The Fire (38 page)

The Russian Empire had begun to stake its sweeping claim.

Catherine planned that this domain would be ruled by her grandson, Alexander, whom she’d named after the great conqueror of the East.

From the first Russo-Turkish War in 1768, Catherine would secure an important concession – the first toe across the threshold of the great Ottoman Empire: the right under treaty, if a cause should arise, for Russia to protect Christian subjects of the Porte.

Shortly thereafter, in secrecy, Catherine’s new favorite, Grigori Potemkin, assisted her in drafting a plan that was breathtaking in scope. They called it the ‘Greek Project.’ It was nothing short of the restoration of the entire Byzantine Empire, as it was prior to its conquests by Islam. This would be ruled by Catherine’s other grandson, whom she had
named after the original founder of the Eastern church: Constantine.

To execute this plan, Potemkin established a military unit of two hundred Greek students, the ‘Company of Foreign Believers,’ to be trained in Russian military technology and expertise, in preparation for a return to their homeland where they would help spearhead the effort to liberate Greece from Turkish rule. This group represented the birth seed of the Etairia ton Philikon, the Society for Greek Independence which would become so instrumental in everything we do here today.

With her strategy in hand, and some passed pawns planted behind enemy lines, now Catherine’s pieces were all in position for a major coup. Or so she believed.

The second Russo-Turkish War, begun in 1787, only two years before the French Revolution, proved even more successful than the first: Potemkin, as commander in chief, secured Russian domination over most of the Black Sea and captured the great Turkish fort, Ismail.

Catherine was about to launch the full ‘Greek Project,’ to dismember the Turkish Empire and take Constantinople, when Potemkin – not only Catherine’s commander in chief and brilliant political strategist, but some said also her secret husband – while returning from treaty signing, was suddenly seized by a mysterious fever. He died, like a dog, alongside the road to Nikolaiev, in Bessarabia, just north of the Black Sea.

The court at St Petersburg was in mourning at the news and Catherine was bereft with grief. Her lofty aspirations and all her complex plans seemed to be indefinitely on hold – relegated to the grave along with the mastermind who’d not only helped to conceive them, but had also executed them.

But just at that moment, an old friend from France arrived
at the Winter Palace, a friend named Helène de Roque, the Abbess of Montglane. With her, she brought an important piece of the Montglane Service – the chess set that had once belonged to Charlemagne – perhaps the most powerful piece: the Black Queen.

This inspired in Catherine the Great, empress of all the Russias, the hope that perhaps all her efforts and the anticipated fruits of her ‘Project’ might not be lost after all.

Catherine secured this one chess piece, while keeping a watchful eye on her friend the abbess in an attempt to discover where the other pieces of the service might be found. More than a year would pass before Catherine’s son Paul – who loathed her – overheard a conversation between the abbess and his mother, disclosing that the empress Catherine planned to disinherit Paul in favor of his son, Alexander. But when the empress realized that Paul had also learned of the existence of the valuable chess piece hidden in her private vault at the Hermitage, she resolved to take immediate action.

Unbeknownst to anyone, the empress, suspicious of her son Paul’s intentions, secretly arranged for the master goldsmith Iakov Frolov – who had made her a perfect copy of the Kazan Black Virgin more than twenty years earlier – to create an equally undetectable copy of the Black Queen.

In desperation, Catherine secretly smuggled the genuine chess piece, through her ‘Company of Foreign Believers,’ to the Greek underground. She placed the ‘perfect’ copy in her vault at the Hermitage, where it remained until her death three years later – when Paul found and destroyed his mother’s will and became tsar of Russia.

Then he held in his hands, at last, what he believed to be the one thing his mother had always craved most.

But one person knew all.

When Catherine the Great died, and the new tsar Paul found the Queen tucked away in her vault, believing it to
be the original, he showed this piece to the Abbess of Montglane just before the State funeral for his mother, in an attempt to elicit, by threats or by force, the abbess’s cooperation in finding the others. He showed enough of his hand to convince the abbess that, regardless of what she said or did, she’d be cast into prison. In response, the abbess held out her hand for the chess piece: ‘That belongs to me,’ she told Paul.

He refused to hand it to her, but she could see, even from this distance, that something was strange. This appeared in every way to be the same heavy gold carving, caked with uncut gemstones, round and carefully polished like robins’ eggs. Indeed, in all respects it was identical to the other: It portrayed a figure dressed in long robes and seated in a small pavilion with draperies drawn back.

But there was just one thing missing.

The Church boasted many stones like these, from Charlemagne’s day and earlier, which were not cut with facets, but were polished by hand to the shape of these, or tumbled with fine-grain silicon as pebbles are refined in the sea, leaving a surface of glass that served to enhance either the natural iridescence or the asterism, the inner star of the gem. Throughout the Bible, such stones were described, along with their hidden meanings.

It was because of this that the abbess could substantiate at a glance that this piece was not the same Black Queen that she herself had brought into Russia from France, more than five years ago.

For, in fear that something like this might happen, the abbess had placed her own secret mark on the original, a mark that no one would ever detect but herself. Using the faceted diamond from her abbatial ring, she’d made a small scratch in the shape of a figure eight upon the cabochon fire-ruby just at the base of the pavilion.

A mark that was no longer there!

There was only one way this could be. The tsarina Catherine had somehow created a perfect copy of the Black Queen for the vault, and had somehow disposed of the real one. It was safe from Paul’s hands, at least.

The abbess had but one chance. At the empress’s funeral, she must pass an encrypted letter to someone in the outside world – through Plato Zubov, the empress’s last amour, who, as Paul had just notified her, would soon be sent into exile.

It was her only hope to save the Black Queen.

When Byron had finished this tale, he lay back against the pillows – his skin even whiter than before, due to the lack of blood – and he closed his eyes. It was clear that his energy – what small bit he might have marshaled at the beginning – had completely drained from him. But Haidée knew that time was of the essence.

She reached out to Kauri, who set the water pipe into her hand, along with a small balance with a new measure of shredded tobacco. She lifted the lid and scooped the tobacco onto the coals. When the smoke rose into the pipe, she wafted some of the fumes back to her father.

Byron coughed slightly and opened his eyes. He looked upon his daughter with enormous love and sorrow.

‘Father,’ she said, ‘I must ask you, how did this information ever reach Ali Pasha, my mother, and the Baba Shemimi, for them to tell you the tale?’

‘It reached someone else,’ said Byron, his voice still reduced to a whisper. ‘It was the person who invited us all to gather in Rome.

‘The next winter after Catherine the Great’s death, the war still raged in Europe. The Treaty of Campo Formio was signed, granting France the Ionian islands and several towns along the Albanian coast. Tsar Paul and the British had signed
a treaty with the sultan at Constantinople, betraying all that his mother, the empress Catherine, had once promised to Greece.

‘Ali Pasha joined forces with France against this nefarious triumvirate. But Ali himself was resolved to play both of these ends against the middle. For by now, he had learned – through Letizia and her friend Shahin – that he held the true Black Queen.’

‘And what of the Black Queen herself?’ asked Haidée, setting aside the water pipe, though in her preoccupation, she still held the small copper balance. ‘If Kauri and I are to protect her, in whose service must she be placed amid all these betrayals?’

‘In the service of Lady Justice,’ said Byron, with a faint, understanding smile directed toward Kauri.

‘Lady Justice?’ asked Haidée.

‘You are standing closest to her yourself,’ said her father. ‘It is she who now holds the Balance in her hands.’

flame
…flamma,
flame, blaze, blazing fire, orig.
flagma
√*
flag in flagrare,
burn, blaze: see flagrant

flagrant
…√*
flag=Gr.
, burn=Skt. √
bhraj,
shine brightly…1. Burning, blazing; hence, shining; glorious

–
The Century Dictionary

Vartan was looking unexpectedly spectacular, for someone who was a world-class, card-carrying, professional chess nerd.

I couldn’t help but recall Key’s first comments about him, back in Colorado, as he now crossed the meadow to greet us, the breezes tossing his curls. He was sporting a striped sweater of bright spring colors, sky blue and electric yellow – quite startling here in the wildflower meadow. It almost made me forget for an instant that I was being chased by every dangerous fool on the planet except my aunt Fanny.

I wondered whether Vartan had gotten decked out in this costume just for me.

He came up and greeted Red Cedar and Tobacco Pouch,
who had a few private words with Key. Then they shook hands all around and departed by the way we’d come.

Vartan laughed when he noticed I was studying his remarkable sweater. ‘I’d hoped you would like my pullover,’ he said, as we started back with Key toward wherever he’d left the car. She walked briskly ahead of us. ‘I had it made specially. It’s the flag of Ukraine. The colors are quite beautiful, I think, but also symbolic.

‘The blue is for the sky and the yellow is for grain fields. Grain is everything to us; it carries deep emotional roots. It’s often hard to remember that before Stalin created those famines from his enforced collective farming, which killed millions, Kiev had been called the Mother of Russia and that Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe. There is a wonderful song about America I’ve heard, which speaks of these same elements of sky and golden meadows of wheat: “
Oh skies so beautiful, with amber fields of waving grain – ”
’ he tried to sing.

‘Yep, we’ve heard that one
,
’ I said. ‘And if Key here had ever had any clout with her illustrious family, she would have made
that
our national anthem – not the barroom ballad about rockets and bombs by her Sir Francis Scott Namesake.’

‘Oh, it’s just the same,’ said Vartan as we three continued across the meadow, Key still in the lead. ‘
Our
national anthem is not so very optimistic either: “Ukraine Has Not Yet Died.”’ Then he added, ‘But I want you to look at something else, which I have had sewn onto the back of my pullover.’

He turned as he walked, to display the embroidered crest stitched on the reverse, also bright yellow and blue, with a sculptured, three-pronged fork in the middle that looked rather Gothic. ‘The arms of Ukraine,’ Vartan said. ‘The crest is of Volodimir, our patron saint, but the trident goes back to before Roman times. Actually, the first one like this was carried by the Indian fire god, Agni. It means rising from the ashes, the eternal flame, “We have not died” and all that—’

‘May I point out,’ said Key over her shoulder, ‘that if we don’t get this show on the road, PDQ, we might soon be
expecting
to die?’

‘I only spoke of it because it’s why I wore the pullover. Because of where we are going right now,’ Vartan said.

Key had shot him a scathing look. Now she picked up her pace, and Vartan did likewise.

‘Whoa,’ I said, racing to catch up. ‘You’re
not
suggesting that we’re going anyplace like the Ukraine?’ I wasn’t even sure I knew exactly where that was!

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Key snapped at me over her shoulder.

Her assurance provided me little comfort since, for Key, an average day’s outing might involve scaling the side of a glacier with her fingernails. With her in charge, as she seemed to be now, we might be headed almost anywhere. And at this point – having already been waylaid or kidnapped two or three times since breakfast –
nothing
would surprise me.

‘No, don’t worry,’ said Vartan, taking my arm when, a little breathlessly, I finally caught up to them. ‘I’m not even certain myself about our exact destination.’

‘Then why did you say “Where we’re going”?’ I asked.

‘We’ll all find out soon enough,’ Key snapped again. ‘But whether or not we’re all going there flying the Ukrainian flag on our chests is a different matter.’

‘In fact, I really wore this shirt just for you,’ Vartan told me, ignoring her obvious irritation. ‘I thought you would like it, because you are part Ukrainian.’

What was
that
supposed to mean?

‘Kryms’kyy – the Crimea, where your father was born – you know it’s part of Ukraine. But there – here is our car at last.’

Ours was the only car in the graveled dirt parking area, an inconspicuous gray sedan. When we reached it, Key held out her palm wordlessly and Vartan handed her the key.
She opened the rear door for him. When he slid into the backseat, I noted a couple of duffel bags already tucked in there. I got in front on the passenger side, and we hit the road, with Key driving.

These back roads out of the park were dusty and winding; they kept forking in different directions, sometimes with no signs to mark the forks.

Key was taking the blind corners pretty quickly and I started to get more than nervous, hoping she knew where she was going.

But I did know one thing for sure: Right at this moment she was more than miffed.

But what for? Girlish jealousy over Vartan’s attentions to me would seem more in keeping with Sage’s provenance.

Besides, Vartan Azov, for all his undeniable appeal, definitely wasn’t Key’s type, as I should know better than anyone. His brains were more of the interior, analytical variety, while Key required someone more connected with the biosphere. Key’s idea of an acceptable male was one who could distinguish a sérac from a moraine at a hundred paces, who could tie half a dozen kinds of knots within seconds – in the frozen dark, while wearing mittens – and who traveled nowhere without an extensive selection of pitons, crampons, and carabiners.

So what was this all about? The grim jawline, the tension behind the wheel? I could see that Key was working herself into a silent snit. But with Vartan tucked into the backseat, able to overhear everything that was said in the front, I had to prod my gray cells, trying to come up with a
maxim de communiqué
that he wouldn’t understand.

As usual, Key beat me to it.

‘Two heads are better than one,’ she muttered from the side of her mouth. ‘On the other hand, three’s definitely a crowd.’

‘I thought your motto had always been “The more, the merrier.”’

‘Not today,’ she said.

After all, Key had had Vartan come all this way through the boondocks to pick us up. Did this mean she now wanted to ditch him?

But looking around at the bleak, deserted landscape, the copses of empty woodland with not one phone line or filling station, I wondered where it might even be possible to set down an unwanted Russian grandmaster who’d proven de trop.

Key pulled off the road into a copse of trees, switched off the engine, and turned to the backseat.

‘Where are they?’ she demanded of Vartan.

I’m sure my expression revealed as much confusion as did his.

‘Where are they watching us from?’ she asked, more fiercely. Then she added, ‘Buster, please don’t jerk my chain by playing the ignorant emigré. You must know that I make my
living
by floating in air.’

Then Key turned to me.

‘Okay, let’s just replay this scenario, shall we?’ she suggested with complete disgust, ticking off each burst of her fury on a separate outstretched finger. ‘You and I escape from D.C., just one step ahead of the snapping jaws of guys who – as you inform me – are employed by the Secret Service! We dress in camouflage and get landed in a place that no one else can possibly reach! We go through a swamp and a forest that have been swept clean of observers by the Piscataway elders! We arrange a pickup car via a route that no one can possibly have foreknowledge of! Are we tracking so far?’

She turned to Vartan and poked his chest with her index finger. ‘Then
this
guy shows up and crosses the open tundra
for half a mile, dressed in neon lights like he’s trying to get attention in the late-night chorus at the Copa Cabaña!’

She repeated, ‘Where were they? A plane? A glider? A balloon?’

‘You believe I wore this sweater to attract someone’s attention?’ said Vartan.

‘Try another reason on me,’ she suggested, folding her arms. ‘And it had better be good. It’s at least five miles to the nearest taxi stand, bub.’

Vartan stared at her for a moment as if he were tonguetied. He seemed slightly flushed but Key wasn’t budging. Finally, he fixed her with an awkward smile.

‘I admit it,’ he said. ‘I did it to draw attention.’

‘So where are they?’ she said again.

Vartan pointed at me. ‘Right there,’ he said.

Once we’d clocked in to the idea of what he was saying, he added, ‘I’m very sorry. I thought I explained, I wanted to make some connection for Alexandra about her father and our homeland. I didn’t understand about this – camouflage thing. I realize now that it’s just like a smothered mate. But I would never wish to place you or Alexandra in any danger. Please believe me.’

Key shut her eyes and shook her head, as if she simply
couldn’t
believe this complete simpleton.

When she opened them again, Vartan Azov was sitting there in the backseat, topless.

‘If we have so many failures of understanding, and so early on,’ Vartan was saying, as Key drove on – and after we’d gotten him to put on another sweater to replace the colorful one he’d peeled off – ‘it seems that this is going to make the rest of our difficulties even more difficult than they already were to begin with.’

Well said and true. But there was one difficulty that
I
certainly wasn’t going to have trouble with any longer: That was the difficulty of trying to imagine Vartan Azov with his shirt off.

I knew what this was. It was called the Drunkard’s Curse – being told, when you’re well into your cups, that you must try
not
to imagine a purple elephant. Even though you’ve never seen a purple elephant in your life, you’ll never be able to drive the imaginary bugger from your brain.

But as a chess player, I was a master of memory and perception. And I knew that once you’ve actually
seen
something, as opposed to imagining it – like the two-second flash of a midgame chess position, or the twelve-second one of Vartan Azov’s pectorals – then there the image will remain, deposited for eternity in your mental vault. Once seen, it’s ineradicable, and try as you may you can never blot it out.

I wanted to kick myself for being a horse’s behind.

This Azov fellow: One week ago I wanted to beat him, or beat him up, or destroy him – a healthy, aggressive stance that’s saved many a chess player from ruin. But I knew that whatever was between him and me was going to be more than just a duel to the death.

I knew Vartan had been right, back in Colorado, when he’d said that there were too many coincidences in our two lives and that we ought to join forces. But was it really coincidence? After all, if Key was right, it had been my mother who’d gone through all that ’loop-de-loop’ in the first place, to put him and me together.

I was standing here at the brink of an abyss, not knowing whom I could trust – my mother, my uncle, my boss, my aunt, even my best friend. Then why should I, or would I, ever trust Vartan Azov?

But I did.

I knew now that Vartan Azov was flesh and blood. And not just because he’d failed to keep his sweater on.

He wanted something from me, something that I’d seen or something I knew, perhaps without even yet realizing, myself, that I knew it. That’s why all the chat about Ukraine and colors and symbols and amber waves of grain –

And then, all at once, I
did
know. It all fit together completely.

I turned over my shoulder to where Vartan sat in the backseat. He was looking at me with those fathomless dark purple eyes with the flame ignited at their depths.

And all at once, I knew that he knew exactly what
I
knew.

‘Taras Petrossian was more than some typical Russian oligarch and chess devotee, wasn’t he?’ I said. ‘He owned a string of chi-chi restaurants, just like Sutalde here in D.C. He was financed by Basil. He had his hand in every pie. And he left it all to
you
.’

From the corner of my eye I saw Key’s mouth twitch slightly, but she didn’t try to stop me. She just kept on driving.

‘Yes he did,’ said Vartan, still looking at me with that intense expression, as if I were a pawn on his board. ‘At least, all but one thing.’

‘I know what that thing was,’ I told him.

I’d racked my mind from the moment I’d stood with Nim on the bridge that night. But hard as I tried to visualize the scenario, there was simply no way I could invent that his mother Tatiana could have gotten back into the courtyard, got inside the treasury – much less into my pocket – to extract the card with the firebird, after my father was killed that day.