At one table where the position looked interesting, she stopped for a moment. It was the Richter-Rauzer, from the Sicilian. She had written a small piece on it for Chess Review a few years before, when she was sixteen. The men were playing it right, and Black had a slight variation in his pawns that she had never seen before, but it was clearly sound. It was good chess. First-class chess, being played by two old men in cheap working clothes. The man playing White moved his king’s bishop, looked up at her and scowled. For a moment she felt powerfully self-conscious among all these old Russian men with her nylons and pale-blue skirt and gray cashmere sweater, her hair cut and shaped in the proper way for a young American girl, her feet in pumps that probably cost as much money as these men used to earn in a month.
Then the wrinkled face of the man who was staring at her broke into a broad, gap-toothed smile, and said, “Harmon? Elisabeta Harmon?” and, surprised, she said, “Da.” Before she could react further, he stood up and threw his arms around her and hugged her and laughed, repeating, “Harmon! Harmon!” over and over. And then there was a crowd of old men in gray clothes around her smiling and eagerly holding out their hands for her to shake, eight or ten of them talking to her at once, in Russian.
Her games with Hellström and Shapkin were rigorous, grim and exhausting, but she was never in any real danger. The work she had done over the past six months gave a solidity to her opening moves that she was able to maintain through the middle game and on to the point at which each of them resigned. Hellström clearly took it hard and did not speak to her afterward, but Shapkin was a very civilized, very decent man, and he resigned gracefully even though her win over him was decisive and merciless.
There would be seven games in all. The players had been given schedules during the long orientation speech on the first day; Beth kept hers in the nightstand by the bed, in the drawer with her bottle of green pills. On the last day she would be playing the whites against Borgov. Today it was Luchenko, with black.
Luchenko was the oldest player there; he had been World Champion before Beth was born, and played and defeated the great Alekhine in an exhibition when he was a boy, had drawn with Botvinnik and crushed Bronstein in Havana. He was no longer the tiger he had once been, but Beth knew him to be a dangerous player when allowed to attack. She had gone through dozens of his games from Chess Informant, some of them during the month with Benny in New York, and the power of his attack had been shocking, even to her. He was a formidable player and a formidable man. She would have to be very careful.
They were at the first table—the one Borgov had played at the day before. Luchenko made a short bow, standing by his chair while she took her seat. His suit today was a silky gray, and when he walked up to the table she had noticed his shoes—shiny black and soft-looking, probably imported from Italy.
Beth was wearing a dark-green cotton dress with white piping at the throat and sleeves. She had slept soundly the night before. She was ready for him.
But on the twelfth move he began to attack—very subtly at first, with pawn to queen rook three. A half-hour later he was mounting a pawn storm down the queenside, and she had to delay what she was preparing to deal with it. She studied the board for a long time before bringing a knight over to defend. She wasn’t happy about doing it, but it had to be done. She looked across the board at Luchenko. He gave a little shake of his head—a theatrical shake—and a tiny smile appeared on his lips. Then he reached out and continued the advance of his knight’s pawn as if heedless of where she now had her knight. What was he doing? She studied the position again and then, shocked, she saw it. If she didn’t find a way out, she would have to take the rook pawn with her knight, and four moves down from that he would be able to bring his innocent-looking bishop from the back rank out to knight five, there on her fractured queenside, and pick off her queen rook in exchange for it. It was seven moves away, and she hadn’t seen it.
She leaned her elbows on the table and rested her cheeks against clenched fists. She had to work this out. She put Luchenko and the crowded auditorium and the ticking of her clock and everything else out of her mind and studied, going through dozens of continuations carefully. But there was nothing. The best she could do was give up the exchange and get his rook pawn as consolation. And he would still have his queenside attack going. She hated it, but it had to be done. She should have seen it coming. She pushed up her queen rook pawn as she had to and watched the moves play themselves out. Seven moves later he got the rook for his bishop, and her stomach knotted when she saw him take up the piece in his hand and set it down at the side of the board. When she took the rook pawn two moves later it was no real help. She was behind in the game, and her whole body was tense.
Just stopping the advance of his pawns down the queenside was grim work. She had to return the pawn she had taken from him to manage it, and that done, he was doubling his rooks on the king file. He wouldn’t let up. She made a threat toward his king as a cover and managed to trade off one of his rooks for her remaining one. It did no good to trade when you were down, because it increased his advantage, but she had to do it. Luchenko gave up the traded piece casually, and she looked at his snow-white hair as he took hers in exchange, hating him for it. Hating him for his theatrical hair and hating him for being ahead of her by the exchange. If they went on trading, she would be ground down to nothing. She had to find a way to stop him.
The middle game was Byzantine. They were both entrenched with every piece supported at least once and many of them twice. She fought to avoid trades and to find a wedge that could bring her back to even; he countered everything she attempted, moving his pieces surely with his beautifully manicured hand. The intervals between moves were long. Every now and then she would see a glimmer of a possibility way down the line, eight or ten moves away, but she was never able to make it materialize. He had brought his rook to the third rank and put it above his castled king; its movement was limited there to three squares. If she could only find a way to trap it before he lifted the knight that held it back. She concentrated on it as strongly as she knew how, feeling for a moment as though the intensity of her concentration might burn the rook off the board like a laser beam. She attacked it mentally with knights, pawns, the queen, even with her king. She mentally forced him to raise a pawn so that it cut off two of the rook’s flight squares, but she could find nothing.
Feeling dizzy from the effort, she pulled her elbows off the table, put her arms in her lap, shook her head and looked at her clock. She had less than fifteen minutes. Alarmed, she looked down at her score sheet. She had to make three more moves before her flag fell or she would forfeit. Luchenko had forty minutes left on his clock. There was nothing to do but move. She had already considered knight to knight five and knew it was sound, although of no particular help. She moved it. His reply was what she expected, forcing her to bring the knight back to king four, where she had planned for it to be in the first place. She had seven minutes left. She studied carefully and put her bishop on the diagonal that his rook sat on. He moved the rook, as she knew he would. She signaled the tournament director, wrote her next move on the score sheet, holding her other hand over it to hide it from Luchenko, and folded the sheet to seal it. When the director came over, she said, “Adjournment,” and waited for him to get the envelope. She was exhausted. There was no applause when she got up and walked wearily off the stage.