The Fire (32 page)

‘Again!’ cried Talleyrand in horror. Then he lowered his voice, though there was no one about to hear. ‘But it was
you
, Charlot, who first told the prophecy. “The Game will only begin again,” you said it had been foretold, “when the opposite is born from the ashes.” How can you still claim your sister is safe if it’s begun anew? You know that Charlotte’s birthday, October 4, is just opposite that of your mother’s – the Black Queen. Does that not mean, if a new Game should begin, that Charlotte would become the White Queen – just as we’ve all believed these many years?’

‘I was mistaken,’ said Charlot softly. ‘The Game has begun again. White has made the first move and an important Black piece has surfaced.’

‘But…’ muttered Talleyrand. ‘I don’t understand.’

As he saw Carême head back across the lawn, Talleyrand sank to his seat once more, looked up at Charlot, and added, ‘With the assistance of Antonin Carême inside those households and palaces, we’d collected nearly all of the pieces from Russia and Britain! My wife, Madame Grand, the White Queen, is decommissioned, her forces disbanded or dead! Mireille’s been in hiding for years, where no one can find her or the pieces. Yet you say it’s begun again? How could White make a move, and yet Charlotte still be safe? What important Black piece could the other team possibly possess that we haven’t captured?’

‘That is precisely what I’ve come here to discover from you and Carême,’ said Charlot, kneeling beside his father on
the grass. ‘But I know it’s true, for I have seen it myself. I’ve seen the new White Queen, just a slip of a girl, but with great power behind her. I’ve held in my hands the valuable chess piece the White Team has captured, and which she now possesses. That piece is the Black Queen of the Montglane Service.’

‘Impossible!’ cried Talleyrand. ‘That’s the piece that Antonin brought back with his own hands from Alexander of Russia! It belonged to the Abbess of Montglane herself. Alexander had promised to secure it for your mother, Mireille, long before he ever became tsar. And he kept that promise!’

‘I know,’ said Charlot. ‘I helped my mother hide it when it was first retrieved from Russia. But the one the White Team has seems to have been hidden longer. That’s what I’ve come hither to discover – in hopes that Carême might help us find a clue as to how there could possibly be
two
Black Queens.’

‘But if the Game has begun anew, as you say,’ said Talleyrand, ‘if the White Team has suddenly surfaced with this powerful piece and made their first move, why did they take you into their confidence? Why did they show it to
you
?’

‘Don’t you see, Father?’ said Charlot. ‘That’s what was wrong with my interpretation of the prophecy. The White Team
has
arisen from the ashes of its opposite. But not in the way I’d imagined. I couldn’t see it, for it involved me, myself.’

When Talleyrand still looked mystified, Charlot added, ‘Father, I am the new White King.’

Seminate aurum vestrum in terram albam foliatum. “
Sow your gold in the white foliated earth.” Alchemy (often called “Celestial Agriculture’) borrows numerous analogies from farming…the epigram…stresses the need to observe “as in a mirror” the lesson of the grain of wheat…the excellent treatise (Secretum) published in Leyden in 1599…compared the operations of wheat farming in detail to the operations of the alchemical Work.

– Stanislas Klossowski de Rola,
The Golden Game

We were out of time, according to Nim. The enemy – whoever he might be – now had the inside track. I’d placed my missing mother and the rest of us in danger. And all because I’d been a complete nitwit and ignored the warning signals, though they’d been flashing as brightly as semiphores on the tarmac, as Key would say.

And what about me? Here I was, for heaven’s sake, bursting into weeping jags – three of them, just in the past twelve hours – wiping away tears, letting my uncle kiss my head
and make it all well, and generally behaving as if I were twelve years old again.

When I’d actually
been
twelve, if memory served, I’d been better than this: a world-class child chess champion who’d seen her father murdered before her eyes and who’d managed to survive it and go on. What was wrong with me now? I couldn’t think my way out of the proverbial paper bag.

My current behavior could only be explained by one thing: that these past ten years of mixing Sage Livingston’s Miss Personality recipe in the Molotov-cocktail-shaker of Rodo Boujaron’s open-hearth bombast must have resulted in soft-ening whatever I’d once regarded as brains into pulp-stuffed banana fritters.

I had to snap out of it.

Metaphor, simile, and hyperbole be damned – along with the torpedoes, as Key also might say, ‘Full speed ahead.’

Nim and I kept up a steady stream of idle chitchat, background noise to deflect our snoopers, while he meticulously searched everything in my place. Including me. He had a little scanning wand, the size of a tiny wire whisk, and with it he gave the once-over to my clothes, china, linens, books, furnishings, and the chess set he’d pulled from my backpack, which he then set up on the living room table. I handed him the missing black queen I’d been carrying around in my pocket. After examining it, he set it in its place on the board as well.

He picked up my backpack and shoved some fresh clothes from the cupboard into it, and stuffed in that front section of the newspaper, too. Then he turned to me.

‘I think we’ve tidied your flat as much as we can for the moment,’ he said aloud. ‘Will that be all, before we head outdoors for our walk?’

I shook my head to indicate there was still something more. I handed him my ski parka, and with a significant look, I said aloud, ‘I should phone Rodo about tonight’s
schedule before you and I get too far afield. I do work for the guy, you know.’

Nim was feeling the back of the down-filled jacket, where the chess map was concealed. It was just slightly stiffer than the rest. He raised his brow.

I started to nod, then I got an idea. ‘In fact, it might be best if I phone Rodo from along our walk.’ I said. ‘He had a few errands. I can check with him from where we stop, to make sure that I’m getting everything he needs.’

‘Well, we’re off then,’ said Nim, as he held out the jacket for me to slip into. ‘Your carriage awaits, madame.’

Just before leaving, he plucked my dangerous cell phone from where we’d left it on the table, and he slipped it between the sofa cushions as if it had been accidentally dropped. Then he offered me his arm.

When I glanced down, I saw the Swiss Army knife in his palm. He handed it to me with a smile. ‘To more penetrating insights,’ he said, squeezing my coat meaningfully, as we went out the door.

When we reached M Street, the heart of Georgetown, the place was glutted with tourists, spilled over here from the Cherry Blossom Festival on the National Mall. Outside every restaurant there were lines of them queued up on the pavement, hungrily awaiting a table or a space at an oyster bar. We had to slalom out into the streets to get past them. The sidewalks of Georgetown provide enough of an obstacle course on their own, what with doggy droppings, slippery and smelly fruits from the famous ginkgo trees, inch-deep holes from missing sidewalk bricks, bicyclists dodging up onto the pavement to avoid the swerving taxis, and truckers double-parked just outside open metal basement doors, unloading their crates of vegetables and beer into the cellars.

But the tourists were the worst, always behaving as if they owned the city of Washington, D.C. Of course, whenever I
took the time to think about it, I realized that they actually
did
.

‘This place makes Manhattan itself seem quite calming,’ commented Nim, still protectively holding my backpack in one hand and my arm in the other as he eyed the profusion of chaos all around him. ‘But I’m taking you somewhere a bit more civilized right now, where we can continue our conversation and lay a plan.’

‘I was serious. I do have an errand to run,’ I told him. ‘It’s really urgent – and only a block or so from here.’

But Nim had his own observations about errands in need of running.

‘First things first,’ he said. ‘I do know when you’ve last eaten. But just when did you last
bathe
?’

Bathe? Was it that obvious? I tried not to sniff at myself right here on a public thoroughfare to try to find out. The truth was, I couldn’t remember, but surely not since before I’d left for Colorado, as I now realized.

Even so, I had a first of my own, something more urgent to attend to immediately, for it very well might not wait.

‘Why didn’t you mention this fastidiousness of yours when we were still at my apartment?’ I demanded. ‘I could have jumped in the shower there.’

‘Your flat?’ he snorted. ‘A campground has more amenities. Besides, it’s too dangerous to return. We can do your errand if it’s really important – but only if it’s en route to my hotel.’

‘Hotel?’ I said, staring up at him in astonishment.

‘Naturally,’ he said, amused. ‘I’ve been here days, as I said, hunting for you. Where did you expect me to stay – in your unprovisioned dwelling place? Or in some local park?’

In truth, I don’t know
what
I’d expected. But it was just as hard to imagine someone as secretive as Nim actually staying beneath the roof of a public house.

‘What hotel?’ I said.

‘You’ll like it,’ he assured me. ‘Quite a welcome change from that barren, eavesdropper-riddled flat of yours. And at least you’ll be clean. It boasts, among its other amenities, a competition-length lap pool and the finest Roman bath in the city, not to mention enough privacy that we may plan the next part of our campaign. It’s just at the end of this street, not far at all. The Four Seasons.’

Perhaps because I was descended from a line of self-proclaimed
philosophes –
masters of complexity theory like my uncle Slava, who’d always preferred the roundabout route to Truth – I myself had never bought into the idea that the first or the fastest answer to a problem was necessarily the right one; no Occam’s Razor girl,
moi.
But in my immediate case, speed seemed to be of the essence, just as in lightning chess, and the simplest solution seemed best. As we walked, I succinctly shared my plan with Nim, and he approved.

The Koppie Shoppe, with its phonetically spelled name that dated back to the 1960s, was located halfway down the next block of M Street. It was lodged between a dim sum diner and a tapas dive whose chief promotional technique was a giant fan that blew food fumes out into the street. Nim and I had to work our way through the queues of ravenously anticipatory tourists to reach our destination and get in the door.

The Shoppe sold office supplies in the front of the store and had a copy shop with printers in the back. It was the only place around town I knew of that had a machine large enough to scan a full front page of the
Washington Post,
not to mention an eighteenth-century chessboard drawing written in blood.

It was also, fortuitously, the only place I knew of whose copy department manager, Stuart, was a fan of leftovers from
a four-star Basque restaurant, and of the sous-chef who could smuggle them to him upon occasion – as well as of said sous-chef’s long-legged sidekick, who could out-Rollerblade him over the cobblestones of Prospect Street.

In Georgetown, as within any other insulated tribal community, outsiders were mistrusted and milked for whatever they were worth or left in the streets to starve, as with these ravenous tourists just outside. But among locals, who were understood to be men of honor, there was an unspoken system of barter and exchange called tit for tat. In Russia, my father had called it
blat
. Either way, it works out to reciprocity.

In my case, Stuart respected my confidentiality. He let me do my own private copying, usually stuff for Rodo, on the big machine when no one else was around. He also let me use the unisex employee bathroom, a big plus, given my improvised agenda for today.

I left Nim in the front of the store among the office supplies, to pick out the de rigueur cardboard mailing cylinders, tape, labels, and small stapler required for my plan, while I took the backpack, went back to the copy department, waved to Stuart who was running a big noisy print job, and then went into the powder room, where I locked the door.

I extracted the
Washington Post
from my backpack, spread the front pages on the floor, removed my parka, and – holding it upside-down, so as not to spill its feathery contents – used the miniature scissors from Nim’s Swiss Army knife to carefully pick loose the threads that Vartan Azov had stitched in.

It was nearly impossible to extract the chessboard without filling the place with down, but at last I managed to get the chessboard drawing cleaned off enough to slip, unfolded, between the first few pages of the
Post.
Rolling them up
together, I stuck them in the satchel. Then I swept the down feathers off the floor with damp toilet paper, as best I could, tossed the paper into the toilet, and flushed.

Step Number One completed.

The soft tap at the bathroom door, as prearranged, told me that Nim was prepared to take over his part: Step Number Two.

I opened the door. He stood outside with his bag of justpurchased office supplies. I exchanged my down jacket for the plastic bag, then exchanged places with him in the bathroom.

While he locked himself inside so he could staple the lining back into my jacket, I went back to the copy room with my stash. The racket of the job that was running there was deafening. I appreciated the noise, so I could concentrate on what I had to do and not have to chat.

Stuart, with gestures, set up the big machine and turned it over to me. I set the first page of the
Post
facedown on the platen and ran off four clean copies. Then I flipped to the page where I’d inserted the drawing of the chessboard. It stuck out a bit, a little wider than the newspaper page that was supposed to be concealing it, but my pal across the room seemed occupied with his print run.

I set the chess drawing facedown with the newsprint covering the top, and ran four copies of that, as well. Then, for good measure, I made four copies of the other page of the
Post
where the front-page articles had spilled over. When I was done, I sorted the large copied pages into four piles, with the chessboard tucked into the middle of each one. I yanked the cardboard cylinders from Nim’s plastic bag, quickly rolled each pile of papers tightly, and started fitting them, one at a time, into their cardboard mailing tubes.

Just then, the racket came to a sudden halt.

‘Drat! Paper jam,’ said Stuart. ‘Alex, come over here a sec
and hold this tray up for me, will you? This thing’s been jamming all day, and the repairman never showed up. I’ll have to stay myself tonight to clean it and find out what’s wrong.’

My heart was pounding. I didn’t want to stop with the job half done, but what could I do? I quickly rolled up all the papers, including the originals, and put them in the plastic bag. Then I went to help him unjam the other copying machine.

‘By the way,’ said Stuart, as I held up the heavy tray so he could pull loose the paper jam, ‘I’m not sure you need to do what you’re doing over there.’

‘What I’m doing?’ I said, as calmly as I could manage to force out.

How did
he
know what I was doing?

‘I mean,’ he said, struggling to extract the culprit, a shredded, ink-stained paper, from where it was trapped, then yanking it out, ‘if you’re copying that for your boss, Mr Boujaron, he’s already been in here earlier this morning with another fella. They had me run some copies of the same darned thing – yesterday’s front page, right? I don’t get it. I mean, the whole paper costs less than just a few of these full-size copies. What’s the attraction?’

Good God! My pulse shot up like a meteor as I struggled not to panic.

Not to mention – what exactly
was
the attraction? Was Rodo the one who’d had my house and my cell phone bugged? Had he heard our conversation about the
Post
? Who was his sidekick this morning? And why was he making copies of that front page?

I knew I had to say
something
to deflect Stuart’s curiosity. But I also needed to get out of here fast. Nim was waiting out front and he’d be wondering, in a sweat, what had happened to that ‘instant errand.’

‘I’m not sure myself what the attraction is. You know my boss,’ I told him as I helped slide the tray back in place. ‘For all I know, maybe Boujaron’s wallpapering a new room with yesterday’s headlines. But he sent me to make a few extra copies. Thanks so much for saving my neck!’

I slapped a ten-dollar bill on the counter on account, grabbed the plastic bag and my backpack, and blew Stuart a kiss on my way out the door.

Outside on the street, Nim took the backpack with a concerned expression.