Grandmaster (17 page)

My mother grabbed my father’s arm and said his name.

He gave her a tense smile back and said, “Don’t worry, Ruth, everything will be fine,” turned, and followed the tournament official to a small private elevator that was waiting for them. He faced out at me as the doors closed, our eyes met one last time, and then he was gone.

29

Moffatt was a short man in his late thirties with a nose like a hawk’s beak and the bossy manners of someone who’s used to being obeyed by everyone around him. He wasn’t dressed extravagantly—just black jeans and a nice button-down striped shirt—but his entourage was very intimidating.

When I got to our table, he was already seated, surrounded by his people. An intense Indian assistant who didn’t seem to know or care about chess stood near him listening to two cell phones at the same time and giving Moffatt a running report on some kind of business deal. The assistant glowered at me, as if to ask: “Don’t you realize my business with my boss is a lot more important than your stupid chess game?”

A solidly built middle-aged woman wearing a brightly colored kerchief stood behind my opponent, giving him a neck and shoulder massage and urging him to relax. On Moffatt’s right side, a man with graying hair, who I guessed was a high-priced chess tutor, whispered some last-minute chess advice in Russian-accented English, moving the pieces around the board at lightning speed to demonstrate his points.

“Daniel Pratzer? Sit down. That’s your chair,” Moffatt said when I walked up, holding out his hand and motioning me to the seat opposite him, as if I was late for a business interview but he was willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. “You’ve had quite a tournament, haven’t you? And your father—my God, I saw his last game against Sanchez. A gem, wasn’t it, Fyodor?” The Russian chess tutor didn’t say anything but his bushy eyebrows rose as if in grudging salute. “Sit, fill out your score sheet. I have something I need to attend to,” Moffatt said, and then he started talking to his assistant about buying an imaging company while I tried to find a pencil with a good point.

The final round began a few minutes late, so once they banished all nonplayers from the tournament hall Moffatt and I had a brief time to chat. “What exactly does it mean to ‘solve’ chess?” I asked him.

He looked pleased that I had heard of him and his work. “All games can be solved,” he told me. “Checkers was solved—we know the optimal order of moves that will generate a successful result every time, and the correct responses to deviations. Chess is far more complicated than checkers, but in the next ten or fifteen years we should have it licked.”

“Won’t that kill the game?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “If it does, it does. My passion is solving puzzles. Then I move on to the next challenge.”

I looked back at him. This little man was dismissing with a careless shrug the potential responsibility for ruining an ancient and beautiful game that had given pleasure to millions. The chess gods my father had conjured up in our hotel suite the night before weren’t going to put up with this. I looked back at Moffatt—at the smirk on his controlling face—and I surprised myself by saying in a low voice: “I’m going to beat you.”

For a moment he appeared thrown by this, and then his gray eyes swirled angrily and he said, “No you’re not. I’m just a few points away from becoming a master. Do you have any idea of the time and expense it’s taken to achieve this? If I lose to a beginner like you, I’ll shed hundreds of rating points. That’s not going to happen.”

A loud buzzer sounded at the front of the hall, and a man with a microphone walked out onto the dais. “On behalf of the organizers, I’d like to thank you all for playing in our tournament. Before we begin the final round, Former World Champion Contender Arkady Shuvalovitch will say a few final words. Arkady?” He paused and looked around. “Has anyone seen Arkady?”

There were several awkward seconds. Then a heavily accented voice rang out: “Yes, I am here!” The schlubby-looking man who had opened the tournament reappeared in what I think was the same ill-fitting suit. He ran forward from the wings, took the microphone, and—in his eagerness—tripped and fell off the dais. He got up, dusted himself off, and looked out at us. “Fathers, sons, mothers, daughters, thank you for playing so well and trying so hard. Always remember, chess is like a camel. It is burdened with a hump, but that also keeps it alive in the middle of the desert. Good luck to you all.”

He walked off the stage as a voice boomed over the PA system: “START YOUR CLOCKS.”

30

The final round of a chess tournament, I discovered, has its own grim intensity, as players who have labored long and hard collect themselves for one last surge. At the front of the hall, the contenders know they’re close to prize money, trophies, and rating points but that a loss now will turn triumph into tragedy. In the middle, strong players who have made a few mistakes and dropped a game or two sit down with tight, combative faces, determined to win their last one and salvage a decent result. At the back of the hall, weaker players who have struggled and lost many games tap their last reserves of stamina and self-respect to try to avoid a complete debacle.

I was in the exact middle of the hall, surrounded by strong players who had won as many games as they had lost and were intent on finishing with a victory. I could feel their concentration surging around me, a silent electrical buzz that crackled in the air.

I had the black pieces against Moffatt, and when he slammed his king pawn down and stared across at me, I was surprised to find that I wasn’t at all nervous. Opening jitters had unsettled me throughout the tournament, but in this final round my mind remained crystal clear.

I looked back at Moffatt and mentally stripped away all the sports cars and chess tutors and zeroes in his bank account. Tonight he would no doubt go back to a penthouse apartment in some supertrendy neighborhood of Manhattan, while I would drive back through the Lincoln Tunnel to our three-bedroom house with the busted garage door and the leaky toilet, but right now it was just the two of us at the table—two brains locked in mental combat.

I remembered my dad’s advice: “If you’re up against a strong player, get him off the book and make him think for himself.” I played Alekhine’s Defense, which my father had told me about. “Alexander Alekhine, who defeated the great Capablanca to become world champion, introduced it in 1921,” Dad had explained. “It’s not played much because it looks so ugly for black at the beginning. But if black plays the first few moves correctly, it leads to an open position with good attacking chances.”

At first Moffatt seemed confident. His white pawns pushed my knight around and took over the center. Soon he was castled safely and had a formidable pawn wall, while my black pieces looked underdeveloped. But my father had counseled me to be patient. “Just play one sound move after another and chip away at white’s center pawns, and his position will start to crumble.”

Moffatt didn’t panic—his tutors had prepared him well. But as the game went on and I castled my own king and started to undermine his center pawn mass, he looked a little irritated. I was rated nearly nine hundred points lower than him. I could tell that he already thought of himself as a master, and me as a rank beginner, and he was putting all kinds of pressure on himself to crush me.

One strong move at a time, my dad had said. I flashed back to the previous night, when my father had replayed his favorite games from memory and Fischer and Morphy had come alive and hovered above me, whispering their most basic lessons into my head. “Get your king to safety. Control the center of the board. Develop your pieces to useful squares—knights first, then bishops, and then rooks. Keep your pawns connected and they’ll fight harder for you, like comrades who can cheer one another on.”

I didn’t try to do anything fancy—I just made sure that every one of my moves had a logical point behind it. Moffatt’s irritation turned to annoyance and then anger. He bit his lip and rubbed the sides of his chin with his palms. “Where the hell are you getting these moves from?” he hissed as we reached the middle game on fairly even turns and I started to switch from defending to attacking. “You’re just a class D player, for God’s sake!”

I thought to myself, This is a part of who I am that I never knew before, part of my birthright. My father wasn’t a great swimmer or runner or football player, but he had one of the greatest chess brains of his generation. And maybe he’d passed a little bit of it on to me. So maybe I’d never be the best athlete or the most popular kid at the Loon Lake Academy, but I suddenly felt like I could take apart this bossy, boastful billionaire.

I didn’t say any of that out loud, though. What I did say was: “Please be quiet, or I’ll have to call over a ref,” and then I made my strongest move yet and got up from the table. I had learned that when my opponent starts getting frustrated, it infuriates him or her even more to stare across at an empty chair. I decided to let Moffatt stew alone for a few minutes while I checked on my dad.

There was already a crowd in the common area, watching the two large monitors. I could see and hear my father, and he didn’t look good. He was breathing in gasps, his face was pale, and tiny beads of sweat threaded together across his forehead. George Liszt had the white pieces and was attacking mercilessly. Every time Dad tried to wiggle out of pressure, Liszt responded immediately, as if he had foreseen my father’s move and had the answer ready.

My mother spotted me and hurried over, with Kate trailing behind. “Your father’s in trouble,” Mom said, and since she didn’t know anything about chess I figured she was worried about the way he looked. “Daniel, we’ve got to get him out.”

“It’s his last game and he’s already in the middle of it,” I told her. “He’ll be done soon.”

“Just look at his face,” she whispered. “He looks like he’s melting.”

“That monster is going to crush him,” Kate added, for once not sarcastic but actually sounding worried herself.

On the monitor Liszt did look like a monster—he appeared twice as big as my dad. It was like watching Godzilla playing chess with the next person he was planning to devour. Liszt sat hunched forward in an aggressive and intimidating pose, as if he might slip forward at any moment and crush my dad to smithereens. His thick arms rested on either side of the table like two anacondas, and he aimed his fierce laser stare right between my father’s eyes, as if trying to melt down the front of Dad’s skull. The big man’s jaw, beneath his thick black beard, sawed very slightly back and forth.

“Ask him to stop grinding his teeth,” my father demanded to the tournament ref, who sat off-screen.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t hear anything,” the ref answered.

Dad looked directly at Liszt. “Why don’t you cut it out and just play chess?”

“I am playing, Morris,” Liszt responded in a mocking rumble. “Keep calm. You don’t want to get upset, do you? We know what happens when you get upset.”

“Silence, both of you,”
the tournament ref commanded, and the game resumed.

I had to go back to my own game, so I gave Mom a reassuring hug. “I’ll be back soon,” I promised her. “Don’t worry about Dad. He’ll get through this okay.”

I don’t think she heard me. She was staring at the monitor screen, where my father’s right hand had drifted to his left wrist to take his pulse. As I headed back into the tournament hall I heard her whisper, “Morris, please … calm down.”

31

Moffatt had already moved when I returned, and my side of the chess clock was running. He was sitting with his arms crossed, staring at the board and glancing at the flashing digital display of the minutes I had left, as if hoping that I would take too long to come back and lose on time. He looked disappointed to see me walk up. I gave him a little smile, as if to say, “Did you really think I would hand you this game?”; slipped back into my chair; and saw right away that he had overreached.

My dad had counseled me to ignore the higher ratings of opponents and just play the best chess I could. Now I understood that his warning cut both ways. Because of my low rating, Moffatt saw me as a class D player, and he apparently couldn’t get that out of his head. He was being wildly overaggressive and trying for a quick mate.

I made a sound defensive move, but instead of backing off he pressed his attack. Three or four moves later it was clear that he wasn’t going to be able to checkmate me, and that he had badly compromised his position. Not only had his attack faltered, but he had left himself open to a counterattack. I stopped defending and started firing off aggressive salvos of my own, and the billionaire panicked.

He took longer to move, and kept glancing across at me, waiting for me to make the beginner’s blunder he was certain was coming. But I was scenting blood, and I wasn’t about to slip up. I sacrificed a pawn for open lines and ripped his king’s position apart. Finally, Moffatt saw that the end was near. Fear gleamed in his eyes, and then grudging acceptance—he was going to lose this game in a few more moves and there was no escape.

The chess player in him stepped back, and the hard-driving businessman took over. “Listen to me, Pratzer,” Moffatt whispered, leaning forward and speaking in such a low voice that only I could hear it. “If I drop this game, all the time and work and money I’ve sunk into making master go out the window. There is a way for us to reach an … accommodation … where I get what I want … and richly deserve … and you get
substantial
restitution—” He broke off and raised his eyebrows as if to assure me that if I let him win, the payoff would be well worth my while.

I looked back at him coldly, seeing him now for the scoundrel that he was. “If you talk to me again, I’ll call over the ref, and report what you just offered. Maybe you’ll solve chess one day, but you’re going to lose this game and you don’t deserve to be a master.” I reached down and made a killer move. “Check.”

Three moves later, Moffatt gave up gracelessly. He stared back at me with narrowed eyes and cobralike fury, as if I had upended all his carefully laid plans and he wanted to sink his fangs into me, and knocked over his king. “What a waste,” he hissed. “What a damn shame.”