White Death

‘But round here, downtown, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen.’ She gestured toward the Gothic gatehouse on the edge of the Green. ‘That’s the main entrance to Yale, you know. That’s the kind of place this is. Ivy League, old school, full of the kids who in twenty years’ time will be running the country.’

‘And screwing it up, same as generations before them have done.’

She raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘President Bush went to Yale.’

‘I rest my case.’

She laughed. ‘Anyway. Like I said, most law-abiding folks wouldn’t hang around on the Green late night, but those that do are only going to lose their wallets and cellphones. Not their lives.’

‘And the lowlife? They here all night?’

She shook her head. ‘Most of them have cleared out by two or three in the morning, even on weekends.’

‘And no one saw Jane Doe being killed, or John Doe being dumped?’

‘Not that we’ve found so far.’

A uniform hurried across the grass toward them, eyes bright with the importance of the news bearer.

‘We’ve got a match on Jane’s fingerprints, ma’am,’ he said.

‘Previous offense?’

‘Arrested in New York on the Iraq war demonstration, February 2003.’

Patrese remembered that day well: there’d been protests all over the world. He’d intended going, but he’d spent what had started as the night before and ended up as the whole weekend with a waitress he’d met on the Strip in Pittsburgh.

‘Regina King,’ the uniform continued.

He must have seen both Patrese’s and Kieseritsky’s eyes widen in surprise, because he nodded. ‘Yes, ma’am. Sir. That Regina King. Kwasi King’s mom.’

5 (#ulink_6609a2fe-553b-5565-9d4d-6a9429e99abf)

Kwasi King was twenty-four years old, and he had been famous for exactly half his life. A month after his twelfth birthday, he became the youngest chess grandmaster in history. Before he reached fourteen, he won the US championship. Chess was pretty much a minority sport as far as the mainstream media were concerned, but one story was always guaranteed to get their attention – a child prodigy who might, just might, be the next Bobby Fischer.

Especially when that prodigy was a black kid raised by a single mom in America’s largest public housing project.

Regina King had been seventeen when she’d given birth to Kwasi. The name meant ‘born on a Sunday’, because he had been. If she knew who Kwasi’s father was, she never said so. She had no qualifications to speak of, but what she did have was a work ethic that was positively Stakhanovite and a tidal desire to give her son a better start than she’d had.

She took two jobs at once, sometimes three, just to keep them afloat; but the jobs were minimum wage and childcare cost money, so the only place she could afford was a small apartment high up in a Queensbridge tower block. Six thousand people lived in the Queensbridge complex, peering with hopeless longing across the water to Manhattan’s glass-and- steel canyons.

Drug dealers worked shifts along the development’s main commercial stretch, punching clocks as diligently as stevedores. You wanted to go get something from the store, even a loaf of bread or a bar of candy, you had to walk past them. This is the life, their very presence seemed to hiss, this is thelife, this is the only life you’ll ever know. In the daytime, they shouted and snarled at each other: when night fell, they started shooting.

Some of them tried their luck with Regina: she was a good-looking girl, and still only twenty. She turned them down, politely but firmly. A couple of her wannabe suitors weren’t used to women turning them down, and liked to use their fists on such occasions: but there was something about Regina which made them meekly accept it and walk away.

One day, shortly before Kwasi’s fourth birthday, Regina took him into Manhattan for the day. They walked through Washington Square Park, past the corner of the world which is forever chess: an array of checkered tables in poured concrete, and round them an endless flow of players and spectators. All human life is here: alcoholic hustlers who’ll bet you a handful of dollars a game, Eastern European grandmasters down on their luck, bankers and lawyers in their lunch hours, students, bums, sages, fools. And the play is strictly speed chess. No two-hour games in reverential library-style silence: five minutes each player, tops, with trash-talking not so much encouraged as mandatory.

Kwasi stood to watch one of the games, his little face barely at table level, so he was peering through the pieces rather than over them as adult players do. The game had ended in a flurry of moves and insults, both players’ laughter deflecting any malice. Come on, Regina said, game’s over, let’s go.

One more, Mom. Can I watch one more?

She’d been at work all week, farming Kwasi out to friends. She owed him a little indulgence, no? Sure, honey, one more. Just one more.

One more became one more after that, and another one, and another one. Nine games later, when a hotshot lawyer had been checkmated seven ways to Sunday by one of the regular park hustlers and grudgingly handed over the five bucks stake, Kwasi turned to him and said, quietly but precisely: ‘You missed checkmate in three moves.’

Regina, swaying from foot to foot in her impatience to get going, stopped dead.

She knew two things for sure. First, Kwasi had never so much as seen a chess set in his life, let alone played with one. Second, he wasn’t the kind of kid to come out with something like this unless he meant it. She’d always known he was bright: talking at six months, reading at a year, glued to The Price Is Right at eighteen months – but this, if this was what she thought it was … well, this was something else entirely.

Lawyer and hustler both laughed: the hustler with some good humor, the lawyer with none. The hustler, breath sweet from his paper-bag rum, leaned toward Kwasi. ‘Mate in three, huh?’

Kwasi said nothing: simply put the pieces back to where they’d been halfway through the game, and played through the three-move sequence. When he finished, the lawyer took the pieces from him and played it through himself, muttering ‘I’ll be damned, I’ll be damned’ with every slap of piece on board.

‘I done seen all that at the time,’ the hustler said. Kwasi merely looked at him, his face completely still like a little black Buddha, until the hustler’s mouth cracked into a goofy raggedy-tooth smile and he threw up his hands in mock surrender. ‘OK, kid, OK, you got me. I never saw that neither, none of that. How old are you?’

‘Three years, eleven months and twenty-six days.’

‘A’iiiight. It’s good to be precise. And when you learn to play chess?’

‘Thirty-eight minutes ago.’

The hustler laughed again, until he saw that Kwasi was serious.

When it came to chess, Serious was Kwasi’s middle name. This is my boy, Regina would proclaim, and he’s not taking no crap off of nobody. Not in the years he spent playing all comers in the park, and certainly not when some of them tried to cheat by making illegal moves or subtly nudging a piece off its square; not when people tried to trash-talk him, because the regulars understood that Kwasi didn’t trash-talk and that, get this, it didn’t matter, ’cos he was so damn good; not in the proper tournaments he played, the ones that had TV crews and arbiters and trophies; not at school when the other kids swung between admiring his talent and calling him a freak; not when the cops came round after yet another gang murder to ask whether he’d seen anything from his apartment window six stories up; not when as a teenager he threw away his polo shirts and acrylic sweaters, started wearing long black leather coats and motorbike boots, and ran his hair into dreadlocks; not even when he went on Letterman or Conan or Leno or any of those shows. He didn’t give a shit about what folks did or said to unsettle him, he didn’t take any shit off of them. He wasn’t in the shit business.

And all the time around him, the endless whispering undercurrent of hope and fear: the next Fischer, the next Fischer, the next Fischer, for Fischer had been both genius and lunatic, the two sides of him waxing and waning against each other until the lunatic had taken over, ringing radio stations after 9/11 to exult in the destruction of the Twin Towers and tell the world that America had had it coming for years.

Wherever Kwasi was, so too would Regina be. To give him more time to play chess, now his tournament winnings were enough to let her go part-time at work, she pulled him out of school and began to home-tutor him herself. The deal was simple: he played chess, she did everything else. She dealt with anything that might stress or distract him even before he knew it existed.

Kwasi had a growth spurt around thirteen or fourteen, and after that people who didn’t know them sometimes thought that he and Regina were brother and sister, or even boyfriend and girlfriend, as she still looked so young. When he went to college – none of the Ivy Leagues would take him, but the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, offered him a chess scholarship and a major in computer science, and he led the varsity chess team to three consecutive Pan-American Championships – she came with him, setting the two of them up in an apartment near campus.

In America of all places, there’s fame and there’s fame; and there was no doubt as to the moment when Kwasi made the jump from one to the other. Three years ago, at the age of twenty-one, he played for the world championship in Kazan, the ancient Tatar capital which was now part of modern-day Russia, a night’s train ride east of Moscow. His opponent was Rainer Tartu, a thirty-something Estonian (long after the fall of communism, the old Soviet republics still dominated the chess world) with wire-rimmed spectacles, a bouffant of sandy hair, an expression of benevolent openness, the fluent English of the international cosmopolitan, and the long slim fingers of a concert pianist, which was what he was when he wasn’t playing chess.

The match was twelve games, with a tie-break procedure if the scores were still level at the end. A dozen US reporters and analysts went out to Kazan to cover the match: the networks carried highlights, and there was full, real-time, coverage over the Internet.

To start with, it all seemed for nothing. Kwasi, this great natural talent, this badass who’d steamrollered all the other candidates to get here, who wore a suit at the board because those were the rules but who wouldn’t cut his hair – indeed, he’d woven red, white and blue ends into his dreads – Kwasi was off the pace.

Tartu won the first game at a canter, played out draws for the second and third, won the fourth and had the better of draws in the fifth and sixth. A succession of draws can appear boring, but these were anything but. They were see-saw games where the initiative swung first one way and then the other, where pressure led to mistakes and mistakes led to pressure. Each player had to dig deep within themselves to hold the line, slugging each other to a battered and exhausted standstill, knowing that it was just as important not to let your opponent draw blood as it was to try to hurt him: because sometimes when the blood starts to flow, it’s hard to staunch.

With one point for a win, half for a draw and none for a loss, Tartu was 4–2 up at halfway. Kwasi looked shell-shocked, and all Regina’s soothing could do nothing to stop the rot. Kwasi was letting it slide through his fingers, little by little. The reporters wanted to go home.

Game seven was another draw, though for the first time in the match Kwasi was the better player. But draws weren’t going to be enough: he had to win two games of the remaining five even to force a tie-break.

In game eight, he finally, triumphantly, magnificently got it right, playing a game of such breathtaking brilliance that when Tartu resigned, he – Tartu – led the audience in a standing ovation. Kwasi peered through his dreads in shy appreciation.

Now it was Tartu’s turn to look shell-shocked. He lost game nine inside twenty moves, almost unheard of at this level. Four and a half points each, but the momentum was all with Kwasi. The reporters were getting their front pages again. Game ten, Kwasi missed a difficult winning chance and had to settle for a draw.

Then came game eleven. In a routine opening, Kwasi made a knight move that brought gasps from the spectators in the hall. Even a casual player could see it was a blunder. Tartu, blinking in astonishment, looked at the position, then at Kwasi, then at the arbiter, then back at Kwasi, then back at the position. There was no trap, no swindle. A genuine, twenty-four-carat mistake, or so it seemed. Five moves later, Kwasi resigned.