Katherine Neville - The Fire

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.

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.