The Lure

38 The Chess Player

Café Roland was pure 1920s’ kitsch, all palm fronds and Art Deco. Somewhere a husky-voiced chanteuse was half-singing a bittersweet lyric to a background of violin, cello and flute.

Near the front door a man was resting his arm on a red velvet cushion, which was as well because the clay pipe he held was about three feet long. He was dressed in a golden tunic lined with thick white fur, and he was wearing a hat which looked like a giant Liquorice Allsort. His free hand was hovering over a chessboard on a polished black cabinet.

The café was big on black: polished black granite floor, square black tables and chairs, a big black clock over the bar, shiny black panelling everywhere. But it was light and airy, with a high vaulted ceiling and tall windows, and delicate green marble pillars decorated with rustic scenes in colourful mosaic.

Freya sat dreaming about the daughter she might have one day.

She was the perfect baby. Toughened against a host of diseases, she had a likely life span of three hundred years. At age three, she had a two-thousand-word command of the English language. By five, she spoke Norwegian, English, German and French fluently, and had a good grasp of history, geography, mathematics, physics, chemistry, English and Russian literature, and biology. By six, Mozart was easy and by age nine, when her physiology allowed it, she had mastered Soradji’s Clavicembalisticum.

She got her doctorate in molecular biology at age sixteen. By then she was both sexually precocious and surprisingly mature. Having taken a ‘year out’, she started a small pharmaceutical company at age eighteen. Its expansion matched her own amazing rate of development and within a decade the young woman, incredibly beautiful by Western standards, was listed in Forbes as well as attracting, and rejecting, a long list of suitors.

A young man wearing a bow tie and waistcoat interrupted her dream. He was dressed in black. Freya ordered hot chocolates in German. Petrie watched the waiter anxiously as the man sauntered behind the bar, heard him give a curt order and then saw him disappear behind an enormous palm; in a moment cigarette smoke began to drift through the fronds and Petrie sighed briefly with relief.

The agreed plan was to split up, but being only flesh and bone, they were postponing the moment, desperate to stay in each other’s company for a few extra minutes. Freya’s fantastic Superbaby receded from her imagination, but the concept left her vaguely uneasy. She looked at the big clock, unconsciously biting her lower lip. ‘Five to ten.’

The chanteuse sang in melancholy vein:

‘I know.’ Petrie rubbed his face.

They both knew. By now, at the castle, a coachload of linguists would have arrived. Some of them would be in the conference room, sorting out viewgraphs; some would be having coffee on the terrace, greeting old colleagues, nodding at rivals; others would be spreading clothes and coats around their little bedrooms. Of the video room or the computers, there would be not a trace.

And Vashislav, Svetlana and Charlie would be gone.

Vashislav the Terrible with his brilliant mind and childish sense of fun; Svetlana the Timid with her there’s-nowhere-else-to-be dedication; Charlie the Gloryseeker with his thirst for the Prize. By now, at five to ten on this cold morning, they no longer existed.

‘If we get through this, Tom…’

‘They’ll get full recognition.’

Freya was still cold and her hand kept straying to a central heating ventilator. ‘Tom, we’re fugitives in a foreign country. We stand out. I don’t have a bean and neither of us speaks the language.’

A silver salver arrived bearing little glasses of water and two hot chocolates which had the consistency of melted chocolate bars.

‘You’re right. That Scandinavian blonde hair. Any cop will spot you from two hundred metres.’

Freya was stirring her chocolate. Her face was strained and worried. ‘I don’t want a perfect baby.’

Petrie looked at her in surprise.

‘I want a messy baby. One that I can nurture and love. One that needs its nose wiped and its diaper changed.’

‘Carissima, have you finally flipped?’

‘Are we doing the right thing, Tom? Maybe this knowledge is better buried. Maybe the species should muddle through without help from the signallers. If the decision-makers want that, do we have the right to say no?’

‘We do, because we’re responsible for our own decisions.’

‘If we voluntarily handed the disks over, it would prove that we intend to keep quiet.’

‘Hand them over?’ Petrie’s surprise turned to bafflement.

‘If we did that we’d never be able to prove that there was a signal. They’d leave us alone.’

‘Betraying Svetlana, Vash and Charlie while we’re about it.’

‘Who are we to make decisions on behalf of the entire human species?’

‘Not so loud, Freya.’ Petrie leaned forwards, speaking quietly. ‘Burning the disks is doing just that. How can we deny humanity the knowledge that there’s something out there? And you’ve picked a fine time to get steamed up about the ethics of germline therapy.’

‘We shouldn’t fix the aging genes. Imagine an eight-hundred-year-old Genghis Khan running our lives. We need death to get rid of monsters and we need young people to question and challenge.’

Petrie shook his head in disagreement. ‘Why should life be brutish and short if we can make it beautiful and long? Anyway, babies will always be horrible messy little critters. And if you want one prone to all the diseases, don’t drink the enzyme juice. Just don’t expect it to thank you when it’s an adult.’

Freya whispered fiercely, ‘I’m a female, have you noticed? It’s my reproductive role you’re playing with. As the goddess of fertility I reserve the right to say No.’

‘Fine. But don’t deny others the chance to say Yes.’

‘Maybe the signallers want humanity dead. Maybe there’s a time-bomb hidden in their DNA-repair instructions.’

‘If what I think about the signal motivation is right…’

‘Ah yes, the famous X-theory, which you don’t deign to reveal to us lesser humans.’

‘And we don’t know what the politicians want, except that one or two of them want us dead, but two don’t make a quorum.’

Petrie looked around. A bearded character three tables away was smoking a strong cigarette. Two five-year-old girls with Turkish fathers were tucking into enormous, cream-laden cakes. Two hatted, elderly ladies were exchanging scandals. A sultry girl with a short black skirt was sipping an espresso and scanning the menu. A cork popped noisily somewhere behind the bar. Through the windows a wide cobbled square scattered with gas lamps and trees showed a toddler, well-clad and looking like a Russian doll, chasing a pigeon. A girl in her mid-twenties, with jeans and red hair, was crossing the square briskly, behind the child. At the far end, a party of tourists hovered around the archway of the muzéum. ‘Our first lovers’ tiff.’

She didn’t respond to Petrie’s smile. ‘Do we sit here until closing time?’

‘If I could only get to a cybercafé…’ Petrie touched his chest, felt the reassuring presence of the disks.

‘Don’t be an idiot. They’ll be watched.’

Petrie reluctantly nodded his agreement. He looked at the menu, not understanding a word.

‘Where do we go? Do you head south and swim the Danube while I walk back north and climb over the High Tatras? Or maybe I’ll walk to the Ukraine and hide in some haystack while you stroll over open fields to the Czech Republic?’ She spread her hands in a gesture of despair. ‘This is a small rural country, Tom, and we’re bottled up in it. And your credit card will set off bells if you try it out.’

Petrie was frowning. ‘Wolfgang von Kempelen.’

‘What?’

‘The chess player.’ Petrie aired his knowledge. ‘Hero of Bratislava, born in 1734. He travelled Europe with his little cabinet, which was a chess-playing machine, which beat all comers. Von Kempelen was the original cybernetics man.’

‘If the police catch us they’ll hand us over for special treatment. Tom, I can’t visualise it. We were speaking to Vashislav, Svetlana and Charlie yesterday. Are they really dead?’

‘So naturally the Slovaks don’t want to tell you that the cabinet was a fraud. It couldn’t have been anything else.’

‘I can’t take it in. That we could be dead before the day is over.’

Petrie shrugged. ‘It must have had a chess-playing dwarf inside it.’

‘A chess-playing dwarf?’ Freya’s eyes were moist. ‘Tom, would you like to come back to planet Earth?’

‘Maybe. I’d think more clearly if I didn’t have this woman going on at me.’ Petrie was riffling through his wallet. ‘Nearly three thousand Slovaks. At seventy to the pound we have forty quid between us.’

‘Wonderful. I might get a change of knickers.’

In the square, there was a sudden flutter of pigeons. The toddler was being pursued by its mother and moving at surprising speed. Petrie said, ‘And another thing you don’t know is that during the Second World War, some of the caves in Slovakia were hideouts for partisans.’

‘That’s about as useful as your chess-playing dwarf.’

‘I’m full of gems like that. For instance, the Domica Cave was formed in the Middle Triassic; it’s twenty-five kilometres long, and you can take a rowing boat through it all the way to Hungary.’

Freya paused, her hands wrapped round the mug of chocolate. ‘Twenty-five kilometres? All the way to Hungary?’

‘All the way to Hungary.’

Petrie continued: ‘The bit open to the public is a four-kilometre round trip, of which only four hundred metres is rowing boat.’

‘So we hide away in the cave after the tours have gone and pinch one of their boats? Thanks, Tom.’

‘The caves are near a town called Plešivec, about a hundred miles from here. A couple of hours by bus.’

‘That’s desperate.’

‘Or you could just walk across the border a couple of miles from here.’

But Freya had stopped listening. Petrie followed her alarmed stare. Three policemen had appeared at the far end of the Hlavné Namestie. They were sauntering in the way policemen do the world over, looking around as they did. They were heading towards the café.

‘Take off. I’ll get the bill.’

‘What about you?’

‘No time.’ Petrie was on his feet. He handed her a wodge of banknotes. ‘Get out of it, Freya.’

‘Will we meet again?’ She stood up, white-faced.

‘No.’

‘Life never knows the return of spring.’

One of the policemen, fat with a red beard and untidy hair down to his collar, was looking in the direction of Roland’s Café; he seemed to be staring directly at them. Petrie turned away, spoke in a low, rapid voice. ‘Listen. Steal a bike. Go to the high-rise apartments south-west of the castle. There’s a wood below them, and a cycle-track going through the wood. The track goes straight to the border post but if you turn off it when you’re in the woods and keep going west you’ll end up in Austria.’

The waiter was eyeing them curiously. Petrie waved banknotes at him and left them on the table. The trio of police were halfway across the square. Whether they had been seen he wasn’t sure, but their direction of approach was unmistakably threatening. ‘Go, Freya!’

She kissed him, holding him in a brief, desperate clutch. Her lips were wet. She whispered, ‘Unur Arnadottir, Reykjavik Seafood Centre. An old friend and an e-mail drop you can trust.’

Then he was pushing her away and she was out of the door.

The Scandinavian blonde hair.

There was a look of surprise from the red-haired policeman and a brief, sharp word to his colleagues. Freya took to the left. The policemen moved quickly, then broke into a trot. Petrie gave it a couple of seconds then sprinted off to the right. He had time to glimpse their hesitation, a moment of confusion about who should chase whom. One of them shouted, ‘Stǔj!’ in a deep, authoritative voice but Petrie, bogles at his heels, wasn’t about to stǔj for anyone, least of all a policeman with a deep, authoritative voice.