best players and there was nothing to do but be a good sport, although when he offered his hand to Zhenya the boy regarded him with contempt.
“Anyway, we have a champion.” The presenter tried to be bright. “And, fortunately, we also have a bonus match between young Evgeny Lysenko and Grandmaster Ilya Platonov.”
“Are you all right?” Arkady asked.
“A little lightheadedness,” Platonov said. “Have you got a smoke?”
Arkady accompanied him out of the van into the cold bite of a wind that drove flakes across curlicues of ice. Both men sucked fiercely on their cigarettes.
“It’s not a tournament that Zhenya prepared for,” Platonov said. “There was never any doubt about the tournament.”
At the club door, the security squad waved and called Platonov’s name.
“They’re waiting for you.”
“It’s hard to explain to someone who is not a player,” Platonov said. “There is a time in your life when you imagine chess so perfectly that your intuition is as solid as any game from any book. Like music, if you can hear the entire suite in one moment. You may seem to move your pieces in a hurry but you’re simply following a score. And then one day this magical ear disappears and you find yourself hawking chess sets to schoolboys for a living. Or worse.” The door of the television van popped open, and the producer yelled for Platonov to move inside the club. Platonov hunched his shoulders. “One day it’s just gone.”
Platonov played white. Between the parking lot and the chessboard he seemed to have found his usual arrogance and wrapped it around himself like a cape. In rapid moves he sacrificed three pawns, opened up the center and developed his pieces while black was still digesting its easy prizes. For the first time since the opening round, Zhenya seemed surprised. Arkady stood in the shadow of a column, out of the boy’s line of sight, and followed the game on a screen from the overhead camera. If Arkady had expected the old man to play it safe and eke out a win he was wrong. Platonov had given Zhenya a huge material advantage. On the other hand, Zhenya’s power pieces hadn’t moved, while the grandmaster’s bishops and knights were already on the battlefield. It was an assault that was too reckless for chess. It was pure blitz.
Zhenya rested his chin in his hand and, with the calm of a young gargoyle at a height, looked down on the pieces on the board. Arkady tried to imagine what it would be like to see the game as Zhenya must. The bishop slyly insinuating himself on the diagonal, the knight leaping barricades, the queen a diva, the king anxious and nearly useless. Or was that too romantic? Did Zhenya see the game merely in bytes, like a computer?
Zhenya pushed his forward pawn closer to the fray, a provocation, and the assault began. As fast as they could hit the clock, Platonov attacked and Zhenya defended. They shuttled pieces in, snatched prizes out, castled under pressure, offered and declined gambits. The thought process could not have been involved, Arkady thought; reason wasn’t enough. This was tempo, pressure, intuition. The shape of the board changed and changed again. Even on the club’s large game screen it was hard to follow the game’s ebb and flow, and just when Arkady expected the entire match would be over in less than a minute Platonov paused to assess the damage. Half the pieces were off the board and somehow, as if Zhenya had reshuffled a deck of cards, the situation was reversed. Platonov had an extra pawn and Zhenya, on the strength of doubled rooks, controlled the center.
Seconds went by. Platonov looked like a man trying to hold a gate closed against a greater force. Arkady wondered whether the grandmaster was trying to find, in the hundred thousand games stored in his mind, a similar position. His precious pawn was an isolated pawn but it was his only winning chance and he assigned a rook to protect it, which opened a hole that Zhenya’s knight immediately filled. Platonov covered up like a hedgehog, which was effective in chess. Blitz, however, was not meant for hedgehogs because moves had to be made at once, at once, at once. He fended off one threat after another and, at the same time, nursed his pawn toward the eighth rank and possible transformation into a second queen. The black king took up the hunt, angling across open squares toward the pawn. The white king was smothered by its own defenses.
While Platonov paused again someone sneezed and Zhenya glanced at the rows of seated spectators. He drew his head in between his shoulders and looked again. The grandmaster was still studying the board when Zhenya laid down the black king.
Platonov was astonished. “What are you doing? You have the advantage.”
“I counted moves. You’d win.”
The teacher in Platonov was outraged. “You counted wrong. How could you do that?”
“You win.”
“Hit me,” said a parrot.
The television van was gone. The tournament participants and their supporters had left. The girl who played Zhenya had waited for half an hour in the cold but, shivering, had given up. Arkady waited by his car at the street end of the casino parking lot and Victor and Platonov stayed with him. They’d tried sitting in the car but the windows fogged up.
“The little shit gave me the game,” Platonov said. “It’s insulting. Then he goes to the restroom and disappears.”
Victor wiped his nose and regarded the minarets of the Golden Khan. “Does it snow in Samarkand? Sounds like the title of a song, doesn’t it? ‘When It Snows Again in Samarkand.’”
In spite of his throat, Arkady had to ask Victor, “Did you sneeze? When Zhenya looked up, was it at you?”
“I have allergies.”
“To what?”
“Things. Certain colognes.”
Which begged the question, wearing or drinking, Arkady thought.
“Anyway, Zhenya did not see me,” Victor said.
“I don’t need charity,” Platonov said. “And they never did let me talk about the chess club.”
“That would have made gripping television.” Victor stamped his feet to stay warm. “Oh, look. Someone actually has to do some work. Front door security has been issued snow shovels. Work beneath their station. So sad.”
The throat was closing Arkady down to a whisper. He asked Platonov, “How good is Zhenya?”
“You saw.”
“Really?”
“Complicated.”
“Speak of the devil,” Victor said.
Zhenya came out of the Golden Khan in the grip of a man who hustled him past security, who bent over their shovels and gave him no more than a glance. At fifty yards Arkady could see that one side of Zhenya’s face was deep red. The man wore a mismatched canvas work coat over suit pants and pointed shoes.
The scene was wrong. Zhenya’s face was starting to swell and turn one eye into a slit. Arkady had never seen him cry before. It was hard to believe no one at the door asked why. Halfway to Arkady, the man reached into a trash can, took out a dirty hand towel, and unwrapped a gun. Security cameras topped poles all around the lot; someone was bound to notice. Victor and Platonov stayed by Arkady’s side.
The man had a thin face, long nose and stringy blond hair. Exactly what Zhenya would grow up to look like, Arkady realized. This was the missing father, Lysenko pere. The man’s eyes were different, charred, as if he’d looked too long at the sun and at close range his canvas jacket gave off the acrid smell of tar. He was the Tar Man, the foreman of the road crew that had labored so futilely all week on the street that ran before Arkady’s building. Zhenya tried to squirm free and the man shook him like a goose held by the neck.
The Tar Man shouted as he marched up to Arkady, “He tore up the check. He saw me and quit the game and when they gave him the check he tore it up. Part of that thousand dollars is mine. I’m the one who taught him.”
“Then the money is yours. Fifty-fifty?” Arkady was agreeable. He wanted to negotiate before too much help showed up.
“Five hundred dollars, right now.”
“Give me the gun.” It was another antique Nagant, like Georgy’s.
“First the money.”
