Katherine Neville - The Fire

‘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. ’

‘Information?’ I objected. ‘What sort of information could possibly be so valuable that someone would want to kill him?’

‘Whatever it was,’ he told me, ‘it must have been something which apparently he could not be permitted to pass along to anyone.’

‘Even assuming my father did get information about something as dangerous as you’re suggesting, how could he possibly have discovered it so quickly there at the Zagorsk treasury? As you yourself know, we were only inside that building for a few brief minutes,’ I pointed out. ‘And during that entire time, my father spoke to no one who could have given him such information.’

‘Perhaps he spoke to no one,’ he agreed. ‘But someone did speak to him. ’

An image of that morning, which I’d so long suppressed, had begun to form in my mind. My father had left me for a moment, that morning at the treasury. He’d crossed the room to look inside a large glass case. And then someone went over and joined him there –

‘ You spoke to my father!’ I cried.

This time, Vartan didn’t try to silence me. He merely nodded in confirmation.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I went and stood beside your father as he was looking into a large display case. Inside that glass case, he and I saw a golden chess piece covered with jewels. I told him it had just been newly rediscovered in the cellars of the Hermitage at Petersburg, along with Schliemann’s treasures of Troy. It was said that the piece had once belonged to Charlemagne and perhaps to Catherine the Great. I explained to your father that it had been brought to Zagorsk and put on display for this last game. It was just at that moment when your father suddenly turned away, he took you by the hand, and you both left that place.’

We had fled outside onto the steps of the treasury, where my father had met his death.

Vartan was watching me closely now as I struggled to keep from betraying all those dark and long-repressed emotions that were, to my great regret, surfacing. But something still didn’t jibe.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ I told Vartan. ‘Why would someone want to kill my father just to prevent him from passing on dangerous information, when everyone seems to have known all about this rare chess piece and its history – including you?’

But no sooner had these words escaped than I knew the answer.

‘Because that chess piece must have meant something completely different to him than it did to anyone else,’ Vartan said with a flush of excitement. ‘Whatever your father recognized when he saw that piece, his reaction was surely not what those who were observing him had expected, or they would never have brought it to be displayed there at that game. Though they might not have guessed what your father had discovered, he had to be stopped before he could tell anyone else who might understand!’

The pieces and pawns certainly seemed to be massing at center board. Vartan was on to something. But I still couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

‘Mother always believed that my father’s death was no accident,’ I admitted, leaving out the small detail that she’d also imagined that the bullet might have been intended for me. ‘And she always believed that chess had something to do with it. But if you’re right, and my father’s death is somehow linked with Taras Petrossian’s, what would connect it all to that chess piece at Zagorsk?’

‘I don’t know – but something must, ’ Vartan told me. ‘I still remember the expression on your father’s face that morning as he stared into the glass case at that chess piece – almost as if he didn’t hear a word I was saying. And when he turned away to go, he didn’t look at all like a man who was thinking about a chess game.’

‘What did he look like?’ I asked with urgency.

But Vartan was looking at me as if he were trying to make sense of it himself. ‘I’d say he looked frightened,’ he told me. ‘ More than frightened. Terrified, though he quickly hid it from me.’

‘Terrified?’

What could possibly have frightened my father so much after only a few quick moments inside that treasury at Zagorsk? But with Vartan’s next words, I felt as if someone had plunged an icy blade into my heart:

‘I can’t explain it myself,’ Vartan admitted, ‘unless, for some reason, it might have meant something significant to your father that the chess piece in that glass case was the Black Queen.’