King's Gambit

by George C. Chesbro

  Arnett spread his open palms out on the table, as if to show that he had meant no offence. ‘My, my,’ he said, ‘the girl seems to be a sensitive subject.’

  John said nothing.

  ‘Maybe there’s a simple answer to that, John,’ Arnett continued seriously. ‘The girl cares for you. She found out the game was getting a bit rough and she backed away from it. Is it so hard for you to believe that someone could fall in love with you?’

  ‘Go to hell, Arnett,’ John said without emotion.

  One of Arnett’s empty hands reached into his jacket pocket and came out with the record of Petroff’s games; in Arnett’s hand the papers seemed like a weapon. John tensed as Arnett spread the papers out on the chessboard between them. Then the other man produced a felt-tipped pen and drew a heavy circle around the legend at the top of the first page.

  ‘I suspect this is where you’ll find the answers,’ Arnett said. ‘The Moscow Institute.’

  John suddenly understood what had been in Arnett’s voice, and why he was here. Arnett had been using his emotions as a line to reel him in, playing him like a fish. The game wasn’t over.

  ‘You expect me to go to Russia?’

  Arnett shrugged. ‘Right now, I’d say that’s where the action is. And my guess is that that’s what you’re still looking for. Under the circumstances, it’s not enough for you to be told you’re world champion. You want to know why.’

  John ignored the feeler. ‘And how do you propose to get me there?’ he asked scornfully. The awareness that Arnett could apparently see into the depths of his soul made him profoundly uncomfortable. ‘You’ve got Gligoric’s body and the microfilm. Which one are you going to throw at me first?’

  ‘Neither,’ Arnett said easily. ‘I’m not going to try to force you to go. As a matter of fact, I can’t. Palmer wrote out a full confession about planting the microfilm, and Gligoric’s body has been efficiently disposed of. I have no hold over you.’

  ‘Then why should I agree to go?’

  ‘I think you’re going to go because you want to. Maybe because you have to. I’m just suggesting that I can make things a little easier for you.’

  ‘You’re crazy. Even if I wanted to go, I doubt that I could get in. I’d be recognised on sight. They may not know who I am in my own country, but they sure as hell do in Russia. I don’t think they’d exactly roll out the red carpet for me.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think there will be any great problem,’ Arnett said casually. ‘For one thing, Russia is probably the last place in the world any Russian would expect you to show up at the moment. So, you’ll have surprise on your side.’

  Arnett reached into his pocket again and withdrew a leather traveller’s packet tied around the middle with a cord. He untied the cord and spread the packet to reveal two inner pockets filled with documents. One of them was a passport. Arnett took out the passport and held it open for John to see. John could recognise himself in the passport photo, but only barely. No one else would ever recognise him; the photo had been expertly retouched, up to and including a head topped with bright red hair. John did not even bother asking where Arnett had got the photo.

  ‘That should get you out of the starting gate,’ Arnett said with a trace of a smile.

  ‘You people don’t miss a trick, do you?’

  Arnett rose. ‘The photo’s a composite, but it will pass. The wig’s waiting for you back at your hotel, along with a few other papers that you may find useful.’

  ‘You knew I’d go,’ John said quietly. He added as an afterthought: ‘Goddamn you, Arnett.’

  ‘You’re booked on a charter flight with a tourist group,’ Arnett continued evenly. ‘It’s a teachers’ group, so you’d better give some thought to what it is you’re supposed to be teaching. The plane leaves Venice at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. You’ll be in and around Moscow for five days. Sometime during your sightseeing, I suggest that you get lost long enough to check out this Moscow Institute.’

  ‘What am I supposed to tell Tom?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing You let me take care of all the telling that has to be done.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘You have a few hours to think it over.’

  ‘Thanks, but I think I just may pass. That would surprise you, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it would. There’s been a neat reversal of situations, John. Before, you always considered yourself good enough to be world champion. Now you are world champion … and the problem is convincing yourself.’

  John remained silent. Arnett abruptly turned and walked off the stage. His footsteps receded as he walked through the auditorium. Suddenly the footsteps stopped and Arnett’s voice, disembodied and ghostly, came at John out of the darkness.

  ‘There’s one more thing I forgot to mention, John. Our sources tell us the girl’s in Moscow.’

  THE END GAME

  FOURTEEN

  The flight to Moscow was uneventful. The wig John was wearing was too tight and had given him a headache. He nursed the pain with two scotches, read for a while, then dozed intermittently. He frequently found himself longing for a chess journal and a set to analyse with, but he had purposely left behind anything that might attract attention and raise suspicions about his true identity.

  No one bothered him. There was an open bar on the flight, and an hour after they were in the air a full party was in swing, complete with a reasonable folksinger who accompanied herself on a battered guitar.

  John stared out the window and thought of the journey ahead of him, a journey to what? Petroff? Anna? He was sure Arnett knew more than he had let on. The CIA man was using him, John thought, for his own mysterious reasons. But, then, it was also true that he was using Arnett, at least for a trip to Moscow that he probably would have wanted to make one day anyway. Like Arnett, he was convinced that the final answers to all his questions lay in Moscow.

  Once he fell asleep and dreamed of Anna. She was standing at the end of a long corridor, beckoning him forward with one hand, warning him away with the other. He awoke in a cold sweat.

  He filled out his Tourist Information Card in the name of John Williams—the name on his passport—and handed it in to the steward. Then he sat back and waited to see what would happen at the airport.

  Nothing happened. His passport and visa were collected along with the others, then given back to him at the passport control desk by a guard who didn’t give him a second glance. A customs officer opened one of his bags, casually rummaged through it, then closed it and marked all the bags. John was safely in Moscow.

  The group was checked into a moderately priced hotel in the north-east section of Moscow. The first thing John did was to lock the door to his room and study the maps of the city Arnett had given him. The Moscow Institute was clearly marked on one of the maps. It was three blocks south of the building housing the Bolshoi ballet.

  A few hours later they were fed a large dinner and introduced to their tour guide, an affable young man by the name of Anatoly Zharkov who spoke English with a pronounced British accent. Zharkov announced the itinerary for their stay.

  They were scheduled to attend a matinee performance of the Bolshoi ballet on Wednesday, the third day of their stay.

  The first two days blended easily into one another. Despite his tension and sense of anticipation, John found that he was enjoying himself. He found the Russians he met to be pleasant and open, anxious to make their American guests comfortable and at home. John looked into the faces of these people and could find no trace of the brutal savagery he had seen in Gligoric. But Gligoric belonged to a shadow world, John thought, and he was international in that respect. The Russians would certainly have no monopoly on cruelty, or barbarians in their employ.

  He thought of Arnett; smooth-talking, urbane, and undoubtedly capable of killing a man in cold blood if the occasion demanded. Such was the nature of the man he was co-operating with, albeit for his own personal reasons.

  His decade-old hatred of the Russians was erased by the Moscow st
reets. Zharkov, the shopkeepers, housewives, businessmen and children had nothing to do with the high-pressure world of international chess or politics. On his visits to the various Russian art museums he found himself impressed by what these people had accomplished—and stunned by his own ignorance. He reflected on the fact that he had travelled around the world many times—and had seen nothing. This was the first time in his life he had ever been out of his own country and had not been lost in chess journals or distracted by some chess problem. He had much to learn, he thought.

  He began immediately educating himself. He paid close attention to Zharkov’s lectures at the various places of interest, bought and read books on Russian history.

  This was Petroff’s land, John thought. And Anna’s. This knowledge gave a new perspective to his thoughts and studies. Underlining everything was the knowledge that—if Arnett was right—Anna was somewhere within a few miles of him.

  Zharkov, an admitted ballet enthusiast, was highly excited on the morning of the third day He hurried through the morning schedule of sightseeing, constantly interspersing his talk with references to the spectacle they would see that afternoon at the Bolshoi. They would be performing Swan Lake, Zharkov announced, one of his favourites, and he could hardly wait to share this experience with the others.

  John found that he regretted that Zharkov would have to be disappointed by the absence of one member of his entourage.

  Zharkov brought them to the ballet an hour before the scheduled starting time of 2 00 pm. John found himself looking up at an imposing, squarish building, grand in its simplicity. Zharkov spent fifteen minutes lecturing on the elegance they would find inside.

  John never heard the end of the lecture. As Zharkov began to talk, John moved to the rear of the group, then stepped quickly into the midst of a crowd of German tourists that was passing by. He walked a hundred yards with the Germans, then slipped away and crossed the street.

  He had no trouble finding the building that housed the Moscow Institute. The small sign on the steel post beside the open gate had the same letters as those on Petroff’s games.

  The large, white building sat in the middle of a sea of grass and white statuary. There were small flower gardens, and cool, dark, sheltered groves of trees separating sections of lawns. A fence surrounded the grounds, extending right round the building. Despite the warm sun, John felt a chill as he stared at the open gate. It was inconceivable to him that the Moscow Institute was what it appeared to be.

  But, he thought, he had come too far to turn back just because the building reminded him of the hospital where his mother was kept.

  In an act of defiance, as if to exorcise his fears, John reached up and pulled off his wig. He stuck the wig into an inside pocket of his jacket, smoothed his hair down, then walked purposefully through the open gate, down a long walk to the main entrance. The door was locked, and it did not escape John’s notice that many of the windows in the façade were barred.

  He rang the bell at the side of the door. A few seconds later the door was opened by a swarthy attendant in an immaculately white uniform. The man had coal-black eyes that might have shown kindness in their depths if they were not filled with suspicion.

  The attendant said something in Russian.

  John reached into his pocket and withdrew one of the documents Arnett had provided him with. As instructed, he showed the paper to the man at the door. The attendant studied it, then gave a slight bow and stepped aside for John to enter. John waited as the attendant carefully locked the door again, then followed the man down a corridor.

  The corridor was long and wide, lined on both sides with rooms, many with the doors open. Any doubts in John’s mind that the Moscow Institute was, indeed, a mental hospital vanished now that he was inside its walls; it had the same smell of emotional sickness and desperation, of people sweating away their lives in the nightmarish, locked saunas of their minds. Someone was moaning from behind one of the locked doors. In other rooms, slack-jawed patients vacantly stared at him.

  John felt paralysed, unable to move. He would stand there until he fell, he thought, staring back at those faces until he became one of them.

  The attendant touched his arm solicitously and spoke.

  ‘I’m all right,’ John said.

  They proceeded down the corridor. The attendant stopped in front of a closed, glass door. He knocked once, then opened the door and motioned for John to go in.

  John walked past the attendant into the office. The room was large, spacious and airy. One wall was covered with portraits of various Russian leaders, past and present. There was a single, wide, oak desk. The man who rose from behind it was in his mid-fifties, with large, expressive blue eyes and a full head of prematurely silver hair. He had an unmistakable air of authority.

  The director nodded perfunctorily to John, then studied the papers the attendant brought to him. Finally he glanced up at John. A veil of suspicion had dropped over his eyes, and he spoke sharply.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ John said. ‘I don’t speak Russian.’

  The director paused and stared hard at John. Then he spoke in fluent English.

  ‘I asked you where you got these,’ the director said. ‘These are government papers, obviously forged, but good enough to get you in to see me.’

  There was no way to go but forward. ‘The papers were given to me,’ John said evenly. ‘My name is John Butler. I’ve come to see Yevgeny Petroff.’

  The director motioned for the attendant to leave. The attendant hurried out of the office, closing the door behind him.

  The director’s face broke into a wide grin. ‘Butler!’ he said. ‘I should have recognised you! You’ve come! You’ve really come!’

  John stood and stared, not sure how to react.

  ‘My name is Yakov,’ the director said, shaking John’s hand. ‘I am very glad to meet you.’

  John shook his head in amazement. ‘What is this place?’

  Yakov’s smile faded. ‘I thought you knew. This is a hospital for the mentally ill.’

  ‘What’s Petroff doing here?’

  Once again the other man’s eyes were veiled. ‘I will take you to see Yevgeny,’ he said quietly.

  FIFTEEN

  Dr Yakov led John down another long corridor, stopped and knocked on the door of the room at the very end. A deep, husky voice boomed from inside. Yakov opened the door and motioned for John to go in.

  The room was nicely furnished, one in a suite, with a view looking out over the vast flower garden. There were original oil paintings on the wall, with the name Petroff scribbled in the lower right hand corners. There were three vases filled with cut flowers.

  Petroff sat in a chair at the opposite end of the room, like a great hulking toad in the midst of a flower bed. He was not at all what John had expected. He gave the appearance more of a prize fighter than a chess champion. He was short and bulky, with huge arms and shoulders. His full, leonine head of hair and granite features set off a pair of eyes that were large, and the blackest John had ever seen, bright with intelligence and love of living. The eyes burned in Yevgeny Petroff’s head like twin lasers.

  The craggy face broke into a grin that encompassed all his features. ‘Butler!’ Petroff exclaimed. Then he added something in Russian.

  Yakov translated. ‘Yevgeny bids you welcome.’

  Petroff rose and extended a large hand. John took it and found the grip to be firm, yet delicate, like that of a surgeon. He searched for something to say but couldn’t find it.

  Still grinning, Petroff went to a cabinet to the right that turned out to be a hidden bar with a single bottle of vodka and glasses. Petroff glanced at Yakov who shook his head. Petroff poured two glasses, brought one to John. John, still speechless, took the glass from the outstretched hand.

  Petroff raised his glass. ‘Cheers,’ he said in fragmented English.

  ‘Yeah,’ John said. ‘Cheers.’

  Both men downed their drinks.

  John felt Anna’
s presence before he saw her. He turned and found her standing in the door. To John, she was even more beautiful than he remembered, with the same dark eyes as her brother. He did not have to be told that she was glad to see him; the look on her face in that single, unguarded moment told him all he needed to know. Regardless of what happened, John thought, that single glance had made his journey worthwhile.

  Anna smiled warmly. ‘Hello, John. You’ve been expected. Why don’t you sit down?’

  The warmth in her voice could not entirely smother the apprehension.

  ‘Thanks, but I’ll stand,’ John said. ‘At least until somebody tells me what this is all about.’

  Anna spoke to her brother in Russian Petroff rose and poured her a drink Anna took the drink and sat down in a chair. She sipped slowly at the vodka, looking at John over the rim of the glass She cast a quick glance at her brother.

  ‘What’s your brother doing here? Is he really cr … mentally ill?’

  ‘Yevgeny will speak for himself,’ Anna said.

  She turned to Petroff and translated John’s question. Petroff laughed, then replied. Anna turned back to John.

  ‘My brother wishes to reassure you that he is quite sane; it is the leaders of our country who are mad. He adds that you, as an American, should fully understand that situation.’

  John shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand anything.’

  Anna spoke to her brother again. He hesitated for a few moments, then nodded his head. As Anna spoke, John could feel Petroff’s eyes on him, gauging him. John could feel the power of that gaze. Petroff might be a poet, painter, journalist and chess champion, John thought, but he was also a hunter.

  ‘As you probably know,’ Anna said, ‘Yevgeny is not very popular with the leaders of our government.’

  ‘To say the least,’ Yakov interjected, looking up at the ceiling.

  ‘He has been protected up to now because of his chess skill. However, a few months ago some of Yevgeny’s friends were arrested They were writers for the literary journal he edits. They were tried and sentenced to long prison terms. Yevgeny was told that his friends would be released if he agreed to stop distributing his writings.’ She paused and looked at her brother. Her face glowed with pride and affection. ‘Yevgeny’s reply was that he would not play for the championship unless they released his friends. That is why he’s here. It’s a common form of … punishment.’