Author's Note: A chess championship is a complicated business, especially in 1969. Precedent had more or less established that one player would win the right to challenge the existing champ every 2-3 years through a series of qualifying matches in the preceding years, and the champion and challenger would play a series of 24 games to determine the championship. In the case of a 12-12 draw, the incumbent remained champion. The actual 1969 world chess championship was played in a series of matches in Moscow between April and June of 1969. Beth has obviously won the right to challenge Borgov, but for story purposes I have simplified the playing of the championship matches into a single, extended trip. Both champion and challenger in 1969 were also Soviet, so stringing the games out was much easier for them than for Beth and Borgov.

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"Again."

Beth picks the knight from the ground again and huffs irritably.

"No more face."

She slumps in her seat at the counter. "Don't you have a book for me to read, or something?"

"No."

"What do you mean, no?"

"You have already read all the books. Reset the board."

Beth makes a face to the pawn as she sets it back on king two, revelling in her moment of childishness. "How do you know what I've read?"

"Is obvious, ditya . Get the queen."

Beth sets it back in place, willing herself not to knock it over out of sheer petulance. "You power-crazed, officious - "

"Yes."

She's caught off her stride. " - What?"

"Yes, I am officious and power-crazed and all these things." Demyan re-arranges the black pawns in his calm, infuriating, ponderous way. "'Officious' is wonderful word, is it not? Reset the board."

It's their third session; somehow they'd settled on meeting three or four times a week, once at her place, and then once at one place or another in Cincinnati; Demyan seems to have a fixed objection to meeting at his home. She's already begun to prefer the meetings in coffee shop or diner, the muted buzz of other customers and the balm of waitstaff moving around her, in focused, graceful orbits.

Every session leaves her tired, and buzzing, and angry. But -

She moves her pawn to king four; he mirrors her, unhurried. On a whim, or so she tells herself, she shifts her second pawn out to queen four. He takes it, with an odd look at her. She moves a pawn to queen's bishop three. The Danish Gambit. Hard. Aggressive. He has to accept or decline, and then she'll see...

Demyan pulls the board out from under the pieces, sending them flying, folds it under his arm, and stands up.

"Wait, wait!" Beth lurches to her feet. "What are you doing?"

"I am going. You are not interested today, and I don't waste my time." He drains his cup in one long swallow, and adds without irony, "Thank you for the tea."

"What - But you can't just - " She's struggling to get the words out, so overwhelming is her incomprehension, her, her anger . "We were playing, you can't - I made a move - you have to - "

"I must do nothing. You are the one that wants something."

"There was nothing wrong with my move!" Beth is shaking from head to foot, but she won't, can't quit. No one has ever - he can't - she can't let him - "The Danish Gambit, it's, it's a, it was fair! You have to respond!"

Demyan pauses in his steady tread to the door; his voice is measured, but his back is still to her. "What did I tell you when we met second time, Miss Harmon?"

Beth stares at the thick gray back of his head, the pugnacious set of his shoulders, his eternally crumpled and stained white shirt, and struggles to control her breathing. "You said a lot of things," she mutters. "That I shouldn't talk, and you would show me, and coffee was an abomination, and the knight is a trickster, and -"

Demyan turns around; his voice is hard. "I said you did not know yourself. And you do not."

"What does that even mean?" she bursts out, beyond endurance. "I didn't hire you to psychoanalyse me! I hired you for chess! All I want is to play chess, and you won't - All you do is provoke me! Criticise me! What do you want from me? What I am supposed to do?"

Beth hauls her breath back in, with an effort. In; out. The silence rings around them. Outside, Mr. Bankforth is mowing his lawn again.

Demyan lets the board drop from under his arm, and the clatter of the wood on the floor of her kitchen is loud. Her board, she realises. Her board.

He's still looking at her. Beth glares back. This is her ground. Her turf, and she'll back away from no one on it.

"This gambit, ditya," he says finally, in a deceptively soft voice. "That you want me to answer. You made it, why?"

Beth reaches for what comes most easily. "Because it's a strong opening. You take everything so slowly, and I wanted to test - "

"No, Miss Harmon," he says steadily. "The truth."

Beth breathes in and out, painfully.

"You made me angry," she says, after a long terrible moment. "I was angry, and I wanted to…"

Demyan just stands there, with implacable, terrible patience.

"...I just wanted you to say something. Do something. You make it all so hard…"

"First, you do not hire me."

God, will this man ever stop being impossible? "For fuck's sake, Demyan! Do you have to - "

"I play with you because I choose to play with you. You play with me because you choose to play with me."

"Fine, whatever you say! Can't we even have one conversation - just one - "

"What happens if you hire someone, Miss Harmon? You tell me."

"Probably I don't have such a gigantic pain in my ass all the time. Are we going to sit down again and play?" Beth subsides back onto her barstool, as much from sudden exhaustion as from a desire to be dramatic.

"You run rings around whoever you hire, is what happens if you hire someone. You make it all about money, and you are boss. You think you are too good to be taught. That is what happens." Demyan settles onto the opposite stool again, and Beth feels the breath come out from the very bottom of her lungs.

The board is still on the floor, and for the moment neither of them makes a move to get it. They look at each other over the bare surface of upended, lost pieces.

"What are we playing for, Miss Harmon?"

"For God's sake," says Beth, managing a smile, "could you stop calling me that?"

He cracks a thin smile. "Very well, ditya . You bring it on yourself." He rights a knight and a bishop, arranging them ranked towards her, on a board that is clearly there in his mind. "And I answer one question myself, pain as I am in your ass. We play so that you can win, ladno ? We play so that you beat that bastard Borgov." He begins to arrange the pawns.

Beth feels a smile quirking her mouth. "Since when do you have something against Borgov? You never mentioned that."

"I know Vasily from boy. Is between me and him. Not your business." He places the last pawn in front of the queen.

"Yes. We play so that I win." Beth begins arranging the white pieces on her side of the table, her hands moving with soothing precision, seeing the squares as clearly as if they were there.

"And how do you win, if you play because you are angry at me?" Demyan refills his teacup from the pot she'd left to the side and stirs in a spoonful of jelly from the jar she'd dug out for him.

Beth moves her pawn to the invisible queen four again; he moves his own; her second slides beside it. The Queen again.

"I don't." Demyan takes her pawn with his; she is already moving her king's knight. "That's what you're trying to tell me, isn't it? I don't win."

His knight glides, a matched pair, to king's bishop three. He doesn't speak.

Her queen's knight moves out on the other side of the board, and he fractures the symmetry with a pawn to queen's knight two. A little spark of glee fires.

"Am I even paying you?" she mutters to the board, several moves later.

Demyan shifts his knight. "You will pay me what you think I am worth."

It's more than an hour later when she takes his king, and both of them agree without words that play is finished for the day. Beth goes silently to the bureau and finds her checkbook in the top drawer. With a steady hand, she writes his name, and underneath, before signing it, neatly scrawls the words fifty dollars .

Demyan has been draining his tea and straightening his shirt; he steps over the board on the floor on his way to the door. Beth takes the cup out of his hand, and holds out the check.

He doesn't look at it; just slides it into his pocket and gives her another one of his implacable looks.

"I really hate the way you take your tea," she says abruptly.

Demyan snorts.

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It's pleasingly cool and echoey in here. The columns, and the huge still space between them, makes it feel like she has space to think. Beth enjoys the sharp cool sounds of her heels clicking across the marble floor to the chair she's directed to, and is just considering taking her book out of her purse when she hears the flat sound of men's shoes approaching, and stops short.

"Oh, God."

"It's delightful to see you again too, Miss Harmon," says Booth, with a tight smile.

"But I thought that other man was working with me now! Mendelsohn. He called and said he was my escort now." Beth becomes aware she's whining like a child, and abruptly shuts up.

The younger man at Booth's elbow smirks, and offers her his hand, formally. "Darius Mendelsohn, Miss Harmon. We've spoken on the phone."

Beth struggles to her feet, unbalanced in more ways than one. "Yes. Hello. Mr, uh, Mendelsohn. I'm Beth Harmon." His hand is cool and dry; he doesn't squeeze. Booth offers his hand to her, with a grimace; she holds it as lightly as possible, and he drops it just as eagerly.

"Mr. Mendelsohn and I will brief you together," Booth says, gesturing her back towards the small room they'd used last time, with a hand hovering above her shoulder. "Then he will travel with you to the U.S.S.R." He pronounces each letter with a mocking distinctness.

Beth takes a hard look at Mendelsohn; she knows very well the ways they think they can influence her by now. He holds her eyes with a half-smile; he has the well-brushed blond look of a farmboy dressed for church. He can't be more than six or seven years older than her, and he has a blue-eyed solidity that half makes her feel safe and half makes her want to punch him.

He pulls out her chair for her in the meeting room; Beth glares.

"Miss Harmon," says Booth, rather pointedly. "Thank you for coming."

Mendelsohn leans across the table and offers her a piece of his Doublemint, with an innocent smile.

"Miss Harmon," says Booth sharply. "We have traveled some distance to prepare you for your trip to Moscow. To keep you safe. I'd appreciate your attention for this short while."

"I never asked you to keep me safe," Beth mutters, to the wood-veneer tabletop.

"You are an American citizen. It's our duty to keep you safe. And you now have a considerable profile in the USSR." Booth has transferred his attention to one of the inevitable buff-colored files.

Mendelsohn cracks his gum. Beth takes advantage of the intermission to shoot another glare at him.

Booth locates what he wants in the file, on a densely printed page. "This trip will be considerably longer than the previous one, and we would like you to be adequately prepared for any situations you may encounter."

"What situations," says Beth, flatly, feeling the walls pressing in again. "It's a chess tournament. I play chess, in front of people, dozens of people, and then I sleep, and then I play again."

Booth raises his head, and his expression is notably mild. "I believe your last trip departed from the planned itinerary somewhat."

Beth drops her head, chastened.

"The Soviet Republic can be a dangerous place for the unwary," says Booth, extracting a pair of glasses from his jacket pocket and unfolding them. "Were you to beat the Soviet champion, it would attract a great deal of attention from the Kremlin. They are not likely to be a friend to anyone who makes the USSR look foolish, and you will be in Moscow on their sufferance. Do you expect to beat the Soviet champion, Miss Harmon?"

Mendelsohn clicks his pen beside a fresh, blank pad of paper, with an expectant look; Beth darts her eyes at him resentfully.

"Maybe," she says, to the edge of Booth's file. "I beat him before. It's a lot of games, though… Maybe."

"The first thing they will try to do," says Booth, taking the glasses off again, and fixing her with one of the looks she remembers from their last encounter, "is to have some leverage over you. They may pass you a message of some form, or they may make contact through a player you encountered over there, someone you know. You were debriefed after the last trip by Mr. Brodsky. Did anyone approach you in that manner during the previous trip?"

"No."

"Were you fully open with Mr. Brodsky, about your encounters and conversations during the previous trip?"

"Yes."

Booth makes a note inside the back cover of the file. Mendelsohn continues to beam expectantly at her from beside a blank sheet of paper.

"Can you confirm for me again your activities during the time after you exited the taxi to Sheremetyevo airport?"

"I walked in the park. I played chess with some old men. Four games, maybe five… I called a friend in New York. I walked back to the hotel and traveled to the airport with my friend Townes." Beth refuses to allow her cheeks to color. "If I weren't open with Brodsky," she says suddenly, "what makes you think I'd tell you now?"

Booth lifts his head and regards her evenly. "Are you suggesting that you were not fully open on that occasion, Miss Harmon?"

"No. Of course not. I'm just saying… why do you think I'd tell you the truth now, if I didn't then?"

"Perhaps," says Mendelsohn in a sandy voice, startling her, "Mr. Booth has confidence that you can see the implications for yourself if we start from any basis other than trust." He cracks his gum and smiles.

Booth clears his throat. "Thank you, Darius. As I was saying, Miss Harmon, the Kremlin will be highly interested in having a card or two to play against you before you begin your first match. They may even reach out to you through one of your American friends or associates. Is there anyone whom you think may have, or have had, contact with Russian agents?"

"No."

"Anyone whose background you know little about, or whose behavior has made you suspicious."

"No."

"Anyone who has ever questioned you extensively about yourself, or encouraged you to behave recklessly?"

A sleek dark head creeps into Beth's memory, mischievous cat-eyes, an agile pink tongue… Beth shakes it away. "No."

"They will be interested to know anything they can use against you. Any embarrassing incident, or behavior that they would consider… unseemly. Even unfeminine. They have very… clear ideas of what is appropriate for men and women, there." Booth regards her over the top of his glasses.

The blood is ringing in Beth's ears, almost drowning out Booth and her own breathing. She's almost sure, almost sure, that nobody can know about Cleo. Nobody saw Cleo at the reception, or in her room, except the hotel staff…

"Miss Harmon?"

"No," she says, through suddenly numb lips, hearing her breath rasp in her own nose. "I can't think of anything."

"Any behavior that might reflect poorly on you. Should it become publicly known." Booth has dropped his gaze back to the file, but the beam of his attention is still fully trained on her; she feels naked, more naked than she'd felt stalking out of the bathroom at the Foxwood, still animated by rage, feeling a mobile island of silence suddenly materialise around her among the kids who were stacking the chairs and folding the tables, and realising that her panties were behind her, still lying on the grubby bathroom floor.

"I don't think…" she says, digging her fingernails into the plush arms of the chair.

Booth has smelt blood, she knows it; he's too much worn in this game even to glance at her, but something about the way he is writing in a tight small hand on the page bespeaks grim, determined satisfaction.

"I take it from your reaction, Miss Harmon, that there are perhaps some things we should discuss."

"If there were," she says, with a flare of Alice, her cold eyes and masklike face, "what would they… What would h-happen to me?"

It's there; she's done it. Blood in the water. Alice won't hold.

"Little of formal consequence." Booth keeps writing. "But their media is under tight state control… they would have no compunction in what they published about you, if they thought the U.S. would not protect you. And they could withdraw your visa. The stories would travel. It would be less than… personally pleasant, for you."

"Yes," she says, in a small, defenseless voice.

Mendelsohn pats her arm sympathetically; she jerks it away.

"We need to be aware of anything they may be able to use against you, so that we can prepare you. Prevent it, as much as possible." Booth sets down his pen, finally, and regards her across the gulf of the table. "And we need to be aware of any contact you may have had with citizens of the USSR, between your leaving me on that trip and this moment."

Beth concentrates on breathing in and out, in and out, as close as she feels she's ever been to dying.

"What has occurred between that moment and this moment can all be dealt with, Miss Harmon. If there is transparency now. If we know everything there is to know, we can take steps to manage the risks and allow you to do what you do best. Play chess."

"Yes," Beth says, thoroughly beaten.

Mendelsohn cracks his gum.

"And we can arrange for your visas and paperwork to be fully completed and validated in advance." Booth makes a final notation on a page in the middle of the file, and flips to a blank one.

Mendelsohn clicks his pen again, expectantly, and poises it over the virgin sheet of paper.

"Now." Booth takes a sip of water from the glass beside him, and gestures to Mendelsohn to pour a glass for Beth. "Tell me where we should begin."

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When she gets back to the house, she doesn't touch the light switch. Darkness seems preferable. Food is impossible. Liquid…

Her back slides down the wall, still in her light spring coat. The green. She should call someone. Townes. Jolene. Benny. The twelve-step people. Someone. Anyone…

Like a miracle: a knock. A second, harder, a few minutes later. His voice. "Beth?"

It would be so easy to keep sitting here, staring at nothing. Looking into the vortex that is her life. The sucking hole where there should be something real, something that can't be taken away from her, where other people have family, and friends, and a life that isn't a rathole. But Townes is here, somehow, and his voice is a guyline, a true north. He deserves better than to stand out there, alone, while she marinates in self-pity.

In the half-light, Townes is all dark, his tweed jacket and the wave of his hair half over one eye. His face is a blur. "Beth, are you..?"

She leaves the door propped open and stumbles back toward the kitchen; it feels like the safest place, the realest, where her back can be against something hard. "Come in…"

"I wanted to see how you were. I didn't hear from you for a few days, and after the last time…" His brows are drawing together as he follows her.

"Please," she says, as his hand goes to the light switch. "No."

Townes drops his hand, with a gesture of helplessness, as she lets her boneless legs slide from under her again.

Townes sits on the floor himself, with his back to the wall across from her. "Beth, what…"

Beth laughs, harsh and choked. "It's just… do you ever wish - "

He's a still, dark shape.

"Do you ever just wish you could be gone? Not dead - exactly. Just - not have to know things. What you've done. What you are. Not to be…"

He draws a knee towards himself, and the sound of his polished shoe sliding across the linoleum is a clear, sharp-edged hush.

"No," he says, after a long moment. "No, I've never wanted to be - to be gone. No matter how hard things get. I feel the air in my lungs, and it hurts sometimes, yes, and I think… No."

Beth pulls her own knees to her chest, and they are two shapes, still, awkward, in the looming half-dark.

"I guess Alice knew," she says, to no one. "My mother. She knew, and she was brave enough… No going back."

That gets Townes's attention; she sees him raise his dark head from his knees. "Your mother?"

"Yes. My first mother. My real one, whatever real means… She was crazy. Went crazy. I don't know… She drove us into a barrier. Both of us. She tried, but she couldn't…" Beth rests her dry eyes on her knee, and remembers Alice's hand on her hair. Her arms, sinewy and strong. Her one last kindness. Close your eyes.

"I'm sorry that happened to you," Townes's voice says out of the darkness, and he sounds as remote as a stranger at church.

Beth laughs again, and this one sounds harsh, falling heavily on the cold floor. "Oh, don't be! I don't need your pity. I didn't ask for it. She was braver than a lot of people I ever met. A lot of men."

There is nothing to say for a long time, as the remnants of the light fade around them.

"Did you have a father?" Townes says, after a long time.

"I suppose I did. Everyone does. She left him… He came one time, wanting to see me, and then he never came again. He didn't want me, when she tried. And that was it."

"I'm sorry for that too," his voice says, small and sad.

"His name was Paul. I suppose I could have found him, if I tried…" Beth closes her eyes, and sees the rail again, the wreck. The tang of burnt metal and brimstone. "But he didn't try that hard. She burned everything, you know. My birth certificate, and letters from him, from before they married, and after she first left. Photos. She burned it all."

"Maybe she thought that was best," he says eventually, a patch of darkness across from her. "To protect you. To make you free."

"Oh, she thought it was best. She always knew what was best." Beth curls her fingers against her own arm, against the reality of her skin, warm, fragile. "I'm very protected, from everyone."

"My mother protected me," Townes says ruefully, from across the way. "She couldn't live without me… My father, he went one day. Just went. When I was eleven. He didn't come home, and she looked and looked, and she cried, and I comforted her. I told her we would be okay… He wrote, in the end. Told her he wasn't coming back, and she cried again…"

Beth feels the tears, undue, prickling her eyes; the strange, stealing sensation of someone else's pain striking through her to the bone. "Townes…"

"I'm not asking for your pity either," his voice says, oddly stiff. "I didn't come here to cry on you. I just wanted you to know…"

Beth lifts her head blindly towards the shape of him. "Did you miss him?"

"I never really knew him. I missed what I thought he was… I missed having someone there, someone who would take responsibility, who would mow the lawn and pay the bills. Mother, she couldn't…" Townes lets his breath out, heavily. "She needed someone, and there I was. What could I do?"

"What did you do?" Beth touches the tender skin of her leg, imagines that it's his arm, that all the comfort she can possess could be conveyed in that one touch.

"I was her little boy. Her pride. Her reason to go on. I was there for her, and I did what I could, until I had to go. Until I thought I'd die if I stayed…" Townes has shrunk into himself; his voice comes to her from lower down, made smaller and hidden. "She never knew about me. She died still proud."

"I'm sorry," she says in her turn, into the blanket of dark.

"Please don't be. Who am I to complain about being loved too much?" he says, and there's something of the smile in his voice now. "We're a pair, Beth, aren't we?"

"Thank you for being here," she says into the darkness, after a long time.

"You don't have to ask, Beth," he says, and his voice is like the clasp of a hand. "You never had to ask…"

Next time: The final days. And Beth puts herself on the line.

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Russian glossary
ditya: child, infant
ladno: okay