Quest sniffed at the scent of perfume in the windowless cubby-hole; it startled her to realize that Bernice Treffler’s professional psyche reeked of femaleness, which was more than she could say for herself. “You’re in over your head,” the Deputy Director of Operations testily informed her visitor. “In Martin’s case, getting well could turn out to be fatal.”
1997: MARTIN ODUM DISCOVERS THE KATOVSKY GAMBIT
STEPPING OFF THE CURB IN FRONT OF THE CROWDED AIRPORT terminal, Martin raised an index finger belt high to flag down one of the freelancers cruising the area in search of customers who didn’t want to deal with the doctored meters on the licensed cabs. Within seconds an antique Zil pulled to a stop in front of him and the passenger window wound down.
“Kuda,” demanded the driver, an elderly gentleman wearing a thin tie and a checkered jacket with wide lapels, along with a pair of rimmed eyeglasses that were the height of fashion during the Soviet era.
“Do you speak English?” Martin asked.
“Nyet, nyet, nye govoryu po-Angliiski,” the driver insisted, and then began to speak pidgin English with obvious relish. “Which whereabouts are you coming to, comrade visitor?” he asked.
“A village not far from Moscow named Prigorodnaia. Ever hear of it?”
The driver rocked his head from side to side. “Everyone over fifty knows where is Prigorodnaia,” he announced. “You have been there before?”
“No. Never.”
“Well, it’s not stubborn to find. Direction Petersburg, off the Moscow-Petersburg highway. Big shots once owned dachas there but they are all late and lamented. Only little shots still live in Prigorodnaia.”
“That’s me,” Martin said with a tired grin. “A little shot. How much?”
“Around trip, one hundred dollars U.S., half now, half when you resume to Moscow.”
Martin settled onto the seat next to the driver and produced two twenties and a ten—which was what Dante Pippen had paid the Alawite prostitute Djamillah in Beirut several legends back. Then, popping another aspirin from the jar he’d bought at the airport pharmacy to dull the pain from the cracked rib, he watched as the driver piloted the Zil through rush-hour traffic toward Moscow.
After a time Martin said, “You look a little old to be freelancing as a taxi.”
“I am one miserable pensioner,” the driver explained. “The automobile belongs to my first wife’s youngest son, who was my stepson before I divorced his mother. He was one of those smart capitalists who bought up industry privatization coupons distributed to the proletarian public, and then turned around and sold them for an overweight profit to the new Russian mafioso. Which is how he became owner of an old but lovingly restored Zil automobile. He borrows it to me when the ridiculous rent on my privatized apartment needs to get paid at the start of the month.”
“What did you do before you retired?”
The driver looked quickly at his passenger out of the corner of an eye. “Believe it or not, no skin off my elbow if you don’t, I was a famous, even infamous, chess grandmaster—ranked twenty-third in Soviet Union in 1954 when I was a nineteen-year-old Komsomol champion.”
“Why infamous?”
“It was said of me that chess drove me mad as a hatter. The critics who said it did not comprehend that, as a chess-playing psychologist once pointed out, chess cannot drive people mad; chess is what keeps mad people sane. You don’t by any chance play chess?”
“As a matter of fact, I used to. I don’t get much of a chance anymore.”
“You have heard maybe of the Katovsky gambit?”
“Actually, that rings a bell.”
“It’s me, the bell that’s ringing,” the driver said excitedly. “Hippolyte Katovsky in the flesh and blood. My gambit was the talk of tournaments when I played abroad—Belgrade, Paris, London, Milan, once even Miami in the state of Caroline the North, another time Peking when the Chinese Peoples Republic was still a socialist ally and Mao Tse-tung a comrade in arms.”
Martin noticed the old man’s eyes brimming with nostalgia. “What exactly was the Katovsky gambit?” he inquired.
Katovsky leaned angrily on the horn when a taxi edged in ahead of him. “Under Soviets, drivers like that would have been sent to harvest cotton in Central Asia. Russia is not the same since our communists lost power. Ha! We gained the freedom to die of hunger. The Katovsky gambit involved offering a poisoned pawn and positioning both bishops on the queen’s side to control the diagonals while knights penetrate on the king’s side. Swept opponents away for two years until R. Fischer beat me in Reykjavik by ignoring the poisoned pawn and castling on the queen’s side after I positioned my bishops.”
His lips moving as he played out a gambit in his head, Katovsky fell silent and Martin didn’t interrupt the game. The Zil passed an enormous billboard advertising Marlboro cigarettes and metro stations disgorging swarms of workers. Fatigue overcame Martin (he’d been traveling for two days and two nights to get from Hrodna to Moscow) and he closed his eyes for a moment that stretched into twenty minutes. When he opened them again the Zil was on the ring road. Giant cranes filled what Martin could see of the skyline. New buildings with glass facades that reflected the structures across the street were shooting up on both sides of the wide artery. In one of them he could make out automobiles barreling by, but there were so many of them on the road he couldn’t be sure which one was his. Traffic slowed to a crawl where men in yellow hard hats were digging up a section of the roadway with jackhammers, then sped up again as the Zil spilled through the funnel. Up ahead an overhead sign indicated the junction for the Petersburg highway.
“Turnoff for Prigorodnaia very shortly now,” Katovsky said. “I was one of Boris Spassky’s advisors when he lost to Fischer in 1972. If only he would have followed my advice he could have vacuumed the carpet with Fischer, who made blunder after blunder. Ha! They say the winner in any game of chess is the one who makes the next to last blunder. Here—here is the Prigorodnaia turnoff. Oh, how time seeps through your fingers when you are not closing your hand into a fist—I remember this road before it was paved. In 1952 and part of 1953, I was driven by a chauffeur to Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria’s dacha in Prigorodnaia every Sunday to teach chess to his wife. The lessons came to an end when Comrade Stalin died and Beria, who behind Stalin’s back created the gulags and purged the most loyal comrades, became executed.”
As Katovsky headed down the spur, past a sign that read “Prigorodnaia 7 kilometers,” the cracked rib in Martin’s chest began to ache again. Curiously, the pain seemed … familiar.
But how in the name of God could pain be familiar?
A pulse, the harbinger of a splitting headache, began to beat in Martin’s temples and he brought his fingers up to knead his brow. He found himself slipping into and out of roles. He could hear Lincoln Dittmann lazily murmuring a verse of poetry.
… the silent cannons bright as gold rumble
lightly over the stones. Silent cannons, soon
to cease your silence, soon unlimber’d to begin
the red business.
And the voice of the poet wearing the soiled white shirt open at the throat.
Sight at daybreak,—in camp in front of the
hospital tent on a stretcher (three dead men lying,)
each with a blanket spread over him
Other voices, barely audible, played in the lobe of his brain where memory resided. Gradually he began to distinguish fragments of dialogue.