The Fire
Though the child’s father had insisted upon naming the new infant Neapolus after an obscure Egyptian martyr instead of Carlo-Maria, as Letizia herself would have preferred, Letizia had made sure to christen all her daughters with the prenom of Maria: Maria Anna, who would later be known as Elisa, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany; Maria Paula, called Pauline, the Princess Borghese; and Maria Annunziata, later called Caroline, Queen of Naples. And they called her Madame Mère – Our Lady Mother.
The Queen of Heaven had indeed blessed all the girls with health and beauty, while their brother, later known as Napoleon, had given them wealth and power. But none of it was to last. These gifts had all dissipated, just like those roiling mists she still could recall surrounding her native isle of Corsica.
Now, as Madame Mère moved through the flower-filled, candlelit rooms of her vast Roman palazzo, she knew that this world would not last either. Madame Mère knew, with a palpitating heart, that this tribute to the Virgin today might prove to be her last in a very long time. Here she was, an old woman left nearly alone, her family all dead or scattered, dressed in perpetual mourning attire and living in an environment so alien to her, surrounded only by transitory things: wealth, possessions, memories.
But one of those memories may have suddenly come back to haunt her.
For only this morning Letizia had received a message, a hand-delivered note from someone whom she had neither seen nor heard from in all these many years, throughout the rise and fall of the Bonaparte Empire – not since Letizia and her family had departed the wild mountains of Corsica nearly thirty years ago. It was from someone whom Letizia had come to believe, by now, must be dead.
Letizia slipped the note from the bodice of her black mourning dress and read it again – perhaps for the twentieth time since she’d received it this morning. It was not signed, but there could be no mistaking who had written it. It was written in the ancient Tifinagh script, the Tamasheq tongue of the Tuareg Berbers of the deep Sahara. This language had always been a secret code used by only one person in communiqués with her mother’s family.
It was for this reason that Madame Mère had sent urgently for her brother the cardinal to arrive here at once before the other guests. And to bring the Englishwoman along with him – that other Maria who’d just recently returned to Rome. Only these two might be able to help Letizia in her dreadful plight.
For if this man whom they called the Falcon had indeed arisen as if from the dead, Letizia knew precisely what she herself would be called upon to do.
Despite the warmth of the many fires in her chambers, Letizia felt that all too familiar chill from the depths of her own past as she read the fateful lines once more:
The Firebird has arisen. The Eight return.
Tassili n’Agger, The Sahara
Autumn Equinox, 1822
We are immortal, and do not forget, We are eternal, and to us the past Is, as the future, present.
– Lord Byron, Manfred
Charlot stood on the high mesa, surveying the vast red desert. His white burnoose flapped about him in the breeze like the wings of a large bird. His long hair floated free, the color of the coppery sands that stretched before him. Nowhere on earth could one find a desert of this precise hue: the color of blood. The color of life.
This inhospitable spot, high on a cliff in the deepest Sahara, a place where only wild goats and eagles chose to live. It had not always been so. Behind him on the fabled cliffs of the Tassili were five thousand years of carvings and paintings – burnt sienna, ocher, raw umber, white – paintings that told the story of this desert and those who had peopled it in the mists of time, a story that was still unfolding.
This was his birthplace – what the Arabs called one’s watar, or homeland – though he had not been here since he was a babe in arms. Here was where his life had begun, Charlot thought. He was born into the Game. And here, perhaps, was where the Game was destined to end – once he had solved the mystery. That’s why he had returned to this ancient wilderness, this tapestry of brilliant light and of dark secrets: to find the truth.
The desert Berbers believed he was destined to be the one to solve it. His birth had been foretold. The oldest Berber legend spoke of a child born before his time, with blue eyes and red hair, who would possess the Second Sight. Charlot closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of this place, sand and salt and cinnabar, evoking his own most primal physical memories.
He’d been thrust into the world early – red and raw and screaming. His mother, Mireille, an orphan of sixteen, had fled her convent in the Basque Pyrenees and journeyed here across two continents, into the deep desert, to protect a dangerous secret. She had been what they called a thayyib, a woman who had known a man only once: his father. Charlot’s birth, here on the cliffs of the Tassili, was midwifed by an indigo-veiled Berber prince with blue-tinted skin, one of the ‘blue men’ of the Kel Rela Tuareg. This was Shahin, the desert falcon, who was to serve as parent, godparent, and tutor for this chosen child.
Across the vast desert before him now, as far as Charlot could see, the silent red sands shifted as they had for untold centuries, moving restlessly, like a living, breathing thing – sands that seemed a part of him, sands that erased all memory…
All but his own, that is. Charlot’s terrible gift of remembering was always with him – even the memory of those things that had not yet come to pass. When he was a child, they had called him the Little Prophet. He’d foreseen the rise and fall of empires, the futures of great men, like Napoleon and Alexander of Russia – or like that of his true father, whom he’d only met once: Prince Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand.
Charlot’s memory of the future had always been like an unstoppable wellspring. He could foresee it, though he might not be able to change it. But of course the greatest gift could also be a curse.
To him, the world was like a chess game, where each move that one made generated a myriad of potential moves – and at the same time revealed an underlying strategy, as implacable as destiny, that drove one relentlessly onward. Like the game of chess, like the paintings on the rock, like the eternal sands – for him, the past and the future were always present.
For Charlot had been born, as it was foretold, beneath the gaze of the ancient goddess, the White Queen, whose image was painted in the hollow of the great stone wall. She’d been known across all cultures and throughout all times. She hovered above him now like an avenging angel, carved high on the sheer stone cliff. The Tuareg called her Q’ar – ‘the Charioteer.’
It was she, they said, who had spangled the nighttime sky with glittering stars. And she who had first set the Game upon its adamantine course. Charlot had journeyed here from across the sea to lay his eyes upon her for the first time since his birth. It was she alone, they said, who might reveal – perhaps only to the chosen one – the secret behind the Game.
Charlot awakened before dawn and tossed off the woolen djellaba he’d used as a cover against the open night air. Something was terribly wrong, though he couldn’t yet sense what it was.
Here in this spot – a difficult four-day hike over treacherous terrain from the valley below – he knew he was well protected. But there was no hiding from the fact that something was amiss.
He rose from his makeshift bed for a better view. Away to the east, toward Mecca, he could make out the thin ribbon of red that ran across the horizon, portending the sun. But he did not yet have enough light to make out his surroundings. As he stood there in the silence atop the mesa, Charlot heard a sound – only meters away. First, a soft footstep on gravel, then the sound of human breathing.
He was terrified to make a false step, or even to move.
‘Al-Kalim – it is I,’ someone whispered – though there was no one within miles to hear.
Only one man would address him as Al-Kalim: the Seer. ‘Shahin!’ cried Charlot. He felt the strong, firm hands press his wrists – the hands of the man who’d always been mother and father, brother and guide.
‘But how have you found me?’ said Charlot. And why had Shahin risked his life to cross the seas and the desert? To come through this treacherous canyon by night? To arrive here before dawn? Whatever had brought him to this place must be urgent beyond imagining.
But more important: Why hadn’t Charlot foreseen it?
The sun broke over the horizon, licking the rolling dunes in the distance with a warm pink glow. Shahin’s hands still firmly grasped Charlot’s in his own, as if he could not bear to let him go. After a long moment, he released Charlot and drew back his indigo veils.
In the rosy light, Charlot could see the craggy, hawklike features of Shahin for the first time. But what he saw in that face actually frightened him. In the twenty-nine years of his life, Charlot had never seen his mentor betray any emotion at all, under any circumstance, much less the emotion that Charlot could see written on Shahin’s face right now, which terrified him: pain.
Why could Charlot still not see inside?
But Shahin was struggling to speak: ‘My son…’ he began, nearly choking on the words.
Although Charlot had always thought of Shahin as his parent, this was the first time that the elder man had ever addressed him in this fashion.
‘Al-Kalim,’ Shahin continued, ‘I would never ask you to use that great gift that was bestowed upon you by Allah, your gift of the Vision, if this were not a matter of the gravest importance. A crisis has occurred that has driven me to cross the sea from France. Something of great value may have fallen into evil hands, something I learned of only months ago…’
Charlot, with fear gripping his heart, understood that if Shahin had come for him here in the desert with such urgency, the crisis must be grave indeed. But Shahin’s next words were more shocking still.
‘It has to do with my son,’ he added.
‘Your…son?’ repeated Charlot, fearing that he’d not heard correctly.
‘Yes, I have a son. He is greatly beloved,’ Shahin told him. ‘And like you, he was chosen for a life that is not always ours to question. From his earliest years, he has been initiated into a secret order. His training was nearly complete – ahead of its time, for he is only fourteen years old. Six months ago, we received word that a crisis had occurred: My son had been sent upon an important mission by the highest shaikh – the Pir of his order – in an attempt to help avert this crisis. But it seems that the boy has never arrived at his destination.’
‘What was his mission? And what was his intended destination?’ Charlot asked – though he realized, in a state of panic, that this was the first time he’d ever had to ask such a question. Why didn’t he already know the answer?
‘My son and a companion in this mission were bound for Venice,’ Shahin answered, though he was looking at Charlot strangely, as if the same question had just struck him, too: How could Charlot not know?
‘We have reason to fear that my son, Kauri, and his companion were abducted.’ Shahin paused, then added, ‘I have learned that they had in their possession an important piece of the Montglane Service.’
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 pawn centre and proceed to attack it. Other common features are Black’s attempts to open the black-squared long diagonal and a pawn storm by Black’s King-side pawns.
– Edward R. Brace, An Illustrated 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 Pass 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 space 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 space 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 assassination 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 bastard 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 assumed 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 assassinated, 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 passed 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.’