, and not just an accident. Maybe not a sophisticated strategy either. In fact, I’ve never seen it before. It was more a case of tactics flying everywhere, like bits of shrapnel. But it took me completely off guard.’ He paused till he got my complete attention. Then he added, ‘And you
won.’

‘But if I don’t recall
how—’
I began.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘That’s why I want you to sit here and study it as long as it takes you, to reconstruct everything till you
know
how you got there. Otherwise, it’ll be like falling from a horse. If you don’t remount at once, you become afraid to ride.’

I’d been afraid to ride for more than ten years of accumulated fear and guilt, ever since Zagorsk, and maybe even earlier. But I did know that Vartan was right about this: I would always be left lying in the dust behind that fleeing horse until I really knew.

Vartan smiled and kissed the tip of my nose.’I’ll make us dinner,’ he said. ‘Tell me when you’ve got the answer. I don’t wish to distract you just at the critical moment in your deciphering. But I can safely promise that once you’ve solved it you can expect a handsome reward. A grandmaster will sleep in your bed and do delightful things to you all night long.’

He was halfway to the kitchen when he turned and added, ‘You
have
got a bed, haven’t you?’

Vartan flipped through the pile of paper, my reconstruction of our game, as he wolfed down the spaghetti he’d prepared for us in my woefully wanting kitchen. But he never complained, even about his own cooking.

I watched his face from across the table. From time to time, he nodded. Once or twice, he laughed out loud. Finally he looked up at me.

‘Your father was some kind of self-created genius,’ he said. ‘I assure you that he never got any of
these
ideas you have just thrust upon me from that long term of sentence that he’d endured, as a boy, at the “Palace of Young Pioneers.” You got these blitz techniques from him? But it’s like something Philidor might have invented, only using pieces instead of pawns.’ He paused and added, ‘Why did you never use any of this on me before today? Ah yes, your “
Amaurosis
.”’

Then he looked at me as if he’d just had a true revelation. ‘Or perhaps it’s we two who have
both
been blind,’ he said.

‘Blind about what?’ I asked.

‘Where is that card that Tatiana gave you at Zagorsk?’

When I retrieved it from the trouser pocket where I’d left it, he flipped it back and forth to look at both sides. Then he stared at me. ‘
Je tiens l’affaire,
’ he said, like Champollion finding the key to the hieroglyphic. ‘You see it? That’s why it says here “Beware the Fire.” The Phoenix is the fire, the eternity that your mother spoke of – the perpetual death and rebirth in ashes and flame. But the firebird doesn’t die in fire or ashes or anything. Her magical feathers bring us eternal light. I think that’s the freedom your mother meant. And the choice. And it would explain what she’s discovered about the chess set itself – why neither Mireille nor Galen could
attain the true meaning, nor could your mother by helping either of them. They’d already drunk the elixir – for whatever their individual motives might have been. They’d exploited the service toward their own ends, but not for the original purpose of the designer.’

‘You mean, it’s like a built-in fail-safe mechanism,’ I said, in amazement, ‘and that al-Jabir had designed it so that
no
one who used the Service for personal gain would then be able to access its higher powers.’

Great solution, I thought. But it still seemed to leave that same old problem facing us.

‘So what
are
those higher powers?’ I said.

‘Your mother told me that she’d given
you
the key to all the rest,’ said Vartan. ‘What did she tell you?’

‘Nothing, really,’ I said. ‘She only asked if I’d understood all of
her
messages that she’d left for me in Colorado – especially the first one:
The chessboard is the key.
She told me that that message had been for me, her special gift.
’

‘How could it be her special gift,’ said Vartan, ‘when we all saw that drawing of the chessboard, just as she surely knew we would? It must have been
another
chessboard she was speaking of as the key.’

I stared down at the board that still sat there before us on the table, that checkmate still in place on its surface. Vartan’s eyes followed mine.

‘I found it inside Mother’s piano in Colorado,’ I said. ‘It was set up with our last Moscow game, yours and mine, just at the place where I fumbled. Key told me you’d sent Mother the position yourself—’

But Vartan was already removing our spaghetti plates and wineglasses from the table and sweeping the pawns and pieces to one side.

Then he turned to me and said, ‘It has to be in here – not hidden in the pieces. She said the board.’

I looked at Vartan and I could feel my heart pounding. He was examining the board closely with his fingertips, just as he had with that desk in Colorado. I had to stop this. I’d never before felt so afraid of my own future.

‘Vartan,’ I said, ‘what if we end up just like all those others? After all, you and I are both natural-born competitors even since our childhoods. Just now in that game, I only wanted to defeat you. I didn’t think even once about sex or passion or love. What if it grabs us? What if, like them, it turns out that we just can’t stop playing the Game, even against each other?’

Vartan looked up at me and after a moment he smiled. It took me by surprise – it was truly radiant. He reached over and took me by the wrist, turning my hand up to kiss the place where my pulse was beating harder than usual. ‘Chess will certainly be the only “game” we shall ever play against each other, Xie,’ he said. ‘And all these other games must be stopped, too.’

‘I know,’ I said. I leaned my forehead down on his hand that still held my wrist. I was too exhausted to think.

He rested his other hand on my hair for a moment, then pulled me back to face him. ‘As for how we’ll “end up,”’ he said, ‘I think it will be a bit more like your parents. That is, if we are very, very lucky. But every chess player knows Thomas Jefferson’s famous line, “I’m a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”

‘Now let’s go to work,’ he added. ‘And let’s hope we get lucky.’

He took my hand and he placed it on the chessboard. Then, with his hand resting over mine, he slid my fingertip beneath his own until I heard a
click.
He lifted my hand from the board, where a section of the surface had popped open. Inside was a single sheet of paper in a loose plastic
wrapper. Vartan extracted it and passed it to me so we could both study it.

It was a tiny drawing of a chessboard. I could see that many of the pawns and pieces were connected to little lines that were then drawn out to the side of the page, where a set of different numbers was written above each line. I counted; there were twenty-six lines in all – the exact number of pieces Lily told us that my mother had captured herself, in the last round of the Game. Some of them seemed to be clustered in sets, like bunches of twigs.

‘These numbers,’ said Vartan, ‘they must be some kind of geodesic coordinates, perhaps the area on a map where each of their pieces has been hidden. So one of two things must be true: Either your father was not the only one who knew this information, or else he had taken a decision to write it down, after all, despite the risk.’ He added, ‘But numbers like these would provide us no more than a general idea, not the specific location.’

‘Except maybe this one here,’ I said, for I’d noticed something. ‘Look, there’s an asterisk printed beside these numbers.’

We traced that line back to the chessboard illustration to see which piece these coordinates might be connected to.

It led to the Black Queen.

Vartan flipped the page over. On the reverse side was a small map of a spot that looked all too familiar, with a tiny arrow at the bottom, pointing north, that seemed to suggest:
Start here.
By now I could hear my heart pounding so loudly in my ears that it was deafening. I gripped Vartan by the arm.

‘You mean you actually recognize where this place is?’ said Vartan.

‘It’s right here in Washington, D.C.,’ I told him, trying hard to swallow. ‘And given which chess piece the line was pointing to on the flip side, it must be in this very spot, right
here inside the District itself, where Mother hid the true Black Queen!’

A familiar voice from across the room said, ‘I couldn’t help but overhear, my dear.’

The hair on my neck stood up!

Vartan had jumped to his feet, the chessboard drawing still clutched in his hand. ‘Who in God’s name is
that
?’ he hissed at me.

There in the open doorway – much to my horror and distress – stood my boss, Rodolfo Boujaron.

‘There, there,’ said Rodo, ‘please resume your seats once more. I did not mean to
déranger
you both when it seems you were just about to finish with your meal.’

Nonetheless, he came into the room and put out his hand to Vartan. ‘Boujaron here,’ he said, ‘Alexandra’s employer.’

Vartan had surreptitiously dropped the map into my lap as he stepped forward and shook hands with Rodo. ‘Vartan Azov,’ he said. ‘A friend of Alexandra’s from childhood.’

‘Oh, a great deal more than that by now, I’m quite sure,’ said Rodo. ‘As you’ll recall, I did overhear you. I didn’t intend to pry in upon your private conversation. But I’m afraid, Alexandra, that you
did
leave your cell phone in the sofa cushions when you last departed. Galen and I and our compatriots were merely using it to monitor those who might come into this place searching for things in your absence. You see, only your mother knew where she had hidden her list, and she trusted only you to retrieve it. But with that manner of yours these past few days – in and out of here, knocking about exactly like a bocce ball – well, we did all feel that one cannot be too careful in these most difficult times. As I am certain you will both agree.’

He went over and pulled the phone from between the
cushions where Nim had left it, opened the window, and flung it out into the canal far below.

So I’d been caught with my phone down again. What in God’s name was
wrong
with me? I felt ill at the thought of everything he must already have overheard – not least, of course, some of those intimate musings between Vartan and me.