White Death (29 page)

‘What? Why?’

‘Too long to explain. Can you seal it off?’

‘The whole university? Are you nuts?’

‘Probably. We’ve got little more than half an hour.’

‘You
are
nuts. The main campus alone is six blocks. It’s Friday afternoon, it’s gridlock heading out of town as it is. Even if I could get the manpower in time, we’d get crucified by City Hall. And anyway, what’s to say he’s not already there?’

‘Good point. OK. Get all the men you have, get some more off the other precincts, and flood the place. Get campus police on alert too. Bullhorns on cars, telling people to watch out. Let’s see if we can spook him. Anyone you see looks vaguely like Kwasi, arrest their ass.’

‘Anyone black, you mean.’

‘Whatever you say, Malcolm X. You know that statue of the goddess?’

‘The one opposite that big-ass library?’

‘That’s the one. I’ll see you there.’

‘You got it.’

They were heading against the worst of the traffic, but it was still pretty thick. Patrese had the siren on all the way in from New Rochelle, and even then it was slow going; but they made it to Columbia with fifteen minutes to spare. Dufresne was by the statue of Athena as promised, directing uniformed officers as though conducting an orchestra.

‘I hate to ask you this,’ Patrese said to Inessa as they pulled up, ‘but …’

‘No. I haven’t done it yet. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve tried every likely starting square, every possible first move: e4, d4, c4, f4, the two knight moves to f3 and c3. Nothing on any of them.’

‘Top left?’

‘What?’

‘Top left-hand corner. Start there. As though you’re reading a book.’

Inessa thought for a moment. ‘No. If you’re going to do it like that, you have to start bottom left. That’s square a1.’

‘OK.’

The letters on a1 were ‘BU’. From there, the hypothetical knight could only move to two squares, b3 (second column along, three from the bottom) – or c2 (third column along, second from the bottom). Square b3 was ‘AYS’, and ‘BUAYS’ wasn’t any word, part of a word or combination of words they’d ever heard of. So it had to be c2: ‘THE’.

Twelve minutes.

Five possible squares now: a3, b4, d4, e3, e1. Not d4: ‘BUTHEOAR’. The other four were all in contention; ‘BUTHEL’, ‘BUTHEN’, ‘BUTHEB’, ‘BUTHELP’.

Choice of four, and with false starts and retracing steps, Inessa probably only had time to pursue one line to its end. Which one?

‘BUTHELP’ had ‘help’ in it. Seemed as good as any. Call it.

‘BUTHELP’ it was.

She looked back at the pattern so far: a1-c2-e1. The next logical step was g2: ‘LE’. ‘BUTHELPLE’. ‘Helpless’? There was an ‘S’ on h4, and now the line was going up the side rather than along the bottom. She started to get faster and faster as she pieced it together: up the right-hand side, along the top, down the left-hand side and in, tracing pretty patterns as it spelt out its message:

BUTHELPLESSPIECESOFTHEGAMEHEPLAYSUPONTHISCH
ECKERBOARDOFNIGHTSANDDAYSHITHERANDTHITHERM
OVESANDCHECKSANDSLAYSANDONEBYONEBACKINTHE
CLOSETLAYS

‘But helpless pieces of the game he plays upon this checkerboard of nights and days. Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays; and one by one back in the closet lays.’

‘You’re a genius,’ Patrese said. ‘A stone-cold genius. What does it mean?’

‘Omar Khayyam. Very famous chess quote. From the
Rubaiyat
.’

‘Who the hell’s Omar Khayyam?’

‘Twelfth century. Persian polymath: poet, astronomer, mathematician, philosopher.’

Patrese turned to the nearest campus policeman. ‘There a Persian faculty?’

‘Persia?’

‘Iran,’ Inessa said.

‘Oh. Yeah. There’s a Center for Iranian Studies up on Riverside Drive. Number 450. The Brookfield.’

‘Where’s that at?’

The campus cop pointed in the direction of the Hudson. ‘Couple of blocks that way.’

Dufresne was already radioing it in: All units to 450 Riverside Drive. Patrese leapt back in his car and fishtailed his way out of the campus pedestrianized area. Athena watched him go, stonily unimpressed.

It took him two minutes to get to the Brookfield building. He left the car in the road, prompting a furious volley of horns from those drivers behind him, and raced for the entrance. A maintenance man in fluorescent orange was going in; a cycle courier with helmet and pollution mask was coming out. Patrese barged between the two of them and into the lobby.

There was an announcements board with movable white letters on the far side.
IN SEARCH OF OMAR KHAYYAM; A NEW APPRAISAL. PROFESSOR KARL MIESES. PURCELL ROOM, 6 P.M. ALL WELCOME.

It wasn’t yet five. If Mieses was here in this building, he’d most likely be in his office. There was a list of the research center’s occupants on one wall. Patrese scanned it.

MIESES, KARL W. PROFESSOR OF PERSIAN STUDIES. ROOM F4. SECOND FLOOR.

Photograph next to it: a black man with silver hair and seventies eyeglasses.

Patrese took the stairs two at a time, gun drawn. Sirens behind and below him: units arriving in response to Dufresne’s call. Patrese barked Mieses’ name and room number into the radio and kept going. No time to wait for back-up.

Top of the stairs, turn right. F4 was third on the left. Door locked.

‘Professor Mieses?’ More shout than question. No answer.

Patrese shot the lock off and kicked open the door.

Mieses was there; well, what Patrese assumed had been Mieses, at any rate.

Cops barreling through the door behind him, stopping, careering into the back of each other. ‘Out!’ Patrese shouted. ‘Out, he’s dead, there’s nothing we can do, give me space. Seal off the building. Someone must have seen something. Find them.’

They left: some quickly, only too keen to get away, and some slowly, as though transfixed by the sight of a body with no head.

Blood everywhere, fresh and dripping with a high odor. Kwasi must have killed Mieses recently, as in a few minutes before Patrese’s arrival. So how come Kwasi wasn’t covered in blood when he walked out of here? And how had he got out in the first place?

Had
he got out? Was he still here?

No, Patrese thought: he wouldn’t dare. Unless he’d thought they wouldn’t get the clue until it was too late, and had reckoned he had all the time in the world. Well, they’d soon find out. They were sealing off the building, and then they’d sweep every last inch of it.

He looked round the room. A professor’s sanctuary: every wall covered in bookshelves, every surface invisible under papers, and half hidden behind a skyscraper of periodicals, a computer so ancient it should have been in the Smithsonian.

Patrese looked down to the floor, for the tarot card he knew would be there. Another Knight: the Knight of Wands, this time. And next to it, something which looked like …

An arm.

Half an arm, more precisely: a bottom half, from the elbow downwards.

Patrese glanced at Mieses’ body again. His left arm was still intact, but his right had been severed at the shoulder. This stray portion of arm next to the tarot card had a hand at its end. Kwasi had only taken his upper arm this time, from shoulder to elbow.

Why?

He’d taken the head, as usual. He’d taken skin patches front and back, as usual. So why only half the arm? Not to save time, that was for sure: it must have actually
cost
him time, to saw the arm twice rather than once.

No, Patrese thought. The only reason Kwasi would have done this was to make the piece of arm easier to carry, and the only reason he’d have done
that
was because he didn’t have enough space for a whole arm in whichever bag he was using.

A little nag in Patrese’s brain: something he’d seen and couldn’t quite recall.

He looked round the room again. What – the obvious fact of a headless body aside – was out of place here?

There, pushed under an armchair. Something fluorescent, scrunched up. Patrese thought of the maintenance man he’d passed on the way in. He reached under the chair and pulled. There were two items, in fact: a waterproof jacket and waterproof trousers, both in bright orange with reflective white flashes, and both drenched in Mieses’ blood.

Patrese looked under the chair again. Another two items, these ones smaller. Shoe covers, velcroed where they fastened round the ankle. A logo on the side, just about visible through the blood spatters. Nalini.

Nalini makes cycling clothes.

Not the maintenance man coming in as Patrese had
arrived, but the cycle courier coming out – helmet on, pollu
tion mask covering his nose and mouth. He’d had one of those cycle courier bags over this shoulder. A head and half an arm would fit in there, but a whole arm wouldn’t. Kwasi must have had some sort of plastic lining inside the bag to keep the blood from dripping, of course; but that wasn’t exactly rocket science.

Kwasi had walked right past Patrese. Right past him, close enough to touch. And now he’d be long gone, lost and anonymous in a Manhattan rush hour.

Helpless pieces of the game, Patrese thought. Helpless pieces indeed.

The NYPD stopped every cycle courier they could find. None of them were Kwasi. Many of them, in fact, were working downtown, and even Lance Armstrong couldn’t have made it from Morningside Heights to Wall Street in the time available.

Patrese gave an impromptu statement to the press from the steps of Columbia’s Butler Library, and inverted the usual wisdom about security services and terrorists. Yes, he said, he remained confident that they’d catch Kwasi King. Kwasi had to be lucky every time; they only had to be lucky once.

And Patrese knew, though he didn’t say, that chess is not a game of luck.

After a couple of hours, he left Dufresne in charge of the scene and headed back towards New Haven with Inessa. She was quiet until they were well clear of town, and then it all came gushing out. She blamed herself: if only she’d solved the puzzle sooner, Professor Mieses would still be alive.

No, Patrese said firmly: it was thanks to her alone that they’d gotten as close to saving Mieses as they had. Without her, they’d still have been floundering round Manhattan when Kwasi struck. She’d got them not just to Columbia but to the Iranian Center itself. There was only one person to blame for any of this, and that was Kwasi. He was the one doing the killing. He was the one playing games: the man-child, unable or unwilling to distinguish between murder and the puzzles page of a newspaper. It was nobody’s fault but his.

Inessa’s problem wasn’t guilt, Patrese knew: it was shock. Being up close to a murder – a real live murder, if that wasn’t a contradiction – was enough to throw most people off balance until they were used to it. All the TV shows and newspaper reports in the world couldn’t prepare you for the visceral impact of knowing that a life had been snuffed out in the time it took you to drink a can of soda. Inessa hadn’t seen Mieses’ body in the flesh, of course, but she’d been part of the race to save him, she’d been swept up in the vortex of police sirens and radio chatter.

Patrese’s instinctive reaction was a very male one: to solve Inessa’s problem for her, break it down into its constituent pieces, point out where she was looking at them wrong, and reassemble them in a way that absolved her of all blame. But he’d been around, and with, enough women to know that Inessa didn’t want him to solve her problem. She wanted him to listen. So that’s what he did. He let her talk, let her spill the words again and again as though she was trying to purge the toxins of her failure from within her.

He listened all the way back to New Haven, and then over dinner in the hotel restaurant, and then with the contents of the minibar in his room. And somewhere
between the second and third locations, he knew that they’d
sleep together that night. Not because he’d be taking advan
tage of her vulnerability, but because cops, doctors and under
takers know the slightly sordid truth that the rest of us prefer to keep hidden.

Sex and death are intertwined. Death makes us feel horny.

Not the actual sight of a dead body itself, of course – well, not usually, and there’s a word for people who broach this – but the presence of death, the imprint it has on those around it. Sex is the harbinger of life, and as such it’s the biggest, most literal fuck-you to death imaginable: assertion of life’s intense but temporary primacy, negation of death’s sting and the grave’s victory.

So when Inessa stood up from the sofa and took Patrese’s hand, he knew that this time she wouldn’t lead him on and then leave at the last minute. And afterwards, when she was sleeping contentedly on his chest – wasn’t it supposed to be the man who conked out first after sex? – he was staring at the ceiling, a single thought going round and round his head.

Kwasi had just killed, so now it was White’s turn.

Patrese was kissing his way down Inessa’s stomach in the half-light of a winter morning when his cellphone rang. ‘Leave it,’ she whispered, but he was already rolling away from her and reaching for the bedside table.