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‘They are demands, then.’
Kwasi shrugged again.
‘The match starts in two weeks’ time.’
A third shrug. ‘I know.’
Nursultan looked at Tartu and raised his eyebrows.
They started to read Kwasi’s list. Nursultan jotted notes in margins, pursing his lips and giving little dismissive laughs from time to time. Tartu read the whole thing very fast, and then went back to the start and did it again, more slowly. Kwasi walked over to the window and looked down at Park Avenue, as though he could will his mother into arriving simply by the power of his gaze.
‘Well,’ Nursultan said at last, ‘Rainer and me, we should talk about this, no?’
‘OK,’ Kwasi said.
He didn’t move. Nursultan laughed. ‘We want to, how you say? Talk about you behind your back.’
‘Oh. OK. Sure.’
‘You go into room next door,’ Nursultan said. ‘I call you when we finish.’
Kwasi left. Nursultan batted the back of his hand against Kwasi’s list. ‘This: outrageous. You know how much money on this all? He want to hold us ransom.’
‘He’s not trying to hold you to ransom.’
Nursultan snorted: hard-headed businessman telling airy-fairy chess player the ways of the world. ‘Two weeks before biggest chess match since Reykjavik? What else he do? Rainer, they not coming to see you. Sorry, but true. They come to see him.’
‘You don’t get him, do you?’
‘Get him?’
‘Understand him.’
‘Sure I do.’
‘No, you don’t. Why does he make all these demands?’
‘To get more money. To, how you say, unsettle you.’
‘No. He makes them because they’re what he wants. He has no agenda beyond that. He’s a child. He doesn’t want to play in Linares, so he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to play in Dortmund, so he doesn’t. He sees the world like a child. Black and white.’
‘He not behave this way last time.’
‘He wasn’t world champion last time. He wanted that prize so much, he didn’t care about anything else. But now he wants everything to be the way he wants it.’
Nursultan flicked through the pages. ‘Some of these, reasonable. Some, no. I see ten, twelve, simply no good. Cannot accept.’
‘Then we won’t play.’
‘You will play.’
‘I’ll play. But he won’t.’
‘Then I negotiate with him.’
Tartu’s smile meant the same thing as the snort Nursultan had given a minute or so before: I know the truth of this situation better than you. ‘He won’t negotiate.’
‘Everyone negotiates.’
‘Not him. These aren’t one hundred and eighty demands: they’re one demand. Take it or leave it.’
‘We’ll see.’ Nursultan called out. ‘Kwasi!’
Two doors opened at once: the one that led into the room where Kwasi was waiting, and the main door of the suite, which was guarded round the clock by Nursultan’s security men. Two of them stood in the doorway. As Kwasi came back in, one of the security men walked over to Nursultan and spoke quickly in Tatar. Nursultan nodded. The man by the door stepped aside, and Patrese walked in. Nursultan remained seated. People like him didn’t get up for government agents.
‘I’m looking for Kwasi King,’ Patrese said.
‘That’s me,’ Kwasi said.
‘Franco Patrese, Federal Bureau of Investigation.’
‘Have I done something wrong?’
Patrese looked around the suite. ‘Could I talk to you in private, sir?’
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Patrese led Kwasi back into the room from where he, Kwasi, had just come, and shut the door behind them. Deep red sofas, antique escritoires, carpets thicker than some of the surfaces he’d played football on, and a wicker chair that JFK had used for his bad back: Patrese figured that, on a Bureau salary, he too could afford to stay in this place. For about five minutes.
He’d volunteered to tell Kwasi. In terms of gathering evidence and following leads, the first twenty-four hours after a homicide was critical, and so it made sense for Kieseritsky to stay in New Haven and supervise the investigation there: it was her turf, and she knew it backwards. The easiest thing to do would have been to phone the nearest precinct to Kwasi’s apartment and get them to send a couple of uniforms over, and perhaps that’s what they would have done had Jane Doe turned out to be an ordinary Jane, but this: this was something else.
The news was going to get out sooner rather than later, and the moment it did the press would be all over them like the cheapest suit on the rack. In that situation, you didn’t need some guy barely out of police academy, so Patrese had hauled ass from New Haven down to New York, a couple of hours’ drive to add to what he’d already done. En route, he’d checked in with his boss at the Bureau’s New Orleans field office, Don Donner – yes, that really was his name and yes, he had eventually forgiven his parents. Donner was one of the least territorial Bureau guys around, which made him a rare and precious beast. Sure, he’d said, do whatever you have to, help them for as long as they need you. We’re all the Bureau: we’re all the good guys.
And Patrese’s hangover had disappeared somewhere around Stamford.
Death notification is the redheaded stepchild of law enforcement work, the dirty job that no one really wants to do; but one of Patrese’s partners, an old-time Pittsburgh detective named Mark Beradino, had always believed it to be one of the most important tasks a police officer could have. It wasn’t merely that you owed the living your best efforts to find whoever had killed their loved one; it was also that the skilled detective could ascertain a whole heap from what the bereaved said or did. Shock and grief, like lust and rage, flay the truth from people.
Patrese knew the rules of death notification. Talk directly. Don’t be afraid of the d-words – dead, died, death. Don’t use euphemisms. Driver’s licenses expired, parcels were passed on, keys were lost. Not people. People died.
Patrese gestured for Kwasi to take a seat, and sat down opposite him.
‘Mr King, your mother is dead.’
Kwasi stared at him. Patrese held his gaze, rock-solid neutral. He didn’t try to take Kwasi’s arm or touch him in any way. Everyone reacts to news like this differently. Some people clap their hands to their chest and catch their breath; some fall sobbing to the floor; some even attack the messenger.
Kwasi did none of these things. He stared at Patrese for fully half a minute, totally blank, as though his brain – this vast, amazing brain that could see fifteen moves ahead through a forest of pieces on a chessboard – was struggling to comprehend the very short, very simple, very brutal sentence he’d just heard.
‘You sure?’ he said at last.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘How?’ He blinked twice. ‘How? Where? When?’
‘Her body was found this morning on New Haven Green.’
‘Where?’
‘New Haven, sir. Connecticut.’
‘What the hell she doing there?’
‘I was hoping you could tell me that, sir.’
Kwasi looked around, as though seeing the room for the first time. ‘Can you take me home, officer?’
‘Sure.’
Manhattan slid past the windows of Patrese’s car. A church on Lexington spat worshippers out on to the sidewalk. In a Union Square café, a man jabbed his fork in the air to make a point amidst pealing laughter from his friends.
The journey passed in silence. Kwasi said nothing, and Patrese didn’t try to make him talk. Some people gush an endless torrent of questions, wanting to know everything about how their loved one has died: others are silent, perhaps in the hope that if they don’t ask, don’t know, don’t listen, then it won’t have happened.
Kwasi didn’t move the entire journey. He sat bolt upright and stared straight ahead. Only once, when they turned past Washington Square Park, did he so much as glance out of the window.
Kwasi’s apartment was on Bleecker Street. Patrese pulled up outside. A little further on, at the junction with Sixth Avenue, police barriers were being erected on the sidewalk.
‘Do you have anyone you can call?’
Kwasi shook his head.
‘No one at all?’
‘No.’ Kwasi made no move to get out of the car.
‘Would you like me to come up with you?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’ Kwasi looked at Patrese for the first time since leaving the Waldorf-Astoria. ‘That would be’ – he searched for the right word – ‘helpful.’
There was a doorman in the lobby; a young guy with tight curly hair and teeth white enough to be visible from space. He got to his feet as they came in.
‘Hey, Mr King. Looking forward to the parade tonight?’
Kwasi didn’t hear; or if he did, he didn’t acknowledge it. Patrese nodded at the man. ‘Parade?’ he asked.
‘Hallowe’en parade. Expecting a million folks, they say.’
The apartment was typical Bleecker: gentrification writ large over smatterings of old-school authenticity. Exposed brickwork and windows framed with industrial steel: wooden floorboards and subtle uplighting. Poliform kitchen with corian countertops and Miele appliances: pre-wired Bose sound system and fifty-inch plasma TV.
And on pretty much every surface was a chess set. There must have been hundreds, jostling on shelves and squatting on tables. Standard sets were very much the minority. Think of a theme, and it was there somewhere. Cowboys faced off against Indians, Crusaders against Saracens, Red Sox against Yankees, Spartans against Athenians, angels against demons. There were Egyptian gods, Norse gods, Greek gods. Terracotta warriors peered sideways towards Harry Potter characters. Star Wars figurines backed on to samurai. One set was made of automobile parts; another had skeleton keys as pieces, fitting into a hole in each square; a third had squares of all different heights. Blue pieces eyeballed green ones, pink played yellow, red played orange. A hexagonal board was designed for three players; a multi-dimensional set stacked four boards atop each other.
Kwasi looked at Patrese, saw his interest.
‘Can never have too many sets,’ he said.
This was Kwasi’s refuge, Patrese sensed. When the world got too big and complex and nasty – and it must have been all those things right now for him, and more – here’s where he came, back to the chessboard, where everything had order and rules and where he was the master.
‘Which one’s your favorite?’
‘Don’t have one. If I did, the others would get upset.’
‘The others? The other sets? The pieces?’
‘That’s right. Tell you one I haven’t got, though. It’s this one from Wales; you know, part of England. The chessboard of Gwenddoleu. The board’s made of gold, the men are made of silver, and when the pieces are set up, they play by themselves.’
‘That’s a nice story.’
‘It’s not a story. It’s true. It really exists.’
Patrese decided to change tack. ‘Mr King, I’m sorry to do this, but I have to ask you some questions about your mother. Help us find the person who killed her.’
‘She was killed?’
‘I told you that.’
‘You told me her body was found on New Haven Green.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, but yes. She was killed.’
‘How?’
Patrese had thought about this one already. ‘A knife was used.’ Not a lie. Not the whole truth either, of course, but not a lie. ‘Now, you said you don’t know why she might have been there. In New Haven.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You did, sir.’
‘I said, “What the hell she doing there?”’
‘I took that as you not knowing why she was there.’
‘I don’t.’
Patrese wondered briefly whether Kwasi was being deliberately obstructive. No, he thought, I’ve just told the man that his mother’s dead. Cut him some slack.
‘When did you last see her?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘You remember what time?’
