Читать книгу Manila Gambit - John Zeugner - Страница 17

“Vera is a woman of endless conditions, isn’t she?” Waldo says at the bar once again. It is Friday and four-thirty. “On the other hand, she knows clearly enough what she wants and what her little boy can take. Nobody over 1400, she told me. What does that mean, anyway?”

“It means she wants slouch players for Mikey. Rating system. Master starts around 1800, I think. Something like that. Maybe 2000?”

“I thought you were an expert.”

“Only to my readers. In our heart of hearts we know what a fraud I am.”

“Fraud, Snelly, is a matter of degrees.”

“You hold the honorary ones, I suppose.”

“Unnecessarily nasty. Why spoil a lovely reunion dinner?”

“Ah yes, the first time Pam has been outside in Hane. I forgot.”

“You had best bury that chip on your shoulder. Even a mixed metaphor gets the point across. Enough said?”

“Enough. Enough. Look who we have in the offing.”

Pam makes her dreamy way through the long lobby of the club, ascends the turquoise carpeted stairs to the bar and motions for someone out of sight to join her. Sure enough, Mikey trails along, still in jeans and polo shirt.

“The young master himself for dinner then, is it?” Waldo says.

I take a long belt from my G & T. At length they both come to the bar. Waldo gives Pam a kiss on the cheek, then shakes hands with Mikey and wishes him well with the exhibition. Still carrying our drinks we move toward the dining room.

“Do you eat a big meal before a simultaneous?” Waldo asks Mikey.

“Nah, Just a filet and some salad and some ice tea. A lot of tea. An excuse for the bathroom, so I can check variations.”

“Well, good! There’s a man who knows what he wants,” Waldo says pulling a chair out for Pam. “Your mother couldn’t make it?”

“She’s lookin’ over the last minute preparations. She likes to have the room set up just right.”

“You don’t?” I ask.

“Nah. So long as I can see the boards. So long as they’re not too low, so you have to stay bent over, and so long as I can wander around in not too big a circle, and so long as there is a stool every now and then so I can sit down a while, I don’t care.”

“Only a few conditions, then,” Waldo observes.

“Mikey has played almost a hundred simultaneous exhibitions. Six hundred and forty-three victories, twenty-seven draws and only three defeats,” Pam says, brushing back wisps of her hair from around her glasses.

“I got a lousy endgame against some Cuban at the Marshall in New York. Actually, it turns out he’s a Master. And I think he was juggling the board when I was on the other side, but his notation checked out. I don’t keep notations. I haven’t got the time. I don’t want to give some of these clowns too much time to prepare something.”

“And the other two losses?” Waldo says.

“Prepared variations. Very nice wrinkle in the Benoni. I knew I had trouble when everything I played he answered immediately. I think we played the opening in one pass—like ten moves in less than a minute. He just wanted to get to his new wrinkle. I stopped a move short and went on, to let me think about it, but that didn’t help. I think he got into MCO on account of it.”

“MCO?” Waldo says.

Pam answers, “Modern Chess Openings. You have to know it all, backwards and forwards, if you want to play serious chess nowadays.”

“Yeah,” Mikey says.

“Well, good luck Mikey,” I offer, hoping to get the conversation onto something else.

“It don’t matter, one way or the other. But I hate to lose. Just for the record, I hate to lose. I really hate to lose.”

Is he talking about something else? Too paranoid an interpretation, I decide. Waldo does the ordering and Pam asks for a Daiquiri.

“I just want to celebrate,” she says. “It’s been so long since we saw you, Mikey.”

“About four weeks. Not so long,” Mikey says.

“It seems like ages,” Pam answers.

“Are you still at the Ramada? I ask.

“Sure. My old man’s too smart to let us get out of there. He’s got a great thing going.”

Waldo says, “I don’t understand.”

There is silence. Mikey opens and closes his left hand on the blue table cloth. And finally Pam says, “Well, will you play the white pieces all around?”

“I play it half and half, usually or sometimes we choose hands and let that decide. But I’m gonna try three new twists in the Sicilian. Watch.” He brings his little electronic board up on the table top. Pam hurriedly pushes aside her plate. Together they hunch over the board. He shows her some new variation. I understand more than I want to about their whisperings.

Waldo is at a total loss and so he orders another drink. “Hilly’s coming later,” he says to no one in particular.

“That’s good,” I answer vacantly. Mikey and Pam do not look up from the electronic board.

“What’s next for you?” Waldo says loudly to Mikey, who glances up at him, then turns back to push more buttons. “I mean where do you go from here?”

“California,” Mikey says, “then Manila, if I can raise the dough.”

“Maybe we can help you there,” Waldo says.

Mikey stops in mid analysis, watches Waldo warily. “Like how?”

“Don’t you think about that, Mikey,” Pam says, “he’s very clever you know,” she says pointing at Waldo. “Don’t worry about that. This really isn’t the time. The exhibition starts in an hour.”

“Yeah,” Mikey agrees. “Lemme show ya the last trick.”

Waldo nods to me, as if to say, ‘See fella, even these obsessive types stop what they’re doing when money is mentioned.’

“Arnold give you space for the feature?” Waldo asks me.

“Sure, and very contritely.”

Waldo laughs, but Mikey comes back to the issue. “You gotta way to raise the money?”

“There are ways and ways,” Waldo says expansively. “Young Snell here might make you such a celebrity a major news station would pick up the tab. And didn’t some millionaire back Fischer once?”

“Just before the Spassky match, but that was different.”

Pam says, “Mikey, don’t worry. These things have a way, a wonderful way of working out.”

“Maybe the paper will pick it up, if you’ve got a good chance to win,” Waldo says.

“I’ll win all right,” Mikey answers. “Nobody there can beat me, except with a prepared variation.”

“Whatever that is,” Waldo smiles nodding toward me.

“Nobody can beat me, if everything’s even and nothin’s been worked out before hand.”

“Yes,” Pam says.

“Well, I suppose you had best simply plan one tournament at a time. A lot of mediocre talent to be whipped tonight, for example,” Waldo continues.

“They’re easy.”

“Or so it has been arranged,” Waldo says. “You have lots of people looking out for you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mikey says.

“This little simultaneous,” Waldo says, “this little simultaneous isn’t exactly the Interzonals, but how would we ever know?”

“What are ya saying?” Mikey asks.

“It’s clear enough. I hope you do well,” Waldo answers.

“I’ll do better than anybody else around here. Better than anyone else you could get to come here.”

“Well, I guess we’ll see,” Waldo says

“That’s right,” Pam answers, all solicitation. “We’ll see in a very few minutes, and then you’ll all get your answer all right. Won’t they, Mikey?”

What little allegiance have we here, I think? The partially lost leading the maimed? And for what reason?

Hillary saves the day. She comes into the dining room, takes over Waldo’s rising antagonisms, and molds them into appropriate assertions of her prerogatives. But that little ritual is lost on Mikey—apparently so, too, on Pam, who merely parrots Mikey’s thoughts on his new variations to the Sicilian Defense. Hillary persuades Waldo to remain behind with her when Pam and Mikey and I leave for the exhibition.

Mikey sits in the back seat of Ned Snow’s Buick station wagon, a behemoth as long as a freight car. Pam swivels in the front seat to watch him.

“Will it take a long time?” she asks.

Mikey doesn’t answer, merely works at his buttons more furiously. So I fill in, “Probably till the wee small hours of the morning. I’ve heard of some that go on past dawn.”

“Not with these wonks,” Mikey says.

“Okay, not tonight then.”

“We’ll all be home early,” he says again, apparently about to laugh at his own remark. Then suddenly he is back on the electronic board again, punching in new variations. Through the rear view mirror he looks very young, vulnerable. I can’t imagine what opening he can be thrashing through that would make a difference at this point.

Pam says, “I used to swim with a swim club. I mean competitively. I used to dread going out for the meet. I used to get sick to my stomach. I remember I used to think, surely this is not a very nice way to spend your time, feeling this way. And I remember getting so upset just before my race would start. Imagining what it would like on the starting block, leaning over the water. Watching that funny, very blue, too blue pool water and smelling chlorine and thinking it would be pretty cold even after I got in, because the air in the pool room was always so hot anyway.”

“Be quiet,” Mikey says, pushing more buttons.

“And daddy would always be in the bleachers right near the timer and he would always be better dressed than anybody in the bleachers and I could tell he was just as nervous as I was. And knowing that made it a whole lot easier to go through with the start. Waiting for that gun to go off and thinking, if only they’d press that little pistol right against my temple, I wouldn’t ever have to do this again.”

“Will ya shut up?” Mikey says louder, but still not looking up from his board.

“But then, after a while I began to think having daddy there wasn’t making it so much easier after all. Sometimes I thought it was making it worse. How could that be? But it was. It was! And so I started to think about ways I could ask him not to come, not to be so involved. But did I know any? No, I didn’t. Do you?”

“Why not ask him directly and be done with it?” I ask.

“I didn’t want to insult him, if you want to know the truth—“

Mikey says, “We don’t want to know the truth. We don’t want ta. We really don’t want ta.”

Pam falls silent. I listen to the giant Buick’s air-conditioning, and to the little clicking of buttons in the backseat.

“I’m not very competitive,” Pam says.

“Well, I am,” Mikey says. And with that declaration we glide to a stop in front of the main meeting hall of the Brandon-Mercer Trailer Park.