White Death (22 page)

‘He’s a killer.’

‘I know.’

‘Were you surprised? Him on the run?’

She made a face. ‘Sort of. It’s a shock, sure, but you see the way he plays chess … He’s a killer on the board too. Two things about his play always stand out. One, it’s so clear. He doesn’t make mysterious or obscure moves, at least not when you analyze them properly. He’s very direct. Very logical.’

‘You make it sound easy.’

‘Isn’t that genius, though? To make the difficult, the almost impossible, look easy?’

And the other way round, Patrese thought: Kwasi could make the easy, the quotidian understandings of human relationships and social functions, look supremely difficult.

‘What’s the other?’

‘What’s the other what?’

‘Thing about his play.’

‘His will. It’s granite. He never gives way to anyone else. If he loses a game – and everyone does sometimes, even the greatest players – he
never
loses the next one. Some people crumble when they lose. But Kwasi, it only makes him stronger. Never seen him lose two straight, ever. I remember one time, a Pan-American tournament. University chess champs. He was top board for UMBC, I was third for Penn State. I watched him play; not the moves on the board, but
him
. It was like looking at, I don’t know, a bird of prey, a hunting animal. A predator. A raptor. Just ruthless. He plays every game as though it’s his last.’ She paused. ‘To the death.’

‘He ever violent to you when you dated?’

‘Physically? Never.’

‘Emotionally?’

Inessa didn’t answer immediately. They ran in silence for a few moments, heading towards the bridge across the harbor. Patrese didn’t press her; he thought her hesitation was more a question of finding the right words than a reluctance to answer.

‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘But not deliberately, if that makes sense. He never abused me, told me I was worthless, any of that. The violence, the psychic violence, he uses it against himself as much as against other people. He had to win everything. Not only chess but everything. We played tennis, he had to win. Poker – Jesus Christ. Couldn’t stop till he was up, didn’t matter if you’d been playing all night.’

‘Sounds pretty wearing.’

‘It is. But then again, you know you’re with a genius; a proper, unalloyed, twenty-four-carat genius. Seriously. You know anything about chess, you see the clarity of his play and the brilliance of his ideas, and you think he’s every bit a Mozart, a Rembrandt, a Shakespeare. All the girls, every female chess player, we all wanted to be with him. Like his status would reflect well on us, you know? The time I was with him, all the other girls despised me. I had what they wanted. But they admired me too, for getting him. Just like you can admire Kwasi’s chess and despise his personality.’

‘How long were you with him for?’ Patrese’s breathing was coming easier now.

‘Not long. Month or so.’

‘Hardly a great romance.’

‘It’s a month longer than he managed with anyone else.’

‘You sure?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘How?’

‘Because of why we finished.’

‘Go on.’

‘Two things. First, his chess was suffering. He lost more games in the month we were together than he had in the two years beforehand. You know what it’s like: young love, you can’t think straight, you can’t eat properly, your mind keeps wandering. To a chess player, all that is death. You’ve got to be strong, focused, clear-headed. Maybe it would’ve settled down, I don’t know: the first flush of the crush fades, you become a proper couple. But he never gave it a chance. I was affecting his chess, so I had to go. That was how he saw it.’

She wiped her sleeve across her brow.

‘That was sure as hell how his mother saw it. She’s the second reason we finished, of course. Relationship like they had, no other woman ever stood a chance. She hated me. Not me as such, I guess, but what I represented.
She
was the only woman in his life, that was how she saw it. She did everything for him – took him to tournaments, cooked, washed, managed, negotiated – and in return she expected total loyalty.’

‘And of course her attachment wasn’t just to him, but to his success too.’

‘Exactly. I threatened that success. If I got too close, not only would she be pushed out, but he might not end up what they’d both planned for: world champion, best ever, all that. Her or me. Chess or me. I lost, on both counts.’

They headed into the park. Patrese pointed ahead with his good arm. ‘I usually run to the lighthouse and back.’

‘Oh?’

‘You sound surprised.’

‘Not a bit. I thought we’d be going further, that’s all. Well, if that’s as far as we’re going to get, you want to race there?’

He laughed. ‘And you told me
he
was competitive.’

‘He is. But so am I. Come on. You’re a Bureau agent, and you won’t race a girl?’

‘You want a head start?’

Her eyes flashed. ‘You want to patronize me a bit more?’

‘What’s the bet?’

‘Winner buys dinner.’

‘Sure. When do we start racing?’

‘We already have,’ and she was off, arms pumping and feet splayed as she sprinted.

Patrese won, but he had to work hard for it, overhauling her only in the last hundred yards or so. They collapsed against the side of the lighthouse in heaving laughter.

‘Double or quits on the way home,’ she said.

‘Sure.’

After a couple of minutes’ rest, Patrese turned round and led the way back toward the city, heedless and ignorant of who might be watching them.

Kwasi had never liked to think of himself as a voyeur. It wasn’t the furtiveness that bothered him but the dirtiness. His mother had told him all women were whores, apart from herself, and that no woman would ever love him as much as she did.

But it wasn’t like he was being a voyeur now. Sure, he was watching them, but they weren’t having sex. Just running.

Funny, he thought. Patrese was looking for him, and yet Kwasi could see Patrese rather than vice versa. Kwasi was the one on the run, but he was standing still while Patrese ran. There were a multitude of ways in which you could watch someone without them knowing – you didn’t even have to be within sight of them; hell, you could be on the other side of the world as long as you had a camera and a web link – and yet he, Kwasi, was hiding from the world almost in plain sight. Going out only in darkness, staying in during daytime. The world was a topsy-turvy place. White was black, black was white.

He wondered how Inessa had portrayed herself to the cops, and whether it had been the same way she’d sold herself to the news networks.
I used to date him, I know him better than anybody, I can help, let me help.
He wondered if they’d see through her, or whether they were so desperate for comment and insight that they’d take anything.

This was a game, wasn’t it? That’s what Patrese had asked him by the dumpsters in Bleecker – nice plaster cast, by the way, from where he’d fended off the chessboard. Another split second, and Kwasi would have stoved in Patrese’s skull.
Who’s white? Who’s Ivory? Who’s in Boston? Who are you playing against?

It was a game. And if it was a game, then he should start playing properly.

The thing about chess is this: it’s a game of perfect information, entirely without chance. Perfect information, because both players can see all the pieces on the board all the time; entirely without chance, because there’s no outside force to provide the element of luck. In poker, you can’t see your opponents’ cards; in backgammon, you rely on the roll of the dice. Not so in chess. That’s why poker and backgammon are poor relations to the game of kings. Chess is a contest of pure skill.

So too here. Patrese was trying to find Kwasi; Kwasi was trying to remain hidden. Patrese would find Kwasi only if Kwasi made a mistake. But the equilibrium in this game was different than in chess. In chess, you begin at stasis; an
even position, the pieces symmetrical with the board undis
turbed. Then you create chaos out of order. Here, the positions weren’t equal. If the status quo was maintained, Kwasi would win; that was, Patrese wouldn’t find him. Chess starts as a draw. This was starting as a win for Kwasi. Kwasi knew things Patrese didn’t.

Everyone always said Kwasi was scrupulously fair at the board. And the fair thing to do when you’re much better than your opponent is to offer him odds, to play handicap; compensate him for the imbalance in skill, even things up. Odds make things even. In chess, there are many ways of doing this. You can play without a pawn or a piece, you can give your opponent more time or extra moves, you can play blindfold while your opponent has sight of the board, and so on.

In this game, though, where the rules weren’t clearly defined, it was harder to think what was best.

Knowledge, Kwasi thought. That was what Patrese wanted with Inessa, of course; he, Patrese, wanted to know about him, Kwasi. Wanted to know what made Kwasi tick. Kwasi had looked Patrese up, of course, after the very first time they’d met, and read about his previous cases. The Human Torch in Pittsburgh, that business down in New Orleans with the axes and the mirrors.

Kwasi had read a lot, and he’d worked out something about Patrese. Patrese always wanted to know
why
. Most cops were happy with what, where, when, how. Patrese wanted the fifth, why, at once the most and least important of the list.

And if that would even things up a bit, that’s what Kwasi would give him. Not all at once, of course: where was the fun in that? But little by little, and things that would be useful if Patrese was smart enough to work it all out.

If.

Americans don’t have much time for smart kids. The media does, because it can make a story out of you – a freak story if it’s the
National Enquirer
, a chatty but serious one if it’s the
New York Times
– but ordinary people don’t. They say they do, but they don’t. Adults don’t like having a little kid telling them they’re wrong. Teenagers don’t like being beaten at chess by someone half their age. College kids don’t like sitting in class alongside someone who should still be in ninth grade.

That’s the curse of being a prodigy. You’re as bright as adults – brighter than most of them, in fact – but you don’t have the life experiences they have, so you can’t really talk to them about things. And everyone your own age feels like a dumbass, stupid and juvenile and just variations on the central theme of being a douchebag.

You’re a 32-bit child in an 8-bit world. You’re not going to fit in anywhere. Show me two stools, any two stools, and I fell between them. The only kids I could possibly hang out with were other chess players, but even then there was a problem. Most of them I could beat with one hand tied behind my back, so they were no contest. The very few who could give me a good game became threats, so I couldn’t let them be my friends either.

The only person who knew what to make of me was my mom. Some doctors wanted to diagnose me hyperactive or with attention deficit disorder, give me Ritalin, dope me up to be a good little zombie. Others thought I was autistic, retarded. She told them all to get fucked. She pulled me out of school to home tutor me. The principal told her she was going to mess up my life. She told him to get fucked too.

It was us against the world. She taught me everything, the whole curriculum, even when she was having to learn it herself. Most of the time, I was teaching her as much as she was teaching me, often more. She insisted that I do all the subjects and get into college, not just because I should have more than chess, but because it would make me better at chess. The first part I could see. The second I thought was bullshit.

I was ready to go to college when I was fourteen. I applied to four Ivy League colleges – Columbia, Princeton, Brown and Dartmouth – and they all turned me down. Didn’t think I’d fit in. No doubts about my intellect or my grades, but concerned that I wasn’t ready for the rest of the college experience. Home schooling did not a rounded young person make, or some shit like that. Patronizing fucks.

Then some guy from the
Baltimore Sun
came to do a piece on me, and mentioned in it that I was hoping to go to college. The day the article came out, the very same day, I got a call from a guy named Neal Marsh, professor of computer science at UMBC. UMBC was building up a chess team to take on the best, and they were offering scholarships. They’d pay my fees as long as I played chess and majored in computer science. Marsh said he’d always wanted to have a future world champion at UMBC.

He let me play as much chess as I wanted. The computer science part helped a lot in that, with search engines and stuff. Turns out I was wrong about getting into college not making me better at chess. Everything I did was to make me better at the game.

You heard of synaesthesia? It’s when your senses get muddled up; you hear colors, you see smells, that kind of thing. Saturday to me is purple and smells of coffee. Red is Beethoven’s Fifth. The taste of eggplant is those little indentations you get on a thimble.

And it’s like that on a chessboard for me too. I don’t see the pieces. I see the paths they make, I hear the squares they can go to. A bishop is a blinking light, a rook is a straight tunnel. Patterns swirl and collide. Every move makes something new, and I’m in control of it all, this board which is the whole world, quivering with tension.

Other people – and I didn’t know this for the longest time, because you think everyone sees the world like you do until you know better – other people have to calculate. This piece goes there, so that piece goes there, and if the rook takes the knight then the pawn can take the rook and no, start again, what if the queen goes to that square … I don’t have to do that. I just see it. I don’t know how, I just do. It’s like everyone else is hacking through the jungle with trees all around them, and I’m hovering above and can see which way’s out and where all the dead ends are.