The Game of Love and Death(6)

“I’ll roll the month, then.” She rattled the dice in her hands and tossed them on the boards of the bridge. “Three and four. The Game lasts until July. Which day is up to you.”

He could add the sum of the dots or multiply them, so long as their product did not exceed the length of the month. He hated having the choice. He would rather blame fate.

He squeezed the dice, kissed his hand, and let them fly. Their clatter echoed over the water.

Death read them. “How droll. A tie.”

Even the numbers were the same, a four and a three. Love nearly chose the twelfth of July as the day the Game would end. That would give him more time, the thing he always wished for. Sometimes, even minutes would have made the difference.

But there was something about the symmetry of the seventh that called to him. So he trusted it. The Game would end at midnight on the seventh of July.

“When will I see you again?” He liked to know what she was doing so he could adjust his interventions to match.

“Two days,” she said.

Love nodded. A pair of days felt right.

Death disappeared, as she did when she’d tired of his presence, and Love wandered, dazed, in the other direction until he found himself standing in front of a nearly empty café. He ate alone in the ancient square, a simple plate of gnocchi with a tart red wine, watching the stars find their way out of the darkening night sky.

The Game had begun. He ached for the players.





ETHAN’S father sat at the desk in the study of his Seattle mansion, sucking an unlit pipe. A New York City newspaper lay open before him. He scowled at it, folded it, and shoved it aside. Outside, a sparrow landed on the windowsill and peered in.

“Ethan!”

No reply.

“Ethan!”

Mrs. Thorne stepped into the room and issued an eloquent sigh. “Ethan’s teaching Annabel how to play croquet,” she said. “Henry’s in the carriage house.”

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “That boy and that infernal thing. It’s at best a waste of time. At worst, it will ruin —”

“Oh, Bernard,” she said, putting her hands flat on his desk and planting a kiss on his shining forehead. “There’s no harm in it. Not considering the world’s real menaces.”

“It’s a piece of —”

“Bernard.”

Mrs. Thorne walked to the bookcase beside the desk. She made a small adjustment to an arrangement of framed photographs, angling one of a smirking, black-haired, black-eyed girl so that it faced the room directly.

“Get Ethan for me,” Bernard said, lighting his pipe. “Henry —”

“Henry’s just as interested in the newspaper,” she said.

“Henry’s interested in music.” He said the word as if it were a curse. “And he’s not —”

“He’s just as much your son as Ethan is. Honestly, after all these years. His father was your closest friend. He was the best man at our wedding.”

“Fetch Ethan,” he said.

“Please?” She tilted her head, looking amused at her husband’s foul mood.

“Get Ethan now, dammit, please,” he said. “Tell him I have an assignment for him.”



Sunlight burst through the carriage house windows, illuminating the edges of Henry’s sheet music. It made him squint, but he kept playing. He pulled his bow along the lowest of his bass strings, digging blood-stirring notes from their depths. He was working on Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations for the school orchestra, and as he moved his way through the song, he filled in the rest of the parts from memory: the singing violins and violas, the keening cellos, the trumpets, and the thumping percussion.

He’d been obsessed with the piece since Mr. Sokoloff had handed out the music a few weeks earlier. It wasn’t the best thing he’d ever played. Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Mozart … there was a long list of more thrilling composers. But it was the first thing he’d played that was more than music — it was a code of sorts. A riddle. A mystery to solve.

He felt sure a secret lay beneath the melodies that linked one movement to the next. There was the obvious place to start: Each movement was dedicated to people identified on the sheet music only by their initials. But that hardly deserved the title of “Enigma.” Anyone who knew the composer could solve it in an instant. There had to be something more. And so, over the last several days, Henry had worked the mystery over in his mind.

Curious, he’d gone to the newspaper archives to find an interview with Elgar, and what he read puzzled him. The man had compared the song to a drama where “the chief character is never on stage.” Henry couldn’t think of any example of such a play. Even in Hamlet, the ghost appears. Henry paused. Outside, a wind kicked up, rustling the spring-bright leaves. He caught a whiff of new grass.

He picked up his bow again, pouring himself into the music. He let it speak for him, ignoring the perspiration that rose from his forehead, gathering and traveling in a bead that carved a slow path down his cheek. He even ignored the fly circling his head like an airplane looking for a place to land. There was so much he wanted to say with the notes.

Henry played until there was a knock on the door. The rhythm of it, from a song called “On the 5:15,” was Ethan’s code. Henry was supposed to return two taps if it was okay for Ethan to enter, but Ethan never waited for that and Henry didn’t want to stop anyway. The door creaked open and the fly spiraled outside.