by Chris Orcutt
“Miss Krüsh will now answer your questions,” the MC said.
A young woman a few rows ahead of me stood up.
“How’d you become so good at chess?”
“I was raised in Soviet Ukraine,” Miss Krüsh said. “The State trained me to beat corrupt Western capitalists. If I lost, my family did not eat.”
The girl gave a start. “Oh my God, that’s terrible!”
“I joke,” Miss Krüsh said. “Ha, ha.”
The crowd laughed.
“Practice, young lady,” she said. “That is how one becomes good at anything.”
From the very top of the auditorium, a preppy young man shouted down at her: “I love you! Can I have your phone number?”
“That depends,” she said. “What is your net worth?”
The crowd tittered. The young man pouted.
“I don’t get my trust fund until I’m twenty-one,” he said glumly.
“Too bad,” she said. “When you get it, and if it is over ten million dollars, you may look me up.”
Another laugh. Across the aisle from me, a studious-looking kid with a beard jumped to his feet.
“In the game against Professor Quincy—”
“Board nine,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Could you explain the series of exchanges beginning with”—he consulted a notebook—“uh…”
“Move seventeen?” She sipped some water.
“Right. You captured his rook. What was your tactical thinking there?”
“An excellent question,” she said. “I sensed that Professor Quincy was attempting to gain a pawn on my queen side, so I devised a zwischenzug, which is German for an ‘in-between’ move. American players know this as an intermezzo or a ‘swishy.’ I allowed the first two pawn exchanges to happen, but before he could make the third capture, I placed him in check. That was the zwischenzug. Since his rook was skewered on the same diagonal, when Dr. Quincy moved his king out of check, I captured his rook.” She smiled and morphed her voice into a comical German accent. “Vun could say I use zvishensook to capture rook. ”
The audience clapped and chuckled. A middle-aged woman across the auditorium asked the next question: “How do you remember all of your moves?”
“How does a litigator memorize her arguments?” Miss Krüsh said. “How does a painter make art or a doctor heal the sick? They just do, because that is who they are. Chess is who I am.”
She answered questions for another half hour, and when the exhibition ended, fans flocked down to the stage to get her autograph. The seat next to mine, Stanley Ford’s, was still empty. Stanley was supposed to be my buffer with the chess goddess during dinner. I supposed I’d just have to go it alone.
I went out to the lobby and bought a copy of her chess primer, Krush Your Opponents, and hustled back into the auditorium. Squeezing through the throng, I held the book out for her to sign. She signed it with a Sharpie and glanced over my shoulder.
“Mr. Stevens…where is Stanley?”
“I thought you would know,” I said. “He never showed tonight. Great tournament, by the way. You’re amazing.”
“One should be excellent in one’s profession,” she said. “Are you excellent in yours, Mr. Stevens?”
“I do my best.”
A student thrust a book at her; Miss Krüsh scribbled her signature on the flyleaf.
“So, Mr. Stevens,” Miss Krüsh said, “I assume you will be taking me out to dinner.”
“Without a chaperone?” I feigned a look of shock.
She smiled and signed the sleeve of a girl’s T-shirt, which read, “Chess Girls Know All the Best Positions.”
“I’d be delighted,” I said.
Across the room, Sally Standish gave me a finger wave; I replied with a roguish smile and a slit-eyed stare that caused her to blush and fidget her feet. Finally Miss Krüsh finished with the last of her fans. As she took her overcoat and handbag from a student assistant, Dr. Malone accosted her and performed a zwischenzug of his own: he kissed her hand.
“Enchanté,” he said.
I seethed—mostly because I knew I should have kissed her hand when I met her, but I’d been chicken. I was also annoyed because Malone did it with such panache, even saying something charming in a foreign language—French, probably. His eyes were a faint gray with a wraith of blue in them, and as much as I hated to admit it, their unusual paleness made them mesmerizing. He grinned at Svetlana wolfishly.
“I should have asked for a draw.”
“Yes,” Miss Krüsh said, “but I would not have given you one.”
“Nonetheless, it was a pleasure being dominated by you.” He handed her a card. “Perhaps while you’re in town you’d like to visit my lab and partake in my study.”
“What do you study?” she said.
“Sexual attraction.”
“No, thank you.”
“A shame,” Malone said. “You would have been an ideal subject.” He turned to me. “Excuse me...aren’t you Stevens, the FBI profiler?”
“I am. Dakota Stevens—not ‘Stevens.’ ”
“What are you doing here at Harvard?”
“I’m on sabbatical,” I said. “Harvard Fellow. Doing research on psychopaths.”
“Interesting,” Malone said. “But this hardly seems like the ideal environment for that kind of research.”
“You’d be surprised,” I said. “In my experience, academia affords psychopaths ideal hiding places and hunting grounds. I’ve only been at Harvard a few days, and my research has already proven quite fruitful.”
“Well, good luck with it.” He shook my hand halfheartedly and turned to Miss Krüsh again. “I’ll have an invitation sent to you in case you change your mind.”
Before she could object, he started for the exit. He met Sally by the door at the top of the amphitheater. Sally smiled over her shoulder at me, and the two of them wandered out into the lobby. I tapped Miss Krüsh on the arm.
“Listen, are you up for an adventure?” I said.
“Pardon?” she said. “I thought you were taking me to dinner.”
“I will, but I’m working, and I need to follow Dr. Malone.”
“I barely know you, Mr. Stevens.” She looked around the empty auditorium. “Explain what you mean by ‘an adventure.’ ”
“While we walk,” I said. “Are you in or out, Miss Krüsh?”
I leveled my eyes on hers.
“Very well,” she said.
I helped her into her overcoat and led us outside. I was afraid I’d lost Malone and Sally, but Malone—a smoker apparently—had stopped in the courtyard to light a cigarette. Miss Krüsh, mincing behind, caught up to me at the lobby doors, where I stared out the windows at Malone and Sally.
“Okay, Mr. Stevens,” she said, “why are you following Dr. Malone?”
“Shh,” I said. “I’ll tell you, but you’ve got to keep it down.”
As we followed Malone and Sally across campus, I explained how Mr. Standish had hired me to extricate his daughter from a relationship with Malone. When I mentioned that Mr. Standish was a friend of the FBI Director, and that I used to work for the Bureau, Miss Krüsh thrust her hands in her coat pockets.
“Ah, the FBI,” she said. “After my family defected and we settled in Manhattan, they watched us for over a year. They thought we were Soviet spies.”
“Different time,” I said.
“I must say, Mr. Stevens…this case of yours seems foolish. Why did you not simply refuse to take it?”
“Because I can’t say no to the Director of the FBI, that’s why.”
Ahead, Malone and Sally crossed Mass Ave to the T entrance and rode the escalator down. Miss Krüsh and I followed, staying a good fifty feet behind them.
“I certainly hope there will be dinner sometime this
evening,” she said.
“Well, little lady,” I said with a bad Texan accent, “if’n you’re good, I might just buy y’all a steak dinner.”
She gave me a withering look. “I suppose other women find that line to be amusing.”
“Hilarious, actually,” I said.
“You will find, Mr. Stevens, that unlike the women you are probably accustomed to, I am not easily impressed.”
“Noted, Miss Krüsh. Walk faster, please.”
When we reached the turnstile, I gave Miss Krüsh a T token, and we followed Malone and Sally down to the Red Line platform to Boston.
8
Enough Said
With a deafening screech, a train rolled into the Harvard T stop, and we boarded one car down from Malone and Sally’s. I guided Miss Krüsh to an open seat near the door and kept an eye on our quarry through the window at the end of the car.
Malone and Sally rode to the Park Street stop and took the escalator up to the street at the corner of Boston Common. There, they strolled hand-in-hand to the statehouse, where they turned down Park Street Place.
“Where are they going?” Miss Krüsh asked, mincing along beside me.
“If I knew that,” I said, “I wouldn’t need to follow them, would I?”
When we came to a cobblestone alleyway, Miss Krüsh wobbled in her high heels. I held out my arm, and she took it.
“I have played in several tournaments here,” she said, “but I rarely leave my hotel. I have seen very little of Boston.”
“Well, stick with me, kid,” I said. “These are my old stomping grounds.”
“ ‘Stomping grounds’?”
“I went to college here.”
“Ah,” she said.
Ahead, the lights of the Parker House Hotel, home to many a Boston debutante’s ball, splashed across the sidewalk. The entry overhang gleamed gold. As Malone and Sally approached the entrance, the doorman tipped his cap and held the door open for them. I tapped Miss Krüsh on the shoulder.
“We might be in luck,” I said.
“Good. I am not dressed for following people.”
When we reached the chandeliered lobby, Malone and Sally were already being ushered into the dining room. Miss Krüsh started to follow them.
“Hold it.” I grabbed her arm. “They’ll see us.”
“Perhaps not,” she said.
She edged past a gaggle of women to the maître d’. She spoke to him, and the maître d’ smiled and grabbed two menus. Miss Krüsh waved me over.
“They do not have a table available until ten o’clock,” she said, “but I told him you would give him a hundred dollars if he could seat us now.”
“I don’t have that kind of cash on me,” I said.
“Then get it,” she said. “The maître d’ said he would seat us in the corner farthest from them. There is an ATM in the lobby.”
“You’ve got this all figured out, don’t you?” I said.
She lowered her eyes and shrugged minutely. “Please, Mr. Stevens…I am famished.”
I knew it was futile to argue with her. Clearly, Miss Krüsh was a woman who, by her virtue of her beauty and talent, was used to getting what she wanted, when she wanted it.
Without another word, I went down to the ATM and withdrew $500 of the remaining grand in my checking account. I folded up five twenties, palmed them to the maître d’, and he seated us in a corner, beneath a portrait of famous Bostonian Henry Cabot Lodge. From here, I had a view of the entire dining room—its carved mahogany moldings, its gold sash drapes on the windows, its ornate table settings, and Malone and Sally at the far end.
When the waiter came, Miss Krüsh ordered filet mignon, “exceedingly rare,” with béarnaise sauce; I ordered the Boston scrod. When a server brought us a basket of the hotel’s legendary Parker House rolls, Miss Krüsh took one, buttered it, and ate it with gusto. Across the room, Dr. Malone and Sally talked quietly, sipping drinks. Several patrician Beacon Hill couples eyed the odd pair; it was impossible not to notice the near 20-year gap in their ages.
“I don’t get it.” I shook my head at them. “What could she possibly see in that guy?”
Miss Krüsh turned in her chair and cast an appraising glance across the dining room at them. “I imagine she is like many other young women—seeking approval from a father figure.”
“Don’t tell me you’re a psychologist, too.”
“No, but my father controlled my chess career for a long time,” she said. “There was a time when older men strongly appealed to me.”
Whatever Sally and Malone’s conversation was, it wasn’t very animated; they acted like a couple that had been married forty years.
“I wish I knew what they were saying,” I said.
“You can know,” she said. “For another twenty.”
The waiter brought our food. As he was about to leave, Miss Krüsh put a hand on his arm.
“I need you to do something for me,” she said.
The story she gave him was this: her boyfriend, Malone, was here with another woman. If the waiter would find out what he and the girl were saying, her friend (me) would pay him an extra $20 when we left. He agreed, and off he went.
“Creative,” I said. “And duplicitous. You could have a future in my business.”
She sliced her filet mignon into thin, equal-sized strips. They lay on her plate like fallen red dominoes.
“It is merely looking at a position,” she said, “seeing what material you have, and devising tactics that leverage your positional advantages.”
“Oh, is that all?” I said.
“In this case, the waiters are our material, and we can get them working for us.”
“Sure…using my money,” I said.
She shrugged indifferently. I ate some scrod and kept an eye on Sally and Malone. Miss Krüsh and I were nearly finished eating when Malone snapped his fingers at his waiter for the check. Our waiter drifted back over to our table. While I pulled out my billfold to pay him, Miss Krüsh played the scorned woman perfectly.
“Go ahead, young man,” she said, “I am quite used to his indiscretions by now.”
“He was talking about how he had to go to Montreal soon,” the waiter said. “Then he said, ‘After this, how about Acorn Street?’ And she said, ‘All right,’ and that’s it.”
Acorn Street was an old cobblestone alleyway on Beacon Hill. What reason could they possibly have for going there? A romantic walk?
“Thanks.” I handed him $40 and my AMEX card to cover the bill. “We’re in a hurry.”
The waiter jogged away.
“What is this ‘Acorn Street’?” Miss Krüsh asked.
“Hard to describe,” I said. “Look, I have a feeling we’re going to be on foot again from here. Are you sure you’re up for this? Or would you prefer to go back to Cambridge?”
“I have nothing better to do,” she said. “Stanley has clearly abandoned me, and I have only my room at Cabot House to look forward to.”
I noticed Malone signing his check. Once the waiter returned with my card and check, I signed it and waited until Malone and Sally left the dining room. As soon as they walked out, I helped Miss Krüsh out of her chair.
“Okay, let’s go,” I said.
We followed Malone and Sally out to the street. Waving off a cab, they hiked back up the hill toward the statehouse, stopping at the corner of Park Street. The gold dome of the statehouse was brightly illuminated, as if taunting crooks to steal it. Malone and Sally kissed, and then they split up. While Malone headed down Beacon Street along the dark Common, Sally went up Bowdoin Street, along the side of the statehouse. I wasn’t sure which one to follow. Miss Krüsh and I stood in the shadows on the corner, watching them get farther apart.
“Well, detective?” she said.
If I was going to be spotted
by one of them, I preferred it was Sally. I could always say I’d followed her after the tournament because I was interested in her. I’d have a harder time explaining such a coincidence to Malone.
“Let’s follow her,” I said. “Come on.”
Sally turned left onto Derne Street, which ran behind the statehouse. She was heading into the heart of Beacon Hill, with its old-fashioned streetlamps, brick sidewalks, and black-shuttered brick townhouses that had long been the homes of Boston’s elite. Miss Krüsh and I stayed a block behind Sally, walking on the opposite side of the street. Quietly, I told Miss Krüsh some of the history of Beacon Hill, including how, back in Colonial times, the hill had been much higher; that is, until much of its dirt was excavated to fill in the swampy Back Bay.
“Fascinating,” Miss Krüsh said, stifling a yawn.
Sally wove through the streets of Beacon Hill, around shadowy corners, along wrought-iron fences with the autumn leaves tumbling along the sidewalk in the night breeze. Then she took a sharp turn down a narrow alleyway: Acorn Street. A street in name only, it was one of the original cobblestone byways in Boston. While Sally continued down Acorn Street, I pulled Miss Krüsh close to me, ducking us behind the corner at the alley entrance.
“I thought we were following her,” Miss Krüsh said.
The chess diva seemed to be adapting to detective work.
“It’s too exposed,” I said. “We’ll wait here.”
Far down Acorn, light from tourist-heavy Charles Street spilled into the alley. Staring at the distant end of the alley, I noticed the backlit figure of a man hiking uphill as Sally wobbled downhill in high heels. The breeze stirred the oak trees around us and blew Miss Krüsh’s hair across my cheek. She smelled good.
