Tactics of Conquest (8 page)

As he settles himself into his seat once again he does so with a little bit of a hop, an unsightly scuffle that masks the trembling of his knees as he eases himself into the huge, stuffed chair. He squints at the board checking to see whether I have made my own move and then, amazingly, leans forward, places a shaking forefinger on my knee and says hoarsely, “David, we’ve got to talk.”

I yank my knee away, huddle over the board, shake my head desperately.

“I mean it, David,” he says. “I really mean it. We have things to discuss.”

Still I say nothing. I maintain my rigid posture, cross my arms in front of my face. I find it hardly credible that this is going on.

“I’m quite serious, David,” he says in an even more determined tone. “We have a number of things to discuss. It can’t be put off any longer.”

Finally I say something. “You fool,” I say, “we can’t talk. We’re playing chess.”

“I know we’re playing chess. That’s what I want to talk about.”

“There’s nothing to say.”

“We have a great deal to say, David. We’ve got to go backstage and discuss things.”

“You idiot,” I say, “don’t you know that there’s coverage of this match unprecedented in all history? There are cameras and microphones all over the stage. They’re listening to every word you’re saying.”

“No, they’re not, David. Remember, it was you who insisted that there be no microphones. They can’t pick up a word.”

“So they’re lip-reading.”

“There are no lip-readers here, David,” Louis says with an uncomfortable laugh. “There may be lip-readers on television but what difference does that make? They can’t do anything to either of us for talking, chatting it up, and that’s what I’m doing. Besides, I said we should go backstage, didn’t I? We can have privacy there.”

“You’re got to be crazy,” I say. “We have absolutely nothing to discuss.”

“Oh, yes, we do,” he says with a nervous little giggle. “You’d be amazed at what we have to discuss. Important new information has reached me which is of the highest importance.”

“I don’t care about your information. I don’t care about the highest importance. Stop talking and let me concentrate or I’ll call the referee and have you disqualified for harassment.”

His forefinger taps my knee again, then, shockingly, his entire palm lies across it, stroking, molding, much as one might touch a woman’s breast. “Don’t be a fool, David,” he says, “this is terribly important. Would I want to talk with you if it weren’t terribly important? Believe me, I hate you just as much as you hate me. But this goes far beyond individual disagreements.” He loops the other hand in his copious beard, begins to tug and whisk away at little edges. “Far beyond, far beyond,” he says in a singing monotone, “and it will be very much to your disadvantage not to listen to me.”

“All right,” I say, “all right, I’ll talk to you. But it can’t be here, in front of all these cameras.”

“Well, of course not,” Louis says, his dishonest face beaming. “What do you think I am, mad or something? I’m going to leave the stage now. At the completion of your next move you can join me backstage and we’ll be able to talk then out of sight.”

“Won’t they think that peculiar? The two of us talking back there, you not coming out here to make your next move? You’ll be losing time on your clock, too.”

“Oh, that’s perfectly all right,” Louis says in a suddenly distracted fashion. “I don’t care about the clock-time lost; I’m just going to beat the hell out of you anyway, David, you know that. Besides,” he says, “besides, it won’t take very long.”

He stands, turns, leaves the stage immediately in his strangely rigid posture, his body held tightly as if against unfavorable breezes or tacking winds,
making his way to the backstage area. Alone on the stage again I feel suddenly shriveled, exposed; I glance to right and left in a somewhat furtive, paranoid manner, wondering if I am being observed closely or whether our brief, intense conversation has been picked up on hidden devices or listened to by the Overlords.

Everything seems quite normal, however (which is to say that everything is stunningly abnormal, but no different from the way it was a few moments ago). The audience is still murmuring in the background (probably still talking about the FIDE official), the lights are hot and bright, the Overlords are scurrying through the cables in their self-important and purplish way. The team of referees, one from each sector, who have had very little to do with the progress of the match, are in one of their eternal consultations below the lip of the stage, probably fighting, as is their wont, about who will have ultimate authority. It is very difficult to establish any kind of relationship to these referees; as a matter of fact it has been difficult to establish a relationship with anyone during this strange and perilous time. When one comes to think of it, the only friend I may have through all of this is Louis, who at least is in a similar position. Nevertheless, I am bound to destroy him. This compounds the irony of the situation to no small degree.

I have used up enough time. Further brooding over the current state of affairs would get me into clock trouble. Also, I am curious to hear what Louis has in his mind. Unhesitatingly, therefore, I make my second move, the move that has been in the back of my mind through all this, a lovely, shining, jewelled beast, awaiting entrance on its canopy of rose.

INTERREGNUM:
The King

In Buenos Aires I had the champion pinned on the seventh rank but lost him when he was able to find and leap upon an undefended Pawn. In Rio de Janeiro I had him for certain when he left a Rook
en prise
, but snatching it with the wrong piece (I should have taken it with the Queen’s Pawn, and took it instead with the King’s Knight), I opened up a deadly file to my Queen and once again he slipped away, enveloping me in a mating net. In Moscow, at the Seniors, I knew I had him for sure, down two Pawns to three in a simple end game. But I allowed him to take timing on me and was forced to blunder my way into a clumsy draw. Frustrating, ah, frustrating! It is expected that the champion will win
most
of his games against other grandmasters, this being after all the definition of a champion. But he cannot by any means win
all
of them; even the greatest have percentages of somewhat lower than eighty percent, meaning that better than one time out of five they can be beaten. But even though the statistical probabilities were in my favor and even though I know myself truly to be the best chess player in the world (the only games I have lost have either been thrown, as in this series, or lost on stupid blunders under time pressure), the fact is that I had never beaten the champion, never once forced him to resign (much less undergo checkmate).

The draw in Moscow was the closest that I had come in our seventeen encounters conducted over a period of five years, and after that draw I went into a raging state of depression which took me from near the top of the standings to the very
bottom within a matter of weeks. I could have won that tournament, too. Everyone said it.

But in New York City, in my birthplace, for the Golden Cups & Knights Championship of the Eastern Seaboard, I knew at last that I had him. We drew against one another in the first round and then in the twelfth; in the first I was able to take him thirty-seven moves until my Fried-Liver Attack succumbed to the wedge of his Knights and my Queen fell. Even then, looking into his eyes somewhere around the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth move, I knew that we had entered into a different relationship. For the first time I had the power over him. He was truly beatable. I knew it, and he knew it too; his eyes refracted that knowledge and it was in a strange, doomed trance that he went through the ensuing twelve moves that gave him the game. His mind was already filled with dread; he knew that we would meet eleven games hence and I could see him calculating already whether he would be able to avoid me; perhaps some sniffle or pimple could erupt in time to afford him a medical excuse. But even then, the match would merely be postponed until he was well again; a game can be canceled only by mutual consent and I would not let him go. He knew that. I could sense that knowledge as a high, dense odor which came through his pores and into my nose.

Much has been written of the champion, of his behavior in head-to-head matches, of his strange and peculiar ability to mesmerize and destroy his opponents, of his ability to infiltrate them with what the specialists call “Monarchial Misery,” in which the opponents seem to lose control of themselves, lose the thrust of their game, and begin to commit infantile blunders of the sort which they have not done for more than twenty years. “Monarchial
Misery,” the specialists say, may come from some strange, psychic force which the champion emanates, a force which causes otherwise mature opponents to go off their game and begin to gibber like children. Two weeks after the matches they are perfectly normal again, calm, confident that they can beat the champion upon a return match. But there are rarely return matches and in tournaments they never do.

The champion has one of the most amazing winning records in the history of chess, over ninety-five percent, I believe, with the utmost majority of his few defeats having occurred when he was playing grandmaster chess before his fifth birthday and thus hardly counting. Since the age of twelve his record approaches perfection: He has lost two games and drawn thirty-four, the two losses meaningless defeats occurring at the end of tournaments already won, forfeiture by nonappearance, When I speak of the eighty-percent win factor, as you see, I am not speaking of the champion who goes beyond the superhuman attainments of even a Fischer or an Alekhine. He is the champion in all but fact since, of course, he refuses to play under FIDE rules.
Refused
to play, I should have said, of course. I am talking of an earlier, simpler time before the Overlords decreed the end of the universe.

The champion in all but title taunted me, then, in Buenos Aires; laughed at me in Rio; left me torn to shreds in Moscow. But New York was a different level altogether; in New York I knew that I could get him. When he appeared for the slated twelfth game of the tournament, the tournament of his assured defeat, it was with a certain mask of trepidation visible even to the most uninvolved spectators (miserable creatures in the back row
who had come into the club only to get out of the snowstorm and who after paying five dollars for their standing room almost instantly put themselves against the wall in various decrepit postures and went into a semi-doze).

The champion was trembling when he appeared before the board; indeed, by appearing five minutes before the start of our scheduled round I was able to stand by the board to greet him and my gesture of seating him with a rather officious air was both so graceless and audacious as to bring various oohs, aahs and moans from the assembled crowd.

The champion as he dropped sullenly into his seat heard those groans and tried to give no visible acknowledgment, preserving that icy demeanor for which he is most famous, but I could detect a tremor through the cheekbones and his hand, as it moved forward to grasp the White Queen’s Pawn, was not entirely steady. I instantly proceeded to set up a devastating middle-of-the-board attack.

By the seventh move it was obvious that I had him in the deepest imaginable straits. A hasty Queen-side development had wrecked his Pawn formation; a questionable Queen’s Gambit had left him open-file in a way which enabled me to bring pressure on his King side which was nearly irresistible. Although the champion in all but title has been renowned for the rapidity of his play, almost always leaving more than an hour on his clock after forty moves, almost always moving within three minutes of the start of his clock, he had used up forty-six minutes for those first seven moves, twelve of them on the sixth move alone. As I made my eighth move, springing free a Knight that in another four moves would force
him into a hasty Queen-side castle, I saw despair vault like flame into his eyes and then he had bolted from the board, using up valuable clock-time to head for the backstage area where he stayed for several moments, emerging in a slow, aged stagger, seating himself before the board again with a sigh, reaching out with trembling hand to move a Pawn. I knew then I had him. (I had never been able to look ahead more clearly; I was never more in control of my game; I felt prescience, that rare power which even in tournament chess occurs perhaps once in every one hundred games.)

I was going to inflict upon the champion his first defeat in official grandmaster play in some eight years. In so doing I was not only going to smash him, and destroy him utterly (because I knew that his psychic makeup was fragile), but I was going to measurably advance my own career; I would be for all time now The Man Who Had Beaten The Champion, and this would measurably increase my own following, increase the sales of my own books (which had, regretfully, done very poorly in the marketplace due to Louis’ corrupt appropriation of my own ideas, which halved my prospective audience), even raise my tournament fees. I might be able henceforth to ask for five hundred dollars, perhaps even seven hundred fifty dollars expense money in return for consent to enter a tournament. At the thought of this an unseemly, almost megalomaniacal cackle came from the depths of my gut. I was able to keep it down only with utmost concentration, and it was with a physical effort that I prevented myself from rubbing my hands and literally laughing aloud with the pleasure of it. Rio, Buenos Aires, and Moscow faded from me now; there was only
the reality of New York, my home city, and the place of my prospective ascension. At the age of forty-eight years, seven months, two days and some hours I stood alone before the throne-room of chess, on the verge of entry.

I looked up then, planning to sweep the board for my next inevitable move, and my eyes, almost as if by accident, caught those of the champion.

He hung over the board like a misshapen thing, his posture a parody of some beast’s. From those eyes, however, shined a most unholy light, and looking at those eyes, gauging for the first time the effect of what I had done to him, I suddenly in a rush understood everything, understood even the roots of the so-called Monarchial Miseries.