“Nothing in particular.”
“Which is nothing at all, of course. Lotte says you’re actually quite good at chess, a diamond in the rough. How good are you?”
“I’m okay.”
“Just okay? Maybe twenty players in the world make a living at chess. Are you one of the twenty best players in the world?”
“I don’t know.”
“You aren’t even ranked because you don’t play in real tournaments. Invisibility might be a shrewd tactic if you’re hustling games in a railroad station, my friend, but to the chess world, you don’t exist.”
Lotte returned with madeleines.
Sternberg produced a smile. “Lotte, I was just telling your friend the good news. The Stalin portraits are beginning to sell again.”
Zhenya and Lotte made nice for ten minutes. His glance stole to the paintings of snowbound villages, peasant revels, bear cubs following their mother. Nothing warmed a Russian heart like bears up a tree.
Later, when Zhenya and Lotte were alone in a café, she said, “I love my grandfather. He’s a sweet man and a fantastic artist. But to spend your life denying your art? Now no one knows him and it’s too late.”
• • •
Maxim was driving Arkady back to the airport in the rain. The ZIL’s windshield wipers slapped back and forth. Foot traffic had become huddled umbrellas. Boots made an appearance. At sidewalk stalls, shopkeepers stretched tarpaulins over boxes of fruit, a table of Prada knockoffs, a row of bicycles.
“Pull over,” Arkady said.
“What now? You’re going to miss your flight,” Maxim said.
“I’ll be right back.”
He stepped over a gutter and slipped between the water that drained from either end of an awning that read KOENIG BICYCLES. A repairman in a plastic bag repositioned bikes. Another, in the dark of the shop, fine- tuned a wheel, spinning it until the spokes blurred and hummed. The more Maxim gestured for Arkady to hurry, the more Arkady was the picture of someone in a mood to browse among pennants, key chains, calipers, bright biking gear and brighter helmets.
Posters of the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia, Tour St. Petersburg streamed on the walls in one endless, continuous race. A bulletin board announced local races from Kaliningrad to Chkalovsk, to Zelenogradsk, to the Curonian Spit.
“It’s an obsession, isn’t it?” Arkady ran his hand over a rack of glossy helmets.
The man with the wheel murmured, “It becomes your fucking life. You can’t let it take over.”
“Well put,” Arkady said. “You do a lot of rides?”
His friend said, “We have a club that rents bikes and tents. We’re very sociable. I would suggest a nice local tour from Kaliningrad to Zelenogradsk or Baltijsk. We go overnight, build a campfire, have a dip in the lake. It’s kind of an adult tour.”
Arkady studied the array of pennants. “It looks like you do races too. Do you use your own bikes?”
“Of course. I mean, we’re showing off the goods, aren’t we?”
“Do you ever fly with them?”
“Sure.”
“Do they go as cargo?”
The man at the wheel stopped it short. “Fuck no. I’m going to put a thousand-dollar bike in the hands of those apes in cargo? We buy a seat for the bike and stow it in the vestibule.”
“Your name is. .?”
“Kurt. I’m Kurt, he’s Karl.”
“A thousand dollars? Is that the limit?”
“There is no limit.”
“Ten thousand dollars?”
“We can do that,” said Karl.
“Ten thousand dollars? You’re wearing a plastic bag and you’ve got bikes selling for ten thousand dollars?”
“Not in the shop. Not at the moment.”
“But we can get whatever you want,” said Kurt.
“I want an Ercolo Pantera.”
This was the point at which they should have tried to steer him to another “top of the line” bike in the shop. Instead, they asked, “What would a Pantera be doing in Kaliningrad?”
That was the question, wasn’t it? Arkady thought.
20
“Whose place is this?” Lotte asked.
“A guy I know.” Zhenya looked into the refrigerator, where a husk of cheese kept a lonely vigil.
“He lets you have a key? He must be a good friend.”
“Sort of. He’s an investigator.”
“Really.” Arkady had allowed Anya to hang photographs of convicts and their tattoos, with an accent on dragons, Madonnas and spiderwebs, and they caught the girl’s eye. “I saw these in a magazine.”
“Would you like a beer?” Zhenya popped two bottles.
“Is your friend a little strange?”
“Arkady? They don’t come more ordinary.”
Lotte walked along the bookcases. “He really likes to read.”
“Your beer. I’m afraid it’s warm.”
Offhand she said, “It’s British. Warm beer is British, cold is American.”
“Okay, here’s your British beer.” He was feeling socially inept. He knew it was a mistake to bring her to Arkady’s apartment. It was all too rushed, but he had no other place to take her. He had expected her to beg off with some excuse about a lecture or a previous engagement. In the official chess world he was a bottom-feeder. Fortunately, he did know how to move the pieces. Chess was alive with traps, gambits, the shepherding of a passed pawn or the menace of rooks aligned like cannon. It was drama. The Sicilian Defense smacked of black deeds in back alleys. Each notation read like a story. No matter how lowly, every player brushed shoulders with the game’s immortals. Morphy and his shoe fetish. Fischer the genius and Fischer the crank. The serene Capablanca and Alekhine, a glutton who ate with his fingers and choked to death on beefsteak.
Besides chess, they had zero in common, Zhenya thought. A little adventure with a hustler was how she’d remember the day. He figured she was probably nineteen, which made her more than a year older, and most likely had her life mapped out: a year of rebellion, followed by a few minor chess trophies, marriage to a millionaire, children, a series of affairs with oligarchs, finally tossed overboard in Monte Carlo.
“What are your plans?” she asked.
“Plans? Join the army and have my brains kicked in.”
“Seriously, what do you want?”
“To be rich, I guess. Have a nice car.”
“What about a home?”
“I suppose,” Zhenya said, although he couldn’t picture what a home would look like.
“You’re so evasive.”
So she said, but he knew if he told her the truth, she would bolt.
“It’s complicated.”
“It’s simple. I heard you shot somebody.”
“Who says that?”
“Everybody. That’s why they’re afraid to play chess with you.”
