White Death

by Daniel Blake

You put the bone in a vice. You gotta be careful here, as the last thing you want is to damage it. So you put leather pads on the jaws of the vice, and you pack a leather bag filled with rice around the bone. Only now can you tighten the vice.

  You take your files and your gravers. Only use the ones made by Vallorbe. They’re a Swiss company, and they’re expensive, but in this game you get what you pay for. You use cheap tools, your work will look cheap.

  You file away all the rough edges and protuberances on the bone, and there are plenty of those. With the gravers – they’re like little chisels – you can make all the patterns you want in the bone. Nice and slowly does it. You don’t want to rush. You don’t need to rush. Like I told you before, no one’s going nowhere.

  When you’ve finished your carvin’, you’re nearly done. Now you just gotta sandpaper it all down to get it as smooth as possible. Sandpaper comes in several grades, and you want to use four or five of them in turn, getting finer each time. Start with 240 grit, very fine, and then work your way through finer and finer ones: extra fine 400, super fine 600, and finally ultra fine 800. By the time you’ve gone through that lot, the bone will feel smooth as glass.

  Like I said, not hard. Not hard at all.

  32

  New York, NY

  If you’re going to run from the law, New York City must be one of the best places in which to do it. Hiding out in a heavily populated urban environment is far easier than doing so in an isolated rural area. People in cities don’t know their neighbors, don’t notice the unusual, don’t like to get involved in anyone’s business but their own. There are endless cheap hotels that take cash and ask no questions: homeless people have an underworld and subculture all their own, and don’t talk to the authorities in a month of Sundays. If you do want to leave the city, that’s the easiest thing in the world. Airports are easily monitored, and all flights require ID checks and passenger lists: but an endless traffic of cars and trains flows like blood through arterial bridges and venous tunnels.

  All this was to Kwasi’s advantage, Patrese thought. Kwasi alone knew where he was going and how he intended to get there. Unlike most criminals, who can hardly find their own assholes without a mirror, Kwasi was super-smart, not just to have killed three people the way he had, but to have had Patrese in his apartment more than once and to have come to ‘help out’ at Columbia. He’d murdered his mother, the person to whom he’d been closest in the whole world, and had acted all shocked and surprised when Patrese had arrived to tell him of her death a few hours later. The man could pick daisies in a minefield and never miss a beat.

  The cops who found Patrese wanted to take him to hospital straight away. No, he said, he had too much to do. Dufresne arrived, having hauled ass all the way from Morningside Heights, and told Patrese the same thing: go to hospital. You didn’t listen to me last time, Dufresne added, and look what happened.

  The manhunt for Kwasi was already in motion: Dufresne had seen to that. An APB of Kwasi’s name and description had gone to every one of the NYPD’s seventy-six precincts, plus the local offices of the Bureau, the ATF, the DEA, the US Marshals, and so on. Bridges, tunnels, airports and railway stations were all being watched.

  So there was no reason for Patrese to keep being ornery. A couple of hours in ER, some industrial-strength painkillers, and he would be back on the case. It was either that or him keeling over in half an hour’s time when the shock kicked in. Dufresne would see him back at Kwasi’s apartment. No ifs, no buts, no arguing.

  Kwasi had spent a long time preparing for this moment. Life, like chess, was a matter of planning. He didn’t simply show up at the board and play whichever move came into his head; he had strategies, schemes. So too here. He wasn’t making this up as he went along. It had all been in place way beforehand.

  First things first: nothing could be traceable to him. He had a spare truck and a second home, both registered to a company based in Gibraltar. His mom had done night school in accountancy, and the moment he’d started earning serious money, she’d set up an offshore company. He’d won the Gibraltar chess tournament three years in a row, he’d liked the place, and it was a less obvious location for going offshore than the Caribbean.

  He kept the truck in the parking lot at Pier 40, right on the Hudson. It was self-park, so he didn’t have to get valets involved; he paid monthly rent in advance, so he didn’t have to worry about being chased for payment; and the lot had a capacity of 3500 vehicles, which greatly reduced the chances of his truck being noticed.

  It was seven blocks from the dumpsters where he’d left Patrese to the Pier 40 parking lot. Kwasi walked purposefully but unhurriedly, hood pulled up to hide his dreads. He’d have to get rid of them now: they were too obvious, too much of a trademark. But that worked both ways. Because people so associated him with them, he’d be harder to recognize without them. Cut his hair, grow a beard, put on eyeglasses and puff out his cheeks with cotton wool pads: to the casual observer, he’d seem a totally different person. Of course, he had extra levels of disguise too, but he didn’t want to use those except when necessary. A disguise was only a disguise when no one knew it was a disguise.

  No one noticed Kwasi on his way to Pier 40, let alone stopped him or tried to talk to him. A couple of police cruisers with sirens raced past, but they could have been going anywhere. This was New York: emergency calls were as unremarkable as traffic lights.

  He got to the parking lot, found his truck, put his ticket into the exit barrier, and turned on to West Street, heading north. The river rolled lazily away to his left. He felt no panic, no fear: just the cold thrill of assessing a position with gimlet eyes, and there was no one in the world better at that.

  Catch me if you can, he thought.

  The cops put on the sirens and took Patrese to Bellevue, where he flashed his badge, jumped the queue, and got seen to instantly. An X-ray told him what he already knew, that his wrist was broken. The doctor gave him a local anesthetic, manipulated the bones back into place, and put a cast on his arm. A nurse iodine-swabbed the cuts on his face where Kwasi had pistol-whipped him and put plasters across them.

  Dufresne had said a couple of hours: the whole thing had taken forty-five minutes. You want good medical service, Patrese thought, you need one of two things: money, or a badge. On the way out, one of the scores of people sitting in the waiting room started mouthing off at Patrese for jumping the queue. Patrese gave him the finger with his good hand, and glanced at the TV set high on the wall, out of range of drunks or junkies. BREAKING NEWS: POLICE SAY WORLD CHESS CHAMPION KWASI KING IS MURDER SUSPECT, FUGITIVE FROM LAW.

  Chess’ Tiger Woods was now its O.J. Simpson.

  The mini-forest of reporters outside Kwasi’s apartment was growing minute by minute, blocking roads, crowding sidewalks, broadcasting breathlessly to a nation agog. Nothing else was running on the news channels. This was no longer simply a story: this was an event. Uniforms cleared a path for Patrese when he got there.

  In the apartment itself, Dufresne was arguing with one of the uniforms. The uniform was pointing out that this was the Sixth Precinct and that Dufresne was about a hundred blocks out of his jurisdiction. Patrese stepped in. Sixth Precinct or Twenty-Sixth, he said, it didn’t matter. This was a Bureau case, end of story. He, Franco Patrese, was in charge, and he wanted Detective Dufresne to head up the New York end of a federal investigation. If the man from the Sixth Precinct wanted to help, he could go get some coffee and donuts.

  The man from the Sixth Precinct turned on his heel and left. Patrese doubted whether either coffee or donuts were high on his immediate agenda.

  Patrese turned to Dufresne. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Huh? Sorry? I should be thanking you, sorting out that jobsworth asshole. What are you sorry for?’

  ‘For not listening to you before. About Kwasi.’

  ‘Hey, we all make mistakes. Ask my wife. You know Kerouac wrote On the Road on one long sheet of paper? My wife’s got a sheet twice as long, filled with all
my failings.’

  Patrese laughed, winced at a jag of pain that had snuck past the pills, and gestured round the apartment. ‘What have you found?’

  ‘No heads or arms or skin, if that’s what you mean. But these; these are interesting.’ He tapped a pile of books on a table. ‘Got these from one of the bedrooms.’ Patrese remembered the rows of bookshelves in Kwasi’s room. ‘Had a team of five guys skim through every book there, see if they could find anything. Look.’

  Colored Post-it notes peeked from various pages. Patrese picked up the first book. Game and Playe of the Chesse, by William Caxton. It was a modern printing – Medieval Institute Publications, Kalamazoo, MI, and beautifully bound in dark red leather – but the copyright page informed him that the book itself had been written in 1474, and illustrated with woodcuts from that time.

  The first woodcut was of an execution.

  A king had just been beheaded. His head, crown on top and eyes closed, lay on the ground next to a chopping block. The executioner was cutting one of the king’s legs with an axe, and four vultures flew around the scene, each with some part of the king’s dismembered body in their beaks.

  Decapitation. Dismemberment. Patrese raised his eyebrows. Dufresne nodded.

  The text itself was in medieval English, which was hard to read. Fortunately for Patrese, some learned professor or other had written an introduction that explained what the book was about. Game and Playe of the Chesse was a speculum regis, a mirror for a prince: a political instruction manual with chess as an allegory for a community where each citizen contributed to the common good according to their station.

  In life as in chess, the king and queen stood for themselves. The king was the most important piece, and had to be protected at all costs. The queen was the most powerful piece, both representing and protecting the king. Next, flanking king and queen, came the bishops, representatives of organized religion. Then the knights, wealthy and educated, with the freedom to jump around denied any other piece. On the outside were the rooks, the walls of the medieval castle, representing those who protected the community – soldiers, usually. Finally came the pawns, divided by Caxton into eight walks of life: laborers and workmen; smiths; scriveners, drapers and clothmakers; merchants, changers; physicians, spicers and apothecaries; taverners, hostellers and victuallers; toll gatherers and town keepers; dice players, ribaulders, messengers and couriers.

  Patrese ran through the victims in his head.

  Regina King. Tarot card: Empress. Empress was another word for queen. Regina was Latin for queen. She’d been the most important woman in Kwasi’s life.

  Darrell Showalter. Hierophant. Bishop. He’d been a monk teacher.

  Dennis Barbero and Chase Evans. Knights. Educated, wealthy in future life if they wanted to be: that was Ivy League for you.

  Howard Lewis. Chariot. Chariot?

  As though reading his mind, Dufresne opened another book and handed it to Patrese. It was a glossary of chess, and under the entry ‘rook’, it said: ‘Often (though incorrectly) known as a castle, the word ‘rook’ comes from the Persian rukh, chariot.’

  Howard Lewis. Chariot. Policeman. Protector. Enforcer.

  ‘He’s playing a chess game,’ Patrese said. ‘We said “Ebony” and “Ivory”, didn’t we? Kwasi’s playing black. He’s Ebony. He’s Black.’

  ‘Looks that way,’ Dufresne said. ‘But some weird-ass chess game. Are they following normal rules? They playing out some sort of game already famous? There must be classic chess games, no? The same way there are classic football and baseball games?’

  ‘I guess. But what about the body parts he takes?’ Patrese pointed to the Caxton woodcut of the executed king. ‘Because of this? But that’s only the king, not the others.’

  Dufresne shrugged. ‘We don’t know. But we did find a couple of variations on the same tale about the history of chess. Genius in ancient India or wherever invents the game. The emperor’s so enthralled with it, he says to the inventor, I’ll give you anything you want. Sure, the inventor says. I’d like a grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two grains on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth, so on and so on, doubling each time. That all? says the emperor. That’s all, says the inventor. So the kingdom’s treasurer starts counting out the rice, and soon realizes that, by the time they get to 64 squares with it doubling each time, they’ll need more rice than there is in the whole world. Furious at being tricked like this, the emperor cuts off the inventor’s head.’

  ‘Moral of the story: no one likes a smart ass.’

  Dufresne laughed. ‘Ain’t that the truth.’

  ‘Even if that’s something to do with it …’

  ‘… it still doesn’t explain the arms and the skin. I know, I know.’

  ‘And it still doesn’t tell us who he’s playing against. Who’s White?’

  Patrese went into the living room. All Kwasi’s chess sets were gone: packed up and taken away for evidence, no doubt. Patrese remembered that one of them had featured the Red Sox and the Yankees: Boston against New York, perhaps the fiercest rivalry in all American sport. If you were going to choose two cities as opposing sides in a game, it would probably be those two, a competitiveness that went back centuries.

  In the nineteenth century, Boston had been a powerhouse in every way: cultural and artistic as it was nearer Europe, educational through its elite schools, economic because of its manufacturing hubs. New York had then been the upstart: dirty, dangerous, crowded, edgy. You’d have gone for a beer with New York, but you’d have wanted Boston dating your daughter. Since then, of course, New York had taken over as the epicenter of national and international capitalism; but the rivalry remained. Was this the latest, weirdest arena in which it was being played out?

  A crime-scene officer was tapping away with latex gloved fingers at one of Kwasi’s computers.

  ‘Found anything?’ Patrese asked.

  ‘Just got it now. Took a while to break the password.’ The CSO swiveled the screen round so Patrese could see: a list of e-mails, most recent at the top. Patrese scanned down quickly, looking to see which names appeared the most often.

  He counted four or five messages from Unzicker, Thomas.

  ‘Open that one,’ Patrese said, pointing to Unzicker’s latest message. It had been sent on Wednesday, 10th November at 23:12. Last night.

  Hey KK. Good to see you yesterday. I know you’re busy and everything, but we really need to talk. Think I might have found a way to make Misha work. Ring me when you can. T. PS Awesome MIThenge. You should come see it sometime. Next one’s in Jan.

  There was an automatic signature below the message. Thomas Unzicker, MIT CSAIL (Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), The Stata Center, Building 32, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

  Cambridge, Patrese thought.

  Darrell Showalter and Chase Evans had both been killed in Cambridge.

  He dialed Anderssen. ‘Max? Franco Patrese. Got someone I think we should visit.’

  There were cops at the toll booths on the George Washington Bridge; looking for him, Kwasi thought, if the radio reports were anything to go by. He hadn’t intended to go across to New Jersey anyway, but seeing the cops made his mind up for sure.

  He swung right, heading for the Alexander Hamilton Bridge and the Cross Bronx Expressway. There were no tolls in that direction, least none that he could think of, which meant he was just another driver going about his daily business. Sure, the cops could pick his truck out at random and stop him, but as long as he stuck to the speed limit and didn’t do anything dumb, the chances of that were minimal. They wouldn’t be looking for this truck, they wouldn’t have time to see him clearly as he went past, and they didn’t have the manpower to stop every black man on every road out of the city.

  Patrese and his men would be all over the Bleecker Street condo. Too bad. All Kwasi’s stuff was there, but none of what they were looking for. They’d take all his lovely chess sets, all his b
ooks, everything he’d spent years accumulating, but that didn’t matter. He carried the memories of them all crystal clear in his head. The cops couldn’t touch anything inside there, nor anything inside the place he was going to.

  That place was where he was heading now: his second home, his fortress, turned by necessity into full-time residence. It wouldn’t take him too long to get there, but he thought it best to arrive under the cover of darkness. A fortress wouldn’t be a fortress very long if anyone saw him entering or leaving.

  So he’d have to park up a few hours until the light had gone. Not at a service station; he couldn’t risk being seen. He’d pull off the interstate once he was well out of town and head down towards the sea. This time of year, way out of season, there’d be no one around. He could stop somewhere secluded, grab a few hours’ sleep, and then complete his journey after dark.

  He imagined the FBI, NYPD and all those other goons as a pack of hounds, barking furiously as they chased their own tails. He was the fox running before them, the quarry. And the fox was cunning. Too cunning for them. Way too cunning.

  33

  Cambridge, MA

  There were two men in Unzicker’s office when Patrese and Anderssen walked in; Unzicker, whom they’d expected to be there, and Nursultan, whom they definitely hadn’t.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Patrese asked Nursultan.

  ‘Maybe I ask you same.’

  ‘I’ll bet your answer’s more interesting than mine.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘All right. I’m here because Kwasi King, who half killed me this morning’ – he held up the arm with the cast on it – ‘is now on the run, suspected of three murders. We found e-mails from Mr Unzicker on his computer. I’ll come to that in a second. But what really interests me is this. You, Mr Nursultan, were at Madison Square Garden a few hours ago. The biggest star in your firmament is now making like O.J. Your championship match has gone down the can. Half the reporters in New York City must want to talk to you. I bet your sponsors sure do. You could spend your next forty-eight hours locked away in crisis meetings. And what do you do? You come up to MIT, which takes time, even if you do have a private jet, and you see a postgraduate student. Of all the things in the world you could be doing, this must be the most important to you. And if it’s the most important to you, I reckon it’s going to be pretty important to me.’