White Death (4 page)

Seventh game to Kwasi. Eighth to Tartu, at last beginning to sweat under the tension. Punch-drunk, perhaps trying to save themselves for what they knew really would be the final decider, they played out the final two games as draws.

Now came sudden death, Armageddon chess: and for once the sobriquet didn’t seem inappropriate. The colors had so far alternated game on game, but since this was a one-off, they tossed again. Kwasi won, and chose Black. In Armageddon chess, White has five minutes to make all his moves and Black only four: but White has to win, because a draw is counted as a Black victory.

By now, thirty-two million people were watching in the United States alone, and three or four times that worldwide.

Tartu and Kwasi shook hands, gave brittle smiles for the cameras. The arbiter checked their clocks, and off they went.

Most all the chess teachers Kwasi had ever had – and every one of them had been obliged to provide their services for free, as Regina had never been able to afford lessons – had tried to stop him playing speed chess in Washington Square Park. It’s not real chess, they’d tell him; it’s cheap stuff, trickery, simple two- or three-move patterns. Real chess takes time and contemplation, real chess requires vision and strategy. Real chess is the Four Seasons: speed chess is Mickey D’s.

But they’d all been wrong, because it was exactly those thousands of two- and three-minute games in the park that won Kwasi the world title now. All the things that were gradually leaching Tartu’s energy from him – the ever-tightening vice of quicker time controls, the barely controlled pandemonium in the hall, the insane pressure of playing a blitz game for the greatest prize in his sport – these were the very things that energized Kwasi, that arced through him like electricity. Four minutes on his clock, spectators who couldn’t keep still or shut up, all eyes on him. This wasn’t a hall in Kazan, this was the park, rain and shine and summer and winter, this was where he felt at home.

Now, with no time in which to think and even less in which to move, Kwasi played with deathless precision, mind and eyes and fingers everywhere on the board at once. He made moves like a tennis player plays shots, all instinct and muscle memory, pieces finding their way to the perfect square time after time as though by homing instinct. Some called it the zone, some called it a trance. It was both, and neither. Kwasi was no longer playing chess. He
was
chess.

And when he came back to the States as world champion, the youngest in history and America’s first since Fischer, he remained chess in a different but equally all-consuming way. Suddenly, the game was no longer a refuge for weirdos and sad sacks, for guys with pocket protectors and BO, sweating out fast-food toxins in gloomy rooms.

Kwasi, single-handedly, had made chess cool.

He played against celebrities. He guested on hip-hop albums, rapping about the ways in which chess mirrored life. He said he was going to hire himself the best architect available and build himself a house shaped like a rook, replete with spiral staircases and parapets. Sponsors fell over themselves to sign him up, this perfect synthesis of every marketing man’s dream: hip enough to appeal to kids, smart enough to appeal to adults, wholesome enough – never much talk of girls, let alone drugs – to be held up as a model for the black community. Kwasi had Tiger’s reach, Jordan’s smarts, 50 Cent’s cred, Denzel’s looks. Will Smith wanted to play him in a movie.

The one thing he didn’t do was the one thing that had made him famous. He didn’t play competitive chess. As world champion, he was guaranteed the right to defend his title, so he didn’t have to go through the official qualification process again, but there were still plenty of other tournaments in which he could have played, names that tripped off the tongue of chess fans the world over: Linares, Wijk aan Zee, Dortmund.

The less he played, the more his mystique grew, this Gatsby of modern-day chess. Was he working on some new fiendish openings? Could anyone else call themselves a winner without playing him?

It wasn’t as though Kwasi needed the tournament income. The championship prize money had made Kwasi a millionaire literally overnight. In the year or two that followed, endorsements multiplied that at least tenfold, probably more. The only two people who knew the exact figures were Kwasi and Regina, and they weren’t telling. And yes, she was still there, always at his side. No one got to say so much as a single word to him without going through her first. No sponsor got to pitch him a proposal until she’d read it and sat in their boardroom for three hours going over it point by point.

When he bought a condo in the Village, she moved in with him. When he played in exhibition matches, she was right there in the auditorium, front and center. When they stayed in hotels, they had a suite, two bedrooms, one for him and one for her. At home or on the road, she made sure his cooking and laundry were done. She was mother, manager, promoter, gatekeeper.

Time
ran a profile on her.
YOU KNOW THE KING,
ran the headline,
NOW MEET THE QUEEN
. She cut it out and put it on the noticeboard in their kitchen, alongside one that showed her on the street outside their old tower block, a farewell to their old life.
THE QUEEN OF QUEENS,
that one said.

And now Kwasi was due to begin the defense of his title – against Tartu once more – at Madison Square Garden in less than two weeks’ time, and Regina was dead.

‘I don’t understand,’ Kwasi said. ‘She’s never late.’

Marat Nursultan tapped his Breitling. ‘We get on with it? We suppose to start a half-hour ago.’

‘Of course,’ said Rainer Tartu.

It was only the three of them in the room: the three most powerful men in world chess. Not that it was an equal triumvirate, of course. Kwasi was the box office: his presence, and his presence alone, determined the dollars. Tartu just happened to be the one on the other side of the board. If Kwasi could have somehow played against himself, the sponsors wouldn’t have given Tartu a look-in; and if he, Tartu, didn’t like it, there were plenty of other grandmasters who’d take his place in a heartbeat.

As for Nursultan … well, he was the kind of guy that everyone had an opinion about. He liked people to call him Mr President, as he held two such offices: the presidency of Tatarstan, the semi-autonomous region of Russia whose capital Kazan had hosted the first match between Kwasi and Tartu; and the presidency of FIDE, the Fédération Internationale des Échecs, the governing body of world chess.

Rumors of bribery and corruption had swirled around both elections, and Nursultan had done little to dampen them: how else, his sly smile and calculated bonhomie seemed to ask, how else was one supposed to win elections? Nursultan was pretty much the prototype for
homo post-sovieticus
: after completing a doctorate in applied mathematics from Kazan State Technical University, he’d seen which way the winds of perestroika were blowing in the late 1980s and had positioned himself accordingly.

In the chaos that had followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he’d made a small fortune in car dealerships, a medium one in oil and banking, and an enormous one in technology. The Kazan Group, of which he was chairman and CEO, was now at the forefront of mobile communications and software development. On a good day he was worth $12 billion, on a bad day $10 billion. He was comfortably one of the richest hundred people in the world. He had mistresses whom he paraded in public and a wife whom he didn’t. He claimed to have been abducted by aliens and given a tour of their galaxy.

And he loved chess with a passion. His Rolls-Royces were only ever black or white, the floors of all the houses he owned around the world were checkerboard marble, and he’d made the game a compulsory subject at every school in Tatarstan. He spent as much time out of Tatarstan as he did in it, leaving the day-to-day running of the place to the prime minister, who happened to be his brother. As far as Nursultan was concerned, both Tatarstan and FIDE were his own private fiefdoms. He liked to answer to one person only: himself.

Now he sat in his suite – the presidential suite, naturally – at the Waldorf-Astoria, graying hair slicked back above his brown, watchful, flat Asiatic face. ‘Kwasi, we not wait any longer. Your mother not here, that too bad.’ He put out his hand. ‘You have demands, no? You give them to me.’

Kwasi handed a sheaf of papers to Nursultan and another one to Tartu. ‘They’re both the same,’ he said.

Nursultan flicked to the last page. ‘Sixteen pages.’ He looked up, eyes glittering with the prospect of challenge. ‘One hundred and eighty demands!’

‘We’ve divided them into sections. Prize money, playing environment, and so on.’

‘This is a laundry list,’ Tartu said.

‘And they’re not demands,’ Kwasi added. ‘They’re conditions. I’m entitled to have match conditions which suit me.’

‘And me?’ Tartu added. ‘Am I entitled to conditions which suit
me
?’

Kwasi shrugged.

‘If we not accept these, er, points,’ Nursultan said carefully, ‘then what?’

‘Then I don’t play.’

‘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?’

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.