One fruit of Gaystik’s victory was the gift of the hotel ballroom by the Einstein management, free of rent, to the chess club. Hotel weddings were out of vogue, and management had been trying for years to clear the patzers, with their mutterings and smoke, from the coffee shop. Gaystik provided management the excuse they needed. They sealed off the main doors of the ball room so that you could enter only through the back, off an alley. They pulled up the fine ashwood parquetry and laid down a demented checkerboard of linoleum in shades of soot, bile, and surgical-scrub green. The modernist chandelier was replaced by banks of fluorescent tubes bolted to the high concrete ceiling. Two months later, the young world champion wandered into the old coffee shop where Landsman’s father had once made his mark, sat down in a booth at the back, took out a Colt .38 Detective Special, and shot himself in the mouth. There was a note in his pocket. It said only I liked things better the way they were before.
“Emanuel Lasker,” the Russian says to the two detectives, looking up from the chessboard, under an old neon clock that advertises the defunct newspaper, the Blat. He is a skeletal man, his skin thin, pink, and peeling. He wears a pointed black beard. His eyes are close-set and the color of cold seawater. “Emanuel Lasker.” The Russian’s shoulders hunch, and he ducks his head, and his rib cage swells and narrows. It looks like laughter, but no sound comes out. “I wish that he does come around here.” Like that of most Russian immigrants, the man’s Yiddish is experimental and brusque. He reminds Landsman of somebody, though Landsman can’t say whom. “I give him such a kick to his ass for him.”
“You ever look at his games?” the Russian’s opponent wants to know. He is a young man with pudding cheeks and rimless glasses and a complexion tinged with green, like the white of a dollar bill. The lenses of his glasses ice over as he aims them at Landsman. “You ever look at his games, Detective? ”
“Just to make this clear,” Landsman says, “that isn’t the Lasker we have in mind.”
“This man was only using the name as an alias,” Berko says. “Otherwise we’d be looking for a man who’s already been dead sixty years.”
“You look at Lasker’s games today,” the young man continues, “there’s too much complexity. He makes everything too hard.”
“Only it seems complexity to you, Velvel,” says the Russian, “for the reason of how much you are simple.”
The shammeses have interrupted their game in its dense middle stages with the Russian, playing White, holding an unassailable knight outpost. The men are still caught up in their game, the way a pair of mountains gets caught up in a whiteout. Their natural impulse is to treat the detectives with the abstract contempt they reserve for all kibitzers. Landsman wonders if he and Berko ought to wait until the players have finished and then try again. But there are other games in progress, other players to question. Around the old ballroom, legs scratch the linoleum like fingernails on a chalkboard. Chessmen click like the cylinder turning in Melekh Gaystik’s .38. The men — there are no women here — play by means of steadily hectoring their opponents with self-aspersions, chilly laughter, whistling, harumphs.
“As long as we’re making things clear,” Berko says, “this man who called himself Emanuel Lasker, but was not the noted world champion born in Prussia in 1868, has died, and we are investigating that death. In our capacity as homicide detectives, which w mentioned but without, it seems, making much of an impression.”
“A Jew with blond hair,” the Russian says.
“And freckles,” Velvel says.
“You see,” the Russian says. “We pay close attention.” He snatches up one of his rooks the way you pluck at a stray hair on somebody’s collar. Together his fingers and the rook take their trip down the file and break the bad news to the Black’s remaining bishop with a tap.
Velvel speaks Russian now, with a Yiddish accent, offering his wishes for the resumption of friendly relations between his opponent’s mother and a well endowed stallion.
“I am orphan,” the Russian says.
He sits back in his chair as if expecting his opponent to require some time to recover from the loss of his bishop. He knots his arms around his chest and jams his hands into his armpits. It is the gesture of a man who wants to smoke a papiros in a room where the habit has been forbidden. Landsman wonders what his father would have done with himself if the Einstein Chess Club had banned smoking while he was alive. The man could go through a whole pack of Broadways in a single game.
“Blond,” the Russian says, the very soul of helpful ness. “Freckles. What else, please?”
Landsman shuffles through his scanty hand of details, trying to decide which one to play. “A student of the game, we’re guessing. Up on his chess history. He had a book by Siegbert Tarrasch in his room. And then there’s the alias he was using.”
“So astute,” the Russian says without bothering to sound sincere. “A couple of top-dollar shammeses.”
The remark does not so much rankle Landsman as nudge him half a wisecrack closer to remembering this bony Russian with the peeling skin. “At one time, possibly,” he continues more slowly, groping for the memory, watching the Russian, “the deceased was a pious Jew. A black hat.”
The Russian tugs his hands out from under his arms. He sits forward in his chair. The ice on his Baltic eyes seems to thaw, all at once. “He was smack addict?” His tone barely qualifies as a question, and when Landsman doesn’t immediately deny the charge, he says, “Frank.” He pronounces the name American-style, with a long, sharp vowel and a shadowless R. “Ah, no.”
“Frank,” Velve1 agrees.
“I—” The Russian slumps, knees spread, hands dangling at his sides. “Detectives, can I tell you one thing?” he says. “Truly, sometimes I hate this lamentable excuse for a world.”
“Tell us about Frank,” Berko says. “You liked him.” The Russian hoists his shoulders, his eyes iced over again. “I do not like anyone,” he says. “But when Frank comes in here, at least I do not run screaming out the door. He is funny. Not handsome man. But handsome voice. Serious voice. Like the man who plays serious music on the radio. At three o’clock in the morning, you know, talking about Shostakovich. He says things in serious voice, it’s funny. Everything he says, always it’s a little bit criticism. Cut of your hair, how ugly your pants, how Velvel jumps every time a person mentions his wife.”
“True enough,” Velvel says. “I do.”
“Always teasing you, but, I don’t know why, it don’t piss you off.”
“It was — You felt like he was harder on himself,” Velvel says.
“When you play him, even though he wins every time, you feel you play better against him than with the assholes in this club,” the Russian says. “Frank is never asshole.”
“Meyer,” says Berko, soft. He flies the flags of his eyebrows in the direction of the next table. They have an audience.
Landsman turns. Two men confront each other over a game in its early stages. One wears the modern jacket and pants and full beard of a Lubavitcher Jew. His beard is dense and black as if shaded in with a soft pencil. A steady hand has pinned a black velour skullcap trimmed with black silk to the black tangle or his hair. His navy overcoat and blue fedora hang from a hook set into the mirrored wall behind him. The lining of his coat and the label of his hat are reflected in the glass. Exhaustion stains the underlids or his eyes: fervent eyes, bovine and sad. His opponent is a Bobover in a long robe, britches, white hose, and slippers. His skin is as pale as a page of commentary. His hat perches on his lap, a black cake on a black dish. His skullcap lies flat as a sewn pocket against the back of his cropped head. To the eye not disillusioned by police work, they might appear to be as lost as any pair of Einstein patzers in the diffused radiance of their game. Landsman would be willing to bet a hundred dollars, however, that neither of them even knows whose move it is. They have been listening to every word at the neighboring table; they are listening now.