Grandmaster (19 page)

Liszt turned to the tournament director. “He could have had help. He could have checked the position on a computer. He could have made a cell phone call to anyone.”

Dad stayed silent, so I jumped to his defense. “My dad doesn’t have a cell phone with him,” I said. “And he didn’t bring a computer on this trip. He just needed a breath of fresh air. You know what I think?”

Liszt glared at me. “I couldn’t care less.”

“I think you don’t have the guts to face him and finish this,” I said. “I think you’re a bully, and you did your best to scare me into taking him home, but right now you’re the one who’s scared.”

The enormous grandmaster stepped toward me threateningly, but my father cut him off and said softly: “George, my son has a point. Why don’t we just sit down at the board and finish this ourselves?”

Liszt looked at my father and saw something he didn’t like. Despite my dad’s paleness, despite the fact that he was sweaty and still trembling, there was a new resolve in his face and a competitive fire glowing in his eyes. “No,” Liszt growled. “I’m out of here. It’s over.”

The tournament director glanced from Liszt to my dad, sizing the situation up. “One question—why
did
you leave the playing area, Grandmaster Pratzer?”

I realized that the cameras were rolling and that whatever Dad answered would be heard and seen by hundreds of people downstairs. “Because I’m a coward sometimes, and I was afraid, and I couldn’t handle the pressure,” Dad said softly, looking into the eyes of the tournament director. Then Dad’s voice hardened. “But I can handle it now.”

“Now is too late, you wacko,” George Liszt told him. “It’s over. I’ve won and I’m leaving. Give me my money.”

“It’s not over,”
the tournament director declared with authority. “We’re outside the rule book here. This is my call, and I declare the game on. It’s black’s move.” He looked at Liu and me. “Only the two players can stay.”

“Goodbye,” I said to my father.

He whispered, “Thanks, Daniel. Tell Mom I love her,” and sat down at the chessboard. “George,” he said, “we’ve had this coming a long time. I believe it’s my move.”

Liu and I rode down in the elevator. “Wow,” she said, “that was intense. Do you think he can really win the game in four minutes? Or maybe it doesn’t matter whether he wins or loses. Maybe he just needs to finish.”

“It matters,” I told her.

The doors opened, and we found ourselves in the crowded common area, where the excitement had reached a fever pitch. My father had taken forty precious seconds to think about his move, and the master was on his podium, waving his arms as he moved pieces on a demo board.

“Grandmaster Pratzer is offering to sacrifice a knight for two pawns,” the master explained. “It looks to me to be a highly speculative sacrifice, but he must have calculated that if white grabs the knight he will have a hard time stopping black’s pawns from advancing.”

George Liszt spent ten minutes staring hard at the board, pondering that same calculation. He looked like a man at a fork in a road, trying to pick a route and suspecting that either path might lead to disaster. He leaned forward and tilted back, he crossed his arms and laid them flat, he squinted at the board and then he glared across at my father. Dad gave him a slightly amused smile back, as if to say: “So you see it, too? What are you going to do about it?”

“Daniel!” My mom came rushing over, trailed by Kate, Eric, and Dr. Chisolm. “What, for God’s sake, was your father doing on the roof?”

“Just getting a breath of air,” I lied badly. “He had a touch of claustrophobia.”

“Morris never had claustrophobia in his life,” she said. “Tell me the truth.”

I met her eyes. “He’s got to do this, Mom.”

“That’s the truth?”

I nodded. “And he said to tell you he loves you.”

She looked back at me, took a quick breath, and grabbed on to the back of a chair for momentary support. “Can’t you explain to me why he’s putting himself through this?” she asked softly. “If I understood the reason, then it might be easier.”

“It goes way back to when he was a teenager, before he met you,” I told her. “If you want to know more than that, you’ve got to ask him.”

She looked for a second like she was contemplating taking the elevator up to the penthouse and asking him right there, and trying to put a stop to this herself. Then she glanced at my father’s face on the monitor. He was watching Liszt, waiting for the big man to move. Dad looked tense and haggard, but an almost imperceptible smile never left his lips. It transformed him, giving him an air of confidence and calmness beyond his exhaustion, as if he were somehow enjoying the pain of this struggle. Mom shrugged her shoulders. “Okay, Morris,” she whispered. “If this is what you have to do, then win it.”

Liszt reached a hand down to the chessboard and decisively took the knight, accepting Dad’s sacrifice.

My father looked back at his old rival for a half second, and the bemused smile on his face became a tiny bit more pronounced. Without studying the board any further, my dad quickly made a bold pawn move.

“That’s a very aggressive pawn thrust for black,” the master said. “It’s difficult to calculate it out fifteen or twenty moves in advance, but it doesn’t look sound to me. The time pressure must be getting to Pratzer.”

“No, is the best move,” a heavily accented voice contradicted him. A man in an ill-fitting suit clambered up onto the podium next to the master. I recognized Former World Champion Contender Arkady Shuvalovitch. “Is exactly the right line for black,” he said. “Only chance.”

“But he only has three minutes left,” the master said.

“Better than two minutes,” Shuvalovitch observed, his eyes never straying from the position.

I realized that this graceless little man with a superb chess brain—who had once played for the championship of the world—could see something in the position that was beyond the ken of the master.

Liszt’s own face tightened at my father’s bold pawn advance, and he fired right back with a move of his own.

“They’re into it now,” the master said. “Black has no time to hesitate, and white is doing a superb job of moving quickly, too, not letting black think on his time.”

They moved faster and faster, stroke and counterstroke, both of them hunched over the chessboard, slamming down pieces and hitting the clock so that their arms and hands were almost a blur. There must have been three hundred people in the common area now, reacting to every move with groans or applause. My dad was the crowd favorite—he had less than a minute left and everyone loves an underdog.

The funny thing was that my father didn’t look scared now. He was a short, bald man, drenched in sweat and visibly trembling, but he somehow looked completely in control and even, momentarily, heroic—as if he had been born for this moment, and waited years for it, and now that it had finally arrived, he was ready and locked in. Time after time I thought he was lost, but he made bold move followed by bold move with an uncanny certainty, as if he were following a script he had already written out in his head.

My mother stood next to me and watched him play with shining eyes. She didn’t know chess, but it didn’t matter. As the crowd lustily cheered him on, she turned to me and whispered, “He’s good, isn’t he?”

“No, Mom,” I told her, “he’s great.”

Liszt looked more and more worried. He was biting his knuckles and throwing constant glances over at my dad’s clock, which showed less than twenty seconds. My father’s king had joined his two pawns on their march across the board, and it was clear that Liszt could not stop them. So he sacrificed his rook for both black pawns, and now he was way down in material and clearly had a lost game, but my dad had only seventeen seconds left. If Dad’s clock ran out before he checkmated Liszt, he would lose on time.

My father slid all the way forward on his seat, almost embracing the chessboard, taking less than a second per move. He was marching another pawn the length of the board to queen it. The crowd cheered his every step, as Liszt parried and retreated and tried his best to halt the pawn. Ten seconds left. Eight. Seven. I began to suspect that even if Dad queened the pawn he would never have time to win the game. Liszt must have reached the same conclusion—he looked more confident. Dad would never make it. Six seconds left. Five.

Dad’s pawn was now one square away from queening, but he only had four seconds left. Three.

Dad moved his king and the crowd let out a collective sigh. It sounded like the air escaping from a punctured blimp as it sputters to the ground for a spectacular crash. Dad had blundered horribly. He had moved his king away from his pawn, allowing Liszt to take it with his own king. Liszt hesitated for a second, as if not able to believe his good fortune. Then he took Dad’s pawn with his king, slammed his fist down triumphantly on the clock, and said: “It’s over, Morris. Your last hope is gone. You lose.”

Dad reached down and moved his knight in a black blur, and said “Checkmate,” and stopped his clock with one second left.

It slowly dawned on me that by grabbing the pawn with his king, Liszt had opened himself up to a hidden checkmate by Dad’s knight and two bishops, and somehow in the whirl of time pressure my father had seen it.

Liszt looked down at the board and then reeled back as if he had been shot by a bazooka shell. “No,” he muttered.

My father held out his hand. “Nice game.”

Then the giant grandmaster was on his feet, shouting: “
This will not stand!
I already won. You left the playing area. I will appeal this. I won first prize!” He pushed over the chess table, and my dad jumped out of the way in the nick of time. Then Liszt grabbed a chair and brandished it like a weapon, and there was shouting and confusion, and the live feed from the camera cut out.

My mom grabbed my arm, panicked, and asked, “What’s happening?”

“Liszt can’t handle losing,” I told her.

“Yes, but what happened to Morris?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted, worried.

“He’ll be okay,” Liu assured her.

“Yes, there are plenty of people up there to deal with this,” Dr. Chisolm agreed, sounding a bit worried himself and punching buttons on his cell phone. “I’m sure everything’s under control.”

There was an eerie, charged silence in the common area as three hundred people stared up at the two dark monitors. No one left. The throng of chess players milled around, waiting and whispering about the gargantuan struggle they had just witnessed. And then there was a
ping
and the doors to the private penthouse elevator opened. My father stepped out alone.

He looked very small and frail standing there, and even a little lost. He stumbled out of the elevator and blinked, as people called out questions to him about George Liszt and what had happened up in the penthouse. “He hit the referee with a chair,” my father said, glancing around at the swirl of faces and the bright lights. “He’s upstairs now. Talking to the hotel security.” Then my dad spotted us and waved, and started to cross the carpet.

I took my mother’s arm and led her toward him, but we had to fight our way through the crowd. Kate reached Dad first, and he put his hand on her shoulder as if for support. Then he saw us getting close and opened his arms, and the next thing I knew we had all joined him in a big family hug.

The crowd broke into applause—a loud and spontaneous ovation that kept getting louder second by second, but my father didn’t seem to hear it.

I think his legs had pretty much given out because it felt like I was propping him up. The ovation from the crowd washed over us in waves as we stood there embracing, and then Dad looked at my mother and kissed her on the lips, and whispered to her and to all of us, “Let’s go home.”

CODA

Chess club was done for the day and so was I. It was a warm May afternoon and I had played four games and won two of them, which was a disappointing result for me these days. In the two months since the tournament I had climbed several hundred rating points to become a class B player and it was pretty clear that next fall I would make the travel team of the Looney Knights—the only sophomore on the squad. I realize that’s not quite the same as cracking into the starting lineup of the New York Yankees, but progress is progress.

I wasn’t studying chess that much, but three nights a week I was playing a game against my dad. He would set up two boards on our dining room table after dinner and I would sit down at one of them and Kate would reluctantly sit down at the other, muttering something like “According to the parenting books, too much chess at an early age can stunt a child’s delightfully unformed mind…”

“Whereas unlimited talking on a cell phone can promote creativity and intellectual development?” Dad asked her. “Don’t even go there. Today I want you both to play the black side of the French, try to trade off your weak bishops, and put as much pressure as you can on my center.”

The funny thing was that for all Kate’s complaining, she was developing into a ferocious player and was getting closer and closer to beating me. “Watch out,” Dad warned. “The second sibling usually ends up kicking the butt of the first.”

“Not in this family,” I told him. “My butt remains unkickable.”

He shot me his all-knowing grandmaster grin, which now flashed playfully in our dining room with some regularity, and whispered: “Sorry, Daniel. It’s only a matter of time. She’s got your number.”

Don’t get me wrong—Morris Pratzer had not undergone a dramatic transformation since winning the New York tournament. His pants were still too short, his scalp had grown balder, and his potbelly bigger, and during tax season he worked long hours at his accounting firm and came home so weary and detached that some nights he barely said five words to us.

But three times a week when we had family chess hour he seemed to come alive. We sat down together, with Mom hovering in the background brewing hot cider and doling out cookies.

Dad didn’t want to play in any more tournaments, and I didn’t push him. But he had rediscovered his love for the game, and he even visited my chess club once to talk about strategy in middle games. We had never had a grandmaster come before, and the club members were very excited. I was a little nervous, but he didn’t try to wiggle his ears or arch his eyebrows. Instead, he stuck to his subject and even showed us some examples from his own old tournament games. Later, he played a simultaneous exhibition against our thirty-four club members and two faculty advisers and whipped us one and all, and my stock among the chess club nerds at having a cool dad rose to new heights.