Grandmaster

by David Klass

  “They posted the next round pairings,” Eric explained. “Mr. Pratzer, you’re playing a tough master named Voorhees. We know him from Jersey tournaments, and he’s a shark. Daniel, you’ve got an unrated named Lowery. The rest of us all drew opponents rated higher than we are.”

  “To hell with ratings,” Mr. Kinney muttered. “We just have to play smart.”

  “I agree,” my dad told him. “Ratings are overrated.”

  “There you go!” Mr. Kinney said, clapping his hands. “I want five points out of this next round.” He glanced at his watch. “Now, if everyone’s agreeable, I’ll deliver the team prayer. One knee, gentlemen.”

  Silly as it was, we all got down.

  “Moment of silence,” Randolph commanded, and we were quiet. I saw my dad bring his arms together and thought for a moment that he might be clasping his hands to pray. Then I saw that the fingers of his right hand were on his left wrist, and I realized that he was taking his pulse.

  “Let us pray,” the hedge fund king said. “Lord, watch over the Mind Cripplers and keep us tight—” Before he got through any more of the prayer, a loud and insistent tapping sounded on the door.

  “Who could that be?” Mr. Kinney asked, annoyed.

  A female voice called out: “Boys? Helloooo? Are you up and decent yet?”

  “It’s her,” he muttered, throwing a look at Brad.

  “Don’t blame me,” Brad said.

  “Let’s try to finish the team prayer,” Dr. Chisolm suggested.

  Mr. Kinney picked up where he had left off. “Lord, keep us tight and keep our eyes on the prize and—”

  “Yooo-hooo, booooysssss? We have snacks, so open up,” the voice called again.

  Mr. Kinney broke off. “Aw, to hell with it,” he muttered, got to his feet, and walked to the door. He opened it and said, “Mariel, what a delightful surprise.”

  A very attractive blond woman in a pink jogging outfit stepped into the room. Her hair was coiffed, her nails were manicured, and her teeth were so white that when she smiled it was almost blinding. It was Britney’s mom, I figured. She looked around at us, and her eyes settled on Dr. Chisolm. “We needed you last night, Sam. Some old geezer blew a gasket and dropped dead at the charity ball.”

  “I’m glad I missed that…” he started to say.

  She talked through him. “Brad, did you get your laps in this morning? There’s a meet coming up and we’re counting on you to break the school record again.” Her blue eyes flicked to Eric. “Speaking of achievements, did I hear something about senior class speaker that I wasn’t supposed to? Congratulations, even though it’s still hush-hush. And you must be Daniel.”

  I blinked and tried not to stare at her teeth. “Yes, ma’am.” I glimpsed Britney walking in behind her, trying to guide a room service waiter who was carrying a tray containing enough doughnuts for a college football team and also a giant thermos of hot coffee.

  “Britney said you were polite. Please call me Mariel. And you must be Daniel’s father. I’ve never met a grandmaster before. I’m fascinated by how your mind works.”

  “It will work better with some hot coffee,” Dad told her, stepping over to help the waiter with the thermos.

  Mariel found a reason to touch each one of us in turn—to fix Dr. Chisolm’s collar and pat Brad’s shoulder and brush some lint off my dad’s sweater.

  “Well now,” she said. “This is all so exciting. Our team is in first place. And I heard about Chez André tonight.”

  Mr. Kinney reluctantly muttered: “I hope you and Britney can join us.”

  “We wouldn’t miss it. Doughnuts, boys, time to get your sugar fix. Who wants coconut?” She practically crammed one into Randolph’s mouth. “What about you, Grandmaster?”

  “I’m watching my weight,” Dad said. “I’ll stick with the coffee.”

  “One doughnut never hurt a waistline,” she told him. “Here, double cream is my favorite.”

  “Mom, he said he doesn’t want one,” Britney whispered sharply. “And we can’t just invite ourselves to dinner…”

  Mariel glanced at her daughter, and for just a moment her confidence seemed to slip and she looked noticeably insecure. She immediately covered it by starting to talk fast again. “You should have a doughnut yourself, honey. You’re all skin and bones. How about cinnamon?” Suddenly the alarm on her cell phone went off. “Spa time,” she announced. “Come on, Brit, there’s nothing like a massage to start the day off right. We’ll see you all later.”

  She headed out, and as she passed Mr. Kinney she bestowed a two-cheek European goodbye kiss on him that looked like it was intended to suck the skin off the front of his skull. “Bye, Randy. Good luck, team.”

  Britney followed her mother out, throwing a backward look at Brad, and for a moment at me, that was both angry and apologetic. Then the door closed and they were both gone.

  “I think she’s fond of you, Randolph,” Dr. Chisolm noted with a wry smile. “And I hear she got five million and the house in the divorce.”

  “Good God,” the hedge fund monarch said, wiping lipstick off his face. “Jesus, Brad.”

  “How is it my fault?” Brad wanted to know.

  Randolph seemed tempted to offer his son an explanation, but instead he glanced at his watch. “Gentlemen, it’s chess time. All team schisms are healed, all distractions have been banished to the spa. This is day two—the extremely crucial day two. There are three rounds, and we need lots and lots of points. Let’s go, Mind Cripplers—off to war!”

  16

  Lowery turned out to be even more of a patzer-face than I was. He was a big lug of a kid—seventeen years old and at least six foot three and two hundred pounds—so it was strange to see him look so frightened. “Is this your first tournament?” he asked while I was filling out my scorecard. “It’s my first one and my last one. Some of these people are freaky smart. The guy I played in the first round was a youth president of Mensa. Chess is an okay game, but it’s like a religion to some of these dudes. Know what I mean?”

  He seemed so nervous I felt sorry for him. “They’re not as smart as they let on. Just try to have fun,” I advised him.

  “You call this fun?” he asked. “Fun is paintball or bowling with my buds. Check out my hand.” His right hand was shaking so badly that he was having trouble writing my name and rating down on his score sheet.

  We sat there waiting for the command to start our clocks. “So … do you study openings?” Lowery whispered.

  “A little,” I admitted.

  “Yeah, right, I’m sure just a little bit.” He popped a Lifesaver into his mouth and cracked it with his teeth.

  Suddenly I felt a hand tap me on the shoulder. “Hey, Jersey boy.” It was Liu. She was wearing tight black pants and some kind of silky dark top, and her hair was loose and hung almost to her hips.

  “Be right back,” I told Lowery, and got up from the table. “Hey, Catwoman.”

  “Don’t make fun of my outfit or I’ll claw your nose off,” she warned.

  “I like it,” I told her. “How was your evening?”

  “Boring,” she said. “My team ate dinner in the hotel restaurant so they could study chess and get a good night’s sleep. What about you guys?”

  “We went to Tribeca for a steak dinner.”

  “I’m on the wrong team,” she said ruefully.

  “Actually, it was a disaster,” I told her. “The other fathers wanted to know why my dad gave up chess, and they got rude. We ended up storming out of the restaurant.”

  “Sounds like maybe you’re on the wrong team, too.” Liu hesitated a beat. “Maybe we should hang out together tonight. With your dad and my mom. If you’re free…?”

  It was the first time a girl had ever asked me out, and I tried not to look too surprised or eager. “Sounds good to me. Our team is planning another fancy dinner, but I know my dad isn’t eager to go.”

  “Then let’s have some fun,” she proposed. “I think I know just the righ
t place…”

  “Chess players, start your clocks,” the tournament announcer said.

  “Gentlemen, start your engines.” Liu imitated his tone perfectly. Then she said, “Good luck, Daniel. Play like you did yesterday and you might actually win one.”

  “Good luck to you, Catwoman,” I told her. She gave me a little snarl and I returned to my table smiling.

  “She’s hot,” Lowery said as I sat down. “Did you meet her here?”

  “She beat me in the first round,” I told him.

  “You’re lucky,” he said. “The youth president of Mensa who whipped my ass was a nerd with zits.”

  I was going to play one of the lesser-known variations my father had shown me, but something told me I wouldn’t need to get fancy with Lowery. Instead I played the main line of the Giuoco Piano, and sure enough Lowery fell into the dreaded Fried Liver. “This is a trap,” he whispered after six moves, “isn’t it?”

  Normally I never talk to opponents during a match, but since he’d asked I whispered back: “It is. It’s called the Fried Liver.”

  He swallowed. “Why do they call it that?”

  “’Cause if you fall into it, you’ll soon be as dead as a piece of fried liver,” I told him.

  “Great,” he muttered. “Terrific.”

  “Shhhh,” the player to his right hissed, and Lowery nodded apologetically and then let out a long sigh. The tournament hall was cool but he had already broken into a sweat. He took his time and came up with a few defensive moves, but they were the wrong ones. The one thing you can’t do when you play the black side of the Fried Liver is let your king get pinned in the middle of the board. I soon had bishops and knights bearing down on his king, and the more he tried to defend the worse it got.

  As I sat there playing moves I had memorized, I realized the truth of what my father had told me. Springing an opening trap isn’t really chess—I wasn’t outthinking Lowery on the field of mental combat. I was just playing moves someone else had worked out and put in a book that I had read. And, as easy and fun as it was for me to destroy Lowery, I realized it was just as easy for the higher-ranked players I played to do this to me. Dad had a point: if I was to have any chance at doing well in this tournament, I would have to get my higher-rated opponents off the main lines and away from the openings they had memorized.

  “Enough,” Lowery said after twelve moves, and knocked over his king. “I’m tired of being a piece of fried meat. I’m out of here.”

  I shook his sweaty hand and handed in my score sheet and took a quick stroll around the hall, checking on other games. Liu was up a pawn to a serious-looking old gent with white hair, and bearing down on him. She was concentrating ferociously, but she felt my look and glanced up at me questioningly. I gave her a thumbs-up, and she flashed me a congratulatory smile before lowering her eyes to the board.

  Eric was losing to a master and not looking happy about it. He played chess the way he did everything in life—grinding and fighting for every inch. The master he was playing was much higher rated and probably far more naturally gifted, but Eric was making him sweat blood for the point.

  A few tables over I saw Brad, who was also engaged in a tough battle but managed to look cool and confident. While I was studying his board, I felt someone grab my arm. It was Grandmaster George Liszt. “Daniel? Come, I need to talk to you about your dad.”

  “No way,” I said, and I tried to pull away, but the big man had the grip of a mountain gorilla.

  “I think you’d better come,” he rumbled. “He needs your help. The referee just warned him for talking to his opponent.” I glanced toward the dais where the top players were playing. I could just make out my father, sitting bent over and concentrating intently. A wary tournament official hovered nearby. I took a step toward him, but Liszt held me back.

  “He’s okay for now,” Liszt assured me, “but he’ll flare up again soon, and then it’ll be a slippery slope. I’ve seen this all before, and it wasn’t pretty. The only way you’ll have a chance of protecting your dad is if you know the truth. Are you brave enough to hear it?”

  I looked up at him and allowed myself to be led away.

  17

  He led me out of the tournament ballroom, and we walked through the common area, past stands selling chess sets, books, and accessories. Liszt kept hold of my arm and chatted as if we were old friends out for a stroll. “My second round opponent crumbled like a piece of toast,” he said, smirking. “Fifteen moves, and he was an expert, too. It happens to some strong players when they play grandmasters. They see my rating and they give up before they sit down at the board. I can see the fear in their eyes. And you won your game, right? This was your first blood?”

  “Where are we going?” I asked. “What happened to my dad just now, and what else do you have to tell me?”

  “This tournament isn’t half bad,” Liszt said. “Quite well run. As soon as he started running his mouth, the refs were right on it. He took the warning and shut up. I’ve always thought he knows that he’s doing it, and that to a certain extent he can control it. But when he bottles it up, it gets much worse.”

  “What gets much worse?”

  We were on a long escalator, descending toward the first floor lobby. “You look just like him, did you know that?” Liszt asked me. “The way he used to look.”

  “No, I don’t…” I began to object.

  “I’ve known him a lot longer than you have,” he pointed out. “This way.” He yanked me to one side, and we walked through the swinging glass doors of a coffee shop in the hotel’s lobby. A corner table was open and in a minute I found myself sipping a cup of tea with milk and watching Grandmaster Liszt lick beads of chai latte off his mustache. “So,” he said, “first of all, as you must have realized, I’m not exactly a pal of your father’s.”

  “I gathered that.”

  “Nor would I say I am completely an enemy.” He ran a hand through his shaggy beard. “I’m a very competitive guy and he was the best of us, and I never could quite accept that. I say, he was the best of us, because he’s been away much too long. He’s struggling now against Voorhees, and even if he wins this one he’ll get thrashed by any of the top dozen players here. Ring rust. And he’s not up on the latest theory.” Liszt took another sip of latte and gave me a puzzled look. “What I don’t get is that Morris made the right decision. He got out while he could. He left it behind before it destroyed him, and he made a clean break. I gather he has a career, and a family, completely outside of the chess world, and I haven’t seen him at a tournament in thirty years. Why the hell did he come back?”

  “I brought him back,” I confessed. “Some kids from my school were entering this tournament. They found out about him and asked me to get him on the team. He’s doing this for me.”

  Liszt raised his bushy eyebrows, which looked like untended hedges, and nodded as if this was beginning to make sense. “Well, if you got him into this, you’ve got to get him out,” the hulking grandmaster said. “And the sooner the better, or you may be guilty of patricide.”

  “Why?” I asked. “It’s just one three-day tournament. I know he had some problems with his temper back in the day, but he says he can control it.”

  Liszt’s deep rumble of laughter sounded like thunder in the mountains. “‘Some problems with his temper’? That’s rich.” He jabbed a finger as thick as a banana in my direction. “Let me tell you a little about your dad’s unfortunate difficulties controlling his temper. They almost killed him, not to mention poor Stanwick.”

  I looked back at him. There was still time to get up and walk out of this coffee shop and not listen to this. But I found myself asking: “Who is Stanwick?”

  “Nelson Stanwick. I still see him in tournaments from time to time. He’s just a shadow of what he was. The truth is I don’t think he ever fully recovered.”

  I knew I was opening a door to something I didn’t want to hear about, but I had to know. “Stop messing with my head,” I told
the big man. “Just tell me what happened.”

  “Sure,” Liszt said, and I got the feeling he was enjoying this. “Why not? That’s why we’re here. But first I’m going to get another latte. They charge so much and the cups are so small. You want something?”

  I shook my head and watched him lumber to the counter. I knew I shouldn’t be listening to my father’s enemy tell tales about him. But at the same time, I was responsible for bringing him here, and I needed to know what the risks were. It seemed to me that a man who openly admitted that he didn’t like my father could be depended on to tell me the full truth, ugly though it might be.

  He sat back down with a second latte, and the chair groaned. “So,” he said, “Morris Pratzer. I first saw him on the circuit back in the seventies. Bobby Fischer had won the title and American chess surged. The first big tournaments for kids with real prize money were held here in New York, at a hotel called the McAlpin. There were a dozen of us who were rising stars. Your dad came late to the table, but it didn’t matter—the chess gods had given him something the rest of us didn’t have.”

  “How good was he?” I asked. “He told me last night he never could have been a Fischer or a Morphy.”

  Liszt shrugged. “Probably Fischer and Morphy didn’t think they could be Fischer or Morphy either. Who knows how good he could have been? In certain tournaments, in certain games, he played with a touch of genius. The rest of us were in awe … and jealous as hell.”

  “I hear he almost won a U.S. Open,” I said.

  “He was young but he dominated,” the burly grandmaster said. “He won lots of tournaments, and he was beginning to be recognized internationally, but he was not a happy camper. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a lonely kid. He had no girlfriends. No pals. He didn’t hang out with the rest of us. When he got to be about fifteen, and the tournament pressures mounted, it grew much worse. He would talk to himself. At first we thought maybe he was a schizophrenic, but it wasn’t that. It was an outlet for him, a way to handle the pressure. I once roomed with him at an international in Madrid, and he kept me awake half the night with his gobbledygook. I finally told him to shut the hell up, and I was tempted to stuff a sock in his mouth. He didn’t only talk to himself. He also talked to his opponents, the way he just did to Voorhees.”