White Death

by Daniel Blake

  The car pulled up. Patrese opened the door, got out, and then leaned back in. ‘I like Kwasi, and I want him to do what’s best for him. I understand the power you have in the chess world, and I don’t want you to make things any more difficult for him than they are already. So I’ll forget what you’ve just said. This time. But never again.’

  20

  Back in New Haven, Patrese stopped at his hotel long enough to shower, shave and change clothes before heading to the Beinecke Library. It was a few minutes’ walk, no more. Central New Haven was three square blocks by three, with the middle one of the nine – the Green – left open, as is the tradition with many New England towns. Patrese walked down streets whose names told the tale of the city’s cornerstones: College, Chapel, Court, Temple.

  Anna said that this time it was she who couldn’t stay too long: she was heading to Manhattan this evening in preparation for running the New York marathon on Sunday.

  ‘OK, I’ll get straight to the point: Knight of Swords,’ Patrese said. ‘Regular aspect, not reversed.’

  ‘Minor arcana,’ she said instantly.

  ‘Exactly. Why the change?’

  ‘The main difference between major and minor arcana is the meanings the cards have when it comes to divination. Major arcana are supposed to represent seismic events; minor arcana are life’s more mundane aspects. There are four knights in the minor arcana, of course, one of each suit – wands, pentacles, swords and cups. Whatever the suit, a knight usually symbolizes a young man, perhaps a teenage boy.

  ‘When it comes to the Knight of Swords in particular – well, he’s confident, articulate, visionary. He’s an idealist, a crusader. See the birds flying above the knight on the card? They symbolize these higher ideals. And the horse here, that shows his energy and vitality. He’s got a passion for truth and a brilliant mind. He can cut to the heart of a matter, he can stand up to people in power.

  ‘But he can also be impetuous, unrealistic and foolish. He can rush in without thinking. Since he lives in his head rather than his heart, he’s not good at developing attachments to people. And his level of commitment can be questionable. He’s a champion of the truth, sure, but sometimes he prefers the fight to the outcome.’

  A lot of that applied to Dennis, Patrese thought. Some of it applied to him too.

  Three victims. Three tarot cards, all providing fairly accurate descriptions of the victim in question. Was this it? Was the killer hoping to go through an entire deck? Seventy-eight cards meant seventy-eight victims. That was an absurd amount. No killer could expect to remain undetected over the course of that many murders, not when he chose such visible victims.

  Seventy-eight would be a national record. America’s most prolific serial killer, Gary Ridgway – the Green River Killer – had confessed to seventy-one murders and been convicted of forty-eight. His killing period had lasted eighteen years, and his victims had been mainly Seattle prostitutes. No police force in the world put maximum effort into investigating dead hookers, whatever they might say publicly.

  That was the only way for a killer to get away with murdering again and again, into double figures and beyond: to choose victims who wouldn’t be missed. Alexander Pichushkin had preyed primarily on elderly homeless men in a Moscow park. Like Ridgway, he’d also been convicted of forty-eight murders, though he claimed sixty-three and was furious to have been caught one short of his target: a victim for every square on a chessboard.

  Besides, the presence of the tarot cards didn’t explain why the killer was taking the heads and arms, or why he was cutting away the patches of skin. No: it couldn’t simply be down to the Tarot. The Tarot was part of the killer’s psychosis, but it wasn’t all of it.

  In the incident room at the New Haven FBI field office, Fox News was on: the afternoon program, Studio B. Patrese saw footage of Kwasi getting the Columbia protestors to disperse; then back to the studio and a raven-haired young woman whom Patrese took a second or two to place. He got there a moment before the caption went up: INESSA BAIKAL. The national women’s chess champion.

  ‘I think he’s scared,’ she said, leaning forward slightly over the studio desk in what Patrese thought a fairly blatant attempt to show some cleavage. ‘It’s not all to do with the tragedy of his mom. He hasn’t played competitively for three years. He has this great mystique around him now, but that mystique goes the moment he steps back into … I was going to say “into the ring”, ’cos that’s what it feels like.’

  She’d had Kwasi hurling insults at the screen last weekend. It didn’t look like he was going to be much happier this time round, Patrese thought.

  ‘I’m no chess expert,’ the interviewer was saying, ‘but doesn’t Kwasi King play totally without fear? Isn’t that part of what makes him so good? How does that square with this idea of him being scared?’

  ‘The problem’s not when he’s at the board. The board’s where he’s most at home: it’s ordered, it has rules, it has patterns, and he understands them better than anybody. At the board, he’s scrupulously correct, as we saw in the famous game last time out when he called his own touch-move and lost, even though no one else had seen it. No: the problem’s getting him to the board.’

  ‘Hence all these, what is it, one hundred and eighty demands we keep hearing about?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you think they’re a smokescreen? A way of avoiding playing Tartu?’

  ‘That’s what a lot of people think. But I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Kwasi doesn’t think like other people. You ask me, he’s making these demands because he feels they’re necessary. Sure, to everyone else in the world they appear extravagant, absurd, but maybe not to him. He sees everything as a zero- sum game: one person wins, one person loses. He never compromises. Ever. I know that first-hand.’

  ‘From when you dated him?’

  ‘Right. In a lot of ways, he’s still a child. He doesn’t get the way the world works. Maybe that’s even part of his charm, part of his appeal. He’s this, like, man-child. Look at today, that clip you were showing. He went to help. Most people wouldn’t have done that. But he did. He didn’t think of all the reasons why not; he just thought of something and did it, like a child. And the conditions he’s demanded for the title match: I haven’t seen them all, but the ones I have seen are mainly about playing conditions. That tells you he might not like playing chess too much any more.’

  ‘He doesn’t like playing chess? But he lives for chess, no?’

  ‘That’s not the same thing.’

  The interviewer laughed. ‘Whoa. Now you’re losing me.’

  ‘This might sound bizarre, but saying Kwasi doesn’t like playing chess isn’t the same as saying he doesn’t like chess. Quite the opposite. As you say, he loves chess. But I think that what he loves is the, er, I don’t know quite how to put this … is the … holy perfection of chess itself, as a game, as an intellectual exercise. Tournament chess is a very different thing. Your opponent’s a couple of feet away, the clock’s ticking down, people are shuffling and coughing …’

  ‘And more, in those time-scramble tie-breaks. They’re practically shouting then.’

  ‘Exactly. Everywhere he’s been since becoming world champion, Kwasi’s been photographed, filmed, followed, interviewed. He’s got a level of fame which I think he’s totally unsuited to, temperamentally. I wouldn’t be surprised if his true happiness – perhaps his only true happiness – is on his own, late at night, playing endless variations against … well, against himself. Against chess itself. Against God, maybe.’

  ‘Against God?’

  ‘There are more possible positions in chess than there are atoms in the universe.’

  ‘You’re kidding me?’

  ‘Not at all. That makes the game pretty much insoluble. It’s not checkers: there’s no perfect line. So man can struggle all he likes to penetrate chess’ inner secrets, but he’ll never get all the way there. Kwasi, though – he wants to get f
urther than anyone.’

  ‘If you were a betting person, Miss Baikal, would you put money on Kwasi being at that table next week, when the match starts?’

  ‘No. No, I would not.’

  21

  Monday, November 8th

  Cambridge, MA

  Universities across the United States make demi-gods out of those who represent them at sports. Nowhere is this more true than in the Ivy League; nowhere in the Ivy League is this more true than at Harvard; and nowhere at Harvard is this more true than on the river.

  Year on year, the Harvard men’s eight is one of the fastest crews in the country. The competition within the squad just to make the boat is so intense that sometimes the racing itself comes as a relief: it’s easier to beat another college than rise to the top of your own. The guys who do make it, therefore, are the kind of alpha males who end up earning millions on Wall Street or in the law: tall, muscular men with the confidence of those who believe that the sun in the sky has no purpose other than to shine directly on to them. They race each other up and down every step in the Harvard stadium. They drive themselves to collapse and beyond on the rowing machines. They argue and fight and never, ever admit that someone else might be better than them.

  They’re not the kind of guys, therefore, who take kindly to their cox not showing up for an outing.

  No cox means the boat can’t go out: eights are too big, heavy and fast to be left unsteered. No outing on the water means another session in the gym, which the rowers hate. Another session in the gym means the cox – half the size of everyone else in the boat to start with – runs the serious risk of having seven shades of shit kicked out of him when his oarsmen finally run him to ground.

  Chase Evans was cox of the Harvard men’s eight, the one that had beaten Yale – again – in their annual match a few months ago, and he hadn’t showed up for training on the first Sunday in November. They’d called his cellphone: no answer. His voicemail had asked them to leave a message, and they’d done so. Several messages, in fact, each more abusive than the previous one. None of the messages had exhibited the slightest trace of concern, even though this no-show was totally out of character for Chase.

  Chase was old-school Harvard. His father had been there, and his grandfather too, and probably a couple more generations of the dynasty fading back into the mists of sepia-photographed time. Chase loved the traditions and the ethos. If you’d pricked him, he’d probably have bled Harvard crimson rather than the plain red everyone else does. He was reliable, organized, solid. His crew trusted him absolutely. On the water, they just rowed: he did everything else, juggling steering, tactics, coaching and motivation with a deft calmness. Crews love coxes like that.

  But still, there was no concern in their messages. The Harvard men’s eight don’t show concern. Concern is weakness. Weakness is for losers.

  No one saw Chase all Sunday, either. Those oarsmen who gave it any thought in between half a dozen hectic stops on an average Harvard day might have figured that Chase was so embarrassed about missing the outing that he’d chosen to hide away rather than face them. He’d be there tomorrow morning, they were sure, and he’d stand on the concrete hard in front of the Newell boathouse, the most famous boathouse on all the Charles, and apologize with the same kind of concise elegance that he used to gee his crews up for one more push when it was fifty strokes to the line and they were dying.

  Chase Evans was indeed at the boathouse on Monday morning. In fact, he was on the concrete hard itself. But he wasn’t going to be saying anything. Not without his head.

  22

  Patrese had spent more of his weekend than he would have liked dealing with the president of Columbia University, who had told him repeatedly that (a) Columbia would do anything they could to help find Dennis Barbero’s killer, (b) Columbia couldn’t allow this tragedy to affect their ongoing search for academic excellence – ‘academic excellence’, Patrese had thought, in this case being used under its lesser-known meaning of ‘snow-white public image and high levels of endowments’.

  If that was Columbia’s attitude, Patrese thought, he could hardly wait to see what Harvard would say about this one. They’d probably demand a cover-up somewhere between the levels of Watergate and Roswell.

  The detective on scene at the Newell boathouse was tall enough to carry his weight well, and his eyes were as gray and cold as the river. ‘Max Anderssen,’ he said. Patrese resisted the temptation to wince as they shook hands: the man had a grip like a mangle. Patrese glanced down at Chase’s body, looking for the tarot card he knew would be there. Another knight: the Knight of Pentacles, this time.

  ‘The crew found him when they arrived here at six,’ Anderssen said. The bane of rowers’ lives, Patrese thought: dawn starts to fit training around lectures and make use of the river before it got too busy. Anderssen nodded toward sprayed piles of vomit. ‘Bit of a shock for some of them, as you can see. The guys who barfed, they’re now the ones yelling loudest about how they want to find the guy who did this and rip his head off.’ He gave a little smile, acknowledgement of testosterone’s predictable pathways.

  ‘Media?’

  ‘Not yet, but that’s only because this ain’t a homicide town, so they’re not clued up to the police department the way they are in big cities.’

  ‘But when they do find out, it’ll be huge.’ Homicide in a safe town was always news: many times more so when it was part of a series, and many times more so again when it took place at perhaps the most famous university in the world.

  ‘It sure will. This is our first in a couple of years.’

  Patrese was surprised. ‘You haven’t had a single homicide in two years?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘I should move here.’

  ‘You’d be out of a job.’

  ‘I know. Sometimes I feel that wouldn’t be a bad thing.’

  ‘Longest clean run in fifty years. But even in normal times, we only ever get one or two a year. I’ve been here more than a decade: most I’ve ever had was five.’ That was impressive, Patrese thought. Cambridge had 100,000 residents, give or take: cities of that size averaged about ten murders per annum. ‘The usual stuff,’ Anderssen continued. ‘Husbands and wives, vagrants intoxicated on God knows what, young street punks too quick to pull a knife or a gun.’ He looked around him: at the yellow tape cordoning off the scene, at the river police boat blocking this section of the Charles. ‘Not this.’

  ‘Not this kind of killing, or not Harvard?’

  ‘Not this kind of killing. I’ve had Harvard before: my very first case, actually.’

  Patrese thought for a second. ‘The roommates?’

  ‘You got a good memory.’

  ‘Remember reading about it. Big news at the time.’

  ‘Just that.’ Anderssen gave Patrese a précis of the case. It had involved two female students, both from overseas. Sinedu Tadesse had come to Harvard from Ethiopia, Trang Ho from Vietnam. They’d roomed together and gotten close: fellow students in their hall of residence had said they were inseparable, always going places in tandem. Co-dependent, some had even sniped. But it hadn’t been co-dependent, not really. It hadn’t been a relationship of equals.

  Tadesse, struggling academically and with mental problems – she’d written to strangers picked from the phone book, describing her unhappiness and pleading with them to be her friend – had clung obsessively to Ho. Ho, more popular and balanced, had found the friendship increasingly suffocating.

  At the end of their third year, Ho had told Tadesse she didn’t want to room with her anymore: she was going to room with someone different for their senior year. Tadesse had brooded, planned, made oblique hints to fellow students about her intentions, and finally stabbed Ho forty-five times with a hunting knife before hanging herself.

  The fallout had been long and complex. Ho’s family had filed suit for wrongful death, emotional distress and negligence against Harvard, alleging that the university had had plenty of
evidence of Tadesse’s mental state and fixation on violent vengeance, and could have prevented Ho’s death had they acted sooner. Harvard had set up a scholarship in Ho’s name, but not before a long debate over whether it should be in both girls’ names, as though this had been some lovers’ mutual suicide pact. And several other students had come forward to say how inadequate they had found Harvard’s mental health policies.

  That might be the heart of it, Patrese thought. What it took to succeed here didn’t necessarily help build a healthy psyche. Attending Harvard wasn’t simply a matter of going to college: it was a sign that you’d been chosen, it was a talisman to put on your résumé. It was a guarantee that you could do pretty much what you wanted to in life, be it something interesting, something lucrative, or both.

  Four victims now. One at Harvard, one at Columbia, the other two found near Yale. Patrese thought of Sinedu Tadesse, and wondered how many students there were at Ivy League colleges who harbored mental problems: how many with violent fantasies that might play out in the way he was looking at right now.

  Oh, the universities themselves wouldn’t want to give out that kind of information, that was for sure. They’d cite patient confidentiality, which in this case meant the same as the Columbia president’s ‘academic excellence’. There were eight universities in the Ivy League – Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Penn, Brown, Cornell and Dartmouth. They’d spent many years building up their collective reputation. They weren’t about to roll over and let their names be trashed.

  Patrese didn’t care.