Lily paused to regard each of us in turn, her gray eyes resting at last upon me.

'The person who finally succeeded, after two hundred years, in this daunting task of rea.s.sembling the Montglane Service and defeating the opposing team was also the individual responsible for its reinterment, thirty years ago, when we thought the Game had ended: your mother.'

'My mother?' It was all I could muster.

Lily nodded. 'Cat's disappearance today can mean only one thing. I suspected it when I first heard her telephone message inviting me here. It now appears that this was only the first step in drawing us all out on center board like this. Now I fear that my suspicions were right: The Game has begun anew.'

'But if this Game ever really existed, if it was so dangerous,' I protested, 'why would she risk setting it in motion again, as you're saying, by inviting us here?'

'She had no choice,' said Lily. 'As in all chess games, it's White that must have made the first move. Black can only counter. Perhaps her move would be the sudden appearance of the long-sought third part of the puzzle that your mother has left here for us to find. Perhaps we'll discover some different clues to her strategy and tactics-'

'But Mother's never played chess in her life! She hates chess,' I pointed out.

'Alexandra,' said Lily, 'today Cat's birthday, the fourth day of the fourth month is a critical date in the history of the Game. Your mother is the Black Queen.'

Lily's tale began with a chess tourney she'd attended with my mother thirty years ago, the first time she and my mother had met my father, Alexander Solarin. During a recess in that match, my father's opponent had died under mysterious circ.u.mstances, which later proved to be murder. This seemingly isolated event, this death at a chess game, would be the first in an onslaught that would soon sweep Lily and my mother into the vortex of the Game.

For several hours, as we three sat in silence, Lily recounted a long and complex story that I can only summarize here.

The Grandmaster's Tale One month after that tourney at the Metropolitan Club, Cat Velis departed New York upon a long-planned consulting a.s.signment in North Africa for her firm. A few months later Mordecai, my grandfather and chess coach, sent me to Algiers to join her.

Cat and I knew nothing of this most dangerous of all games in which we ourselves, as we soon discovered, were mere p.a.w.ns. But Mordecai had long been a player. He knew that Cat had been chosen for a higher calling and that when it came to close maneuvers, she might need my help.

In the Casbah of Algiers, Cat and I met with a mysterious recluse, the widow of the former Dutch consul to Algeria, and a friend of my grandfather, Minnie Renselaas. The Black Queen. She gave us a diary written by a nun during the French Revolution that recounted the history of the Montglane Service and the role that this nun, Mireille, had played in it. Mireille's diary later proved vital to understanding the nature of the Game.

Minnie Renselaas enlisted Cat and me to penetrate deep into the desert, to the Ta.s.sili Mountains, and retrieve eight of the pieces she'd buried there. We braved Saharan sand-storms and pursuit by the secret police, as well as a vicious opponent, the 'Old Man of the Mountain,' an Arab named El-Marad who, we soon discovered, was the White King. But at last we found Minnie's pieces hidden in a cave in the Ta.s.sili protected by bats. We clawed in the rubble to extract the eight pieces.

I shall never forget the moment when I first saw their mysterious glow: a King and a Queen, several p.a.w.ns, a Knight, and a camel, all of a strange gold or a silvery material, and caked with uncut jewels in a rainbow of colors. There was something otherworldly about them.

After many travails, at last we returned with the pieces. We reached a port not far from Algiers, only to be seized by the same dark forces still pursuing us. El-Marad and his thugs kidnapped me, but your mother brought reinforcements to my rescue; she struck El-Marad on the head with her heavy satchel of chess pieces. We escaped and brought the bag of pieces to Minnie Renselaas in the Casbah. But our adventure was far from over.

With Alexander Solarin, Cat and I escaped from Algeria by sea, pursued by a dreadful storm, the Sirocco, that nearly tore our ship apart. During months of boat repairs on an island, we read the diary of the nun Mireille, which enabled us to solve some of the mystery of the Montglane Service. When our ship was ready, we three crossed the Atlantic by sea and arrived in New York.

There we discovered we had not left all the villains behind in Algeria, as we'd hoped. A group of scoundrels lay in wait my mother and my uncle among them! And another six pieces had been hidden in those jammed drawers in a secretary in my family's apartment. We defeated the last of the White Team and captured these extra six pieces.

At my grandfather's house in Manhattan's Diamond District, we all a.s.sembled: Cat Velis, Alexander Solarin, Ladislaus Nim all of us players on the Black Team. Only one was missing, Minnie Renselaas herself, the Black Queen.

Minnie had left the Game. But she'd left something behind as a parting gift for Cat: the last pages of the nun Mireille's diary, which revealed the secret of the marvelous chess set. It was a formula that, if solved, could do far more than create or destroy civilizations. It could transform both energy and matter and much, much else.

Indeed, in Mireille's diary she stated that she had worked alongside the famous physicist, Fourier, in Gren.o.ble to solve the formula herself, and she claimed she had succeeded in 1830, after nearly thirty years. She possessed seventeen pieces more than half of the set as well as the cloth, embroidered with symbols, that had once covered the board. The bejeweled chessboard itself had been cut into four pieces and buried in Russia by Catherine the Great. But the Abbess of Montglane, herself imprisoned in Russia soon thereafter, had secretly drawn it from memory on the lining of her abbatial gown, in her own blood. This drawing Mireille also now possessed.

But though Mireille had only had seventeen pieces of the Montglane Service back then, we ourselves now had twenty-six, including those of the opposing team and others that had been buried for many years, as well as the cloth that covered the board perhaps enough to solve the formula, despite its clear dangers. We were only missing six of the pieces and the board itself. But Cat believed that by hiding the pieces for once and all where no one could ever find them, she could stop this dangerous Game.

As of today, I believe we've learned she was mistaken.

When Lily had finished her story, she looked drained. She arose, leaving Zsa-Zsa sacked out like a wet sock in the pile of pillows, and she crossed the room to the desk where the soiled piece of fabric lay open to expose its ill.u.s.trated chessboard, a painting that we now understood had been drawn, nearly two hundred years ago, in abbatial blood. Lily ran her fingers over the strange array of symbols.

The air in the room was filled with the rich scent of bubbling beef and wine; you could hear the log cracking from time to time. For a very long time, n.o.body spoke.

At last, it was Vartan who broke the silence.

'My G.o.d,' he said, his voice low, 'what this Game has cost you all. It is hard to imagine that such a thing ever existed or that it might really be happening again. But I don't understand one thing: If what you say is true if this chess service is so dangerous; if Alexandra's mother already owns so many pieces of the puzzle; if the Game has begun again and White has made its first move, but n.o.body knows who are the players what would she gain by inviting so many people here today? And do you know what is this formula she spoke of?'

Key was looking at me with an expression suggesting she might already know.

'I think the answer may be staring us in the face,' said Key, speaking for the first time. We all turned to look at her, as she sat there beside the piano.

'Or at least, it's cooking our dinner,' she added with a smile. 'I may not know much about chess, but I do know a lot about calories.'

'Calories?' said Lily in astonishment. 'Like the kind you eat?'

'There's no such thing as a calorie,' I pointed out. I thought I could see where Key might be going with this.

'Well, I'm sorry, but I beg to differ,' said Lily, patting her waist. 'I've packed on a few of those nonexistent "things" in my time.'

'I'm afraid I do not understand,' Vartan chimed in. 'We were talking about a dangerous game of chess where people were killed. Now are we discussing food?'

'A calorie isn't food,' I said. 'It's a unit of thermal measure. And I think Key here may have just resolved an important problem. My mother knows that Nokomis Key is my only friend here in the valley, and that if I ever had a problem she'd be the first and only one I would turn to, to help resolve it. That's Key's job, she's a calorimetrician. She flies into remote regions and studies the thermal properties of everything from geysers to volcanoes. I think Key's right. That's why my mother built this fire: as a big, fat, calorie-laden clue.'

'Excuse me,' said Lily. Looking more than exhausted, she went over and swept Key aside. 'I need to recline for a moment on some of my thermal properties. What on earth are you two talking about?'

Vartan looked lost as well.

'I'm saying that my mother is underneath that log or at least, she was,' I told them. 'She must have had the tree placed here months ago, on removable props, so when she was ready she could exit through the stone air shaft under the floor and light the fire from below. I think the shaft may vent to a cave just downhill.'

'Isn't that a rather Faustian exit?' said Lily. 'And what does it have to do with the Montglane Service or the game of chess?'

'It has nothing to do with it,' I said. 'This isn't about a chess game that's the whole point, don't you see?'

'It has to do with the formula,' Key pointed out with a smile. This was, after all, her area of expertise. 'You know, the formula you told us the nun Mireille worked on in Gren.o.ble, with Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier. The same Fourier who was also the author of The a.n.a.lytic Theory of Heat.'

When our two brilliant grandmasters sat there like lumps, staring at us with blank expressions, I figured it was time to clarify.

'Mother didn't invite us all here and then leave us in the lurch because she was trying to make a clever defense in a chess game,' I told them. 'As Lily said, she's already made her move by inviting us here and leaving that piece of cloth right where she hoped Lily might find it.'

I paused and looked Key in the eye. How right she was it was time to get cooking, and all those clues Mother had left now seemed to fall into place.

'Mother invited us here,' I said, 'because she wants us to collect the pieces and solve the formula of the Montglane Service.'

'Did you ever discover what the formula was?' Key repeated Vartan's question.

'Yes, in a way though I've never believed it myself,' said Lily. 'Alexandra's parents and her uncle seemed to think it possible that it was true. You may judge for yourselves from what I've already told you. Minnie Renselaas claimed it was true. She claimed she was leaving the Game because of the formula created two hundred years ago. She claimed that she, herself, was the nun Mireille de Remy who'd solved the formula for the elixir of life.'

The Vessel.

Hexagram 50: The Vessel.

The Vessel means making and using symbols as fire uses wood. Offer something to the spirits through cooking it... This brightens the understanding of the ear and eye and lets you see invisible things.

Stephen Karcher, Total I Ching.

I hid the drawing of the chessboard inside the piano and shut the lid until we could figure out what to do with it. My compadres were unloading their luggage from Key's car, and Lily had just taken Zsa-Zsa outside in the snow. I stayed indoors to finish cooking our dinner. And to think.

I'd raked the ashes and stuffed more kindling beneath the huge log. As I stirred the Boeuf Bourguignonne, the liquid bubbled away in the copper kettle hanging from its hook above the fire. I added a splash of burgundy and stock to thin the broth.

My mind was bubbling pretty actively, too. But instead of clarifying something within my mental vessel, the bubbling seemed only to have congealed into a lumpy ma.s.s at the bottom of the pot. After hearing Lily's tale and its outcome, I knew I had too many ingredients interacting with one another. And each new idea only seemed to ignite more questions.

For instance, if there really was such a powerful formula as this longevity elixir that some nun had been able to solve nearly two hundred years ago, then why hadn't anyone done it since namely my parents? While Lily had indicated that she'd never believed the whole story herself, she claimed that the others had. But Uncle Slava and my parents were all professional scientists. If their team had put together so many pieces of the puzzle, why would they hide them instead of trying to solve it themselves?

But it seems, as Lily told us, that no one knew where the pieces of the Montglane Service had been buried and who had buried them. As the Black Queen, my mother was the only one who knew to which of the four she'd a.s.signed each piece for hiding. And my father alone, with his prodigious chess memory, was the one she allowed to know where the pieces were actually hidden. Now that my father was dead and my mother was missing, the trail was cold. The pieces could likely never be found again.

Which led to my next question: If Mother really wanted us to solve this formula now, thirty years later and if she was pa.s.sing the torch to me, as all indications seemed to suggest then why had she hidden all the pieces so no one could ever find them? Why had she failed to include some kind of map?

A map.

On the other hand, maybe Mother had left a map, I thought, in the form of the drawing of that chessboard and those other messages I'd already retrieved. I touched the chess piece that still lay concealed in my pocket: the Black Queen. Too many clues pointed to this one piece. Especially Lily's story. Somehow she must tie it all together. But how? I knew I needed to ask Lily one more critical I heard tramping and voices in the mudroom. I hung my soup ladle on an overhead hook and went to help with the bags. I instantly wished I hadn't.

Lily had picked up Zsa-Zsa from the snow, but couldn't get back inside. Key wasn't exaggerating when she'd mentioned on the phone my aunt's pile of designer luggage: valises were piled everywhere, even blocking the inner door. How had they ever fit all this into one simple Aston Martin?

'How did you bring all this over from London? The Queen Mary?' Key was asking Lily.

'Some of these can't go up the spiral stairs,' I pointed out. 'But we can't leave them here.'

Vartan and Key agreed to haul only those that Lily had designated as most critical up the stairs. They'd remove the excess bags to the spot of my choosing: under the billiard table, where no one would trip over them.

The moment they'd departed the mudroom with the first load, I crawled over the piles of bags, pulled Lily and Zsa-Zsa inside, and shut the outer doors.

'Aunt Lily,' I said, 'you told us that no one but my father knew where each of the pieces was hidden. But we do know a few things. You know which pieces you buried or hid yourself, and Uncle Slava does, too, with his own. If you could remember which pieces your team was missing at the end, then we'd only have to figure out my parents' two parts of the puzzle.'

'I was only given two of the pieces myself to hide,' Lily admitted. 'That leaves twenty-four pieces for the others. But only your mother knows if they each got eight. For the six missing pieces, I'm not sure after all these years that my memory is perfect. But I think I recall that we were missing four White pieces: two silver p.a.w.ns, a Knight, and the White King. And the two Black pieces were a gold p.a.w.n and a Bishop.'

I paused, not certain that I'd heard correctly.

'Then...the pieces that Mother captured and that you all buried or hid included everything else except those six?' I said.

If Vartan's story was true, there was one piece that must have been missing from the cache they'd buried thirty years ago. He'd seen it, alongside my father, at Zagorsk. Hadn't he?

Vartan and Key were coming back down the spiral stairs at the end of the room. I couldn't wait I had to know now.

'Your team possessed the Black Queen?' I asked her.

'Oh yes, that was the most important piece of them all, according to Mireille's diary,' said Lily. 'The Abbess of Montglane took it to Russia herself, along with the chessboard she'd cut into parts. The Black Queen was in the possession of Catherine the Great, then seized by her son Paul on the empress's death. Finally it was pa.s.sed to Mireille by Catherine's grandson, Emperor Alexander of Russia. Cat and I found it among Minnie's cache in that Ta.s.sili cave.'

'Are you sure?' I asked her, my voice weakening along with my grip on the situation.

'How could I forget, with all those bats in that cave?' said Lily. 'My memory might not be perfect about the missing pieces, but I held the Black Queen in my own hands. It was so important, I feel sure your mother must have buried that piece herself.'

My temples were throbbing again, and I felt that same churning in my stomach. But Key and Vartan had just arrived for another haul of bags.

'You look as if you've just seen the proverbial ghost,' Key said, regarding me strangely.

She could say that again. But it was a real one: the ghost of my dead father at Zagorsk. My suspicions were back in full gear. How could Vartan's and Lily's versions of the Black Queen both be true? Was this part of my mother's message? One thing was sure: The Black Queen in my pocket wasn't the only one 'behind the eight ball.'

As I was thinking this over, my ears were a.s.saulted by the deafening clamor of the fire-engine bell ringing just above the front door. Vartan stared up at it in horror. Some visitor, undaunted at the prospect of having his hand bitten off by the bear outside, had reached into its maw and twisted our unique front-door chime.

Zsa-Zsa started yapping hysterically at the noisy bell. Lily retreated with her into the lodge.

I shoved aside a few bags and stood on tiptoe to peer out through the eagle's gla.s.s eyeb.a.l.l.s. There on our doorstep was a ma.s.sed gaggle of folks in hooded parkas and furs. Though I couldn't see faces, their ident.i.ties weren't to be a mystery for long: Across the snowy expanse I glimpsed with sinking heart the BMW parked just beside my car. It was sporting vanity plates that read SAGESSE.

Vartan, from behind, whispered in my ear. 'Is it someone you know?'

As if anyone we didn't know well would ever make the trek to this place.

'It is someone I'd like to forget I know,' I told him, sotto voce. 'But it does seem to be someone who's been invited.'

Sage Livingston wasn't a girl who might graciously accept cooling her heels on the front doorstep, especially if she'd arrived with an entourage. With a sigh of resignation I threw open the doors. I was in for yet another unpleasant surprise.

'Oh no the Botany Club.' Key took the words out of my mouth.

She meant the botanically named Livingstons, all of them Basil, Rosemary, and Sage a family of whom Key liked to quip: 'If they'd had more children, they'd have called them Parsley and Thyme.'

But in my youth, they'd never seemed much of a joke. Now they were one more puzzle on my mother's invitation list.

'Darling! It's been truly forever!' gushed Rosemary, as she swept into our constricted mudroom before the rest.

Sporting dark gla.s.ses and swathed in her extravagant, hooded lynx cape, Sage's mother looked even more youthful than I'd remembered. She briefly enfolded me in her cloud of endangered animal skins and bussed me with an 'air kiss' at either cheek.

She was followed by my old archnemesis, her flawlessly perfect ash-blond daughter, Sage. Sage's dad, Basil, due to the clear constrictions of our broom-closet entry chamber, lagged with another man just outside the door no doubt our 'new neighbor' a craggy, sun-leathered chap in jeans, sheepskin jacket, western boots, and hand-blocked Stetson. Alongside the haughty Basil with his silvery sideburns and haute couture Livingston women, our new arrival seemed somewhat out of place at this ball.

'Aren't we expected to come inside?' Sage demanded by way of cheery greeting, though it was the first time we'd laid eyes on each other in years.

She glanced past her mother toward the inner doors where Key stood, and raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow as if astonished she should find her here. There'd been little love lost over the years between Nokomis Key and Sage Livingston, for a variety of reasons.

No one seemed about to remove wet togs or to introduce me to our external guest. Vartan parted the wall of hanging coats and furs, stepped over some luggage, and addressed Rosemary with a charm I didn't know chess players possessed.

'Please permit me to remove your wrap,' he offered in that soft voice I'd always regarded as sinister. Under these close conditions, I realized it might be interpreted slightly differently in a boudoir.

Sage herself, a longtime collector of designer men as well as clothes, shot Vartan a meaningful look that might bring a bull elephant to its knees. He didn't seem to notice, but offered to take her coat as well. I introduced them. Then I squeezed past this intimate threesome, heading outside to greet the two men. I shook hands with Basil.

'I thought you and Rosemary were out of town and couldn't make it,' I mentioned.

'We changed our plans,' Basil replied with a smile. 'We wouldn't have missed your mother's first birthday party for the world.'