“Inspector!” Tom rapped upon his desk, thinking about those pills again.
“Ah,” the Inspector woke, stretching like he’d been napping for an hour. “So where were we?”
“You said there is something special about the twelve men’s names before they changed it. What is it?”
“All those foreign names on the list are a translation to one name in English.” The Inspector said.
“One name?” Tom grimaced. “Are you saying the twelve people The Pillar killed shared one certain name — in different languages — then changed it to a fake one in the same year?”
The Inspector nodded proudly.
“That’s odd,” Tom said. “Definitely interesting. But I don’t see how this exposes The Pillar’s reason for killing them.”
“Not when you know of the name they all shared in the past.”
“Is that relevant?”
“Most definitely.”
“What is that name?” Tom asked curiously, not expecting the Inspector’s answer.
It was such a strange answer, so much he had the Inspector repeat it to make sure he heard it right the first time.
“Carter Pillar,” the Inspector said. “The twelve men shared the name of Carter Pillar.”
Chapter 49
Close to Kalmykia region, Russia
“What are you doing?” I ask The Pillar, as our balloon floats into more visible grounds.
He looks up from his phone, which he has been using to play chess for some time. “I’m playing chess against the computer.”
“I see that,” I say. “You’ve been clicking buttons like a child for half an hour now.”
“I have the strongest thumbs.” He grins, still staring at the screen of his phone.
“The weakest mind, too.”
“Love you when you’re nasty like that.” he clicks a side button and plays a song, which has the lyrics saying ‘I’m feeling kinda mean… blah, blah, blah.’ “It’s a song by Double Vision.”
“So?”
“I need to feel mean and practice chess in case we’re playing against the Chessmaster with Carroll’s pieces.”
“And a couple of computer games will make you good at it?”
“I am playing against the commercialized version of IBM’s Deep Blue.” He still grins like a child, making a move against the machine.
I’m beginning to get curious, peeking to see how far he went. “Any luck?”
“Nah,” The Pillar says. “This is the seventh game I lost in a row.”
“In only a couple of moves, apparently.” I point at the screen.
The Pillar glances toward me. “I think we’d better give in and let the world end. Neither of us can beat the Chessmaster.”
“You’ve just said it may be another sort of chess game,” I remind him. “Besides, there must be a point in collecting Carroll’s pieces.”
“Of course, but we don’t know what it is.”
“Maybe you can only beat the Chessmaster with Carroll’s Knight. It’d make sense why Lewis scattered the pieces all around the world.”
The Pillar seems to like the idea. “Not bad thinking for a mad girl who’s a mere character in a children’s book.”
“Stop the joking. Be serious for a few minutes.”
“Can I be seriously joking?” He raises an eyebrow.
“Stop it, really.”
“Seriously mad?”
“Pillar!”
“I was thinking seriously funny. Now that’s new.”
“I’m not going to warn you again. Now tell me what’s in Kalmykia. I’m sure the chess piece didn’t say just to go there without further clues.”
“You want to know what’s in Kalmykia?”
“Yes.”
“Chess City.”
“Chess City? What is that?”
“A large complex devoted to chess competitions, located east of Elista, Kalmykia, in Russia.” The Pillar tucks his phone into his battered pocket. “A small town, actually, with a domed Chess Hall.”
“A center for playing chess, you mean?”
“Yes, but that’s not Chess City’s main attraction. The small city is an Olympic-style village of Californian-Mediterranean Revival Style architecture. It has a conference center, public swimming pool and a museum of Kalmyk Buddhist art.”
“And?” I tilt my head. Clearly none of what he’d mentioned is what we’re after.
“Chess City also has a complex feature of sculptures and artwork devoted to chess. One of them is a statue of a man called Ostap Bender.”
“Who’s that?”
“A fictional character of popular books written by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov, Russian authors, equally infatuated with Alice in Wonderland.”
“What were their books about?”
“The character in their books proposed a creation of a world chess capital.”
“That’s interesting.” I’m curious to see where the Chessmaster fits in.
“Earlier, Chess City had been used to host holy men like the Dalai Lama and such, but then, when completed in 1998, a millionaire from Kalmykia, and ruler of the republic since 1993, by the name of Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, made this city into something much madder.”
“I’m listening.”
“Kirsan Ilyumzhinov was also president of FIDE, the international governing body of chess, at the time,” The Pillar explains. “A fanatical chess enthusiast, and totally against the IBM scam with his friend Garry Kasparov, had the city expanded and built for the 33rd Chess Olympiad.”
I am not saying a word. The Pillar’s story seems complex, so I keep listening eagerly, waiting for the punchline, because with The Pillar, there is always a punchline.
“Since then, Chess City has hosted three major FIDE tournaments. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov had future plans for hosting watersport and skiing events, but that never happened.”
“Why?”
“You want the truth or the newspaper’s headlines at the time?”
“Start the newspapers at the time.”
“They claimed that due to Kalmykia being a poor republic of approximately 300,000 people located in the barren steppe regions in the southeastern corner of Europe, with scant natural resources, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov was corrupt and economically stealing the poor people’s money,” The Pillar says. “As a result, the construction of the opulent Chess City was abandoned.”
“Abandoned?”
“It became a dead city,” The Pillar says. “As beautiful as it was, the investigations never ended, and no one lived there anymore.”
At this moment, the city starts to show itself beyond the fading white of snow in the distance. Slowly, I am absorbing the ridiculously beautiful and larger than life aspect of it. From this far, I could already see an endless chessboard built on the ground, much, much larger than the one in Marostica.
Beyond it, the rest of the city’s buildings are colorful and enchantingly designed, reminding me of the ridiculousness of everything Lewis Carroll imagined in Wonderland.
“I can’t believe how beautiful it is,” I say. “How come such a place is abandoned?”
“Which brings us to what really happened with Kirsan Ilyumzhinov,” The Pillar says.
“I’m curiouser and curiouser.” I say.
“In reality, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov was a dear friend of…”
“Of whom?”
“The March Hare.”
It takes me a second to connect the March to these events, but once I remind myself of the light bulb in the Hare’s head, my brain lights up with the answer. “Are you telling me, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov was searching for Wonderland?”
“Most definitely,” The Pillar nods. “The March Hare, being chased by Black Chess, including them having implanted a light bulb in his head, couldn’t build more gardens to bring him back to Wonderland. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, being a Lewis Carroll fan — so many Russians are, trust me, because of the time Lewis spent there — he persuaded the March Hare to build Chess City, which was supposed to be the next best thing to the Garden of Cosmic Speculation.”