The Fire. Katherine Neville

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      ‘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.’

      

      Vartan opened the doors and we reentered the octagon. I could hardly tell him what the Black Queen meant to me. I knew that if everything he’d just told me was true, then my mother’s disappearance might well be connected to the deaths of both my father and Petrossian. We might all be in danger. But before I’d gone three paces, I stopped in my tracks. I’d been so riveted by Vartan’s private revelations that I’d completely forgotten about Lily and Key.

      The two of them were down on the floor in front of the campaign desk with the empty desk drawer between them, as nearby Zsa-Zsa drooled on the Persian rug. Lily had been saying something privately to Key, but they both stood up as we came in; Lily was clutching what looked like a sharp steel nail file. I saw bits of splintered wood scattered here and there.

      ‘Time waits for no man,’ said Key. ‘While you two have been cloistered in there – taking each other’s confessions or whatever you were up to – look what we’ve found.’

      She waved something in the air that looked like a piece of old, creased paper. As we approached, Lily regarded me with gravity. Her clear gray eyes seemed oddly veiled, almost like a warning.

      ‘You may look,’ she admonished me, ‘but please don’t touch. No more of your extravagant impulses around that fire. If what we’ve just discovered in that drawer is what I believe it may be, it is extremely rare, as your mother would surely attest if she were here. Indeed, I suspect this document may be the very reason she’s not here.’

      Key carefully opened the brittle paper and held it up before us.

      Vartan and I leaned forward for a better look. On closer observation, it seemed to be a piece of fabric – so old and soiled that it had stiffened with age like parchment – upon which an illustration had been drawn with a sort of rusty-red solution that had bled across the fabric in places, leaving dark stains, though the figures could still be made out. It was the drawing of a chessboard of sixty-four squares where each square had been filled with a different strange, esoteric-looking symbol. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what it was supposed to mean.

      But Lily was about to enlighten us all.

      ‘I don’t know how or when your mother may have obtained this drawing,’ she said, ‘but if my suspicions are correct, this cloth is the third and final piece of the puzzle that we were missing nearly thirty years ago.’

      ‘Piece of what puzzle?’ I asked, in extreme frustration.

      ‘Have you ever heard,’ said Lily, ‘of the Montglane Service?’

      

      Lily had a story to tell us, she said. But in order to tell it before other guests might arrive, she begged me not to ask questions until she had told it all, without distractions or interruptions. And in order to do so, she informed us, she needed to sit upon something other than the floor or a rock wall – all that seemed available in our cluttered but chair-less lodge.

      Key and Vartan trooped up and down the spiral stairs, collecting cushions, ottomans, and benches until Lily was now ensconced with Zsa-Zsa in a pile of plumpy pillows beside the fire, with Key perched on the piano bench and Vartan on a high library stool nearby, to listen.

      Meanwhile, I’d set myself the task I did best: cooking. It always helped clear my mind and at least we’d have something for everyone to eat if others showed up as announced. Now I watched the copper kettle hanging low over the fire, the handfuls of freezedried vittles that I’d foraged from the food locker – shallots, celery, carrots, chanterelles, and beef cubes – as they plumped up in their broth of stock, strong red wine, splashes of Worcestershire, lemon juice, cognac, parsley, bay and thyme: Alexandra’s time-tested campfire Boeuf Bourguignonne.

      Letting it bubble away for a few СКАЧАТЬ