The Fire
I heard a phone ringing.
It took me a moment to realize this time it wasn’t the desk phone, it was the cell phone in my trouser pocket. I was surprised it even worked in this remote region of Colorado. In fact, I’d only given out this number to a handful of people.
I yanked the phone from my pocket and read the incoming caller ID: Rodolfo Boujaron, my boss back in Washington, D.C. Rodo would just be arriving for work at his famous restaurant, Sutalde, to learn that the chickadee he believed had been working his night shift had flown the coop.
But in all fairness to myself, if I’d ever had to ask my boss’s permission first, I would likely never have gotten any time off at all. Rodo was a workaholic who thought everyone else should be, too. He liked to keep 24/7 surveillance on all his employees, because ‘the fires must always be stroked,’ as he’d say in that accent, so thick you could cut it with a meat cleaver.
At this moment, however, I was in no mood to deal with Rodo’s rantings, so I waited until I saw the voice message sign pop on my phone screen, then I listened to what he’d recorded:
‘Bonjour, Neskato Geldo!’
That was Rodo’s nickname for me in his native Basque – ‘Little Cinder Girl’ – a reference to my job as a firebird: the person who stokes the coals.
‘So! You are sneaking away in the dead of the night and leaving me to discover Le Cygne this morning, in your place! I hope she will not produce the…aruatza. How you say? The œuf? If she makes the mistake, it’s you who cleans it up! You abandon your post with no warning – for some boum d’anniversaire – so Le Cygne tells me. Very well. But you MUST return back here at the ovens before Monday, to make the new fire. So ungrateful! You will please recollect why you even have a job: that it was I who rescued you from the CIA!’
Rodo clicked off – he was clearly lathering himself into one of his typical Basque-Hispano-French snits. But his blathering wasn’t quite as bizarre as it sounded, once you learned to read Rodo’s multi-lingo-isms:
The ‘Cygne’ – the swan – whom he’d suggested might lay an egg on the night shift during my absence was my colleague, Leda the Lesbian, who’d happily agreed to pinch-hit for me, if necessary, until my return.
When it came to maintaining those huge wood ovens for which the restaurant Sutalde was known (hence its name in Basque: ‘The Hearth’), Leda – as glamorous as she appeared when on display (as she often was) – was no slouch back in the kitchens, either. She swung a mean shovel; she knew the difference between hot ashes and embers. And she preferred taking over my Friday night solo hitch on the graveyard shift, to her customary cocktail-hour duties on the floor of the restaurant, where overjazzed and overpaid male ‘K Street lobbyists’ were always hitting on her.
When it came to Rodo’s comment about gratitude, however, the ‘CIA’ that he’d ‘rescued me from’ was not the Central Intelligence Agency of the U.S. government, but merely the Culinary Institute of America in rural New York – a training ground for master chefs, and the only school I’d ever flunked out of. I’d spent a fruitless six months there just after high school. When I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to study at any college, my uncle Slava felt I should prepare myself to get a job in the only other thing I’d ever known how to do, besides chess – something that Nim had trained me in himself when I was young. That was cooking.
In short order, I’d found the CIA atmosphere a bit like storm trooper boot camp: endless classes in accounting and business management, memorizing vast repertoires – of terminology more than of technique. When I’d dropped out in frustration, feeling I was a failure in everything I’d ever done, Slava urged me into an underpaid apprenticeship – no dropouts, cop-outs, time-outs, or waffling permitted – at the only four-star establishment in the world that specialized exclusively in open-hearth cuisine: that is, cooking with live coals, embers, ash, and fire.
But now, almost four years into my five-year contract, if I took a good hard look in the mirror I had to confess that I’d turned into as much of an isolated loner – even living smack in the midst of Our Nation’s Capital – as my mother was, here in hermetic retreat atop her very own Colorado mountain.
In my case, I could explain it away with ease: After all, I was contractually tied to the obsessively slave-driving schedule of Monsieur Rodolfo Boujaron, the restaurateur-entrepreneur who’d become my boss, my mentor, even my landlord. With Rodo standing over me these past four years, cracking the proverbial whip, I’d had no time for a social life.
In fact, my all-consuming job at Sutalde, that my uncle had so prudently locked me into, now provided me exactly the same structure – the practice, the tension, the time clocks – that had been woefully lacking in my life ever since my father had died and I’d had to abandon the game of chess. The task of preparing and maintaining the fire for a full week of cooking each week required all the diligence of minding an infant or tending a flock of young animals: You couldn’t afford to blink.
But if that mirror told me the unblinking truth about myself, I’d have to admit that my job, these past four years, had provided me a lot more than structure or diligence or discipline. Living with the fire as I did – looking into those flames and embers day after day so I could manage their height and heat and strength – had taught me a new way of seeing. And thanks to Rodo’s recent vituperous rantings, I’d just seen something new: I’d seen that my mother might have left me another clue – one that I ought to have noticed the very moment I walked in the door.
The fire. Under the circumstances, how could it be here at all?
I hunkered down beside the hearth for a better look at the log in the pit. It was a seasoned white pine of at least thirty caliper inches – a log that would burn faster than a denser hardwood from a broadleaf tree. Though it was clear that my mother, as a mountain girl, knew plenty about building fires, how could she have created this fire without prior planning – not to mention without loads of assistance?
In the hour or so I’d been here, no one had applied fresh kindling, enlivened the embers with a bellows or blowpipe – nothing to speed the intensity of the heat. Yet this fire was a pretty mature one with flames six inches high, which meant that it had been burning for three hours. Given the steady, even nature of the flame, somebody had stayed around tending this fire for well over an hour until it was really established.
I checked my watch. This meant that my mother must have vanished from the lodge even more recently than it had first appeared – perhaps only half an hour before I’d arrived. But if so – vanished to where? And was she alone? And if she – or they – had departed by a door or a window, why were there no tracks, other than mine, in the snow?
My head was aching from this cacophany of clues that all seemed to lead toward nothing more than background noise. But then, yet another sour note leapt out at me: Just how had my boss Rodo known that I’d left to attend a ‘boum anniversaire,’ as he called it – a birthday party? Given Mother’s lifelong reluctance about even mentioning her birth date, I’d told no one why I was leaving or where I was going – not even Leda the Swan, as Rodo’s message said. No matter how contradictory things might appear, I knew there must be a theme to my mother’s disappearance hidden here somewhere. And there was one more place that I hadn’t yet searched.
I plunged my hand into my pocket and grabbed the wooden chess queen I’d rescued from the billiard table. With my thumbnail, I scraped off the bottom circle of felt. Within the hollowed-out queen, I saw that something hard and firm had been inserted. I jimmied it out: a tiny bit of cardboard. I took it over to the window light and pried it open. When I read the three words printed there, I nearly fainted.
Beside it were the faded traces of the phoenix – just as I remembered from that bleak, awful day at Zagorsk. I remembered that I’d found it in my pocket then, too. The bird seemed to be flying up to heaven, enshrined in an eight-pointed star.
I could scarcely breathe. But before I could come to grips with anything – before I could fathom what in God’s name this might mean – I heard the sound of a car horn outside.
I looked out the window and saw Key’s Toyota pulling up into the snowy parking space, just behind my car. Key emerged from the driver’s side, followed by – from the backseat – a man dressed in furs who helped out my aunt Lily, similarly attired. All three of them were headed straight for the front door.
In panic, I shoved the cardboard back into my pocket, along with the chess piece. I raced to the mudroom; the outer doors were just swinging open. Before I could speak, my eyes flashed past the two women – right to the ‘gigolo’ of my aunt Lily.
As he stepped over the threshhold, he was shaking loose snow from the high fur collar of his coat. His eyes met mine, and he smiled – a cold smile, a smile filled with danger. It was no more than an instant before I understood why.
Standing there before me, in my mother’s isolated mountain retreat, as if we two were completely alone in time and space, was the man who had killed my father.
The boy who had won the Last Game. Vartan Azov.
Black and White
It is here that the symbolism of black and white, already present in the squares of the chess board, takes on its full value: the white army is that of light, the black army is that of darkness…each of which is fighting in the name of a principle, or that of the spirit and darkness in man; these are the two forms of the “holy war”: the “lesser holy war” and the “greater holy war,” according to a saying of the prophet Mohammed…
In a holy war it is possible that each of the combatants may legitimately consider himself as the protagonist of Light fighting the darkness. This again is the conse-quence of the double meaning of every symbol: what for one is the expression of the Spirit, may be the image of dark “matter” in the eyes of the other.
– Titus Burckhardt, The Symbolism of Chess
Everything looks worse in black and white.
– Paul Simon, Kodachrome
Time had stopped. I was lost.
My eyes were locked with those of Vartan Azov – dark purple, nearly black, and bottomless as a pit. I could see those eyes as they gazed at me across a chessboard. When I was a child of eleven, his eyes hadn’t frightened me. Why should they terrify me now?
Yet I could feel myself slipping down – a kind of vertigo, as if I were sliding into a deep, dark hole where there was no way out. Just as I’d experienced so many years ago, in that one awful instant in the game when I’d understood what I had done. I could feel my father then, watching me from across that room as I had slowly plummeted into psychological space, out of control, falling and falling – like that boy with wings who’d flown too near the sun.
Vartan Azov’s eyes were unblinking now, as always, as he stood there in my mudroom looking over the heads of Lily and Nokomis, looking directly at me as if we were completely alone, as if there were only the two of us in the world, in an intimate dance. With the black-and-white squares of a chessboard in between. What game had we been playing then? What game were we playing now?
‘You know what they say,’ Nokomis announced, breaking the spell as she tilted her head toward Vartan and Lily. ‘Politics makes strange bedfellows.’
She’d kicked off her boots, tossed off her parka, yanked off her cap – releasing that waterfall of black hair that tumbled to her waist – and she was marching from the mudroom past me in her stocking feet. She plopped down on the hearth wall, shot me a wry smile, and added, ‘Or perhaps the motto of the United States Marine Corps?’
‘‘Many are called but few are chosen’?’ I guessed gamely, knowing my friend’s compulsive predilection for epigrammatizing. I actually felt relieved, for once, to play her game. But she could tell by my face that something was not as it seemed.
‘Nope,’ she said with raised brow. ‘ ‘We’re just looking for a few good men.’ ‘
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ asked Lily as she stepped into the room. She had stripped to her skintight ski outfit, which clung to every curve.
‘Consorting with the enemy,’ I suggested, indicating Vartan. I grabbed Lily by the arm, took her aside, and hissed, ‘Have you blanked out all of the past? What were you thinking, bringing him along? Besides, he’s young enough to be your son!’
‘Grandmaster Azov is my protégé,’ Lily announced indignantly.
‘Is that what they’re calling them these days?’ I cited Key’s earlier observation.
Pretty unlikely, since Lily and I both knew that Azov’s ELO ranking was two hundred points higher than hers had ever been.
‘He’s a grandmaster?’ said Key. ‘Grandmaster of what?’
I let that pass, since Mother had eradicated all mention of chess from our family vocabulary. Lily remained undaunted – though she was about to unload some further unexpected information to my already overloaded brain.
‘Please don’t blame me for Vartan’s presence here,’ she informed me calmly. ‘After all – your mother invited him! All I did was to give him a ride!’
Just as I was recovering from that broadside, a small, damp rodent – about four inches tall and sporting soggy, fuchsia hair ribbons – came barreling into the room. The disgusting beast flew into the air and leapt into Aunt Lily’s waiting arms. It lapped her face with its equally bright pink tongue.
‘My darling Zsa-Zsa,’ said Aunt Lily, cooing at the beast, ‘you and Alexandra haven’t been introduced! She would love to hold you for a moment, wouldn’t she?’ And before I could protest, she’d palmed the writhing thing off to me.
‘I’m afraid I’m still searching for a line for this one,’ Key admitted, watching our doggie display with amusement.
‘How about “Familiarity breeds contempt”?’ I quipped. But I should never have opened my mouth: The revolting dog tried to stick its tongue beween my teeth. I tossed it back to Lily in disgust.
While we three were playing patty-cake, my archnemesis Vartan Azov had likewise removed his furs and stepped into the room. He was dressed all in black, a turtleneck sweater and slim trousers, with a simple gold neck chain that cost more than any chess tournament winnings I’d ever heard of. He ran his hand through his unruly mop of black curls, as he was gazing around at the totem carvings and sweeping expanse of our family lodge.
I could certainly see why his appearance had stopped traffic at the Mother Lode. Apparently, over the past decade my erstwhile opponent had been working out with something more physically strenuous than a chessboard. But pretty is as pretty does, as Key might say. His good looks didn’t make his presence here – most especially under these circumstances – any more palatable to me. Why on earth would my mother invite here the very man whose last appearance in our lives had heralded the end of my chess career and resulted in my father’s death?
Vartan Azov was crossing the room directly to where I stood beside the fire – there seemed to be no avenue of escape.
‘This is a remarkable house,’ he said, in that soft Ukrainian accent – a voice that had always seemed so sinister when he was a boy. He was looking up toward the skylights filled with rosy light. ‘I’ve not seen anything like it anywhere. The front doors – the stonework, these carved animals looking down upon us. Who built it all?’
Nokomis answered; it was a well-known tale in these parts.
‘This place is legendary,’ she said. ‘It was the last joint project – maybe the only joint project – between the Diné and the Hopi. They’ve been fighting turf wars over the outside cattle and oil intruders ever since. They built this lodge for Alexandra’s ancestor. They say she was the first Anglo medicine woman.’
‘My mother’s great-grandmother,’ I added, ‘a real character, by all accounts. She was born in a covered wagon and stayed on to study the local pharmaceuticals industry.’
Lily rolled her eyes at me, as if to suggest it must’ve been mainly hallucinogenic mushrooms, if the decor was any indication.
‘I can’t believe it,’ my aunt chimed in. ‘How could Cat have been holed up here all these years? Charm is one thing, but what about the amenities?’ She strolled around the room with Zsa-Zsa wriggling beneath her arm, and with one bloodred-lacquered fingernail she left a trail through the furniture dust. ‘I mean, the important questions. Where’s the nearest beauty salon? Who picks up and delivers the laundry?’
‘Not to mention where’s the so-called kitchen,’ I agreed, motioning to the hearth. ‘Mother is not exactly prepared for entertaining.’ Which only served to make this birthday boum all the stranger still.
‘I’ve never met your mother,’ Vartan commented, ‘though naturally, I was a great admirer of your father. I would never have imposed upon you like this, but I was so honored when she offered her invitation to stay here—’
‘Stay here?’ I said, nearly choking on the words.
‘Cat insisted that we must stay here at the house,’ Lily confirmed. ‘She said there was plenty of room for everyone, and that there were no decent hotels nearby.’
Right on both counts – unfortunately for me. But there was another problem, as Lily was quick to point out.
‘It seems that Cat still hasn’t returned from her outing. That isn’t like her,’ she said. ‘After all, we’ve dropped everything to come here. Has she left any inkling that might explain why she invited us all, and then left?’
‘Nothing conspicuous,’ I said evasively. What else could I say?
Thank God I’d had the presence of mind to stash that lethal game in the pillow sack before Vartan Azov landed on my doorstep. But Mother’s encrypted note atop the piano, along with the hollow black queen and her contents, were still burning a hole in my pocket. Not to mention my brain.
How could a cardboard plaque suddenly surface here when, so far as I knew, it was only seen by my father and me ten years ago and thousands of miles away? In the shock and pandemonium following my father’s death at Zagorsk, I’d hardly thought of that strange woman and the message she’d handed me just before the game. Then later, I’d assumed the card had disappeared, just as she had. Until now.
I needed to get Vartan Azov out of the way – and quickly – so I could broach some of these issues with my aunt. But before I could think how, I saw that Lily had halted before the British campaign desk and set Zsa-Zsa down on the floor. She was following with her fingertips the trail of wire that led from the telephone to a hole in the side of the desk. She yanked at the drawer, to no avail.
‘Those damned drawers always stick,’ I told her from across the room. But my heart was churning again: How could I not have thought of something so obvious first? Inside that drawer was my mother’s rustic answering machine. I went over as Lily pried the drawer open with a letter opener. This certainly wasn’t my choice of audience to listen to Mother’s private tape, but beggars can’t be choosers, as Key would say.
Lily glanced up at me and pushed the Play button. Vartan and Nokomis came over to join us at the desk.
There were the two messages I’d left from D.C., then a few from Aunt Lily – in her case, moaning about having to make a trip into the ‘Wasteland,’ as she referred to Mother’s remote mountain hideaway. I was in for a few unpleasant surprises, starting with another ‘birthday invitee’ – a voice that, unfortunately, I knew only too well:
‘Catherine, dearest,’ came the affected, upper-class accent of our nearest neighbor (which is to say, five thousand acres away), Rosemary Livingston – a voice rendered perhaps even more abrasive than usual by the scratchy tape.
‘How I HATE the idea of missing your WONDERFUL soiree!’ Rosemary oozed. ‘Basil and I shall be away. But Sage will be thrilled to come – with bells on! And our new neighbor says to tell you that he can make it, too. Toodle-oo!’
The only proposition less pleasant than spending time with the boring, officious billionaire Basil Livingston and his status-hunting wife, Rosemary, was the idea of being forced to pass even an instant more time with their pretentious daughter, Sage – the professional prom queen and emerita Pep Club president – who had already tortured me through six years of grammar school and high school. Especially a Sage, as Rosemary had mentioned, ‘with bells on.’
But at least it sounded like we had a brief respite before her descent upon us, if the planned party was to be a soiree and not an afternoon gig.
My big question was why the Livingstons had been invited at all, given my mother’s strong distaste for how Basil Livingston had raked in his several fortunes – mostly at civilization’s expense.
In brief, as an early venture capitalist, Basil had deployed his control of OPM (Other People’s Money) to buy up huge chunks of the Colorado Plateau and turn it over to oil development – including lands that were contested as sacred by the local Indian tribes. These were some of the turf wars that Key had alluded to.
As for inviting this ‘new neighbor’ that Rosemary had mentioned – what on earth was Mother thinking? – she’d never fraternized with the locals. This birthday bash was starting to sound more and more like the makings of an Alice in Wonderland party: Anything might crawl out from under the nearest teacup.
And the next message – the unfamiliar voice of a man with a German accent – only served to confirm my worst fears:
‘Grüssgott, mein Liebchen,’ the caller said. ‘Ich bedaure sehr…Ja – please excuse – my English is not so good. I hope you will be understanding of all of my meanings. This is your old friend Professor Wittgenstein, from Vienna. I am in great surprise to learn of your party. When did you plan it? I hope you will receive the gift I sent in time for the important day. Please open it at once so that the contents do not spoil. I regret that I cannot come – a true sacrifice. For my absence, my only defense is that I must attend the King’s Chess Tourney, in India…’
I felt that old danger signal coming on again, as I pushed the machine’s Pause button and glanced up at Lily. Fortunately, she seemed, for the moment, completely at sea. But it was clear to me that there were a few too many dangling key words here – the most obvious, of course, being ‘chess.’
As for the mysterious ‘Professor Wittgenstein of Vienna,’ I wasn’t sure how long it had taken Mother to catch on, or how quickly Lily would guess. But, accent or no, it had taken me exactly twelve seconds to ‘understand all of his meanings’ – including who the caller actually was.
The real Ludwig von Wittgenstein – the eminent Viennese philosopher – had by now been dead for more than fifty years. He was famous for his incomprehensible works like the Tractatus. But more to the purpose of this message were the two obscure texts that Wittgenstein had privately printed and given to his students at Cambridge University in England. These were in two small notebooks bound with paper covers – one colored brown and the other blue – which were ever thereafter called ‘The Blue and Brown Books.’ Their main topic was language games.
Lily and I were acquainted, of course, with someone who was an obsessive devotee of such games, and who’d even published a tractatus or two of his own, including one on the subject of these very Wittgenstein texts. The clincher was that he was also born with the genetic idiosyncrasy of one blue eye and one brown one. This was my uncle Slava: Dr Ladislaus Nim.