White Death

by Daniel Blake

  And just in case he somehow managed to give them the slip, they’d got an electronic back-up. Both Unzicker’s room and his office were locked by keycard, and every time those keycards were used, they were logged by the computer systems in question. These were now set up so a message was sent to Patrese’s BlackBerry every time Unzicker used either keycard. They’d probably never need it, but when it came to surveillance, one layer too many was better than one too few.

  Unzicker seemed to find the whole thing much less disturbing than his fellow students did. When people catcalled him – ‘Hey, freak, the law finally caught up with you?’; ‘Gee, Unzicker, those guys your boyfriends?’ – things like that – Unzicker didn’t appear to notice, though one of his watchers would usually have a quiet word with the person responsible. It was hard to tell sometimes whether they were observing him or protecting him. Perhaps Unzicker enjoyed the attention. If he did, he wasn’t saying.

  Patrese had stayed in Cambridge. This was where the next murder was going to take place, he reasoned, so this was where he needed to be. And after forty-eight hours of finding that Unzicker’s life was both very typical of a student (he studied, he ate) and very atypical (he didn’t drink, party, or chase girls, all the things Patrese had done when he’d been at college), Patrese decided to tag along during one of the Bureau’s spells of surveillance.

  It was late afternoon, beginning to turning dark. Unzicker left his office in the Stata Center, acknowledged Patrese’s presence with the slightest of nods, and set off out of the building and west on Vassar Street. Patrese indicated to the pair of Bureau men that they should hang back a few yards while he talked to Unzicker.

  ‘How’re you doing, Thomas?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘This bothering you? Us getting on your case?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know why we’re doing it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  Unzicker turned to look at Patrese. ‘’Cos you’re looking for the guy who murdered all those people, and you don’t have the first clue who did it.’

  That was, Patrese thought, just about the first time he’d got more than monosyllables from Unzicker when the topic hadn’t been computers. Not to mention that it had been uncomfortably close to the truth.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Patrese asked.

  ‘Are you coming with me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you’ll see.’

  Couldn’t fault his logic.

  The answer turned out to be the gym; or rather, what was beneath the gym. Patrese knew what it would be before they got in there: the heavy outside door, the relentless drone of the ventilation system and the smell of cordite and lead all gave it away. To a law enforcement officer, places like this were practically home.

  A shooting range.

  To judge from the posters on the noticeboards, MIT had several gun clubs: the Pistol & Rifle Club, the Sport Pistol Club, the Varsity Rifle. Unzicker went into the administration office and handed his ID to a woman behind the desk, who checked it against a list, got up, went to a cabinet by the far wall, unlocked it, and handed him a gun. Walther P22, Patrese saw.

  ‘Yours, or the club’s?’ he asked.

  ‘Mine.’

  Patrese was momentarily surprised: how the hell could someone like Unzicker be allowed to own a weapon? This was Massachusetts, whose gun laws were notoriously strict; this wasn’t an NRA paradise like Arizona or Alaska.

  He ran quickly through what he knew about Unzicker, which was a lot, and what he knew about Massachusetts gun law, which was enough. Unzicker was a weirdo, sure, but he hadn’t been a youth offender; he’d never committed an adult felony; he’d never been confined to a hospital or institution for mental illness, drug addiction or habitual drunkenness; and he had no restraining orders nor outstanding arrest warrants against him. Weirdo or not, he was as entitled as any other citizen of Massachusetts to bear arms.

  ‘You come here often?’ Patrese asked. Sounded like the worst chat-up line ever.

  ‘Try to.’

  ‘You like shooting?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Targets? Animals?’ He left the natural progression – ‘people’ – unsaid.

  ‘Targets.’

  ‘Not animals?’

  ‘No.’

  That made sense, Patrese thought. Target shooting was a great stress reliever, and a guy like Unzicker, working hard all day, using his brain till it was red hot, probably needed that. All the best shots Patrese had known, first in the Pittsburgh police and latterly in the Bureau, had the same qualities Unzicker presumably needed to succeed at MIT: focus, concentration, self-discipline, attention to detail.

  The same qualities, in other words, displayed by whoever had killed Darrell Showalter, Chase Evans and Glenn O’Kelly.

  Patrese had thought Kwasi King innocent, and he’d been wrong. He’d thought Unzicker first guilty, then innocent, and now he was unsure. Truth be told, he didn’t know what to think any more. For every pointer to Unzicker’s innocence, Patrese could find one to his guilt, and vice versa. Uncertainty in Patrese’s personal life was normal, even desirable. Uncertainty on a case could be the kiss of death.

  He followed Unzicker from the admin office on to the range itself. Safety goggles on, ear defenders on. Unzicker clipped a paper target to its holder and sent it right down the other end of the range, fifty feet away. He shuffled his feet, squirmed slightly, adjusting shoulders and hips and head; the shooter’s dance, seeking the ideal firing stance.

  Fire. Gun lowered to forty-five degrees, pointing downrange.

  Unzicker knew what he was doing with a gun, that was obvious. No fancy stuff, no macho posturing.

  Gun up again. Shuffle. Squirm. Stillness.

  To Patrese, Unzicker seemed a statue, frozen at the moment between heartbeats, blinks, breaths.

  Fire. Lower. Raise.

  Ebb. Flow.

  Fire.

  Zen. Every other part of Unzicker’s life – his work, his hacks, Patrese right here – looked to fade away. Republican yoga, someone had once called it.

  The Walther P22 holds ten rounds. When Unzicker had fired them all and his magazine was empty, he lowered the weapon, engaged the safety, put it on the table in front of him, and brought the paper target back from the end of the range.

  Patrese gasped. Unzicker’s grouping wouldn’t have shamed a professional marksman.

  Unzicker took the paper off its hanger and examined it. For a moment, pride flitted across his face, but it was gone as soon as it had arrived, and Patrese saw what came on its heels: perhaps the one emotion harder to hide than any other.

  Fear.

  Patrese left Unzicker’s surveillance to the two Bureau men. He was getting into his car when his BlackBerry chimed. Another message from Kwasi.

  No puzzle this time. This was more like the first message Kwasi had sent, pitched somewhere between confession and explanation.

  The Caliph of Baghdad was once asked: ‘What is chess?’ You know what he replied? ‘What is life?’ Chess is life, Franco. Understand that, and you’ll understand me. To the enlightened mind, chess is the platform for the spirit to be transformed.

  The chessboard has 64 squares of alternating color. The white squares are the path of the head, the dark squares the path of the heart. The pieces are the forces of nature: light and dark, good and evil. Each piece has a deeper significance. Pieces which move in straight lines are our actions on earth. Pieces which move outside of straight lines are our alignment with the divine. Pieces which move in both directions represent the point where heaven and earth meet. Some pieces are more powerful than others, but after the game, when they’re all put back in the box, they’re all equal again, as are we after death.

  The ancients thought chess must have been of divine origin, as no mortal mind could ever have envisaged a game so beautiful. To be the best of those mortals, to be better than however many billion people are also on earth; it’s a privilege,
Franco. Chess is a game, it’s art, it’s science, all wrapped up in one.

  When you play chess, you feel like you’re talking to the gods. Somewhere along the way, if you’re very special, you become one. You become a god. You feel the changing. You know the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes? It’s divided into hexagrams. Have a guess how many? 64. Of course.

  When I won the world title, I was still a mortal. I was the first among mortals, but I was not yet a god. I didn’t play competitively for a few months, and people thought me better rather than worse for it, as though by not playing, I wasn’t having to sully myself with the dirty business of moving wooden pieces across a marble board. They imagined all the masterpieces I could be conjuring up, though I knew as well as anyone that most grandmaster games aren’t masterpieces any more than most football matches or sculptures or symphonies aren’t masterpieces. I went back to the board for exhibitions, but not competitive play: and if you really want to know why I’m the way I am now, I think – no, I know – it goes back to one of those exhibitions.

  You ever heard of simultaneous chess? It’s when one player – a grandmaster, usually – takes on a whole bunch of people at the same time. Not all on one board; all on different boards. You set up the tables in a big ‘U’ formation, with the grandmaster on the inside, walking from board to board. He stops a few seconds at each one, examines the position, makes his move, goes on to the next one. Each of his opponents must move when the grandmaster arrives at his table, so each person can think about his own move for as long as the grandmaster takes to make a circuit. How many people can you play at once? However many you like. The world record’s about 600.

  Now imagine playing a simultaneous exhibition blindfold: that is, not looking at the boards at all, any of them. Stand with your back to the room and shout out moves in turn. You have to keep all those positions – and they’re changing move by move – all of them inside your head. Your opponents can see the boards, of course: some of them couldn’t hold their own name in their head unless it was written down. But you can’t see a thing. You can’t even take the slightest glance.

  How many people do you think you could play like that? Not 600, that’s for sure. Most grandmasters couldn’t manage much more than a dozen. The world record was 45. My sponsors wanted me to break that. They wanted me to play 64 games, one for each square of the board, and keep them all in my head. 64 games, 2048 pieces, 4096 squares. They’d pay me a million dollars. I said yes. My mom said yes.

  A couple of doctors told me this was a bad idea. Playing blindfold simultaneous games was thought to cause great mental strain, even madness. I told them to get fucked. I didn’t go round poking into their operations and telling them what to do, did I? So why should they get involved with my thing? The sponsors said there had to be a physician present in the hall when I did the exhibition, else they couldn’t get insured, like this was some damn boxing match. Fine, I said: the physician sits in the corner, shuts the fuck up and doesn’t bother me, he can do what the hell he likes.

  I played the exhibition: 64 players. The only stipulation I had was that none of them were grandmasters; other than that, I didn’t care who they were, what their ratings were. It was easy to start with. When you’ve studied chess as long as I have, the opening patterns are burned into your brain, you don’t need to see the board at all. I got rid of the weaker players first: quick combinations, usually, a sacrifice here or there, which got people applauding.

  The more games you win, the fewer you have to keep track of: but of course the flipside is that the games which go on longest are the ones with the strongest players. And it takes time. I’m used to concentrating for five or six hours at a time, but this was way longer than that. I ate, I drank, I danced on the spot to keep myself alert. More games won now: 30, 40, 50. Not a single draw, let alone a loss. I could hear the chatter: can he win all 64? People almost never win all their games in simuls. To do that – and blindfold – well, Franco, let me tell you, it wouldn’t be much easier than winning the world championship itself. I made a blunder against the 57th guy, and he blundered right back. 60 wins, 61, and now there were just three left, all down to endgames. Not many pieces on the board, and so you have to calculate everything spot on. You make a single fuck-up, you’re not going to get it back.

  Three boards at once, all in my head. Only three, and not many pieces so not much to remember, but by this time I’m really tired. Really, really tired. I can see my mom urging me on, and for a moment I hallucinate, as she turns into a chess piece herself, a human-size black queen – you know where this is going, right? – and I do that cliché thing in movies, I blink and shake my head like a dog, and when I open my eyes again, she’s back to being mom.

  Cut a long story short, I won all the games. Sixteen hours, it took in all. Some asswipe TV reporter asked me what I was going to do now, and I just said, ‘Sleep’. But that was the one thing I couldn’t do. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep. My mind was racing, full of knight forks and pawns marching up the board together and all that. Next time I used a crosswalk, I saw myself as a rook, gliding across the black-and-white stripes. I saw people whose heads became those of chess pieces as I looked at them. A man with a hat had the crown of a king; a police horse reared up like a knight. People walked on sidewalks one way, cars moved another way. I started to dream of a world run entirely according to the rules of chess, where nobody could do nothing unless it accorded with those rules. People were becoming pieces to me. You know that weird stage between wake and sleep when things make perfect sense even though you know they’re nuts? That was my life, all the time.

  And when you start to see people as pieces, you start to treat them like pieces too. That was how they were treating me, after all. When you get to be famous, everyone wants a piece of you, but they want it for themselves, not for you. Not a single person – my mom apart, and not always even her – gave a damn for me as a person, about what was best for me. All they wanted was to make money off of me, to make themselves look good by being with me. They’d offer five when I knew they had ten; they’d offer a hundred when I was worth a thousand. Mom and I had grown up pretty poor. I’d had enough of people making money at our expense.

  No one was ever straight with me, not once. I was the only honest man out there. You know why? Everywhere I turned, I saw liars and hypocrites. Emanuel Lasker, one of the first world champions, had this saying: ‘On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not last long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in a checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.’ Lasker knew what time it was. As a young boy, you’re keenly aware of injustices, of duplicity. And on a chessboard, everything is open. You can’t hide or prevaricate. You have to move when it’s your turn.

  And the more I saw people as pieces, the more it worked the other way. I began to see pieces as people. A piece in a bad position caused me physical pain. I bet you’re laughing as you read this, but it’s absolutely true. Physical pain. A knight marooned on the sidelines, a bishop hemmed in by its own pawns, pieces crowding in and jostling each other like it was rush hour on the subway. I’d feel myself getting short of breath, or a sharp stabbing pain in my side, until I could free them, open up the position, breathe. If I could have, I would have become those pieces, taken their pain as mine.

  I felt myself becoming chess, becoming at one with the game. Time was a vortex. I’d sit down to study for what felt like a half hour only to find that eight hours had passed. Several times, I started after dinner, and the next thing I knew was the pinking of the dawn through the curtains. Who did I play against? Sometimes online, sometimes Misha, sometimes myself.

  And gradually I found myself needing opponents, actual physical opponents opposite me, less and less. Faceless names on a server were one thing, because everything my end could be set up exactly the way I wanted it. Playing online, you can’t hear the other person sigh, see him twitch, get annoyed by him pacing up and down. So
the idea of tournament play, with all its mistakes and people shuffling and time pressure and cameras and moronic questioners – the very idea became horrific. I was so much better than all my human opponents that there would be no joy in victory, just relief.

  I had my mind on higher things. I was going to attain perfection. I would cut myself off from the world and dedicate myself purely to the game. People held no interest for me. I was a scholar in the secluded hush of a library, seeking the inner truth. The boundaries between the chessboard and the rest of my world dissolved and melted. Reality flipped inside out: board and pieces were all that seemed sharp, and everything else was out of focus. The pathway between my mind and a new realm opened up, and I found myself in a dimension where everything was black and white, where knights flew above and pawns marched past, where measureless heights and fathomless depths whirled away to infinity. I lived in a house shaped like a rook, with parapets and spiral staircases. I saw the true beauty of chess, and with it the true horror. I was playing the game, and the game was without end. I saw the cosmos.

  Steinitz, another of the old world champions, claimed to have played against God and won. You read the Luzhin book? Luzhin’s this guy like me, for whom chess is so much more vivid than life itself; and at the end, he throws himself out of the window of his hotel room. He’s falling, falling, towards a floor tiled in squares of black and white: and he’s not scared at all, he’s content, serene, because this is the world he knows, this is where he belongs. He’s happy because he’s going home.

  That’s how I was living. But you can’t live like that, not forever. There were times when I knew it wasn’t right. Maybe I should get therapy, I said. No, Mom replied, a thousand times no. Your brain is unique, Kwasi. I’m not letting some charlatan mess with it. What she meant, of course – though I didn’t realize this till later – what she meant was, what if it works? What if therapy cures you of this, saps your will to win, makes you ‘normal’? So no therapy. But you can’t live alone. You need people.