At the opening of this amazing fiction, a cadaver is discovered, the body of a wealthy businessman from Vienna, apparently a suicide without plausible motivation. Next to the body is a chessboard made of rags with buttons for pieces whose positions on the board may hold the only clue. As the plot of this passionately colored, coolly controlled thriller unfolds, we meet two chess players--one a clever, persecuted Jew, the other a ruthless, persecuting German--who have faced each other many times before and played for stakes that are nothing less than life itself.