Manila Gambit. John Zeugner

Then I look forward to a fun week. Simultaneous pleasure. Is that it? Is that the headline? Double your pleasure, simultaneously. Get to watch and get to participate, or get participate and to watch. You got it?”

      “Goodnight, Waldo.”

      “Goodnight, Paul. Sleep tight.”

      There is a coke machine in the basement, near the metal door to the garage. After I cover Pam with the bedspread, I decide to take the elevator down. Perhaps just boozy advice, whiskey talk from old Waldo, but I am interested in his unforgiving logic.

      Mounted in the center of the garage door there is a small thick plate of glass about four inches wide and ten inches high, a little viewer into the parking area. It takes a special key to open or close the metal door. Just before I put my coins in the coke machine a flash of reflected light comes through the glass in the door. I stop and move to the viewer. Through chicken wire reinforcement I can see a bit of the garage. Cars are cramped on each other. I hear, or think I hear, a scratching sound somewhere to the lower right. I press up against the glass and squint. Yes, one, two, three juveniles in scuffed satin jackets are moving quickly around a Mercedes. Black kids in sneakers and each one carrying a bent coat-hanger. A kind of contest, then? Who gets in first wins the prize? What is the prize? The getting in? How can they drive the car anywhere, since you need another special key to open the overhead door to the outside.

      Laughter and scratching on glass. A kind of whirling dance, as they try first one window, then another, circling the car as if it were a predator. Then one of them gets the back passenger door open. Instantly they are all inside, hunched over in the front seat. The engine coughs to life. They rev the accelerator. It takes three efforts, but finally they get the great vehicle backed out and turned into the tiny passage toward the electric overhead door. Will they simply drive through the flimsy aluminum, is that the solution? But no. They ease the car right alongside my door, then move forward until the driver’s window is even with the key box to the overhead door. The window comes down and the driver produces the sacred key. Of course! It was probably hanging from the gear shift or in the glove compartment. There’d be no reason to take it inside the building. How simple!

      The car eases by my viewing window. The kid next to the driver suddenly sees my face, takes a very quick reading and decides that I am no threat. Merely a puzzled and amused spectator through the glass. As if acknowledging my intentions and capabilities the kid nods and tosses me a bird. I watch his insolent third finger glide past my chicken-coop lens. The overhead door winds up very slowly and then the Mercedes goes screeching up the cement entryway, out of sight. The door slowly comes down. I get my can of cold coke and go back up to the fourth floor. Pam is still asleep. I decide she looks uglier in repose than awake, somehow less vulnerable, attentive, or concerned.

      Chapter 12

      “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