Platonov sneered. “Some victory. He fooled a baby. He managed time better than an opponent who could barely see over the chessboard.”

“It’s down to four players,” Arkady said.

“I never said he wasn’t talented. I said he was wasting his talent. He only plays for money and this, this, this is the proof. In a casino. Look at him.” Platonov pointed to the television screen. Zhenya had pulled up his hood, as good as hiding his face. “He thinks he’s Bobby Fischer.”

During the intermission, a girl Zhenya’s age dared to break into Zhenya’s solitude to offer him a stick of gum the careful way someone feeds a half-wild animal. When the intermission was over she stayed in the player’s seat opposite him and he chewed more thoughtfully.

Playing black, she immediately challenged Zhenya for control of the center of the board. Her style was as cold-blooded as his, sacrificing a pawn to gain tempo and reach level ground with white. Blitz was a sprint and it was hard to distinguish the beginning from the middle game and the middle game from the end. Forty moves in five minutes. No draws. On the other board still in action-the university champion versus a grizzled veteran-the need for speed encouraged exchanges for simplification’s sake. In contrast, Zhenya and the girl developed an intricate structure of poison pawns, veiled threats and phantom attacks. The slightest push could bring it all down. She studied the board with a penetrating gaze. Zhenya closed his eyes. He liked to play blindfolded; Arkady had seen him do it many times. In his mind, Zhenya once told him, he saw all the variations in three dimensions. Not analyzed. Saw.

Zhenya opened his eyes. He pushed. Starting equal in material, he and the girl machine-gunned the board for the next five moves, ending in positions that were identical with one exception: she attacking his king with a bishop while he attacked hers with a knight. A bishop had more sweep than a knight, but a knight jumped enemy lines and in crowded quarters that was the edge.

She saw it. “Mate in five,” she said and set her king on its side.

“The girl has possibilities,” Platonov said.

“We have our finalists!” the presenter announced. “Moscow University undergraduate champion Tomashevsky and our tournament surprise.”

“What did you think of Zhenya’s game?” Arkady asked.

“What did you think?” Platonov threw the question back. “You’ve wondered for days what he’s been doing. He’s been preparing.”

Lydia pulled Tomashevsky and Zhenya in front of the camera and asked what they would do with a thousand dollars if they won.

“Buy a new road bike,” Tomashevsky said. He looked athletic. “And beer.”

“And you?” Lydia asked Zhenya.

“A tricycle,” suggested Tomashevsky.

Zhenya said nothing. He looked at a cage of gaudy parrots that huddled together and blinked their leathery eyelids.

“It must be a secret,” the presenter let him off the hook.

“This is the truth about chess,” Platonov said. “People don’t win a match, they lose. They find a way to lose. Chess is one choice after another and people get tired of choosing. The body gets tired and the brain gives in. The brain says, what are you doing here pulling your wad when you could be out in the midst of life, with women and song and good champagne?”

“How do you think the university champion will do?” Arkady asked.

“Against Zhenya? He doesn’t stand a chance.”

Platonov was right. The game was an anticlimax. Although they played under the overhead camera, the finalists revealed no original or interesting strategy. Television viewers watched the systematic demolition of a university scholar by a boy who did nothing but rapidly offer him choices, one after another. With each wrong choice the scholar’s position deteriorated a little bit. After twenty moves he was only down a pawn but he had nowhere to go. Every move involved some small loss. He was bound by invisible knots that tightened with resistance because he saw that with every succeeding move his situation would be more obvious. Before his friends and admirers. Professors. On television. He did the only rational thing and moved the same piece twice.

“A double move, disqualified!” said the producer, Platonov, all the players and half the people in the gaming hall.

“What a shame,” said the presenter. “The match is decided by a disqualification, a mistake on the part of Tomashevsky, accidentally handing the match to his opponent, Evgeny Lysenko. What a terrible way to lose the tournament when he was doing so well.”

The student Tomashevsky rose from his chair in disbelief, like a man betrayed by nothing more than eagerness and stunned by the magnitude of his error. He’d gotten ahead of himself was all. It happened to the best players and there was nothing to do but be a good sport, although when he offered his hand to Zhenya the boy regarded him with contempt.

“Anyway, we have a champion.” The presenter tried to be bright. “And, fortunately, we also have a bonus match between young Evgeny Lysenko and Grandmaster Ilya Platonov.”

“Are you all right?” Arkady asked.

“A little lightheadedness,” Platonov said. “Have you got a smoke?”

Arkady accompanied him out of the van into the cold bite of a wind that drove flakes across curlicues of ice. Both men sucked fiercely on their cigarettes.

“It’s not a tournament that Zhenya prepared for,” Platonov said. “There was never any doubt about the tournament.”

At the club door, the security squad waved and called Platonov’s name.

“They’re waiting for you.”

“It’s hard to explain to someone who is not a player,” Platonov said. “There is a time in your life when you imagine chess so perfectly that your intuition is as solid as any game from any book. Like music, if you can hear the entire suite in one moment. You may seem to move your pieces in a hurry but you’re simply following a score. And then one day this magical ear disappears and you find yourself hawking chess sets to schoolboys for a living. Or worse.” The door of the television van popped open, and the producer yelled for Platonov to move inside the club. Platonov hunched his shoulders. “One day it’s just gone.”

Platonov played white. Between the parking lot and the chessboard he seemed to have found his usual arrogance and wrapped it around himself like a cape. In rapid moves he sacrificed three pawns, opened up the center and developed his pieces while black was still digesting its easy prizes. For the first time since the opening round, Zhenya seemed surprised. Arkady stood in the shadow of a column, out of the boy’s line of sight, and followed the game on a screen from the overhead camera. If Arkady had expected the old man to play it safe and eke out a win he was wrong. Platonov had given Zhenya a huge material advantage. On the other hand, Zhenya’s power pieces hadn’t moved, while the grandmaster’s bishops and knights were already on the battlefield. It was an assault that was too reckless for chess. It was pure blitz.

Zhenya rested his chin in his hand and, with the calm of a young gargoyle at a height, looked down on the pieces on the board. Arkady tried to imagine what it would be like to see the game as Zhenya must. The bishop slyly insinuating himself on the diagonal, the knight leaping barricades, the queen a diva, the king anxious and nearly useless. Or was that too romantic? Did Zhenya see the game merely in bytes, like a computer?

Zhenya pushed his forward pawn closer to the fray, a provocation, and the assault began. As fast as they could hit the clock, Platonov attacked and Zhenya defended. They shuttled pieces in, snatched prizes out, castled under pressure, offered and declined gambits. The thought process could not have been involved, Arkady thought; reason wasn’t enough. This was tempo, pressure, intuition. The shape of the board changed and changed again. Even on the club’s large game screen it was hard to follow the game’s ebb and flow, and just when Arkady expected the entire match would be over in less than a minute Platonov paused to assess the damage. Half the pieces were off the board and somehow, as if Zhenya had reshuffled a deck of cards, the situation was reversed. Platonov had an extra pawn and Zhenya, on the strength of doubled rooks, controlled the center.