White Death (3 page)

Drug dealers worked shifts along the development’s main commercial stretch, punching clocks as diligently as stevedores. You wanted to go get something from the store, even a loaf of bread or a bar of candy, you had to walk past them.
This is the life
, their very presence seemed to hiss,
this is the
life, this is the only life you’ll ever know
. In the daytime,
they
shouted and snarled at each other: when night fell, they
started shooting.

Some of them tried their luck with Regina: she was a good-looking girl, and still only twenty. She turned them down, politely but firmly. A couple of her wannabe suitors weren’t used to women turning them down, and liked to use their fists on such occasions: but there was something about Regina which made them meekly accept it and walk away.

One day, shortly before Kwasi’s fourth birthday, Regina took him into Manhattan for the day. They walked through Washington Square Park, past the corner of the world which is forever chess: an array of checkered tables in poured concrete, and round them an endless flow of players and spectators. All human life is here: alcoholic hustlers who’ll bet you a handful of dollars a game, Eastern European grandmasters down on their luck, bankers and lawyers in their lunch hours, students, bums, sages, fools. And the play is strictly speed chess. No two-hour games in reverential library-style silence: five minutes each player, tops, with trash-talking not so much encouraged as mandatory.

Kwasi stood to watch one of the games, his little face barely at table level, so he was peering through the pieces rather than over them as adult players do. The game had ended in a flurry of moves and insults, both players’ laughter deflecting any malice. Come on, Regina said, game’s over, let’s go.

One more, Mom. Can I watch one more?

She’d been at work all week, farming Kwasi out to friends. She owed him a little indulgence, no? Sure, honey, one more. Just one more.

One more became one more after that, and another one, and another one. Nine games later, when a hotshot lawyer had been checkmated seven ways to Sunday by one of the regular park hustlers and grudgingly handed over the five bucks stake, Kwasi turned to him and said, quietly but precisely: ‘You missed checkmate in three moves.’

Regina, swaying from foot to foot in her impatience to get going, stopped dead.

She knew two things for sure. First, Kwasi had never so much as seen a chess set in his life, let alone played with one. Second, he wasn’t the kind of kid to come out with something like this unless he meant it. She’d always known he was bright: talking at six months, reading at a year, glued to
The Price Is Right
at eighteen months – but this, if this was what she thought it was … well, this was something else entirely.

Lawyer and hustler both laughed: the hustler with some good humor, the lawyer with none. The hustler, breath sweet from his paper-bag rum, leaned toward Kwasi. ‘Mate in three, huh?’

Kwasi said nothing: simply put the pieces back to where they’d been halfway through the game, and played through the three-move sequence. When he finished, the lawyer took the pieces from him and played it through himself, muttering ‘I’ll be damned, I’ll be damned’ with every slap of piece on board.

‘I done seen
all
that at the time,’ the hustler said. Kwasi merely looked at him, his face completely still like a little black Buddha, until the hustler’s mouth cracked into a goofy raggedy-tooth smile and he threw up his hands in mock surrender. ‘OK, kid, OK, you got me. I never saw that neither, none of that. How old are you?’

‘Three years, eleven months and twenty-six days.’

‘A’iiiight. It’s good to be precise. And when you learn to play chess?’

‘Thirty-eight minutes ago.’

The hustler laughed again, until he saw that Kwasi was serious.

When it came to chess, Serious was Kwasi’s middle name. This is my boy, Regina would proclaim, and he’s not taking no crap off of nobody. Not in the years he spent playing all comers in the park, and certainly not when some of them tried to cheat by making illegal moves or subtly nudging a piece off its square; not when people tried to trash-talk him, because the regulars understood that Kwasi didn’t trash-talk and that, get this, it didn’t matter, ’cos he was so damn good; not in the proper tournaments he played, the ones that had TV crews and arbiters and trophies; not at school when the other kids swung between admiring his talent and calling him a freak; not when the cops came round after yet another gang murder to ask whether he’d seen anything from his apartment window six stories up; not when as a teenager he threw away his polo shirts and acrylic sweaters, started wearing long black leather coats and motorbike boots, and ran his hair into dreadlocks; not even when he went on
Letterman
or
Conan
or
Leno
or any of those shows. He didn’t give a shit about what folks did or said to unsettle him, he didn’t take any shit off of them. He wasn’t in the shit business.

And all the time around him, the endless whispering undercurrent of hope and fear:
the next Fischer, the next Fischer, the next Fischer,
for Fischer had been both genius and lunatic, the two sides of him waxing and waning against each other until the lunatic had taken over, ringing radio stations after 9/11 to exult in the destruction of the Twin Towers and tell the world that America had had it coming for years.

Wherever Kwasi was, so too would Regina be. To give him more time to play chess, now his tournament winnings were enough to let her go part-time at work, she pulled him out of school and began to home-tutor him herself. The deal was simple: he played chess, she did everything else. She dealt with anything that might stress or distract him even before he knew it existed.

Kwasi had a growth spurt around thirteen or fourteen, and after that people who didn’t know them sometimes thought that he and Regina were brother and sister, or even boyfriend and girlfriend, as she still looked so young. When he went to college – none of the Ivy Leagues would take him, but the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, offered him a chess scholarship and a major in computer science, and he led the varsity chess team to three consecutive Pan-American Championships – she came with him, setting the two of them up in an apartment near campus.

In America of all places, there’s fame and there’s
fame
; and there was no doubt as to the moment when Kwasi made the jump from one to the other. Three years ago, at the age of twenty-one, he played for the world championship in Kazan, the ancient Tatar capital which was now part of modern-day Russia, a night’s train ride east of
Moscow. His opponent was Rainer Tartu, a thirty-something
Estonian (long after the fall of communism, the old Soviet republics still dominated the chess world) with wire-rimmed spectacles, a bouffant of sandy hair, an expression of benevolent openness, the fluent English of the international cosmopolitan, and the long slim fingers of a concert pianist, which was what he was when he wasn’t playing chess.

The match was twelve games, with a tie-break procedure if the scores were still level at the end. A dozen US reporters and analysts went out to Kazan to cover the match: the networks carried highlights, and there was full, real-time, coverage over the Internet.

To start with, it all seemed for nothing. Kwasi, this great natural talent, this badass who’d steamrollered all the other candidates to get here, who wore a suit at the board because those were the rules but who wouldn’t cut his hair – indeed, he’d woven red, white and blue ends into his dreads – Kwasi was off the pace.

Tartu won the first game at a canter, played out draws for the second and third, won the fourth and had the better of draws in the fifth and sixth. A succession of draws can appear boring, but these were anything but. They were see-saw games where the initiative swung first one way and then the other, where pressure led to mistakes and mistakes led to pressure. Each player had to dig deep within themselves to hold the line, slugging each other to a battered and exhausted standstill, knowing that it was just as important not to let your opponent draw blood as it was to try to hurt him: because sometimes when the blood starts to flow, it’s hard to staunch.

With one point for a win, half for a draw and none for a loss, Tartu was 4–2 up at halfway. Kwasi looked shell-shocked, and all Regina’s soothing could do nothing to stop the rot. Kwasi was letting it slide through his fingers, little by little. The reporters wanted to go home.

Game seven was another draw, though for the first time in the match Kwasi was the better player. But draws weren’t going to be enough: he had to win two games of the remaining five even to force a tie-break.

In game eight, he finally, triumphantly, magnificently got it right, playing a game of such breathtaking brilliance that when Tartu resigned, he – Tartu – led the audience in a standing ovation. Kwasi peered through his dreads in shy appreciation.

Now it was Tartu’s turn to look shell-shocked. He lost game nine inside twenty moves, almost unheard of at this
level. Four and a half points each, but the momentum was
all with Kwasi. The reporters were getting their front pages again. Game ten, Kwasi missed a difficult winning chance and had to settle for a draw.

Then came game eleven. In a routine opening, Kwasi made a knight move that brought gasps from the spectators in the hall. Even a casual player could see it was a blunder. Tartu, blinking in astonishment, looked at the position, then at Kwasi, then at the arbiter, then back at Kwasi, then back at the position. There was no trap, no swindle. A genuine, twenty-four-carat mistake, or so it seemed. Five moves later, Kwasi resigned.

In the press conference afterwards, Kwasi explained what had happened. He’d reached out to move the knight, and as he’d done so, he’d realized it would be a mistake: but before he’d been able to withdraw his hand, he’d felt the tips of his fingers brush the head of the knight. Chess rules state that if you touch a piece, you have to move it. He’d touched the knight, so he’d had to move it.

Sitting next to Kwasi, in front of the world’s press, Tartu shook his head in astonishment. I didn’t see you touch it, he said. The arbiter concurred: Me neither. Kwasi could have chosen a different move, a better move, and no one would have been any the wiser. How did he feel about that?

He shrugged. At the chessboard, he said, rules are rules. Nobody’s fault but mine.

And now he needed to win the last game just to take the
match into a tie-break. Tartu could try to close things down,
go for the easy draw. Kwasi would have to shake things up: go for the victory even at the risk of losing.

Mikhail Tal, a former world champion and the most dashing player the modern game has seen, once said: ‘You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where two plus two equals five, and where the path leading out is only wide enough for one.’

In game twelve, that’s exactly what Kwasi did. He piled complication on complication, trying to scramble Tartu’s powers of concentration and calculation. Feint left and go right: feint right and go left. Knights jumping around at close quarters, rooks battering down open lines. In between moves, Kwasi got up and walked around, pawing at the ground like a bull.

A well-aimed, well-timed counterpunch from Tartu would probably have taken the game back to Kwasi, but Tartu was – as Kwasi had hoped – too conservative, too wedded to the idea that he could ride out the storm if he battened down the hatches. Kwasi sacrificed two pieces and then a third to rip open Tartu’s defenses; and when Tartu finally extended a hand in resignation, he looked almost relieved that the agony was over.

Tie-break: first ever in a world championship.

The twelve games so far had been played with classical time controls: each player given two hours to make forty moves. Now there would be four games at 25/10: twenty-five minutes for all moves, with ten seconds added to each player’s clock every time he made a move. Kwasi won the first game and Tartu the second. The third and fourth were both draws. Still level.

The ratchet got even tighter, and up went the excitement. Two games at 5/3: five minutes for all moves, three seconds added per move. If the scores were still level after these two games, another set of two would be played, and another, up to five: ten possible games in all. NBC cleared its schedule and started beaming the matches live. Viewing figures later released would show that, on average, quarter of a million more people started watching every minute as news of the showdown spread across America.

Kwasi won the first game. He was five minutes from the world title, all he needed was a draw – and he blew it, letting Tartu’s pieces strangle the life out of his position. Third and fourth games, both draws. Fifth game, Tartu won, and now he had the advantage. That meant shit or bust for Kwasi: win or go home.

He crouched low on his seat like a panther, wild and beautiful. When he reached across the board, it seemed that he was not so much shuffling wooden figures from one square to another as unleashing some long-hidden primal force. The cameras zoomed in on his face. He winced in agony, gasped in delight. He put his head in his hands. When he bared his teeth, a couple of the spectators in the front row recoiled instinctively.

This wasn’t just chess anymore, the commentators panted breathlessly: this was heavyweight boxing, this was a five-set Wimbledon final, this was Ali and Frazier, Borg and McEnroe, where the momentum swings first one way and then the other, and both men can practically smell the prize they want so much.

Frantic scramble with seconds left for both men in game six, but it was the flag on Tartu’s clock that dropped first. He’d lost on time. They were even again. The crowd stamped and cheered, not because they were against Tartu but because they recognized that what they were seeing was a once-in-a-lifetime drama.