Grandmaster (41 page)

"Thank you," Zharkov said simply.

Five minutes later, after hanging up his clothes in the plain room's unpainted closet, he left with Durganiv. As they walked through a side door of the hotel toward the parking lot, Justin Gilead and Andrew Starcher came through the main entrance doors to the José Marti.

 

I
t was late afternoon, and the muted sun shone
dully through the dirt-streaked windows of the small apartment in the Old Havana section. A sharp triangle of light slashed across the naked belly of Katarina Velanova as she lay in bed next to Zharkov, smoking, staring at the ceiling.

"I'm sorry you haven't liked it here," Zharkov said. "But I'm glad you're well."

"Yuri sees to all my needs," Katarina said. "And he has gotten me all the necessary papers, but..." She hesitated and blew a long plume of smoke toward the ceiling. "I haven't anyone to talk to. I don't speak Spanish. Half the Russians here are KGB, and the other half want to be. A chance word, an unfortunate remark from me, and someone might know that Galina Panova is really Katarina Velanova. I am afraid I may meet someone who might have seen me before. So I stay in my room and watch television. They have no Russian programs here, so I am reduced to watching cartoons. At least they have foreign bookstores in Havana."

"It won't be for too much longer," Zharkov said. "When I go back, I'm going to get rid of Ostrakov. With him gone, there's no reason you won't be able to come back."

"No?" She raised an eyebrow. "What about the
Vozhd?"

"When this mission is done, I will own him," Zharkov said. "He will last in power only so long as I wish him to. And when he goes, I will succeed him."

"When this mission is done," she echoed. There was a faint tremble in her voice. Zharkov knew she was worried about the danger of this assignment. He took the cigarette from her hand and took a long puff before handing it back. Then he placed his hand on her bare breast.

During the months she had been away, he had missed her deeply. He had even wondered, at times, if he had fallen in love with her. Was love possible for one such as he was? He believed that she loved him, but was he able to return love?

Lying here by her side, he realized that it might even be more than love. It was life. Katarina Velanova was his confidante, the only person to whom he could speak without concealing his meanings. The only one who knew his plans and his dreams and his secret lusts. She was a lover, yes. But more important, she was his friend. His only friend.

"Don't worry," he said. "This will go smoothly." And with no change in his soft, bedroom-conversation tone, he said, "Justin Gilead arrives today."

Katarina sat up in the bed. The ashtray slid from her belly and overturned, fouling the sheet with ashes and cigarette butts.

"Where is he?" she asked.

"He'll be at the José Marti, where I'm staying."

She stared at the ceiling, biting her lip, deliberating. Then she spoke. "Let me kill Justin Gilead for you."

Zharkov chuckled, surprised. "Why? You don't even know him."

"I know what he means to you, to us. And I can do it."

"He is not easily killed," Zharkov said.

"Perhaps. Perhaps not by you or by other men. Perhaps he is too wary, too much on his guard. But I am a woman. I could move close to him in a receiving line somewhere and quietly put a knife into his heart. I'd be gone before anyone found out. Give me the knife, Alyosha. I want to do it."

"Patience, little tigress," the Russian said.

"I will do it," Katarina said. "I will do it now." Her lips were a tight line across the milky smoothness of her face.

"I'm afraid not," Zharkov said. "He has to live until Friday night, anyway. And then I have other plans."

"Oh?" Her anxious face flicked into a smile. "What plans?"

"First, poor Justin Gilead, the deranged American spy, will be the one who kills that great people's leader, Fidel Castro. He will try to escape but, alas, a Russian bullet will stop him." He smiled. "A simple plan."

Katarina was silent. She brushed the ashes and cigarette butts from the bed into the cupped palm of one hand, put them all back in the ashtray, lit another cigarette, and lay back down.

"An audacious plan," she said softly. "But if it fails, I am going to kill the Grandmaster for you. I hate Justin Gilead."

 

J
ustin Gilead turned to look at Starcher
, who was lying on the bed in a pair of oversized boxer shorts. His long socks were held up by black garters. His undershirt was of thin ribbed cotton.

The room seemed to vibrate with the heavy periodic thud of Latin music. The room had lacked both television and radio, but Starcher had carried a radio in his luggage. The two men played it to foil the listening devices they knew would be concealed in the room.

Starcher rolled a cigar between his fingers, eyeing it as lovingly as if he were a satyr and it a lifetime supply of the world's most beautiful women.

Justin sat on the edge of the bed and said softly, "Sure you won't go, Starcher?"

"No. I don't want to let our friend know I'm here yet. He might recognize me. And don't call me that anymore. Try Andrew." Harry Andrew was the name on the old forged CIA passport Starcher had used to enter Cuba.

"All right, Andrew." Gilead was smiling.

"You're looking forward to this, aren't you?" Starcher asked.

"Yes."

"Remember our deal. You won't—"

"You don't have to remind me. And tonight, if I get the chance, I'll talk to Kutsenko."

Starcher lighted the cigar. He nodded through the heavy smoke, which seemed to settle around him instead of rising to the ceiling.

After Justin left, Starcher turned off the radio and lay back on the bed. Some of what he had told Justin was true. He did not want to make an appearance just yet, for fear of being recognized. But he also wanted to stay in the room, just in case Zharkov or his Nichevo henchmen had any idea of planting a bomb in Justin's suitcase or poisoning his aftershave lotion. He didn't know the cause of the hatred that Gilead felt for Zharkov, but if it was reciprocal, then Zharkov would unhesitatingly take the first chance to remove Gilead. The Russians had attempted to kill the Grandmaster in the past; Starcher did not want them to succeed now.

He smoked and thought and waited.

 

T
he pre-tournament cocktail party
was held where the games would be played, in the towering main ballroom of the José Marti Hotel. A wide balcony ringed the room along its second-floor level. When Justin arrived, the room held a hundred persons but still looked as deserted as a Kansas wheat field in winter.

There were only a handful of women, most of them wives of competitors. The rest were chess players, their seconds, local Cuban officials, and members of the world press.

Justin stopped inside the doorway and scanned the room, but did not see the face he was looking for. When he spied Richard Carey, captain of the United States team, he walked over to join his group.

"Justin, good to see you again," Carey said gruffly. "You in shape to tangle with these Russian bears?"

Justin smiled and nodded as Carey pumped his hand vigorously.

The popular impression was that chess players were slim, effete intellectuals who lived at the chessboard because they were afraid of the real world. But Carey was a bull mastiff of a man with the build and physical presence of a teamster boss. He had big, strong hands, hardened by years of exposure to the weather on the Vermont farm where he lived. His robust frame seemed to belie the quiet, subtle nature of his chess game.

He was the highest ranked of all active American chess players, his rating just a few points below that of Kutsenko. Many felt that he would be the next challenger for the world championship. Justin did not share that view. In his mind, Carey would not show well in match play—one player meeting another over a long series of games—because of a basic flaw in his game.

Carey spent too much time poring over positions, looking into them for subtleties that they just did not contain. Occasionally, a position was clear and simple, and the way to exploit it was merely to play routine, basic chess grounded firmly in sound general principles. But Carey overestimated his opponents and played as if every position were a mine field and each move a life-and-death decision.

All too often, this forced him into time trouble. Without enough time left on his clock, he sometimes had to make his final crucial moves without fully examining positions that did require careful analysis.

In chess, the clock was merciless, the player's greatest enemy. The American Bobby Fischer, the onetime world champion and great chess genius, was once asked how he managed never to get into time trouble in a game. He responded, "When you're in time trouble, then it just isn't chess anymore."

Justin did not think Carey would be able to beat Kutsenko and the clock, too.

The big American introduced Justin to the other members of the American team and some of their seconds. Gilead had seen the two other members at tournaments before, but had never spoken to them.

"We were just saying how glad we were that Washington didn't put the kibosh on this trip and stop us from coming," Carey told Gilead. "So where have you been, anyway? You kind of vanished there for a while."

"I was burned out," Gilead said. "I just needed some time off and some rest.”

"You're feeling all right now?"

Gilead nodded, his eyes still searching the room. "I'm sorry about Needham getting ill, but it's good to be here. I'm looking forward to playing again."

"You up to date on your theory?" Carey asked.

"A little rusty, maybe."

"There've been a lot of changes," he said, and he began to describe two new variations in the Caro-Kann defense, which had been an opening Justin frequently used. Carey's interpretation immediately led to a dissent from another member of the U.S. team, a tall, gangly midwestern youngster named John Shinnick. His viewpoint was in turn challenged by the team's third member, a brooding and intense Syrian-American named Yassir Gousen. Justin took the opportunity to disengage himself and walk away.

He saw Ivan Kutsenko across the room, surrounded by a large group of people, and wandered casually in that direction. Justin recognized Victor Keverin, one of the members of the Russian team. At sixty, Keverin was still a brilliant and dangerous player, although he now lacked the physical stamina to be a serious contender for the world championship. Alongside Kutsenko was a young man with brilliant, sad eyes. Justin guessed that he was the youngest member of the Soviet team, Vyacheslav Ribitnov. Justin had studied the analyses of some of his games in
Shakmatni,
the Russian chess journal. He was a sparkling young player of the kind Russia seemed to produce year after year. They would have meteoric careers for a few years, and then, just as rapidly as their light had flared, it would sputter and die. The contradictions inherent in playing a game that required total intellectual freedom in a regime that crushed intellectual freedom simply became too much for most of them. It was hard to be free at a chessboard and then, moments after leaving the board, become just another faceless number who was told where to go and what to do and where to live and what to think and say.

Most of them wound up either defecting or allowing their chess skills to deteriorate. The kind of Russian who usually became world champion did not have the eyes that Ribitnov had. Russian chess champions were generally stolid, middle-of-the-road types with a large sense of humor who had made all the emotional adjustments that were necessary and counted themselves lucky to have some measure of freedom, even if only at the chessboard.

The burnouts were those who thought they should be free all the time. Ribitnov was clearly one of those. But so, too, from his appearance, was Ivan Kutsenko. His face had the haunted look of a captured animal, and his eyes burned with the glazed, darting confusion of a mouse dropped into the cage of a boa constrictor. No wonder he was trying to defect. Given time, Russia would crush his spirit and destroy his genius.

Justin guessed that the woman at his side, a tiny but strong-looking brunette with severe upswept hair, was his wife, the physician, Lena Kutsenko. She nodded appreciatively as Kutsenko spoke to several men holding pads and pencils. Behind the Russian champion was a wall of men who were large, sullen, and not particularly bright looking.

Many chess players did not look like chess players. These men did not look like chess players because they weren't. They were, Justin knew, KGB—the inevitable traveling companions of any Russian artists or athletes who were allowed out of their own country to compete. They were there both as bodyguards and as jailers. Justin wondered how a Russian ever managed to win a game, knowing that these grim-faced bears with guns in their armpits were standing around watching every gesture, trying to overhear every word.

As Justin walked forward, Kutsenko saw him and stepped away from the crowd to greet him. They had never met before, although Justin had seen the young man's photographs. His career was just beginning to soar when Justin went on his ill-fated trip to Poland, and they had never played each other. But Justin had studied the Russian champion's games carefully in the last few weeks. Kutsenko was a player without a weakness; his strategies were subtle and far-reaching; his tactics were precise and powerful, and his concentration was impressive. Justin looked forward to playing him. He had not realized until he saw Kutsenko's face how much he had missed the game of chess, that solitary companion that had been with him as a child and as a man.

"You are Justin Gilead," Kutsenko said, extending his hand.

"Yes. It is a pleasure to meet you."

"The chess world has missed you very much," Kutsenko said. "I have studied your games."

"And I yours," Justin said. As he spoke, Kutsenko, with surprising poise for a man who appeared so reclusively shy, took his elbow and moved back with him toward the group of Russians.