The Eight Page 12

  “We’d better call the doctor,” the first judge added hastily.

  Solarin walked over to the basin where Fiske had tossed the ring. It was no longer there. “Yes, let’s get a doctor,” he replied.

  But I knew nothing of these events as I sat in the lounge waiting for Lily to return with our third round of coffee. If I’d known what was going on behind the scene—sooner instead of later—the next events might never have transpired at all.

  It had been forty-five minutes since our recess had begun, and I was beginning to feel a little puckered around the bladder from all the coffee. I wondered what was going on. Lily arrived at the table and smiled conspiratorially.

  “Guess what,” she whispered. “I ran into Hermanold back in the bar, looking ten years older and conferring heavily with the tournament physician! We can adjourn permanently as soon as we finish our cafe, darling. There’s not going to be a game today. They’re going to announce it in a few minutes.”

  “Fiske was really sick? Maybe that’s why he was playing so strangely.”

  “He’s not sick, darling. He’s over his illness. Rather abruptly, too, I might add.”

  “He’s resigned?”

  “In a manner of speaking. He hanged himself in the men’s room just after the break.”

  “Hanged himself!” I said, and Lily shushed me as several people looked around. “What are you talking about?”

  “Hermanold said he thought the pressure was too much for Fiske. The doctor had other ideas. The doctor said it was really hard for a man weighing a hundred forty pounds to break his neck by hanging himself from a six-foot-high partition.”

  “Could we pass on this coffee and get out of here?” I kept thinking about Solarin’s green eyes as he bent over me. I felt ill. I needed to get outside.

  “Very well,” said Lily loudly. “But let’s hurry back. I don’t want to miss a second of this exciting match.” We crossed the room briskly. When we reached the lobby, two reporters jumped up.

  “Oh, Miss Rad,” said one as they approached us, “what’s going on, do you know? Will the game resume today?”

  “Not unless they bring a trained monkey in to replace Mr. Fiske.”

  “You don’t think much of his playing, then?” said the other reporter, scribbling in his notebook.

  “I don’t think of his playing at all,” Lily replied smugly. “I only think of my own playing, as you know. As for the game,” she added, bulldozing her way to the door with reporters trailing behind, “I’ve seen enough to know how it will end.” She and I plowed through the double doors to the courtyard and headed down the ramp to the street.

  “Where the hell is Saul?” Lily said. “The car is always supposed to be parked in front, he knows that.”

  I looked down the street and saw Lily’s big blue Corniche sitting at the end of the block across Fifth Avenue. I pointed it out to her.

  “Great, just what I need, another parking ticket,” she said. “Come on, let’s get out of here before all hell breaks loose inside.” She grabbed my arm, and we raced off down the street in the bitterly cold wind. As we reached the end of the block, I realized the car was empty. Saul was nowhere to be seen.

  We crossed the street, looking up and down for Saul. When we reached the car we found the key still in the ignition. Carioca seemed to be missing.

  “I don’t believe this!” Lily fumed. “In all these years, Saul has never left the car unattended. Where the hell could he be? And where’s my dog?”

  I heard a rustling sound that seemed to come from beneath the seat. I opened the door and bent over, reaching underneath. A little tongue slobbered all over my hand. I hauled Carioca out, and as I was straightening up I saw something that made my blood run cold. There was a hole in the driver’s seat.

  “Look,” I said to Lily. “What’s this hole here?”

  Just then, as Lily was leaning forward to examine it, we heard a “thunk,” and the car shook slightly. I glanced over my shoulder, but there was no one nearby. Pulling myself out of the car, I dropped Carioca on the seat. I examined the side of the car facing the Metropolitan Club. There was another hole that hadn’t been there a second earlier. I touched it. It was warm.

  I looked up at the windows of the Metropolitan Club. One of the French windows off the balcony was open, just above the American flag. The sheer drapery was blowing out the window, but no one was there. It was one of the windows of the gaming room, the one just behind the arbiters’ table. I was positive.

  “Jesus,” I whispered to Lily. “Someone’s shooting at the car!”

  “You can’t be serious,” she said. She came around and looked at the bullet hole in the side, then followed my gaze along the line of trajectory to the open French window. There had been no people on the bitterly cold street, and no cars had passed by when we’d heard the thunk. That didn’t leave many other possibilities.

  “Solarin!” said Lily, grabbing my arm. “He warned you to leave the club, didn’t he? That bastard is trying to bump us off!”

  “He warned me that I was in danger if I stayed at the club,” I told her. “So now I’ve left it. Besides, if someone wanted to shoot us, it would be pretty hard to miss from this distance.”

  “He’s trying to scare me away from this tournament!” Lily insisted. “First he kidnaps my chauffeur, then he shoots at my car. Well, I’m not so easily scared off.”

  “Well, I am!” I told her. “Let’s get out of here.”

  The haste with which Lily moved her bulk around to the driver’s side suggested she agreed with me. She started the car up and screeched out into Fifth Avenue, tossing Carioca across the seat.

  “I’m starving,” she yelled over the whine of wind that came across the windscreen.

  “You want to eat now?” I yelled back. “Are you crazy? I think we should go to the police at once.”

  “No way,” she said firmly. “If Harry finds out about any of this, he’ll imprison me so I can’t play in this tournament. You and I are going to get something to eat and figure this one out for ourselves. I can’t think unless I’m fed.”

  “Well, if we don’t go to the police, then let’s go back to my place.”

  “There’s no kitchen at your place,” she said. “I need red meat to get my brain cells working.”

  “Just head for my apartment. There’s a steak house a few blocks away on Third Avenue. But I warn you, once you’ve been fed I’m going directly to the police.”

  Lily pulled up in front of The Palm restaurant on Second Avenue in the forties. She shuffled through her big shoulder bag and pulled out her pegboard chess set, stuffing Carioca into the bag in its place. He stuck his head out the top and drooled down the side.

  “They don’t let dogs into restaurants,” she explained.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” I said, holding up the chess set she’d dropped in my lap.

  “Keep it,” she said. “You’re a computer genius, and I’m a chess expert. Strategy is our bread and butter. I’m sure we can figure this out if we put our heads together. But first, it’s time for you to learn a little chess.”

  Lily stuffed Carioca’s head down into the bag and closed the flap. “Have you heard the expression, ‘The pawns are the soul of chess’?”

  “Mm. Sounds familiar, but I can’t place it. Who said it?”

  “André Philidor, the father of modern chess. He wrote a famous chess book around the time of the French Revolution, in which he explained that using the pawns en masse could make them just as powerful as the major pieces. No one had ever thought of that before. They used to sacrifice the pawns just to get them out of the way so they didn’t block the action.”

  “Are you trying to say you think we’re a couple of pawns that somebody’s trying to get out of the way?” I found the idea strange but interesting.

  “Nope,” said Lily, getting out of the car and tossing her bag over her shoulder. “I’m trying to say it’s time for us to join forces. Until we find what ga
me it is we’re playing.”

  We shook hands on it.

  AN EXCHANGE OF QUEENS

  Queens never make bargains.

  —Through the Looking-Glass

  Lewis Carroll

  ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA

  AUTUMN 1791

  The troika sluiced across the snowy fields, its three horses blowing steamy billows through their nostrils. Beyond Riga the snow had been so deep on the roads that they had changed from the dark carriage to this wide, open sleigh with its three horses harnessed abreast, the leather straps studded with silver bells and the wide, arklike sides tattooed with the imperial crest in nails of solid gold.

  Here, only fifteen versts from Petersburg, the trees were still hung with ocher leaves, and peasants were still laboring in the partly frozen fields, though the snow already lay thick on the thatched roofs of the stone cottages.

  The abbess lay back in her pile of furs and looked at the open countryside as it rushed past. By the European Julian calendar it was already November 4, exactly one year and seven months from the date—dare she think of it—when she’d determined to withdraw the Montglane Service from its hiding place of a thousand years.

  But here in Russia, by the Gregorian calendar, it was only October 23. Russia was backward in many things, thought the abbess. A country that operated by a calendar, a religion, and a culture that were all her own. In centuries, these peasants she saw along the road had changed neither their costume nor their custom. The craggy faces with their black Russian eyes that turned as her carriage passed bespoke an ignorant people, still bound by primitive superstition and ritual. The gnarled hands clutched the same pickaxes and hacked at the same frozen soil that their ancestors had known a thousand years before. Despite the ukases dating from the days of Peter I, they still wore their thick hair and black beards uncut, tucking the loose ends into their sheepskin jerkins.

  The gates of St. Petersburg lay open across the snowy expanse. The driver, dressed in the white livery and gold braid of the Imperial Guard, stood on his platform at the front of the troika with legs spread wide and lashed the horses onward. As they passed within the city, the abbess saw snow sparkling on the cupolas and high domes rising across the river Neva. Children skated on the frozen surface and, even so late in the year, the peddlers’ colorful booths were strung out along the waterfront. Mongrel dogs in splotched colors barked as her sleigh passed by, and little yellow-haired children with dirty faces ran beside the runners to beg for coins. The driver whipped the horses ahead.

  As they crossed the frozen river, the abbess reached into her traveling case and fingered the embroidered cloth she carried with her. She touched her rosary and said a brief Ave. She felt the weight of the grim responsibility that lay before her. It was she, and only she, who bore the burden of placing this powerful force into the right hands, hands that would protect it from the greedy or ambitious. The abbess knew it was her mission. She had been chosen for this task from birth. All her life she had awaited the events that would bring it to pass.

  Today, after nearly fifty years, the abbess would see the childhood friend to whom she had unburdened herself so many years ago. She thought back to that day and to the young girl so much like Valentine in spirit, fair and fragile, a sickly child in a back brace who’d willed herself through illness and despair to a happy, healthy childhood, little Sophia Anhalt-Zerbst, the friend whom she had remembered over so many years, thought of fondly so often, written her secrets to nearly every month of her adult life. Though their paths had taken them far apart, the abbess still remembered Sophia as a girl chasing butterflies across the courtyard of her parents’ home in Pomerania, her golden hair shining in the sunlight.

  As the troika crossed the river and approached the Winter Palace, the abbess felt a momentary chill. A cloud had passed over the sun. She wondered what sort of person her friend and protectress would be, now that she was no longer little Sophia of Pomerania. Now that she was known throughout Europe as Catherine the Great, Czarina of all the Russias.

  Catherine the Great, Empress of all the Russias, sat before her dressing table and looked into the mirror. She was sixty-two years old, of less than average height, overweight, with an intelligent forehead and heavy jaw. Her ice-blue eyes, usually sparkling with vitality, were flat and gray this morning, ringed red with weeping. For two weeks she had been shut into her chambers, refusing even to admit her family. Beyond the walls of her apartment the entire court was in mourning. Two weeks earlier, on October 12, a black-clad messenger had arrived from Jassy with the news that Count Potëmkin was dead.

  Potëmkin, who had put her on the throne of Russia, handing her the tassel from the hilt of his sword to wear when, astride a white horse, she’d led the mutinous army to overthrow her husband, the czar. Potëmkin, who had been her lover, minister of state, general of her armies, and confidant, the man she described as “my only husband.” Potëmkin, who’d expanded her empires by a third, extending them to the Caspian and the Black Sea. He had died on the road to Nicolayev like a dog.

  He was dead of eating too much pheasant and partridge, gorging himself on rich cured hams and salted beef, drinking too much kvass and ale and cranberry liquor. Dead of satisfying the plump noblewomen who trailed behind him like camp followers, waiting for a crumb from his table. He’d tossed away fifty million rubles on fine palaces, costly jewels, and French champagne. But he had made Catherine the most powerful woman in the world.

  Her ladies-in-waiting flitted about her like silent butterflies, powdering her hair and stringing ribbons through her shoes. She stood, and they draped the gray velvet robes of state over her shoulders, laden with the decorations she always wore in court: the crosses of St. Catherine, St. Vladimir, St. Alexander Nevsky; the ribbons of St. Andrew and St. George crossing her bosom, swaying with their heavy gold medals. She threw back her shoulders to display her excellent posture and descended from her chambers.

  Today, for the first time in ten days, she would appear in court. Met by her personal bodyguard, she marched between the lines of soldiers through the long corridors of the Winter Palace, past the windows where years earlier she’d watched her ships sail down the Neva toward the sea to meet the Swedish fleet attacking St. Petersburg. Catherine gazed out of the windows thoughtfully as she passed.

  Within the court waited the mass of vipers who called themselves diplomats and courtiers. They conspired against her, plotted her downfall. Her own son Paul planned her assassination. But also arrived at Petersburg was the one person who might save her, a woman who held within her hands the power that Catherine had lost with the death of Potëmkin. For just this morning her oldest friend from childhood had arrived at St. Petersburg, Helene de Roque, the Abbess of Montglane.

  Weary after her appearance in court, Catherine retired to her private audience chamber leaning on the arm of her current lover, Plato Zubov. The abbess was waiting there in the company of Plato’s brother Valerian. She rose when she saw the empress and crossed the room to embrace her.

  Spry for her age and thin as a wintry reed, the abbess sparkled at the sight of her friend. As they embraced, she glanced at Plato Zubov. Wearing a sky-blue coat and skintight breeches, he was so bedecked with medals he looked as if he might topple over. Plato was young, with delicate, pretty features. There could be no mistake regarding his role at court, and Catherine stroked his arm as she spoke to the abbess.

  “Helene,” she sighed. “How often I have longed for your presence. I can scarcely believe you are here at last. But God has listened to my heart and brought my childhood friend to me.”

  She motioned the abbess to be seated in a large, comfortable chair and herself took a chair nearby. Plato and Valerian stood each behind one of the women.

  “This calls for a celebration. However, as you may know, I am in mourning and cannot have a fete for your arrival. I suggest we dine together tonight in my private chambers. We can laugh and enjoy ourselves pretending for a moment that we are young girls again. Valerian
, have you opened the wine as I instructed?”

  Valerian nodded and went to the sideboard.

  “You must try this claret, my dear. It is one of the treasures of my court. It was brought to me from Bordeaux by Denis Diderot many years ago. I value it as if it were a fine gem.”

  Valerian poured the dark red wine into small crystal tumblers. The two women sipped the wine.

  “Excellent,” said the abbess, smiling at Catherine. “But no wine can compare with the elixir produced in these old bones by seeing you again, my Figchen.”

  Plato and Valerian glanced at each other at the use of such familiarity. The empress, born Sophia Anhalt-Zerbst, had been nicknamed “Figchen” as a child. Because of Plato’s exalted position, he had made so bold in bed as to call her “mistress of my heart,” but in public he always referred to her as “Your Majesty,” as did her own children. Oddly, the empress had not seemed to notice the effrontery of this French abbess.

  “Now you must tell me why you chose to remain so long in France,” said Catherine. “When you closed the abbey, I’d hoped you might come at once to Russia. My court is filled with your expatriate countrymen, especially since your king has been captured at Varennes trying to flee France, and is now held prisoner by his own people. France is a hydra with twelve hundred heads, a state of anarchy. This nation of shoemakers has reversed the very order of nature!”

  The abbess was surprised to hear so enlightened and liberal a ruler speak out in this manner. Though it could not be denied France was dangerous, was it not this same czarina who’d befriended the liberal Voltaire and Denis Diderot, proponents of class equality and opponents of territorial warfare?

  “I could not come at once,” the abbess replied to Catherine’s question. “I was concerned with certain business—” She looked sharply at Plato Zubov, who stood behind Catherine’s chair stroking her neck. “I cannot speak of these matters with anyone but you.”