Free The Empire of Ice Cream by Jeffrey Ford Page B

years, to get it together to deal with the damn gold again. Just by luck, I guess, I ran into a guy who knew this guy, a Dominican, who fenced stuff from break-ins out in the Hamptons. I met him one winter afternoon over in the parking lot at Jones Beach. Thinking it might be a setup, I only took three pieces with me.
    â€œThe wind was blowing like a motherfucker that day. It was like a sandstorm even in the parking lot. The guy was there when I pulled up, sitting in a shiny black Cadillac. We got out of the cars. He was short, dark-skinned, wore sunglasses and a raincoat. We shook hands, and he asked to see what I had. I took two of the pieces out and held them up for him to see. He took one look at them and said, ‘Isiaso,’ and then made a face like I was holding a couple of turds. The guy didn’t say anything else, he just turned around, got in his car, and drove away.
    â€œAnd that’s the way it went trying to fence them. I’d give it a shot, be turned down, and then get swamped in a lot of bad circumstance. Then I just wanted to unload them and take whatever I could get. Even this guy, Bowes, who bought gold teeth down on Canal Street in the city wouldn’t touch them. He called them La Ventaja del Demonio , and threatened to call the cops if I didn’t leave his shop. It wasn’t until after my mother passed away that I decided to try to find out about them.
    â€œImagine me, Bobby Lennin, failer of classes and king of detention, in the library. I don’t think I’d ever been in the fucking place in my life. But I started there, and you know what? I discovered I wasn’t as stupid as I looked. There was some real pleasure in researching them. It was the only thing that offset the depression of drinking. In the meantime, old man Ryan took pity on me and gave me a job bartending here at The Tropics. I barely managed to keep myself from getting too screwed up until he went home in the evening, so as to keep the job.
    â€œYeah, I scoured the library, got interlibrary loans, all that good stuff, and I started to crack the story on the chess set. Then, when the Internet came in, I got with that too, and over a period of long years, I put it together. The set was known as The Demon’s Advantage . Scholars talked about it like it was more a legend than anything that actually existed. It was supposedly crafted by this goldsmith in Italy, Dario Foresso, in 1533, commissioned by a strange cat who went by the name of Isiaso. The dude had no last name as far as I could tell.
    â€œAnyway, this Isiaso was from Hispaniola, now the Dominican Republic. In 1503, I think it was Pope Julius II declared Santo Domingo an official city of Christendom. It was the jumping-off place for European explorers who were headed to South and North America. Isiaso was born the year the pope gave the two-fingered salute to the city. Our boy’s father was Spanish, an attaché to the crown, there to oversee the money to be spent on expeditions. You know, basically an accountant. But his mother was a native, and—here’s where it gets creepy—said to be from a long line of sorcerers. She was an adept of the island magic. Isiaso, who was supposed to be like a genius kid, learned the ways of both parents.
    â€œWhen he was in his twenties, his old man ships him off to Rome to finish his education. He goes to the university and studies with the great philosophers and theologists of the time. It was during these years that he comes to see the battle between Good and Evil in terms of chess—the dark versus the light, etc., with the advantage going back and forth. Strategy was part of it, and mathematics along with faith, but, to tell you the truth, I never really completely understood what he was getting at.
    â€œSomehow Isiaso gains wealth and power very quickly. Rises to the top of the heap. No one can figure out how he came by his wealth and those who cross him meet with weird and ugly