The Queen's Gambit: Chapters 4–6

He nodded amiably at Beth, acknowledging her as another fast player, and she nodded back.

The tables sat in the center of the floor and a black velvet rope on wooden
staunchions kept the watchers from getting too close to the players.

There were several fast moves and the tension lessened, with each player relinquishing a knight and a bishop in trades.

Beth liked the move, and she liked the way Beltik picked up his pieces firmly and set them down with a tiny graceful flourish.

He toppled his king with a kind of elegant disdain, reached over and gave a hasty handshake to Beltik, stood up and stepped over the rope, brushing past Beth, and left the room.

She leaned over the board and placed her cheeks against her palms, studying intently.

Beth brought her bishop out for another check. Klein interposed the pawn, as she knew he would.

After several hours of this she got out of bed and in her blue pajamas walked over to the dormer windows.

There was a sliver of a moon, partly obscured by clouds.

...immediately the thought came into her mind, along with the exultant feeling the whispered voice had given her: I could have done this at eight.

Every piece he had was protected; it seemed as though there were double the usual complement of pawns to protect them.

She played against the board only, with lines of force etched for her into its surface: the small stubborn fields for the pawns, the enormous one for the queen, the gradations in between.

Mrs. Wheatley seemed nonplused for a moment.

“I’m not Aristotle,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “but it could be construed as wrong. I have received a message from Mr. Wheatley.”

During the night Beth woke to hear rain on the roof over her head and intermittent rattling against the panes of her dormer windows.

She brought up a bishop behind her queen: the threat was checkmate, and he was forced to parry it with his queen.

As Beth set the newspaper on the green plastic hassock by the sofa she saw with quiet astonishment that her own picture was printed on the front page, at the bottom.

She found what she wanted on the fourth floor: a wooden set almost identical to the one Mr. Ganz owned, with hand-carved knights and big, substantial pawns, and rooks that were fat and solid.

She lugged her suitcase up to the front desk and registered for them both, unperturbed by the look the room clerk gave them.

The tournament was on the mezzanine in the Taft Room; all Beth had to do was take the elevator.

The man reached down to the board and with surprising delicacy picked up the white king pawn with his fingertips and dropped it lightly on king four.

Then he continued laying out the moves of a game, shuffling the pieces around on the board with casual dexterity, occasionally pointing out a potential trap.

The game built to a balanced fugue in the center. It was like time-lapse photography on TV where a pale-green stalk humps itself from dirt, heightens, swells and explodes into a peony or a rose.

She even handled the pieces themselves with confidence, picking them up and setting them down with aplomb.

But she managed to pin it and trade her knight for it and then play with great care for an hour and a half until Rudolph made a blunder and she zeroed in on it.

Mrs. Wheatley ordered herself a carafe of red wine and drank it and smoked Chesterfields throughout the meal.

Driving in from the airport, they passed one construction site after the other, the big yellow cranes and bulldozers standing idle near stacks of girders.

Mrs. Wheatley was ecstatic; she had read the article in the Lexington paper aloud and then said “Wonderful!”

Back at school afterward things seemed more and more drab.

Now and then a small boy appears and dazzles us with his precocity at what may be the world’s most difficult game.

“You look just like a debutante!” she said when Beth tried on the dress for her.

For an hour or more they talked about boys and dating and clothes, veering erratically from cool sophistication to giggles, while Beth sat uneasily at one end of a sofa holding a crystal glass of Coca-Cola, unable to think of anything to say.

Nobile stared at her a minute, as though she had suggested something illicit. “Russia’s murder,” he said finally. “They eat Americans for breakfast over there.”

Sometimes she would visualize herself as what she wanted to become; a truly professional woman and the finest chessplayer in the world, traveling confidently by herself in the first-class cabins of airplanes, tall, perfectly dressed, good-looking and poised—a kind of white Jolene.

Although the U.S. Open was being held in Las Vegas, the other people at the Mariposa Hotel seemed oblivious to it.

There were three chessboards set up: one on a table by the window, one on the bureau, and the third in the bathroom next to the basin.

In the middle of that book was a photograph of him at thirteen, standing solemnly at a long table facing a group of uniformed midshipmen seated at chessboards; he had played against the twenty-three-man team at Annapolis without losing a game.

She reached out and made the move, advancing a knight in a way that would force the first trade. It looked innocuous enough.

He kept attacking, and with impotent dismay, she saw a lost game gradually become manifest.

“You can’t finesse everything, dear,” Mrs. Wheatley said.