“Don’t worry about the painting,” he told me as we went down the hallway. “I’ll return it within the week.”
“You may as well keep it,” I said. “The movers are coming to pack my things on Friday. That was the reason I’d called you at first. I’m leaving the country this weekend. I’ll be gone for a year. My company is sending me abroad on business.”
“That firm of hacks,” said Nim. “Where are they sending you?”
“Algeria,” I said as we reached the door.
Nim halted cold and glared at me. Then he began to laugh. “My dear young woman,” he said, “you never fail to amaze me. You’ve regaled me for nearly an hour with tales of murder, mayhem, mystery, and intrigue. Yet you’ve managed to miss the main point.”
I was completely confused. “Algeria?” I said. “What does it have to do with any of this?”
“Tell me,” said Nim, putting his hand under my chin and turning my face up to his, “have you ever heard of the Montglane Service?”
THE KNIGHT’S TOUR
Knight: You play chess, don’t you?
Death: How did you know that?
Knight: I have seen it in paintings and heard it sung in ballads.
Death: Yes, in fact I am quite a good chess player.
Knight: But you can’t be better than I am.
—The Seventh Seal
Ingmar Bergman
The midtown tunnel was nearly deserted. It was after seven-thirty in the evening, and you could hear the loud whine of the Morgan’s engine echoing off the walls.
“I thought we were going to dinner,” I yelled over the noise.
“We are going,” said Nim mysteriously, “to my place on Long Island, where I practice being a gentleman farmer. Though there aren’t any crops at this time of year.”
“You have a farm on Long Island?” I said. It was odd, but I’d never visualized Nim actually living anywhere. He seemed to appear and disappear, rather like a ghost.
“Indeed I do,” he replied, peering at me in the darkness with his bicolored eyes. “As you may be the only living person to testify. I guard my privacy carefully, as you know. I plan to prepare dinner for you myself. After we dine, you can spend the night.”
“Now just one minute.…”
“Obviously it’s hard to confuse you with reason or logic,” said Nim. “You’ve just explained you’re in danger. You’ve seen two men killed in the last forty-eight hours, and you’ve been warned you’re somehow involved. You don’t seriously propose to spend the night alone in your apartment?”
“I have to go to work in the morning,” I told him.
“You’ll do no such thing,” said Nim with finality. “You will stay away from your known haunts until we get to the bottom of this. I have a few things to say on the subject.”
As the car careened through the open countryside, wind whistling around us, I tucked the blanket closer and listened to Nim.
“First I’m going to tell you about the Montglane Service,” he began. “It’s a very long story, but let me start by explaining that it was originally the chess service of Charlemagne.…”
“Oh!” I said, sitting up straighter. “I have heard of it, but I didn’t know the name. Lily Rad’s uncle Llewellyn told me about it when he heard I was going to Algeria. He says he’d like me to get him some of the pieces.”
“No doubt he would.” Nim laughed. “They’re extremely rare and worth a fortune. Most people don’t believe they even exist. How did Llewellyn hear of them? And what makes him think they’re in Algeria?” Nim was speaking in a light, casual manner, but I could tell he was paying close attention to my response.
“Llewellyn’s an antique dealer,” I explained. “He has a client who wants to collect these pieces at any cost. They have a contact who knows where the pieces are.”
“I doubt that very much,” said Nim. “Legend has it that they’ve been buried away for well over a century, and were out of circulation for a thousand years before that.”
As we drove through the black night, Nim told me a bizarre tale of Moorish kings and French nuns, of a mysterious power that had been sought for centuries by those who understood the nature of power. And, finally, how the entire service had disappeared underground, never to be seen again. It was believed, Nim told me, that it had been hidden somewhere in Algeria. Though he didn’t say why.
By the time he’d finished this improbable tale, the car was moving through a deep thicket of trees, and the road dipped very low. When it came up again we could see the milk-white moon hovering low over a black sea. I could hear owls calling to each other in the woods. It certainly seemed a long way from New York.
“Well,” I sighed, pulling my nose out of the blanket, “I’ve already told Llewellyn I’d have no part in it, that he was crazy to think I’d try to smuggle a chess piece that big, made of gold, with all those diamonds and rubies—”
The car swerved sharply, and we nearly ran off into the sea. Nim slowed down and brought us under control.
“He had one?” he said. “He showed you one?”
“Of course not,” I said, wondering what was going on. “You told me yourself they’ve been lost for a century. He showed me a photograph of something like it made of ivory. In the Bibliothèque Nationale, I think.”
“I see,” said Nim, calming down a bit.
“I don’t see what all this has to do with Solarin and people getting murdered,” I told him.
“I’ll explain,” Nim said. “But you’re sworn not to repeat this to anyone.”
“That’s just what Llewellyn said.”
Nim looked across at me in disgust. “Perhaps you’ll be more cautious when I explain that the reason Solarin has contacted you, the reason you’ve been threatened, could be due to these very chess pieces.”
“That’s impossible,” I pointed out. “I’d never even heard of them. I still know practically nothing about them. I haven’t anything to do with this silly game.”
“But perhaps,” said Nim sternly as the car shot along the dark coast, “someone thinks you do.”
The road curved slightly away from the sea. On either side manicured hedges, ten feet high, enclosed large estates. From time to time I caught moonlit glimpses of huge manor houses set back on sweeping snow-covered lawns. I had never seen anything like it near New York. It reminded me of Scott Fitzgerald.
Nim was telling me about Solarin.
“I don’t know much except what I’ve read in the chess journals,” he said. “Alexander Solarin is twenty-six years old, a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, raised in the Crimea, the womb of civilization but grown quite uncivilized in recent years. He was an orphan raised in a state-sponsored home. At the age of nine or ten he beat the pants off a headmaster at chess. Apparently he’d learned to play at the age of four, taught by fishermen on the Black Sea. He was popped at once into the Pioneers’ Palace.”
I knew what that was. The Palace of Young Pioneers was the only advanced institute in the world that devoted itself to churning out chess masters. In Russia chess was not only the national sport, it was an extension of world politics, the most cerebral game in history. The Russians thought their long hegemony confirmed their intellectual superiority.
“So if Solarin was in the Pioneers’ Palace, that meant he had strong political backing?” I said.
“Should have meant,” Nim replied. The car swung out toward the sea again. Spray from the waves was licking at the road, and there was a thick residue of sand on the pavement. The road dead-ended into a wide drive with large double gates of sculptured wrought iron. Nim punched a few buttons on his dashboard, and the gates swung open. We drove into a jungle of tangled foliage, mountainous curlicues of snow like the Snow Queen’s domain in the Nutcracker.
“In fact,” Nim was saying, “Solarin refused to throw games to the preferred players, a strict rule of political etiquette among the Russians in tournament play. It’s been widely criticized, but it doesn’t stop the
m doing it.”
The drive was unplowed, and it seemed no cars had been through in some time. Trees arched above like spans of a cathedral, closing off the garden from view. At last we came to a big circle drive with a fountain at the center. The house loomed before us in the moonlight. It was immense, with large gables overlooking the drive and chimneys cluttering the roofs.
“So,” said Nim as he turned off the car engine and looked across at me in the moonlight, “our friend Mr. Solarin enrolled in the school of physics and dropped out of chess. Except for the occasional tournament, he hasn’t been a major contender since the age of twenty.”
Nim helped me out of the car, and we labored, carrying the painting, to the front door, which he opened with a key.
We stood in an enormous entrance hall. Nim switched on the light, a large cut-crystal chandelier. The floors here and in the rooms opening off the hall were of hand-cut slate, polished so it shone like marble. The house was so cold I could see my breath, and ice had formed thin layers on the edges of the slate tiles. He led me through a succession of darkened rooms into a kitchen at the back of the house. What a marvelous place it was. The original gas jets were still mounted in the walls and ceiling. Setting the painting down, he lit the carriage lamps around the walls. They cast a cheery golden glow over everything.
The kitchen was huge, perhaps thirty by fifty feet. The back wall was French windows opening onto a snowy lawn, the sea beyond crashing up with wild foam in the moonlight. At one end of the room were ovens large enough to cook for a hundred people, probably wood burning. At the opposite end was a gigantic stone fireplace that filled the entire wall. Before it was a round oak table that would seat eight or ten, its surface cut and battered with years of use. Around the room were arrangements of comfortable chairs and overstuffed sofas covered in bright flowery chintzes.
Nim went to the woodpile stacked against the fireplace wall and broke up a bed of kindling, swiftly piling heavy logs on top. After a few minutes the room glowed warmly with an inner light. I pulled off my boots and curled up on a sofa as Nim uncorked some sherry. He handed me a glass and poured another for himself, taking a seat beside me. After I’d peeled off my coat, he tipped his glass toward mine.
“To the Montglane Service and the many adventures it will bring you,” he said, smiling, and took a sip.
“Yum. This is delicious,” I said.
“It’s an amontillado,” he replied, swirling it in his glass. “People have been bricked into walls still breathing, for sherries inferior to this one.”
“I hope that’s not the sort of adventure you’re planning for me,” I told him. “I really have to go to work tomorrow morning.”
“‘I died for Beauty, I died for Truth,’” quoted Nim. “Everyone has something he believes himself willing to die for. But I’ve never met anyone willing to risk death to put in an unnecessary day’s work at Consolidated Edison!”
“Now you’re trying to frighten me.”
“Not at all,” Nim said, stripping off his leather jacket and silk scarf. He was wearing a brilliant red sweater that looked unexpectedly splendid with his hair. He stretched his legs out. “But if a mysterious stranger approached me in a deserted room at the United Nations, I’d be inclined to pay attention. Especially if his warnings were consistently followed close at heel by the untimely deaths of others.”
“Why do you think Solarin singled me out?” I asked.
“I was hoping you could tell me that,” said Nim, sipping his sherry meditatively and gazing into the fire.
“What about that secret formula he claimed to have had in Spain?” I suggested.
“A red herring,” Nim said. “Solarin is purportedly a maniac for mathematical games. He’d developed a new formula for the Knight’s Tour, and wagered it against anyone who beat him. Do you know what a Knight’s Tour is?” he added, seeing my confusion. I shook my head in the negative.
“It’s a mathematical puzzle. You move the Knight to every square of the chessboard without landing on the same square twice, using regular Knight moves: two squares horizontal and one vertical or the reverse. Through the ages, mathematicians have tried to come up with formulas to do it. Euler had a new one. So did Benjamin Franklin. A Closed Tour would be one in which you wound up on the same square you started from.”
Nim stood up, walked over to the ovens, and started hauling down pots and pans, lighting gas jets on the stove as he spoke.
“Italian journalists in Spain thought Solarin might have hidden another formula within the Knight’s Tour. Solarin likes games with many layers of meaning. Knowing he was a physicist, they naturally jumped to conclusions that would make good press.”
“Exactly. He’s a physicist,” I said, pulling a chair over near the stove and bringing along the bottle of amontillado. “If the formula he had wasn’t important, why would the Russians smuggle him out of Spain so fast?”
“You’d have an excellent career in the paparazzi,” said Nim. “That was exactly their line of reasoning. Unfortunately, Solarin’s field of physics is acoustics. It’s obscure, unpopular, and totally unrelated to national defense. They don’t even offer a degree in it in most schools in this country. Perhaps he’s designing music halls in Russia, if they’re still building any.”
Nim banged a pot down on the stove and marched off into the pantry, returning with an armload of fresh vegetables and meat.
“There were no tire marks in your drive,” I pointed out. “And there’s been no new snow in days. So where did the fresh spinach and exotic mushrooms come from?”
Nim smiled at me as if I’d passed an important test. “You have the correct investigative abilities, I’ll say that. Just what you’re going to need,” he commented, putting the food down into the sink and washing it. “I have my caretaker do the shopping. He arrives and departs by the side entrance.”
Nim unwrapped a loaf of fresh dilled rye bread and opened a crock of trout mousse. He slathered up a big slice and handed it to me. I’d never finished breakfast and had barely touched my lunch. It was delicious. Dinner was even more so. We had thinly sliced veal smothered in kumquat sauce, fresh spinach with pine nuts, and fat red beefsteak tomatoes (impossibly rare at this time of year) broiled and stuffed with lemon apple sauce. The wide, fan-shaped mushrooms were sautéed lightly and served as a side dish. The main course was followed by a salad of red and green baby lettuce with dandelion greens and toasted hazelnuts.
After Nim had cleared away the dishes, he brought a pot of coffee and served it with a splash of Tuaca. We moved to big squishy chairs near the fire, which had burned down to glowing charcoal. Nim had located his jacket draped over a chair and pulled out the cocktail napkin from the fortune-teller. He looked at Llewellyn’s printing on the napkin for a very long time. Then, handing it to me, he got up to stir the fire.
“What do you notice that is unusual about this poem?” he asked. I looked at it but didn’t see anything odd.
“Of course you know that the fourth day of the fourth month is my birthday,” I said. Nim nodded soberly from the hearth. The firelight turned his hair a brilliant reddish gold. “The fortune-teller warned me not to tell anyone about that,” I added.
“As usual, you kept your word at all cost,” Nim observed wryly, throwing a few more logs on the fire. He went over to a table in the corner and pulled out some paper and a pen, returning to sit beside me.
“Take a look at this,” he said. Printing in neat block letters on the paper, he copied out the poem into separate lines. Previously it had been scrambled across the napkin. Now it read:
Just as these lines that merge to form a key
Are as chess squares; when month and day are four;
Don’t risk another chance to move to mate.
One game is real and one’s a metaphor.
Untold times this wisdom’s come too late.
Battle of White has raged on endlessly.
Everywhere Black will strive to seal his fate.
Con
tinue a search for thirty-three and three.
Veiled forever is the secret door.
“What do you see here?” said Nim, studying me as I studied his printed version of the poem. I wasn’t certain what he was driving at.
“Look at the structure of the poem itself,” he said a little impatiently. “You’ve a mathematical mind, try to put it to some use.”
I looked at the poem again, and then I saw it.
“The rhyming pattern is unusual,” I said proudly.
Nim’s eyebrows went up, and he snatched the paper away from me. He looked at it a moment and started to laugh. “So it is,” he said, handing it back to me. “I hadn’t noticed that myself. Here, take the pen and write down what it is.”
I did so, and I wrote:
“Key-Four-Mate (A-B-C), Metaphor-Late-Endlessly (B-C-A), Fate-Three-Door (C-A-B).
“So the rhyming pattern is like so,” said Nim, copying it below my writing on the paper. “Now I want you to apply numbers instead of letters and add them up.” I did so beside where he’d printed the letters, and it looked like this:
ABC
123
BCA
231
CAB
312
666
“That was the number of the Beast in the Apocalypse: 666!” I said.
“So it was,” said Nim. “And if you add the rows horizontally, you’ll find they add to the same number. And that, my dear, is known as a ‘magic square.’ Another mathematical game. Some of those Knight’s Tours that Ben Franklin developed had secret magic squares hidden within them. You’ve quite a knack for this. Found one your first time out that I hadn’t seen myself.”
“You didn’t see it?” I said, rather pleased with myself. “But then what was it you wanted me to find?” I studied the paper as if searching for a hidden rabbit in a drawing from a child’s magazine, expecting it to pop out at me sideways or upside down.
“Draw a line separating the last two sentences from the first seven,” said Nim, and as I was drawing the line he added, “Now look at the first letter of each sentence.”