White Death

‘Now you tell me.’

‘In order, it comes right after the Devil card. It’s a bad omen. When they play tarot games in Europe, they often leave this one out. The deck we’ve got here, the original one from the fifteenth century, that doesn’t have it either. The Tower is bad, Franco. Bad. Chaos. Impact. Downfall. Failure. Ruin. Catastrophe. You want to know how bad it is? It’s the only card that’s better inverted. That way, you land on your feet.’

Anna took Patrese’s hand again, and this time the fear was in her eyes rather than his.

‘Be careful out there, Franco.’

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Wednesday, November 3rd

Cambridge, MA

Building 32 of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, better known as the Stata Center, is a whimsical cartoon village, a riot of angles and perspective. Walls swerve and collide, columns lean like Pisan towers, surfaces change color and texture at the drop of a hat, from dark brick to brushed aluminum, saffron paint to mirrored steel. Crumpled and concertinaed, the building looked as though it had suffered an earthquake.

In an office with walls that sloped so violently no bookshelves would stand flush against them, Marat Nursultan sipped at his coffee.

‘You’re sure you haven’t heard from him?’ he said.

Thomas Unzicker shook his head. He wore square-rimmed glasses and a WHO THE FUCK ARE HARVARD?sweatshirt. He was twenty-four, and still got ID-checked in pretty much every bar from here to Cape Cod.

Nursultan clattered his spoon into the saucer. ‘We have to get hold of him.’

Unzicker stared at Nursultan a good ten seconds before replying. Nursultan didn’t break the gaze. Unzicker rarely spoke unless the subject was computers, when you couldn’t shut him up; but otherwise, almost nothing. Nursultan didn’t know whether Unzicker was just shy or whether it was something deeper, more pathological. He didn’t care, either way. He wanted Unzicker for his peculiar form of genius, not for his company.

‘His mom’s dead.’ Unzicker’s voice was little more than a whisper. Nursultan had to lean forward to hear it. It was always like this. If a door slammed or someone was talking outside, you had to ask Unzicker to repeat himself; that’s how quietly he spoke.

‘I want to talk with him. Much important on this, you know. He being difficult before his mother dead. He try to play me both way, yes? Be difficult with title match, get advantage on this project. Or maybe other way round. But I not have it. I not do business that way. So tell me: you need him for this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Really need him?’

‘Yes.’

‘You can’t do it on your own? Or get someone else in for him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘This thing’s only going to work with the kind of chess Kwasi plays.’

‘There are other super-grandmasters.’

Unzicker shook his head again. ‘Too much to explain to someone new.’

‘If someone beats us to it …’ Unzicker shrugged; Nursultan kept talking. ‘You sure no one else know about this?’ Headshake. ‘What that mean? Yes, no one know, or no, you not sure?’

‘I haven’t told anyone.’

‘The police? They been round?’ Headshake. ‘They check up on things. They want to find out about his mother, they examine every bit of his life, then they find us.’

‘We’re not doing anything illegal.’

‘No. But what we do, it is secret.’ He rubbed his fingers together. ‘Valuable.’

Unzicker said nothing. In the corridor outside, a quartet of students in gym shorts padded past. A squeal of laughter from the day-care center echoed off the walls.

Nursultan looked out of the window, across a roofscape dotted with Technicolor huts. MIT, he thought, was supposed to be about reason, logic, engineering excellence. But this building was like one of those car-crash sculptures, like someone had just thrown it up. It didn’t even look finished. And that was the point. What Unzicker was doing here, what everyone was doing here, it was all nothing more than work in progress. Science was an open question. Every discovery made was merely a stepping stone to the next one.

Frank Gehry, who’d designed this place, had said the same about his buildings: they always looked more interesting under construction than when they were finished. That’s what he’d wanted here: that restless sense of something still happening. The floorplans looked like fractals. That was deliberate, to make sure the people inside didn’t think linearly. They were doing research that could change the world, they had to think in weird dimensions. If the building looked like it was leaping off the planet, so were the people inside. That was the theory, anyway.

Nursultan smiled and stood. ‘Moment you hear something, you tell me. Remember who pay you. Remember how much more I pay when we make this work.’

He patted Unzicker on the shoulder. It felt to Unzicker like the grasp of a bear’s claw.

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Thursday, November 4th

Patrese had settled in to New Haven for the long haul, whether he liked it or not. The Bureau had booked him a room – special rates for government employees, naturally – in the downtown New Haven Hotel, conservatively named and conservatively decorated in various tones of corporate taupe.

He’d had the New Orleans field office FedEx him up a bunch of his suits, dress shirts and black leather Oxfords so he’d actually look like a Bureau agent. All he’d had packed when Kieseritsky had first called on Sunday morning was casual clothes for a weekend at the football.

He’d spent the past couple of days following up leads that had started without promise and had become even more hopeless. In the process, he’d gotten himself acquainted with the city’s geography and neighborhoods. Westville, East Rock and the East Shore were the ‘best’ – for which, read ‘richest’ – places to live. Fair Haven, the Hill and Dwight-Kensington were at the other end of the scale. As was so often the case, Patrese thought, the prettier the name, the bigger the shithole.

The first forty-eight hours after the murders had come and gone, and with them the hope that this thing might get solved quick and clean. The task force had followed up any known cases of criminal pairings, be they siblings, couples, friends, colleagues or any other imaginable permutation. Nothing doing.

And meantime, pressure was mounting from several directions at once. The press were clamoring for more information, which meant an arrest or another victim. Kwasi King wanted his mother’s body back so he could give her a proper burial, but the medical examiner wanted to keep hold of it a while longer, perhaps even till the crime was solved. Patrese had rung Kwasi to tell him. Kwasi had delivered himself of an unflattering opinion of medical examiners in general and the New Haven one in particular. Kwasi was well into the anger phase of grief, Patrese had thought.

Anna’s tarot reading had freaked Patrese more than he wanted to admit. The Fool had annoyed him; the Moon had unsettled him; and as for the Tower, men diving to earth while the building burned behind them … it reminded him of the pictures from New York on the day seared into America’s collective memory, when some of those trapped above the firelines in the Twin Towers had been pushed or jumped to their lonely, brutal deaths. An uncanny harbinger of that tragedy, no? If the Tarot was right about that, what else might it be right about?

Now Patrese was in the hotel bar, about to order dinner before turning in for the night. He couldn’t be bothered to go out, but equally he thought it defeatist to order room service. Hence the bar.

The waitress informed him that tonight’s special was apizza, a white clam pie pizza with a thin crust and no mozzarella. Apizza was New Haven’s main contribution to world cuisine, and boy did you know it when you were here. If one more person in this town asked Patrese whether he’d tried it, he might start committing murders himself rather than trying to solve them.

His cellphone rang. He held a finger up to the waitress: let me get this.

The display showed a 212 number. Manhattan code. Kwasi?

‘Patrese.’

‘Agent Patrese?’ A man’s voice, deep and rough: not Kwasi’s. ‘My name is Bobby Dufresne. I’m a detective with the NYPD, Twenty-Sixth Precinct.’

He didn’t need to tell Patrese why he was calling.

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