Grandmaster (18 page)

But I had finished with him and was already moving to hand in my score sheet and check on my father. I ran into Eric, who had also just finished. “How’d it go?” he asked.

“Busted the billionaire!” I reported. “And you?”

“Mind-crippled the master!” he exulted. “And my dad is winning, too. The German international master must still be jet-lagged. So we have a real chance to win first prize, if your father can pull his game out.”

“That’s a big if,” I told him as we hurried out the door of the tournament hall. More than two hundred people had gathered in front of the two monitors to watch my dad and Liszt duke it out. A master stood on a podium, commentating. As we walked up I heard him say: “Black is not lost yet, but he’s sure not looking good.” Liu spotted me and hurried over. “Your father’s coming apart at the seams,” she told me. “He’s taken two bathroom breaks in the last fifteen minutes to try to pull himself together. He’s also losing badly on time. Your mom can’t even watch. Whatever Liszt is doing is making your dad crazy.”

On the monitor, my father looked like he might have a nervous breakdown at any moment. He was trembling and drenched in sweat, as if he had just stepped out of a sauna. His arms were not folded in front of him in his usual position, but rather they were clutching the sides of the table as if he were dizzy and bracing himself. When he squinted down at the board he looked like his head was spinning, and when he glanced up at Liszt he looked like a torture victim staring into the eyes of his tormentor.

Mom and Kate were sitting on chairs near a window, by themselves. Every few seconds my mother would turn to the screen and glance at her husband and then quickly look away. I walked over to her, and Liu and Eric followed. “Hey, Mom…”

I was going to tell her that I had won my game, but when she turned her head to look at me I could see at once that she didn’t care about chess results. Deep lines of worry crosshatched her face. She grabbed my wrist and I could feel her desperation. “Daniel,” she said. Just my name. But I understood it was an urgent plea.

“It’s almost over,” I told her. “They’re moving into the endgame.”

She shook her head. “Now,” she said.

“I don’t know where they are, Mom,” I told her.

Suddenly the crowd reacted. I glanced at the monitor and saw that my father had made a move.

“That’s a fascinating move for black,” the master said. “On its face it doesn’t look sound, but it’s certainly interesting. I admit I didn’t see it coming. I’ll have to take a few seconds and study it.”

Liszt clearly didn’t think it was sound. The big grandmaster caught my father’s eye, smiled, made a quick move of his own in reply, and then slid his thumb and index finger over his throat and around the front of his neck.

“He’s telling your father that he’s choking,” Eric surmised.

“No,” I said, “he’s reminding my dad of something a lot worse.”

“What’s worse than choking away the final game?” Eric asked.

“Stanwick,” I whispered.

“Who’s Stanwick?” my mom demanded.

Just then Dr. Chisolm hurried over to join us.

“Hey, Dad, did you win?” Eric asked.

Dr. Chisolm nodded, but he was staring at my father on the monitor. “I’m not sure I like the way he’s rubbing his jaw,” he muttered.

“His jaw?” Kate asked. “Dad has lousy teeth so…”

“And his left shoulder,” Dr. Chisolm noted.

I could see on the monitor that Dad’s hand had slid down from rubbing his jaw to massaging his left shoulder.

Dr. Chisolm dug out his cell phone. “It could be nothing,” he said, “but…”

I realized that the heart is on the left side of the body, and guessed that tightness in the jaw and pain in the left shoulder are warning signs of serious heart trouble. “Who are you calling?” I asked.

“I got the cell phone number of one of the high tournament officials,” Dr. Chisolm said. “Just in case.”

On the monitor, Liszt did something really strange. He had taken off his belt, and now he brought the leather strap up to his neck and let the ends hang down from his shoulders.

“What the heck is that guy doing?” Eric asked.

Dr. Chisolm punched buttons on his cell phone. “No answer. I’ll try again.”

“Please put that belt back on and stop misbehaving,” the tournament ref rebuked Liszt.

But it was too late. The sight of the belt, and no doubt the reminder it was, unhinged my father. For a moment I thought he was going to go over the table at Liszt. Then he muttered a curse, got up from the table, and bolted.

A second later, Dr. Chisolm got through. He spoke a few quick words and then turned to us, the cell phone still pressed to the side of his face. “Your father left the playing room, and before they could stop him he ran out of the penthouse suite,” he told me.

“Where is he?” my mother asked.

“No one knows,” Dr. Chisolm told her. “He’s gone.”

32

“They’ve checked the penthouse floor and they can’t find him,” Dr. Chisolm reported to my mom. “Hotel security thinks he’s still inside the hotel. There are doormen at all exits, and none of them recall seeing him walking out. Do you think he might have gone to your room to look for you?”

Mom nodded hopefully and hurried off toward the elevators with Kate trailing a step behind. Dr. Chisolm ran to join them, and Eric followed.

“Don’t you want to go?” Liu asked me.

“If he’s in our suite, they’ll find him,” I told her. “But I don’t think he is.”

She heard a note of fear in my voice. “Where do you think he is, Daniel?”

I recalled what Grandmaster Liszt had told me about what my dad had done long ago when he cracked under extreme pressure. “I think he might be up on the roof.”

Liu looked back at me. “Why the roof?”

“Once, at a tournament in San Francisco, the police had to wrestle him off a hotel roof,” I told her in a low voice. “And it happened at a couple of other tournaments, too, when he came unglued. And he was playing Liszt up in the penthouse, so the roof is very close.”

“Let’s go,” she said.

We ran to the elevators and were soon rocketing up to the thirty-fifth floor. “There’s no button for the penthouse floor,” I pointed out, “let alone for the roof. They’re probably both locked off.”

“It’s a hotel, not a prison,” Liu said. “We’ll find a way.”

We reached the thirty-fifth floor, bolted down the hallway, and found a flight of stairs heading up. I took them three at a time, with Liu right behind me. The next stairwell had a
P
instead of a floor number. A closed door said:
PENTHOUSE FLOOR. PRIVATE.

“Want to take a quick look?” Liu asked.

“Let’s keep going,” I told her.

We climbed a narrow metal staircase that corkscrewed upward into semidarkness. I imagined Dad circling up these stairs alone, trembling, needing light and air, and craving escape from the pressure he felt closing in on all sides of him.

At the top of the metal stairs was a heavy steel door. In the dim lighting, I could just read the red sign on it:
WARNING: EMERGENCY DOOR. KEEP CLOSED BY NEW YORK STATE LAW. ALARMS WILL SOUND
.

“Does this qualify as an emergency?” I asked Liu.

“Definitely,” she said, and pushed the handle of the door. It stayed shut.

I raised my foot and kicked the handle hard, and the door burst open. No alarms sounded. Either the sign was a bluff or the system wasn’t working. I stepped through the doorway and Liu followed me out into blinding sunlight.

New York is a jungle of skyscrapers and we stepped out onto the roof—the sun-splashed uppermost tier. The tops of other skyscrapers were all around us, with spires and cell phone towers. Far below, Broadway looked as narrow as a bowling alley, the cars and buses were nickels and dimes, and the people crawled like beetles.

There was nothing up there—no furniture, no ladders or construction material, not even a bench. I guess they were afraid a strong wind might blow debris off the flat surface and onto the heads of pedestrians far below. I looked in every direction and didn’t spot my father. “There,” Liu suddenly said. “Oh my God.”

Dad was standing at the very edge of a corner of the roof, his back to us, looking down at the street below. We ran toward him, and with each step I dreaded that he would slip off and suddenly disappear right before our eyes. When we got close, Liu hung back. “You talk to him alone, Daniel.”

I stepped toward him, but didn’t have a clue what to say. “Hey, Dad, I thought I might find you up here,” I said, knowing how ridiculous it sounded.

He was facing south, looking down at lower Manhattan all the way to the Statue of Liberty raising her torch above New York Harbor. He didn’t turn his head at the sound of my voice. I wasn’t sure he even heard me.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

Long seconds dragged by. “Not too well,” he finally answered. And then, softly, “I’m sorry, Daniel.” I thought he might be turning to face me, but instead he pitched forward into nothingness.

33

I didn’t have time to think or feel afraid—I just stepped forward and caught him by the arm, and held on to him. We stood clinging together, at the edge of the roof above the great city that swept beneath and away in all directions. Dad was trembling so badly that I was afraid he might shake us both over the lip at any second.

Behind me, I heard Liu shouting out my name, and begging us to be careful. “Easy does it,” I said.

“I wasn’t trying to jump. I’m just feeling a little dizzy,” Dad whispered back.

“Then let’s sit down,” I suggested. “Because I’m not letting go. If you go over the edge, I’m going, too.”

“Okay, let’s sit,” he agreed.

Slowly, holding on to each other, we sat down side by side on the edge of the roof, with our legs hanging over the side of the building. I felt a bit dizzy myself, so I kept my eyes fixed on Lady Liberty’s torch and tried to figure out what to say. “Mom is downstairs waiting for us,” I told him very gently. “You have nothing more to prove here. Not to me, not to George Liszt, not even to Fischer and Morphy. I’ve seen you at your best—I’ll never forget what you did to Grandmaster Sanchez. It’s enough.”

“No, it’s not enough,” he replied in a whisper. “I wasn’t going to jump just now … but part of me wanted to.”

I let go of his arm and took his right hand. It felt cold and clammy. “What are you talking about?”

“George Liszt has led the life I should have had,” he whispered. “He’s traveled to international tournaments, and won brilliancy prizes, and followed his stars. Not a week has gone by in my tiny office in New Jersey when, on some deep level, I haven’t thought of who I should have been, and rued the day I quit, and hated myself for the weak coward I am. I pushed it far away and tried to pretend it wasn’t there, but this tournament—and especially this last game—has forced me to dredge it up and face it. You want to hear the truth about Grandmaster Pratzer? That’s who your father is. A man who regrets his life.”

“You walked away from this crazy chess world for good reasons.”

“That’s what I tried to tell myself,” he agreed. “And it’s true enough on some level. But it’s also a big lie.”

I held his hand tightly. “There are two sides to everything. You made a mature decision.”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I love you and your sister and your mom, and I want to go home. But I also know this—I see it very clearly. There’s a big part of me that can’t possibly leave now. I can’t walk back into my office on Monday morning and pretend this never happened, and pick up the first tax forms on my desk and sip the bitter coffee from the cracked mug.”

“What’s the alternative?” I asked him.

A spark seemed to kindle in his black eyes, and he squeezed my hand. “There’s only one thing to do. I need to go down there and face Liszt and finish this game. Not for your mother, or for you, or for anyone else in the world. This is something I need to do for me.
For me.
And I’m ready.”

I spoke softly. “I’m not sure you can handle it. You look terrible, and I’m worried about your heart. Also, they probably disqualified you as soon as you left the penthouse. Anyway, you’re almost surely out of time by now.”

“Got to do it,” he whispered, and the spark in his eye had kindled into a flame. It danced and flickered like a kind of madness, but it also gave him new strength and determination. “Got to try. You’re my son. Help me.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay, Dad. I’ll stay with you every step of the way. And the first one’s going to be the hardest. Can we slide back on our butts and get away from the edge before we stand up?”

Dad’s sweaty body trembled. “I don’t know if I can move,” he said. “I’m kind of frozen here.”

“Just a few inches,” I encouraged. “Backward. Come on. One, two … three.”

We slid inch by inch back from the abyss, and then stood up and started walking across the roof.

Liu hurried over. “Hi, Mr. Pratzer. Can I help you?”

“Take my other arm,” he said. “I’m feeling better now, but I’m still a little dizzy.”

Liu took his other arm and we braced him between us and led him back toward the stairs. “Let’s go quickly,” Dad said. “I can’t have much time left on my clock.”

“Don’t worry about the game,” Liu told him. “It really doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to my father,” I told her. “He’s going to go down and finish. And that’s his decision, so we have to respect it and help him.”

Liu looked back at me. “Great,” she muttered, “two insane men in one family. I really know how to pick ’em.”

“I like this girl, Daniel,” my father told me as we took another step. “You might want to keep her around for a while.”

34

“It’s over,” George Liszt shouted as soon as he saw us walk into the penthouse playing area. “He’s disqualified himself. Who knows where he’s been?”

The ref called over the tournament director, a well-dressed, dignified older man, who ordered that Dad’s clock be stopped while the whole mess was sorted out. I saw that Dad only had four minutes and seven seconds remaining.

“I know where he’s been,” I told them. “On the roof. By himself. There’s a surveillance camera up there if you need proof.” I made that up, but it sounded plausible.