Grandmaster

by David Klass

  “Really good,” she admitted. “For a pushover, you played one hell of a game.”

  We reported our result to the scorer’s table, and then we walked out the gaping doors into the ballroom lobby. “My mom’s still playing,” Liu said. “I saw her when we walked by.”

  “My dad’s probably up in our room,” I replied. “Decompressing from that first game.”

  “Who could blame him, after that?” she asked. “A rook sacrifice, and the forced mate was gorgeous. He really hasn’t played in thirty years?”

  “Nope,” I told her. “I should probably go check on him. Nice meeting you, Liu. Good luck the rest of the way.” I held out my hand.

  She looked back at me and took my hand. “Good luck to you.” Her hand still felt small and warm, and this time when we shook she gave me a little squeeze. “Can I ask you one question? You really don’t know why your father gave up chess?”

  “I don’t have a clue,” I told her. “Whatever happened, he doesn’t want to talk about it. He did tell me one possible reason, but I don’t think he was being serious.”

  “What did he say?” she asked.

  I looked into Liu’s glittering black eyes. “That he quit because he realized that playing in chess tournaments was a really bad way of trying to meet a nice girl.”

  She stuck out her tongue at me, and I turned away and headed for the elevators.

  11

  I let myself into our suite and heard the lowing. It was a low mooing chant that repeated itself over and over, and even though there were no words I could tell it was my father’s voice. It was coming from his bedroom. “Dad?”

  The lowing stopped. “Daniel? Is that you?”

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Fine. Come in.”

  I walked into his bedroom. My father was lying on the rug on his back. He was wearing one of the hotel’s white terry cloth robes and he had a white towel over his eyes.

  “What was that sound?” I asked. “It sounded like someone was strangling a cow in here.”

  “That was a deep breathing exercise. It helps relieve tension and stabilize the heart rate. How did your game go?”

  “Lost it,” I told him. “She was really strong. But I think I played well. What’s the matter with your heart?”

  “Nothing. I just checked my blood pressure and it’s barely elevated. But when I play chess I can’t stop myself from getting tense.” He removed the towel from his eyes and looked up at me. “Did you save the score sheet from your game?”

  I dug it out of my pocket. When you play a tournament game, you have to record all the moves using an algebraic shorthand, which they taught us in chess club. That way, if a disagreement breaks out about a position, the tournament referee can use the score sheets to settle the matter. Also, if you write your moves down, you can replay the game later and analyze it. “When you’re done relaxing, I’ll set up the pieces and let’s play it through,” I suggested.

  “Hand it over.”

  I gave him the score sheet, and he read it while lying flat on his back, his eyes flicking down the column of moves. “Good start,” he muttered. “Here’s where you went wrong. You should have challenged her for control of the center. Whoever controls the center of the battlefield makes his opponent fight on the wings.”

  “Can you really play the whole game out in your head?” I asked, amazed.

  “What’s so hard about visualizing a chessboard? There are only sixty-four squares.” He finished scanning the sheet and handed it back. “Not bad, Daniel. I’m impressed. Next time you drop a pawn in the middle game, counterattack. When you’re playing a good player and they get an advantage, you have to shake things up. Otherwise they’ll just trade pieces and grind you down.”

  “I saw the end of your game,” I told him. “Two guys were talking about you in the bathroom. They thought you had blundered away your rook. They didn’t realize it was a brilliant sacrifice.”

  “I don’t know about brilliant, but it got the job done.” He studied my face for a moment and then he asked, “What else did they say about me?”

  “Nothing.” I looked down at the plush carpeting.

  “Come on,” he said. “Out with it.”

  I met his eyes. “One of them said he’d heard that you were a wacko grandmaster from long ago.”

  “Wacko, huh?” Dad sat up.

  “They were just a couple of fools gossiping in a bathroom. Anyway, you showed them a flash of genius.”

  “‘Genius,’” he repeated softly. “‘Brilliant.’ Daniel, these are lovely words you’re coming up with lately … that you haven’t attributed to your father before.”

  “Well, I never saw you play chess before,” I pointed out, my voice practically glowing with pride and excitement. “You really played like a grandmaster! That supernerd expert was going right for your jugular. He thought he had you cooked. And all the time you were waiting to spring your devious trap. It was just … so cool to watch.”

  Dad stood up and nodded, looking grateful but also oddly sad. “Strange—I guess I never realized how important it was for you to see me do really well at something.”

  “I did feel very proud,” I told him. “Is that a bad thing? I mean, I know you’re a good accountant, but I can’t really watch you do that.”

  “I’m a better than average accountant,” he said. “But I was a very good chess player, for a wacko.” He said it with a smile, but then he broke off for a moment, deep in thought. “Daniel…” I could see that he was tempted to tell me his deep, dark secret—why he had given up the game he loved thirty years ago. I didn’t want to pry, but I was very curious to hear the real reason. Then he flinched and I saw him pull back, as if he had realized it would be too painful to talk about. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said. “Dr. Sam was stuck in what looked like a marathon game, so Randolph moved our dinner reservation back. We have about an hour to kill. You might want to check out the pool.”

  “Isn’t it a little late for a swim?” I asked.

  “Apparently not,” Dad said. “A friend of yours called a few minutes ago. She said she was heading down to the pool. She invited you to join her.”

  “Liu?” I asked, maybe a little too eagerly.

  “No,” Dad said, “I believe her name was Britney.” He shot me a grin. “For a young man who claims to have trouble with girls, you seem to have your share of female admirers.”

  “You got that wrong,” I told him. “Britney is Brad Kinney’s girlfriend. She also happens to be the prettiest girl in our school. Believe me, the only thing she feels for me is pity.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that, kiddo,” Dad said, heading into the bathroom. He turned on the shower, but his voice floated out above the sound of running water: “You ignore the insight of Grandmaster Pratzer at your peril.”

  12

  The Palace Royale pool was located next to the hotel gym, on the third floor. I pushed through the doors, wearing my bathing suit and a T-shirt, and saw that the pool was almost deserted. A family was in the shallow end—the parents playing with their two tots, who were equipped with balloonlike flotation devices on arms and legs. In the deep end, a shark swam back and forth from one side to the other, knifing through the water so quickly it left a boiling silvery wake.

  Of course it wasn’t really a shark. It was the top swimmer at the Loon Lake Academy, Brad Kinney, getting his laps in before dinner. Perched on a lounge chair on the deep side of the pool, wearing a teensy-weensy purple bikini and watching him swim, was Britney. She was holding a stopwatch, and her eyes never left Brad as he did a flip turn and set off at turbo speed for the other side.

  I walked over to her and tried not to stare. I’m pretty sure no one has ever looked that good in a purple bikini in the history of the world. “Hey, Britney.”

  Her eyes left the swimming champion and focused on me. “Hi, Daniel. How did your first game go?”

  “I lost,” I told her. “But it doesn’t matter. The re
st of the team will pick up the slack.”

  “You’ll win the next one,” she said. And then she added, “Your dad sounds nice. Thanks for coming down. When Brad swims his laps I have no one to talk to.”

  In the water beneath us, Brad flashed by and was gone. “How many does he do?” I asked.

  “A hundred,” she said. “And he never slows down. Isn’t that amazing?”

  “Remarkable,” I agreed. “So what are you doing in Manhattan on a Friday night?”

  “We were going to come tomorrow, but my mom got invited to some kind of charity ball this evening. I have to go with her, so I won’t be able to come to the steak house. But we can all go out to dinner tomorrow.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said. “Well, maybe I should jump in the shallow end and move my arms a little and pretend I can swim.”

  She laughed. “Come on. I’m sure you can swim just fine.”

  “Not like that,” I said, as Brad motored by.

  “No one swims like that,” Britney responded softly.

  “I’m off to do my dog paddle. Catch you later,” I told her. “Have a ball at the charity ball. Looking forward to meeting your mom.”

  “Thanks. She’s eager to hang out with the team—” Britney broke off, and I was surprised to see tension in her face. “I don’t know exactly how she’ll fit in,” she admitted, sounding a little worried.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said quickly. She hesitated and then added: “My mom’s been through a rough time, and she’s a bit of a character, but I guess all parents are, right?”

  “Absolutely,” I assured her. “My dad is short, bald, and the poorest father at Loon Lake. Believe me, if I can bring him on this trip, you shouldn’t have any worries about your mom.”

  Britney flashed a grateful smile. “You don’t take yourself too seriously. That’s kind of a rare thing at our school.”

  “If I took myself too seriously, I’d be disappointed,” I told her with a grin. “But seriously, if your mom raised you, I’m sure she must be pretty cool.”

  “She is,” Britney agreed in a low voice. “Thank you…”

  “What are you two whispering about?” a voice demanded.

  I whirled around to see that Brad had finished his hundred laps, climbed out of the pool, and was toweling off just a few feet from us.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I was just wondering how you can swim so many laps without slowing down.”

  “This was nothing,” Brad told me, as if his usual workouts were twice as hard. Then he turned to Britney. “Did you get my time, baby?”

  She looked down at the stopwatch. It was still running. She clicked it off. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I got distracted…”

  “Yeah, well, I’m sorry, too,” Brad growled. “Without a time, it’s useless. I just wasted half an hour of training.”

  “You were really swimming fast,” I told him.

  Brad glared at me. “Did anybody invite you to speak?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Then make yourself scarce, Patzer-face.” He turned back to Britney. “I’m going to swim twenty laps of backstroke. Make sure you clock it to the second.”

  13

  “So you’re a bean counter, Morris?” Randolph Kinney said, taking a gulp from his gin martini and wrapping his tongue around an olive like an octopus seizing a small fish with its tentacle. Everyone but me had won, so the Mind Cripplers had posted five points in the first round and our host was in a genial mood. “What firm are you at?”

  “Just a small outfit in Jersey,” my father replied, taking a sip from his glass of tomato juice.

  We were standing at the bar of the Patagonia Steakhouse in a fashionable downtown section of Manhattan called Tribeca. The lighting was dim, the portions looked huge, and the high-ceilinged space was packed with diners even though it was past nine. Eric and Brad were chatting on cell phones, drawing dirty looks from other patrons at the bar. From what I overheard, Eric was browbeating his lab partner about a big project due next week, while Brad was making plans with Britney for Saturday night.

  I was standing next to my dad, sipping a ginger ale and wondering if I should jump into the adult conversation and try to rescue him. “So what’s the name of your small firm?” Randolph pressed. “I do lots of work with bean counters in Jersey. I’m sure I’ve heard of you guys.”

  “Haug and Gilooly,” my father said.

  “Haug and Gilooly,” Randolph repeated, making the names sound even sillier than normal. “Never heard of it. Must be really small.”

  “Sounds like Howdy Doody,” Dr. Chisolm contributed, well into his second large glass of red wine. “But all those bean counters have silly names.”

  My father smiled at him. “So you’re a sawbones?”

  Dr. Chisolm’s eyes narrowed. I don’t think anyone had referred to him as a sawbones in a while. “I’m Chief of Cardiac Surgery at Hackensack Hospital.”

  “I’m kind of surprised to see you at a steak house,” Dad said. “You must know more about cholesterol than any of us. Doesn’t slicing into a rare steak make you think of the operating table?”

  “I did become a vegetarian for a while during my residency,” Dr. Chisolm admitted. “But I can handle it now. You just have to learn to separate.”

  Dad turned to Mr. Kinney. “And you’re a hedge trimmer?”

  “You made that up,” Mr. Kinney said. “That’s pretty good. But, yeah, I run a four-billion-dollar global macro hedge fund that tilts toward technology…”

  Meanwhile, I heard Brad telling Britney: “The steak house looks okay. Nothing special.”

  A hostess walked over to us and said, “Kinney party? Your table is ready.”

  “Gotta go chow down,” Brad grunted into the phone. “If I were you, I’d drag your mom out of there before she gets going. And watch out for those New York prep boys.” He hung up.

  “Make sure you triple-check those graphs,” Eric ordered his lab partner, and then he also punched out.

  “This way, please,” the hostess said, and we followed her through the restaurant to a table for six, in its own private alcove. I sat between my father and Eric. My family didn’t go out to eat often, and when we did it was usually for pizza or Chinese, or on special occasions to a nice family chain restaurant. Patagonia was by far the most elegant restaurant I’d ever been in.

  “Welcome. I’m Claudio, your server,” a tall young man with an earring said. “Let me tell you about today’s specials. We have…”

  “Save it,” Randolph cut him off. “We already know what we want. I’ll have the bone-in rib eye, bloody. Put something green next to it. And we need some wine.” He glanced at Dr. Chisolm, who was almost finished with his second glass. “Sam, what is that piss you’re drinking?”

  “It’s an estate-bottled Malbec,” Dr. Chisolm said.

  “Malbec went to hell in ’76 when frost killed off the old vines in Bordeaux,” Mr. Kinney declared.

  “Actually, we have more than two dozen Argentine Malbecs on our list, several of which are stunning,” Claudio interjected proudly.

  “Actually, they’re not,” Mr. Kinney told him, running his eyes down the extensive wine list. “So let’s not waste time. Bring us this Rhone—and let’s pair it with this Barolo. Now, I’m hungry, so let’s get some food on the table, pronto.”

  “Yes, sir,” Claudio said, swallowing his pride and no doubt imagining his tip.

  The rest of us ordered, and we were soon tucking into steaks the size of manhole covers. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. Chess tournaments are very hard work. The game against Liu had exhausted me. I read somewhere that a grandmaster can lose between six to eight pounds of body weight during an average game just by concentrating so hard. Maybe this tournament would help Dad lose a little of his potbelly.

  He had barely touched his steak, and he was understandably staying out of a conversation, between the two other dads, on who drove the better s
ports coupe. Meanwhile, Eric and Brad were going through the girls at our school year by year, picking out the cutest ones and rating them on a scale of one to ten.

  I kept quiet and ate and thought we might get through this dinner without a major blowup.

  Then the table conversations changed. Eric and Brad began planning what they were going to do with their share of the first-place prize money. Meanwhile, their fathers shifted from sports cars to the importance of winning. There was a candle on our table, and Brad’s father held his index finger above the flame. “It’s all in the mind,” he said, slowly lowering his finger till the flame licked his skin. I swear I could smell flesh burning. His eyes were fixed and hard.

  My father reached out and pulled Mr. Kinney’s hand away from the candle. “You don’t have to do that,” he said. “We already know you’re tough.”

  “It’s not about being tough,” Randolph told him. “It’s a lesson I want the boys to take away from this weekend. If you want to win, you’ve got to be willing to take risks and endure things that others can’t.”

  As if on cue Dr. Chisolm got up from his chair and bent over all the way to the floor and then walked his feet up the wall of our dining alcove so that he was standing on his hands. He kicked away from the wall and began walking on his hands. Finally, with a great effort, he slowly picked his left hand up and stood on just his right, his face turning red from the pressure of his full body weight. “I used to be able to hold this position for two minutes,” he grunted, putting his other hand back down and then falling to his knees.

  “Still pretty studly, Dad,” Eric said proudly. And then he told all of us: “Dad was a varsity gymnast at Stanford. He tried out for the Olympic team.”

  “What about you, Morris?” Randolph asked. “Got anything you want to show the boys?”

  Dad thought about it and smiled. “I’ve got one or two things up my sleeve,” he said. “Check this out.”