by Daniel Blake
‘Going back.’
‘Want me to come?’
‘That’s kind, but you’ve done more than enough to help …’
‘I meant more to keep you company.’ She kissed him again. ‘I’ve missed you.’
Patrese smiled. ‘I’m not sure how much time I’m going to have.’
‘Heck, Franco, I don’t care. And I don’t throw myself like this at just anyone. Give me a few minutes to pack my stuff – I’ve got some work to take with me – and I’ll be with you.’
‘Sounds good. I’ve got something I want to run past you anyway.’
Here’s what Patrese had been thinking. Now they knew that Kwasi was both Ebony and Ivory, and that each victim represented a chess piece in some way, they could start ticking off the ones he’d already accounted for. Neither of the kings. One of two queens: Regina, the black queen. One of four bishops: Showalter, white. Three of four knights: Evans for white, Barbero and Mieses for black. Three of four rooks: O’Kelly and Anderssen for white, Lewis for black. And none of the pawns.
There were 32 pieces on a chessboard, and Kwasi had killed eight. But none of those eight had been pawns, though pawns made up exactly half of all pieces on the board. What were the odds of that? By the law of averages, you’d expect there to be as many pawns as pieces among the victims.
Perhaps he was killing pieces first, then pawns, Inessa suggested.
He’d already thought of that. That would make sense if he was killing in order, most valuable pieces through less valuable pieces through pawns, but he wasn’t. The kings were priceless, and yet none of his victims represented the king. He’d only killed one queen, his own mother. If there was an order to his killing, it wasn’t in terms of the value of the pieces. How about moves? Like he’s acting out the moves of a game? Queen moves, bishop moves, knight moves, that kind of thing.
Possible, Inessa replied, but again unlikely. The exact sequence of murders was bishop, queen, knight, knight, rook, rook, knight, rook. Yes, that was a plausible order of moves in the middle of a chess game, but not at the start of one. On the very first move, each side can only move ten of its sixteen pieces: all eight pawns, as they’re on the second row, and both knights, as they can jump over other pieces. Once the pawns move forward, they can clear the way for other pieces behind them: but they have to move first.
Patrese said he’d read somewhere that the pawns are known as the soul of chess. That’s right, Inessa said: the phrase had been coined by an eighteenth-century French player. But what of it?
Patrese paused before answering. He knew where his thoughts were taking him, and he knew it made sense, but the stubborn part of him didn’t want to know, as the truth of what it meant was unfathomably horrific.
They’d found no pawns among the victims. Kwasi must have killed some pawns.
There was only one way both those statements could be true: that Regina King and Darrell Showalter were the first victims the police had found, but not the first ones Kwasi had killed. He’d killed others. Up to sixteen others. And the police hadn’t found any of them.
Among the books found at Kwasi’s condo in Bleecker after he’d first gone on the run had been the medieval treatise Game and Playe of the Chesse, in which the author William Caxton had divided pawns into eight categories: laborers, clothmakers, apothecaries, dice players, those kind of things. Patrese doubted it was anything as literal as that; and besides, surely clothmakers and apothecaries couldn’t be killed without anyone knowing? They probably couldn’t even go missing without someone saying something.
Think like Kwasi. Pawns were expendable. Pawns were the lowest rank. Pawns could, if they were very lucky, get to the other end of the board and promote into a piece, but most of them went forward blindly, locked in the restrictions of their existence. They were the ones no one cared about. And they’d have to be the kind of people who, even if their bodies were found, would make no waves whatsoever.
At the start of this case, in the few hours before they’d gotten IDs for Regina King and Darrell Showalter, the cops had referred to the corpses as John Doe and Jane Doe. This was what Patrese would be looking for now, he realized: a whole bunch of John Does. People without identity, who’d died as they lived, without leaving a mark. The downtrodden. The invisible. The forgotten. The missing. The nameless.
The homeless.
In a world of social security numbers, store loyalty cards, cellphones, tax returns, benefit checks, Internet addresses and a hundred other things that leave digital breadcrumbs, being homeless is the best way, perhaps the only way, to fall off the grid completely. Few people spare the homeless so much as a glance, even when they drop a guilt-soaked dime in their begging cups.
To be without a home is to be without an identity: you’re not classified, you’re not quantified, you’re not a name on a system. You live in a disused train tunnel or a space beneath an underpass that isn’t even high enough to stand up in. You have no medication, no social worker, no one to look out for you except the odd Good Samaritan and your fellow homeless people, who are often bombed out of their heads and no one’s idea of a reliable safeguard.
If you have your own patch, your own makeshift fortress of discarded mattresses and cardboard boxes, then one day you’re not there anymore, people – always supposing they even notice – will assume you’ve moved on somewhere. You’re not traceable. That’s the point. You can go missing for months or years, and by the time your body’s found, it probably won’t even be recognizable as you.
As victims for a murderer, therefore, homeless people are pretty much perfect.
There was no point going round homeless areas in New York and Boston and asking if anyone had gone missing. Most of them were already missing; they were on the Missing Persons list, and they’d stayed that way because they hadn’t shown up on a database somewhere. Nor was there any point scouring the city for bodies which hadn’t been found. No; their best hope of finding whether this theory held any water was to ask every medical examiner’s office in the New York and Boston areas how many dismembered and unidentified John Does they’d had through in the past few months.
Unlike many public employees, medical examiners do work during the Thanksgiving holidays: people aren’t considerate enough to stop dying for four or five days just to give the ME a break. In fact, more people die during Thanksgiving than in any other four-day period throughout the year: too much food, too much alcohol, too many family tensions boiling over.
Patrese mobilized as many Bureau agents and cops as could be spared in New York and Boston, and set them to work. Dismembered bodies, that was what they were looking for. Perhaps only certain parts of them had been found, as Patrese couldn’t believe Kwasi would have made it too obvious by sticking so adamantly to the headless, legless and skin-patched template that had marked the eight victims they’d found so far. If he had done so, they’d have been on to him long before. No tarot cards either, presumably. Perhaps he’d had a different signature for the pawns than the pieces.
The answers started coming back within a few hours. MEs in both cities were routinely presented with body parts that they had no way of identifying. A leg here, a torso there, a couple of arms here, like some gruesomely warped shopping list. Many of these parts’ owners had been dead so long that they’d severely decomposed, making identification all the harder. Leave a torso in water for a few days, and when you take it out the skin will peel off like a glove.
Could Kwasi have killed eight black homeless men in New York and eight white homeless men in Boston? Sure he could. Hell, he could have killed eighty in each. These crimes aren’t routinely logged in crime databases. They should be, of course, but they’re not; because the vast majority of ME departments haven’t got the time, money or staff to go round trying to identify body parts that have literally no clue as to their origin.
One of the Boston MEs rang Patrese personally to impress on him the sheer scale of what they were dealing with. Have a guess how many sets of unident
ified human remains are sitting in evidence rooms across the nation, he said.
No idea, Patrese replied.
Have a guess; go on.
I don’t know: ten thousand?
Higher.
Twenty thousand?
Higher still.
Patrese, doubling like the inventor of chess with his demands for grain: Forty thousand?
Spot on. Forty thousand sets of remains, all unidentified. And of those forty thousand, about one in seven ever make it on to a database. The rest are sent to a mass grave and covered in quicklime. What else is there to do?
What else indeed? Patrese thought.
59
Mom knew, of course. She knew all about the flotsam and jetsam. We used to joke about it: flotsam in New York, jetsam in Boston. I remember the first time it happened. I was down in Washington Square Park, where I used to hang out as a kid. There was this homeless guy there, Victor, one of the hustlers. Just him and me, playing late night, no one else around.
He was a good guy, least I thought he was. I’d known him since I was a kid. He didn’t treat me no different from no one else, and that was rare, you know, especially after I became champion. Victor would trash-talk you and whale on your ass just the same, didn’t matter whether you were some other hobo or the damn president himself.
Anyhows, we’re playing speed chess, and your blood’s up, you know? Slamming those pieces down, slamming the clock back and forth. Victor knows all the tricks, but he’s no match for me. I beat him every time out. He’s swigging from this bottle in a paper bag, and gradually he starts to get real aggressive. Trash-talk becomes nasty, personal. He starts telling me how my mom’s a ho and all that. No one says that kind of stuff to me. I tell Victor to cool it. He keeps on going. I stand up and tell him that’s it, he better shut the fuck up if he knows what’s good for him. He stands up too, and starts yelling ’bout how I done gone changed since I became champion and stuff, all these airs and graces I got now.
Shit, Victor, I say, I’m still here playing with you, just the two of us, just like we used to do back in the day. Victor’s having none of it. Maybe he’s high as well as drunk, I don’t know; but suddenly he takes his bottle out of the bag, smashes it on the table, and lunges at me with the jagged edge. I jump back and yell at him to cut it out. He lunges again. I knock the bottle from his hand and slam his head on the table once, hard, just to make it clear this shit stops here.
He stays like that, head on the table, for a few seconds.
I pull him up again to say OK, no hard feelings, but of course he’s dead, limp and heavy in my grasp, and there’s this smell of piss and shit like he’s soiled himself. A little hard to tell, given that Victor’s usual fragrance wasn’t exactly Alpine fresh to start with, but anyway. Motherfucker’s definitely dead. Now what?
No one saw us, ’cos it’s night and we’re alone. I could leave Victor here and let someone find him in the morning, but that doesn’t seem right: got to give the man some dignity, no? But equally, I can’t be found with him. You know what the media will do if they catch ahold of this? So I pull my hood up so nobody recognizes me, sling his arm over my shoulder so he’s draped across me, and start to walk with him, his feet dragging. My pick-up’s a block away. Long as we don’t come across a cop, we should be OK. Anyone who sees us will just think he’s dead drunk and I’m carrying him home.
Dead drunk. Funny.
We get to the pick-up, no major alarms. Can’t sling him in the back, in the loading bay: it’s got a cover which I’d have to open, and in any case it’s too obvious if someone sees us. So I shove him into the passenger seat, climb in myself and start driving. Can’t take him back to Bleecker Street, as there’s a doorman and stuff there. But I know where I can take him. The place I end up taking them all. The place you don’t know about.
And on the way, I talk to Victor. Sounds a little sentimental, maybe, but I honestly think he was my only friend, Mom apart. Like I said, he was always the same to you, no matter who you were. Ornery bastard, sure. Call him an equal opportunities asshole. But he wasn’t a phony and he wasn’t a hypocrite.
I start telling him all this stuff I’ve never told anyone before. About how my daddy had tried to come back into my life when I started getting famous, when I was a teenager. I didn’t want nothing to do with him. Mom had always said he’d walked out on us before I was even born, and I didn’t want nothing to do with anyone like that. We were a unit, Mom and me. We didn’t need no one else.
But he kept coming round, all full of how he’d seen me in the paper and on the TV and stuff, and I could tell that Mom was starting to kinda like the idea he might be around more often, ’cos he sure could be charming when he wanted to. I always remembered that about you, she said to him one night: you could charm the birds off the trees. Must have forgotten ’bout how feckless he was, too.
When he’d gone, I told her just that. We’d done fine without him all this time; why the hell would we need him now? You jealous? she asks. Jealous that you might not have my undivided attention for once? That ain’t nothing to do with it, I say, but of course it is. And she knows it as well as I do.
Listen, she says. Women got needs, just like men do. And I ain’t been with no man in a while. So when your daddy – and remember, I did love him once upon a time – when your daddy comes back and is acting all sweet and stuff, it makes a woman feel good, you know? Hell, you’re just a boy, you don’t know too much about these things, but trust me on this one.
No way, I say. No way. That man’s coming back in here over my dead body.
And then she smiles this weird little smile, like I’ve passed some kind of test or something, and says in this very soft, very calm voice that no other woman will ever love me like she does, and she knows no other man will ever love her like I do.
I tell Victor all this. When I get to the place, I take him out of the pick-up and upstairs – it’s the small hours and the place is deserted, so I ain’t worried about anyone seeing me – and then I talk to him some more. I know I can’t keep him here forever like this, but it’s a funny sort of thing we have going here, me just talking and him just listening, and soon I start thinking that I’d like to keep something to remember this by, this good old chat we’ve just had, something to immortalize Victor by so his death isn’t totally in vain.
And a few days later, I’m in Cambridge with Unzicker, studying a position for Misha to work on, when suddenly I feel this amazing rush, and it takes me a moment or two to work out what it is.
The power I felt when I smashed his head on the table – hell, I’d never felt anything like it. Sure, I was upset just after, but that was shock, and also a bit of human conditioning, I guess. You’re told that violence is bad and killing is worse. You’re supposed to be revolted by it, not exult in it. But you do: it’s savage, it’s primal.
And I realized something else, too. When you first kill, in fact, you kill two people; not just the victim, but yourself too. Your old self is gone, and in its place is a new persona. I’m no longer part of humanity, not really. I’m one of the bad guys, the others.
And I want to do it again.
People have noticed Victor’s gone, sure, but they all think he’s just drying out for the millionth time or something. Truth is, people like Victor don’t have lives the way most people have lives. You get beyond fifty on the streets, you’re doing good. So if I want to kill again, I have to find another homeless person. But the way I’ve chosen to give Victor a tribute, I need a white guy now. I tell Unzicker I’ve had enough and I’ll see him tomorrow, and then I drive around for a bit till I find some dude under a bridge, and I know he doesn’t recognize me because he probably wouldn’t recognize himself in a mirror, and I break his neck there and then, and just as before I pile him into the pick-up and take him back to the place, and we talk the whole way, like old friends.
I told Mom round about the third or the fourth one. Actually, I didn’t tell her: she came in and saw one of the skin pa
tches hanging there, and the shrunken heads, and she freaked, but I caught her before she could run out the door and I told her listen, listen, I need this, this is what keeps me sane, the feeling of power I get, I can’t operate without it, and I know what she’s thinking, that she can’t do anything that might make me play even a little bit worse, she can’t endanger the golden calf in any way whatsoever. She’s tied herself to me so completely that she can’t jeopardize even the slightest part of it, as anything that threatens me threatens her too.
So she tolerates it. As long as it’s making me feel good, she tolerates it. But as the title match gets closer and closer, things start to go haywire. Ever since the blindfold simul fucked with my mind, I haven’t been right. People as pieces, pieces as people. The killings aren’t making it any better.
She starts to get worried, which just worries me in turn. She tells me not to be a jerk and just play the match. She doesn’t understand what’s in my head.
And the night of Hallowe’en, when I’m finished with the pawns and come back with the monk guy from Cambridge, the whole thing just snaps. I don’t want to play, I say. I don’t want to defend this damn title. You should have let me have therapy.
If you don’t play, she replies, if you fuck this all up, everything that we – we – have worked so hard for, I’ll never forgive you. I’ve done everything for you, and this is how you reward me? You don’t go through with it, I’ll tell the police what you’ve been doing.
You’d turn in your own son? I say.
You’d betray your own mother? she replies.
60
Sunday, November 28th
New Haven, CT
When they’d released Unzicker this time last week, Anderssen had said emphatically that they should stop hanging around, waiting for the other side to make mistakes: they should make them dance to the cops’ tune rather than vice versa. Now they knew the other side was only one man, Kwasi, that strategy seemed to be more rather than less imperative. They could just wait for Kwasi to choose his next victim; or they could try to influence who that victim would be, and catch him in the act.
