The Immortal Game (9 page)

Lonny could not understand what he was seeing. His wife and Red’s wife and a gun. Still shaking with adrenaline, Lonny thought of Red’s son; this had the feel of a dream. It was nothing like real life.

“Lonagan!” Mrs. Scarlotti shouted, her face a twisted, ugly sneer.

Then Whitey dropped her with a bullet to the head.

More chaos as the crowd screamed and scattered, unsure where to go now.

“Where is Christopher?” Whitey asked Lonny.

Kelly threw up all over the steps. The vomit steamed in the frigid air.

Lonny knelt next to her. “Northeastern. Just before the museum. With
Vilma
.”

21

She knew.

Before the door opened. Before she saw the blond man’s face. She often claimed a supernatural awareness, a sixth sense if you like.

She knew when bad things were going to happen, even as a child.

In Guatemala, in her youth, she had known when the dark mood was about to descend on her father, possess him. She knew to be still, to avoid his eyes, his dark, dark eyes.

Her brothers never saw it coming. They paid for their ignorance, with pain.

And her mother,
Vilma
had known what she would do to him. She still kept that secret locked in her heart.

So she knew, when she heard those soft, slow footsteps in her hallway, that the boy was in trouble.

They were playing chess. It seemed to soothe him. The game soothed her too. The boy wasn’t bad. He had foresight, thought a few moves ahead, so rare in boys, rarer still in men.

A sad smile on her face as he took her queen and looked at her proudly. Men could never resist that trap.

She was hoping to teach him a lesson.

But then she heard, and knew, so instead she leaned close and whispered, “Time to run, Christopher. Out the window.”

*

The German was surprised to find the door unlocked. He chuckled to himself as he pushed it open.

The woman nodded at him. She was sitting at a table in the kitchen, a chess set in front of her. The game had not started.

He did not see the boy, did not hear him, but he could smell him.

She motioned to the board. “Do you play?”

The question caught him so off guard, he smiled and nodded.

She pointed to the chair across from her. “Sit.”

He sat. It was a beautiful, wooden chess set. Absently, he touched the king, stroked it.

The woman looked at him with amusement. No fear. She was no killer but she knew he was. And still no fear. He was impressed.

“If you’re in a hurry,” she said as she pulled something from under the table, “we could play a timed match.”

A small box with two clocks. She clicked her side and moved her queen’s pawn to Q4, then smacked the button on her clock again.

The German was on the clock. He realized with something like shock that he was still smiling. He moved his king’s knight and hit the timer.

The game had begun.

He was not used to being on the clock, but he was good.

When she took his knight, after a vigorous chase, he knocked the table in acknowledgment. When she tried to snare him, he did not take the bait, but left her queen be. She winked at him.

He was the better player. Went right for the jugular. A killer in every way.

When it was clear to both of them, she knocked her king over in resignation.

He nodded. “You enjoy the game, not so much winning.”

Her teeth flashed. The joy of being understood. A wonderful final thought, he decided, and ended her life with a burp from his silenced revolver.

Regret was a rare emotion from him, he did not enjoy the throbbing now in his tiny, cold heart, but there it was, unexpected and unwelcome.

He closed her eyes with his fingers and sighed.

The German looked in the other rooms. In one, an open window let in a biting breeze. He looked outside. No sign, the boy was in the wind.

22

When Lonny and Whitey got to
Vilma’s
apartment, the door was unlocked, the apartment cold, and another dead woman greeted them in the kitchen.

Lonny saw the chess set in front of her and flipped it over.

“Stop,” Whitey said. “We need to find Christopher.”

Lonny shook with rage, but quieted.

They found the open window.

“She stalled him.” Lonny smiled tightly.

“While Christopher went out the window?”

“That’s what she told him to do.” Lonny walked over to the closet, a thoughtful expression on his face. “But kids don’t always listen.” Lonny opened the closet door.

A trembling Christopher peered up at them.

“It’s okay.” Lonny knew it was a lie, but wasn’t sure what else to say.

The boy looked feral, lost. Lonny remembered, as a child, when a squirrel had climbed into his family’s chimney. Christopher reminded him of that scared squirrel. He had fallen down a rabbit hole into a frightening world of creatures he had previously only seen from afar.

“Christopher?” Whitey said.

The boy’s mouth quivered until his voice cracked. “Uncle Whitey?”

“Stay where you are, kid.”

The boy nodded.

Whitey looked at Lonny. “He’s still out there. He’ll wait for us to leave.”

“What’s our move?” Lonny gazed out the open window, looking absently for the German assassin.

There was a flash across the street and then Whitey knocked Lonny to the floor and a bullet hole appeared on the wall.

“Stay with the boy,” Whitey said.

Lonny wanted to argue but knew it was the right play. This was Whitey’s battle to win or lose.

Whitey rushed over to the closet. “Christopher, I need you to be brave for me. I need you to listen to Lonny.”

Christopher nodded.

“I’m gonna take care of the bad man.”

“Get him good, Uncle Whitey.”

Whitey kissed his nephew on the forehead. The look in his eyes when he touched Lonny’s shoulder made the former detective shiver as Whitey’s expression changed from affection to the hardness of a born killer. The man who left that room had only one thing
 
on his mind: vengeance.

The German was furious. He had revealed his position and hadn’t killed anyone. He pressed a button on his phone.

“The boy is probably on his way home. Perhaps you have men to watch for him?”

He did not wait for a reply.

The German knew the Italian would come for him. The detective would pursue the boy. A killer and a protector by nature.

Whitey was scared.

He stood in the lobby of
Vilma’s
building sucking air into his lungs. He needed to cross the street and he wanted the German to take a shot at him, reveal his location. Was he in the same room? More than anything, Whitey needed the German to miss.

He inhaled, opened the door and poked his head out and pulled it in. No shot. He ran outside. He stopped, stutter stepped, faked left, and then went right. He pictured himself in the German’s crosshairs, tried to time how long it would take to line up the shot. With every step, he bet his life.

Cars swerved around him, slammed on their brakes, honking. Pedestrians squinted in his direction.

His entire body clenched, braced for the German’s bullet.

It didn’t come.

The German watched it all through his rifle lens, a tight smile of respect on his lips. It was rare that the German came up against a worthy adversary. Now today, two. The woman with the chess set and this Italian. Nice to deal with people who knew and accepted the stakes of the contest. Life and death. The only stakes worth playing for.

The Italian would not allow the German to get comfortable; three times the German thought he might have him but then a twitch of movement would throw him off. So be it. Now the Italian wouldn’t know the whereabouts of the German, who could exploit his opponent’s uncertainty.

He remembered Afghanistan. The helicopter crash, into the side of a mountain. He remembered everything constricting, his gut, his chest, even his heart, before impact. Fear, an unfamiliar sensation. The pilot had been crushed in the cockpit, two others impaled by glass and metal.

Scraped and bruised, but alive, he checked on the dead soldiers before grabbing his rifle and jogging to higher ground
.

Five Afghanis coming for him, and when they moved through open sand, they had moved with the same herky-jerky movement as Scarlotti. The younger German had fired, but hit nothing, five times, bullets he couldn’t spare, and now they knew exactly where he was.

He returned to the helicopter, and wiped more blood on himself from his platoon mates, rubbing the sticky fluid onto his face, the rusty smell overpowering. He sat. He waited.

Not very long.

They were quiet, fast, securing the area. They inspected the helicopter. The German watched, eyes wide and dead, careful not to move his pupils. Using his peripheral vision, he braced for a bullet from their American-supplied weapons. That tight feeling, fear.

It was there in the helicopter, playing dead. He knew he wouldn’t be following anyone’s orders again.

Their voices rose with the belief that the shooter had fled. The German waited, not sure what to do, not sure where he was. One Afghani was going through the pockets of the pilot, gathering his weapons and throwing them to the soldiers outside
.

Then the radio crackled to life and the German turned toward the sound, and the young Afghani in the cockpit noticed. It was the last thing he would ever notice. The German’s bullet hit him in the left cheek, the ones outside, he hit in the chest.

There were two more, about twenty meters away. They panicked, opened fire on the helicopter. The German felt a stab of pain in his arm, just below his shoulder. But he remained calm. One never knew until the moment was upon them, if he could be cool under fire.

The German was cool. Carefully he lined up a shot and fired a burst at the closest soldier. He didn’t miss.

The last soldier continued the panic of gunfire as the German crawled into the cockpit, over twisted metal and shattered glass, reaching for the radio. English sounded so precise compared to the sing-song gibberish of these soldiers. “Hang in there,” the British officer told him. “We are en route.”

The German waited and observed the soldier firing at him. A pattern emerged and the German knew when the man would pop up and fire, and the German readied the .45 bullet to be waiting for him when he did.

He’d been lucky. Those men had been too young, too green. When the moment came, they had panicked, been sloppy.

He knew William Scarlotti was none of these things. He tried to shake it off but that was like shaking off smoke, the now familiar, unwelcome sensation of fear squeezing his chest.

The trick, Whitey thought, was to assume you were going to die. It freed up your mind to worry about other things. It was amazing what you could accomplish when you weren’t busy trying to save your life.

When you thought you were living your final moments, the world came into sharp focus. The details sang. This dim, quiet hallway would fit right into a Hitchcock film. The cigarette burns on the rug. The melody of street sounds, tires squealing, horns honking. You never knew what the last thing you were going to notice would be.

He gripped the pistol in his hand and tried the door to the apartment, the one the German had fired from. Unlocked. He pushed it open. It squealed on its hinges like something out of a
slasher
movie.

There was a woman slumped back in her chair in the kitchen, but Whitey didn’t think about her; he saw Karen, shot between the eyes, in a triangle house in Vermont, dead before she knew what hit her, dead because of him, because he couldn’t stay away. He might as well have pulled the trigger.

His heartbeat rang like a bell in his head. He felt heavy, like he was underwater, limbs moving through liquid.

Some sins you never stopped paying for.

Why was she holding a gun?

For half a second, he thought it was her ghost, come back from the dead to exact revenge. For half a second, he was ready to accept his punishment. Then instinct took over. He shot the corpse, right through her heart, and heard a man curse in German.

Whitey didn’t realize at first that he had been hit in his left arm, a glancing blow. He was too busy admiring his opponent. The German had put his arm though the sleeve of the woman’s sweater. She was on his lap. He seemed to hold her tenderly.

Then the pain in his arm made him suck in his breath. He found a towel to press on the wound.

“Almost.” He touched the dead man’s shoulder. “Almost.”