The Fire (40 page)

The themes of these venues were cleverly designed to evoke places where the Armenians had originated or to which they had migrated over the centuries. In St Petersburg, for example, he opened a costly champagne and wine club that served cuisine from California’s Central Valley. In Moscow, the Golden Fleece restaurant served Greek fare, replete with goatskins of retsina, which evoked foods that Jason and the Argonauts might have consumed while crossing the Black Sea from Colchis to Tomis.

But the most sought-after of all these places was the exclusive private Moscow club – its costly membership available by invitation only – called Baghdaddy’s. This club alone would have provided Taras Petrossian the resources that he swiftly expended to secure for me, his young stepson, the best chess tutors and trainers money could buy.

This enabled him, as well, to sponsor many tournaments from his own pocket. He did so for reasons that shall soon become clear as I continue.

Baghdaddy’s was more than a posh club. It featured Middle Eastern cuisine in an exotic, Orientalist setting of copper
trays, camel saddles, and samovars – with a rare chessboard placed beside each divan. At the entrance, a large portrait of the great caliph Harun al-Rashid greeted guests, with this maxim inscribed beneath:

Baghdad, one thousand years ago, the birthplace of competitive chess.

For it is known among devotees of chess history that it was this illustrious Abbasid caliph, al-Rashid – a man who, as it’s reputed, could play two simultaneous games of chess blindfolded – who turned the game of chess into an example par excellence of warfare training, thus removing it from the realm of gambling or divination and enhancing its stature within the strictures of the Qur’an against those kinds of things.

The most interesting aspect of this particular club of my stepfather’s was his private collection of rare chess pieces he’d gathered from all over the world, which were set into lighted alcoves around the walls. Taras Petrossian let it be known that he was always in the market for more of these, to add to his collection, and that regardless of the cost, he remained always willing to outbid his competitors in the antiquities market.

There was, of course, one chess set in whose pieces he would have been most especially interested. And with the collapse of the Soviet Union, followed by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the imminent incursion of American troops into Baghdad – all of these events coming within just a ten-year period – anyone needing a quick infusion of funds and in a position to lay hands on something to barter might have been only too willing to part with a piece of the Montglane Service.

When the government crackdown on private profiteers began, my stepfather quickly disposed of his businesses and fled Russia for London. But it is apparent that when it came
to the chess set, he – and perhaps his silent partner – still maintained their same mission. Perhaps they were about to close in on that very objective.

For I believe that just prior to two weeks ago, when Taras Petrossian was killed in London, something they sought had been removed from Baghdad.

When Vartan finished his story, Key shook her head and smiled.

‘I’m afraid I really underestimated you, mister,’ she told him with a warm pat on his arm. ‘What a childhood! Raised by a guy who seems to have been so self-obsessed and unscrupulous that he may even have married your mother just in order to get his hands on
you.
You provided the passport for his nefarious mission, to become chess guru to the stars!’

I was sure Vartan would make swift objection to such a long-range potshot, fired by a woman who, after all, hardly knew him and had never met Petrossian. Instead, he merely smiled back at her and said, ‘It seems I’ve underestimated you, too.’

But I had a bigger question – one that had been bugging me the whole time I listened to Vartan’s story, a question that had brought back that pounding of blood behind my eyes, a pounding that was only exacer bated by the constant, humming throb of the Bonanza’s engine – though I wasn’t sure how I could actually bring myself to ask it. I waited until Key went back to resume the controls from ‘Otto’ and check our bearings. Then I took a deep breath.

‘I’m assuming,’ I said to Vartan, my voice shaking, ‘that if Petrossian’s “mission” – and Basil Livingston’s – was to round up more pieces of the Montglane Service, that would have to include the one that you and my father saw together at Zagorsk?’

Vartan nodded and watched me carefully for a moment.
Then he did something entirely unexpected. He took my hand in his and leaned over and kissed me on the forehead as if I were still a little child. I felt the heat of his skin infusing mine at these two contact points, as if we’d been electrically grounded. Then at last, almost reluctantly, he released me.

I was so taken off my guard, I felt my throat growing hard and the tears welling up in my eyes.

‘I must tell you all of it,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘After all, that is what we’re here for. But do you think you can take this right now?’

I wasn’t sure that I could. But I nodded, anyway.

‘That tournament in Moscow – the match between you and me – I was just a child myself, so I didn’t understand at all then. But from what I’ve been able to put together, I can think of only one reason why that event was established in the first place: to lure you and your father into Russia. With your mother protecting your father, they could never have gotten him to go back there of his own accord. Do you see?’

I certainly did. I felt like screaming and pulling my hair out. But I knew what he’d said was right on target. And I knew exactly what that meant.

In a way,
I
had killed my father.

If not for my childhood compulsion to become the world’s youngest grandmaster – if not for the alluring golden opportunity dangled before us to accomplish that goal – my father would never have returned to his homeland at any cost.

That’s
what my mother was afraid of.

That’s
why she’d made me give up chess when he was killed.

‘Now that we’ve learned so much about the Game,’ Vartan told me, ‘it must all make perfect sense. Anyone who was a player would surely
know
who your father was – not just the great grandmaster, Aleksandr Solarin, but a major player
himself in the Game – and the husband of the Black Queen. My stepfather lured him there to show him that they had that important chess piece, perhaps with the hope that they somehow could strike some kind of bargain…’

Vartan paused and looked at me as if he wanted to take me in his arms and comfort me. But his expression was so distraught, it seemed he needed comforting himself.

‘Xie, don’t you see what this means?’ he said. ‘Your father was sacrificed – but
I
was the bait that was used to lure you both into the trap!’

‘No, you weren’t,’ I told him, putting my hand on his arm as Key had done just a moment before. ‘I
wanted
to beat you; I
wanted
to win; I
wanted
to be the world’s youngest grandmaster – just as you did. We were only children, Vartan. How could we possibly have guessed then that it was more than just a game? How would we even know
now
– if Lily hadn’t explained it to us?’

‘Well, we know very well
now
exactly what it is
,
’ he told me. ‘But
I
certainly should have known even before that. Only a month ago, Taras Petrossian called for me to come to London, though I hadn’t seen the man in years, not since he’d emigrated. He wanted me to play in a large tournament he was organizing. By way of incentive to attend, he could not resist reminding me that, if not for his generosity in acquiring coaching and the like during his years as my surrogate parent, my grandmaster title might never have been awarded. I owed him, as he explained to me in no uncertain terms.

‘But shortly before the tournament, upon my arrival at the Mayfair Hotel where my stepfather resided, I learned that he had something quite different, something more important, in mind, in the way of that “payoff.” He asked me to perform him a service. And he showed me a letter he’d received from your mother…’

Vartan had paused, for my expression surely said all. I shook my head and motioned for him to go on.

‘As I said, Petrossian showed me a letter from Cat Velis. From the gist of her letter, it seems that he possessed several items that had belonged to your late father. He wanted to get them into your mother’s hands as quickly as possible. But she didn’t want my stepfather to send them to her himself, nor to pass these objects to Lily Rad during the tournament. Either of these alternatives seemed to your mother to be…the word she used, I think, was “imprudent.” She suggested that Petrossian enlist
me
, instead, to send these objects anonymously to Ladislaus Nim.’

The chessboard drawing.

The card.

The photo.

Now it was all falling into place. But though Petrossian could have gotten the card from my coat pocket at Zagorsk, how on earth had he ever laid hands on that chessboard drawing, which Nim thought was in the possession of Tatiana, much less that ‘only photo in existence’ of my father’s family?

But Vartan hadn’t quite finished. ‘Your mother’s letter also invited me to join Lily and Petrossian after the tournament and come to Colorado, which I agreed to do. We could discuss everything there, she said.’

He paused and added, ‘But as you know, my stepfather himself was killed before that London tourney even finished. Lily and I had met privately in London. We were unsure exactly how much to reveal to each other of what your mother had shared with either of us, since Lily hadn’t been able to reach her. But we both mistrusted Petrossian and Livingston. And we agreed that Petrossian’s involvement, combined with your mother’s cryptic party invitations to us all, suggested that your father’s death at Zagorsk may not have been an accident. As the only other person who’d been
present at Zagorsk when your father died, I privately believed that the items I’d mailed might somehow be involved.

‘The moment that Lily and I learned of my stepfather’s untimely and suspicious death, we both resolved to leave the tournament at once. And in order to draw less attention to our movements, we agreed to fly to New York and go to Colorado by Lily’s private car.’

Vartan stopped and regarded me gravely with his dark eyes. ‘Of course, you know the rest of the story from there,’ he told me.

Not quite.

Though Vartan might not know how it was that Petrossian had come by the chessboard and those other items in the packet that Mother had arranged for him to send to Nim, there was still one major item that hadn’t been accounted for.

‘The Black Queen,’ I said. ‘You told Key and me, when we were back in Maryland, that it was you yourself who’d sent that chessboard drawing to Nim. Now you’ve explained how and why. Then you said you believed that Taras Petrossian was killed because he sent the Black Queen to my mother.

‘But you’d also told me earlier that the last time you’d seen that piece was ten years ago, inside that glass case in the treasury at Zagorsk. So how did Petrossian get his hands on it? And how – and
why
– would he himself send something that valuable and that dangerous to my mother, when he knew that she was afraid even to have him communicate directly with her?’

‘I don’t know for certain,’ said Vartan, ‘but given the events of these past few days, I have begun to form a very stong suspicion. It occurred to me – odd though it may seem – that Taras Petrossian may
already
have had that chess piece in his possession ten years ago, when we were all at Zagorsk.

‘After all, it was
he
who’d arranged to remove our last game to that remote spot; it was
he
who told me that the chess piece had just been discovered in the cellar of the Hermitage and how famous it was; and it was
he
who said that it had been brought to Zagorsk just in order to display it there for our chess tourney. So why couldn’t it also have been Taras Petrossian, the man who’d lured you to Russia, who had placed the chess piece there in that glass case – perhaps in the hope that, when Aleksandr Solarin saw it…’

But he stopped, since clearly – as for me – there was no obvious answer as to what Petrossian’s objective might have been. Whatever he had hoped might come of all these clever machinations that, as it seemed, had resulted in nothing for anyone – except death.

Vartan rubbed his head of curls to bring the blood back, for even to him it wasn’t making sense.

‘We’ve been assuming,’ he said, picking his way, ‘that they were all playing on different teams. But what if they weren’t? What if my stepfather was trying to contact your parents all along? What if he had always been on their team, but somehow they didn’t know it?’

And then I saw it.

And in the same exact moment – so did Vartan.

‘I don’t know how Petrossian got his hands on that chessboard drawing,’ I said, ‘and he could have picked my pocket for the placard – though it’s unlikely it would have meant anything to anyone but my father and me. But there’s one thing I
do
know. There’s only one person on earth who could have given him that photo that you put in the packet and sent to my uncle. I think it’s the same person who warned us with that card at Zagorsk.’

I took a deep breath and tried to focus on exactly where this was leading. Even Key was listening intently, at this point, from her place at the controls.

‘I think,’ I added, ‘that the person who gave Taras Petrossian that chess piece in the first place, ten years ago – maybe even the person who helped him to lure us to Moscow – was the same person who gave him that photo, so it could be put in the packet to my mother that you ended up sending to Nim, to make my mother believe in Petrossian’s story.

‘That person is my grandmother! My father’s own mother! You and Key first triggered the idea when you both kept saying that my mother believes there may be no Game, that we may somehow really be on the same team. And if it
was
my grandmother behind all this, it could mean—’