Grandmaster (7 page)

It had been a match between children, a meeting of two lonely, gifted ten-year-old boys who had drawn themselves into the magic of a strange game where kingdoms were lost and won in the turn of a thought. Alexander Zharkov had played against Justin Gilead then, in the sight of chess masters from all over Europe and the Soviet Union.

Young Alyosha had burned with shame when his father strapped a radio receiver to his forearm before the match. He explained that the American boy, Gilead, was probably the finest child chess player in the world and that Zharkov could not leave the game to chance.

"I play well, too, father," Alyosha had protested, but the receiver remained.

During the match, the Russian grandmasters conferred on each of Alyosha's moves. His instructions were broadcast to him through minute electric shocks on the flesh of the Russian boy's arm. The first set of signals named the piece to move; the second told him which square to occupy. He clenched his teeth to hold back his tears during the sham match. He wanted to play Gilead alone, to match his mind to his opponent's. As it was, Alyosha was little more than a robot mechanically moving pieces on a board. He looked across at the young American with the raven black hair, grateful that Gilead's head was always down, over the board, studying the pieces and the positions.

Alyosha read the signal on his forearm and made another move. For the first time, Justin Gilead looked up, revealing a pair of eyes of the most extraordinary electric blue Zharkov had ever seen. They were old eyes, wise and pained, locked strangely into a child's face and body. Gilead moved a knight and said softly, "Check. Mate in five."

Stunned, Alyosha turned and looked across the room to where the delegation of Russian chess masters were following the moves on a portable chessboard. His father's face was flushed with anger. Alyosha knew there would be no more instructions, no more radio signals.

He resigned. As the two boys stood up to shake hands, Gilead whispered, "Do you speak English?"

"A little," Alyosha said numbly.

"I hope someday I can play against you, and not those men back there." He nodded toward the rear of the room.

"Oh..." Alyosha wanted to die of shame.

"Your sleeve," Gilead said.

Zharkov looked at his shirt cuff, where a small wire looped close to the fabric. "You knew."

"It's all right," Gilead said. "Another day. Another place. We will play a real game."

After the match, Justin was surrounded by press photographers and reporters, eager for a story on the young chess genius. He never mentioned Alyosha's radio receiver.

There had not been a rematch. Zharkov was permitted to continue his chess career until he began his military service. He followed his father to Nichevo meetings, said nothing, and listened. Justin Gilead disappeared off the face of the earth that very week.

Zharkov saw Gilead only twice during the twenty-five years that followed.

On both occasions, Zharkov had killed him. On both occasions, the Grandmaster had returned.

The second time had been four years ago in Poland. Gilead had survived and escaped, but then had vanished once again. The Americans did not know where he was, in fact believed him dead, and even Zharkov's far-flung network of spies had not been able to find a trace of him. The Russian eventually had come to believe that Justin Gilead had died of his wounds.

Died. The way a human being would have.

And now the medallion had surfaced, and while Ostrakov did not know what it meant, Alexander Zharkov did. He knew it as surely as he knew the sun would rise in the morning. He had feared it for years.

Justin Gilead—the Grandmaster—was alive.

Unconsciously, Zharkov's hands lifted to the high Russian military collar he wore.

Justin Gilead. The hunter. The hunted. Their destinies were as entwined as their pasts, and Zharkov knew he could never leave Gilead's death to others. That task, he knew, had been assigned to him and him alone since the moment of his birth.

He tore open the collar. Beneath it, burned into his flesh and scarred into ugly permanence, was the mark of the coiled snake.

BOOK TWO

 

 

The Wearer of the Blue Hat

 

 

J
ustin Gilead learned early about death.
His mother, a stage actress of remarkable beauty, died before Justin was three years old. His father, a novelist known worldwide by the single name Leviathan, which graced a stream of flashy if embarrassingly illiterate best-sellers, decided during his wife's funeral that the care of a preschool infant would hinder mightily the extensive research in the bars and bordellos of Europe necessary to produce his masterpieces.

As a result, Justin was raised in different cities around the United States by a succession of faceless aunts and uncles and chance associates of his father's who welcomed Leviathan's fat checks in return for sheltering and feeding a small boy who spoke little, had few friends, and amused himself by playing solitary games of chess during the lonely evenings of his childhood. One uncle encouraged him, and soon Justin was playing in, and winning, tournaments. When he was nine, he finished second in the United States junior chess championships.

Donald Gilead learned of his son's ability at the chessboard only when the invitation for Justin to participate in the French tournament reached him while he was in Paris arguing with a whore over the price of an evening. Thinking of the good publicity the boy's victory could generate for Leviathan's book, the elder Gilead had Justin flown over alone like so much baggage.

After Justin's triumphant match with the young Russian prodigy, the boy accompanied his father into the dim bars and illegal gambling houses in the seedy side streets of Courbevoie, where Donald Gilead found comfort. They did not speak much to each other. Gilead had all but forgotten the presence of the quiet boy. Justin, too, kept to his own thoughts. They were of robes.

Yellow robes. The back of the chess hall had been full of small, dark men in yellow robes, watching, concentrating. But their focus was not on the game. He, Justin Gilead, had been the object of their attention. He could feel them; their thoughts were almost palpable to him. And in words that were not words, the men in the yellow robes had said,
Come. You are of us. The man is not your father. This is not your home. We have come to take you home.

At first he had found the intense stares of the small men to be distracting, but whatever energy—that was the only word he could think of for their strange communication through distance, their language without words—they sent to him shortly had the reverse effect. It concentrated his vision. It tightened his ranging mind until there was nothing for him to see or question or understand except the chess pieces in front of him, the knights and bishops and pawns that moved to his direction. For the length of that extraordinary match with the Russian boy who had not been permitted to control his own pieces, Justin Gilead did not merely play the game. He
was
the game.

He wished he could talk to someone about the group of men in their yellow robes and the unearthly feeling of power they had sent to him during the match. Slowly he looked around the bar. His father, shirt unbuttoned down to the belly, was fondling the breasts of a dirty-looking blond woman to the encouragement of other bleary-eyed patrons.

No, there was no one who would understand about the men in the yellow robes. Justin looked the other way and tried to stay awake. At the far end of the bar, a dark man with a sharp nose and thinning hair sat silently, watching Justin's father and the blond woman.

His father shouted something, and the woman shouted back, spewing out a stream of gutter French. Justin turned in time to see his father reel back drunkenly, then smash his fist into the woman's face. She screamed. A small explosion of blood sprayed from her nose.

Swiftly, his face blank, the dark man at the end of the bar rose. As he walked toward Justin's father, who had collapsed across the bar, he reached into the short cloth jacket he wore and popped open a knife with a six-inch-long blade.

All conversation stopped. The only sound in the bar was the rhythmic chant of a frothy French jazz tune. The bar patrons quickly slinked off their stools and away like unseeing worms. The barman stood stock-still as if to convince the man with the knife of his discretion. The man with the knife jerked his head toward the door.

Donald Gilead, his hands held shakily above his head, staggered wildly toward the exit, the man and the blond woman behind him.

Justin was frozen. He stood up on rubber legs and looked around the bar frantically, searching for someone who would help, but no one paid any attention to the boy. Running, he made his way out the door in time to see the dark man jab the blade into his father's bloated, exposed belly. Donald Gilead stared ahead stupidly for a moment, shuffling on his feet, then crashed backward into the slime of the stone-paved street.

The boy stared at the scene, breathing shallowly, watching his father's open eyes glaze over like those of some huge felled beast. A trickle of filthy water from the street formed a black pool around the dead man's face and mixed with the thread of blood oozing from between his lips. A wave of shock and revulsion rippled up through Justin's insides. For a moment, the man lying dead in the street looked no more human than the carcass of a slaughtered bull.

He looked up uncomprehendingly at the two figures standing over the body, the blond woman with her nose blackened comically with smeared blood, and the dark man holding the switchblade. By the harsh blue-white light of the street lamp, the knife glinted like a moving, living thing as the man walked slowly toward Justin, his breathing audible in the quiet night.

Justin backed away. Slowly at first, his hands shielding his face like a childish mask, he watched the silver gleam of the blade alternately disappear into shadow and shine brightly under the light as the dark man came closer, faster, toward him. His head bumped against the rough surface of a wall. The bump sent one message shooting through his body, and that was that this man, this stranger, was going to kill him.

He ran. Through the street, past heaps of rotting garbage and half-open back doorways reeking of liquor and stale smoke he ran, panting, not daring to look back, trying to keep his footing on the slippery stones of the pavement.

Two men walked out of one of the dingy bars along the street. Justin scurried up to them, clutching one of the men by the leg of his trousers.

"Stop him!" he yelled, pointing. "He's got a knife. He killed my father, and he's going to kill me, too."

Shrugging profusely, the man said something in French that was meant, Justin guessed, to sound comforting. Justin kept pointing, trying to indicate through his gestures that someone was after him. The two men looked at each other, then took a few steps down the street. The running footsteps had stopped. The dark man was gone. There was no one in view except a man and a woman, strolling arm in arm at a leisurely pace.

The Frenchman with Justin gestured to the couple and spoke something that sounded like a question.

"No," Justin said, relief flooding through him.

Then, as the couple passed beneath the street lamp, Justin recognized the blond woman. And beside her, the man with the knife, now hidden from view.

The woman smiled and called a name, holding out her arms.

"Ah," the Frenchman said, lifting Justin off the ground. He laughed and called something to the dark man and the blonde as he offered Justin to them.

Justin screamed, kicking the Frenchman in his side. "Put me down!"

The Frenchman dropped him with a curse and shouted at the couple. They paid him no attention. They were running after the boy.

The two sets of footsteps dropped off to one. The dark man was alone again. The winding street grew darker. Several of the street lamps had been smashed, and the seedy bars had given way to abandoned buildings and vacant lots. There was no one here, and Justin's limbs were trembling from the long exertion.

Still the footsteps came.

Justin forced himself to keep running, searching for a wider cross street, where he could lose himself, find a taxi, a policeman... No. He had learned his lesson with the Frenchman. Anyone he stopped would smile and shrug, not comprehending his pleas for help. And then turn him over to the dark man with the shiny knife. There was nowhere for him to go but straight into the darkness, running as long as he could, until the dark man caught him, until...

His legs buckled. With a groan, Justin hit the pavement on his knees and slapped forward, skinning his face. He heard his breath whistling out of him. He closed his eyes. He couldn't run anymore.

Farther.

He looked up. There was no one. Only the silent night broken by the sound of the dark man's footsteps, walking now.

Farther.

It was not a word, exactly, but a command nonetheless, some unspoken will that was drawing him up, pushing him forward.

The chess pieces, think only of the chess pieces.

He propelled himself ahead, his knees hurting, the bits of gravel embedded in his cheek beginning to sting.

1 am the game.

The silent force was stronger. It pulled him, enveloped him like strange music growing louder. It was all around him, along with the scent of almonds and lush flowers. It was overpowering, an eerie chorus of voices calling to him, leading him to them.

He picked up speed, traveling as fast as he could, his lungs bursting, his body wracked. He wished it were all a dream, and that he would awake in Aunt Jane's house or Uncle Sid's apartment and he would be safe in Houston or Cincinnati or in any of the other places he'd been instructed to call home. But he knew it was no dream. The street was real, the footsteps behind him were real, the knife the dark man carried was real.

Still, something peculiar was happening to him, something like a dream. The music, the flowers, the scent of almonds: Peculiar yet somehow . . . familiar.