Grandmaster by David Klass Page B

enjoying this. “Why not? That’s why we’re here. But first I’m going to get another latte. They charge so much and the cups are so small. You want something?”
    I shook my head and watched him lumber to the counter. I knew I shouldn’t be listening to my father’s enemy tell tales about him. But at the same time, I was responsible for bringing him here, and I needed to know what the risks were. It seemed to me that a man who openly admitted that he didn’t like my father could be depended on to tell me the full truth, ugly though it might be.
    He sat back down with a second latte, and the chair groaned. “So,” he said, “Morris Pratzer. I first saw him on the circuit back in the seventies. Bobby Fischer had won the title and American chess surged. The first big tournaments for kids with real prize money were held here in New York, at a hotel called the McAlpin. There were a dozen of us who were rising stars. Your dad came late to the table, but it didn’t matter—the chess gods had given him something the rest of us didn’t have.”
    “How good was he?” I asked. “He told me last night he never could have been a Fischer or a Morphy.”
    Liszt shrugged. “Probably Fischer and Morphy didn’t think they could be Fischer or Morphy either. Who knows how good he could have been? In certain tournaments, in certain games, he played with a touch of genius. The rest of us were in awe … and jealous as hell.”
    “I hear he almost won a U.S. Open,” I said.
    “He was young but he dominated,” the burly grandmaster said. “He won lots of tournaments, and he was beginning to be recognized internationally, but he was not a happy camper. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a lonely kid. He had no girlfriends. No pals. He didn’t hang out with the rest of us. When he got to be about fifteen, and the tournament pressures mounted, it grew much worse. He would talk to himself. At first we thought maybe he was a schizophrenic, but it wasn’t that. It was an outlet for him, a way to handle the pressure. I once roomed with him at an international in Madrid, and he kept me awake half the night with his gobbledygook. I finally told him to shut the hell up, and I was tempted to stuff a sock in his mouth. He didn’t only talk to himself. He also talked to his opponents, the way he just did to Voorhees.”
    “Why didn’t the refs disqualify him?”
    “Sometimes they did. He got lots of warnings, and a bad reputation. But when he was warned and managed to choke it back, it was like putting dynamite in a bottle. He wouldn’t sleep, he wouldn’t eat, his heart would start racing, he would puke his guts out between rounds, and doctors had to be called to calm him down. I saw him do some things you wouldn’t believe. He lost a match in Cincinnati, and instead of knocking over his king he bit it in half. I think he cracked a couple of teeth.” It was true—two of my father’s molars had given him lots of problems over the years, and he had recently had expensive implants. “In Montreal, I saw him kick over a table and nearly break his opponent’s legs. In San Francisco, he blundered badly and had to be wrestled off the hotel roof by the police. I think he would have thrown himself off.”
    With a sinking heart, I remembered the open window in our suite. “What happened to Stanwick?”
    “That was a one-off tournament in Texas. An oil billionaire put up thirty thousand dollars for first place. Your father was undefeated till the last round, but he was really in bad shape. He was talking to himself and to opponents, he wasn’t eating or sleeping, and then in his final game against Stanwick he threatened to kill him.”
    “It couldn’t have been a real threat,” I said. “My dad says chess is war.”
    “Chess is war, but it was a real threat,” Liszt told me.
    “How can you be sure?”
    “Because when the ref heard it and disqualified Morris, he dove over the table and started choking poor Stanwick! I