Читать книгу Manila Gambit - John Zeugner - Страница 10

“Where’d you get the technical data?” Waldo asks, evidently pleased.

“There’s chess magazines that annotate the games.”

“So it’s not your prose, then?”

“Maybe not, maybe so. It all passes through the extraordinary prism of my mind.”

“Of course!” Waldo says, pretending to applaud. “And you are learning the game.”

“Learning the game, Waldo. Learning the game. Pam finds me a good listener, brother confessor. Maybe a well-meaning but ignorant therapist. . . . maybe.”

“Let me tell you a thing or two. Actually two. Let me tell you two things this afternoon before we go out for a little dinner and some political talk. Two items of interest to you. Two items to think about through the long, hot Florida night. The lonely Florida night.”

Sometimes Waldo begins to embellish on a residual theme, some private vision that been formulating through most of the empty morning at the paper, and he, like Pam, seems overcome by the deliberate texture of the thing, sidetracked by consciousness of whatever it was he was going to say. “Two items. Item one: about marriage—“

“Jesus, Waldo, give me a break. It’s the hottest part of the afternoon.”

“That’s true enough. I’ve noticed them sweating out there inordinately today. Just how hot is it? Shall we call the radio station for a reading? Okay. Okay. We’ll leave item one. Item two: you need to dwell not on the technical stuff so much, but on the human interest side of the game. Personality profiles. Higher reader identification stuff. Gossip. Human interest stuff. Your pieces are competent. Everybody thinks you know the game well. But nobody wants to read the column as it is presently constructed. Except maybe some of the trailer park aficionados.”

“Human interest stuff?”

“Precisely. Gossip. Innuendo. Contemplation of the tensions in the matches, that kind of thing. The human side of the game. Have you read this?” Waldo reaches under his desk, pulls out a copy of a book, Reinfield’s The Human Side of Chess. “Fascinating stuff. Only a few games in the back by way of illustrating personality quirks. They were all nuts. Absolutely bonkers. Every one of them. Wonderful read!” Waldo says proudly. He holds the book up. “I’ve got a theory.”

I accept the book and don’t follow up on the offer of a theory. But Waldo is remorseless. “Why don’t we take off a bit early this afternoon?”

“Suits me.”

Waldo has already stood up, begun the assembly of a letter folder to be put inside the leather attaché case he always carries ceremoniously out of the office, down through the rank and file, to be deposited until the morning on the backseat of Hillary’s blue Mercedes. “I’ve got a theory,” he repeats in the leather interior of that car. “It occurs to me that there is a distinctively national component to these champions, or at least a distinctively American style, versus the European one—and I include Russia in that European rubric.”

Kentucky Fried Chicken, Arby Roast Beef, McDonalds, Dairy Queen, Dunkin’ Donuts whiz by on the Tamiami Trail as we head south to the club. The cement pavement, like the bay on the right, sparkles in a glare that shimmers heat at the air-conditioned chamber of the car. Waldo accelerates, swivels in his specially vented wicker seat on the leather upholstery. “The American champions are much younger. They burn out faster, and they’re much loonier. Aggressive, given to all sorts of combinations and hostile actions at the board and away from it. Nearly all religious quacks. Sexually hung-up freaks. Did you know that Paul Morphy, the first American world champion supposedly— I don’t think the title was awarded then—ended up his days kneeling naked in a semi-circle of women’s shoes?”

“I’d like to try that.”

“It’s drafty,” Waldo answers evenly. “Why not do something on the last days of the American champions? Crib whole sections from Reinfield, if you need to. This fellow Fischer is very much in the American mold. Maybe you could get an interview with him. Where does he live anyway?”

“I dunno.”

“Well, maybe I’ll make it my business to find out and we’ll try to get you to talk to him.”

“Not for a while.”

“Why not? You afraid?”

“Sure. And I won’t be suckered into another absurd possibility argument. I won’t.”

“Sensitive fellow,” Waldo remarks. “Ready for item one?”

“No. Not really.”

“Neither am I. It cuts too close to the bone. We need G & Ts for that.” “For everything.”

“Yes,” Waldo laughs, “for everything.”

The road to the club from off the trail bisects a large black neighborhood filled with graying tin-roofed shacks, and rusted-out Buicks. Tape recorders stud the tops of the wounded cars. Kids in grey underwear run off and onto the porches that slope down to the littering palm leaves browning in the dirt before the shacks. A few old men in glistening white short-sleeve shirts sit in rocking chairs and move almost imperceptibly on the porches. They pat their foreheads with sand colored handkerchiefs.

Waldo eyes this scene avidly. Every time we come, it is as if the feast of this litter pumps him for the cool, gripping hold of the Gin and Tonic at the bar. He remarks, as he always does, while the Mercedes plumes through the watching envy, “Hmmn, such American choices. Such American choices.”

Then the ironwork of the trellised archway to the club grounds looms up, and we are safely in. Harry, the black retainer in a white linen suit, bows enough to bring a smile back to Waldo’s temporarily disturbed visage.

“The first few sips, the first few slugs of a G & T have got to be the most refreshing liquid in the history of the planet,” Waldo says, sinking more easily, more pleasantly, into the deeper blue shag carpet in the bar. The yachts are mostly out. Grey and white docks stand tranquil and receptive through the polished, floor-to-ceiling glass at the far end of the bar.

“The Americans—young and nuts,” Waldo continues, putting both hands now around his glass. The lime half bobs to the surface. He pokes at it with his right thumb. “You need to find a new champion, Snelly. Someone on the way up. Younger and nuttier even than Fischer. Make him the center of your column—become an expert on him. Expertise is the path to fortune in this land. Isn’t that so?”

“I thought rich women were,” I answer, having finished more than half of my drink. There is a perfect thirst-quenching shuffling of interior props about midway down a good G & T. You need middling gin with a good bite to it, and Schweppes, nothing else, for tonic. And a full half a lime that impedes the drinking even as it shuts the ice away from your lips and speeds the liquidification of your brain.

Waldo orders two more. “Somebody out there just like you, only with chess talent. Do you have any?”

“Why don’t you ask me next year at this time?”

“So it’s not such a bad long-term arrangement, then?”

“I’ll stay through the Interzonals.”

“The Interzonals, they sound wonderfully exotic,” Waldo remarks contemplating the second drink set before us. “Wonderfully official. The Interzonals. . . . The Interzonals of the mind.”

“In Manila.”

“The Interzonals in Manila. Very expensive, Very, very expensive.”

“Very far away,” I add.

“Very lonely,” Waldo says softly. “Very lonely.”

That’s all there is to the negotiation. We adjourn to the dining room for Crenshaw

Mellon, escargot, filet mignon, hearts of palm salad again, and chocolate crepes for dessert, with Waldo’s private bottle of Drambuie.

On the second round of that sweet, sad liquid, Hillary joins us. She is a tall, leggy woman, imperially thin with a shock of thick blonde hair that has just the trace of curve as it hits the back of her neck. Very tan, very fit, very shrewd all at once.

“Hilly!” Waldo shouts, standing up so quickly that his legs dump a bit of the table toward my lap. “I didn’t think you were coming tonight.”

“And so you waited,” Hillary says smiling, nodding toward me, as I fight my way to a standing position against the lip of the table. “Please, please. You’re having such trouble. Simply give it up on my account,” she says half-laughing.

“Hilly, what happened? What are you doing here now?”

“Waiting for dinner, love. I’m starved. Won’t you get me some?” Abruptly she puts herself beside Waldo and I slump back into my position/ “How’s Pamela?” she says as I readjust my napkin.

“Coming along well, I think.”

“Yes. Coffee seems to feel she’s making great strides. And for that we thank you, don’t we Waldo.”

“Of course. Of course,” Waldo says. He has swiveled about and is gesturing energetically to the waitress at the far end of the room. “But what happened?”

“Claire bowed out, so Frances called it off. Probably the best thing. I couldn’t imagine what we were going to say to each other. Knowing glances, vague references to Jack. The whole depressing, boring affair. I’m glad I’m out of it. And Frances’s notion of Thai food is more than a bit pathetic.”

“Eh, heh,” Waldo agrees.

A tall bourbon and soda arrives, then a plate of potato skins, then four stuffed mushrooms.

“Aren’t you boys off to save the Republic tonight?” she says working a fork through one of the skins.

“You shouldn’t be so hard on Van Shuten, if that’s what you mean,” Waldo answers.

Is there a trace of irritation in his voice? I can’t quite decide.

“Well, don’t let me keep you. After all, the bombs can fall almost anytime now that Waldo’s finished his Drambuie. Haven’t you darling?”

“Well, I think I’ll have one more, to keep you company through the entrée, at least,” Waldo says, head cocked to one side.

“Splendid. Well said. I hate to eat alone. And now young Snell why don’t you tell me some good chess stories, since your little column is the talk of the town.” She smiles, pops one mushroom into her mouth.

Waldo and I watch her precise mastication for the next half hour. Waldo talks about some of the quirkier aspects of some of the champions. He is a fund of anecdotes—a slick litany of personal disintegrations, aberrant behaviors. Hillary seems to be enjoying the recitation, but just before dessert she interrupts Waldo’s prized story with a curt, “You’re certainly more cogent the second time through, but less interesting.”

“Ah, I forgot I mentioned all of this before,” Waldo apologizes, smiles weakly.

“Since he has nothing to say,” Hillary gestures toward me. “It’s just as well and your telling has improved enormously. But you’ve spent more than enough time with this boring companion. Why don’t you hurry to Van Shuten’s and tell him doom is not around the corner, but merely across the bay?”