I shall never forget the moment when I first saw their mysterious glow: a King and a Queen, several pawns, a Knight, and a camel, all of a strange gold or a silvery material, and caked with uncut jewels in a rainbow of colors. There was something otherworldly about them.
After many travails, at last we returned with the pieces. We reached a port not far from Algiers, only to be seized by the same dark forces still pursuing us. El-Marad and his thugs kidnapped me, but your mother brought reinforcements to my rescue; she struck El-Marad on the head with her heavy satchel of chess pieces. We escaped and brought the bag of pieces to Minnie Renselaas in the Casbah. But our adventure was far from over.
With Alexander Solarin, Cat and I escaped from Algeria by sea, pursued by a dreadful storm, the Sirocco, that nearly tore our ship apart. During months of boat repairs on an island, we read the diary of the nun Mireille, which enabled us to solve some of the mystery of the Montglane Service. When our ship was ready, we three crossed the Atlantic by sea and arrived in New York.
There we discovered we had not left all the villains behind in Algeria, as we’d hoped. A group of scoundrels lay in wait – my mother and my uncle among them! And another six pieces had been hidden in those jammed drawers in a secretary in my family’s apartment. We defeated the last of the White Team and captured these extra six pieces.
At my grandfather’s house in Manhattan’s Diamond District, we all assembled: Cat Velis, Alexander Solarin, Ladislaus Nim – all of us players on the Black Team. Only one was missing, Minnie Renselaas herself, the Black Queen.
Minnie had left the Game. But she’d left something behind as a parting gift for Cat: the last pages of the nun Mireille’s diary, which revealed the secret of the marvelous chess set. It was a formula that, if solved, could do far more than create or destroy civilizations. It could transform both energy and matter and much, much else.
Indeed, in Mireille’s diary she stated that she had worked alongside the famous physicist, Fourier, in Grenoble to solve the formula herself, and she claimed she had succeeded in 1830, after nearly thirty years. She possessed seventeen pieces – more than half of the set – as well as the cloth, embroidered with symbols, that had once covered the board. The bejeweled chessboard itself had been cut into four pieces and buried in Russia by Catherine the Great. But the Abbess of Montglane, herself imprisoned in Russia soon thereafter, had secretly drawn it from memory on the lining of her abbatial gown, in her own blood. This drawing Mireille also now possessed.
But though Mireille had only had seventeen pieces of the Montglane Service back then, we ourselves now had twenty-six, including those of the opposing team and others that had been buried for many years, as well as the cloth that covered the board – perhaps enough to solve the formula, despite its clear dangers. We were only missing six of the pieces and the board itself. But Cat believed that by hiding the pieces for once and all where no one could ever find them, she could stop this dangerous Game.
As of today, I believe we’ve learned she was mistaken.
When Lily had finished her story, she looked drained. She arose, leaving Zsa-Zsa sacked out like a wet sock in the pile of pillows, and she crossed the room to the desk where the soiled piece of fabric lay open to expose its illustrated chessboard, a painting that we now understood had been drawn, nearly two hundred years ago, in abbatial blood. Lily ran her fingers over the strange array of symbols.
The air in the room was filled with the rich scent of bubbling beef and wine; you could hear the log cracking from time to time. For a very long time, nobody spoke.
At last, it was Vartan who broke the silence.
‘My God,’ he said, his voice low, ‘what this Game has cost you all. It is hard to imagine that such a thing ever existed – or that it might really be happening again. But I don’t understand one thing: If what you say is true – if this chess service is so dangerous; if Alexandra’s mother already owns so many pieces of the puzzle; if the Game has begun again and White has made its first move, but nobody knows who are the players – what would she gain by inviting so many people here today? And do you know what is this formula she spoke of?’
Key was looking at me with an expression suggesting she might already know.
‘I think the answer may be staring us in the face,’ said Key, speaking for the first time. We all turned to look at her, as she sat there beside the piano.
‘Or at least, it’s cooking our dinner,’ she added with a smile. ‘I may not know much about chess, but I do know a lot about calories.’
‘Calories?’ said Lily in astonishment. ‘Like the kind you eat?’
‘There’s no such thing as a calorie,’ I pointed out. I thought I could see where Key might be going with this.
‘Well, I’m sorry, but I beg to differ,’ said Lily, patting her waist. ‘I’ve packed on a few of those nonexistent “things” in my time.’
‘I’m afraid I do not understand,’ Vartan chimed in. ‘We were talking about a dangerous game of chess where people were killed. Now are we discussing food?’
‘A calorie isn’t food,’ I said. ‘It’s a unit of thermal measure. And I think Key here may have just resolved an important problem. My mother knows that Nokomis Key is my only friend here in the valley, and that if I ever had a problem she’d be the first and only one I would turn to, to help resolve it. That’s Key’s job, she’s a calorimetrician. She flies into remote regions and studies the thermal properties of everything from geysers to volcanoes. I think Key’s right. That’s why my mother built this fire: as a big, fat, calorie-laden clue.’
‘Excuse me,’ said Lily. Looking more than exhausted, she went over and swept Key aside. ‘I need to recline for a moment on some of my thermal properties. What on earth are you two talking about?’
Vartan looked lost as well.
‘I’m saying that my mother is underneath that log – or at least, she was,’ I told them. ‘She must have had the tree placed here months ago, on removable props, so when she was ready she could exit through the stone air shaft under the floor and light the fire from below. I think the shaft may vent to a cave just downhill.’
‘Isn’t that a rather Faustian exit?’ said Lily. ‘And what does it have to do with the Montglane Service or the game of chess?’
‘It has nothing to do with it,’ I said. ‘This isn’t about a chess game – that’s the whole point, don’t you see?’
‘It has to do with the formula,’ Key pointed out with a smile. This was, after all, her area of expertise. ‘You know, the formula you told us the nun Mireille worked on in Grenoble, with Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier. The same Fourier who was also the author of The Analytic Theory of Heat.’
When our two brilliant grandmasters sat there like lumps, staring at us with blank expressions, I figured it was time to clarify.
‘Mother didn’t invite us all here and then leave us in the lurch because she was trying to make a clever defense in a chess game,’ I told them. ‘As Lily said, she’s already made her move by inviting us here and leaving that piece of cloth right where she hoped Lily might find it.’
I paused and looked Key in the eye. How right she was – it was time to get cooking, and all those clues Mother had left now seemed to fall into place.
‘Mother invited us here,’ I said, ‘because she wants us to collect the pieces and solve the formula of the Montglane Service.’