A plastic shade on the van’s rear window was open a crack. Arkady squinted through it at a parking lot that was a maze of ruts in old snow. It was weird, the geometry of reality, he thought. How it changed depending on where you stood.
Platonov muttered in Arkady’s ear, “Chess is not gaming. Cretins! Besides, this tournament is not even chess. We used to play in real chess halls with real rules. It’s blitz. It’s not even blitz, it’s television.”
On screen the presenter asked herself, “For those who don’t follow chess closely, you may ask yourself what exactly is blitz?”
“In a regular…,” the producer said.
She said, “In a regular game of chess a player has two hours to make forty moves. In blitz he has five minutes. For this tournament, for motivation, in case of a tie the winner will be determined by the flip of a coin. The pace, as you can imagine, is rapid and exciting.”
“Like a mugging,” Platonov said.
The producer said, “Knockout…”
She said, “The competition will be a knockout system. Who plays white will be determined, again, by a flip of a coin, actually a casino chip. White or black, if you lose, you’re out. We have sixteen competitors, players of all ages who have survived preliminary rounds.”
Platonov stared at the monitor. “I recognize some. Whack-offs, dilettantes, anarchists.”
The producer shot Platonov a warning scowl.
The presenter said, “Our tournament champion will win a thousand dollars and the Casino of the Golden Khan will donate to children’s shelters across the city a thousand dollars.”
A thousand? That much was swept up in loose chips every night, Arkady thought.
“And there is a special bonus. The tournament champion will play a game with legendary Grandmaster”-she stopped to hear the producer’s feed-“Ilya Platonov. Are we ready?”
Platonov spied a different question in Arkady’s eyes and said, “They’re giving me five hundred. An honorarium. They say I can talk about the chess club.”
Arkady doubted it. They’d trot Platonov in and out like a dancing bear.
She unhooked a golden rope. “Find your tables, please.”
In the van the producer punched in music to scurry by as the players milled around and found their assigned tables. One camera scanned a player with shaky hands that had shaved him badly, a girl chewing on her hair, a fresh-cheeked university student Buddhalike at his board. The other camera focused on supporters: an anxious mother who pressed a handkerchief to her mouth, a girlfriend with chess books stacked on her knees and on the back row, fresh from the drunk tank, Victor. Fifteen players were in their seats. One was missing.
“We seem to be short one player.” The presenter found a place card at an empty seat. “E. Lysenko. Is there an E. Lysenko here?”
Arkady was jolted. E. Lysenko was Zhenya. Was he there?
The opponent was a stickler for the rules. He folded his arms and informed her, “You’ll have to give me a bye.”
“We’ll have to give him a bye,” the producer said into his microphone. “Start the games. Come on, Lydia! We need action.”
“It looks as if we will have to give you a bye,” she said at her end. “So, you go through the first round and you didn’t have to lift a finger.”
In the van Arkady said, “It’s not ten o’clock yet. There are five minutes to go. You’re starting early.”
The producer waved him off.
“It’s not ten,” Arkady said.
The producer told Platonov, “I liked your friend more as a dummy. Get him out of here.”
Arkady pulled the microphone off the producer’s head and spoke to the presenter directly. “Wait! Give him a chance.”
“He’s here,” she said.
In an anorak with the hood halfway up, Evgeny Lysenko, called Zhenya, looked like a sentry posted at a miserable border. At twelve years old he was short and slight and his natural gait was a reluctant shuffle. His hair was drab, his features ordinary. He habitually looked down to avoid attention and Arkady realized that Zhenya must have been among the spectators the entire time, waiting in the shadow of his hood until the last second before claiming his seat.
“How did his name get on the list?” Platonov asked.
“Sorry.” Arkady gave the headset back. His throat burned.
“Get fucked,” said the producer.
The opponent won the flip and chose white. He observed to Zhenya, “No time to clean your fingernails?”
Zhenya’s nails had black moons from his living in railroad cars around Three Stations. He stared at them as his opponent opened with his king pawn. Zhenya went on studying the dirt that lined his hands. The opponent waited. Every second was precious in blitz. Other boards jumped with moves and the slap of time buttons.
The producer told Arkady, “After all that, your boy froze.”
A minute passed. Players at the nearer tables stole glances at Zhenya, who left the white pawn alone and unchallenged in the center of the board. Early moves were the easiest, but Zhenya looked transfixed. Two minutes passed. The time clock was digital, with two LCD faces set in tough plastic for the occasional toss by an unhappy loser. The camera zoomed in. It was difficult to tell in all the motion on other boards who was winning or losing, but Zhenya’s board and clock made it immediately plain who was falling further and further behind. His opponent didn’t know how to set his expression. At first he was pleased to see Zhenya, by all appearances, at a loss. As the seconds passed he felt more and more uneasy, as if forced to dance alone. Someone was being humiliated; he could no longer say who. He said nothing to Zhenya; speaking over the board after play began was against the rules. Zhenya stood and the opponent half stood, expecting the boy to quit. Instead, Zhenya took off his anorak and hung it over the back of the chair to settle in for longer analysis.
With two minutes to go, Zhenya went into action. It wasn’t so much the development of black pieces that was extraordinary as the rapidity with which he met white’s every move. White would advance a piece and hardly hit the time button when black did the same, so that the clicks of the buttons came in pairs and the enormous time advantage white had for his moves came to seem pointless, even ridiculous. He began to play at Zhenya’s pace, conceding doubled pawns for a promising queenside push. He traded pieces at a slight disadvantage, saw the queenside attack fade, was stampeded into a high-speed exchange that cleared the board and, stripped, watched as a black pawn strolled to promotion. Cameras, guests and finished players watched as the white king dropped. The loser sank into his chair, still confused. It was the sort of loss that could kill a game for a man, Arkady thought. Zhenya looked for the next opponent.
Platonov’s verdict in the van was, “Nothing but tricks. If you let Zhenya set the rhythm, of course he’ll overwhelm you. In blitz you don’t play with your head. There’s no time to think. You play with your hands and the little shit has very fast hands. But now everyone knows how strong he is. Vanity will be his downfall.”
Zhenya’s second opponent was the prodigy. Perched on his booster seat the boy leveled an unblinking gaze at Zhenya, who had picked his fingernails during intermission. The producer ate it up.
“Two boys from different planets and neither of them Earth. Get tighter.”
When the prodigy won the coin toss, the camera closed in on a smile trying to hide in a corner of his lips. He had the voice of a choir soprano. “White, please.”
Playing black again, Zhenya answered from the start, simply countering and developing his pieces, castling, leaving no obvious weaknesses and mounting no clear attack. Trench warfare. He was even in material until the prodigy did to Zhenya what Zhenya had done to his first opponent and lumbered him with doubled pawns, the first chink in black’s defense. It had promise. Trying to protect his men Zhenya lost offense, and no offense made for an overburdened defense. Targets started to appear. It was so hard to choose, the prodigy squirmed in his seat. It wasn’t until he was down to fifteen seconds on his clock that he realized Zhenya had almost a full minute left on his. At which point, black unveiled a long diagonal across the board and a pin on white’s queen. Not a serious pin, not one that couldn’t be refuted with no more than two or three minutes of analysis. The prodigy’s hand hovered. It was still in the air when his clock said 0:00.