Legends

STEPPING OFF THE CURB IN FRONT OF THE CROWDED AIRPORT terminal, Martin raised an index finger belt high to flag down one of the freelancers cruising the area in search of customers who didn’t want to deal with the doctored meters on the licensed cabs. Within seconds an antique Zil pulled to a stop in front of him and the passenger window wound down.

“Kuda,” demanded the driver, an elderly gentleman wearing a thin tie and a checkered jacket with wide lapels, along with a pair of rimmed eyeglasses that were the height of fashion during the Soviet era.

“Do you speak English?” Martin asked.

“Nyet, nyet, nye govoryu po-Angliiski,” the driver insisted, and then began to speak pidgin English with obvious relish. “Which whereabouts are you coming to, comrade visitor?” he asked.

“A village not far from Moscow named Prigorodnaia. Ever hear of it?”

The driver rocked his head from side to side. “Everyone over fifty knows where is Prigorodnaia,” he announced. “You have been there before?”

“No. Never.”

“Well, it’s not stubborn to find. Direction Petersburg, off the Moscow-Petersburg highway. Big shots once owned dachas there but they are all late and lamented. Only little shots still live in Prigorodnaia.”

“That’s me,” Martin said with a tired grin. “A little shot. How much?”

“Around trip, one hundred dollars U.S., half now, half when you resume to Moscow.”

Martin settled onto the seat next to the driver and produced two twenties and a ten—which was what Dante Pippen had paid the Alawite prostitute Djamillah in Beirut several legends back. Then, popping another aspirin from the jar he’d bought at the airport pharmacy to dull the pain from the cracked rib, he watched as the driver piloted the Zil through rush-hour traffic toward Moscow.

After a time Martin said, “You look a little old to be freelancing as a taxi.”

“I am one miserable pensioner,” the driver explained. “The automobile belongs to my first wife’s youngest son, who was my stepson before I divorced his mother. He was one of those smart capitalists who bought up industry privatization coupons distributed to the proletarian public, and then turned around and sold them for an overweight profit to the new Russian mafioso. Which is how he became owner of an old but lovingly restored Zil automobile. He borrows it to me when the ridiculous rent on my privatized apartment needs to get paid at the start of the month.”

“What did you do before you retired?”

The driver looked quickly at his passenger out of the corner of an eye. “Believe it or not, no skin off my elbow if you don’t, I was a famous, even infamous, chess grandmaster—ranked twenty-third in Soviet Union in 1954 when I was a nineteen-year-old Komsomol champion.”

“Why infamous?”

“It was said of me that chess drove me mad as a hatter. The critics who said it did not comprehend that, as a chess-playing psychologist once pointed out, chess cannot drive people mad; chess is what keeps mad people sane. You don’t by any chance play chess?”

“As a matter of fact, I used to. I don’t get much of a chance anymore.”

“You have heard maybe of the Katovsky gambit?”

“Actually, that rings a bell.”

“It’s me, the bell that’s ringing,” the driver said excitedly. “Hippolyte Katovsky in the flesh and blood. My gambit was the talk of tournaments when I played abroad—Belgrade, Paris, London, Milan, once even Miami in the state of Caroline the North, another time Peking when the Chinese Peoples Republic was still a socialist ally and Mao Tse-tung a comrade in arms.”

Martin noticed the old man’s eyes brimming with nostalgia. “What exactly was the Katovsky gambit?” he inquired.

Katovsky leaned angrily on the horn when a taxi edged in ahead of him. “Under Soviets, drivers like that would have been sent to harvest cotton in Central Asia. Russia is not the same since our communists lost power. Ha! We gained the freedom to die of hunger. The Katovsky gambit involved offering a poisoned pawn and positioning both bishops on the queen’s side to control the diagonals while knights penetrate on the king’s side. Swept opponents away for two years until R. Fischer beat me in Reykjavik by ignoring the poisoned pawn and castling on the queen’s side after I positioned my bishops.”