Best Crime Stories of the Year Volume 2 by Sara Paretsky

Author:Sara Paretsky [(ed), Sara Paretsky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781804548714
Publisher: Head of Zeus

PART TWO: THE MIDDLEGAME

In another of Murakami’s games his opponent lost it all in the middlegame. Not because Olsen played badly, but because he was under pressure after falling into the Murakami Trap in the opening. The pleasant-mannered but always silent Olsen had used up valuable time in trying to work out his response and it left him struggling against the clock as well as Murakami’s strongly positioned and numerically superior major pieces. A frequently rehearsed argument revolves around the issue of whether Olsen sacrificed his queen, or Murakami took it. Most people, myself included, think it obvious that Olsen would not voluntarily have sacrificed her, and that all he achieved when Murakami took the piece was a postponement of the inevitable. In an ordinary game Olsen would have resigned and handed the victory to Murakami, but in lightning chess there’s always the chance your opponent will be stressed into making a catastrophic mistake. So Olsen chose to suffer on and allow himself to be cut up, piece by piece; all the while his one remaining black knight hopped about like a headless chicken. Playing that game over again, move by painful move, was like enduring a Greek tragedy. You know how it’s going to end; the object is only to find the most beautiful way of getting there, what the drivers call the scenic route.

*

I met Judith Szabó while she was still Gio Greco’s fixer and girlfriend. It was at a ball at the Sforzesco Palace that Luca Giualli, head of the Lombardy cartel, had purchased from the commune and turned into his own private fortress. In addition to hiring a small army to take care of the family’s security he had employed me to look for holes in the security routines and pick up signs of any imminent planned attacks.

I was standing by the piano in the atrium looking out across the crowds of the rich and the powerful in their tuxedos and ballgowns. I noticed her, even though she tried to carry herself just like any other guest. Not only because she was so strikingly beautiful in her bright red gown and long, raven-dark hair, but because she had been unable to resist approaching me like a professional.

“You’re not doing your job especially well,” was the first thing she said to me.

She was a couple centimeters taller than my 175.

“You must be Judith Szabó,” I said.

“See, that’s better. How did you work that out?”

“I hear things. And you walk around like a queen and look around like a driver. Your name isn’t on the guest list, so how did you get in?”

“I am on the guest list. As Anna Fogel, from the Tokyo cartel. There’s an invitation in the same name. It was just too easy to hack the system, and the check on my fake ID was embarrassingly feeble.” She flashed a bank card at me.

I nodded. “And why wouldn’t I just sound the alarm now and have you cuffed?”

She smiled briefly before nodding in the

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