The Queen's Gambit (35 page)

She shook her head quickly. “
Nyet
” and poured herself a glass of water from the cut-glass pitcher in the center of the table.

Her afternoon was free, and she could take a tour of Sverdlov Square and the Bely Gorod and the museum at St. Basil’s, but even though it was a beautiful summer day, she didn’t feel like it. Maybe in a day or two. She was tired, and she needed a nap. She had won her first game with a Russian grandmaster, and that was more important to her than anything she might see outside in the huge city that surrounded her. She would be here eight days. She could see Moscow another time. It was two in the afternoon when she finished lunch. She would take the elevator up to her room and try for a nap.

She found she was too high from beating Laev to sleep. She lay on the huge soft bed staring at the ceiling for nearly an hour and played the game with him over and over, sometimes looking for weakness in the way she had played it, sometimes luxuriating over one or another of her moves. When she came to the place where she had offered him her bishop she would say
zap!
aloud, or
pow!
It was wonderful. She had made no mistakes—or could find none. There were no weaknesses. He’d had that nervous way of drumming his fingers on the table and scowling, but when he resigned he looked only distant and tired.

Finally, rested a bit, she got out of bed, put on jeans and her white T-shirt, and opened the heavy draperies at the window. Eight floors below was some kind of convergence of boulevards with a few cars dotting their emptiness, and beyond the boulevards was a park dense with trees. She decided to take a walk.

But when she was putting on her socks and shoes, she began to think about Duhamel, whom she would be playing White against tomorrow. She knew only two of his games, and they went back a few years. There were more recent ones in the magazines she had brought; she should go over them now. Then there was his game with Luchenko that was still in progress when she left. It would be printed up along with the other three and handed out tonight when the players met for an official dinner here in the hotel. She had better do a few sit-ups and knee bends now and take a walk some other time.

The dinner was a bore, but more than that, it was infuriating. Beth was seated at one end of the long table with Duhamel, Flento and Hellström; the Russian players were at the other end with their wives. Borgov sat at the head of the table with the woman Beth had seen him with at the Mexico City Zoo. The Russians laughed throughout the meal, drinking enormous quantities of tea and gesturing broadly, while their wives looked at them in adoring silence. Even Laev, who had been so withdrawn at the tournament that morning, was ebullient. All of them seemed to be pointedly ignoring Beth’s end of the table. She tried for a while to converse with Flento, but his English was poor and his fixed smile made her uncomfortable. After a few minutes of trying, she concentrated on her meal and did what she could to tune out the noise from the other end of the table.

After dinner the tournament director handed out printed sheets with the day’s games. In the elevator she started going through them, beginning with Borgov’s. The other two were draws, but Borgov had won his. Decisively.

***

The driver brought her to the hall by a different route the next morning, and this time she could see the huge crowd in the street outside waiting to get in, some of them with dark umbrellas against the morning drizzle. He took her to the same side entrance she had used the day before. There were about twenty people standing there. When she got out and hurried past them into the building they applauded her. Someone shouted, “Lisabeta Harmon!” just before the doorman closed the door behind her.

On the ninth move Duhamel made an error in judgment, and Beth pounced on it, pinning his knight in front of a rook. It would cramp him for a moment while she got out her other bishop. She knew from studying his games that he was cautious and strong at defense; she had decided the night before to wait until she got a chance and then overwhelm him. By the fourteenth move she had both bishops aimed at his king, and on the eighteenth she had their diagonals opened. He hid from it, using his knights cleverly to hold her off, but she brought out her queen, and it became too much for him. His twentieth move was a hopeless try at warding her off. On the twenty-second he resigned. The game had taken barely an hour.

They had played at the far end of the stage; Borgov, playing Flento, was at the near end. As she walked past him to the subdued applause the audience gave while games were in progress, he glanced up at her briefly. It was the first time since Mexico City that he had actually looked directly at her, and the look frightened her.

On an impulse she waited for a moment just out of sight of the playing area and then came back to the edge of the curtain and looked across. Borgov’s seat was empty. Over at the other end he was standing, looking at the display board with the game Beth had just finished. He had one broad hand cupped over his jaw and the other in his coat pocket. He frowned as he studied the position. Beth turned quickly and left.

After lunch, she walked across the boulevard and went down a narrow street to the park. The boulevard turned out to be Sokolniki Street, and there was a good deal of traffic on it when she crossed in a large crowd of pedestrians. Some of the people looked at her and a few smiled, but no one spoke. The rain had ended and it was a pleasant day with the sun high in the sky and the enormous buildings that lined the street looking a little less prisonlike in the sunshine.

The park was partly forested and had along its lanes a great many cast-iron benches with old people sitting on them. She walked along, ignoring the stares as best she could, going through some places that were dark with trees, and abruptly found herself in a large square with flowers growing in little triangles dotted here and there. Under a kind of roofed pavilion in the center, people were seated in rows. They were playing chess. There must have been forty boards going. She had seen old men playing in Central Park and Washington Square in New York, but only a few at any one time. Here it was a large crowd of men filling the barn-sized pavilion and spilling out onto the steps of it.

She hesitated a moment at the worn marble stairs leading up to the pavilion. Two old men were playing on a battered cloth board on the steps. The older, toothless and bald, was playing King’s Gambit. The other was using the Falkbeer Counter Gambit against it. It looked old-fashioned to Beth, but it was clearly a sophisticated game. The men ignored her, and she walked up the steps and into the shade of the pavilion itself.

There were four rows of concrete tables with painted boards on their surfaces, and a pair of chess players, all men, at each. Some kibitzers stood over the boards. There was very little talk. From behind her came the occasional shouts of children, which sounded exactly the same in Russian as in any other language. She walked slowly between two rows of games, smelling the strong tobacco smoke from the players’ pipes. Some of them looked up at her as she passed, and in a few faces she sensed recognition, but no one spoke to her. They were all old—very old. Many of them must have seen the Revolution as boys. Generally their clothes were dark, even the cotton shirts they were wearing in the warm weather were gray; they looked like old men anywhere, like a multitude of incarnations of Mr. Shaibel, playing out games that no one would ever pay attention to. On several tables lay copies of
Shakmatni v USSR
.

At one table where the position looked interesting, she stopped for a moment. It was the Richter-Rauzer, from the Sicilian. She had written a small piece on it for
Chess Review
a few years before, when she was sixteen. The men were playing it right, and Black had a slight variation in his pawns that she had never seen before, but it was clearly sound. It was good chess. First-class chess, being played by two old men in cheap working clothes. The man playing White moved his king’s bishop, looked up at her and scowled. For a moment she felt powerfully self-conscious among all these old Russian men with her nylons and pale-blue skirt and gray cashmere sweater, her hair cut and shaped in the proper way for a young American girl, her feet in pumps that probably cost as much money as these men used to earn in a month.

Then the wrinkled face of the man who was staring at her broke into a broad, gap-toothed smile, and said, “Harmon? Elisabeta Harmon?” and, surprised, she said, “
Da
.” Before she could react further, he stood up and threw his arms around her and hugged her and laughed, repeating, “Harmon! Harmon!” over and over. And then there was a crowd of old men in gray clothes around her smiling and eagerly holding out their hands for her to shake, eight or ten of them talking to her at once, in Russian.

***

Her games with Hellström and Shapkin were rigorous, grim and exhausting, but she was never in any real danger. The work she had done over the past six months gave a solidity to her opening moves that she was able to maintain through the middle game and on to the point at which each of them resigned. Hellström clearly took it hard and did not speak to her afterward, but Shapkin was a very civilized, very decent man, and he resigned gracefully even though her win over him was decisive and merciless.

There would be seven games in all. The players had been given schedules during the long orientation speech on the first day; Beth kept hers in the nightstand by the bed, in the drawer with her bottle of green pills. On the last day she would be playing the whites against Borgov. Today it was Luchenko, with black.

Luchenko was the oldest player there; he had been World Champion before Beth was born, and played and defeated the great Alekhine in an exhibition when he was a boy, had drawn with Botvinnik and crushed Bronstein in Havana. He was no longer the tiger he had once been, but Beth knew him to be a dangerous player when allowed to attack. She had gone through dozens of his games from
Chess Informant
, some of them during the month with Benny in New York, and the power of his attack had been shocking, even to her. He was a formidable player and a formidable man. She would have to be very careful.

They were at the first table—the one Borgov had played at the day before. Luchenko made a short bow, standing by his chair while she took her seat. His suit today was a silky gray, and when he walked up to the table she had noticed his shoes—shiny black and soft-looking, probably imported from Italy.

Beth was wearing a dark-green cotton dress with white piping at the throat and sleeves. She had slept soundly the night before. She was ready for him.

But on the twelfth move he began to attack—very subtly at first, with pawn to queen rook three. A half-hour later he was mounting a pawn storm down the queenside, and she had to delay what she was preparing to deal with it. She studied the board for a long time before bringing a knight over to defend. She wasn’t happy about doing it, but it had to be done. She looked across the board at Luchenko. He gave a little shake of his head—a theatrical shake—and a tiny smile appeared on his lips. Then he reached out and continued the advance of his knight’s pawn as if heedless of where she now had her knight.
What was he doing?
She studied the position again and then, shocked, she saw it. If she didn’t find a way out, she would have to take the rook pawn with her knight, and four moves down from that he would be able to bring his innocent-looking bishop from the back rank out to knight five, there on her fractured queenside, and pick off her queen rook in exchange for it. It was seven moves away, and she hadn’t seen it.

She leaned her elbows on the table and rested her cheeks against clenched fists. She had to work this out. She put Luchenko and the crowded auditorium and the ticking of her clock and everything else out of her mind and studied, going through dozens of continuations carefully. But there was nothing. The best she could do was give up the exchange and get his rook pawn as consolation. And he would still have his queenside attack going. She hated it, but it had to be done.
She should have seen it coming.
She pushed up her queen rook pawn as she had to and watched the moves play themselves out. Seven moves later he got the rook for his bishop, and her stomach knotted when she saw him take up the piece in his hand and set it down at the side of the board. When she took the rook pawn two moves later it was no real help. She was behind in the game, and her whole body was tense.

Just stopping the advance of his pawns down the queenside was grim work. She had to return the pawn she had taken from him to manage it, and that done, he was doubling his rooks on the king file. He wouldn’t let up. She made a threat toward his king as a cover and managed to trade off one of his rooks for her remaining one. It did no good to trade when you were down, because it increased his advantage, but she had to do it. Luchenko gave up the traded piece casually, and she looked at his snow-white hair as he took hers in exchange, hating him for it. Hating him for his theatrical hair and hating him for being ahead of her by the exchange. If they went on trading, she would be ground down to nothing. She had to find a way to stop him.

The middle game was Byzantine. They were both entrenched with every piece supported at least once and many of them twice. She fought to avoid trades and to find a wedge that could bring her back to even; he countered everything she attempted, moving his pieces surely with his beautifully manicured hand. The intervals between moves were long. Every now and then she would see a glimmer of a possibility way down the line, eight or ten moves away, but she was never able to make it materialize. He had brought his rook to the third rank and put it above his castled king; its movement was limited there to three squares. If she could only find a way to trap it before he lifted the knight that held it back. She concentrated on it as strongly as she knew how, feeling for a moment as though the intensity of her concentration might burn the rook off the board like a laser beam. She attacked it mentally with knights, pawns, the queen, even with her king. She mentally forced him to raise a pawn so that it cut off two of the rook’s flight squares, but she could find nothing.