The Queen's Gambit (37 page)

“Excellent!” he said, in English. “A beautiful recovery!”

His words were so conciliatory that she was astonished. She was unsure what to say.

“Excellent!” he said again. He reached down and picked up his king, held it thoughtfully for a moment and set it on its side on the board. He smiled wearily. “I resign with relief.”

His naturalness and lack of rancor made her suddenly ashamed. She held out her hand to him, and he shook it warmly. “I’ve played games of yours ever since I was a small girl,” she said. “I’ve always admired you.”

He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment. “You are nineteen?”

“Yes.”

“I have gone over your games at this tournament.” He paused. “You are a marvel, my dear. I may have just played the best chess player of my life.”

She was unable to speak. She stared at him in disbelief.

He smiled at her. “You will get used to it,” he said.

The game between Borgov and Duhamel had finished sometime earlier, and both men were gone. After Luchenko left she went over to the other board and looked at the pieces, which were still in position. The Blacks were huddled around their king in a vain attempt to protect, and the White artillery was coming at its corner from all over the board. The black king lay on its side. Borgov had been playing White.

Back at the lobby of the hotel a man jumped up from one of the chairs along the wall and came smiling toward her. It was Mr. Booth. “Congratulations!” he said.

“What became of you?” she asked.

He shook his head apologetically. “Washington.”

She started to say something but let it pass. She was glad he hadn’t been bothering her.

He had a folded newspaper under his arm. He pulled it out and handed it to her. It was
Pravda
. She couldn’t penetrate the boldface Cyrillic of the headlines, but when she flipped it over, the bottom of page one had her picture on it, playing Flento. It filled three columns. She studied the caption for a moment and managed to translate it: “Surprising strength from the U.S.”

“Nice, isn’t it?” Booth said.

“Wait till this time tomorrow,” she said.

***

Luchenko was fifty-seven, but Borgov was thirty-eight. Borgov was also known as an amateur soccer player and once held a collegiate record for the javelin throw. He was said to exercise with weights during a tournament, using a gym that the government kept open late especially for him. He did not smoke or drink. He had been a master since the age of eleven. The alarming thing about playing over his games from
Chess Informant
and
Shakmatni v USSR
was that he lost so few of them.

But she had the white pieces. She must hang on to that advantage for dear life. She would play the Queen’s Gambit. Benny and she had discussed that for hours, months before, and finally agreed that that was the way to go if she should get White against him. She did not want to play against Borgov’s Sicilian, much as she knew about the Sicilian, and the Queen’s Gambit was the best way to avoid it. She could hold him off if she kept her head. The problem was that he didn’t make mistakes.

When she came across the stage to an auditorium more crowded than she believed possible, with every inch of the aisles filled and standees packed behind the back row of seats, and a hush fell over the enormous crowd of people and she looked over to see Borgov, already seated, waiting for her, she realized that it wasn’t only his remorseless chess that she had to contend with. She was terrified of the man. She had been terrified of him ever since she saw him at the gorilla cage in Mexico City. He was merely looking down at the untouched black pieces now, but her heart and breath stopped at the sight of him. There was no sign of weakness in that figure, motionless at the board, oblivious of her or of the thousands of other people who must be staring at him. He was like some menacing icon. He could have been painted on the wall of a cave. She walked slowly over and sat at the whites. A soft, hushed applause broke out in the audience.

The referee pressed the button, and Beth heard her clock begin ticking. She moved pawn to queen four, looking down at the pieces. She was not ready to look at his face. Along the stage the other three games had started. She heard the movements of players behind her settling in for the morning’s work, the click of clock buttons being pushed. Then everything was silent. Watching the board, she saw only the back of his hand, its stubby fingers with their coarse, black hair above the knuckles, as he moved his pawn to queen four. She played pawn to queen bishop four, offering the gambit pawn. The hand declined it, moving pawn to king four. The Albin Counter Gambit. He was resurrecting an old response, but she knew the Albin. She took the pawn, glanced briefly at his face and glanced away. He played pawn to queen five. His face had been impassive and not quite as frightening as she had feared. She played her king’s knight and he played his queen’s. The dance was in progress. She felt small and lightweight. She felt like a little girl. But her mind was clear, and she knew the moves.

His seventh move came as a surprise, and it was clear immediately that it was something he had saved to spring on her. She gave it twenty minutes, penetrated it as well as she could, and responded with a complete deviation from the Albin. She was glad to get out of it and into the open. They would fight it out from here with their wits.

Borgov’s wits, it turned out, were formidable. By the fourteenth move he had equality and possibly an edge. She steeled herself, kept her eyes from his face, and played the best chess she knew, developing her pieces, defending everywhere, watching every opportunity for an opened file, a clear diagonal, a doubled pawn, a potential fork or pin or hurdle or skewer. This time she saw the whole board in her mind and caught every change of balance in the power that shifted over its surface. Each particle of it was neutralized by its counter-particle, but each was ready to discharge itself if allowed and break the structure open. If she let his rook out, it would tear her apart. If he allowed her queen to move to the bishop file, his king’s protection would topple. She must not permit his bishop to check. He could not allow her to raise the rook pawn. For hours she did not look at him or the audience or even the referee. In the whole of her mind, in the whole of her attention she saw only those embodiments of danger—knight, bishop, rook, pawn, king and queen.

It was Borgov who spoke the word “Adjourn.” He said it in English. She looked at her clock uncomprehendingly before she realized that neither flag had fallen and that Borgov’s was closer to it than hers. He had seven minutes left. She had fifteen. She looked at her score sheet. The last move was number forty. Borgov wanted to adjourn the game. She looked behind her; the rest of the stage was empty, the other games were over.

Then she looked at Borgov. He had not loosened his tie or taken off his coat or rumpled his hair. He did not look tired. She turned away. The moment she saw that blank, quietly hostile face, she was terrified.

***

Booth was in the lobby. This time he was with half a dozen reporters. There was the man from the New York
Times
and the woman from the
Daily Observer
and the Reuters man and the UPI. There were two new faces among them as they came up to her in the lobby.

“I’m tired as hell,” she told Booth.

“I bet you are,” he said. “But I promised these people…” He introduced the new ones. The first was from
Paris-Match
and the second from
Time
. She looked at the latter and said, “Will I be on the cover?” and he replied, “Are you going to beat him?” and she did not know how to answer. She was frightened. Yet she was even on the board and somewhat ahead on time. She had not made any errors. But neither had Borgov.

There were two photographers and she posed for pictures with them, and when one of them asked if he could shoot her in front of a chess set she took them up to her room, where her board was still set up with the position from the Luchenko game. That already seemed a long time ago. She sat at the board for them, not really minding it—welcoming it, in fact—while they shot rolls of film from all over the room. It was like a party. While the photographers studied her and adjusted their cameras and switched lenses around, the reporters asked her questions. She knew she should be setting up the position of her adjourned game and concentrating on it to find a strategy for tomorrow, but she welcomed this noisy distraction.

Borgov would be in that suite of his now, probably with Petrosian and Tal—and maybe with Luchenko and Laev and the rest of the Russian establishment. Their expensive coats would be off and their sleeves rolled up and they would be exploring her position, looking for weaknesses already there or ten moves down the line, probing at the arrangement of white pieces as though it were her body and they were surgeons ready to dissect. There was something obscene in the image of them doing it. They would go on with it far into the night, eating supper over the board on that huge table in Borgov’s parlor, preparing him for the next morning. But she liked what she was doing right now. She did not want to think about the position. And she knew, too, that the position wasn’t the problem. She could exhaust its possibilities in a few good hours after dinner. The problem was the way she felt about Borgov. It was good to forget that for a while.

They asked about Methuen, and as always she was restrained. But one of them pressed it a bit, and she found herself saying, “They stopped me from playing. It was a punishment,” and he picked up on that immediately. It sounded Dickensian, he said. “Why would they punish you like that?” Beth said, “I think they were cruel on principle. At least the director was. Mrs. Helen Deardorff. Will you print that?” She was talking to the man from
Time
. He shrugged. “That’s for the legal department. If you win tomorrow, they might.”

“They weren’t all cruel,” she said. “There was a man named Fergussen, some kind of attendant. He loved us, I think.”

The man from UPI who had interviewed her on her first day in Moscow spoke up. “Who taught you to play if they didn’t want you doing it?”

“His name was Shaibel,” she said, thinking of that wall of pictures in the basement. “William Shaibel. He was the janitor.”

“Tell us about it,” the woman from the
Observer
said.

“We played chess in the basement, after he taught me how.”

Clearly they loved it. The man from
Paris-Match
shook his head, smiling. “The
janitor
taught you to play chess?”

“That’s right,” Beth said, with an involuntary tremor in her voice. “Mr. William Shaibel. He was a damn good player. He spent a lot of time at it, and he was good.”

After they left she took a warm bath, stretching out in the enormous cast-iron tub. Then she put on her jeans and began setting up the pieces. But the minute she had it on the board and began to examine it, all the tightness came back. In Paris her position at this point had looked stronger than this, and she had lost. She turned from the desk and went to the window, opening the draperies and looking out on Moscow. The sun was still high, and the city below looked far lighter and more cheerful than Moscow was supposed to look. The distant park where the old men played chess was bright with green, but she was frightened. She did not think she had the strength to go on and beat Vasily Borgov. She did not want to think about chess. If there had been a television set in her room, she would have turned it on. If she had had a bottle of anything, she would have drunk it. She thought briefly of calling room service and stopped herself just in time.

She sighed and went back to the chessboard. It had to be studied. She had to have a plan for tomorrow morning at ten.

***

She awoke before dawn and lay in bed for a while before looking at her watch. It was five-thirty. Two hours and a half. She had slept two hours and a half. She closed her eyes grimly and tried to get back to sleep. But it didn’t work. The position of the adjourned game forced itself back into her mind. There were her pawns, and there was her queen. There was Borgov’s. She saw it, she could not stop seeing it, but it made no sense. She had stared at it for hours the night before, trying to get some kind of plan together for the rest of the game, moving the pieces around, sometimes on the real board and sometimes in her head, but it was no good. She could push the queen bishop pawn or bring the knight over to the kingside or put the queen on bishop two. Or on king two. If Borgov’s sealed move was knight to bishop five. If he had moved his queen, the responses were different. If he was trying to make her analysis a waste, he might have played the king bishop. Five-thirty. Four and a half hours until game time. Borgov would have his moves ready now and a game plan arrived at by consultation; he would be sleeping like a rock. From outside the window came a sudden noise like a distant alarm, and she jumped. It was just some Russian fire drill or something, but her hands shook for a moment.

She had kasha and eggs for breakfast and sat down behind the board again. It was seven forty-five. But even with three cups of tea, she somehow could not penetrate it. She tried doggedly to get her mind to open, to let her imagination work for her the way it so often worked over a chessboard, but nothing came. She could see nothing but her responses to Borgov’s future threats. It was passive, and she knew it was passive. It had beaten her in Mexico City and it could beat her again. She got up to open the draperies, and as she turned back to the board, the telephone rang.

She stared at it. During her week in this room, it had not rung once. Not even Mr. Booth had called her. Now it was ringing in short bursts, very loudly. She went over and picked it up. A woman’s voice said something in Russian. She couldn’t make out a word of it.

“This is Beth Harmon,” she said.

The voice said something else in Russian. There was a clicking in the receiver, and a male voice came through as clearly as if it were calling from the next room: “If he moves the knight, hit him with the king rook pawn. If he goes for the king bishop, do the same. Then open up your queen file. This is costing me a bundle.”