The Eight

by Katherine Neville

  Llewellyn smiled strangely. Then, cryptically, he said, “It’s a she. And we have cause to believe she’ll only deal with another woman.”

  Llewellyn hadn’t been very clear, but I thought it best not to press the issue as I had motives of my own that might accidentally slip out in conversation.

  When we returned to the living room, Lily was sitting on the sofa with Carioca in her lap. Harry was standing near the atrocious lacquered secretary at the far end of the room, speaking on the phone. Though his back was to me, I could tell by the stiffness of his stance that something was wrong. I glanced at Lily, and she shook her head. Carioca’s ears had perked up when he saw Llewellyn, and a little growl shook his fluffy body. Llewellyn hastily excused himself, giving me a peck on the cheek, and departed.

  “That was the police,” said Harry, hanging up the phone and turning to me with a devastated expression. His shoulders were hunched, and he seemed about to weep. “They’ve dredged a body from the East River. They want me to come down to the morgue and identify it. The deceased”—he choked on the words—“had Saul’s wallet and chauffeur’s license in his pocket. I have to go.”

  I turned green. So Mordecai had been right. Someone was trying to cover up, but how had Saul’s body wound up in the East River? I was afraid to look at Lily. Neither of us said a word, but Harry didn’t seem to notice.

  “You know,” he was saying, “I knew something was wrong last Sunday night. When Saul came back here, he shut himself up in his room and wouldn’t speak to anyone. He didn’t come out at dinner. You don’t think he could have committed suicide? I should have insisted on speaking to him … I blame myself for this.”

  “You don’t know for certain that it’s Saul they found,” said Lily. She glanced at me with pleading eyes, but I didn’t know if she was pleading for me to tell the truth or to keep my mouth shut. I felt horrible about the whole thing.

  “Do you want me to go with you?” I suggested.

  “No, darling,” said Harry, heaving a big sigh. “Let’s hope Lily’s right and there’s been a mistake. But if it is Saul, I’ll have to stay down there a while. I’d want to claim the … I’d want to make arrangements for him in a funeral home.”

  Harry kissed me good-bye, apologizing again for the sadness of the evening, and finally left.

  “God, I feel awful,” said Lily when he’d gone. “Harry loved Saul like a son.”

  “I think we should tell him the truth,” I said.

  “Don’t be so goddamned noble,” said Lily. “How the hell are we going to explain that you saw Saul’s body two days ago at the UN and forgot to mention it even over dinner? Remember what Mordecai said.”

  “Mordecai seemed to have some presentiment that these murders were being covered up,” I told her. “I think I should talk to him about it.”

  I asked Lily for Mordecai’s number. She dropped Carioca into my lap and went over to the secretary to get some paper. Carioca licked my hand. I wiped it off.

  “Can you believe the shit that Lulu drags into this house?” she said, referring to the hideous red-and-gold secretary. Lily always called Llewellyn “Lulu” when she was angry. “The drawers stick, and these ugly brass handles are too much.” She jotted Mordecai’s number on a piece of stationery and handed it to me.

  “When are you leaving?” she asked.

  “For Algeria? On Saturday. I doubt we’ll have much time to talk before then, though.”

  I stood up and tossed Carioca to Lily. She held him up and rubbed her nose against his as he wriggled to escape.

  “I won’t be able to see you before Saturday anyway. I’ll be closeted with Mordecai playing chess until the tournament begins again next week. But in case we get any news about Fiske’s death or … or Saul … how will I reach you?”

  “I don’t know what my address will be. I think you should wire my office here and they’ll forward the mail.”

  We agreed to that. I went downstairs, and the doorman got me a taxi. As my cab swept through the bitter black night, I tried to go over everything that had happened so far, to make some sense of it. But my mind was like a knotted skein of yarn, and my stomach had cold little lumps of fear. I rode in the quiet desperation of total panic to the front door of my apartment house.

  Tossing some money to the taxi driver, I raced into the building and through the lobby. I frantically pushed the elevator button. Suddenly I felt a tap on my shoulder. I nearly jumped three feet in the air.

  It was the front desk man, holding my mail in his hand.

  “I’m sorry if I startled you, Miss Velis,” he said apologetically. “I didn’t want you to forget your mail. I understand you’ll be leaving us this weekend?”

  “Yes, I’ve given the manager the address of my office. You can forward all my mail there after Friday.”

  “Very good,” he said, and bade me good night.

  I didn’t go directly to my apartment. I pushed the button for the roof. No one but the building residents knew about the storm door that led to the broad, tiled expanse of terrace that overlooked all of Manhattan. There below me, as far as I could see, lay the sparkling lights of the city I was soon to leave. The air was clean and crisp. I could see the Empire State and Chrysler buildings shimmering in the distance.

  I stayed up there for about ten minutes until I felt I had my stomach and my nerves under control. Then I took the elevator back down to my floor.

  The single hair I’d left on the door was unbroken, so no one had been inside. But when I’d unlocked all the bolts and stepped into the hallway, I knew something was wrong. I’d not yet switched on the hall lights, but from the main room at the end of the hall a faint light was glowing. I never left the lights on when I went out.

  I flicked on the hall lights, took a deep breath, and walked slowly down the hallway. Across the room on the piano was a small cone-shaped lamp that I used for reading music. It had been flipped to shine on the ornate mirror above the piano. Even from twenty-five feet away, I could see what the lamp illuminated. On the mirror was a note.

  I moved in a daze across the room, picking my way through the jungle. I kept thinking I heard rustling behind the trees. The little light glowed like a beacon, drawing me to the mirror. I made my way around the massive piano and stood before the note. I could feel the same familiar chill pass down my spine as I read it.

  I have warned you but you

  will not listen. When you

  meet with danger,

  you should not hide your head

  in the sand—there is a lot of sand in

  Algeria.

  I stood there for a long time looking at the note. Even had the little Knight at the bottom not given me a hint, I recognized the handwriting. It was Solarin’s. But how had he entered my apartment without disturbing the booby trap? Could he scale an eleven-story wall and come through the window?

  I racked my brain trying to make sense of the whole thing. What did Solarin want of me? Why was he willing to take such risks as breaking into my apartment just to communicate with me? He’d gone out of his way twice to speak with me, to warn me, each time only shortly before someone was killed. But what did it have to do with me? Moreover, if I was in danger, what did he expect me to do about it?

  I went back down the hall and locked my door again, putting on the chain. Then I went through the apartment, checking behind the trees, in the closets and butler pantry, to make certain I was alone. I tossed my mail on the floor, pulled down the Murphy bed, and sat on the edge as I removed my shoes and stockings. It was then that I noticed it.

  Across the room, still glowing in the soft lamplight, was the note. But the lamp had not been trained precisely on the center of the note. It shone on one side only. I stood up again, stockings in hand, and went back to look at it. The light was carefully pointed at one side of the note—the left side—so that it shone on the first word of each line only. And the first words combined to form a new sentence:

  I will meet you in Algeria.
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br />   At two o’clock in the morning I was lying in bed staring at the ceiling. I couldn’t shut my eyes. My brain was still ticking away like a computer. There was something wrong, something missing. There were many pieces to a puzzle, but I couldn’t seem to put them together. Yet I was certain they would fit somehow. I ran over it again for the thousandth time.

  The fortune-teller had warned me I was in danger. Solarin had warned me I was in danger. The fortune-teller had left an encrypted message in her prophecy. Solarin had left a hidden message in his note to me. Were the fortune-teller and Solarin somehow connected?

  There was one thing I’d overlooked because it hadn’t made sense. The fortune-teller’s encrypted message had read “J’adoube CV.” As Nim had pointed out, it seemed she wanted to contact me. If this were true, why hadn’t I heard from her since? Three months had passed, and she had disappeared off the map.

  I dragged myself out of bed and turned the lights back on. Since I couldn’t sleep, I might as well try to figure the damned thing out. I went to the closet and fumbled about until I found the cocktail napkin and the folded piece of paper where Nim had written the poem in iambic lines. I walked to the butler pantry and poured myself a stiff shot of brandy. Then I plopped down in a pile of pillows on the floor.

  Pulling a pencil out of a nearby jar, I started counting off letters and circling them as Nim had shown me. If the bloody woman wanted so much to communicate with me, maybe she already had. Maybe there was something else hidden in this prophecy. Something I hadn’t seen before.

  Since the first letter of each line had yielded a message, I tried writing down the last letter of each line. Unfortunately that spelled “yrereyeer.”

  That didn’t strike me as symbolically significant, so I tried all the first letters of the second words in each line, the third words, and so forth. I got things like “aargtobaf,” and “tcaitwwsi.” This set my teeth on edge. I tried the first letter of the first sentence and the second letter of the second and got “jrngleher.” Nothing seemed to work. I took a slug of brandy and kept plodding away like this for an hour.

  It was nearly three-thirty in the morning when it occurred to me to try odd and even numbers. Taking the odd-numbered letters of each sentence, I finally hit pay dirt. Or at least I hit something that looked like a word. The first letter of the first sentence, the third letter of the next, then the fifth, the seventh, and I got: “JEREMIAHH.” Not only a word, but a name. I dragged myself around the room, plowing through piles, until I turned up a musty old Gideon Bible. I flipped through the directory until I found Jeremiah, the twenty-fourth book of the Old Testament. But my message said “Jeremiah-H.” What was the “H” for? I thought about that for a moment until I realized that “H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet. So what?

  Then I noticed that the eighth sentence of the poem read “Continue a search for a thirty-three and three.” I was damned if that didn’t sound like chapter and verse.

  I looked up Jeremiah 33:3. Bingo.

  Call unto me and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.

  So I’d been right. There had been another message hidden in the prophecy. The only problem was, this message was fairly useless to me as things stood. If the old dirt bag had wanted to “shew” me things that were great and mighty, then where the hell were these things? I knewest not.

  It was refreshing to learn that a person who’d never yet been able to complete a New York Times crossword puzzle could excel in decrypting fortunes from a cocktail napkin. On the other hand, I was getting pretty frustrated. While each layer I unveiled seemed to have some meaning, in the sense that it was English and contained a message, the messages didn’t seem to lead anywhere. Except to other messages.

  I sighed, looked at the goddamned poem, slugged down the rest of my brandy, and decided to start again. Whatever it was, it had to be hidden in the poem. That was the only place it could be.

  It was five A.M. when I got it through my thick head that perhaps I shouldn’t be looking for letters any longer. Perhaps the message was spelled out in words, as it had been in Solarin’s note to me. And just as the idea struck me—perhaps the third glass of brandy helped—my eyes fell upon the first sentence of the prophecy.

  Just as these lines that merge to form a key …

  When the fortune-teller had spoken those words, she’d been looking at the lines of my hand. But what if the lines of the poem itself formed the key to the message?

  I picked up the poem for one last pass. Where was the key? I’d decided by now to take these cryptic clues in their literal sense. She’d said the lines themselves formed a key, just as the rhyming pattern, when added up, had produced “666,” the number of the Beast.

  It’s hard to claim I had a sudden flash of insight, when I’d been studying the damned thing for five hours, but that’s what it felt like. I knew, with an assurance that belied my lack of sleep and alcohol-to-blood ratio, that I had found the answer.

  The rhyming pattern of the poem not only added up to 666. It was the key to the hidden message. My copy of the poem was so scribbled over by now, that it looked like a map of intergalactic relationships in the universe. Flipping the page over to write on the back, I copied out the poem and rhyming pattern again. The pattern had been 1-2-3, 2-3-1, 3-1-2. I selected the word from each sentence that corresponded to that number. The message said: JUST-AS-ANOTHER-GAME-THIS-BATTLE-WILL-CONTINUE-FOREVER.

  And I knew, with the unshakable confidence my drunken stupor afforded, exactly what that meant. Hadn’t Solarin told me we were playing a game of chess? But the fortune-teller had warned me three months earlier.

  J’adoube. I touch thee. I adjust thee, Catherine Velis. Call unto me and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things which thou knowest not. For there is a battle going on, and you are a pawn in the game. A piece on the chessboard of Life.

  I smiled, stretched my legs, and reached for the phone. Though I couldn’t contact Nim, I could leave a message on his computer. Nim was a master of encryption, perhaps the world’s foremost authority. He’d lectured and written books on the subject, hadn’t he? No wonder he’d grabbed that note out of my hand when I’d first noticed the rhyming pattern. He’d guessed at once that it was a key. But the bastard had waited until I figured it out for myself. I dialed the number and left my farewell message:

  A pawn advances to Algiers.

  Then, as the sky was growing light outside, I decided to go to bed. I didn’t want to think anymore, and my brain agreed with me. I was kicking the mail away that I’d thrown in a pile on the floor, when I noticed an envelope that had no stamp and no address. It had been hand-delivered, and I didn’t recognize the complex, loopy writing that spelled out my name. I picked it up and slashed it open. Inside was a large card on heavy paper. I sat down on the bed to read it.

  My dear Catherine,

  I enjoyed our brief meeting. I will not be able to speak with you prior to your departure, as I am leaving the city myself for a few weeks.

  Based upon our chat, I’ve decided to send Lily to join you in Algiers. Two heads are better than one, when it comes to problem-solving. Wouldn’t you agree?

  By the way, I forgot to ask … did you enjoy your meeting with my friend the fortune-teller? She sends you a greeting: Welcome to the Game.

  With fondest regards,

  Mordecai Rad

  THE MIDDLE GAME

  Here and there in the ancient literatures we encounter legends of wise and mysterious games that were conceived and played by scholars, monks, or the courtiers of cultured princes. These might take the form of chess games in which the pieces and squares had secret meanings in addition to their usual functions.

  —The Glass Bead Game

  Hermann Hesse

  I play the game for the game’s own sake.

  —Sherlock Holmes

  ALGIERS

  APRIL 1973

  It was one of those lavender-blue twilights shimmer
ing with the unfolding of spring. The sky itself seemed to hum as my plane circled through the thin mist rising off the Mediterranean coast. Beneath me lay Algiers.

  “Al-Djezair Beida,” they called it. The White Isle. It seemed to have risen dripping from the sea like a fairyland city, a mirage. The seven fabled peaks were packed with clustered white buildings tumbling over each other like the decorative frosting on a wedding cake. Even the trees had mystical, exotic shapes and colors not of this world.

  Here was the white city that lit the way into the Dark Continent. Down there, below the gleaming facade, lay the scattered pieces of the mystery I’d traveled halfway around the globe to discover. As my plane dipped over the water, I felt I was about to land, not in Algiers, but on the first square: the square that would lead me into the very heart of the game.

  The airport at Dar-el-Beida (the White Palace) is just at the edge of Algiers, its short runway lapped by the Mediterranean Sea.

  Before the flat two-story building, a row of palm trees waved like long feathers in the cool musty breeze as we stepped off the plane. The scent of night-blooming jasmine pervaded the air. Across the front of the low glass airport had been tacked a hand-painted ribbon: these curlicues, dots, and dashes that resembled Japanese brush painting were my first glimpse of classical Arabic. Beneath the sculptured letters, the printed words translated: “Bienvenue en Algérie.”

  Our luggage had been piled on the pavement so we could identify our pieces. A porter put mine on the metal cart as I followed the stream of passengers into the airport.

  Joining the Immigrations line, I thought how far I’d come since that night barely a week ago when I’d stayed up to unravel the fortune-teller’s prophecy. And I’d come the distance alone.

  It had not been by choice. That very first morning after deciphering her poem, I’d tried frantically to contact everyone among my motley crew of friends, but there seemed to be a conspiracy of silence. When I’d called Harry’s apartment, Valerie the maid told me that Lily and Mordecai were closeted somewhere studying the mysteries of chess. Harry had left town to convey Saul’s body to obscure relatives he’d located in Ohio or Oklahoma—somewhere in the Interior. Llewellyn and Blanche, taking advantage of Harry’s absence, had jogged off to London on an antique-buying spree.