The Emperor of Ocean Park (48 page)

“I appreciate this,” I tell him, although I am vaguely disappointed. I am not sure what I hoped for, but this is too prosaic.

“Incidentally, your father had no D.C. permit, which made his possession within the city limits illegal. But I guess that doesn’t matter now.” I say nothing. Nunzio fills the void with another question. “So, what are you and your sister up to, anyway? Are you taking this stuff seriously?”

“What stuff?”

“Tracking down the stuff about your father, all that.”

I am suddenly wary, though also intrigued that he has lumped Mariah and me together. “I just want to know the truth,” I say boldly, if a bit stupidly. “About my father, I mean.”

“Yeah, well, I guess we all want to know our fathers better, don’t we?” Agent Nunzio laughs, not unkindly. “I wish I’d known mine better, anyway. So, good luck.”

Everyone else in the world is telling me to back off. But the Federal Bureau of Investigation seems to want me to go ahead. A good thing, too, because I am not about to stop.

CHAPTER 26
SAM LOYD’S CHALLENGE

T
HE
E
LM
H
ARBOR
C
HESS
C
LUB
meets every Thursday night in an antiquarian bookstore owned by an evil old man named Karl. The establishment, which does business under the deceptively misdescriptive name of Webster & Sons—there never was a Webster, so he had no sons; Karl has always owned it, believing that New Englanders will more readily buy books from a shop that hints of an Anglo-Saxon provenance—rambles and zags through the second floor of a three-story brick-fronted building just beyond the northern edge of the campus, near Henley Street, the unmarked but widely accepted border between the overwhelmingly white university community and the unfamiliar, and thus, by definition, dangerous, black-and-brown world next door. On the first floor is an Indian restaurant that does a brisk student business, and one browses books or plays chess surrounded by the eye-scorching aroma of cheap curry. Cramped apartments, including Karl’s, fill the third. Probably Karl owns the whole building, but nobody knows. One reaches the store by pushing the appropriate buzzer, then opening a glass door, being careful of the diagonal crack that has been there since I was a student, and finally climbing a narrow staircase that surely violates every safety rule enacted since the nineteenth century: no railings, uneven risers that tend to pop loose unexpectedly, an impossibly sharp turn at the halfway point, and the only useful illumination the uncovered bulb on the landing, with a wattage of, perhaps, forty.

I do not know where Karl is from, but I do know that his fundamental meanness, like a cancer, has always kept him thin and bald, evidently nourishing itself on his own flesh, for he eats everything in sight. His
face is an odd inverted triangle, jowly at the bottom despite his otherwise entire lack of body fat. The pupils of his eyes are colorless and pale, like the eyes of an albino. What hair he has left is piled in thin snowy wings on either side of his flat head. In my student days, Karl was a terror, not over the board, as chess players like to say, for he boasted only moderate strength, but around the club itself. If you spilled a few drops of Coca-Cola on his grimy wooden tables, those pale, lidless eyes would darken and grow monstrous, and Karl would screech obscenities for a minute and a half, never mind the players trying to concentrate. If you happened to remark that a peanut-butter cookie seemed stale—he always provided refreshments, and they usually made you sick—he would mutter, “I see,” then proceed to blunder around the rooms with a wastebasket under his arm, sweeping away everything edible or drinkable, even food you brought upstairs yourself. Karl’s comments about the games in progress, or the games just finished, were always punctuated with his proudly offensive locker-room humor—male locker-room humor, that is, and the raunchier the better; he was the master of similes comparing chess pieces to body parts, and positions on the board with those same parts at work. As for women, they should not, in Karl’s opinion, play chess at all; whenever a female student was sufficiently unfortunate to find her way to the club, Karl would be gracious and charming, the very picture of Old World courtliness. He would then proceed to rest his lustful gaze on her for the entire visit—but never on her face. Karl’s crawling, creepy stare is like a live thing, a devouring force of nature; you can feel its greedy, envious insistence even when it is directed at somebody else. Of the very few women who happened by the club in my student days, almost none returned. One brave teen, a math major, a Russian émigrée whose younger brother is nowadays one of America’s better players, actually withstood Karl’s crude, unblinking scrutiny for eight weeks running before he finally managed to drive her away.

Yet there was, and still is, no other game in town.

As an undergraduate, I could hardly be kept from the chess club; during law school, I made a point of visiting at least monthly; in my ten years on the faculty, however, I have stopped in no more often than once or twice a year. Each time, Karl finds a way to treat me with the same viciously rude bonhomie I remember so painfully from my student days, for his racism, if not so deeply ingrained as his sexism, has nevertheless managed to survive the university’s lurch through integration
to ethnic tribalism to diversity to multiculturalism to whatever it is we call the unbridled celebration of the self with which the nation’s campuses seem determined to welcome the new century. I am scarcely surprised, then, when I walk in the door just before meeting time and Karl, busily setting out last month’s crackers, spins in place, hitches up his too-large pants, and booms, “Well, look who has darkened my doorway again! After all this time! You get it, Doctor? Darkened my doorway!”

I would stare him down, but Karl has no time for such games, and has already turned back to his work. Two local teenagers, one of them an authentic rising star, are playing blitz games—five minutes apiece—in the corner, punctuating their rapid moves with the patter of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, circa 1950, which has somehow become the established second language of chess players all over the United States: “You patzer! You nebbish! You fish! You didn’t see that, did you? Sac, sac, mate! You should have left your king a little luft!” Actually, in the mouths of fourteen-year-old Ivy League faculty brats, it sounds very funny, and I sometimes join in just to keep the chatter going, but my business tonight is with Karl. So I say calmly: “Yes, Karl, I get it.” And Karl turns and lifts a snow-white eyebrow, as though to say he expected better.

“Yes? So? Good. So, what do you want? A game? Yes? Liebman over there is available, or he will be as soon as Aidoo finishes cutting off his balls. Here, have a cracker, Doctor.” Proffering the wicker bowl.
Doctor
is what he always calls me, his mocking tone another of his unsubtle insults, but ineffective because I know it for envy.

“No, thank you.”

“You do not trust my crackers? They are maybe too old for you?”

“They’re fine, Karl.”

“Then have one, Doctor.” Thrusting the bowl again. “Go ahead.”

“Thank you, but no.”

“I insist.”

I shake my head. With Karl, everything is a fight. Everything has frustrated him. They say there is an angry ex-wife someplace, sullen sons and daughters someplace else, a grandchild or two whom he never sees, and a university chair in political economy left behind when he fled Eastern Europe thirty years ago, but Karl generates rumors the way the summer sun generates heat: you have to be careful, wearing skepticism like sunblock, or you are likely to get scorched.

“Thank you,” I tell him, “but I’m not hungry.” He stares, pale eyes waiting me out. He knows I want something; he can smell hope in others, and lives to squelch it. Still, no place to go but forward. “The truth is, I have a question that calls upon your expertise.”

“My expertise,” he repeats, rubbing his perfectly shaved chin with skinny fingers. “I was not aware I had any
expertise
that could be of use to a professor of your eminence.”

His ridicule is unrelenting, but I refuse to be sidetracked. Karl is not much of a chess player, but he is a brilliant problemist, holding countless national and international titles for composing chess problems and solving them. He is the only person I know who is likely to possess the answer to the question that now troubles me.

Still, the simple experience of being in the chess club soothes my ragged nerves: the click of pieces being slammed down and the clack of the chess clocks and the hoots from the winners and the excuses from the losers, a splendid symphony of the titanic, tense, yet ultimately relaxing battle of mind versus mind. And relaxation I need, time away from . . . well, away from the very concerns that have brought me to Karl’s door.

I ask him if we can sit down, and he leads me to a corner from which he can still see the entrance, in order to make fun of whoever walks in. We sit under a cheap blowup of a book-jacket photograph of Emanuel Lasker, bearing a sloppily forged version of the great champion’s autograph—
To Karl,
and so forth—even though Karl would have been a toddler when Lasker died. Perhaps it was inscribed to some other Karl. I wonder whether he really believes anybody will be fooled, or whether he intends it as a joke.

“So—you need what?” Karl demands angrily, finally settling at the table after twice jumping from his chair to make members crossing the threshold feel unwelcome. He beckons me with his fingers. “What expertise?”

“It has to do with a chess problem,” I begin.

“So! A problem! Please set it up for me,” he commands, waving toward a board, and I sense his secret delight that I am actually inquiring about a subject on which he knows more than anybody else.

“No, no, it’s not a problem I’m having trouble solving. It’s—well, it’s more like a
kind
of problem.”

“What
kind
of problem?” he inquires sweetly, mimicry being the least of his misspent gifts.

“I need to know about—well, I seem to remember, years ago, when I was a student, you used to give these lectures about chess problems . . . .”

“Back when there were people who
cared
about chess problems. When chess was art, not the wretched computer-driven
science
it has become. In the old days, we cared more about beauty than victory. These
children”
—he waves toward the filling room, where the youngest child is in high school—“well, they have no concept. None. All they want to do is win. That is your culture. America spoils chess, as it spoils all things. Art? What art? Winning, all you Americans can think of is winning. Winning and getting rich. Your country is too young to have so much power. Too immature. Yet, because of your power, everybody pays attention. Everybody. You are teaching the whole world that only one thing matters!”

It occurs to me as I listen to this screed that Karl and my father probably would have gotten along, but I have to cut him off or he will preach to me the rest of the night.

“Yes, Karl, yes, exactly.” Word by word, I raise my voice to make him listen. “I want to talk about chess as an art.”

“Good! Good! At last I find a man of culture!” His words are filling the room, and a few of the players look up in irritation, but nobody admonishes him. Another rumor is that Karl once picked up a student who talked back and tossed him down the stairs.

“Thank you,” I murmur, uncertain whether he expects a response.

“So, how is it that I can help you?” he demands, his lips curled in an ungracious sneer.

“One of those lectures you gave—it was about a kind of theme in problems called the Excelsior. Do you remember that?”

“The Excelsior,” he snaps. “A helpmate. A silly idea. Sam Loyd’s invention. He invented it as a joke, and now we all take it seriously. Because we have no memory.” A shake of the wispy head. “So. The Excelsior. What about it?”

I hesitate, trying to frame my query in a way that will excite his interest rather than his ridicule. The helpmate is an unusual species of chess problem in which black moves first instead of white and the two sides cooperate so that, after a stated number of moves, black is checkmated. Sam Loyd, who lived and worked at the end of the nineteenth century, was a journalist and magician who invented many games and puzzles popular to this day. He was also one of the great developers of
the art of the chess problem . . . and one of my father’s heroes.
Sam Loyd turned everything upside down,
the Judge used to say, who now and again dreamed of doing the same thing, only in law, not chess.
He taught everybody that the pieces were smarter than anybody thought.

“I remember that Sam Loyd invented the Excelsior,” I tell Karl. “I remember that much from your fascinating lecture.” Pouring on the butter. “But I admit I don’t remember, um, just exactly what the Excelsior was. And, in particular”—finally selling the whole hog—“in particular, if somebody was working on a problem called the Double Excelsior with the knight . . . .”

Karl interrupts. He is tired of the sound of my voice, as he is tired of the sound of any voice not emanating from his mouth. He prefers his own answers to other people’s questions, even when nobody has asked him anything. It is easy to believe that he used to be a professor; he would fit in perfectly over at the law school. When he speaks now, his pace is rapid and clipped, as though I am wasting his time.

“The Double Excelsior with the knight is a famous chess challenge, Doctor, and a lovely one. The only difficulty is that it happens to be impossible. Listen.” He leans close to me, pointing a bony finger as though casting a spell. “The Excelsior theme has a very clear and very silly set of rules. In an Excelsior, a white pawn begins on its home square and makes exactly five moves, moving two squares on its first move, then one square on each of the next four, so that it ends on the eighth square. And even though you are no doubt rusty, Doctor, I am sure you remember what happens when a pawn reaches the eighth square? Mmmm?”