The Player on the Other Side (22 page)

He twisted and moaned in his sleep, and he moved upward from level to dark level — still very dark, very deep, but by a subtle toneless dark than those lightless depths at which the dream (he now knew) had begun.

A pawn went sliding past, dipping to go by diagonally. And as it passed his vision (he was still immobilized, waiting his turn), he knew why it had sidestepped like that: it had taken a piece, one of his best, which screamed as the pawn replaced it on the board.

And the pawn had the face of Walt.

Suddenly he had to make a move (now,
now!
) but there would be no time to think; he must just
move
; and he did; and he knew as he did that it was a terribly wrong move. The shape ahead of him was the shape of Ann Drew, and when he realized what he had done she looked at him with disgust and loathing and began to bleed all over her body; her loathing was infinitely greater than her agony, and he tried to tell her that he'd had to move that way, that there'd been no time to think. But her loathing was greater than his voice, his whole mind; it would never let her understand. And he moaned and twisted, and came up a bit more out of his rolling sleep.

The game was a shooting-gallery kind of chess, with rows of chess pieces moving from left to right, and above them a row of heads moving from right to left. The heads were Emily and Myra and Walt and Percival and his father and himself, and one face that was not a face at all but a blank in the shape of a head. In endless succession they moved heads to the left, chess pieces to the right, so that from moment to moment Walt was a pawn, his father was a pawn, Tom Archer was a king, Mrs. Schriver a knight. A moment, and it was all changed: Percival was a pawn, Mallory a king, the faceless one a rook … a castle.

There was one remarkable instant when all the heads fitted all the chessmen — when everything was as clear to him as if he had always known this curious game and its complex rules. But then the instant blinked away, and he cried out at his inability to remember any of the right heads for the pieces. And he gnashed his teeth and scissored his jaws, because for that short solar moment he had seen the face of the faceless one — the king, the player on the other side.

He groaned aloud, ‘The player on the other side.'

And came higher out of his dream, almost out of sleep.

‘Check,' someone said. And it echoed, and on each descending pulse a check for &1,000,000 went spinning on the wind.

‘And mate!' someone cried. But this was a cry of ecstasy, for a sheet-lightning flash revealed Tom Archer in intimate embrace with Ann Drew. Or did ‘check' with ‘mate' mean stop it, stop it? (‘Should any man know cause why these twain should not be wed,' muttered the bishop, ‘let him speak now or forever hold his peace.') (Which piece is that? The queen! Then use the queen, use it, the most powerful piece on the board. Only … the queen has forgotten how to move. Who's the player on the other side? Tell me that and I'll remember the moves.) …

With a wrenching grunt Ellery came finally out of his dream and his sleep. His inhospitable bed angered him, and he lurched up and away from it to stand, weaving, in the dark. His mouth felt like an ant farm, and a faintly luminous rime seemed to salt his eyelids.

He stumped into his study, stubbed his toe, groped for a curse word, fumbled and found the desk-lamp switch, dropped into the chair, lifted the lid of the coffeepot, dropped it back in disgust. And leaned back to gloom owlishly at the bland backs of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition. A to AND. AND to AUS (Ann to Archer?) … He skipped along the attentive row. HAR to HUR (laugh her off!) … SHU to SUB and SUB to TOM. (And
that
was clear: kick him in the subway.)

He shook his head and told himself aloud to shut up, which made him glance guiltily toward the other bedroom. And he wondered what his father would say at the sight of him sitting barefoot at his desk in the middle of the night telling himself to shut up. And suddenly, uninvited, inexpressibly welcome, suddenly the dream flashed across his mind, all of it at once; and, father or no father: ‘Well, sure!' he cried.

For it
was
like a game! There was Walt, the pawn, all but worthless in himself, yet deadly if played with skill — and Walt had been played adroitly indeed. (He and the Inspector had pored over the My Dear Walt letters signed with the cryptic Y, letters typewritten with such perfect exactness on the faint blue lines of the cheap ruled paper … read them and marveled and discussed, reread and discussed again how clear it now was that to lock up the weapon Walt was merely to lock up a gun or a switchblade and let its user go.)

Yes, Y had played Walt well, with painstaking cruelty. Through his victorious anger at the letters Ellery could have wept at the tragedy of this slow dutiful little blinking man, his past forgotten and his future hopeless, unloving and unloved, a lone cipher in the midst of an involved equation — suddenly receiving those passionless, directing, assuring, omnipotent letters … that icy cascade of admiration, those calm promises of greatness: Walt, man of destiny, dispenser of death, the chosen one for that mighty trust … loved at last.

Little as Walt knew about himself, he must dimly grasp that he was less clever than most; yet here he was, outwitting the sharp, outflanking the powerful — even now, silent in a cell, unafraid, for had not his great and awful patron written that no harm would come to him? Of course Walt would not speak! Why should he? He need only wait — rescue was certain, his destiny foreordained.
My Dear Walt
. Safe all along, because anyone, even the great man himself (Ellery winced and writhed) could tell at a glance that he, Walt, hadn't brains enough to be the player on the other side.

Player on the other side … Oh, yes, it was a game — a game in which for any piece to be swept off the board meant death, and millions of dollars hung on every move. A game in which York Square was the board, and didn't it have a castle in each corner? Walt the pawn, the castles the rooks. What else?

‘Well, sure,' Ellery said, again aloud, and again guiltily; but the Inspector slept on in the other bedroom.

For the queen was there, oh, yes; the queen, the powerful piece — as his dream had had it — uncertain of the moves. (How terrible, the move that left Ann bleeding, loathing.)

What else?

A knight? Do we have a knight? Oh, yes (and Ellery almost smiled) — oh, yes, we have a knight, Percival … Sir Percivale, brought to ruin by the dark arts of the Arthurian enchantress … Parsifal, ‘the guileless fool' who at the end became guardian of the Holy Grail; and was that so far gone in its cynical symbolism?

But there's no bishop, no bishop … (Only one who is subject to such fantasies of the night can know how very elusive a detail can be, and how desperately desirable.)

But Ellery punched the leather arm of his chair, elated. There was one! For in the olden days of the game didn't they call the bishop an
archer
? He had seen antique sets whose piece in the bishop's square carried a bow. Archer …

Pawn, rook, knight, queen, bishop … king?

For take the king and the game is over. That's how you know he's the king.

The player on the other side.

The faceless one … Immediately Ellery shut his eyes and saw again that mad progression of chessmen changing heads. It was a shock to remember that one miraculous instant when all the right heads were on all the right pieces — even the head of the faceless one. The king, the player on — And now to have forgotten it —

Ellery sprang from his chair. But his left leg had gone to sleep, and he staggered back. The swivel chair swiveled maliciously; he flailed, and the coffeepot jumped off the desk; he lunged and caught it just as it was about to baptize the rug.

Breathing hard, Ellery set the pot carefully back on the desk and started over. (Make haste slowly, aging man. Tell yourself the story of the young bull and the old bull who spotted the herd of heifers in the valley. ‘Shake a hoof, old-timer,' bellowed the youngster. ‘Let's run down there and smooch us one of those heifers.' ‘No, son,' said the old bull with dignity, ‘let's walk down there and smooch 'em all.')

And Ellery stood on his sensible leg and shook the other until he could all but hear the pins and needles jingle. Then he limped to the bookshelf and fingered out his Bartlett from between Fowler and Roget. And riffled, and squinted, and found what he was looking for; and with his index finger as a bookmark he limped back to the desk chair and the direct lamplight.

The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient …

Ellery arrghed and clapped the book shut. That's what you get when you go bird-dogging for analogies! They strike close enough to make a noise, but then they go ricocheting off into the irrelevant. (What caliber bullet does it take to kill the irrelevant? he thought inexcusably; and: The irrelevant never forgets. He was warned by this that his brain was running too fast for its own good, and he put
Familiar Quotations
and Huxley aside and sat down quietly to think.)

He sat thinking for some time, unmoving except when he crossed his legs the other way. Once he muttered, ‘But it's my move.' After a while his eyes drooped shut. But he had never been further from sleep.

And the move came to him.

Instantly he rejected it. Don't be a fool, he advised himself, you'll lose your knight … If only he could recall which head went on which piece! Especially … The move came creeping back to him; he stepped on it. He thought of other moves.
The
move, uncrushed, laid its warm head on his ankle and purred and purred. He tried to kick it off. But now it had its claws in him. He sighed in surrender and took it up into his lap. And stroked its unusual carcass, and said, Let's have a look at you …

He knew, when he rose, that he had made up his mind long before. He knew the dangers. He knew, also, the infernal nuisance of persuasion and argument he was going to have to go through. None of which mattered.

Ellery shuffled doggedly through the apartment, shot open the door of the Inspector's bedroom so that the knob cannoned into the socket it had dug for itself in the bedroom plaster (a concession which always brought his father up standing, though he might not truly waken for ten minutes or more) and stood patiently waiting while the old man beat the end of blanket away from his ears and snarled ‘
Wurra, wurra, wurra
,' and similar incantations, ending with, ‘What in time time is it?'

Then Ellery said, ‘Dad, we'll have to let Walt go.'

Hell broke loose.

Part Three

End Play

25

Waiting Moves

Mr. J. H. Walt went back to York Square, and a miracle was passed by the fourth estate.

On booking Walt for Myra York's death, Inspector Richard Queen had asked the newsmen to sit on it. He took his oath on a long-term better break if they would go along with him now. Therefore three papers had mentioned Walt's arrest not at all; three had mentioned it, but harmlessly (‘held for questions') in the back pages. The seventh paper, honoring its promise, reported nothing in its news columns; but, alas, from its editorial page crawled That Certain Columnist, who had chewed and spewed as follows:

…
Anyone for a handyman's job? There's one open at a downtown private park surrounded by crackerjack castles. Seems the incumbent can't explain away evidence connecting him with the latest obit in a dead-millionaire epidemic they've been enjoying like on the square. Up to now the police score was 0 for 3, but maybe they're getting the old batting eye back and the Commissioner will be able to point with pride to the Kitty-Korner Killings down at Kosy-Kastle Square
.

Maybe. Because grim suspicion: Trickling down the left side of this (coff-coff) ‘liberal' administration could be the sludgy notion that scot-free murder is quicker and neater than taxing the rich to death
.

Now it may be that some of the newspapers went along with Inspector Queen because they respected and trusted him. Or it may be — it may indeed well be — that other columnists had sharply pointed things to say and had them ready to jab, but slipped them back into the scabbard when Brother Rat ratted. And this in turn may have been from contempt for That Certain Columnist's politics (pro-mom, anti-sin and for anything and everything that promised to incite hatred in the breasts of the masses); or from dislike of his person, which looked, felt and smelled like aging yeast; or from envy of his income, which was counted by computers. Whatever the motivations, the betrayed all worked together to leave T. C. C. high and dry on an uncharted reef, belatedly aware that a scoop is not a scoop unless floated by a tide of like-thinking late-comers. And there he clung until the morning editions swept down on his stranded scoop, with an elemental howl, a typhoon that smashed its hull to the bilge.

For now — said
all
the papers, including the derelict's own — it appeared that Myra was a suicide, consequently John Henry Walt was released from custody; Emily was an accident; and such progress had secretly been made on Robert's case that an arrest could be expected at any hour.

None of this came (officially) from Centre Street.

The Curious Incident of the Embarrassing Moment came about in this way:

Because no man can remain in an immovable state of fear, perplexity or anger and keep his sanity, Ellery swung out into a brief light-heartedness. It was evoked, perhaps, by the sun on Ann Drew's hair. She was walking her little beast in York Square, and Tom Archer was with her; and Ellery was to reflect later that if any one of these entities had been absent he would not have made so erroneous an error.