The Fire
The octagon was a room perhaps one hundred feet across and thirty feet high. The fire pit took up the center, with a copper hood above it, hung with pots, rising to the moss rock chimney that pulled smoke upward to the sky. It was like an enormous teepee, except for the massive furniture scattered everywhere. My mother had always been averse to things one might actually sit on – but there was our ebony parlor grand piano, a sideboard, an assortment of desks, library tables, and revolving bookcases, and a billiard table that no one ever played on.
The upper floor was an octagonal balcony that overhung the room. There were small chambers there where people could sleep and even, sometimes, bathe.
Molten light poured through the lower windows at every side, glittering across the dust that draped the mahogany. From the ceiling skylights, rosy morning light sifted down, picking out the features of the colorfully painted heads of animal totems that were carved into the enormous beams supporting the balcony: bear, wolf, eagle, stag, buffalo, goat, cougar, ram. From their lofty perspective, nearly twenty feet high, they seemed to be floating timelessly in space. Everything seemed to be frozen in time. The only sound was the occasional cracking of fire from the log.
I walked around the perimeter, from one window to another, looking out at the snow: except for mine, there was not one print to be seen anywhere. I went up the spiral stairs to the balcony and checked each partitioned sleeping space. Not the slightest trace.
But how had she done it?
It appeared that my mother, Cat Velis, had vanished into thin air.
A jarring noise broke the silence: A telephone was ringing. I dashed down the steep, twisted stair and snatched the receiver from atop Mother’s British campaign desk, just before the machine kicked in.
‘Good Lord, what were you thinking, darling, choosing this godforsaken spot?’ came the throaty voice, tinted with a bit of British accent, of a woman I knew only too well. ‘And for that matter, where on earth are you? We’ve been driving around this wilderness for what seems days!’ There was a pause, when she seemed to be speaking aside to someone else.
‘Aunt Lily?’ I said.
For it was surely she – my aunt, Lily Rad – my first chess mentor and still one of the top women grandmasters in the game. Once, she’d been my mother’s best friend, though they hadn’t touched base in years. But what was she doing calling here now? And driving around – what on earth did that mean?
‘Alexandra?’ said Lily, confused. ‘I thought I was phoning your mother. What are you doing there? I thought you and she weren’t…on the best of terms.’
‘We’ve reconciled,’ I said hastily, not wanting to open that can of worms again. ‘But Mother doesn’t seem to be here right now. And where exactly are you?’
‘She’s not there?! You can’t be serious,’ Lily said, fuming. ‘I’ve come all the way from London just to see her. She insisted! Something about a birthday party – God knows what that means. As for where I am right now, it is anyone’s guess! The satellite positioning system on my automobile keeps insisting that I’m in Purgatory – and I’m fully able to accept that judgment. We haven’t seen anything resembling civilization for hours.’
‘You’re here? In Purgatory?’ I said. ‘That’s a ski area – it’s less than an hour from here.’ But it seemed crazy: The top female British-American chess champion came from London to Purgatory, Colorado, to attend a birthday party? ‘When did mother invite you?’
‘It wasn’t so much an invitation as an edict,’ Lily admitted. ‘She left the news on my cell phone, with no means to reply.’ There was a pause. Then Lily added, ‘I adore your mother – you know that, Alexandra. But I could never accept—’
‘Neither could I,’ I said. ‘Let’s drop it. So how did you know how to find her?’
‘I didn’t! Good God, I STILL DON’T! My car’s by the road someplace near a town that promotes itself as the next stop from Hell; there’s no edible food; my driver refuses to budge without being given a pint of vodka; my dog has disappeared into some…dune of snow – chasing some local rodent…AND – I might add – I have had more trouble locating your mother by phone, this past week, than the Mossad had in tracking down Dr Mengele in South America!’
She was hyperventilating. I considered it was time to intervene.
‘It’s okay, Aunt Lily,’ I told her. ‘We’ll get you here. As for food, you know I can whip something up. There’s always plenty of tinned food here and vodka for your driver – we can put him up, too, if you like. I’m too far away, it would take too long to reach you. But if you’ll give me your satellite coordinates, I’ve a friend quite near there who can escort you here to the lodge.’
‘Whomever he may be, bless him,’ said my aunt Lily, not a person normally given to gratitude.
‘It’s a she,’ I said. ‘And her name is Key. She’ll be there in half an hour.’ I took down Lily’s mobile number and left a message at the airstrip to arrange for Key to pick her up. Key had been my best friend since childhood, but she’d be more than surprised to learn that I’d turned up here with no warning after all this time.
As I hung up the phone, I saw something across the room that I hadn’t noticed before. The top of Mother’s parlor grand piano – which was always raised, in case she got the urge to play – had been lowered flat. Atop was a piece of paper with a round, dark weight set upon it. I went over to look, and I felt the blood flooding into my brain.
The paperweight was overt enough: Propped on a metal key ring, to keep it from rolling, was the eight ball from our billard table. The note itself was definitely from my mother; the code was so simplistic that no one else could have invented it. I saw how hard she’d worked to communicate cryptically, clearly with no help.
The note, in large print, read:
WASHINGTON
LUXURY CAR
VIRGIN ISLES
ELVIS LIVES
AS ABOVE, SO BELOW
The Elvis part was simple: my mother’s last name – Velis – was spelled two different ways to show it was from her. As if I needed that helpful clue. The rest was a lot more upsetting. And not because of the code.
Washington was, of course, ‘DC’; Luxury Car was ‘LX’; Virgin Isles was ‘VI.’ Together, in Roman numerals (as they clearly were), their numeric value was:
D = 500
C = 100
L = 50
X = 10
V = 5
I = 1
Tally them up, and it’s ‘666’ – the Number of the Beast from the apocalypse.
I wasn’t worried about that Beast – we had plenty of those protecting us, scattered about the lodge as our animal totems. But for the first time, I was truly worried about my mother.
Why had she used this hackneyed pseudomillennial ruse to grab my attention? What about the paperweight on top – another standard bunkum, ‘Behind the eight ball’ – what on earth did that mean?
And what should one make of that old alchemical drivel, ‘As above, so below’?
Then, of course, I got it. I removed the eight ball and the bit of paper, setting them on the keyboard music stand, and I opened the piano. Before I could set the strut in place, I nearly dropped the lid.
There, inside the hollow body of the instrument, I saw something I thought I would never, ever see again inside my mother’s house as long as she lived.
A chess set.
Not just a chess set – but a chess set with a game set up, a game that had been partially in play. There were pieces here that had been removed from the field of play and were set out upon the keyboard strings at either side – black or white.
The first thing I noticed was that the Black Queen was missing. I glanced over at the billiard table – good heavens, Mother, really! – and saw that the missing queen had been placed in the rack where the eight ball was supposed to be.
It was something like being drawn into a vortex. I began to feel the game in play. Good Lord, how I had missed this. How had I been able to leave it behind me? It was nothing like a drug at all, as people sometimes said. It was an infusion of life.
I forgot the pieces that were off the board or behind the eight ball; I could reconstruct everything from the patterns that were still there. For several long moments, I forgot my missing mother, my aunt Lily lost in Purgatory with her chauffeur, her dog, and her car. I forgot what I’d sacrificed – what my life had become against my will. I forgot everything except the game before me – the game cached away like a dark secret, in the belly of that piano.
But as I reconstructed the moves, the dawn arose through the high glass windows – just as a sobering realization dawned within my mind. I could not stop the horror of this game. How could I stop it, when I had replayed it over and over again in my mind these past ten years?
For I knew this game quite well.
It was the game that had killed my father.
The Pit
Mozart: Confutatus Maledictum – how would you translate that?
Salieri: ‘Consigned to the flames of woe.’
Mozart: Do you believe in it?
Salieri: What?
Mozart: The fire that never dies, burning you forever.
Salieri: Oh, yes…
– Peter Shaffer, Amadeus
Deep in the pit of the hearth, the fire spilled over the sides of the giant log like liquid heat. I sat on the moss rock fireplace ledge, and I gazed down mindlessly. I was lost in a daze, trying hard not to remember.
But how could I forget?
Ten years. Ten years had passed – ten years during which I’d believed I had managed to repress, to camouflage, to bury a feeling that had nearly buried me, a feeling that emerged in that splinter of a second just before it happened. That frozen fragment of a moment when you still think that you have all of your life, your future, your promise before you, when you can still imagine – how would my friend Key put it? – that ‘the world is your oyster.’ And that it will never snap shut.
But then you see the hand with the gun. Then it happens. Then it’s finished. Then there is no present anymore – only the past and future, only before and after. Only the ‘then,’ and…then what?
This was the thing we never spoke of. This was the thing I never thought about. Now that my mother, Cat, had vanished, now that she’d left that murderous message lodged in the bowels of her favorite piano, I understood her unspoken language, loud and clear: You must think about it.
But here was my question: How do you think of your own small, eleven-year-old self, standing there on those cold, hard marble steps in that cold, hard foreign land? How do you think of yourself, trapped inside the stone walls of a Russian monastery, miles from Moscow and thousands of miles from anyplace or anyone you know? How do you think of your father, killed by a sniper’s bullet? A bullet that may have been intended for you? A bullet that your mother always believed was intended for you?
How do you think of your father, collapsing in a pool of blood – blood that you watch in a kind of horror, as it soaks into and mingles with the dirty Russian snow? How do you think of the body lying on the steps – the body of your father as his life slips away – with his gloved fingers still clinging to your own small, mittened hand?
The truth of the matter was, my father wasn’t the only one who had lost his future and his life that day, ten years ago, on those steps in Russia. The truth was, I had lost mine, too. At the age of eleven, I’d been blindsided by life: Amaurosis Scacchistica – an occupational hazard.
And now, I had to admit what that truth really was: It wasn’t my father’s death or my mother’s fears that had caused me to give up the game. The truth was –
Okay. Reality check!
The truth was, I didn’t need the truth. The truth was, I couldn’t afford this self-examination right now. I tried to squash that instant rush of adrenaline that had always accompanied any glimpse, however brief, into my own past. The truth was: My father was dead and my mother was missing and a chess game that someone had set up inside our piano suggested it all had plenty to do with me.
I knew this lethal game that still lurked there, still ticking away, was more than a gaggle of pawns and pieces. This was the game. The last game. The game that had killed my father.
Whatever the implications of its mysterious appearance here today, this game would always remain etched with acid in my mind. If I’d won this game, back in Moscow, ten years ago, the Russian tournament would have been mine, I’d have made the grade, I would have been the youngest grandmaster in history – just as my father had always wanted. Just as he’d always expected of me.
If I had won this Moscow game, we’d never have gone to Zagorsk for that one final round, that ‘overtime’ game – a game that, due to ‘tragic circumstances,’ was destined never to be played at all.
Its presence here clearly carried some message, like my mother’s other clues, a message that I knew I must decipher before anyone else did.
But there was one thing I knew, above all: Whatever this was, it was no game.
I took a deep breath and stood up from the hearth, nearly conking my head on a hanging copper pot. I yanked it down and slapped it atop the nearby sideboard. Then I went to the parlor grand, unzipped the bench cushion, gathered all the pieces and pawns from the piano strings, and dumped them into the pillow sack along with the board. I left the piano lid propped open as it usually was kept. I zipped up the lumpy pillow and shoved it into the sideboard.
I’d nearly forgotten the ‘missing’ Black Queen. Plucking her from the triangular rack of balls on the billiard table, I put the eight ball back in its proper place. The pyramid of colored balls reminded me of something, but at the moment I couldn’t think what. And perhaps it was my imagination, but the queen seemed slightly weightier than the other pieces, though the circle of felt on the base seemed solid enough. But just as I thought to scratch it off with my thumbnail, the phone started ringing. Recalling that my aunt Lily was about to descend, with chauffeur and yappy dog in tow, I shoved the queen in my pocket along with the bit of paper containing my mother’s ‘encryption,’ dashed to the desk, and caught the phone on the third ring.
‘You’ve been keeping secrets from me’ came the liquid voice of Nokomis Key, my best friend since our youth.
Relief flooded through me. Though we hadn’t spoken in several years, Key was the only person I could think of who might actually figure out a way to solve the quandary I found myself in at this moment. Nothing ever seemed to ruffle Key’s feathers. She’d always been able to solve problems with that same ingenious and ironic detachment in a crisis that Br’er Rabbit possessed. Right now, I hoped she could pull this particular rabbit out of the hat – or in my case, the briar patch – one more time. That’s why I’d asked her to meet Lily and bring her here to the house.
‘Where are you?’ I asked Key. ‘Did you get my message?’
‘You never told me you had an auntie,’ Key said in reply. ‘And what a babe! I found her along the roadside, accompanied by a dog of unidentifiable genetic origin, surrounded by stacks of designer luggage, and plowed into a snowdrift in a quarter-million-dollar car that would do James Bond proud. Not to mention the younger “companion” who looks like he could pull down that much cash each week himself, just by sauntering along the Lido clad in a thong bathing suit.’
‘You’re referring to Lily’s chauffeur?’ I said, astonished.
‘Is that what they call them these days?’ Key laughed.
‘A gigolo? That doesn’t sound much like Lily to me,’ I said.
Nor did it sound like any of a long procession of rigidly formal drivers that my aunt had always employed. Not to mention that the Lily Rad I’d known since my infancy was far too preoccupied with her international image as the Queen of Chess to waste her time, her energy, or her wads of cash on keeping a man. Though I admit, the rest of the Lily scenario – the car, the dog, and the luggage – all rang true.
‘Believe me,’ Key was saying with customary assurance. ‘This guy’s so steamy, he has smoke coming out of his nostrils. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” And your auntie sure looks like she’s been “rode hard and put away wet.”’
Key’s addiction to slogans and colloquialisms was exceeded only by her favorite topic: heavy metal, the kind you drive.
‘But that car in the snowdrift,’ she informed me, practically panting, ‘it’s a Vanquish – Aston Martin’s flagship limited edition.’ She began rattling off numbers, weights, gears, and valves until she caught herself and realized just whom she was talking to. Simplifying it for the mechanically impaired, she added: ‘That monster cruises at a hundred and ninety miles per hour! Enough horses to pull Ophelia from here to China!’
That would be Ophelia Otter – Key’s favorite bush plane, and the only machine she trusted to get into those remote sites where she did her work. But knowing Key, if unfettered, she could go on talking horsepower for hours. I had to rein her in, and fast.
‘So where are they now, the motley crew and their car?’ I pressed, with no small amount of urgency. ‘When I last heard from Lily, she was on her way here for a party – that must’ve been an hour ago. Where is she?’
‘They were hungry. So while my crew’s digging out the car, your aunt and her sidekick are watering and foddering at the Mother Lode,’ Key said.
She meant a restaurant just off the track, which specialized in wild game, and I knew the place well. They had so many horns, antlers, and other cartilaginous display on the walls there that walking through the room without paying attention was as dangerous as running with the bulls at Pamplona.
‘For God’s sake,’ I said, my impatience bubbling over. ‘Just get her here.’
‘I’ll have them at your place within the hour,’ Key assured me. ‘They’re just watering the dog now, and finishing their drinks. The car’s another matter, though: It’ll have to be shipped to Denver for repairs. Right now, I’m at the bar, and they’re still at the table, thick as thieves, whispering and sipping vodkas.’ Key snorted a laugh into the phone.
‘What’s so funny?’ I said, in irritation at this further delay.
Why did Lily – never a drinker – require a booze infusion at ten in the morning? And what about her chauffeur? Though, in fairness to him, it appeared he wouldn’t have much left to be chauffeuring around, if the car was that badly damaged. I confess, I had trouble visualizing my flamboyant, chess-playing aunt, with her de rigueur flawless manicure and exotic clothes – brunching atop the peanut-shell-and-beer-encrusted floors of the Mother Lode, nibbling away at their trademark fare of possum stew, rattlesnake steak, and Rocky Mountain Oysters – the Colorado euphemism for deep-fried bulls’ balls. The image boggled the brain.
‘I don’t get it,’ Key added sotto voce, as if reading my thoughts aloud. ‘I mean, nothing against your auntie – but this guy is pretty hot stuff, like an Italian film star. The staff and the clientele all stopped talking when he walked in, and the waitress is still drooling on her shirtfront. He’s dripping with as many furs as your aunt Lily is, not to mention the designer gold trim and custom-made clothes. This guy could get any babe. So pardon me – can you clarify – exactly what draws him to your aunt?’
‘I guess you were right all along,’ I agreed with a laugh. ‘He’s attracted to her figure.’ When Key said nothing, I added: ‘Fifty million.’
I hung up to the sound of her groans.
I realized that I probably knew Lily Rad better than anyone else could know such an eccentric; despite the difference in our ages, we had much in common. For starters, I knew I owed Lily everything. It was Lily, for instance, who had first discovered my chess abilities when I was only three years old. Who had convinced my father and my uncle that these leanings of mine should be developed and exploited – over my mother’s irritated, and eventually angry, objections.
It was this bond with Lily that made my phone conversation with Key seem so odd. Though I hadn’t seen my aunt in a number of years – and she had also dropped out of the chess world – I found it hard to swallow that a person who’d been an older sister to me, as well as mentor and mother, could suddenly be lobotomized by hormones over some good-looking hunk. No, something was wrong with this picture. Lily just wasn’t the type.
Lily Rad had long earned a reputation as the Elizabeth Taylor of chess. With her voluptuous curves, jewels, furs, designer cars, and cash liquidity bordering upon the obscene, Lily had single-handedly brought glamour to professional chess; she’d filled that enormous black hole of Soviet lassitude – all that remained back in the seventies after Bobby Fischer had departed the game.
But Lily wasn’t all just panache and pizzazz. People had flocked to her games in droves, and not only to observe her cleavage. Thirty years ago, in her chess-playing prime, my aunt Lily had boasted an ELO rating approaching that of the more recent Hungarian chess whizzes, the Polgar sisters. And for twenty of those years, Lily’s best friend and coach – my father, Alexander Solarin – had honed her brilliant defenses and helped keep her star soaring high in the chess empyrean.
After my father’s death, Lily had returned to her former chess coach and mentor: the brilliant chess diagnostician and historian of the ancient art of the game, who happened also to be Lily’s grandfather and her only living relative, Mordecai Rad.
But then, on the morning of her fiftieth birthday, the lights were suddenly and surprisingly extinguished on Lily’s chess marquee.
On the morning of her birthday, so the story goes, Lily was running a bit late for her breakfast appointment with her grandfather. Her chauffeur had pulled the limo from her apartment building out onto Central Park South, and he’d managed to maneuver deftly through the thick morning traffic, down the West Side Highway. They had just passed Canal Street when, up ahead in the sky, they saw the first plane hit the first tower.
Thousands of cars screeched to a halt, the highway in instant gridlock. All drivers were staring up at that long, dark plume of smoke, unfolding like the tail of a big, black bird – a silent omen.
In panic, in the backseat of the limo, Lily tried desperately to tune her TV to the news – any news – but she flipped through the channels in vain. Everything was static. She was going mad.
Her grandfather was at the top of that building. They had an appointment to meet at nine o’clock, at a restaurant called Windows on the World. And Mordecai had a special treat for Lily, something that he wanted to reveal to his only descendant on this special day, her fiftieth birthday: September 11, 2001.
In a way, Lily and I were both orphans. We’d each lost our closest relative, the person who had done the most to train us in our chosen field. I had never questioned for a moment why Lily had closed up her vast apartment on Central Park South that very same week of her grandfather’s death, why she’d packed a single bag – as she later wrote me – and headed for England. Though she bore no great love for the British, Lily had been born in England, her late mother was English, so she carried dual citizenship. She just couldn’t face New York. I’d barely heard a word from her since. Until today.
But at this moment, I knew that the one individual I desperately needed to see – perhaps the only person who knew all the players in our lives, the only one who might hold the key to my mother’s disappearance, perhaps even to those cryptic messages that seemed somehow related to my father’s death – was Lily Rad.