White Death

by Daniel Blake

  Kwasi hadn’t been playing chess.

  He’d been collecting.

  A chessboard, and pieces. He’d had quite the collection back in his Bleecker Street condo, all those themed sets of Star Wars and baseball players and historical figures and all. But he’d always been missing one: the ultimate chess set for the ultimate player.

  A human chess set.

  It wasn’t finished, of course. Kwasi had twenty-four pieces, and there should have been thirty-two: forty-eight squares where there should have been sixty-four. And, Patrese thought, Kwasi must have known he wasn’t going to finish it now, whatever happened in here over the next few hours.

  Inessa got up. Patrese saw that she wasn’t cuffed.

  No, he thought. No.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  Thoughts tumbled in Patrese’s head like acrobats.

  The first time he’d run out here with Inessa, and she’d covered her surprise when he’d pointed out the lighthouse.

  The knight’s tour puzzle, which she’d solved just a few moments too late for them to catch Kwasi.

  She said she’d seen chess as a fairy tale, and here she was in a castle.

  The mini-breakdown she’d admitted to, when she’d shaved her head. Chess and madness, she’d said; and Patrese had thought of Kwasi, but of course Inessa had meant herself too.

  All the help she’d given Patrese on the case, but how much had amounted to anything concrete? It had been Tartu who’d realized that Kwasi was playing himself. Inessa had talked a lot, given them a lot of information, but nothing crucial, nothing that had really made a difference. Catja, the CBS reporter, had even asked how Inessa had helped; and Patrese had been too busy giving a nice answer to stop, think and give a true one.

  Starkweather and Fulgate. Brady and Hindley. Fred and Rose West.

  ‘But you can’t have,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘Can’t have what?’

  ‘Killed them. You had alibis.’

  ‘I didn’t kill them. I helped …’ – she glanced at Kwasi, who nodded: Go on – ‘I helped Kwasi the night before Hallowe’en. He was arguing with Regina. He rang me and asked me to come over. We’d started seeing each other again, but secretly, so as not to piss her off, but she must have found out. I said I was out with somebody: Darrell, it was. Not a romantic thing, God no. We’d met at a Russian literature seminar’ – Patrese remembered all the Tolstoys and Dostoyevskys in Showalter’s room – ‘and he’d asked me out to dinner. Doesn’t matter that you’re out with him, Kwasi said. Just come, now. I told Darrell I had to go, and he badgered me as to why, so eventually I told him, and quick as a flash he said he’d come too, he was such a fan of Kwasi’s, and as a religious man he felt he could help mediate between mother and son, and I just said sure, whatever, I just wanted to get there. I figured Darrell could go do something else when we got here if it all got too hectic. I wasn’t really thinking straight, to be honest. So we got here, big argument, Regina calling me a bitch, saying I wanted to steal her boy away from her, and Darrell tried to calm things down but he wasn’t having any effect, so eventually the three of us – me, Kwasi and Regina – went for a drive to sort it out, and Darrell said he’d stay here and try to get some sleep, and I said sure, we’d drive back to Cambridge later that night or first thing Sunday so he’d be back in time for church. So he got his head down, while off I went with Kwasi and Regina, and we got to the Green, and we got out of the car and started walking because I thought the cold night air would cool tempers off a bit, and Regina was still nagging away at Kwasi, and suddenly he snapped, killed her right there. And I was like, oh my God, what have you done? And then Kwasi took the head and the arm and the skin, and it was like I was watching a horror movie. We got back in the car, and he told me I couldn’t do anything or go to the cops or anything as I’d be an accessory. On the way back to the lighthouse, he told me all about the vagrants, and he knew I hated people like that ever since one killed my mom back in Russia, and what he was doing with the chess set, and how the black queen was dead and I was the white queen and we’d live together forever as black king and white queen just as soon as this was done, and it’s weird, Franco, but the way he said it, it all kinda made sense, you know? And then we were back at the lighthouse and suddenly I remembered Darrell was still there, and Kwasi realized this fitted perfectly with the bishop thing, and he knew we couldn’t leave Darrell alive anyway because he’d go to the cops the moment he heard Regina had been found, and in any case if there were two bodies there then it would draw attention away from either one of them in particular, if you know what I mean, and then … He killed Darrell. I didn’t. I helped move Darrell when we got back to the Green with his body, but I didn’t kill him, or any of the others. But Kwasi said I had to go get myself involved with the investigation, get close to you, run interference, steer you away if ever you got too close. And once you realized it was just Kwasi, and once it was clear you were closing in, better to draw you in here on our own terms than anything else.’

  She ran her hands through her hair. One of her hairpins tumbled down a cascade of hair and came to rest right at the end, hanging off like a freestyle climber.

  ‘You ready?’ Kwasi said.

  ‘Ready for what?’

  ‘Ready for the game.’

  ‘The game?’

  ‘Sure. Such a beautiful set, we’ve got to play with it, no?’

  ‘But …’

  ‘I know it’s not finished. But we can improvise. The remaining squares are marked out there, on the table. I just haven’t been able to fill them in yet. And I already have the other pieces we need.’ He reached into a small canvas bag and brought out six: a white queen – Inessa’s face was unreadable – a white bishop, two black bishops, a white knight and a black rook.

  ‘What about the kings?’ Patrese asked.

  Kwasi smiled, as though he’d wanted Patrese to ask that question all along. ‘The kings are right here, Franco.’

  I should have known, Patrese thought: I should have realized all along.

  ‘That’s right,’ Kwasi said. ‘You and me. We’re the kings.’

  They weren’t going to play one-on-one, of course; that would be no contest. Patrese would have Misha on his side. Misha would play white, with Patrese as the white king, and Kwasi would be the black king. That was how confident Kwasi was, that he’d give Misha the advantage of first move.

  What were they playing for? Patrese asked.

  Well, Kwasi said, wasn’t that obvious too?

  If Kwasi won, Patrese would die. If Misha won. Kwasi would die. If it was a draw, they’d play another game, and if need be another and another, till they got a result. If Kwasi won, he’d tell the cops that he’d abducted Inessa unilaterally and that she’d had nothing to do with any of it. If Patrese won, he could tell them exactly what Inessa’s role had really been. That was how much Inessa backed Kwasi to win: she was trusting her freedom, if not exactly her life, to him.

  You’re really prepared to kill yourself? Patrese asked.

  Sure, Kwasi said. If my chess isn’t good enough, then sure. If it is, then I’ll spend the rest of my life in jail. Either way, everyone will remember me. Steinitz said he played chess with God, gave God pawn odds, and still won. Medieval paintings showed young champions playing chess with the devil for the souls of mankind. This was no different. Kwasi against Misha, Kwasi against Patrese; and at stake was life itself, the life that had become chess, the chess that had become life, the machine that had become animate. Unzicker and Kwasi were the guardians of Misha, and Unzicker was dead. Patrese had killed him. Now Patrese would have the chance to see greatness on both sides: Misha, and Misha’s co-creator. Patrese had killed Unzicker, but he couldn’t kill Misha.

  Kwasi said all this as though it was the most reasonable thing in the world. That was true insanity, Patrese thought: not to rant and rave, but to accept the madness as totally normal, to talk about playing chess with God as one would talk about the weather.


  Kwasi bustled around, setting everything up. On a small table next to the larger chessboard sat Misha itself, an apparently ordinary computer with a chessboard graphic on the screen. Kwasi explained that Misha had voice-recognition software installed, so all Kwasi had to do was shout out his moves. Misha would make the move on its ‘board’ and, after suitable calculation time, speak its reply and make that move too, and so on. Kwasi would move the pieces around on the macabre board. Misha also had a chess clock running in the top corner of the screen.

  There was a long work surface against the far wall. Kwasi made sure that everything was arranged to his satisfaction: knives, cooking pots, fretsaws, sand, buckets, detergent, Nappy-San, gravers, sandpaper, salt, battery acid, bran flakes, baking soda, all laid out as though on some TV cookery show.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s play.’

  Outside, the SWAT team leader – Blackburne, he was called – was in Kieseritsky’s ear, as she’d known he would be. The SWAT guys always want to go in. It’s what they train for, it’s what they enjoy: a lot of them say privately that the thrill of a successful mission is better than sex. To them, a hostage situation by its nature involves force – the hostage-taker is always holding his victims against their will – and the only way to deal with force is more force. Cut off the building’s power supply, blast it with white noise, go in there like avenging angels and finish it off.

  The problem, as Kieseritsky knew full well, was that there are two elements to successfully resolving a hostage situation: neutralizing the perpetrator and rescuing the victims. SWAT teams and their ilk are very good at the first, but sometimes they’re not so good at the second.

  Let us storm the place, Blackburne said to Kieseritsky. We’ll use the thick walls to our advantage: no one inside will be able to hear us coming. We’ll scale the walls up to the top, where there’s a railing and a walkway round the glass dome that houses the light itself. We’ll cut away a pane of that glass and come down into the lighthouse that way: absolutely silent till we get to where Kwasi’s holding Patrese and Inessa, and then we’ll use stun guns and flash grenades to disorientate them all, take Kwasi captive and free his hostages.

  Kieseritsky demurred. Let’s wait a bit longer. Sieges can last twenty-four hours, sometimes more. Patrese knows Kwasi. Let him do his stuff. We’ve no way of knowing what’s going on inside there.

  That’s just the point, Blackburne replied. We don’t know what’s going on in there. For all we know, Kwasi could have killed the both of them by now. Kwasi’s refused to talk to anyone but Patrese, and now Patrese’s in there with him, we’ve lost our only link with the inside. We have to do something.

  More time, Kieseritsky repeated.

  How much more time?

  An hour. We’ve heard nothing in an hour, then …

  Then we’ll go in.

  No, she said. Then we’ll reconsider.

  Kwasi was famous for playing the Sicilian Defense as black, but he surprised Inessa – and Misha too, perhaps, if anyone could ever tell – by choosing instead to play the Pirc, where black yields initial control of the center and tries to attack white from the flanks. Even if Patrese had begun to understand the unfathomably complex grandmaster logic behind the moves, he still couldn’t have seen much beyond one simple, grotesque fact.

  The pieces that Kwasi was moving on the board in front of him, and indeed the board itself, had once been people. People whose deaths Patrese had tried to avenge: people whose names and lives had haunted him for a month, and people whose names he’d never known and would probably never get to know.

  Whatever happened, someone was going to die.

  Kwasi had removed the signet ring from Patrese’s finger and placed it on the white king’s square, and then done the same with his own ring and the black king’s square. An early exchange of bishops – the white one having Darrell Showalter’s head, now the size of an orange – saw the white queen high up the board, out on a flank.

  First Kwasi and then Misha castled. The pair of white knights clustered ahead of the pawns protecting the white king, Patrese’s ring; the black knights bookended the black queen, as though she had an arm round each of their shoulders. A black pawn bustled into the center, followed by his mate. A white knight went up one flank; the remaining white bishop darted to the other, training his sights down a long diagonal.

  Misha thought for twenty minutes before its next move.

  ‘Queen to d4,’ it announced, and Inessa gasped.

  ‘What?’ Patrese said. ‘What?’

  Kwasi came over and moved Misha’s queen to d4. His eyes glittered: excitement, for sure, and perhaps apprehension too.

  Patrese looked at the chessboard graphic on Misha’s screen: considerations of taste aside, it was easier to see what was going on there than on Kwasi’s board.

  The white queen could be taken. Misha was offering a queen sacrifice.

  Kwasi stared at the board, and then into space. His body quivered.

  It wasn’t a mistake, that was for sure. It was about as shocking a move as could ever have been played at this level, but it wasn’t a mistake. Kwasi had three ways to take the queen, and they all led into dizzying complications, possibilities sprouting like spring leaves at every turn.

  ‘Oh,’ Kwasi said, ‘that is magnificent!’ He was looking at Misha’s screen: talking to the chip within, perhaps. ‘I bet if we run the position through a normal engine now, it’ll say I’m winning, right? But that … That’s a move I’d be proud to make. I need to think. I need to really, really think.’

  Patrese looked at Inessa. Inessa was studying the board, shaking her head.

  ‘This is way too deep for me,’ she said. ‘Way too deep.’

  She shook her head again, and as she did so the hairpin lost the last of its grip and dropped to the floor.

  Blackburne came over to Kieseritsky again.

  They had to go in now, he reiterated. There was nothing for a negotiator to do, as Kwasi was making no demands, so there was no chance of spinning this out via endless dialogue. If Kieseritsky didn’t agree, he was prepared to take it higher, even to the White House if need be. There was nothing to be gained from staying put, and everything to be gained from going in.

  Kieseritsky thought for a moment. She’d listened to Patrese, and now he was incommunicado, status unknown. Fat lot of good that had done her. She’d sat on her hands already on his request, but he was no longer around to force his opinion on her.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘In you go.’

  Kwasi paced the room in an exquisite agony of calculation. He clasped his hands to his head, he squatted in the corner, he went up close to the computer and peered at the screen as though he could somehow look inside Misha’s brain.

  When neither Kwasi nor Inessa were looking, Patrese stretched out his leg, put his foot over the hairpin on the floor, and began to drag it back towards him.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Kwasi barked.

  ‘Just stretching,’ Patrese blurted.

  Kwasi looked at him with surprise, as though he’d forgotten Patrese was there. He hadn’t been talking to Patrese; he’d been talking to himself, warning himself not to make a certain move because he’d seen the trap at the end of it. Better to see the trap a moment before you played the move than a moment after.

  He shook his head and turned away again.

  Patrese waited until Inessa too had stopped looking at him. Then he bent down, closed his fingers round the hairpin, tucked it into his palm as best he could – it wasn’t easy with the plaster cast – and straightened up again.

  ‘Knight d5,’ Kwasi said suddenly.

  He’d turned down the sacrifice.

  Blackburne gathered all the TV reporters together, off-camera. They were about to assault the lighthouse, he explained, and they didn’t know whether Kwasi had a television inside. If he did, and he was watching the coverage, they couldn’t possibly risk him seeing the SWAT guys coming up the outside of the building.

&nbs
p; No way, the reporters said. You guys mount an assault – one of the most dramatic bits of TV imaginable – and we’re not allowed to film it? No way. Absolutely no way. NFW.

  You can film it, Blackburne said, you just can’t transmit it, not till we’re done. It’ll be over in ten minutes. After that, after we’ve got the hostages out and dealt with Kwasi, you can show it round the clock for all I care. But not now, not live. If you all stick to that, none of y’all will get a march on anyone else.

  OK, they said. That’s a deal.

  The SWAT boys fanned out round the back of the tower, as far from the main door as possible. They had dynamic climbing ropes with grappling hooks on the end, and these hooks were wrapped in hardened rubber to eliminate the telltale clang of metal on metal. The tower was too high for the ropes to be thrown to the top, so instead they used miniature, low-powered rocket launchers that sent the ropes spiraling into the sky. Aimed properly – and these guys were SWAT, so of course they aimed properly – the hooks fastened first time on the railing round the top of the lighthouse.

  They didn’t know how strong the railing was, so they went up one at a time to minimize the amount of stress on it. Each man was carrying a child’s weight worth of equipment, but they still went up the ropes fast enough to draw gasps from some of the reporters. At the top, one of them brought out a laser glass cutter – the glass on the lighthouse housing would inevitably be tempered glass, which is resistant to traditional manual glass cutters – and scored a circle wide enough for a man to pass through. Two other men lifted the scored circle clean away from the window.

  They were in.

  And we shall play a game of chess,

  Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

  In every sport, there are a handful of contests that resonate through the ages. Chess is no exception: aficionados still talk in awestruck wonder of Bobby Fischer’s 1956 game against Donald Byrne, or Kasparov’s titanic struggle against Veselin Topalov in 1999. This game, Kwasi against Misha, was every bit the equal of those. No one had ever played for such high stakes – for life and death, literally – and the quality of the play matched the gravity of the prize. It was almost as though Misha too knew what was at stake.