The Eight: The Fire Part 33

This mistake would prove to destroy her life.

As well as my own.

When Vartan and I had come this far in the ma.n.u.script, he put his hand over mine on the page. 'We shall continue this story in a moment,' he told me softly. 'But I believe that you and I likely already know the answer to what it is that this man believes has destroyed his life, if not his mother's. And to why it seemed so critical that he's done as he has, and that he has written this for us.'

I looked up into Vartan's dark eyes in the reddish light of the coals. And I knew he was right.

'Because he's still alive,' I said.

Vartan nodded slowly and said, 'And the one he loves is not.'

City of Fire.

At the end of the world, the world shall be judged by fire, and all these things that G.o.d made of nothing shall by fire be reduced to ashes, from which ashes the Phoenix is to produce her young... After the conflagration, there shall be formed a new heaven and a new earth, and the new man will be more n.o.ble in his glorified state.

Basil Valentinus, The Golden Tripod.

G.o.d gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time.

You've got to bang a few rocks together to create fire.

Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess.

It was indeed a long and winding road, but a glorious one, back to that s.h.i.+ning City on the Hill that I called home.

First, Key, as usual, had prearranged (with Lily, this gig's designated driver) for all of us to rendezvous at a more private venue than Lake Hood, a small private seaplane base on a lake slightly north of Anchorage: a place where people might not even know what a limited-edition Aston Martin was, much less a place where it might attract attention. But how did they get that car here all the way from Wyoming, over thousands of miles of rough tundra?

'Let me guess,' I said to Lily, 'you and my mother shared 24/7 s.h.i.+fts up the Alcan Highway singing "Night and Day." Or just how in h.e.l.l did you get here?'

'My usual technique,' said Lily, brus.h.i.+ng the lacquered tips of her fingers to her lacquered thumbnail in the timeless gesture signifying moolah. 'Naturally, once I had examined our proposed terrain, I knew that private car ferries over water would have to be my route of preference.'

But then a hush fell as Vartan helped my father from the plane and my father got a glimpse of my mother for the first time in ten years. Even Ms. Zsa-Zsa was silent.

Of course, we all know the basics of how each of us has arrived here on the planet: A sperm dances with an egg. Some think G.o.d provides the spark that triggers the process, others view it as more of a chemical thing. But what we were seeing before us was something completely different, and we all knew it. Now I was glad that Vartan had made us two stand before that steamy mirror so I could see myself as he saw me. Right now, seeing my own parents look upon each other for the first time in ten years, I understood that I was actually witnessing how I myself had even come to be here.

However you looked at it, it was some kind of miracle.

My father's hands were in my mother's hair, and as their lips met, their bodies seemed to flow together, to meld into each other. We all watched them for a very long time.

Key, at my side, whispered, 'They must have read all the Instructions.' She paused to consider, and added, 'Or maybe they even wrote the book.'

I could feel tears welling up again. If this became any more of a habit I'd have to start carrying a hanky.

As they continued their embrace, my father slowly extended his arm toward us. Lily said to me, 'I think he wants you.'

When I went over to them, he wrapped his arm around me and my mother did likewise, so we were all wrapped together in a bundle. But before I could get embarra.s.sed that this might be getting a bit too goopy, Father said something he'd struggled to explain to me during our flight. 'It was my fault, Alexandra. I can see it now. It's the only time I ever opposed Cat over anything. But I want you to know that I didn't do it for you I did it for myself.'

Though he was speaking to me, he never took his eyes from my mother's face.

'Once here in America, when I found that I would have to exchange one of the two things I loved for the other to abandon chess in order to have the life that I'd chosen with Cat it was so difficult. Too difficult. But when I knew that my daughter could play, that she wanted to play the game' he turned those silvery green eyes upon me; my eyes, I realized 'I knew that you, my daughter, Xie, could be my surrogate,' he said. 'In a way, I used you, like one of those parents pus.h.i.+ng forward their child how do you call them?'

'Stage mothers,' my mother said, with a light laugh, breaking up the Slavic angst a bit. She put her hand on my father's head and pushed his hair back from the dark purple scar that could never be removed from our lives. With a sad smile, she told him, 'But you've paid for your crime, I think.'

Then Mother turned to me. 'I don't want to replace your father as your Svengali,' she said, 'but there is that other Game that we need to discuss, and I'm afraid we must do it right now. I've had little time to discover just how much you know. But you were able to decipher all the messages I left you, weren't you? Especially the first one?'

'The chessboard is the key,' I said.

Then she did the oddest thing. She released my father, put her arms around me in a crus.h.i.+ng embrace, and said in my ear, 'Whatever happens, that's my gift to you.'

Then she let me go, and she beckoned for the others to join us.

'Lily has a place on the water, on Vancouver Island,' she told us. 'We are going there for a while the three of us. And Zsa-Zsa.' She scruffled the dog's head and Zsa-Zsa wriggled in Lily's arms. 'Nokomis has agreed to fly us there from here and to have Lily's car s.h.i.+pped back east. For the time being, only this group will know where we are, until we are sure of my husband's condition. And Lily will contact Nim about it, in person, as soon as she returns to New York.'

Then Mother looked at Vartan and me. 'How much have you read of Galen's papers?'

'All of them,' said Vartan. 'How he helped to rescue the girl, how he obtained from her the true Black Queen of the Sufis, how he used it to help his mother solve the formula, and how, in the end, he drank the elixir himself. When combined with the story that Lily had already told us about Mireille, Charlot's mother, it was truly awful. To live forever, always at risk and in fear. And to understand that you will be forever alone with the knowledge that you, yourself, have created-'

'But there's more,' my mother cut in. 'I've just given Xie the key to all the rest. If you do replace Galen as White King, and if Alexandra agrees to take my place, then perhaps at last you two will be the ones who'll be able to provide the solution to those who will understand the appropriate thing to do with it.'

To me she said, 'Just remember one thing, my love: the card that Tatiana Solarin gave you so long ago in Russia. On one side lies freedom. On the other lies eternity. The choice is everything.' Then, as Key routed the others onto the plane, Mother said to us with a smile, her eyes a bit misty, 'But both of you will know where to find me, should you have any questions about the instructions.'

Tail winds from west to east cut our flying time like crazy. Three hours to Seattle and four and a half from there to D.C. So even though we lost three hours in time zone translation, it was just closing on dinnertime Monday night one week after 'that night in Baghdad' when Vartan and I walked into my apartment.

He dropped the one duffel bag with our belongings on the floor and folded me into his arms. 'I don't care what happens by tomorrow,' he murmured into my hair. 'Tonight we start our serious home studies on those instructions your parents were showing us. That looked like something I really want to learn.'

'Dinner first,' I said. 'I don't know what food is here, but I don't want you collapsing from hunger when we're just getting started on our homework.'

I went off to the kitchen and pulled down some cans and boxes of pasta. 'It's spaghetti,' I said as I leaned out the door.

Vartan was standing in the living room, looking down at the chessboard that Nim had left set up there on my round oak table.

'Have you ever had regrets about that last game?' he asked. He looked up at me. 'Oh, I don't of course mean regrets about your father, or of all that came after. I mean regrets that you and I never were given the chance to play that game at all.'

'Did I regret it? Bitterly,' I said with a smile. 'That game was my one last opportunity to churn you into creamed b.u.t.termilk.'

'Then let's do it,' he suggested.

'Do what?'

'Let's play it now,' Vartan said. 'I know that you're out of practice, but it might do you some good to play just this once.'

He plucked the white and black queens from the board and mixed them behind his back. Then he held out his two fists to me, the queens concealed inside.

'This is crazy,' I said.

But I tapped his right hand, feeling myself a little tingly all over.

When he opened it, the white queen sat on his palm. Vartan handed her to me. Then he seated himself at the far side of the table, where the black pieces were and set his queen in situ. 'Your move,' Vartan said, gesturing for me to take my place in the chair opposite.

The moment I'd taken my seat and I'd set the white queen in her place on the board, it was as if something clicked to life inside of me. I forgot that I hadn't sat before a chessboard in more than ten years. I felt energy flooding through me, crackling with potentialities, my brain calibrating just like Key's Fourier transform and Maxwellian equations, and calculating those infinitely rolling waves of heat and light and sound and lasers and high infrared vibrations that no one could see or hear.

I picked up the knight and put it on d4.

I was still looking at the board some moments later when I realized that Vartan hadn't yet made his opening move. I looked up and saw that he was watching me with a strange expression I couldn't fathom.

'Your move,' I pointed out.

'Maybe this was a poor idea,' he told me.

'No, it was a good one,' I said, feeling thoroughly juiced. 'Go on, go ahead.'

'Alexandra,' he said, 'I've been playing in compet.i.tion all these past ten years, you know. My ELO is far above twenty-six hundred. You simply can't defeat me with the King's Indian, if that's what you think.'

It had always been my favorite, so neither of us needed him to add, You couldn't last time, either.

'I don't care whether or how I defeat you,' I told him. I lied. 'But if you prefer, just reply with a different defense.' I couldn't believe we were discussing this instead of playing.

'I'm afraid I don't even know how to lose,' Vartan said with an apologetic smile, as if he'd just realized what he was doing. 'Far less how to lose graciously. You know that I can't simply throw this, even if I wanted to, just to make you feel good.'

'Fine you can throw a tantrum instead, when I beat you,' I said. 'Just play.'

With some reluctance he moved his knight out, and we were on.

In fact, on his next move he did adopt another defense than expected he played p.a.w.n to e6! The Queen's Indian! I tried not to show my excitement. For this was exactly what my father and I had planned and hoped and strategized and rehea.r.s.ed for, when I was to play White at Zagorsk!

And since every possible reply to this defense had been etched into my brain, ever since my childhood, I was well prepared to pull out my big guns, should anyone ever have used it against me. Vartan had told me back in Wyoming that timing was everything, hadn't he?

Well, now was the time.

Life imitates art. Reality imitates chess.

On the ninth move, I threw my wrench into Vartan's machinery. I slid out my knight's p.a.w.n g2 to g4.

Vartan looked up at me in surprise and let out a short laugh. He'd clearly forgotten that this was supposed to be a serious game. 'You never played that move in your life,' he said. 'Who do you think you are a little Kasparov?'

'No,' I said, keeping my poker face in place. 'I'm a little Solarin. And I believe it's your move.'

He shook his head, still laughing but now, for once, he was paying more attention to the board than to me.

Chess is an interesting game that never stops providing lessons in how the human mind works. I knew, for instance, that Vartan had the advantage of a brain jam-packed with ten years of variations that I'd never even heard of. In those ten years, he had played against the best players in the field, and more often than not he'd won.

But weak though my position against his might be in these respects, I knew that right now I held the advantage of surprise. When Vartan first sat down to this chessboard he thought he was playing against that traumatized, twelve-year-old chess dropout he'd fallen in love with and whom he hoped not to harm emotionally any further than he could help. But with one unantic.i.p.ated p.a.w.n move, he'd suddenly discovered that he was playing a game that if he didn't start paying sharp attention, and quickly he might actually lose.

It felt great.

But I knew I had to deep-six all my euphoria or I'd never make it through this game. After all and I'd bet my bippy on it, as Key would say with Vartan's encyclopedic memory storage and vast experience called 'tacit knowing' in chess he could instantly recall all the variations on that last move of mine, same as any others. But it's known that masters tend to focus on what is abnormal but then to recall what is normal. So I'd have to fool with his mind, muck up that carefully honed intuition.

I had only one trick tucked up my sleeve that might yet save me, one that my father had given me, a technique that he'd shared with no one as far as I knew. And I knew it was something that was hardly part of the normal toolbox of standard chess training. For years, I'd actually been afraid to deploy it, because of my so-called Amaurosis Scacchistica, which had even overcome me during tournament play. Indeed, I'd wondered if it wasn't this technique of my father's itself that might've caused my chess blindness because of how it sometimes turned everything topsy-turvy.

Everyone knows, my father had told me ever since I was small, that if one of your positions is threatened, you have two choices of a response: either to defend or to attack. But there is another option no one ever thinks of: to ask the pieces for their own opinion of the situation that they find themselves in.

This made enormous sense to a child. He meant that, although each position you find yourself in might have its strong or weak points in terms of attack or defense of the overall board, when it came to the pieces, the situation was completely different. For a chess piece, such strengths and weaknesses are part and parcel of its very nature, of its persona. They are its modus operandi, both the freedom and the limitations of how that piece moves around within its seemingly closed black-and-white world.

Once my father had pointed this out, I could quickly see, for instance, that when a queen was threatening a knight, the knight couldn't threaten the queen back. Or when a rook is attacking a bishop, the bishop's in no position to attack the rook. Even the queen, the most powerful piece on the board, can't afford to pause very long on an oblique square that's smack in the oncoming path of a lowly p.a.w.n, or she'll get nailed. Each piece's weakness in terms of its natural limitations, of how it could be trapped or attacked was also its strength when it was attacking someone else.

What my father liked was to find situations where you could exploit these innate traits in concert, in an aggressive all-out tactical bombardment a true revelation to a fearless six-year-old child, and one that I hoped I could use today. I'd always been more of a close-in, hand-to-hand tactical player anyway. And I knew just in order to tie with Vartan Azov I definitely needed a few more surprises.

After what seemed a very long time, I glanced up. Vartan was looking at me with a strange expression.

'Astonis.h.i.+ng,' he said. 'But why haven't you said it?'

'Why haven't you moved?' I wanted to know.

'All right,' he agreed. 'So I shall then make the only move that's open to me.'

Vartan reached out with one long fingertip and toppled his king. 'You failed to mention that you had me in checkmate,' he told me.

I stared at the board. It took me a full fifteen seconds to find it.

'You didn't see it?' he asked in amazement.

I was in a kind of giddy shock. 'I guess I need a little more coaching before I jump back into the big time,' I admitted.

'Then how did you do it?' he asked.

'It's a strange technique of looking at the game that my father taught me when I was little,' I said. 'But it seems sometimes to backfire, once it gets inside my synapses.'

'Whatever it is,' Vartan said with a widening grin, 'I think you had better teach this "technique" to me. It's the only time in my life that I never really saw it coming.'

'I didn't either,' I confessed. 'And when I lost that last game to you in Moscow, it was the same thing Amaurosis Scacchistica. I've never wanted to discuss it with anyone, but I admit that wasn't the first time it happened.'

'Xie, listen to me,' Vartan said, coming around the table to take my hands. He pulled me to my feet. 'Every player knows that chess blindness can strike anybody, anywhere, and at any time. Each time it happens, you curse yourself. But it's a mistake ever to believe that it's some special curse from the G.o.ds that was reserved just for you. You had already left the game before you were able to discover that on your own.

'Now,' he told me, 'I want you to look at this board. What you did just now was very strong, and not just an accident. Maybe not a sophisticated strategy either. In fact, I've never seen it before. It was more a case of tactics flying everywhere, like bits of shrapnel. But it took me completely off guard.' He paused till he got my complete attention. Then he added, 'And you won.'

'But if I don't recall how-' I began.

'Go on,' he said. 'That's why I want you to sit here and study it as long as it takes you, to reconstruct everything till you know how you got there. Otherwise, it'll be like falling from a horse. If you don't remount at once, you become afraid to ride.'

I'd been afraid to ride for more than ten years of acc.u.mulated fear and guilt, ever since Zagorsk, and maybe even earlier. But I did know that Vartan was right about this: I would always be left lying in the dust behind that fleeing horse until I really knew.