Part 37 (1/2)

A gallon jug of Sagardoa flew out of a large pigeonhole and exploded on the stone floor at Sage's feet, splattering cider everywhere. Instinctively attempting to preserve her six-hundred-dollar shoes, Sage skittered backward, but as Vartan made to spring at her she halted him again with the pointed gun. At the same moment, another jug flew off the top of the rack, right at her head. Sage quickly ducked behind a nearby table as the jug hurtled by and crashed to the floor beside her.

The avalanche of cider pots moved along the line. Sagardoa jugs were flying from high pigeonholes as Sage crouched behind the table, her elbow braced like a sharpshooter's shot them out of the air like clay pigeons. She took a few potshots at the rack, too, trying to nail her hidden adversary.

At the first shot, Vartan had dragged me down behind our table and toppled it over, spilling the contents book, valuable papers, chess queen, and Chteauneuf du Pape upon the stone floor. We hunkered behind it. The crashes and gunshots continued as the phone kept ringing at the far end of the room.

Vartan expressed my thoughts, 'I don't know who our savior is behind that wine rack, but he won't hold her off much longer. We must find a way to get at her.'

I peered out from behind the loose tablecloth. The place reeked of fermented apple mash.

Sage, in her relatively protected position, controlling center board, had managed to reload faster than Annie Oakley. I prayed that she ran out of bullets before Leda ran out of cider. But even if so, I hadn't much hope, since her heavies outside, on hearing this commotion, would be cras.h.i.+ng in here at any instant.

Suddenly, the phone stopped ringing. A deafening silence filled the room. No crashes. No gunshots.

My G.o.d, was it all over?

Vartan and I peered over the tabletop just in time to see the door of the restaurant burst open. Sage, on her feet, her profile to us, had turned with a smug little smile to greet her cronies. But instead a blur of white trousers, red sashes, and black berets charged through the door into the room, Rodo leading the pack with his ponytail flying, his phone in his hand, and Eremon just behind him.

In astonishment, Sage's eyes narrowed, and she leveled her gun at them from across the room.

But around the corner of the cider rack, intervening between Sage and her target, sailed what appeared to be a large copper soup tureen on wheels, three feet across and held like a s.h.i.+eld. It was barreling between the tables right at Sage. Leda launched the kettle aloft just as Sage fired the gun in her direction. The tureen descended, taking Sage down like a bowling pin but I saw that Leda was knocked off her pins, too, and sitting on the ground. Had she been hit?

While Vartan and the others raced to grab the gun and decommission Sage, I scrambled to make sure Leda was okay, but Eremon beat me to it. He gracefully helped Leda to her feet and gestured to the leaking cider bottle in the rack across the room that the bullet had actually hit. While Vartan secured the gun, a couple of Basque Brigadeers pulled Sage up, yanked off their waist sashes, and bound her hand and foot. Then, as she writhed in furious indignation, still babbling, they dragged her out the door.

Rodo smiled in relief when he saw that we were all okay. I retrieved the diamond bracelet from the mess of broken gla.s.s and wine puddles on the floor and handed it to Eremon. He shook his head and tossed it far out the door into the ca.n.a.l.

Rodo was telling me, 'When the Cygne was coming here to work, she noticed some people she recognized, under the wisteria pergola at Key Park. It was La Livingston, who'd come to have me help find you the other day at your uncle's, and the security men from the morning before the private boum at Sutalde. The Cygne thought it was suspicious, seeing them together right there, just near your house. So when she got here to work she phoned Eremon and me. We thought it was suspicious, too. By the time you arrived here, she was downstairs preparing the fires for tonight and we were already en route. But she phoned again on my cell phone after she heard the entry of another person up here, crept upstairs, and saw that you were in real danger. She told us your friend was threatening you with a gun and those men were posted outside. We laid our plan that the moment we had disarmed the men out there, I would ring the house phone in here. That would be the Swan's signal to create a distraction inside to divert La Livingston so she wouldn't shoot you before we could come through the door.'

'The Swan ”diverted” her all right,' I agreed, hugging Leda in thanks. 'And not a moment too soon. Sage was getting an itchy trigger finger, and I was afraid we might inadvertently scratch it. But how did you disarm those guys outside?'

Eremon said, 'They were derailed by a few Jota moves that they were certainly not expecting. E.B. has lost none of his high kicks. These men have now been turned over to Homeland Security of the U.S. government, which is holding them for bearing illegal firearms within the District and for impersonating Secret Service agents.'

'But Sage Livingston?' Vartan asked Rodo. 'She seems mad. And with rather the opposite goal of the one you were espousing to the two of us just last night. What can become of someone like her, who was raised to destroy everything in her path?'

Leda said, 'I recommend a very lengthy s.h.i.+ft at some feminist lesbian spiritual retreat in some very remote part of the Pyrenees. Think we can arrange it?'

'I'm certain that we could,' said Rodo. 'But there is someone we know who especially wishes to take charge of Sage's case. I should say, two someones, for their own different reasons. Quod Severis Metes. I believe, if you think of this, you will understand who they are. For now, you know the combination to my safe. When you've finished with those materials, don't leave them lying about there on the floor, do as you've done in the past.' He winked.

With that, Rodo was out the door, snapping instructions in Basque, left and right, all the way across the footbridge.

Eremon was on his knees, tsk-tsk-ing as he checked out Leda's scruffed legs and bruises from her fall. He stood, put his arm around her shoulders, and accompanied her to the cellar, to 'help with the heavy logs,' as he said. I thought there might be hope for something a bit more alchemical there yet.

Vartan and I returned to our place beside the windows where the setting sun now licked the tops of the high-rise buildings across the river, and we started putting away our valuable, dangerous, wine-splashed stash. 'The combination to his safe?' he said.

'Basque mathematics,' I told him.

I knew that Rodo didn't have a safe, but he did have a P.O. box up the street, just like mine. The number was 431. He was hinting that the safest route was to get the stuff out of here by mail again, as I'd done before, and worry about the rest later.

I was about to slip The Books of the Balance back into its container when Vartan put his hand on my arm. Looking at me with those dark purple eyes, he said, 'You know, I thought she really might kill you.'

'I don't think she wanted to kill me,' I told him. 'But she was so completely crazed at losing, in just one day, all her wealth, connections, her access to power everything she's ever believed she wanted.'

'Believed?' said Vartan. 'She sounded to me quite convinced.'

I shook my head, for I thought maybe I'd finally gotten the message.

Vartan said, 'But who is it who will ”take charge of the case” of a person like her, as Boujaron said? Sage was raised to believe she is something like a G.o.d. Who could imagine anybody who would want to deal with such a person?'

'I don't need to imagine,' I told him. 'I already know. It's my mother and my aunt Lily who will help her.'

Vartan stared at me across the table. 'But why?' he said.

'My mother even if it was in self-defense, or in defense of Lily Rad did kill Rosemary's father. And Rosemary was sure that she'd killed my father t.i.t for tat. It appears that Sage herself was raised to be like a tracer bullet, a heat-seeking missile looking for a place to explode. Or to implode. She almost did it right here in this room.'

Vartan said, 'This might explain your mother wanting to help Sage maybe a kind of atonement. But what of Lily Rad? She never even knew of the Livingstons' connection with your mother.'

'But,' I pointed out, 'Lily did know that her own father was the Black King and her mother the White Queen. She knew the devastation that had swept her own life because of it. She's known what it feels like to be a p.a.w.n within your own family.'

This was what my mother had saved me from.

The Game.

And now I knew exactly what I must do.

I said to Vartan, 'This book, The Books of the Balance, and the secret that al-Jabir hid in the chess set have been waiting more than twelve hundred years for someone to come along and release them from the bottle. I think we're it. I think it's time.'

We stood there beside the wall of windows overlooking the ca.n.a.l, filled with the beautiful rosy flamingo flame of the sunset, and Vartan put his arms around me from behind. I opened the wine-spattered book that was still in my hand. Vartan looked over my shoulder as I flipped through the pages until I came to the small ill.u.s.tration of a matrix of three-by-three squares with a number printed in each. They looked familiar.

4 9 2.

3 5 7.

8 1 6.

'What does it say, just underneath here?' I asked Vartan.

He translated, 'The most ancient Magic Square, which is represented here, existed thousands of years ago in India, and in Babylonia under the Chaldean Oracles.' Vartan paused to add, 'This seems to be some medieval commentator speaking, not al-Jabir himself.'

He went on. 'In China, this square was used to lay out the eight provinces of the land with the emperor living at center. It was sacred because each number had esoteric significance; also, each row, column, and diagonal adds up to 15, which, if added in turn, reduces to the number 6.'

'Six-six-six,' I said, glancing up over my shoulder at Vartan.

He released me from behind, and together we took the book closer to the window, where he continued. 'However, it was al-Jabir ibn Hayyan, the father of Islamic alchemy, who made this square renowned, in The Books of the Balance, for its other important properties of ”correct proportions” that lead to balance. If the four squares in the southwest corner are carved out as shown, they add to 17, providing the series 1:3:5:8 of perfect Pythagorean musical ratios by which, according to Jabir, ”everything in the world exists.” The remaining numbers in this magic grid 4, 9, 2, 7, 6 add up to 28, which is the number of ”mansions” or stations of the moon, and also of letters in the Arabic alphabet. These are the numbers most important to al-Jabir: 17 adds to 8, the esoteric path, which provides the larger ”Magic Square of Mercury” made of 8 by 8 squares. This is also the layout of a gaming board with 28 squares around the outside the exoteric or outer path.'

'The chessboard is the key,' I told Vartan. 'Just as my mother said.'

Vartan nodded. 'But there is more: Al-Jabir invested this ancient wisdom in the symbol of Mercury. Mercury is the only both astronomical symbol of ”above” and alchemical symbol of ”below” that contains all three important sigils for both: the circle representing sun and the crescent representing moon of spirit, and the cross or ”plus” sign, representing the four aspects of matter: four directions, four corners, four elements, four aspects fire, earth, water, air hot, cold, wet, dry...'