Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

She was supposed to have lunch with Mr. Booth and some people who were coming over from the embassy, but when she walked into the vast lobby of the hotel, which felt like a carpeted gymnasium with Victorian armchairs lining its walls, he was not there. The lady at the desk had a message for her on a sheet of paper: “I’m really awfully sorry, but some work has come up over here and we won’t be able to get away. I’ll be in touch.” The note was typed, with Mr. Booth’s name, also typed, at the bottom. Beth found one of the hotel restaurants—another carpeted gymnasium of a room—and managed enough Russian to order blinchiki and tea with blackberry jam. Her waiter was a serious-faced boy of about fourteen, and he served the little buckwheat cakes onto her plate and spread the melted butter and caviar and sour cream for her with a little silver spoon. Except for a group of older men in army officers’ uniforms and two authoritative-looking men in three-piece suits, there was no one else in the restaurant. After a moment another young waiter came by with a pitcher of what looked like water on a silver tray, and a little shot glass beside it. He smiled at her pleasantly. “ Vodka? ”

She shook her head quickly. “ Nyet ” and poured herself a glass of water from the cut-glass pitcher in the center of the table.

Her afternoon was free, and she could take a tour of Sverdlov Square and the Bely Gorod and the museum at St. Basil’s, but even though it was a beautiful summer day, she didn’t feel like it. Maybe in a day or two. She was tired, and she needed a nap. She had won her first game with a Russian grandmaster, and that was more important to her than anything she might see outside in the huge city that surrounded her. She would be here eight days. She could see Moscow another time. It was two in the afternoon when she finished lunch. She would take the elevator up to her room and try for a nap.

She found she was too high from beating Laev to sleep. She lay on the huge soft bed staring at the ceiling for nearly an hour and played the game with him over and over, sometimes looking for weakness in the way she had played it, sometimes luxuriating over one or another of her moves. When she came to the place where she had offered him her bishop she would say zap! aloud, or pow! It was wonderful. She had made no mistakes—or could find none. There were no weaknesses. He’d had that nervous way of drumming his fingers on the table and scowling, but when he resigned he looked only distant and tired.

Finally, rested a bit, she got out of bed, put on jeans and her white T-shirt, and opened the heavy draperies at the window. Eight floors below was some kind of convergence of boulevards with a few cars dotting their emptiness, and beyond the boulevards was a park dense with trees. She decided to take a walk.

But when she was putting on her socks and shoes, she began to think about Duhamel, whom she would be playing White against tomorrow. She knew only two of his games, and they went back a few years. There were more recent ones in the magazines she had brought; she should go over them now. Then there was his game with Luchenko that was still in progress when she left. It would be printed up along with the other three and handed out tonight when the players met for an official dinner here in the hotel. She had better do a few sit-ups and knee bends now and take a walk some other time.

The dinner was a bore, but more than that, it was infuriating. Beth was seated at one end of the long table with Duhamel, Flento and Hellström; the Russian players were at the other end with their wives. Borgov sat at the head of the table with the woman Beth had seen him with at the Mexico City Zoo. The Russians laughed throughout the meal, drinking enormous quantities of tea and gesturing broadly, while their wives looked at them in adoring silence. Even Laev, who had been so withdrawn at the tournament that morning, was ebullient. All of them seemed to be pointedly ignoring Beth’s end of the table. She tried for a while to converse with Flento, but his English was poor and his fixed smile made her uncomfortable. After a few minutes of trying, she concentrated on her meal and did what she could to tune out the noise from the other end of the table.

After dinner the tournament director handed out printed sheets with the day’s games. In the elevator she started going through them, beginning with Borgov’s. The other two were draws, but Borgov had won his. Decisively.

The driver brought her to the hall by a different route the next morning, and this time she could see the huge crowd in the street outside waiting to get in, some of them with dark umbrellas against the morning drizzle. He took her to the same side entrance she had used the day before. There were about twenty people standing there. When she got out and hurried past them into the building they applauded her. Someone shouted, “Lisabeta Harmon!” just before the doorman closed the door behind her.

On the ninth move Duhamel made an error in judgment, and Beth pounced on it, pinning his knight in front of a rook. It would cramp him for a moment while she got out her other bishop. She knew from studying his games that he was cautious and strong at defense; she had decided the night before to wait until she got a chance and then overwhelm him. By the fourteenth move she had both bishops aimed at his king, and on the eighteenth she had their diagonals opened. He hid from it, using his knights cleverly to hold her off, but she brought out her queen, and it became too much for him. His twentieth move was a hopeless try at warding her off. On the twenty-second he resigned. The game had taken barely an hour.

They had played at the far end of the stage; Borgov, playing Flento, was at the near end. As she walked past him to the subdued applause the audience gave while games were in progress, he glanced up at her briefly. It was the first time since Mexico City that he had actually looked directly at her, and the look frightened her.

On an impulse she waited for a moment just out of sight of the playing area and then came back to the edge of the curtain and looked across. Borgov’s seat was empty. Over at the other end he was standing, looking at the display board with the game Beth had just finished. He had one broad hand cupped over his jaw and the other in his coat pocket. He frowned as he studied the position. Beth turned quickly and left.

After lunch, she walked across the boulevard and went down a narrow street to the park. The boulevard turned out to be Sokolniki Street, and there was a good deal of traffic on it when she crossed in a large crowd of pedestrians. Some of the people looked at her and a few smiled, but no one spoke. The rain had ended and it was a pleasant day with the sun high in the sky and the enormous buildings that lined the street looking a little less prisonlike in the sunshine.

The park was partly forested and had along its lanes a great many cast-iron benches with old people sitting on them. She walked along, ignoring the stares as best she could, going through some places that were dark with trees, and abruptly found herself in a large square with flowers growing in little triangles dotted here and there. Under a kind of roofed pavilion in the center, people were seated in rows. They were playing chess. There must have been forty boards going. She had seen old men playing in Central Park and Washington Square in New York, but only a few at any one time. Here it was a large crowd of men filling the barn-sized pavilion and spilling out onto the steps of it.

She hesitated a moment at the worn marble stairs leading up to the pavilion. Two old men were playing on a battered cloth board on the steps. The older, toothless and bald, was playing King’s Gambit. The other was using the Falkbeer Counter Gambit against it. It looked old-fashioned to Beth, but it was clearly a sophisticated game. The men ignored her, and she walked up the steps and into the shade of the pavilion itself.