White Death. Daniel Blake

made the game a compulsory subject at every school in Tatarstan. He spent as much time out of Tatarstan as he did in it, leaving the day-to-day running of the place to the prime minister, who happened to be his brother. As far as Nursultan was concerned, both Tatarstan and FIDE were his own private fiefdoms. He liked to answer to one person only: himself.

      Now he sat in his suite – the presidential suite, naturally – at the Waldorf-Astoria, graying hair slicked back above his brown, watchful, flat Asiatic face. ‘Kwasi, we not wait any longer. Your mother not here, that too bad.’ He put out his hand. ‘You have demands, no? You give them to me.’

      Kwasi handed a sheaf of papers to Nursultan and another one to Tartu. ‘They’re both the same,’ he said.

      Nursultan flicked to the last page. ‘Sixteen pages.’ He looked up, eyes glittering with the prospect of challenge. ‘One hundred and eighty demands!’

      ‘We’ve divided them into sections. Prize money, playing environment, and so on.’

      ‘This is a laundry list,’ Tartu said.

      ‘And they’re not demands,’ Kwasi added. ‘They’re conditions. I’m entitled to have match conditions which suit me.’

      ‘And me?’ Tartu added. ‘Am I entitled to conditions which suit me?’

      Kwasi shrugged.

      ‘If we not accept these, er, points,’ Nursultan said carefully, ‘then what?’

      ‘Then I don’t play.’

      ‘They are demands, then.’

      Kwasi shrugged again.

      ‘The match starts in two weeks’ time.’

      A third shrug. ‘I know.’

      Nursultan looked at Tartu and raised his eyebrows.

      They started to read Kwasi’s list. Nursultan jotted notes in margins, pursing his lips and giving little dismissive laughs from time to time. Tartu read the whole thing very fast, and then went back to the start and did it again, more slowly. Kwasi walked over to the window and looked down at Park Avenue, as though he could will his mother into arriving simply by the power of his gaze.

      ‘Well,’ Nursultan said at last, ‘Rainer and me, we should talk about this, no?’

      ‘OK,’ Kwasi said.

      He didn’t move. Nursultan laughed. ‘We want to, how you say? Talk about you behind your back.’

      ‘Oh. OK. Sure.’

      ‘You go into room next door,’ Nursultan said. ‘I call you when we finish.’

      Kwasi left. Nursultan batted the back of his hand against Kwasi’s list. ‘This: outrageous. You know how much money on this all? He want to hold us ransom.’

      ‘He’s not trying to hold you to ransom.’

      Nursultan snorted: hard-headed businessman telling airy-fairy chess player the ways of the world. ‘Two weeks before biggest chess match since Reykjavik? What else he do? Rainer, they not coming to see you. Sorry, but true. They come to see him.’

      ‘You don’t get him, do you?’

      ‘Get him?’

      ‘Understand him.’

      ‘Sure I do.’

      ‘No, you don’t. Why does he make all these demands?’

      ‘To get more money. To, how you say, unsettle you.’

      ‘No. He makes them because they’re what he wants. He has no agenda beyond that. He’s a child. He doesn’t want to play in Linares, so he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to play in Dortmund, so he doesn’t. He sees the world like a child. Black and white.’

      ‘He not behave this way last time.’

      ‘He wasn’t world champion last time. He wanted that prize so much, he didn’t care about anything else. But now he wants everything to be the way he wants it.’

      Nursultan flicked through the pages. ‘Some of these, reasonable. Some, no. I see ten, twelve, simply no good. Cannot accept.’

      ‘Then we won’t play.’

      ‘You will play.’

      ‘I’ll play. But he won’t.’

      ‘Then I negotiate with him.’

      Tartu’s smile meant the same thing as the snort Nursultan had given a minute or so before: I know the truth of this situation better than you. ‘He won’t negotiate.’

      ‘Everyone negotiates.’

      ‘Not him. These aren’t one hundred and eighty demands: they’re one demand. Take it or leave it.’

      ‘We’ll see.’ Nursultan called out. ‘Kwasi!’

      Two doors opened at once: the one that led into the room where Kwasi was waiting, and the main door of the suite, which was guarded round the clock by Nursultan’s security men. Two of them stood in the doorway. As Kwasi came back in, one of the security men walked over to Nursultan and spoke quickly in Tatar. Nursultan nodded. The man by the door stepped aside, and Patrese walked in. Nursultan remained seated. People like him didn’t get up for government agents.

      ‘I’m looking for Kwasi King,’ Patrese said.

      ‘That’s me,’ Kwasi said.

      ‘Franco Patrese, Federal Bureau of Investigation.’

      ‘Have I done something wrong?’

      Patrese looked around the suite. ‘Could I talk to you in private, sir?’

       7

      Patrese led Kwasi back into the room from where he, Kwasi, had just come, and shut the door behind them. Deep red sofas, antique escritoires, carpets thicker than some of the surfaces he’d played football on, and a wicker chair that JFK had used for his bad back: Patrese figured that, on a Bureau salary, he too could afford to stay in this place. For about five minutes.

      He’d volunteered to tell Kwasi. In terms of gathering evidence and following leads, the first twenty-four hours after a homicide was critical, and so it made sense for Kieseritsky to stay in New Haven and supervise the investigation there: it was her turf, and she knew it backwards. The easiest thing to do would have been to phone the nearest precinct to Kwasi’s apartment and get them to send a couple of uniforms over, and perhaps that’s what they would have done had Jane Doe turned out to be an ordinary Jane, but this: this was something else.

      The news was going to get out sooner rather than later, and the moment it did the press would be all over them like the cheapest suit on the rack. In that situation, you didn’t need some guy barely out of police academy, so Patrese had hauled ass from New Haven down to New York, a couple of hours’ drive to add to what he’d already done. En route, he’d checked in with his boss at the Bureau’s New Orleans field office, Don Donner – yes, that really was his name and yes, he had eventually forgiven his parents. Donner was one of the least territorial Bureau guys around, which made him a rare and precious beast. Sure, he’d said, do whatever you have to, help them for as long as they need you. We’re all the Bureau: we’re all the good guys.

      And Patrese’s hangover had disappeared somewhere around Stamford.

      Death notification is the redheaded stepchild of law enforcement work, the dirty job that no one really wants to do; but one of Patrese’s partners, an old-time Pittsburgh detective named Mark Beradino, had always believed it to be one of the most important tasks a police officer could have. It wasn’t merely that you owed the living your best efforts to find whoever had killed their loved one; it was also that the skilled detective