Grandmaster

by David Klass

  “The only one that can jump over others.” He placed it almost reverently on the board. “Since chess was invented in India, more than a thousand years ago, it’s the only piece whose role and movement have never changed at all.”

  “They don’t teach us much about the history of chess in our club,” I told him. “But I guess each piece has something unique about it.”

  He placed the white queen next to the king. “When they first cooked up the game, the king was a scholarly, wise Indian emperor—much too refined to do much fighting himself. What we call the queen was a male war minister who stood near and advised him. The Spanish later turned the piece into a powerful woman, probably to honor the Virgin Mary, or perhaps because women can be so dangerous.”

  I thought of Britney and how she had hurt my feelings and then reduced me to a babbling idiot when she asked me to wipe the mud off her face. “You can say that again,” I muttered. “No wonder they can move so far in so many different directions.”

  His white pieces and pawns were ready now, and he set up the black pieces and then leaned back and surveyed the board. There was an expression on his face that I had never seen before—a dangerous sharpness, a knife-blade-like keenness. He was a gentle man, but peering down at the chess pieces through his thick glasses he looked downright nasty. “Do you have any idea what chess really is, Daniel?”

  “A game? A pastime?” He shook his head and I tried again. “A three-dimensional timed logic test?”

  “War,” he told me. “Two armies facing each other on a battlefield, fighting to the death.”

  “That’s one way to think about it.”

  “There’s no other way. It’s war and annihilation, pure and simple. When you capture a piece, you’re killing it. When you capture the enemy king, his whole army is put to the sword.”

  “That’s a pretty bloodthirsty interpretation,” I said. “I prefer to think of it as a logic test.”

  “Logic test be damned,” he grunted, and took a few fast breaths. His fingers had folded into fists and I could see how tense he was and how hard he was trying to relax. I wondered what was making him so nervous. “Listen,” he said, “I made the hotel reservation at the Palace Royale. We’re sharing a standard room. Twin beds. No frills. It’s still more than two hundred a night.”

  “We could stay at home and drive back and forth,” I suggested.

  “No. The opening round is on Friday night, and the first Saturday round starts early. If we’re gonna do this, let’s stay in Manhattan and do it right.”

  “A standard room will be fine,” I told him. “I don’t care if I have to sleep on the floor.” I tried to come up with something positive, to make him look a little happier. “Maybe we’ll win first prize. It’s ten thousand dollars, Dad. Our share of that would be more than three grand.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that,” he said.

  “Brad and Eric are strong players,” I pointed out, “and so are their dads. And I know you haven’t played in years, but you were a grandmaster. So we probably have as good a shot as anyone.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting somebody?” he asked. “What about you?”

  I was very tempted to tell him about the five-player-a-round rule, and that they had only invited the two of us to add his score to their own totals. But instead I said: “Sure, I might have a strong tournament, too. You can never tell.”

  “No, you can’t,” he agreed, taking off his glasses and starting to polish them on his shirt, so that he was looking away from me when he added softly, “Daniel, you may hear something at the tournament about me.”

  “What kind of something?”

  He was still looking down at his glasses and not at me. “The chess community is small. People hang around for years. They remember things they should have forgotten.”

  “You mean I may hear something bad about you?”

  He glanced up at me, and there was a clear warning in his eyes. “If you do hear anything, I want you to remember it happened a long time ago. I was a very different person back then.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Look, I’m the one who got you into this. Whatever happened in the past is history. But do you want to give me a heads-up about what I may hear, just so I can prepare myself to ignore it and forget it?”

  “No,” he said, “I’d rather not. Let’s play.”

  “Against you? You’re a grandmaster.”

  “Then I’ll give you white.”

  He turned the board around so that the white pieces were in front of me. “Go ahead, son,” he said. “Bring it on.”

  So I tried to bring it. I know other kids wrestle their fathers, or race them, or play one-on-one basketball against them, but we had never even arm-wrestled before. This was the first time that I could remember my father and me going full tilt at each other in friendly combat.

  I say “friendly” because we started out amicably enough, smiling and making small talk—and we were playing in the warmth and comfort of our own living room. Also, there was nothing at stake—no money, no trophies, not even rating points.

  But the underlying vibe of the game didn’t stay friendly for long. I’d never thought of my father as particularly aggressive, but when he sat facing me at the chessboard that evening, his shoulders hunched slightly forward, his fingers knitted tightly together on the table while he scrutinized the pieces and sometimes glanced up at me, his intensity was tangible, and he seemed formidable and bent on annihilation.

  He also talked trash. Chess is supposed to be a silent game, and if someone annoys you with conversation during a tournament, you can raise your hand and wave over an official who will tell your opponent to zip his lip. But the only person I could have appealed to was my mom, who was futzing around the kitchen baking brownies and occasionally throwing surprised but pleased glances at us, as if to say, “Look at the two of you boys, having fun together! You should both be packing for your big trip tomorrow, but I’m not going to break this magical father-son moment.”

  I played my usual king’s pawn opening and he muttered, “Really?” and then, after he’d slammed his own king’s pawn forward two squares: “It only gets worse from here.” Soon he was on the edge of falling into an opening trap with a ridiculous nickname—the Fried Liver.

  I felt a little bad for him, because when I get someone into the Fried Liver I always destroy him. But at the same time, his aggressiveness seemed to be contagious, or maybe it was just the father-son rivalry kicking into high gear. I wanted to beat him and shut his trash-talking mouth. I wanted to put his army to the sword. “Maybe you have been away from chess a little too long,” I muttered, springing my trap.

  He glared back at me for half a second and then made an unexpected move, and I soon found that I was the one trapped. I wiggled and flailed, but in five moves I was hopelessly lost, and I soon knocked over my king. “You rule, Grandmaster. For now.”

  He held out his hand.

  I reached out and took it. I couldn’t remember ever shaking my father’s hand quite this way before. We had, of course, shaken hands many times in the past, but always for formal occasions, when our handshakes had a clear purpose. This wasn’t a congratulatory shake, or a consolatory shake—it was the handshake of two buddies who have just done something fun or, at least, something that’s supposed to be fun. He held the grip a few seconds longer than necessary and looked into my eyes. “Don’t be pissed off.”

  “I’ll get you next time.”

  He released my hand. “You do realize that I didn’t beat you at chess?” he asked.

  I looked back at him. “That wasn’t chess?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Chess is two minds doing fair battle. Chess is forcing your opponent to outthink you strategically and creatively. I didn’t have to think at all in that game because you never got me off a very well-known line. Why on earth do you play that opening?”

  “It was the first opening in the book,” I told him. “Most of the kids play it—at least the beginners.” />
  “That,” he said, “is exactly why you shouldn’t play it. Especially against someone like me. The Giuoco Piano has been around for five hundred years. It’s been analyzed to death. And it’s sheer suicide to try to trap someone with the Fried Liver unless you know the Traxler Counter Gambit and all its subvariations.”

  “Guess I’ll have to study harder.”

  “Forget it,” he told me. “There are lots of kids out there who study chess openings for two hours a day. I know because I was one of them. If you play the main lines of the most common openings against them, they’ll beat the pants off you twenty times in a row without ever having to think of an original move.”

  “So what should I do?” I asked.

  “Play something sound but obscure. Choose an opening where you’ll get a solid position after ten moves, and they’ll soon be off the book and forced to think for themselves. Suddenly that giant advantage they have—of hundreds of hours studying opening theory and traps—will be gone. They’ll have to come up with their own original moves, which means you’ll be meeting evenly on the field of mind combat—and you’ll have a legitimate chance.”

  “The tournament starts tomorrow night,” I told him. I glanced at my watch. “Twenty-one hours and counting. There’s no time for me to start learning new openings.”

  Dad hesitated a long beat, and then he began to set up the pieces again, but this time he didn’t do it slowly. His hands moved so fast that the pawns and knights and bishops became a black-and-white blur. He lifted his palms and they were all in place, as if he had conjured them. “Okay, Daniel,” he said, “pay close attention. This is where we start.”

  6

  “Don’t forget underwear,” my mother said as I finished tossing clothes into a duffel bag.

  “I’m not planning on wearing any,” I told her. “Underwear’s unlucky. I play better without it.”

  She looked at me. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I packed plenty of clean underwear, Mom,” I promised her. “And if I run out, I’m sure they sell it near our hotel. They probably sell socks, too, somewhere in Manhattan.”

  She closed the door and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Take care of your father.”

  “Take care of him how?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He never has trouble sleeping, but he was up for hours last night, twisting and turning. Then, after midnight, he got up and tiptoed out of the bedroom.”

  “Midnight snack?”

  She shook her head. “I followed him.”

  “You sneak.”

  “Spying is part of my job as a wife and mother.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “The study,” she said. “He switched on my computer.”

  “Your laptop? I wonder why.”

  “I bet because it’s newer,” she said, “so it’s the only one that has a chess application.”

  “You saw him playing the computer?”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “I peeked in the door and he was sitting at the desk, his hands folded, his eyes burning at the screen. Daniel, I’ve never seen him look like that.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like he wanted to strangle someone.”

  “The computer must have been beating him,” I guessed. “I think you can set it right up to master level, and maybe even to grandmaster strength. The new programs are really powerful. No one in my club can beat them.”

  She shrugged. “I couldn’t tell who was winning. But he was talking to it. Insulting it. Calling it names. Gizmo. Dolt. Screwhead.”

  “Screwhead?” I repeated with a smile. “Really?”

  “It’s not funny. He was threatening it. I’ve never heard your father ever threaten anyone, and…”

  Dad’s voice drifted in from the living room. “Daniel, are you packed? We’ve got to hit the road.”

  “Just getting clean underwear,” I shouted back. I could see how concerned Mom was. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “He’s just a very competitive chess player.”

  She put her hand on my arm. “I am worried. I thought it would be good for you two to share an activity. But there’s something going on here that I don’t understand and I don’t like. He’s not a young man, your father, and he has high blood pressure.”

  “Not anymore,” I said. “He got it down and under control.”

  “He got it down with pills,” she said. “I want you to watch him and—”

  Dad opened the door. “What are you two up to?”

  “I was just wishing my baby good luck,” Mom told him, and kissed me on the cheek. “Don’t forget to call. As many times a day as you like. Kate and I want to hear all the exciting news.”

  “Actually, I couldn’t care less about the chess mess,” Kate called out from the living room. “But the salient point—do you like that vocabulary word, Mom?—the salient point here is that Daniel’s getting to go on an expensive trip to New York and I’m not. All the parenting books recommend fairness and equality between kids, so the only fair thing would be if I got to go on a shopping trip next weekend, and I’ve already picked out some stores…”

  “The salient point is that you might use our absence to stop worrying about parenting books and start worrying about your history project,” Dad told her. “Now get out of the way before I run you over with my suitcase.” He headed out into the living room, and I hoisted up my duffel bag and followed him.

  “Are you threatening your own daughter?” Kate asked, and then screamed and jumped to one side as Dad ran at her with his rolling suitcase, the wheels squeaking across the wooden floor.

  I gave Mom a kiss and a reassuring hug. “Don’t worry about a thing,” I told her. And then in a softer voice: “What could go wrong at a chess tournament?”

  She looked back at me and raised her eyebrows, as if to ask, “How should I know?” I followed Dad out the door, down the steps, to our car.

  We headed out of town and were soon on a wide-open four-lane highway, speeding eastward at seventy miles per hour while Friday afternoon commuters endured stop-and-go traffic in the westbound lanes. Driving seemed to relax Dad a little bit. He opened his window a crack, put on some jazz, and then glanced at me and said, “So, tell me about the rest of our team.”

  “The Chisolms and the Kinneys.”

  “The boys are friends of yours?”

  “Not exactly friends. They’re both seniors.”

  “It was nice of them to ask a freshman along. I take it they’re good kids?”

  “They’re good at a lot of things,” I answered carefully.

  “Like what?”

  “Brad’s the captain of the swim team and holds the school records for several distances. Eric’s the senior class president and valedictorian.”

  “World beaters,” Dad muttered.

  “You could say that.”

  He heard the edge in my tone and turned down the jazz. “You don’t like them?”

  “We’re not exactly best chums.”

  “Then why the heck are we doing this?” he demanded.

  “Because they invited us,” I told him.

  “Who cares?”

  “I do. They never even talked to me before.”

  “Do you mean to say,” Dad asked, “that we’re going to all this trouble and expense—driving to New York and playing in a three-day tournament—to get on the good side of two stuck-up jerks who you don’t even like?”

  I nodded. “That pretty much sums it up.”

  “Well, that’s … screwy,” Dad said.

  “It is screwy,” I agreed. “But you might as well hear the rest of it.”

  “Sure,” Dad said, “since I reserved a hotel room—which it’s now too late to cancel—and I paid the nonrefundable three-hundred-dollar registration fee, this seems like a good time for me to hear the truth.”

  “The truth is they think I’m a terrible player, as well as a social zero, but they couldn’t care less about that.”

  “They’d
better care about you,” Dad said. “It’s a team event, right? With six players, we all have to do well to have a chance.”

  “Wrong,” I muttered, finally admitting the embarrassing truth to him. “In each round they’ll count the top five scores out of six. Since there are five rounds, the best possible team score is five wins per round for a total of twenty-five.”

  Dad switched off the jazz and gripped the steering wheel a little tighter. He looked quite angry. “I figured they invited me as a ringer, but you’re saying they’ve completely discounted you already, and you’re just window dressing?”

  “Correct,” I admitted. “They want to win this thing, and you’re their ace in the hole. Grandmasters don’t grow on trees. I’m just along for the ride.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he demanded.

  I shrugged. “I thought if you found out you might not come.”

  “I’ll fix them,” Dad said. “I’ll lose every game on purpose.”

  “Don’t do that. Please.”

  “Why not?” he demanded. “They deserve it.”

  I was silent for a while, and then I spoke in a soft voice, staring straight ahead at the spire of the Empire State Building that had just become visible in the distance, poking up across the Hudson River. “I’m not exactly the most popular kid at school,” I confessed.

  “Who is?” Dad asked.

  “Chisolm and Kinney are superstars,” I told him. Dad tried to point out something, but I waved for him to be silent, and he took the hint. “In fact, I’m kind of low man on the totem pole in a lot of areas,” I went on. “You might have been too busy with tax season to notice, but my midterm grades weren’t great, I didn’t make the freshman basketball team, and cute girls aren’t exactly lining up to date me.”

  “All perfectly normal for a high school freshman,” Dad noted. “Listen, don’t be too hard on yourself. You’ve got plenty of time. You’re a great kid.” He tried to put his hand on my shoulder again, but I shrugged it off. “I was busy during tax season, but I should have taken more of an interest in how you were doing,” he admitted.

  “Let’s not have too many mushy moments,” I muttered.