White Death (33 page)

And when you start to see people as pieces, you start to treat them like pieces too. That was how they were treating me, after all. When you get to be famous, everyone wants a piece of you, but they want it for themselves, not for you. Not a single person – my mom apart, and not always even her – gave a damn for me as a person, about what was best for me. All they wanted was to make money off of me, to make themselves look good by being with me. They’d offer five when I knew they had ten; they’d offer a hundred when I was worth a thousand. Mom and I had grown up pretty poor. I’d had enough of people making money at our expense.

No one was ever straight with me, not once. I was the only honest man out there. You know why? Everywhere I turned, I saw liars and hypocrites. Emanuel Lasker, one of the first world champions, had this saying: ‘On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not last long. The creative
combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merci
less fact, culminating in a checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.’ Lasker knew what time it was. As a young boy, you’re keenly aware of injustices, of duplicity. And on a chessboard, everything is open. You can’t hide or prevaricate. You have to move when it’s your turn.

And the more I saw people as pieces, the more it worked the other way. I began to see pieces as people. A piece in a bad position caused me physical pain. I bet you’re laughing as you read this, but it’s absolutely true. Physical pain. A knight marooned on the sidelines, a bishop hemmed in by its own pawns, pieces crowding in and jostling each other like it was rush hour on the subway. I’d feel myself getting short of breath, or a sharp stabbing pain in my side, until I could free them, open up the position, breathe. If I could have, I would have become those pieces, taken their pain as mine.

I felt myself becoming chess, becoming at one with the game. Time was a vortex. I’d sit down to study for what felt like a half hour only to find that eight hours had passed. Several times, I started after dinner, and the next thing I knew was the pinking of the dawn through the curtains. Who did I play against? Sometimes online, sometimes Misha, sometimes myself.

And gradually I found myself needing opponents, actual physical opponents opposite me, less and less. Faceless names on a server were one thing, because everything my end could be set up exactly the way I wanted it. Playing online, you can’t hear the other person sigh, see him twitch, get annoyed by him pacing up and down. So the idea of tournament play, with all its mistakes and people shuffling and time pressure and cameras and moronic questioners – the very idea became horrific. I was so much better than all my human opponents that there would be no joy in victory, just relief.

I had my mind on higher things. I was going to attain perfection. I would cut myself off from the world and dedicate myself purely to the game. People held no interest for me. I was a scholar in the secluded hush of a library, seeking the inner truth. The boundaries between the chessboard and the rest of my world dissolved and melted. Reality flipped inside out: board and pieces were all that seemed sharp, and everything else was out of focus. The pathway between my mind and a new realm opened up, and I found myself in a dimension where everything was black and white, where knights flew above and pawns marched past, where measureless heights and fathomless depths whirled away to infinity. I lived in a house shaped like a rook, with parapets and spiral staircases. I saw the true beauty of chess, and with it the true horror. I was playing the game, and the game was without end. I saw the cosmos.

Steinitz, another of the old world champions, claimed to have played against God and won. You read the Luzhin book? Luzhin’s this guy like me, for whom chess is so much more vivid than life itself; and at the end, he throws himself out of the window of his hotel room. He’s falling, falling, towards a floor tiled in squares of black and white: and he’s not scared at all, he’s content, serene, because this is the world he knows, this is where he belongs. He’s happy because he’s going home.

That’s how I was living. But you can’t live like that, not forever. There were times when I knew it wasn’t right. Maybe I should get therapy, I said. No, Mom replied, a thousand times no. Your brain is unique, Kwasi. I’m not letting some charlatan mess with it. What she meant, of course – though I didn’t realize this till later – what she meant was, what if it works? What if therapy cures you of this, saps your will to win, makes you ‘normal’? So no therapy. But you can’t live alone. You need people.

There were only three people who knew Kwasi well enough to be of use to Patrese. One of them wasn’t talking to him, and another was under such heavy and overt surveillance that he wouldn’t be a model of co-operation either.

That left Tartu. Yes, Patrese remembered that he too hadn’t been keen to help: but maybe Tartu would reconsider now that a few days had passed, now that they were a couple of corpses further down the line, and now that Patrese was running out of options.

Patrese left the hotel and set out on the short walk toward the Beinecke Library.

No one else in the rare books room, Tartu noticed, but him and Anna. Perfect.

She’d brought out the Voynich Manuscript, one of the most famous items in all the Beinecke’s collections. The Voynich was … well, no one really knew what it was. It
was about 240 vellum pages, though there may have origi
nally been more pages long since lost or stolen. The Voynich’s script was unreadable, its language unknown. It had illustrations of plants, but most did not match known species. Some scholars thought it an elaborate cipher, others theorized it was automatic writing, a human channeling of spirit instructions. And there were plenty, of course, who thought it nothing but a hoax.

‘My God,’ Tartu whispered. ‘This is really it. I can’t believe it.’

Anna smiled at him as though in benevolent indulgence of a child’s artwork.

‘Enjoy it,’ she said.

She turned and went back to her desk on the other side of the room.

Tartu put his hand in his jacket pocket and closed his fingers round the X-Acto. He looked around the room. Still empty. No one to see him. There were video cameras, but over the past week he’d gotten to know where they were, and while walking around the room had managed to work out their blind spots.

He hadn’t been allowed to bring any bags into the room, of course, but he’d sneaked a few peeks behind the reference desk, and he saw that Anna and other members of staff had left a few round there. Not especially big ones, but big enough for his purpose.

She had no idea, he thought: no idea at all. A few cuts, that was all it would need. The X-Acto was scalpel sharp. She wouldn’t even know it was happening.

He eased the knife out of his pocket.

Patrese pushed open the door to the Rare Books room. It was heavy, presumably for sound muffling, and it moved silently on its hinges: well oiled, as a squeaky door being opened hundreds of times a day would have driven even the calmest librarian mad.

Tartu had his back to Patrese. He was pulling something out of his pocket.

The briefest glinting of something metallic as the light caught it.

Knife, Patrese saw.
Knife
. Tartu looking to see whether Anna had noticed.
Knife
. Patrese’s head swam with missing heads and shoulder stumps and skin patches cut out.

‘Hey!’ Patrese shouted.

Two heads jerked toward him as though they were mari
onettes: Anna surprised; Tartu alarmed. Tartu dropped the X-Acto and clamped his hand to his mouth. Blood oozed between his fingers. He must have cut himself as he jumped, Patrese thought.

Patrese covered the distance to Tartu’s desk in a few quick strides. Anna hurried over too, eyes widening as she saw the blood. ‘Don’t get it on the manuscript!’ she cried. ‘For God’s sake, keep it away from that. I’ll get you a tissue or something.’

Patrese bent down and picked the X-Acto up from the floor. ‘That’s where the blood came from,’ he said. He turned to Tartu. ‘What the hell are you doing with this?

Anna’s face spoke of a thousand betrayals. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Not you.’

‘You were going to kill her,’ Patrese said.

‘Kill her?’ Tartu said. ‘
Kill her?
’

‘No,’ Anna said. ‘He wasn’t going to kill me.’

‘Then what?’ Patrese asked.

‘There’s only one reason you’d bring a knife like that in here. He was going to cut pages out of the manuscript. Destroy a priceless work.’

Tartu had been doing it for years. Sometimes he took pages from rare books or map collections; more often, he stole the books altogether. The texture, the smell, the rarity: all these pulsed arcs of ecstasy through him. He’d stolen from libraries in London, Moscow, Mumbai, Paris, Melbourne, Chicago, Berlin, New York, Cambridge Massachusetts and Cambridge, England. He’d stolen copies of Newton’s
Principia Mathematica
and of Kepler’s
Astronomia Nova
; he’d stolen works by Galileo, Malthus, Copernicus, Huygens; he’d stolen first editions of Dostoyevsky, Mark Twain, Voltaire, Cervantes and Goethe. He’d never yet gotten a Gutenberg Bible or a Shakespeare First Folio. He’d thought there was still time for that. Perhaps not any more.

Getting away with it had been easy. For a start, it could take libraries years to realize that anything was missing, and even when they did, they were often too embarrassed to take matters to the police. When the police
did
get involved, they tended not to give it too much priority: book theft was hard for the non-bibliophile to understand. Some of the books Tartu kept, the others he sold on privately. There were plenty of men in the former Soviet bloc who’d made fortunes illegitimately and now wanted to make themselves look like men of culture: how better to do that than through beautiful and rare books?

And stealing such books didn’t diminish their provenance. If anything, it enhanced it. Pretty much every great book had been plundered at least once in its life. Henry VIII had ransacked the monasteries; Napoleon had stolen thousands of books before going into exile on Elba; Hitler had enshrined the ransacking of libraries in Nazi state law.

Tartu didn’t tell any of this to Patrese. If need be, he’d say it was a temporary madness, something he’d never done before, and then he’d get his government to intervene and have the whole thing hushed up.

Anna had left the room, telling Tartu she could hardly bear to look at him anymore.

‘You’re in big trouble, Rainer,’ Patrese said.

‘You have no proof.’

That was true, Patrese knew. If he’d waited a few more seconds, he might have caught Tartu slicing out one of the manuscript’s pages red-handed. But as it was, he had no direct evidence.

‘I can make life very difficult for you.’

‘I brought the knife in by mistake. You made me jump just as I’d discovered I had it on me.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘Prove it.’

‘You want me to search your room? I will do. I’ll turn it inside out.’

Patrese watched Tartu carefully as he said this, and the flicker of fear that rippled Tartu’s features was enough. Patrese had reckoned this hadn’t been Tartu’s first time – you don’t bring a cutting knife into a library on a whim, after all – and that, since Tartu had been in the States for several weeks now, he might well have done it somewhere else too. Tartu had been mainly in New York, and New York wasn’t exactly short of libraries.

‘Which one?’ Patrese asked. ‘Columbia?’

Tartu looked at Patrese for long seconds.

‘I’ll make your room look like a whirlwind’s hit it,’ Patrese continued. ‘And I’ll make sure it goes public, too. You’re news right now, Rainer.’

Tartu shook his head. ‘New York Public. I stole from the New York Public Library.’

‘You want to do this the easy way or the hard way?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I need help in catching Kwasi. One reason and another, you’re my best hope. You help me – and how much help that is,
I
decide, not you – and if after all of it I’m happy you’ve done what you could, I’ll forget about whatever’s in your room, and I’ll tell Anna that after a thorough investigation, multi-agency co-operation, blah de blah, we’ve concluded that you were telling the truth and that things happened exactly the way you said they did. Brought the knife in by accident, found it by chance, and so on. Your choice.’

It wasn’t much of a choice. Patrese knew that as well as Tartu did.

‘OK,’ Tartu said. ‘I’ll help.’

Back at the hotel, Patrese explained to Tartu what had been going on with the case these past ten days or so, and then handed him the BlackBerry so Tartu could read Kwasi’s latest message. Tartu read it through twice before speaking.

‘Wow,’ he said eventually. ‘He sounds like one of those hippies who timed when they’d have to drop acid so they could get maximum trippiness out of the stargate scene in
2001
.’

‘He sure does. Anything else?’

‘Tell me what you’ve seen first.’

‘OK. That part at the end about needing people; that interests me. It’s almost like that might be why he’s killing them, through some warped desire for company. He has no friends, he’s said that before, so perhaps this is the only way he can make friends.’

‘By killing them?’

‘They don’t have a choice that way. Maybe that’s why he keeps their heads. To talk to them.’

Tartu winced. ‘That’s sick.’

‘He sure is. But there’s something about that which bothers me. That theory would work better for Ivory, for White, for Unzicker or whoever it is. He takes the victims away before he kills them. He’s organized. He gets to spend some time with them. Kwasi, though, he’s just Crazy Kwasi: kill them on the spot, frenzy and violence.’

‘Not a great way to make friends.’

‘Not a great way to make friends, indeed.’

‘But it gives a hint to where it all started, no? The fallout with his mother? When he says that sometimes even she didn’t have his best interests at heart.’