Mitch Silver - The Bookworm

Lara remembered the Russian Girls semifinal she played here. It wasn’t her home club, so she’d been given the side of the table closer to the door. The place was so full of patzers and gawkers, every newcomer who arrived pushed the crowd more tightly up against her back. She distinctly remembered going for a quick mate so she could get away from the guy with greasy, unwashed hair, leaning over her shoulder and whispering dumb moves into her ear.

Today, what with kids playing video games and texting all day, Russian chess is in such a sorry state the current world champion is Norwegian. Imagine. This all-comers match tonight against the retired fifteen-time champ was, sadly, just one more proof of the game’s decay. Twenty-two players were arrayed in a circle, and the only people pressing up against the challengers’ backs were one or two of the younger girlfriends.

Kasparov was in the middle of the circle, still going on about Russia’s need for closer economic ties with the U.S. to his captive audience of uncaring pawn pushers. Lara congratulated herself on missing most of his speech. When The Other Russia’s motley group of parties had been unable to agree on a Presidential candidate, it had rendered them irrelevant on the political landscape, Kasparov the most irrelevant of them all. But that didn’t keep him from bloviating.

Lara’s hundred-ruble entrance fee entitled her to stash her stuff in a cubbie and take down a shopworn set from the shelf by the door, under the “ net mobilnykh ” reminder. She dutifully turned off her mobile and passed by the jumble of clocks on a table; these games wouldn’t be timed.

Kasparov finished his talk to a smattering of applause. Waiting for the matches to start, Lara fingered a rook where one of the little turrets on top had broken off the castle. In public, in private, Russia was decline and fall everywhere you looked.

Garry was older than she remembered, of course, with gray mixed into his thick black hair. To make it just that much harder on himself, he was playing Black on every board, so he would be dealing with twenty-two opening moves from twenty-two eager beavers. Even so, when the bell rang, he took no more than five seconds to size up a board and push a piece ahead before taking three steps to his right and repeating the process. The twenty-two of them were like twenty-two roses and he was the only bee, going flower to flower.

She needed to do something unorthodox to get his attention, so Lara moved her knight forward. He was across from her now. Without looking up he moved his queen’s pawn up one space. Then he was gone to deal with the pimply boy on her left.

If you simply tried to defend against a great player, you’d be sliced to ribbons. L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace. Lara wanted to open up the center before she lost the advantage of playing White, and brought her own pawn out. The situation called for a flanking maneuver, a discovered check, anything to make him think a little about this game, this opponent.

By his eighth circuit of the boards, he’d already mated over half the players. With fewer competitors, he was coming around faster, leaving her barely enough time to plot a move. Here he was again. He looked at the Botvinnik Fork she was lining up and said, eyes still on the board, “Haven’t we played before? I remember your hands.”

“Yes, we played when my hands and I were a lot younger.”

He stopped and looked up. “You beat me that time, didn’t you? With the same fork.” Without waiting for her to answer, he interposed his bishop.

Five more players on the next go-round conceded defeat, either toppling over their king or reaching out for a handshake. Kasparov was practically running around the circle now that there were just the four of them left.

Lara had seen his bishop coming. She abandoned the fork and, instead, took the exposed pawn, the one the bishop had been defending, en passant. This nicely opened up the long defile for her own bishop.

She looked around the circle. One of the players on the far side was up and walking away from his board in defeat. Sore loser. The other guy on that side looked for several minutes at his position and finally stuck out his hand.

And then there were two: the history prof and the kid with the pimples who couldn’t be more than fifteen, sitting next to her. The other players and onlookers were now congregating behind them five deep. One was even standing a little too close. Just like old times! She looked over at the kid’s board. He had a nice modified Caro-Kann going. Would he castle now and bring his rook into play?

She hadn’t noticed Kasparov standing in front of her board, studying it. He startled her by saying, “I like your inventiveness,” before moving his queen out, threatening a number of nasty possibilities.

She put her hand on her queen’s bishop. Moving it she said, “There’s something I want to ask you.”

His face took on a quizzical expression. In the old Soviet days, when there were no rock stars, starry-eyed nymphets propositioned chess champions all the time. Now there was no Soviet, and she was no nymphet. He looked down and moved his other bishop forward, offering to exchange pieces. It was a simplifying move for both of them. Without speaking, he sidled over to the boy.

The teenager had castled. The great Garry Kasparov took his time before moving his king away from the square threatened by his opponent’s newly emboldened rook. Then he stepped back to Lara.

She waited for him to refocus on the board before taking his bishop. She too desired a simplifying move. He smiled a little and said, “So ask.”

She could feel the other forty people in the room press forward in anticipation. What did this woman with the Asian eyes want from the celebrity? To have her picture taken with him? Something more? Her question was not what they expected. “What would you pay to get your hands on the Bible?”

Kasparov raised a bushy eyebrow before taking her bishop. Then, without replying, he moved to his right, where the whiz kid had him in a pickle, having developed a nice three-pawns-to-two thing on the left-hand side. Lara looked back to her own board. She could retake his piece with her queen, the way he wanted her to. But she could look down the road and see only bad things if she did. Or she could do the spectacularly flamboyant thing and sacrifice her queen right now, giving him an enormous edge in material but denying him the tempo he needed for his attack. It might just be her winning line.

He was back. After a silent minute that they both spent studying the position in front of them, he said, still looking down, “This Bible you speak of. If I have to bid for it, Larissa Mendelova, then you’re not your father’s daughter.”

Lara sat there and studied the man’s face. Nothing in the room was moving—not the pieces, not the players, not even the onlookers. But tumblers were turning in her mind, over and over, back and forth. And then a mental something dropped into place, one tiny cog in a much larger mechanism, and Lara knew what she had to do.

She reached out her hand and took Kasparov’s chess piece with her queen, the move he wanted her to make. It would be over soon. Let the kid be the last man standing. Or sitting. She had things to do.

Ulrike Preisz had a sixth sense about people and desserts. Which customers would order straight off the menu and which ones had to be coaxed with the rolling trolley brimming with the Sacher tortes and apfel kugels and all the pastries mit schlag.