There were two tables set up for adjourned games. A classic rookpawn ending was in place on one of them, waiting for Borgov and Duhamel. Her position with Luchenko had been laid out on the other. As she sat down at her end of it, Borgov and Duhamel came in together and walked to the board at the other side of the room in grim silence. There was a referee for each game, and the clocks were already set up. Beth had her ninety minutes of overtime, and Luchenko had the same, along with an extra thirty-five minutes left from yesterday. She had forgotten about his extra time. That put three things against her: his having the white pieces, his still unstopped attack, and his extra allotment of time.
Their referee brought over the envelope, opened it, showed the score sheet to both players and made Beth’s move himself. He pressed the button that started Luchenko’s clock, and without hesitation Luchenko advanced the pawn that Beth had expected. There was a certain relief in seeing him make the move. She had been forced to consider several other replies; now the lines from them could be dropped from her mind. Across the room she heard Borgov cough loudly and blow his nose. She tried to put Borgov out of her mind. She would be playing him tomorrow, but it was time now to get to work on this game, to put everything she had into it. Borgov would almost certainly beat Duhamel and begin tomorrow undefeated. If she wanted to win this tournament she had to rescue the game in front of her. Luchenko was ahead by the exchange, and that was bad. But he had that ineffective rook to contend with, and after several hours of study she had found three ways of using it against him. If she could bring it off, she could exchange a bishop for it and even the score.
She forgot about how tired she was and went to work. It was uphill and intricate. And Luchenko had that extra time. She decided on a plan developed in the middle of the night and began retreating her queenside knight, taking it on a virtual knight’s tour to get it up to king five. Clearly he was ready for that—had analyzed it himself sometime since yesterday morning. Probably with assistance. But there was something he might not have analyzed, good as he was, and that he might not see now. She pulled her bishop away from the diagonal his rook was on and hoped he wouldn’t see what she was planning. It would appear that she was attacking his pawn formation, forcing him to make an unstable advance. But she wasn’t concerned with his pawn position. She wanted that rook off the board badly enough to kill for it.
Luchenko merely pushed up the pawn. He could have thought longer about it—should have thought longer—but he didn’t. He moved the pawn. Beth felt a tiny thrill. She took the knight off the diagonal and put it not on king five, but on queen bishop five, offering it to his queen. If his queen took it, she would take the rook for her bishop. That in itself would be no good for her—paying for the rook with the knight and the bishop—but what Luchenko hadn’t seen was that she would get his knight in return because of the queen move. It was sweet. It was very sweet. She looked up hesitantly at him.
She had not looked at him in almost an hour, and his appearance was a surprise. He had loosened his tie, and it was twisted to one side of his collar. His hair was mussed. He was biting his thumb and his face was shockingly drawn.
He gave it a half-hour and found nothing. Finally he took the knight. She took the rook, wanting to shout with joy as it came off the board, and he took her bishop. Then she checked, he interposed, and she pushed the pawn up to the knight. She looked at him again. The game would be even now. The elegant look was gone. He had become a rumpled old man in an expensive suit, and it suddenly occurred to her that she wasn’t the only one exhausted by the games of the past six days. Luchenko was fifty-seven. She was nineteen. And she had worked out with Jolene for five months in Lexington.
From that point on, the resistance left him. There was no clear positional reason why she should be able to hurry him to a resignation after taking his knight; it was a theoretically even game. His queenside pawns were strongly placed. But now she whittled away at the pawns, throwing subtle threats at them while attacking his remaining bishop and forcing him to protect the key pawn with his queen. When he did that, brought up his queen to hold his pawns together, she knew she had him. She focused her mind on his king, giving full attention to attack.
There were twenty-five minutes left on her clock and Luchenko still had nearly an hour, but she gave twenty of her minutes to working it out and then struck, bringing her king rook pawn up to the fourth rank. It was a clear announcement of her intentions, and he gave it long, hard thought before moving. She used the time his clock was ticking to work it all out—every variation on each of the moves he might make. She found an answer to anything he might do, and when he finally made his move, bringing his queen, wastefully, over to protect, she ignored the chance to grab one of his attacking pawns and advanced her king rook pawn another square. It was a splendid move, and she knew it. Her heart exulted with it. She looked across the board at him.
He seemed lost in thought, as though he had been reading philosophy and had just set down the book to contemplate a difficult proposition. His face was gray now, with tiny wrinkles reticulating the dry skin. He bit his thumb again, and she saw, shocked, that his beautiful manicure of yesterday had been chewed ragged. He glanced over at her with a brief, weary glance—a glance with great weight of experience and a whole long career of chess in it—and back one final time at her rook pawn, now on the fifth rank. Then he stood up.
“Excellent!” he said, in English. “A beautiful recovery!”
His words were so conciliatory that she was astonished. She was unsure what to say.
“Excellent!” he said again. He reached down and picked up his king, held it thoughtfully for a moment and set it on its side on the board. He smiled wearily. “I resign with relief.”
His naturalness and lack of rancor made her suddenly ashamed. She held out her hand to him, and he shook it warmly. “I’ve played games of yours ever since I was a small girl,” she said. “I’ve always admired you.”
He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment. “You are nineteen?”
“Yes.”
“I have gone over your games at this tournament.” He paused. “You are a marvel, my dear. I may have just played the best chess player of my life.”
She was unable to speak. She stared at him in disbelief.
He smiled at her. “You will get used to it,” he said.
The game between Borgov and Duhamel had finished sometime earlier, and both men were gone. After Luchenko left she went over to the other board and looked at the pieces, which were still in position. The Blacks were huddled around their king in a vain attempt to protect, and the White artillery was coming at its corner from all over the board. The black king lay on its side. Borgov had been playing White.
Back at the lobby of the hotel a man jumped up from one of the chairs along the wall and came smiling toward her. It was Mr. Booth. “Congratulations!” he said.
“What became of you?” she asked.
He shook his head apologetically. “Washington.”
She started to say something but let it pass. She was glad he hadn’t been bothering her.
He had a folded newspaper under his arm. He pulled it out and handed it to her. It was Pravda. She couldn’t penetrate the boldface Cyrillic of the headlines, but when she flipped it over, the bottom of page one had her picture on it, playing Flento. It filled three columns. She studied the caption for a moment and managed to translate it: “Surprising strength from the U.S.”