White Collar - as an unofficial novel - part 5

Chess

Neal returned home after a day's work, picked up his mail where June used to leave it for him and walked upstairs to his apartment. He browsed through the envelopes. He still seemed to get fan mails. He could tell because his official address was still at Sing Sing and when they forwarded a letter to June's it was always fans. Everybody who had a normal reason to send him anything knew where he lived.

"Realists don't fear the results of their study," a voice said behind him. Moz.

"Then why don't you find me more favorable results, Dostoyevsky?" Neal returned and kept browsing through his mail.

"I hit everybody who would or could know about the damn music box. Nothing's coming up."

"Well, keep looking." The box still existed so someone must know about it. Unless someone bricked it into a wall and then died. He stared at the back of a postcard. He turned.

"Moz."

He showed it to his friend who sat on the sofa.

"Ah. Your anonymous chess opponent again. Why aren't you more curious about who's sending them?"

Neal shrugged.

"I like the mystery."

"Your girlfriend's missing. You can't find the one thing that might free her. One could say there's enough mystery in your life. Where's the postmark from on this one?"

Neal looked at it. It was addressed to him at this place. But there was no postmark on the stamp.

"There isn't one."

"There isn't one?" Neal handed it to his friend so he could see for himself. "As in someone hand-delivered this card to your door?"

Neal took the pile of cards he had received so far, about once a week for the last six or seven weeks.

"This is odd," he noted, looking at them. "The other cards are blank. The new one has a picture of the Museum of Natural History on it." Moz flipped it over and confirmed. "A good mystery makes life interesting."

Neal grabbed the little chessboard from the bookshelf.

"You know the Chinese curse?" Mozzie asked as Neal sat down on the opposite side of the sofa table. "May you live in interesting times."

"You know that's the first of two curses?"

"What's the other one?"

"May you find what you're looking for," Neal answered. Moz smiled. "What's the move?"

"Uh, knight to D-7," he read from the card.

Neal made the move on the chessboard.

"Knight to D-7..." he mumbled. He closed his eyes. There was one person from his past he wanted to meet but others seem to turn up instead. And this one he had hoped he would never cross paths with again. He rose his head and met Mozzie's eyes.

"You've done this move before, haven't you?" Observant as always.

"Moz, I know who I'm playing." His friend blinked and tried to come to conclusions too. "Keller. This was our last game."

"Keller," Mozzie repeated, frowning. They had not met, but Neal had told him enough for him to know it meant trouble. "Looks like he's in New York. Who won?"

"I don't know. We never finished playing."

If Keller had turned up in his life only to finish the game he was lucky.

Neal got to the office early the next morning to do some research before Peter arrived. What he did was totally legal and he was expected to keep an eye on minor crimes too, to find patterns for instance. But what he did now was to find crimes that matched a profile Peter might not even know about.