The Eight: The Fire Part 11

When he realized what it was, his blood froze.

It was a slave market.

He had never seen one in his life, yet how could he be mistaken? There below him were hundreds of women held in enormous fenced-in pens like animals in a barnyard, chained to one another by ankle bracelets. They stood without moving, with bowed heads, all looking at the ground as if ashamed to see the platform toward which they were headed: the platform where the merchants displayed their wares.

But there was one who looked up. She looked directly at him, as it seemed, with those silvery eyes, as if expecting to find him there.

She was only a wisp of a girl, but her beauty was breathtaking. And there was something more. For Charlot now understood exactly why he had lost his memory. He knew that even if it cost his life, even if it cost the Game itself, he must save her, he must rescue her from that pit of iniquity. At last he understood everything. He knew who she was and what he must do.

Kauri had grasped Charlot by the arm with urgency.

'My G.o.d! It is she!' he told Charlot, his voice trembling with emotion. 'It's Haidee!'

'I know,' Charlot said.

'We must save her!' Kauri said, clinging to Charlot's arm.

'I know,' Charlot repeated.

But as he stared down into her eyes, unable to avert his gaze, Charlot knew something else that he could not speak of to anyone until he could understand, himself, just what it all might mean.

He knew that it was Haidee herself who had blocked his vision.

After their brief consultation with Shahin on the parapet, they had arranged their plan, the simplest they could devise on such short notice, though even so it would be fraught with difficulty and danger.

They knew there was no way they could effect an abduction or escape for the girl from so large a crowd. Shahin, they agreed, would depart at once to retrieve their horses for their departure, while Charlot and Kauri, posing as a wealthy French colonial slave trader and his servant, would purchase Haidee at whatever the cost and meet him at the medina's western edge, an isolated area not far from the northwest gate, a place where their exit from the city might be less remarked upon.

As Charlot and Kauri descended into the crowd of purchasers awaiting the first block of humans being prepared for auction, Charlot felt a tension and rising fear that he could barely contain. Slipping among the dense crowd of men, his vision of the pens was blocked for a time. But he did not need to see the faces of those who were held there like livestock awaiting slaughter. He could already smell their fear.

His own fear was scarcely less affecting. They'd begun by auctioning the children. As each lot of young ones was herded from the pens and up onto the auction stand, fifty souls to a parcel, where they could be seen, their clothes were stripped, their hair, ears, eyes, noses, and teeth were examined by the auctioneers, and a starting price for each was put upon their heads. The smaller children were sold in lots of ten or twenty, and the 'sucklings' were sold with their mothers to be sold once again, no doubt, the moment they'd been weaned.

Charlot's mounting revulsion and horror were nearly overwhelming. But he knew he must bring these emotions under control until he could learn precisely where Haidee was. He glanced at Kauri, then nodded toward a man in a striped kaftan, standing just beside them in the throng.

'Sire,' Kauri addressed the man in Arabic, 'my master is a trader for a prominent sugar plantation in the New World. Women are needed in our colonies, both for slave breeding and for childless planters. My master is sent hither to acquire good breeding stock. But we are unfamiliar with custom at auctions in these parts. Perhaps you would be so kind as to enlighten us as to your procedures. For we've overheard that this auction today might contain a high quality of both black and white gold.'

'You have overheard quite correctly,' said the other, seemingly pleased to know something that these strangers were ignorant of. 'These lots today are directly come from the recently deceased Sultan Mulay Suliman's personal household at the palace, the choicest of flesh. And yes, both procedure and prices often go very differently here than in other slave markets even than at Marrakech, the largest slave market in Morocco, where five or six thousand humans are sold per year.'

'Different? How so?' asked Charlot, his anger at this fellow's callousness beginning to restore a bit of his strength.

'In the Western trade, like at Marrakech,' the man said, 'you'll find that strong healthy males are in greatest demand to ship to plantations like yours in the European colonies while for export to the East, eunuch youths bring the highest prices, for they're favored as concubines by wealthy Ottoman Turks. But here in Fez boys between five and ten years may bring no more than two or three hundred dinars each, although young girls of that age bring more than double that amount. And a girl that's reached the age to breed if she's attractive, p.u.b.escent, and yet still a virgin might command something like the value of fifteen hundred dinars, more than one thousand French livres. As these girls are the choicest and most highly sought after here, if you have the money you won't have long to wait. They will always be sold first, just after the children.'

They thanked the man for his information. Charlot, in despair at these words, had taken Kauri by the shoulder and now began to propel him to the edge of the crowd so they might quickly gain a better view of the auction platform.

'How can we possibly do it?' Kauri whispered to Charlot. For it was clear that it was now too late ever to procure such an enormous sum, even if they knew how.

Just as they cleared the crowd, Charlot said beneath his breath, 'There is one way.'

Kauri looked at him with open, questioning eyes. Yes, there was one way, as they both knew, that they could acquire so large a sum quickly, regardless of what such a decision might cost them in the end. But did they really have a choice?

There was no time to think further. Almost as if the hand of fate had grasped him, Charlot felt the terror grasp his spine. He looked back toward the platform with a jolt to see the slender form that he knew was Haidee, her nakedness now covered only by her long, loose abundance of hair, as with a string of other young girls, chained to one another by a silver cuff attached to the left wrist and ankle of each she was herded up onto the platform.

As Kauri stood guard, blocking the view of the others, Charlot huddled beneath his own robe as if merely pulling off his outer djellaba. But with one hand he reached beneath his underlying kaftan and removed the Black Queen from her leather pouch so he could see her. Unsheathing his sharp bousaadi, he sc.r.a.ped away a bit of the charcoal. Then from the soft, pure gold, he prized out a single, costly stone. It fell into his hand an emerald the size of a robin's egg. He put the Black Queen back in her pouch, untied the bag from his waist, tossed back his djellaba, and handed the pouch to Kauri.

With the smooth stone still clutched in his palm Charlot, all alone, walked to the front of the crowd to stand directly beneath the platform of those naked and terrified women. But when he looked up he saw only Haidee. She was looking down at him with no fear, with enormous trust.

They both knew what he must do.

Charlot might have lost his vision, but he knew beyond a doubt that this was right.

For he knew that Haidee was the new White Queen.

The Hearth.

Every Greek state had its prytaneum... On this hearth there burned a perpetual fire. The prytaneum was sacred to Hestia, the personified G.o.ddess of the hearth... The question still remains, why was so much importance attached to the maintenance of a perpetual fire?...Its history goes back to the embryo state of human civilization.

James George Frazer, The Prytaneum.

Washington, D.C.

April 6, 2003.

My taxi dropped me on M Street in the heart of Georgetown just as the Jesuit church bells at the end of the block were calling out the end of Sunday night.

But Rodo had left so many unanswered messages on my cell phone to start up the fires that, exhausted as I was, and although I knew Leda would cover for me, I'd already decided not to go home. Instead I would go to the kitchens only a block from where I lived to prepare the new fire for the week, as usual.

To say I was exhausted was the understatement of the millennium. Getting out of Colorado had not gone exactly as planned.

By the time the Livingstons had departed our dinner Friday night, the rest of us were already completely wiped out. Lily and Vartan were still on London time. Key said she'd been up before dawn and needed to get home and get some shut-eye, too. And what with the emotional traumas and psychic bruising I'd been subjected to from the very moment of my arrival on that Colorado mountaintop, my mind was by now so cluttered with potential moves and countermoves that I couldn't see the board for the pieces.

Lily, glancing around at our haggard faces, suggested that it was time to call it a night. We'd readjourn first thing in the morning, she said, when we'd be in a better state to construct a strategy.

According to her idea, this would consist of activity on multiple fronts: She herself would sleuth to learn more about Basil Livingston's activities within the chess world, and Vartan would milk his Russian contacts to discover what he could about the suspicious death of Taras Petrossian. Nokomis would ferret out what possible escape routes my mother might have taken after departing the lodge in Four Corners, to see if she could pick up her trail, while I was a.s.signed the thankless task of contacting my elusive uncle to learn what he might know about her disappearance and what 'gift' he had sent her, as he'd said in his mysterious message. We all agreed that finding my mother was top priority that I'd phone Key on Monday to find out what she'd learned.

Key was on the phone with her crew, checking the status of Lily's car that they'd sent off to Denver on a trailer. That was when the news broke that there would be a change in our plans.

'Oh no,' she said, regarding me with a grim expression as she held the phone to her ear. 'The Aston Martin got to Denver just fine, but there's a blizzard headed our way from the north. It's already in southern Wyoming. It should hit here before noon tomorrow. Cortez airport has shut down for the weekend, along with everything else.'

I'd been in this boat before, so I knew the drill. Although this was only Friday and my return flight to D.C. wasn't scheduled until Sunday, if a blizzard dumped enough snow here tomorrow I could still miss my connection at Denver. Worse yet, and beyond contemplation, we might all be stranded here in the mountains for days with one bed among us, living on a diet of flash-dried food. So we'd have to depart the mountaintop first thing in the morning the three of us with Zsa-Zsa and the luggage well before the snows. .h.i.t, and make the five-hundred-mile trek through the Rockies in my rental car, which could be dropped at the Denver airport.

Upstairs, I a.s.signed Aunt Lily and her companion Zsa-Zsa the only real bed my mother's bra.s.s bed, tucked into one of the semiprivate alcoves on the octagonal balcony. They were both fast asleep before they even hit the mattress. Vartan helped me pull out futons and sleeping bags, and he offered to help me clean up the after-dinner mess.

My houseguests must have observed that our accommodations here at Mother's octagon were primitive. But I'd neglected to mention that the lodge only sported one small bathroom on the ground floor under the stairway with no shower, only a claw-footed tub and a big, old-fashioned iron sink. As I knew from long experience, that was where we'd have to do the dinner dishes, too.

On Key's way out, she glanced in the open bathroom door where Vartan his cashmere sleeves shoved above his elbows was swirling dishes around in the sink and rinsing them off in the tub. He pa.s.sed a wet plate out the door for me to dry.

'Sorry we can't recruit you no room,' I said, motioning to the cramped s.p.a.ce.

'There's nothing s.e.xier than seeing a strong man slaving over a sink of hot, sudsy dishes,' Key informed us with a wide grin.

I laughed, as Vartan pulled a grimace.

'Now, no matter how much fun this is, you two,' she said, 'please don't stay up all night playing in the bubbles. You've got a rough road ahead of you tomorrow.'

Then she vanished into the night.

'This actually is fun,' Vartan told me as soon as she'd gone. He was now pa.s.sing cups and gla.s.ses out the door. 'I used to help my mother like this in Ukraine when I was little,' he went on. 'I loved to be in the kitchen and smell the bread baking. I helped with everything grinding coffee and sh.e.l.ling peas you couldn't ever get me to leave. The other children said I was fastened to my mother's how do you say it? her ap.r.o.n ties? I even learned to play chess on the kitchen table, while she cooked.'

I admit I had trouble visualizing the arrogant, ruthless boy chess wizard of my last acquaintance as this self-described mama's boy. Stranger yet was the disparity in our cultures that instantly leapt to mind.

My mother could build a fire. But when it came to cooking, she could barely dip a tea bag in hot water. The only kitchens I'd known as a child were far from cozy: a two-burner hot plate in our apartment in Manhattan, versus my uncle Slava's huge old wood-burning ovens and walk-in fireplace at his mansion on Long Island, where you could cook for a cattle drive though being such a recluse, he never did. And my chess upbringing itself could hardly be described as idyllic.

'Your kitchen life sounds wonderful to somebody like me, a chef,' I told Vartan. 'But who taught you chess?'

'That was my mother, too. She got me a little chess set and taught me to play I was very tiny,' he told me, pa.s.sing the last of the silverware through the door. 'It was just after my father was killed.'

When Vartan saw my shocked reaction, he reached out and wrapped his wet hands over mine as I still held the silverware in the dishcloth.

'I'm sorry I thought everyone knew,' he explained hastily. Taking the silverware from my hands, he set it down. 'It's been in all the chess columns ever since I made grandmaster. But my father's death was nothing like yours.'

'What was it like?' I said. I felt like weeping. I was ready to drop to the floor from exhaustion. I couldn't think straight. My father was dead, my mother was missing. And now this.

'My father was killed in Afghanistan when I was three,' Vartan was explaining. 'He was conscripted there as a soldier at the height of the war. But he hadn't served for long, so my mother could receive no pension. We were very poor. That's why eventually she did it.'

Vartan's eyes were trained upon me. He'd taken my hands in his again, and now he pressed them tightly. 'Xie, are you listening to me?' he said in a tone I hadn't heard before so urgent it was almost a command to pay attention.

'Let's see,' I said. 'You were poor, your father was shot in the line of duty. So far am I tracking?' But then I did snap to. 'That's why who did what?' I said.

'My mother,' said Vartan. 'It was several years before she understood how good I was at chess how good I could be. She wanted to help me in any way she could. I found it hard to forgive her, but I knew that she did what she thought was right by marrying him.'

'Marrying who?' I said, though I had grasped it before he said it.

Of course. The man who'd managed the chess tourney where my father was killed, the man who was Basil Livingston's partner in crime, the man who was snuffed out himself by the Siloviki two weeks ago in London. It was none other than Vartan Azov's own stepfather...

'Taras Petrossian.'

Needless to say, Vartan and I didn't get much sleep before dawn. His checkered Soviet childhood made my father's at least, what little I knew of it myself seem cheery by comparison.

The crux of it was, Vartan had resented and disliked the new stepfather he'd acquired at the age of nine, but was reliant upon him for the sake of his mother's comfort and Vartan's own chess education and training. After Vartan attained his GM ranking after his mother died, and Petrossian was in self-imposed exile outside Russia Vartan had little to do with the man. That is, not until this past chess tournament two weeks ago in London.

Still why had he mentioned nothing about this relationship to us when we were discussing strategies earlier? If it was in 'all the chess columns,' did Lily already know?

Now, as we sat side by side deep in the pillows beside the waning light of the fire, I found myself too exhausted to protest or even to speak, but still too distraught to adjourn upstairs and try to get some sleep. Vartan had poured us some brandy from the sideboard. As we sipped it, he reached over and rubbed my neck with one hand.

'I'm sorry. I thought you must know all this,' he told me as gently as possible, kneading my tense neck tendons. 'But if we are indeed involved in that larger Game, as Lily Rad said, I believe that you and I have too many coincidences in our lives not to join forces.'

Starting with a few suspicious family murders, I thought. But I said nothing.

'I would like to begin this spirit of cooperation,' Vartan told me with a smile, 'by offering you my skill at something I do even better than I play chess.'

He slipped his hand from my neck to beneath my chin and tilted my face up to his. I was about to protest when he added, 'This skill is something else that my mother taught me when I was quite small. Something I believe you will need before we leave here tomorrow morning.'

He got up and went into the mudroom, returning with my big down-filled parka, which he tossed in my lap. Then he headed to the piano. I sat up in the cushions in alarm as he opened the lid and reached inside. He extracted the drawing of the chessboard, which in my stupor I had somehow completely forgotten.

'You had planned to take this with you, hadn't you?' Vartan inquired. When I nodded, he added, 'Then you should be grateful your parka is thick enough to conceal it in all that down. And thank heaven that my mother taught me how to sew!'

I'd made this grueling ten-hour drive often, but even so, all day Sat.u.r.day I was wrangling with the steering wheel, barely outpacing the snapping winds of the incoming storm. Though I did have the comfort of some extra thermal padding from the drawing of a two-hundred-year-old chessboard hidden inside the down filling of my parka. And the added comfort of my last-minute decision to grab the pillow bag stuffed with that chess set and place it in my rucksack. Just in case there was some further message I'd overlooked.

Just as the blizzard hit Denver, I dropped Lily's entourage and luggage at the front door of the Brown Palace and let the doorman take the car. We got our first meal of the day at the Ship's Tavern just before the restaurant closed. We agreed that we would all touch base later in the week. And I grabbed a few hours of sleep myself, crashing on the sofa in Lily's suite. As it turned out, that would be the last food and sleep I would have for twenty-four hours.

Now at midnight in Georgetown, as I descended the steep flight of stone steps and crossed the wooden footbridge over the gla.s.sy, shimmering ca.n.a.l, I could see Rodo's world-famous restaurant Sutalde, The Hearth there on the low bluff below me, overlooking the river.

Sutalde was unique even for a place steeped in history like Georgetown. Its weathered stone buildings dating from the 1700s were among the earliest still standing in Washington, D.C., and they were seeping with charisma.

I unlocked the front door to the restaurant and switched off the burglar alarm. Though the interior lights were on automatic dousers, I never bothered to turn them on when I came into Sutalde, even so late at night. Across the vast room, where the original barn doors had once been, was a wall of many-paned windows overlooking the ca.n.a.l and the river. As I moved among the damask-draped tables, ghostly in the gloom, I had a panoramic view of the pale celadon green sweep of Key Bridge, illuminated by its tall, slender lanterns all the way across the river. On the far sh.o.r.e, the lights of the high-rise buildings of Rosslyn were reflected in the glittering midnight waters of the wide Potomac.

From those windows to the matre d's desk, extending the length of the room's left wall, ran a rack that stood nearly as tall as I and displayed handmade jugs of Basque cider from every province. It provided a corridor of sorts so that waiters and my boss's favorite diners could get to their destinations without being forced to navigate the forest of tables. Rodo was quite proud of it all the cider, the display, and the touches of privacy and cla.s.s it provided. I ducked around the rack and descended the curving flight of stone steps to the kitchens. Here was the magical stone dungeon created by Rodolfo Boujaron, where most evenings privileged diners, if they had nothing but time on their hands and beaucoup d'argent, could watch through an enormous gla.s.s wall as their prix fixe eight-course meal was prepared over flames and hot embers by scurrying staff and award-winning master chefs.

Beside the great stone ovens I found Leda the Lesbian sitting on the high chair we used for monitoring the fires. She seemed calm and relaxed, reading a book while smoking her traditional hand-rolled Turkish cigarette in its black lacquered holder and sipping a Pernod pastis, her favorite drink.

The ovens, I noticed with appreciation, had already cooled down and she had mucked them out in preparation for my task for the week ahead, which would save me time tonight.

Rodo was right about one thing. Leda was a swan, a soignee creature of both detachment and strength. But she preferred to be called Leda the Lesbian, both as a vocational badge of pride, I think, and a way to keep certain clients at arm's length. I could understand her concerns. I'd be worried about the length of unsolicited arms, too, if I looked as rakish and come-hither as she did.

The sweep of her swanlike neck was exaggerated by a short-cropped silver-blond shock of hair like a flattop crew cut. Her translucent white skin, artificially arched eyebrows, lips perfectly outlined in bloodred paint, and lacquered cigarette holder all contrived to give her the look of a stylized art nouveau ill.u.s.tration. Not to mention that her costume of preference, weather permitting, was what she was wearing, even now, at midnight beside the cold hearth: nothing but sparkly Rollerblades, a rhinestone-studded T-shirt, and men's satin boxer shorts. Leda was, as the French say, 'such a one.'

Leda turned in relief when she heard me on the stairs. I dropped my backpack on the floor, stripped off my down jacket, and carefully folded it and placed it on top.

'The prodigal returns, thank heavens,' she said. 'Not a moment too soon. "Ma.s.sa Rodolpho Legree" has been driving us all in circles ever since you left.'

Leda's concept of Rodo as a slave master was shared by anyone who'd ever manned the kilns on his behalf. As in a military drill, obedience became second nature.

By way of demonstration, tired and hungry as I was, I was already on the move to the woodpile. Leda set down her cigarette and drink, slid off her chair, and followed, swishing behind me on her silent Rollerblades to the back wall, where we each pulled a stack of hardwood so I could start building the new fire in all four of the large stone hearths.

'Rodo said if you got here tonight, I should stay and help you,' she said. 'He said the fire must be done right tonight it's important.'

As if that familiar admonition would help either my bleary eyes or my travel-addled brain get focused, I thought. Not to mention my growling stomach.

'What else is new?' I said as she helped me plop the two large 'andiron logs' into place in the first hearth, which would serve to support the others. 'But Leda, I haven't really slept in days. I'll get things going here in all the hearths they'll take a few hours to establish before we can cook. Then if you'll watch the fires, I can go home and get a little shut-eye. I'll be back before sunrise, I promise, to start making the bread.'

I'd finished stacking the triangle of upper logs atop the andirons and shoved some crumpled paper beneath. Then I added, 'Besides, it's not so urgent everything tonight be done on our drillmaster's schedule. You know the restaurant's always closed Mondays-'

'You don't know what's been happening around here,' Leda interrupted, looking uncustomarily concerned as she handed me another pile of paper. 'Rodo is holding a big boum tomorrow night for a bunch of dignitaries, here in the cellar. It's very private. None of us has been invited even to work the tables. Rodo said he wants only you to help him cook and serve.'