Grandmaster

by Molly Cochran

  She served Zharkov a freezing cold Stolichnaya, thick as molasses, and sipped a glass of champagne. She was artifice itself, Zharkov thought as he watched her spin an interesting but trivial fabric of small talk around them. Not once did she question his motive for the visit; not once did she appear in any way perturbed at the late intrusion. She was dressed in some sort of silky pajamas, the kind of thing wealthy young matrons and expensive call girls wear around the house on off evenings, and her blond hair was perfectly styled, short and curly in front, with the back long and upswept. It was not a current hairstyle, but it was glamorous, and it gave her face an illusion of sexiness that it did not actually possess. Zharkov found himself studying the woman as if she were an exhibit in a museum. Her face was quite different from the early photographs of her in the files. The features were the same, but better. The slightly sloping nose had been replaced by a narrow, upturned button. Her jawline had been restructured into a square shape.

  Zharkov, perhaps because of the potent vodka, felt an illogical urge to laugh. Only an agent of extraordinary vanity would go to the trouble of surgically reconstructing her face without changing her general appearance for cover purposes. And also because of the vodka, he thought he could discern the blunt features of a thug beneath the fine artificial lines. Something about her repelled him, on principle. She was the kind of enforcer his father had eliminated from Nichevo when it ceased to be Stalin's plaything and took on the dimensions of a serious organization focused on serious work. Nichevo had no place for crude killers anymore.

  But Zharkov did.

  "There is a man I want to question," he said bluntly, interrupting her chatter.

  Her eyes slid toward him, amused. "So? The Committee will bring him to you. If you ask." A smile spread across her face.

  "He's an American. A diplomat. He has immunity."

  "I see. It would be quite against international law to bring him in for interrogation, wouldn't it?" She wagged a schoolmarmish finger at Zharkov. The gesture made him hate her.

  Her complicity was obvious. She would work for him, for enough money. But she would want to maintain the thin charade of her innocence. He would have to endure the lewd dance between them for a time. Zharkov wanted to get her out of his sight, this whore of the KGB who killed for sport and then painted her lips to conceal the blood on them. He wanted to leave her silky presence, clear his lungs of her cloying perfume, wash his hands, burn his clothes. Instead, he accepted another drink and danced his role as she expected.

  "It would," he said.

  "But, forgive me, I'm just a housewife these days, you know," she said with a show of scatterbrained frustration that nauseated Zharkov. "Isn't the sort of thing you're thinking of somewhat out of the range of Nichevo?" She put her fingers to her lips. "Can we mention the name?"

  Zharkov rose. "Madam, I've taken enough of your time."

  "No, wait." She touched his arm, flashing the most ingratiating smile. "Do sit down, Colonel. I'm interested."

  "In what?" Zharkov asked archly.

  She sighed. "All right. Touché. You want someone to kidnap an American diplomat so you can interrogate him. The man I presume you want is Andrew Starcher, but since he's in the hospital, my guess is his assistant. The dark, ugly one. Am I close?"

  Zharkov nodded.

  "You needn't worry about speaking here, Colonel. My apartment isn't bugged." She gestured curtly toward a gilt-framed photograph of her husband's male lover. "For obvious reasons."

  She poured herself another glassful of champagne. "The question is, why have you come to me? Everyone knows I've been retired for years."

  "That is not the question," Zharkov said, pulling a stack of hundred ruble notes from his jacket. He spread them in front of her, arranging them in rows of ten. "This is the question."

  She eyed the bills with something like love. "Of course, the Committee—"

  "The KGB can have him when I'm through, if you want to prove your loyalty to the Committee. I just don't want that oaf Ostrakov to kill him before I've had my chance with him."

  "Then this is a personal matter? Not Nichevo business?"

  "That's not your concern."

  "They'll blame you. There'll be an incident," she said.

  "Will there?" Zharkov asked coldly.

  Maria Lozovan thought. "Of course, there are alternatives, believable alternatives." She still had not touched the money.

  "I thought as much." He laid out five new rows of bills.

  Maria smiled up at him. "You were right, Comrade Colonel. This was the question."

  She scooped up the notes in both hands.

  "And that is your answer."

  It was nearly three o'clock in the morning when Zharkov returned to his apartment. The first thing he saw upon entering was the chessboard set up with the black queen in play. How dangerous was Maria Lozovan to him? What prevented her from taking the money and spilling what she knew to the KGB?

  Only her greed, he thought. She might have guessed that there was something to come after the relatively minor task of capturing Michael Corfus—a more impressive, more expensive assignment.

  As for himself, he decided that he risked little on the surface. Even if Maria Lozovan turned him in, what would the Committee do to him? At most, it might chastise him for interfering with the diplomatic-immunity laws with a low-ranking American agent. But the KGB itself had done much worse to people of far greater importance. Corfus's kidnapping would be presented to the Americans as the act of anti-Western radicals. Then, to make it stick, a few troublesome dissidents would be taken from the political prison at Lubyanka and hanged. Nichevo, the Committee would say. Who cares?

  Still, there might be questions. Why had Zharkov done it? Why use an agent of Lozovan's caliber to get to someone as politically innocuous as Starcher's aide?

  They could not find out about the Grandmaster. Zharkov would not permit it. Justin Gilead was his, and his alone. He had hunted Gilead for the whole of his life, and he would not allow Ostrakov or his clones to find the great beast before he did.

  He stripped off his clothes and crawled silently into bed with Katarina.

  He embraced her, feeling the warmth of her body rush through him like molten metal. He remembered the first time he had met her—God, was it fifteen years ago?—when she had led his initiation into the rites of love and into the service of a woman who was more God than woman, who had tied him to her with the power of her body and her sex, and had promised him the world. In return, he had to promise her his loyalty.

  Katarina had been trained by her and saved by her, just for Zharkov. He pressed his body against her back and with his left hand stroked the nipple of her left breast. It responded instantly, hardening, furrowed, and in her sleep, Katarina, created for one purpose only, moaned slightly with pleasure. He slipped his other hand through the small valley between her hip and his mattress and then put his hand between her legs. She was, as he knew she would be, wet there. He dipped his fingers into her moistness, then brought his hand up, to anoint her breasts with her own juice.

  He felt her shudder. She turned to him, then rolled him onto his back and climbed on him, easing him into her. In the misty moonlight that filtered into the master bedroom from the window overlooking the garden behind the building, he could see her eyes flashing as she straddled him and then began lifting her butttocks up and down, enveloping him with her wetness, sinking down powerfully on him, swallowing his shaft with her hot opening. Then she leaned forward; her hardened nipples grazed his chest. Her tongue touched the inside of his ear, and he heard her say softly, "I am going to fuck you as you have never been fucked before, Alyosha."

  And he knew he would surrender himself to her completely, that he would think of nothing but his body and his pleasure, but as he closed his eyes so he could concentrate on his throbbing sex, he saw again, in his mind, the chessboard in the other room and the white king moving out to meet his pieces. So naked, so vulnerable, so pitifully exposed. The game wo
uld be his.

  The game was moving, moving beautifully, and it would be a game not of pawns, but of kings.

  And he would win.

  The Grandmaster would be his.

  Half a world away, a man quietly sat in a darkened room, his legs folded under him. Outside, waves lapped against the hull of a boat, but the man did not hear them. The unlighted room smelled of waste and rotted food, but the man did not notice the scent. A bowl of food sat untouched on the hard floor next to him. The man sat staring straight ahead at a point in the darkness ahead of him, his eyes unfocused, unseeing.

  His frame was gaunt and wasted, and his mind held no thoughts, no visions, no great plans, no master strategies. It was, like his body, useless and rotted.

  But sometimes, alone, in the silent frightening dark, the man remembered music and the scent of almonds.

  BOOK THREE

  Nichevo

  Chapter Twelve

  The day after the ceremony investing Justin as the Wearer of the Blue Hat, Tagore tied narrow tubes of cloth weighted with small stones to the young boy's wrists and ankles. He led him to the small lake to the east of Rashimpur.

  "Swim," he commanded.

  The boy struggled for a few yards. "I can't," he said. "Help me."

  "Swim."

  He made it a quarter of the way across before losing consciousness.

  The next week Tagore led him to a narrow footpath at the base of Amne Xachim. "Run," he said.

  "Where to?"

  "To the place where you can run no more."

  Justin ran until he dropped, exhausted, the dust of the footpath biting into the raw flesh beneath the stone bracelets he wore.

  Tagore was waiting for him. "Farther," he said.

  A month later, he took the boy farther up the mountain to where the scrub grass sprouted in scattered clumps beneath the snow. A thirty-foot-high boulder rose out of the ground, its slick surface covered by a thin layer of ice.

  "Climb," Tagore said.

  The boy looked at him reproachfully. The weights binding him had completely removed the skin around his wrists and ankles. At night, when he slept, the weights were removed, and his flesh healed into paper-thin scabs. But each morning they were rubbed raw again, the pain permeating him during every waking moment. His back and arms and legs ached constantly with a dull throb. His fingers were cracked and blistered. The exercises Tagore saw him through every morning left him paralyzed with fatigue and dizzy from the arcane methods of breathing the monks taught. He was made to stand for hours, his arms outstretched until there was no more feeling in them, to breathe with such depth that he felt his ribs would crack, to lie outside in the cold until his shivering gave way to numbness. He hated Tagore.

  "Climb," the teacher repeated.

  Justin climbed.

  Halfway up the boulder, he slipped and fell. Tagore caught him effortlessly.

  "I can't," the boy cried. "I won't. Not with these weights. It hurts too much."

  Tagore grasped him by the cloth on his back and propelled him off the ground, onto the freezing boulder. "Climb," he said.

  Enraged, Justin climbed to the top of the rock. His arms and legs and face were already beginning to bruise from his fight with the massive boulder, but he didn't care. Defiantly, he looked down at Tagore. "I did it," he said triumphantly.

  His training had begun.

  From the monks, Justin learned the Hindi dialect of the region. From special tutors summoned by Tagore, he learned Russian, Chinese, Italian, French, German, Polish, Spanish. From ancient books he learned mathematics and astronomy. From Tagore he learned strength.

  The small weights disappeared from beside Justin's pallet. In their place were new weights with stones twice their size.

  He was taken back to the small lake. "Swim," Tagore said.

  By the time he was twelve years old, the stones he wore around his neck, his waist, his wrists and ankles weighed more than a hundred pounds.

  When he was thirteen, he swam the length of the lake without a breath.

  When he was fifteen, the weights were removed. He could outrun a rabbit.

  When he was sixteen, his sleeping pallet was replaced by a floor of sharp rocks laced with thorns.

  At seventeen, he could walk over fire.

  By the time Justin was nineteen, he could change his heartbeat at will, registering different pulses in various parts of his body. For six weeks, Tagore shut him inside a sealed cave with no food or water. When the cave was opened, Justin rose and left in silence.

  At twenty, he was left inside the cave for five months. This time, Justin did not wait for Tagore to come to him. He left the cave when he was ready. In front of the cave, the rock slab that had sealed the opening lay split into fragments.

  Justin had grown into a nearly perfect specimen of young manhood. The scars where he had carried the heavy weights had disappeared, and his skin was bronzed and hardened from his years spent in the rugged mountain climate. The boy's stick-thin limbs had filled out with muscle.

  When he moved, it was with the grace of a tiger. He had learned how to walk without disturbing even the dry leaves underfoot. He could endure a degree of pain that even the disciplined monks of Rashimpur found astonishing. He exercised for weeks on end without sleep or food. He had grown tall, more than a foot taller than most of the monks at Rashimpur. During devotions, he towered above them, his electric blue eyes surveying all he saw with detached grandeur.

  "Your body has grown well," Tagore said.

  "I have done my best." A small spark flashed in his blue eyes. His teacher had never complimented him before.

  Tagore became an old man. The crinkles around his eyes and mouth had deepened into furrows, and the skin over his beak nose was stretched and spotted. Justin had always thought of Tagore as a big man, the greatest and strongest of all the remarkable men at Rashimpur. Now he looked at him as a man would regard an equal, and he noticed for the first time that his teacher was just barely taller than the other monks, his small bones as fragile as a bird's.

  Tagore smiled with his eyes. "You have done your best," he said softly.

  "Yes..." He was puzzled. "And you, too, Tagore," he added. "Your training has given me everything."

  "Ah," Tagore said. "And with my training and your body you are prepared to rule over Rashimpur?"

  Justin's face broke into a sudden smile. "Yes," he said, exultant. "I did not want to announce myself ready for the task, but yes, I am ready."

  "And for what reasons do you feel you are adequately prepared for this task?"

  Justin stammered. "I—I don't understand. I'm the strongest of all the monks of Rashimpur. I have trained all my life to be the Wearer of the Blue Hat. And I wear the amulet of Patanjali. It is my destiny to rule. I am grown now. It is time. You have said so yourself."

  "I said only that your body has grown well. You have learned next to nothing about your soul."

  "That's not fair," Justin said. "I practice my devotions longer than any. I have carried through the Nine Steps of Renunciation. I have learned all of the eighty-four positions of the Asana, and even the longest mantras. I have been the best chela in every exercise of the spirit. The monks themselves have acknowledged my ability."

  Tagore sat silently for several moments. "My son, a chela is a pupil only. The Wearer of the Blue Hat does not look to others for proof of his merit. He must know in his own heart of his place."

  "But I am the best," Justin protested. "I do know it."

  "Is that why you chose to smash the rock sealing the cave rather than to wait inside for us?"

  Justin's frown disappeared. "I knew it was time. I wanted to prove that I could leave of my own will."

  Tagore spoke quietly, his voice full of sadness. "Was it so difficult for you to wait, unnoticed, in silence?" he asked.

  Justin didn't answer.

  "Come."

  They walked through the Great Hall to the Tree of the Thousand Wisdoms. Tagore stood before it, his shoulders st
ooped with age. "Do you remember when the holy ones came to see you by this tree?" he asked.

  "Of course," Justin said.

  "Was it painful when I scraped your hand along the bark?"

  Justin smiled. "Yes," he said. "At that time, I thought it was the worst pain in the world. In my dreams, this tree possessed a bark of iron."

  "But you are much stronger now," Tagore said.

  "I hope so," Justin said lightly.

  Tagore raised his hawklike head. "Very well, my son. Pass your hand along the bark once more."

  Justin looked from his teacher to the massive tree. "I don't want to damage it," he said.

  "The Tree of the Thousand Wisdoms cannot be destroyed. Ever. Even by one so prideful as you." There was the faintest trace of anger in his voice.

  Justin nodded curtly. He raised his hand as high as he could reach and grasped the bark of the tree. Then, with all his strength, he swept his hand downward.

  The pain was as hideous as he remembered. Like metal spikes, the bark of the tree speared and cut the palm of his hand to bleeding strings. Blood poured out of him.

  Justin gasped once with the white-hot shock that seared through him, but he quickly brought himself under control. This was, he reasoned, Tagore's final test for him. If he could endure this pain, he could endure anything. He would be ready. He closed his eyes. Slowly his blood vessels contracted. The bleeding stopped. He willed his throbbing nerves to silence, and the pain subsided to a dull thumping. At last, he was prepared to face Tagore.

  "There is no more pain," he said proudly. Tagore said nothing. Justin plucked a leaf from the tree. "May I heal it now?" he asked.

  "If you are the one who heals your wounds, yes," Tagore said.

  Justin grasped the leaf with his wounded hand.

  He screamed.

  The touch of the leaf was like fire. He dropped the leaf and it fell, blood-soaked, to the floor. The throbbing pain had returned, greater than before. Justin tried to will it into submission, but the pain raged unabated.