I traced my eye slowly down the page, but as I moved toward the bottom a horrible chill had started to come over me, despite the warm and cheery fire.
“What’s wrong?” Nim said, looking at me strangely. I stared at the paper, speechless. Then I picked up the pen and wrote what I saw.
“J-A-D-O-U-B-E / C-V,” said the paper, as if speaking to me.
“Indeed,” Nim was saying as I sat, frozen, beside him. “J’adoube, the French chess term meaning I touch, I adjust. That is what a player speaks when he is about to adjust one of his pieces during a game. Followed by the letters ‘C.V.,’ which are your initials. It suggests that this fortune-teller was sending you a message of some sort. She wants to get in touch with you, perhaps. I realize … What on earth is making you look so dreadful?” he said.
“You don’t understand,” I told him, my voice limp with fear. “J’adoube … was the last word that Fiske said in public. Just before he died.”
Needless to say, I had nightmares. I was following the man on the bicycle up a long winding alley that wove up a steep hill. The buildings were so closely packed that I couldn’t see the sky. It grew darker as we penetrated deeper into the maze of ever-narrowing cobbled streets. As I turned each corner, I caught a glimpse of his bicycle disappearing into the next alley. At the end of a cul-de-sac, I cornered him. He was waiting for me like a spider in its web. He turned, pulling the muffler from his face to expose a blanched white skull with gaping sockets. The skull began to grow flesh before my eyes until it slowly took on the grinning face of the fortune-teller.
I woke up in a cold sweat and threw back the comforter. I sat up in bed, shaking. The fireplace in the corner of my room still had a few glowing embers. Peeking out the window, I saw snowy lawns below. At center was a large marble basin like a fountain and beneath it a larger pool big enough for swimming. Beyond the lawn was the winter sea, pearly gray in the early-morning light.
I couldn’t remember everything that had happened the night before, Nim had poured so much Tuaca down me. Now my head hurt. I got out of bed and staggered into the bathroom, turning on the hot-water tap. I managed to find some bubblebath called “Carnations and Violets.” It smelled pretty bad, but I dumped it into the tub, and it formed a thin layer of foam. As I sat in the hot tub, our conversation started to come back in bits and pieces. Soon I was terrified all over again.
Outside my bedroom door was a small pile of clothes: an oiled-wool sweater from Scandinavia and some flannel-lined yellow rubber duck boots. I pulled them on over my clothes. As I went downstairs I could smell the delicious aroma of breakfast already cooking.
Nim was standing at the stove, his back to me, wearing a plaid shirt and jeans and yellow boots like mine.
“How do I get to a phone to call my office?” I asked.
“There are no phones here,” he said. “But Carlos, my caretaker, came by this morning to help me clean up. I asked him to place a call in town to your office to tell them you won’t be in. I’ll drive you back this afternoon and show you how to safeguard your apartment. Meanwhile, let’s have something to eat and go look at the birds. There’s an aviary here, you know.”
Nim whipped up some eggs poached in wine, thick Canadian bacon, and fried potatoes, with some of the finest coffee I’d had on the eastern seaboard. After breakfast, with very little conversation, we went out through the French windows to look at Nim’s property.
The land ran nearly a hundred yards along the sea, out to the end of a point. It was all open with only a row of thick high hedges at either end to separate it from adjoining properties. The oval basin of the fountain and the larger swimming pool beneath were still partly filled with water, with floating barrels to break up the ice.
Beside the house was an enormous aviary with a Moorish dome constructed of wire mesh and painted white. Snow sifted through the latticework and gathered on twigs of the small trees that grew inside. Birds of every variety perched in the branches, and large peacocks strolled about on the ground, dragging their lovely feathers through the snow. When they screamed out their awful cry, they sounded like women being knifed. It jarred my nerves.
Nim unlocked the mesh door and escorted me inside the open dome, pointing out the various species as we moved through the snowy maze of trees.
“Birds are often more intelligent than people,” he told me. “I keep falcons here as well, in a separate section closed off from the others. Carlos feeds them red meat twice a day. The peregrine is my favorite. As with many other species, it’s the female that does the hunting.” He pointed out a small speckled bird perched atop a birdhouse at the back of the aviary.
“Really? I didn’t know that,” I said as we went over to take a closer look. The bird’s narrow-set eyes were large and black. I felt she was appraising us.
“I’ve always felt,” said Nim as he looked at the falcon, “that you have the killer instinct.”
“I? You must be joking.”
“It hasn’t been properly fostered yet,” he added. “But I plan to begin its cultivation. It has been latent in you entirely too long, in my opinion.”
“But I’m the one people are trying to kill,” I pointed out.
“As in any game,” said Nim, looking down at me and ruffling my hair with one gloved hand, “you may choose whether to react to a threat defensively or aggressively. Why don’t you opt for the latter, and threaten your opponent?”
“I don’t know who my opponent is!” I said, extremely frustrated.
“Ah, but you do,” Nim replied cryptically. “You have known from the very beginning. Shall I prove it to you?”
“You do that.” I was getting upset again and didn’t feel like talking as Nim led me out of the aviary. He locked it and took my hand as we headed back to the house.
He removed my coat, sat me on a sofa near the fire, and pulled off my boots. Then he walked over to the wall where he’d propped my painting of the man on the bicycle. He brought it over and set it on a chair before me.
“Last night, after you’d gone to bed,” said Nim, “I looked at this painting for a very long time. I’d had a feeling of déjà-vu, and it bothered me. You know how I must wrestle problems to the ground. This morning, I solved it.”
He walked over to an oak counter that ran beside the ovens and opened a drawer. Out of it he pulled several packs of playing cards. He brought them over and sat beside me on the sofa. Opening each pack, he extracted a joker from the deck and tossed it on the table. I looked silently at the cards before me.
One was a jester with cap and bells, riding a bicycle. Both he and his cycle were posed in precisely the same position as the man in my painting. Behind his bicycle was a tombstone that said RIP. The second was a similar jester, but he was two mirror images, like my man riding his bicycle over an inverted skeleton. The third was a fool from a tarot deck, walking along blithely, about to step over a precipice.
I looked up at Nim, and he smiled.
“The jester in the card deck has traditionally been associated with Death,” he said. “But it is also a symbol of rebirth. And of the innocence that mankind possessed before the Fall. I like to think of him as a knight of the holy grail, who must be naïve and simple in order to stumble upon the good fortune he is seeking. Remember that his mission is to save mankind.”
“So?” I said, though I was more than a little unnerved at the resemblance between the cards before me and my painting. Now that I saw the prototypes, the man on the bicycle even seemed to have the jester’s hood and his oddly spiraled eyes.
“You asked who your opponent was,” Nim replied quite seriously. “I think, just as in these cards and in your painting, the man on the bicycle is both your opponent and your ally.”
“You can’t be talking about a real person?” I said.
Nim nodded slowly and watched me as he spoke. “You’ve seen him, haven’t you?”
“But that was only a coincidence.”
“Perhaps,” he agreed. “But coincidences can t
ake many forms. For one, it may have been a lure by someone who knew of this painting. Or it may have been another kind of coincidence,” he added with a smile.
“Oh, no,” I said, for I knew perfectly well what was coming. “You know I don’t believe in prescience or psychic powers or all that metaphysical mumbo-jumbo.”
“No?” said Nim, still smiling. “But you’d be hard-pressed to come up with another explanation for how you’d executed a painting before you’d seen the model. I’m afraid I must confess something to you. Like your friends Llewellyn, Solarin, and the fortune-teller, I think you have an important role in the mystery of the Montglane Service. How else can you explain your involvement? Could it be that in some fashion you’ve been predestined—even chosen—to play a key—”
“Forget it,” I snapped. “I am not chasing around after this mythical chess set! People are trying to kill me, or at least involve me in murders, don’t you get it?” I was practically screaming.
“I ‘get it’ all right, as you so charmingly put it,” Nim replied. “But you are the one who seems to have missed the point. The best defense is a good offense.”
“No way,” I told him. “It’s obvious you’ve set me up as the fall guy. You want to get your hands on this chess service, and you need a patsy. Well, I’m already into this up to my neck, right here in New York. I’m not about to go trotting off to some foreign country where I know nobody I could turn to for help. Maybe you’re bored and you need a new adventure, but what happens to me if I get into trouble over there? You don’t even have a damned phone number I can call. Perhaps you think the Carmelite nuns will rush to my aid the next time I get shot at? Or the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange might follow me around picking up the dead bodies I leave in my wake?”
“Let’s not get hysterical,” said Nim, always the calm voice of reason. “I am not at a loss for contacts on any continent, though you don’t know that because you’re too busy avoiding the issue. You remind me of those three monkeys who try to avoid evil by shutting off their sensory perceptions.”
“There is no American consulate in Algeria,” I said between gritted teeth. “Perhaps you have contacts at the Russian embassy who’d be glad to help me out?” Actually this was not entirely impossible, as Nim was part Russian and part Greek. But so far as I knew, he had less than a nodding acquaintance with the countries of his ancestry.
“As a matter of fact, I do have contacts with a few of the embassies in the country of your destination,” he said with what looked suspiciously like a smirk, “but we’ll get to that later. You must agree, my dear, that you are involved in this little escapade whether you like it or not. This quest for the holy grail has become a stampede. You’ll have no bartering power whatever, unless you get to it first.”
“Just call me Parsifal,” I said glumly. “I should have known better than to come to you for help. Your way of solving problems has been to find more difficult ones that make the first look sweet by comparison.”
Nim stood up, pulled me to my feet, and looked down at me with a smile of great complicity. He placed his hands on my shoulders.
“J’adoube,” he said.
SACRIFICES
People do not care to play chess on the edge of a precipice.
—Madame Suzanne Necker
Mother of Germaine de Staël
PARIS
SEPTEMBER 2, 1792
No one realized what sort of day it would be.
Germaine de Staël did not know as she said farewell to the embassy staff. For today, September 2, she would attempt to flee France under diplomatic protection.
Jacques-Louis David did not know as he hastily dressed for an emergency session of the National Assembly. For today, September 2, enemy troops had advanced to within 150 miles of Paris. The Prussians had threatened to burn the city to the ground.
Maurice Talleyrand did not know as he and his valet, Courtiade, pulled his costly leather-bound books from the shelves of his study. Today, September 2, he planned to smuggle the valuable library across the French border in preparation for his own imminent flight.
Valentine and Mireille did not know as they walked in the autumn garden behind David’s studio. The letter they’d just received told them the first pieces of the Montglane Service were in jeopardy. They could not guess that this letter would soon place them in the eye of the tornado that was about to sweep across France.
For no one knew that precisely five hours from now, at two o’clock the afternoon of September second, the Terror would begin.
9:00 AM
Valentine dangled her fingers in the small reflecting pool at the rear of David’s studio. A large goldfish nibbled at her. Not far from where she sat, she and Mireille had buried the two pieces of the service they’d brought with them from Montglane. And now there might be more to join those.
Mireille stood beside her, reading the letter. Around them the dark chrysanthemums glistened smoky amethyst and topaz in the foliage. The first yellow leaves fluttered to the water’s surface, giving off the scent of autumn despite the torpid late-summer heat.
“There can only be one explanation of this letter,” said Mireille, and she read aloud:
My Beloved Sisters in Christ,
As you may know, the Abbey of Caen has been closed. During the great unrest in France, our Directrice, Mile. Alexandrine de Forbin, has found it necessary to join her family in Flanders. However, Sister Marie-Charlotte Corday, whom you may also remember, has remained behind at Caen to attend unexpected business matters which may arise.
Though we have never met, I introduce myself. I am Sister Claude, a Benoit nun of the late convent at Caen. I was personal secretary to Sister Alexandrine, who visited some months ago at my home in Épernay before departing for Flanders. At that time, she pressed me to convey her tidings in person to Sister Valentine, should I find myself at any time soon in Paris.
I am presently in the Cordeliers quarter of that city. Please meet me at the gates of l’Abbaye Monastery at precisely two o’clock today, as I do not know how long I shall remain here. I think you understand the importance of this request.
—Your Sister in Christ
Claude of the Abbaye-aux-Dames, Caen
“She comes from Épernay,” said Mireille when she’d finished reading the letter. “It is a city east of here, on the Marne River. She claims that Alexandrine de Forbin stopped there en route to Flanders. Do you know what lies between Épernay and the Flemish border?”
Valentine shook her head and looked at Mireille with large eyes.
“The fortresses of Longwy and Verdun are there. And half the Prussian army. Perhaps our dear Sister Claude brings us something more valuable than the good tidings of Alexandrine de Forbin. Perhaps she brings us something that Alexandrine found was too dangerous to take across the Flemish border, with armies warring there.”
“The pieces!” said Valentine, leaping to her feet and frightening the goldfish. “The letter says that Charlotte Corday has stayed behind at Caen! Caen may have been a collection point at the northern border.” She paused to think this through. “But if so,” she added in confusion, “why was Alexandrine attempting to leave France by the east?”
“I do not know,” Mireille admitted, pulling her red hair loose from its ribbon and bending to the fountain to splash water on her hot face. “We shall never know what the letter means unless we meet Sister Claude at the appointed hour. But why has she chosen the Cordeliers, the most dangerous quarter of the city? And you know that l’Abbaye is no longer a monastery. It has been converted into a prison.”
“I am not afraid to go there alone,” said Valentine. “I promised the abbess I would assume this responsibility, and now the time has come to prove myself. But you must stay here, my cousin. Uncle Jacques-Louis has forbidden us to leave the grounds in his absence.”
“Then we will have to be very clever in our escape,” Mireille replied. “For I will never let you go into the Cordeliers without me. You may be sure o
f that.”
10:00 AM
The carriage of Germaine de Staël swept through the gates of the Swedish embassy. Atop the carriage stacks of trunks and wig boxes were piled, guarded by the coachman and two liveried servants. Within the coach Germaine was ensconced with her personal maids and many jewelry cachets. She wore the official costume of an ambassadress, replete with colored ribbons and epaulettes. The six white horses plowed through the already steaming streets of Paris, bound for the city gates. Their splendid cockades displayed the Swedish colors. The doors of the coach were emblazoned with the crest of the Swedish Crown. The window draperies were drawn shut.
Lost in her own thoughts within the insufferable heat and darkness of the coach, Germaine did not look out the window until, inexplicably, her coach came to a sudden jarring stop before reaching the city gates. A maid leaned forward and opened the window sash.
Outside, a mob of ragged women milled about, carrying rakes and hoes as if they were weapons. Several leered at Germaine through the window, their hideous mouths like jagged holes with blackened and missing teeth. Why did the rabble always have to look so rabblesque? thought Germaine. The hours she’d labored in political intrigue, lavishing her considerable fortune upon bribes to the right officials—and all for the sake of miserable wretches such as these. Germaine leaned out the window, one massive arm resting upon the ledge.
“What transpires here?” she called out in her booming, authoritarian voice. “Let my carriage pass at once!”
“No one is permitted to leave the city!” cried a woman from the mob. “We guard the gates! Death to the nobility!” This cry was picked up by the crowd, which was growing larger. The screeching hags nearly deafened Germaine with their racket.
“I am the Swedish ambassadress!” she called out. “I am on an official mission to Switzerland! I command you to let my carriage pass!”
“Ha! She commands it!” cried a woman near the carriage window. She turned upon Germaine and spat into her face as the crowd cheered.