Read Online Grandmaster by Molly Cochran - Free Book Online

while he was in Paris arguing with a whore over the price of an evening. Thinking of the good publicity the boy's victory could generate for Leviathan's book, the elder Gilead had Justin flown over alone like so much baggage.
    After Justin's triumphant match with the young Russian prodigy, the boy accompanied his father into the dim bars and illegal gambling houses in the seedy side streets of Courbevoie, where Donald Gilead found comfort. They did not speak much to each other. Gilead had all but forgotten the presence of the quiet boy. Justin, too, kept to his own thoughts. They were of robes.
    Yellow robes. The back of the chess hall had been full of small, dark men in yellow robes, watching, concentrating. But their focus was not on the game. He, Justin Gilead, had been the object of their attention. He could feel them; their thoughts were almost palpable to him. And in words that were not words, the men in the yellow robes had said, Come. You are of us. The man is not your father. This is not your home. We have come to take you home.
    At first he had found the intense stares of the small men to be distracting, but whatever energy—that was the only word he could think of for their strange communication through distance, their language without words—they sent to him shortly had the reverse effect. It concentrated his vision. It tightened his ranging mind until there was nothing for him to see or question or understand except the chess pieces in front of him, the knights and bishops and pawns that moved to his direction. For the length of that extraordinary match with the Russian boy who had not been permitted to control his own pieces, Justin Gilead did not merely play the game. He was the game.
    He wished he could talk to someone about the group of men in their yellow robes and the unearthly feeling of power they had sent to him during the match. Slowly he looked around the bar. His father, shirt unbuttoned down to the belly, was fondling the breasts of a dirty-looking blond woman to the encouragement of other bleary-eyed patrons.
    No, there was no one who would understand about the men in the yellow robes. Justin looked the other way and tried to stay awake. At the far end of the bar, a dark man with a sharp nose and thinning hair sat silently, watching Justin's father and the blond woman.
    His father shouted something, and the woman shouted back, spewing out a stream of gutter French. Justin turned in time to see his father reel back drunkenly, then smash his fist into the woman's face. She screamed. A small explosion of blood sprayed from her nose.
    Swiftly, his face blank, the dark man at the end of the bar rose. As he walked toward Justin's father, who had collapsed across the bar, he reached into the short cloth jacket he wore and popped open a knife with a six-inch-long blade.
    All conversation stopped. The only sound in the bar was the rhythmic chant of a frothy French jazz tune. The bar patrons quickly slinked off their stools and away like unseeing worms. The barman stood stock-still as if to convince the man with the knife of his discretion. The man with the knife jerked his head toward the door.
    Donald Gilead, his hands held shakily above his head, staggered wildly toward the exit, the man and the blond woman behind him.
    Justin was frozen. He stood up on rubber legs and looked around the bar frantically, searching for someone who would help, but no one paid any attention to the boy. Running, he made his way out the door in time to see the dark man jab the blade into his father's bloated, exposed belly. Donald Gilead stared ahead stupidly for a moment, shuffling on his feet, then crashed backward into the slime of the stone-paved street.
    The boy stared at the scene, breathing shallowly, watching his father's open eyes glaze over like those of some huge felled beast. A trickle of filthy water from the street formed a black pool around the dead man's face and mixed with the thread of blood oozing from