The Eight: The Fire Part 22

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-cla.s.s 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-c.o.c.ktail-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 d.a.m.ned 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, furnis.h.i.+ngs, 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 cus.h.i.+ons 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 s.p.a.ce 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 a.s.sured 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 compet.i.tion-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 antic.i.p.atory 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 t.i.t 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 unis.e.x 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 st.i.tched 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 G.o.d! 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.

'What kept you?' he asked as we plowed back through the throngs.

'Cripes,' I told him. 'Let's just do this. I'll fill you in later.'

Without a further word, we hoofed it to the Georgetown post office two blocks away and just around the corner, and scrambled up the stone steps. Nim provided a defensive blockade as I slipped behind a counter, where I rolled the rest of my stash into the cylinders, sealed them with the tape he'd bought, and made out the labels one to Aunt Lily, one to Nokomis Key, one each to the post office boxes of Nim and my mother. The one with the original drawing of the chessboard I sent to myself, right here at the Georgetown post office. Then for extra safety, I filled out one of those big yellow cards and signed it, so the post office would hold my mail for me until further notice.

At least this way, I thought, as my uncle and I walked back down the stone steps of the Georgetown post office, no matter what happened to me or to the others, the sacrifice that was made by a dying abbess, two hundred years ago in a Russian prison, would not have been in vain.

I took a hot, soapy shower and washed the three-day-old Colorado dust from my hair in the most elegant marble bathroom I'd ever seen in my life. Then, sporting nothing but the thick toweling robe that I'd found in the room and the designer swimsuit graciously provided me by the Four Seasons concirge, I went down to where my uncle said he'd meet me, in the athletic club on the lower floor of the hotel.

First, I did thirty laps in the lane by reservation only that Nim had arranged for me in their private lap pool. Then I joined him in the enormous marble Roman Jacuzzi bath, which, if drained, would have comfortably slept fifty fullgrown sumo wrestlers.

I had to concede it to my uncle: Wealth and comfort had their appealing points.

But I knew that if this Game I'd been thrown into was really as dangerous as everyone kept saying, I wouldn't have much longer to enjoy anything, especally if I kept sitting around doing pattycakes here in the steamy water.

As if my uncle had read my mind, he moved across the hot pool to sit on the marble shelf beside me. 'Given that we don't know whatever may lie ahead of you just now,' he said, 'I thought you could only be a.s.sisted in it by being given a hot bath and a decent meal.'

'Last wish?' I asked him with a smile. 'I'll never forget it. My mind's working better already, I can tell. And I learned something really important today.'

'About your boss Boujaron at the copy shop. You told me,' he said. 'That does raise some questions, of which we already have many. But there's something-'

'No, I discovered something I think is more important than that,' I said. 'I learned whom I could trust.'

When he focused his bicolored eyes on me with curiosity, I added, 'At the post office, and even before, I didn't have to think for one second before filling out those mailing labels. I knew who could be trusted with copies of the board. Not just you and my mother, who already had it, but Aunt Lily and my friend Nokomis Key, as well.'

'Ah,' said Nim. 'Your friend Key's first name is Nokomis? So that must explain it.'

'Explain what?' I said.

And that quickly, I was getting the uncomfortable feeling again that there was something headed in my direction I really didn't want to meet up with.

'While you were bathing, I picked up my messages from last night,' said Nim. 'Almost no one knows I'm here just my caretaker. Yet there was a fax waiting for me here from last night from one "Selene Luna, Hank Tallchap's grandmother."'

I was puzzled for just a moment, then I saw that Nim was smiling, and I got it too. 'Selene' and 'Luna' both meant 'moon.'

'"By the sh.o.r.es of Gitchee Gumee, By the s.h.i.+ning Big Sea Waters..."' I quoted.

'"Stood the wigwam of Nokomis, Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis,"' Nim finished for me. 'So this friend of yours, does she really resemble Hiawatha's grandmother from the famous poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow?'

'Only in how she thinks,' I told him. 'She could raise a warrior brave single-handed. And you'd be surprised that she knows more about cooking up secret codes than anyone I've ever known except you. Indian smoke signals, she calls them. So apart from puzzling out how she managed to find me, what was her message?'

'I confess, for once I was at a loss there, too,' Nim said. 'But now that I know who she is, clearly it was encoded for your eyes only.'

He reached over for his toweling robe beside the pool, pulled out the fax, and handed it to me.

It did take a minute. But when I got it, I turned slightly green. How could it be? n.o.body had seen that coded message but me!

'What is it?' said Nim in alarm, his hand on my shoulder.

I could only shake my head. I couldn't speak.

Kitty's had a reversal of fortunes, it read. She's coming back from the Virgin Isles, she leased a luxury car, she'll be in DC tomorrow. She says you have her number and the rest of her contact info. She's still in apartment A1.

The message was still the same: A1 meant it had to do with Russians and a secret room in Baghdad. But the reversal of fortune was definitely the key. I reversed the message in my mind. Instead of DC-LX-VI in Roman numerals, which added to 6-6-6, it would now read: IV-XL-CD, which added to 4-4-4. Three numbers, I noticed, that when multiplied added to 64, the number of squares on a chessboard!

The chessboard provides the key.

And if Kitty-Cat was taking an alternate route to the one she'd left atop that piano in Colorado, it meant that my mother was, possibly even at this very moment, right here in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.!

I'd dawdled here too long. I'd just turned to my uncle to tell him we had to go, and I started to step out of the Roman bath. But just at that moment I was confronted by absolutely the worst thing I could imagine in my wildest dreams. Around the corner came three figures I could hardly visualize together certainly not in my current state of deshabille, with nowhere to run or hide: Sage Livingston, Galen March, and my boss, Rodolfo Boujaron.

PART THREE.

Rubedo.

The Arabic saying "Blood has flowed, the danger is past," expresses succinctly the central idea of all sacrifice: that the offering appeases the power... The driving-force behind the mechanism of sacrifice, the most characteristic of the symbolic inferences of blood, the zodiacal symbol of Libra representing divine legality, the inner conscience of man...for example in alchemy, when matter pa.s.ses from the white stage (albedo) to the red (rubedo)...

J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols: 'Blood'

The Prometheus myth...is an ill.u.s.tration of sublimation...which confirms the alchemic relation between the volatile and fixed principles... At the same time suffering (like that of Prometheus) corresponds to sublimation because of its a.s.sociation wth the colour red the third colour in the alchemical Magnum Opus, coming after black and white.

J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols: 'Prometheus'

Fire in the Head.