The Eight: The Fire Part 6

The King's Indian Defense.

[The King's Indian Defense] is generally considered the most complex and most interesting of all the Indian Defenses... Theoretically, White ought to have the advantage because his position is freer. But Black's position is solid and full of resource; a tenacious player can accomplish miracles with this defense.

Fred Reinfeld, Complete Book of Chess Openings Black will...allow White to create a strong p.a.w.n centre and proceed to attack it. Other common features are Black's attempts to open the black-squared long diagonal and a p.a.w.n storm by Black's King-side p.a.w.ns.

Edward R. Brace, An Ill.u.s.trated History of Chess The silence was broken by the sound of splintering wood.

I glanced across the room from where I stood by the hearth and saw that Lily had disconnected Mother's answering machine and pulled the spaghetti of wires from the drawer; they were splayed across the campaign desk. With Key and Vartan looking on, she was using the dagger-shaped letter opener to pry the stuck drawer all the way out of the desk. From the sound of it, she was deconstructing the thing.

'What are you doing?' I said in alarm. 'That desk is one hundred years old!'

'I hate to destroy an authentic souvenir of British colonial warfare it must mean so much to you,' my aunt said. 'However, your mother and I once found some objects of immeasurable value hidden in drawers that were jammed just like this one. She must have known something like this would set off a few bells for me.' She went on hacking in frustration.

'That campaign desk is awfully flimsy to keep anything of value,' I pointed out. It was just a lightweight box with drawers, on collapsible legs or 'horses' of the sort British officers hauled by pack mules on campaigns through treacherous mountain regions from the Khyber Pa.s.s to Kashmir. 'Besides, for as long as I can recall, that drawer has always jammed.'

'Time to unjam it, then,' Lily insisted.

'Amen to that,' Key agreed, grabbing up the heavy stone paperweight lying on the desk and handing it to Lily. 'You know what they say: "Better late than never."'

Lily grasped the rock weight and swung it down onto the drawer with force. I could hear the soft wood splintering further, but she still couldn't yank the drawer all the way out.

Zsa-Zsa, crazed by all the noise and excitement, was squeaking frantically and bouncing around everyone's legs. She sounded something like a colony of rats going down at sea. I picked her up and tucked her under my arm, squishing her into temporary silence.

'Permit me?' Vartan offered Lily politely, taking the tools from her hands.

He stuck the letter opener between the desk and the side of the drawer and hammered it with the paperweight, jimmying it until the soft wood cracked loose from the drawer's base. Lily gave one good tug on the handle and the drawer was released.

Vartan held the damaged drawer in his hands and studied the sides and base, while Key knelt on the floor and stretched her arm back into the open hole as far as she could reach. She felt around inside.

'There's nothing there that I can touch,' Key said, tipping back on her haunches. 'But my arm won't reach all the way to the back.'

'Permit me,' Vartan repeated, and he set down the drawer and squatted beside her, sliding his hand back into the open cavity of the desk. He seemed to take quite a long time feeling around. At last, he withdrew his arm and looked up at the three of us with no expression as we stood there expectantly.

'I can't find anything back there,' Vartan said, standing up and brushing the dust from his sleeve.

Maybe it was my natural suspicion or just my jangled nerves, but I didn't believe him. Lily was right. Something could be hidden there. After all, these desks might've had to be lightweight for transport but they also had to be secure. For decades, they'd been used to carry battle plans and strategies, messages with secret codes from headquarters, field units, and spies.

I palmed off Zsa-Zsa to Lily once more and yanked open the other drawer of the campaign desk, rummaging around inside until I found the flashlight we always kept there. Brushing Key and Vartan to one side, I bent forward and swept the flashlight around, exploring inside the desk. But Vartan was correct: There was nothing in there at all. So what had made that drawer stick all these years?

I picked up the damaged drawer from the floor where Vartan had put it, and I looked it over myself. Though I saw nothing amiss, I shoved the answering machine and tools aside and I set the drawer atop the desk, pulling out the other drawer to dump out its contents. Comparing the two side by side, it seemed that the rear panel of the damaged drawer was slightly higher than that of the other drawer.

I glanced at Lily, still holding the wriggling Zsa-Zsa. She nodded to me as if to confirm that she'd known all along. Then I turned to confront Vartan Azov.

'It seems there's a secret compartment here,' I said.

'I know,' he said softly. 'I noticed it earlier. But I thought it best that I should not mention it.' His voice was still polite, but his cold smile had returned a smile like a warning.

'Not mention it?' I said, in disbelief.

'As you've said yourself, that drawer has been do you say, stuck? for a very long time. We've no idea what is hidden there,' he said, adding with irony, 'maybe something valuable like battle plans left from the Crimean War.'

This wasn't entirely implausible, since my father had actually grown up in the Soviet Crimea but it was highly unlikely. It wasn't even his desk. And though I was as nervous as anyone about looking inside that secret compartment, I'd had about enough of Mr Vartan Azov's high-handed logic and steely glances. I turned on my heel and headed for the door.

'Where are you going?' Vartan's voice shot after me like a bullet.

'To get a hacksaw,' I tossed over my shoulder, and kept on moving. After all, I reasoned, I could hardly deploy Lily's rock-smashing technique. Even if the contents had nothing to do with Mother, there might be something fragile or valuable tucked away in that panel.

But Vartan had crossed the room, swiftly and silently, and was suddenly there beside me, his hand on my arm, propelling me toward the door right into the mudroom. Inside the cloistering closet he slammed the inner doors shut and leaned against them, blocking any exit.

We were jammed there together in the tiny s.p.a.ce between the food locker and the coat hooks that were laden with enough fur and down-stuffed parkas, I could feel the static electricity plastering my hair to the wall. But before I could protest this preemption, Vartan had grasped me by both arms. He spoke quickly, under his breath so no one outside could hear.

'Alexandra, you must listen to me, this is extremely important,' he said. 'I know things you need to know. Crucial things. We must speak right now before you go about opening any more cupboards or drawers around here.'

'We have nothing to talk about,' I snapped, with a bitterness that surprised me. I extracted myself from his grasp. 'I don't know what on earth you're doing here why Mother would even invite you-'

'But I know why she asked me,' Vartan interrupted. 'Though I never spoke with her, she didn't have to say it. She needed information and so do you. I was the only other person there on that day, who may be able to provide it.'

I didn't have to ask what he meant by there or what the day in question was. But this hardly prepared me for what came next.

'Xie,' he said, 'don't you understand? We must speak about your father's murder.'

I felt as if I'd been socked in the stomach; for a moment my wind was gone. No one had called me Xie my father's preferred nickname for me, short for Alexie in the ten years since my chess-playing youth. Hearing it now, coupled with Your father's murder, made me feel completely disarmed.

Here it was again, that thing we never spoke about, the thing I never thought of. But my suppressed past had managed to penetrate the crushing, suffocating s.p.a.ce of the mudroom and was staring me in the face with that horrid Ukrainian sangfroid. As customary, I retreated into complete denial.

'His murder?' I said, shaking my head in disbelief as if that would somehow clear the air. 'But the Russian authorities maintained at the time that my father's death was an accident, that the guard on that roof shot him in error, believing that someone was absconding with something valuable from the treasury.'

Vartan Azov had suddenly turned his dark eyes upon me with attentiveness. That strange purple gleam was burning from within, like a flame being blown alive.

'Perhaps your father was escaping the treasury with something of great value,' he said slowly, as if he'd just spotted a hidden move, an oblique opening he'd previously overlooked. 'Perhaps your father was leaving with something whose value he himself might have only just grasped at that moment. But whatever did happen on that day, Alexandra, it is certain to me that your mother would never have asked me to come all this distance just now to this remote spot, along with you and Lily Rad unless she believed, as I do, that your father's death ten years ago must be directly related to the a.s.sa.s.sination of Taras Petrossian, just two weeks ago, in London.'

'Taras Petrossian!' I cried aloud, though Vartan silenced me with a swift glance toward the inner doors.

Taras Petrossian was the rich entrepreneur and business mogul who, ten years ago, had organized our Russian chess tourney! He'd been there, that day at Zagorsk. I knew very little more than this about the man. But at this moment Vartan Azov arrogant b.a.s.t.a.r.d or no suddenly had my full attention.

'How was Petrossian killed?' I wanted to know. 'And why? And what was he doing in London?'

'He was organizing a big chess exhibition there, with grandmasters from every country,' Vartan said, one eyebrow slightly raised, as if he'd a.s.sumed I would already know that.

'Petrossian fled to England several years ago with plenty of money, when the corrupt capitalist oligarchy he'd created in Russia was seized, along with that of many others, by the Russian state. But he hadn't completely escaped, as he might have imagined. Just two weeks ago, Petrossian was found dead in his bed, in his posh hotel suite in Mayfair. It's believed he was poisoned, a tried-and-true Russian methodology. Petrossian had often spoken out against the Siloviki. But the arm of that brotherhood has a very long reach for those whom they wish to silence-'

When I seemed confused by the term, Vartan added, 'In Russian, it means something like "The Power Guys." The group who replaced the KGB just after the Soviet Union collapsed. Today, they're called the FSB the Federal Security Bureau. Their members and methods remain the same; only the name has changed. They are far more powerful than the KGB ever was a State unto themselves, with no outside controls. These Siloviki, I believe, were responsible for your father's murder after all, the guard who shot him was surely in their employ.'

What he was suggesting seemed crazy: KGB gunmen with poison up their sleeves. But I could feel that awful chill of recognition begin to creep into my spine again. It had been Taras Petrossian, as I now recalled, who'd relocated that last game of ours outside of Moscow, to Zagorsk. If he'd now been a.s.sa.s.sinated, it might give more credence to my mother's fears all these years. Not to mention her disappearance, and the clues she'd left that pointed to that last game. Perhaps she had been right in her suspicions all along. As Key might say, 'Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.'

But there was something more that I needed to know, something that didn't make sense.

'What did you mean a moment ago,' I asked Vartan, 'when you said that my father might have been "escaping the treasury with something of value" which only he might understand?' Vartan smiled enigmatically, as if I'd just pa.s.sed some important esoteric test.

'It didn't occur to me myself,' he admitted, 'until you mentioned the "official" explanation of your father's death. I think it likely that your father was leaving the building that morning with something of enormous value, something that others could only intuit might be in his possession, but which they could not see.' When I looked mystified, he added: 'I suspect he was leaving the building that morning with information.'

'Information?' I objected. 'What sort of information could possibly be so valuable that someone would want to kill him?'

'Whatever it was,' he told me, 'it must have been something which apparently he could not be permitted to pa.s.s along to anyone.'

'Even a.s.suming my father did get information about something as dangerous as you're suggesting, how could he possibly have discovered it so quickly there at the Zagorsk treasury? As you yourself know, we were only inside that building for a few brief minutes,' I pointed out. 'And during that entire time, my father spoke to no one who could have given him such information.'

'Perhaps he spoke to no one,' he agreed. 'But someone did speak to him.'

An image of that morning, which I'd so long suppressed, had begun to form in my mind. My father had left me for a moment, that morning at the treasury. He'd crossed the room to look inside a large gla.s.s case. And then someone went over and joined him there 'You spoke to my father!' I cried.

This time, Vartan didn't try to silence me. He merely nodded in confirmation.

'Yes,' he said. 'I went and stood beside your father as he was looking into a large display case. Inside that gla.s.s case, he and I saw a golden chess piece covered with jewels. I told him it had just been newly rediscovered in the cellars of the Hermitage at Petersburg, along with Schliemann's treasures of Troy. It was said that the piece had once belonged to Charlemagne and perhaps to Catherine the Great. I explained to your father that it had been brought to Zagorsk and put on display for this last game. It was just at that moment when your father suddenly turned away, he took you by the hand, and you both left that place.'

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 pa.s.sing 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 p.a.w.ns certainly seemed to be ma.s.sing 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 doc.u.ment 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 pa.s.sion and skill, so many years had pa.s.sed 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 rea.s.sembled 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 rea.s.sembled: twenty-six pieces and p.a.w.ns 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.'