But Lily wasn’t all just panache and pizzazz. People had flocked to her games in droves, and not only to observe her cleavage. Thirty years ago, in her chess-playing prime, my aunt Lily had boasted an ELO rating approaching that of the more recent Hungarian chess whizzes, the Polgar sisters. And for twenty of those years, Lily’s best friend and coach – my father, Alexander Solarin – had honed her brilliant defenses and helped keep her star soaring high in the chess empyrean.
After my father’s death, Lily had returned to her former chess coach and mentor: the brilliant chess diagnostician and historian of the ancient art of the game, who happened also to be Lily’s grandfather and her only living relative, Mordecai Rad.
But then, on the morning of her fiftieth birthday, the lights were suddenly and surprisingly extinguished on Lily’s chess marquee.
On the morning of her birthday, so the story goes, Lily was running a bit late for her breakfast appointment with her grandfather. Her chauffeur had pulled the limo from her apartment building out onto Central Park South, and he’d managed to maneuver deftly through the thick morning traffic, down the West Side Highway. They had just passed Canal Street when, up ahead in the sky, they saw the first plane hit the first tower.
Thousands of cars screeched to a halt, the highway in instant gridlock. All drivers were staring up at that long, dark plume of smoke, unfolding like the tail of a big, black bird – a silent omen.
In panic, in the backseat of the limo, Lily tried desperately to tune her TV to the news – any news – but she flipped through the channels in vain. Everything was static. She was going mad.
Her grandfather was at the top of that building. They had an appointment to meet at nine o’clock, at a restaurant called Windows on the World. And Mordecai had a special treat for Lily, something that he wanted to reveal to his only descendant on this special day, her fiftieth birthday: September 11, 2001.
In a way, Lily and I were both orphans. We’d each lost our closest relative, the person who had done the most to train us in our chosen field. I had never questioned for a moment why Lily had closed up her vast apartment on Central Park South that very same week of her grandfather’s death, why she’d packed a single bag – as she later wrote me – and headed for England. Though she bore no great love for the British, Lily had been born in England, her late mother was English, so she carried dual citizenship. She just couldn’t face New York. I’d barely heard a word from her since. Until today.
But at this moment, I knew that the one individual I desperately needed to see – perhaps the only person who knew all the players in our lives, the only one who might hold the key to my mother’s disappearance, perhaps even to those cryptic messages that seemed somehow related to my father’s death – was Lily Rad.
I heard a phone ringing.
It took me a moment to realize this time it wasn’t the desk phone, it was the cell phone in my trouser pocket. I was surprised it even worked in this remote region of Colorado. In fact, I’d only given out this number to a handful of people.
I yanked the phone from my pocket and read the incoming caller ID: Rodolfo Boujaron, my boss back in Washington, D.C. Rodo would just be arriving for work at his famous restaurant, Sutalde, to learn that the chickadee he believed had been working his night shift had flown the coop.
But in all fairness to myself, if I’d ever had to ask my boss’s permission first, I would likely never have gotten any time off at all. Rodo was a workaholic who thought everyone else should be, too. He liked to keep 24/7 surveillance on all his employees, because ‘the fires must always be stroked,’ as he’d say in that accent, so thick you could cut it with a meat cleaver.
At this moment, however, I was in no mood to deal with Rodo’s rantings, so I waited until I saw the voice message sign pop on my phone screen, then I listened to what he’d recorded:
‘Bonjour, Neskato Geldo!’
That was Rodo’s nickname for me in his native Basque – ‘Little Cinder Girl’ – a reference to my job as a firebird: the person who stokes the coals.
‘So! You are sneaking away in the dead of the night and leaving me to discover Le Cygne this morning, in your place! I hope she will not produce the…aruatza. How you say? The œuf? If she makes the mistake, it’s you who cleans it up! You abandon your post with no warning – for some boum d’anniversaire – so Le Cygne tells me. Very well. But you MUST return back here at the ovens before Monday, to make the new fire. So ungrateful! You will please recollect why you even have a job: that it was I who rescued you from the CIA!’
Rodo clicked off – he was clearly lathering himself into one of his typical Basque-Hispano-French snits. But his blathering wasn’t quite as bizarre as it sounded, once you learned to read Rodo’s multi-lingo-isms:
The ‘Cygne’ – the swan – whom he’d suggested might lay an egg on the night shift during my absence was my colleague, Leda the Lesbian, who’d happily agreed to pinch-hit for me, if necessary, until my return.
When it came to maintaining those huge wood ovens for which the restaurant Sutalde was known (hence its name in Basque: ‘The Hearth’), Leda – as glamorous as she appeared when on display (as she often was) – was no slouch back in the kitchens, either. She swung a mean shovel; she knew the difference between hot ashes and embers. And she preferred taking over my Friday night solo hitch on the graveyard shift, to her customary cocktail-hour duties on the floor of the restaurant, where overjazzed and overpaid male ‘K Street lobbyists’ were always hitting on her.
When it came to Rodo’s comment about gratitude, however, the ‘CIA’ that he’d ‘rescued me from’ was not the Central Intelligence Agency of the U.S. government, but merely the Culinary Institute of America in rural New York – a training ground for master chefs, and the only school I’d ever flunked out of. I’d spent a fruitless six months there just after high school. When I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to study at any college, my uncle Slava felt I should prepare myself to get a job in the only other thing I’d ever known how to do, besides chess – something that Nim had trained me in himself when I was young. That was cooking.
In short order, I’d found the CIA atmosphere a bit like storm trooper boot camp: endless classes in accounting and business management, memorizing vast repertoires – of terminology more than of technique. When I’d dropped out in frustration, feeling I was a failure in everything I’d ever done, Slava urged me into an underpaid apprenticeship – no dropouts, cop-outs, time-outs, or waffling permitted – at the only four-star establishment in the world that specialized exclusively in open-hearth cuisine: that is, cooking with live coals, embers, ash, and fire.
But now, almost four years into my five-year contract, if I took a good hard look in the mirror I had to confess that I’d turned into as much of an isolated loner – even living smack in the midst of Our Nation’s Capital – as my mother was, here in hermetic retreat atop her very own Colorado mountain.
In my case, I could explain it away with ease: After all, I was contractually tied to the obsessively slave-driving schedule of Monsieur Rodolfo Boujaron, the restaurateur-entrepreneur who’d become my boss, my mentor, even my landlord. With Rodo standing over me these past four years, cracking the proverbial whip, I’d had no time for a social life.
In fact, my all-consuming job at Sutalde, that my uncle had so prudently locked me into, now provided me exactly the same structure – the practice, the tension, the time clocks – that had been woefully lacking in my life ever since my father had died and I’d had to abandon the game of chess. The task of preparing and maintaining the fire for a full week of cooking each week required all the diligence of minding an infant or tending a flock of young animals: You couldn’t afford to blink.
But if that mirror told me the unblinking truth about myself, I’d have to admit that my job, these past four years, had provided me a lot more than structure or diligence or discipline.