Читать книгу White Death - Daniel Blake - Страница 12

‘I don’t understand,’ Kwasi said. ‘She’s never late.’

Marat Nursultan tapped his Breitling. ‘We get on with it? We suppose to start a half-hour ago.’

‘Of course,’ said Rainer Tartu.

It was only the three of them in the room: the three most powerful men in world chess. Not that it was an equal triumvirate, of course. Kwasi was the box office: his presence, and his presence alone, determined the dollars. Tartu just happened to be the one on the other side of the board. If Kwasi could have somehow played against himself, the sponsors wouldn’t have given Tartu a look-in; and if he, Tartu, didn’t like it, there were plenty of other grandmasters who’d take his place in a heartbeat.

As for Nursultan … well, he was the kind of guy that everyone had an opinion about. He liked people to call him Mr President, as he held two such offices: the presidency of Tatarstan, the semi-autonomous region of Russia whose capital Kazan had hosted the first match between Kwasi and Tartu; and the presidency of FIDE, the Fédération Internationale des Échecs, the governing body of world chess.

Rumors of bribery and corruption had swirled around both elections, and Nursultan had done little to dampen them: how else, his sly smile and calculated bonhomie seemed to ask, how else was one supposed to win elections? Nursultan was pretty much the prototype for homo post-sovieticus: after completing a doctorate in applied mathematics from Kazan State Technical University, he’d seen which way the winds of perestroika were blowing in the late 1980s and had positioned himself accordingly.

In the chaos that had followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he’d made a small fortune in car dealerships, a medium one in oil and banking, and an enormous one in technology. The Kazan Group, of which he was chairman and CEO, was now at the forefront of mobile communications and software development. On a good day he was worth $12 billion, on a bad day $10 billion. He was comfortably one of the richest hundred people in the world. He had mistresses whom he paraded in public and a wife whom he didn’t. He claimed to have been abducted by aliens and given a tour of their galaxy.

And he loved chess with a passion. His Rolls-Royces were only ever black or white, the floors of all the houses he owned around the world were checkerboard marble, and he’d made the game a compulsory subject at every school in Tatarstan. He spent as much time out of Tatarstan as he did in it, leaving the day-to-day running of the place to the prime minister, who happened to be his brother. As far as Nursultan was concerned, both Tatarstan and FIDE were his own private fiefdoms. He liked to answer to one person only: himself.

Now he sat in his suite – the presidential suite, naturally – at the Waldorf-Astoria, graying hair slicked back above his brown, watchful, flat Asiatic face. ‘Kwasi, we not wait any longer. Your mother not here, that too bad.’ He put out his hand. ‘You have demands, no? You give them to me.’

Kwasi handed a sheaf of papers to Nursultan and another one to Tartu. ‘They’re both the same,’ he said.

Nursultan flicked to the last page. ‘Sixteen pages.’ He looked up, eyes glittering with the prospect of challenge. ‘One hundred and eighty demands!’

‘We’ve divided them into sections. Prize money, playing environment, and so on.’

‘This is a laundry list,’ Tartu said.

‘And they’re not demands,’ Kwasi added. ‘They’re conditions. I’m entitled to have match conditions which suit me.’

‘And me?’ Tartu added. ‘Am I entitled to conditions which suit me?’

Kwasi shrugged.

‘If we not accept these, er, points,’ Nursultan said carefully, ‘then what?’

‘Then I don’t play.’

‘They are demands, then.’

Kwasi shrugged again.

‘The match starts in two weeks’ time.’

A third shrug. ‘I know.’

Nursultan looked at Tartu and raised his eyebrows.

They started to read Kwasi’s list. Nursultan jotted notes in margins, pursing his lips and giving little dismissive laughs from time to time. Tartu read the whole thing very fast, and then went back to the start and did it again, more slowly. Kwasi walked over to the window and looked down at Park Avenue, as though he could will his mother into arriving simply by the power of his gaze.

‘Well,’ Nursultan said at last, ‘Rainer and me, we should talk about this, no?’

‘OK,’ Kwasi said.

He didn’t move. Nursultan laughed. ‘We want to, how you say? Talk about you behind your back.’

‘Oh. OK. Sure.’

‘You go into room next door,’ Nursultan said. ‘I call you when we finish.’

Kwasi left. Nursultan batted the back of his hand against Kwasi’s list. ‘This: outrageous. You know how much money on this all? He want to hold us ransom.’

‘He’s not trying to hold you to ransom.’

Nursultan snorted: hard-headed businessman telling airy-fairy chess player the ways of the world. ‘Two weeks before biggest chess match since Reykjavik? What else he do? Rainer, they not coming to see you. Sorry, but true. They come to see him.’

‘You don’t get him, do you?’

‘Get him?’

‘Understand him.’

‘Sure I do.’

‘No, you don’t. Why does he make all these demands?’

‘To get more money. To, how you say, unsettle you.’

‘No. He makes them because they’re what he wants. He has no agenda beyond that. He’s a child. He doesn’t want to play in Linares, so he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to play in Dortmund, so he doesn’t. He sees the world like a child. Black and white.’

‘He not behave this way last time.’

‘He wasn’t world champion last time. He wanted that prize so much, he didn’t care about anything else. But now he wants everything to be the way he wants it.’

Nursultan flicked through the pages. ‘Some of these, reasonable. Some, no. I see ten, twelve, simply no good. Cannot accept.’

‘Then we won’t play.’

‘You will play.’

‘I’ll play. But he won’t.’

‘Then I negotiate with him.’

Tartu’s smile meant the same thing as the snort Nursultan had given a minute or so before: I know the truth of this situation better than you. ‘He won’t negotiate.’

‘Everyone negotiates.’

‘Not him. These aren’t one hundred and eighty demands: they’re one demand. Take it or leave it.’

‘We’ll see.’ Nursultan called out. ‘Kwasi!’

Two doors opened at once: the one that led into the room where Kwasi was waiting, and the main door of the suite, which was guarded round the clock by Nursultan’s security men. Two of them stood in the doorway. As Kwasi came back in, one of the security men walked over to Nursultan and spoke quickly in Tatar. Nursultan nodded. The man by the door stepped aside, and Patrese walked in. Nursultan remained seated. People like him didn’t get up for government agents.

‘I’m looking for Kwasi King,’ Patrese said.

‘That’s me,’ Kwasi said.

‘Franco Patrese, Federal Bureau of Investigation.’

‘Have I done something wrong?’

Patrese looked around the suite. ‘Could I talk to you in private, sir?’