The Fire (10 page)

We had fled outside onto the steps of the treasury, where my father had met his death.

Vartan was watching me closely now as I struggled to keep from betraying all those dark and long-repressed emotions that were, to my great regret, surfacing. But something still didn’t jibe.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ I told Vartan. ‘Why would someone want to kill my father just to prevent him from passing on dangerous information, when everyone seems to have known all about this rare chess piece and its history – including you?’

But no sooner had these words escaped than I knew the answer.

‘Because that chess piece must have meant something completely different to
him
than it did to anyone else,’ Vartan said with a flush of excitement. ‘Whatever your father recognized when he saw that piece, his reaction was surely not what those who were observing him had expected, or they would never have brought it to be displayed there at that game. Though they might not have guessed what your father had discovered, he had to be stopped before he could tell anyone else who might understand!’

The pieces and pawns certainly seemed to be massing at
center board. Vartan was on to something. But I still couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

‘Mother always believed that my father’s death was no accident,’ I admitted, leaving out the small detail that she’d also imagined that the bullet might have been intended for
me.
‘And she always believed that chess had something to do with it. But if you’re right, and my father’s death
is
somehow linked with Taras Petrossian’s, what would connect it all to that chess piece at Zagorsk?’

‘I don’t know – but something
must,
’ Vartan told me. ‘I still remember the expression on your father’s face that morning as he stared into the glass case at that chess piece – almost as if he didn’t hear a word I was saying. And when he turned away to go, he didn’t look at all like a man who was thinking about a chess game.’

‘What did he look like?’ I asked with urgency.

But Vartan was looking at me as if he were trying to make sense of it himself. ‘I’d say he looked frightened,’ he told me. ‘
More
than frightened. Terrified, though he quickly hid it from me.’

‘Terrified?’

What could possibly have frightened my father so much after only a few quick moments inside that treasury at Zagorsk? But with Vartan’s next words, I felt as if someone had plunged an icy blade into my heart:

‘I can’t explain it myself,’ Vartan admitted, ‘unless, for some reason, it might have meant something significant to your father that the chess piece in that glass case was the Black Queen.’

Vartan opened the doors and we reentered the octagon. I could hardly tell him what the Black Queen meant to
me.
I knew that if everything he’d just told me was true, then my mother’s disappearance might well be connected to the deaths
of both my father and Petrossian. We might all be in danger. But before I’d gone three paces, I stopped in my tracks. I’d been so riveted by Vartan’s private revelations that I’d completely forgotten about Lily and Key.

The two of them were down on the floor in front of the campaign desk with the empty desk drawer between them, as nearby Zsa-Zsa drooled on the Persian rug. Lily had been saying something privately to Key, but they both stood up as we came in; Lily was clutching what looked like a sharp steel nail file. I saw bits of splintered wood scattered here and there.

‘Time waits for no man,’ said Key. ‘While you two have been cloistered in there – taking each other’s confessions or whatever you were up to – look what we’ve found.’

She waved something in the air that looked like a piece of old, creased paper. As we approached, Lily regarded me with gravity. Her clear gray eyes seemed oddly veiled, almost like a warning.

‘You may look,’ she admonished me, ‘but please don’t touch. No more of your extravagant impulses around that fire. If what we’ve just discovered in that drawer is what I believe it may be, it is extremely rare, as your mother would surely attest if she were here. Indeed, I suspect this document may be the very reason she’s
not
here.’

Key carefully opened the brittle paper and held it up before us.

Vartan and I leaned forward for a better look. On closer observation, it seemed to be a piece of fabric – so old and soiled that it had stiffened with age like parchment – upon which an illustration had been drawn with a sort of rusty-red solution that had bled across the fabric in places, leaving dark stains, though the figures could still be made out. It was the drawing of a chessboard of sixty-four squares where each square had been filled with a different strange,
esoteric-looking symbol. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what it was supposed to mean.

But Lily was about to enlighten us all.

‘I don’t know how or when your mother may have obtained this drawing,’ she said, ‘but if my suspicions are correct, this cloth is the third and final piece of the puzzle that we were missing nearly thirty years ago.’

‘Piece of
what
puzzle?’ I asked, in extreme frustration.

‘Have you ever heard,’ said Lily, ‘of the Montglane Service?’

Lily had a story to tell us, she said. But in order to tell it before other guests might arrive, she begged me not to ask questions until she had told it all, without distractions or interruptions. And in order to do so, she informed us, she needed to sit upon something other than the floor or a rock wall – all that seemed available in our cluttered but chair-less lodge.

Key and Vartan trooped up and down the spiral stairs, collecting cushions, ottomans, and benches until Lily was now ensconced with Zsa-Zsa in a pile of plumpy pillows beside the fire, with Key perched on the piano bench and Vartan on a high library stool nearby, to listen.

Meanwhile, I’d set myself the task I did best: cooking. It always helped clear my mind and at least we’d have something for everyone to eat if others showed up as announced. Now I watched the copper kettle hanging low over the fire, the handfuls of freezedried vittles that I’d foraged from the food locker – shallots, celery, carrots, chanterelles, and beef cubes – as they plumped up in their broth of stock, strong red wine, splashes of Worcestershire, lemon juice, cognac, parsley, bay and thyme: Alexandra’s time-tested campfire
Boeuf Bourguignonne.

Letting it bubble away for a few hours as I stewed in my own juices, I reasoned, might be just the recipe I needed.
I confess, I felt I’d had enough shocks in one morning to last me at least until supper. But Lily’s confession was about to top that pile.

‘Nearly thirty years ago,’ Lily told me, ‘we all made a solemn vow to your mother that we would never again speak of the Game. But now, with this drawing, I know that I
must
tell the story. I think that’s what your mother intended, too,’ she added, ‘or she would never have hidden something so critically important here in that jammed desk drawer. And though I’ve no idea why she would dream of inviting all those others here today, she would never have invited anyone on such a significant a date as her birthday unless it had to do with the Game.’

‘The game?’ Vartan took the words from my mouth.

Although I was surprised to learn that Mother’s obsession about her birthday might have something to do with chess, I still figured that if it was thirty years ago, it couldn’t be the game that killed my father. Then something occurred to me.

‘Whatever this game was that you were sworn to secrecy about,’ I said to Lily, ‘is that why Mother always tried to keep me from playing chess?’

It wasn’t until this last that I recalled that no one outside of my immediate family had ever
known
that I’d been a serious chess champion, much less about our longtime family altercations over it. Key, despite a raised brow, tried not to look too surprised.

‘Alexandra,’ said Lily, ‘you’ve misunderstood your mother’s motives all these years. But it isn’t your fault. I’m extremely sorry to confess that all of us – Ladislaus Nim and I, even your father – agreed it was best to keep you in the dark. We truly believed that once we’d buried the pieces, once they were hidden where no one could find them, once the other team was destroyed, then the Game would be over and done with
for a very long time, perhaps forever. And by the time you were born, and we’d discovered your early passion and skill, so many years had passed that we all felt sure you would be safe to play chess. It was only your mother who knew differently, it seems.’

Lily paused and added softly, almost as if speaking to herself, ‘It was never the game of chess that Cat feared, but quite another Game: a Game that destroyed my family and may have killed your father – the most dangerous Game imaginable.’

‘But what Game was it?’ I said. ‘And what kind of pieces did you bury?’

‘An ancient Game,’ Lily told me, ‘a Game that was based upon a rare and valuable bejeweled Mesopotamian chess set that once belonged to Charlemagne. It was believed to contain dangerous powers and to be possessed of a curse.’

Vartan, just beside me, had firmly grasped my elbow. I felt that familiar jolt of recognition, something triggered in the recesses of my mind. But Lily hadn’t finished.

‘The pieces and board were buried for a thousand years within a fortress in the Pyrenees,’ she went on, ‘a fortress that later became Montglane Abbey. Then during the French Revolution the chess set – by then called the Montglane Service – was dug up by the nuns and scattered for safekeeping. It disappeared for nearly two hundred years. Many sought to find it, for it was believed that whenever these pieces were reassembled the Service would unleash an uncon-trollable power into the world like a force of nature, a force that could determine the very rise and fall of civilizations.

‘But in the end,’ she said, ‘much of the Service
was
reassembled: twenty-six pieces and pawns from the initial thirty-two, along with a jewel-embroidered cloth that had originally covered the board. Only six pieces and the board itself were missing.’

Lily paused to regard each of us in turn, her gray eyes resting at last upon me.

‘The person who finally succeeded, after two hundred years, in this daunting task of reassembling the Montglane Service and defeating the opposing team was also the individual responsible for its reinterment, thirty years ago, when we thought the Game had ended: your mother.’

‘My mother?’ It was all I could muster.

Lily nodded. ‘Cat’s disappearance today can mean only one thing. I suspected it when I first heard her telephone message inviting me here. It now appears that this was only the first step in drawing us all out on center board like this. Now I fear that my suspicions were right: The Game has begun anew.’

‘But if this Game ever really existed, if it was so dangerous,’ I protested, ‘why would she risk setting it in motion again, as you’re saying, by inviting us here?’

‘She had no choice,’ said Lily. ‘As in all chess games, it’s White that must have made the first move. Black can only counter. Perhaps her move would be the sudden appearance of the long-sought third part of the puzzle that your mother has left here for us to find. Perhaps we’ll discover some different clues to her strategy and tactics—’

‘But Mother’s never played chess in her life! She hates chess,’ I pointed out.

‘Alexandra,’ said Lily, ‘today – Cat’s birthday, the fourth day of the fourth month – is a critical date in the history of the Game. Your mother is the Black Queen.’

Lily’s tale began with a chess tourney she’d attended with my mother thirty years ago, the first time she and my mother had met my father, Alexander Solarin. During a recess in that match, my father’s opponent had died under mysterious circumstances, which later proved to be murder. This seemingly
isolated event, this death at a chess game, would be the first in an onslaught that would soon sweep Lily and my mother into the vortex of the Game.

For several hours, as we three sat in silence, Lily recounted a long and complex story that I can only summarize here.

The Grandmaster’s Tale

One month after that tourney at the Metropolitan Club, Cat Velis departed New York upon a long-planned consulting assignment in North Africa for her firm. A few months later Mordecai, my grandfather and chess coach, sent me to Algiers to join her.

Cat and I knew nothing of this most dangerous of all games in which we ourselves, as we soon discovered, were mere pawns. But Mordecai had long been a player. He knew that Cat had been chosen for a higher calling and that when it came to close maneuvers, she might need my help.

In the Casbah of Algiers, Cat and I met with a mysterious recluse, the widow of the former Dutch consul to Algeria, and a friend of my grandfather, Minnie Renselaas. The Black Queen. She gave us a diary written by a nun during the French Revolution that recounted the history of the Montglane Service and the role that this nun, Mireille, had played in it. Mireille’s diary later proved vital to understanding the nature of the Game.

Minnie Renselaas enlisted Cat and me to penetrate deep into the desert, to the Tassili Mountains, and retrieve eight of the pieces she’d buried there. We braved Saharan sand-storms and pursuit by the secret police, as well as a vicious opponent, the ‘Old Man of the Mountain,’ an Arab named El-Marad who, we soon discovered, was the White King. But at last we found Minnie’s pieces hidden in a cave in the Tassili protected by bats. We clawed in the rubble to extract the eight pieces.

I shall never forget the moment when I first saw their mysterious glow: a King and a Queen, several pawns, a Knight, and a camel, all of a strange gold or a silvery material, and caked with uncut jewels in a rainbow of colors. There was something otherworldly about them.

After many travails, at last we returned with the pieces. We reached a port not far from Algiers, only to be seized by the same dark forces still pursuing us. El-Marad and his thugs kidnapped me, but your mother brought reinforcements to my rescue; she struck El-Marad on the head with her heavy satchel of chess pieces. We escaped and brought the bag of pieces to Minnie Renselaas in the Casbah. But our adventure was far from over.