Read Online The Fire by Katherine Neville - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Katherine Neville
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prime, my aunt Lily had boasted an ELO rating approaching that of the more recent Hungarian chess whizzes, the Polgar sisters. And for twenty of those years, Lily’s best friend and coach – my father, Alexander Solarin – had honed her brilliant defenses and helped keep her star soaring high in the chess empyrean.
After my father’s death, Lily had returned to her former chess coach and mentor: the brilliant chess diagnostician and historian of the ancient art of the game, who happened also to be Lily’s grandfather and her only living relative, Mordecai Rad.
But then, on the morning of her fiftieth birthday, the lights were suddenly and surprisingly extinguished on Lily’s chess marquee.
On the morning of her birthday, so the story goes, Lily was running a bit late for her breakfast appointment with her grandfather. Her chauffeur had pulled the limo from her apartment building out onto Central Park South, and he’d managed to maneuver deftly through the thick morning traffic, down the West Side Highway. They had just passed Canal Street when, up ahead in the sky, they saw the first plane hit the first tower.
Thousands of cars screeched to a halt, the highway in instant gridlock. All drivers were staring up at that long, dark plume of smoke, unfolding like the tail of a big, black bird – a silent omen.
In panic, in the backseat of the limo, Lily tried desperately to tune her TV to the news – any news – but she flipped through the channels in vain. Everything was static. She was going mad.
Her grandfather was at the top of that building. They had an appointment to meet at nine o’clock, at a restaurant called Windows on the World. And Mordecai had a special treat for Lily, something that he wanted to reveal to his only descendant on this special day, her fiftieth birthday: September 11, 2001.
In a way, Lily and I were both orphans. We’d each lost our closest relative, the person who had done the most to train us in our chosen field. I had never questioned for a moment why Lily had closed up her vast apartment on Central Park South that very same week of her grandfather’s death, why she’d packed a single bag – as she later wrote me – and headed for England. Though she bore no great love for the British, Lily had been born in England, her late mother was English, so she carried dual citizenship. She just couldn’t face New York. I’d barely heard a word from her since. Until today.
But at this moment, I knew that the one individual I desperately needed to see – perhaps the only person who knew all the players in our lives, the only one who might hold the key to my mother’s disappearance, perhaps even to those cryptic messages that seemed somehow related to my father’s death – was Lily Rad.
I heard a phone ringing.
It took me a moment to realize this time it wasn’t the desk phone, it was the cell phone in my trouser pocket. I was surprised it even worked in this remote region of Colorado. In fact, I’d only given out this number to a handful of people.
I yanked the phone from my pocket and read the incoming caller ID: Rodolfo Boujaron, my boss back in Washington, D.C. Rodo would just be arriving for work at his famous restaurant, Sutalde, to learn that the chickadee he believed had been working his night shift had flown the coop.
But in all fairness to myself, if I’d ever had to ask my boss’s permission first, I would likely never have gotten any time off at all. Rodo was a workaholic who thought everyone else should be, too. He liked to keep 24/7 surveillance on all his employees, because ‘the fires must always be stroked, ’ as he’d say in that accent, so thick you could cut it with a meat cleaver.
At this moment, however, I was in no mood to deal with Rodo’s rantings, so I waited until I saw the voice message sign pop on my phone screen, then I listened to what he’d recorded:
‘Bonjour, Neskato Geldo!’
That was Rodo’s nickname for me in his native Basque –
After my father’s death, Lily had returned to her former chess coach and mentor: the brilliant chess diagnostician and historian of the ancient art of the game, who happened also to be Lily’s grandfather and her only living relative, Mordecai Rad.
But then, on the morning of her fiftieth birthday, the lights were suddenly and surprisingly extinguished on Lily’s chess marquee.
On the morning of her birthday, so the story goes, Lily was running a bit late for her breakfast appointment with her grandfather. Her chauffeur had pulled the limo from her apartment building out onto Central Park South, and he’d managed to maneuver deftly through the thick morning traffic, down the West Side Highway. They had just passed Canal Street when, up ahead in the sky, they saw the first plane hit the first tower.
Thousands of cars screeched to a halt, the highway in instant gridlock. All drivers were staring up at that long, dark plume of smoke, unfolding like the tail of a big, black bird – a silent omen.
In panic, in the backseat of the limo, Lily tried desperately to tune her TV to the news – any news – but she flipped through the channels in vain. Everything was static. She was going mad.
Her grandfather was at the top of that building. They had an appointment to meet at nine o’clock, at a restaurant called Windows on the World. And Mordecai had a special treat for Lily, something that he wanted to reveal to his only descendant on this special day, her fiftieth birthday: September 11, 2001.
In a way, Lily and I were both orphans. We’d each lost our closest relative, the person who had done the most to train us in our chosen field. I had never questioned for a moment why Lily had closed up her vast apartment on Central Park South that very same week of her grandfather’s death, why she’d packed a single bag – as she later wrote me – and headed for England. Though she bore no great love for the British, Lily had been born in England, her late mother was English, so she carried dual citizenship. She just couldn’t face New York. I’d barely heard a word from her since. Until today.
But at this moment, I knew that the one individual I desperately needed to see – perhaps the only person who knew all the players in our lives, the only one who might hold the key to my mother’s disappearance, perhaps even to those cryptic messages that seemed somehow related to my father’s death – was Lily Rad.
I heard a phone ringing.
It took me a moment to realize this time it wasn’t the desk phone, it was the cell phone in my trouser pocket. I was surprised it even worked in this remote region of Colorado. In fact, I’d only given out this number to a handful of people.
I yanked the phone from my pocket and read the incoming caller ID: Rodolfo Boujaron, my boss back in Washington, D.C. Rodo would just be arriving for work at his famous restaurant, Sutalde, to learn that the chickadee he believed had been working his night shift had flown the coop.
But in all fairness to myself, if I’d ever had to ask my boss’s permission first, I would likely never have gotten any time off at all. Rodo was a workaholic who thought everyone else should be, too. He liked to keep 24/7 surveillance on all his employees, because ‘the fires must always be stroked, ’ as he’d say in that accent, so thick you could cut it with a meat cleaver.
At this moment, however, I was in no mood to deal with Rodo’s rantings, so I waited until I saw the voice message sign pop on my phone screen, then I listened to what he’d recorded:
‘Bonjour, Neskato Geldo!’
That was Rodo’s nickname for me in his native Basque –
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