The Queen's Gambit (36 page)

Feeling dizzy from the effort, she pulled her elbows off the table, put her arms in her lap, shook her head and looked at her clock. She had less than fifteen minutes. Alarmed, she looked down at her score sheet. She had to make three more moves before her flag fell or she would forfeit. Luchenko had forty minutes left on his clock. There was nothing to do but move. She had already considered knight to knight five and knew it was sound, although of no particular help. She moved it. His reply was what she expected, forcing her to bring the knight back to king four, where she had planned for it to be in the first place. She had seven minutes left. She studied carefully and put her bishop on the diagonal that his rook sat on. He moved the rook, as she knew he would. She signaled the tournament director, wrote her next move on the score sheet, holding her other hand over it to hide it from Luchenko, and folded the sheet to seal it. When the director came over, she said, “Adjournment,” and waited for him to get the envelope. She was exhausted. There was no applause when she got up and walked wearily off the stage.

***

It was a hot night and she had the window open in her room while she sat at the ornate writing desk with her chessboard on it, studying the adjourned position, looking for ways to embarrass Luchenko’s rook, or to use the rook’s vulnerability as a cover for attacking him somewhere else. After two hours of it, the heat in the room had become unbearable. She decided to go down to the lobby and then take a walk around the block—if that was safe and legal. She felt dizzy from too much chess and too little food. It would be nice to have a cheeseburger. She laughed wryly at herself; a cheeseburger was what an American of a type she thought she would never be craved when traveling abroad. God, was she tired! She would take a brief walk and come back to bed. She wouldn’t be playing the adjournment out until tomorrow night; there would be more time for studying it after her game with Flento.

The elevator was at the far end of the hall. Because of the heat, several rooms were open, and as she approached one of them she could hear deep male voices in some kind of discussion. When she was even with the doorway she looked inside. It must have been part of a suite because what she saw was a grand parlor with a crystal chandelier hanging from an elaborately molded ceiling, a pair of green overstuffed sofas and large, dark oil paintings on the far wall, where an open door led to a bedroom. There were three men in shirtsleeves standing around a table that sat between the couches. On the table was a crystal decanter and three shot glasses. In the center of the table was a chessboard; two of the men were watching and commenting while the third moved pieces around speculatively with his fingertips. The two men watching were Tigran Petrosian and Mikhail Tal. The one moving the pieces was Vasily Borgov. They were three of the best chess players in the world, and they were analyzing what must have been Borgov’s adjourned position from his game with Duhamel.

Once as a child she had been on her way down the hall in the Administration Building and had stopped for a moment by the door to Mrs. Deardorff’s office, which was uncharacteristically open. Looking furtively inside, she had seen Mrs. Deardorff standing there in the outer office with an older man and a woman, involved in conversation, their heads together in an intimacy she would never have expected Mrs. Deardorff to be capable of. It had been a shock to peer into this adult world. Mrs. Deardorff held her index finger out and was tapping the lapel of the man with it as she talked, eye to eye, with him. Beth never saw the couple again and had no idea what they had been talking about, but she never forgot the scene. Seeing Borgov in the parlor of his suite, planning his next move with the help of Tal and Petrosian, she felt the same thing she had felt then. She felt inconsequential—a child peering into the adult world. Who was she to presume? She needed help. She hurried past the room and to the elevator, feeling awkward and terribly alone.

***

The crowd waiting by the side door had gotten bigger. When she stepped out of the limousine in the morning they began shouting, “Harmon! Harmon!” in unison and waving and smiling. A few reached out to touch her as she went by, and she pushed past them nervously, trying to smile back. She had slept only fitfully the night before, getting up from time to time to study the position of her adjourned game with Luchenko or to pace around the room barefoot, thinking of Borgov and the other two, neckties loosened and in shirtsleeves, studying the board as though they were Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin with a chart of the final campaign of World War II. No matter how often she told herself she was as good as any of them, she felt with dismay that those men with their heavy black shoes knew something she did not know and never would know. She tried to concentrate on her own career, her quick rise to the top of American chess and beyond it, the way she had become a more powerful player than Benny Watts, the way she had beaten Laev without a moment of doubt in her moves, the way that, even as a child, she had found an error in the play of the great Morphy. But all of it was meaningless and trivial beside her glimpse into the establishment of Russian chess, into the room where the men conferred in deep voices and studied the board with an assurance that seemed wholly beyond her.

The one good thing was that her opponent was Flento, the weakest player in the tournament. He was already out of the running, with a clear loss and two draws. Only Beth, Borgov and Luchenko had neither lost nor drawn a game. She had a cup of tea before playing began, and it helped her a little. More important, just being in this room with the other players dispelled some of what she had been feeling during the night. Borgov was drinking tea when she came in. He ignored her as usual, and she ignored him, but he was not as frightening with a teacup in his hand and a quietly dull look on his heavy face as he had been in her imagination the night before. When the director came to escort them to the stage, Borgov glanced at her just before he left the room and raised his eyebrows slightly as if to say, “Here we go again!” and she found herself smiling faintly at him. She set down her cup and followed.

She knew Flento’s erratic career very well and had memorized a dozen of his games. She had decided even before leaving Lexington that the thing to play against him, if she had the white pieces, would be the English Opening. She started it now, pushing the queen bishop pawn to the fourth rank. It was like the Sicilian in reverse. She felt comfortable with it.

She won, but it took four and a half hours and was far more grueling than she had expected. He put up a fight along the two main diagonals and played the four-knights variation with a sophistication that was, for a while, far beyond her own. But when they got into the middle game, she saw an opportunity to trade her way out of the position and took it. She wound up doing a thing she had seldom done: nursing a pawn across the board until it arrived at the seventh rank. It would cost Flento his only remaining piece to remove it. He resigned. The applause this time was louder than ever before. It was two-thirty. She had missed breakfast and was exhausted. She needed lunch and a nap. She needed to rest before the adjournment tonight.

She ate a fast lunch of spinach quiche and a kind of Slavic
pommes frites
in the restaurant. But when she went up to her room at three-thirty and got into bed, she found sleeping out of the question. There was an intermittent hammering going on above her head, as though workmen were installing a new carpet. She could hear the clumping of boots, and every now and then it sounded as if someone had dropped a bowling ball from waist level. She lay in bed for twenty minutes, but it was no good.

By the time she finished supper and arrived at the playing hall she was more tired than she ever remembered being. Her head ached and her body was sore from being hunched over a chessboard. She wished fervently that she could have been given a shot to knock her out for the afternoon, that she could face Luchenko with a few solid hours of dreamless sleep behind her. She wished she had risked taking a Librium. A little fuzz in her mind would be better than this.

When Luchenko came into the parlor room where the adjournment was to be played, he looked calm and rested. His suit, a dark worsted this time, was impeccably pressed and fit him beautifully across the shoulders. It occurred to her that he must buy all his clothes abroad. He smiled at her with restrained politeness; she managed to nod and say, “Good evening.”

There were two tables set up for adjourned games. A classic rookpawn ending was in place on one of them, waiting for Borgov and Duhamel. Her position with Luchenko had been laid out on the other. As she sat down at her end of it, Borgov and Duhamel came in together and walked to the board at the other side of the room in grim silence. There was a referee for each game, and the clocks were already set up. Beth had her ninety minutes of overtime, and Luchenko had the same, along with an extra thirty-five minutes left from yesterday. She had forgotten about his extra time. That put three things against her: his having the white pieces, his still unstopped attack, and his extra allotment of time.

Their referee brought over the envelope, opened it, showed the score sheet to both players and made Beth’s move himself. He pressed the button that started Luchenko’s clock, and without hesitation Luchenko advanced the pawn that Beth had expected. There was a certain relief in seeing him make the move. She had been forced to consider several other replies; now the lines from them could be dropped from her mind. Across the room she heard Borgov cough loudly and blow his nose. She tried to put Borgov out of her mind. She would be playing him tomorrow, but it was time now to get to work on this game, to put everything she had into it. Borgov would almost certainly beat Duhamel and begin tomorrow undefeated. If she wanted to win this tournament she had to rescue the game in front of her. Luchenko was ahead by the exchange, and that was bad. But he had that ineffective rook to contend with, and after several hours of study she had found three ways of using it against him. If she could bring it off, she could exchange a bishop for it and even the score.

She forgot about how tired she was and went to work. It was uphill and intricate. And Luchenko had that extra time. She decided on a plan developed in the middle of the night and began retreating her queenside knight, taking it on a virtual knight’s tour to get it up to king five. Clearly he was ready for that—had analyzed it himself sometime since yesterday morning. Probably with assistance. But there was something he might not have analyzed, good as he was, and that he might not see now. She pulled her bishop away from the diagonal his rook was on and hoped he wouldn’t see what she was planning. It would appear that she was attacking his pawn formation, forcing him to make an unstable advance. But she wasn’t concerned with his pawn position. She wanted that rook off the board badly enough to kill for it.

Luchenko merely pushed up the pawn. He could have thought longer about it—
should
have thought longer—but he didn’t. He moved the pawn. Beth felt a tiny thrill. She took the knight off the diagonal and put it not on king five, but on queen bishop five, offering it to his queen. If his queen took it, she would take the rook for her bishop. That in itself would be no good for her—paying for the rook with the knight and the bishop—but what Luchenko hadn’t seen was that she would get his knight in return because of the queen move. It was sweet. It was very sweet. She looked up hesitantly at him.

She had not looked at him in almost an hour, and his appearance was a surprise. He had loosened his tie, and it was twisted to one side of his collar. His hair was mussed. He was biting his thumb and his face was shockingly drawn.

He gave it a half-hour and found nothing. Finally he took the knight. She took the rook, wanting to shout with joy as it came off the board, and he took her bishop. Then she checked, he interposed, and she pushed the pawn up to the knight. She looked at him again. The game would be even now. The elegant look was gone. He had become a rumpled old man in an expensive suit, and it suddenly occurred to her that she wasn’t the only one exhausted by the games of the past six days. Luchenko was fifty-seven. She was nineteen. And she had worked out with Jolene for five months in Lexington.

From that point on, the resistance left him. There was no clear positional reason why she should be able to hurry him to a resignation after taking his knight; it was a theoretically even game. His queenside pawns were strongly placed. But now she whittled away at the pawns, throwing subtle threats at them while attacking his remaining bishop and forcing him to protect the key pawn with his queen. When he did that, brought up his queen to hold his pawns together, she knew she had him. She focused her mind on his king, giving full attention to attack.

There were twenty-five minutes left on her clock and Luchenko still had nearly an hour, but she gave twenty of her minutes to working it out and then struck, bringing her king rook pawn up to the fourth rank. It was a clear announcement of her intentions, and he gave it long, hard thought before moving. She used the time his clock was ticking to work it all out—every variation on each of the moves he might make. She found an answer to anything he might do, and when he finally made his move, bringing his queen, wastefully, over to protect, she ignored the chance to grab one of his attacking pawns and advanced her king rook pawn another square. It was a splendid move, and she knew it. Her heart exulted with it. She looked across the board at him.

He seemed lost in thought, as though he had been reading philosophy and had just set down the book to contemplate a difficult proposition. His face was gray now, with tiny wrinkles reticulating the dry skin. He bit his thumb again, and she saw, shocked, that his beautiful manicure of yesterday had been chewed ragged. He glanced over at her with a brief, weary glance—a glance with great weight of experience and a whole long career of chess in it—and back one final time at her rook pawn, now on the fifth rank. Then he stood up.