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rolled-up sleeve of her embroidered shirt.
    She presses another note into his hand. It says:
    “Who was hurt?”

CHAPTER 4
I know what
we are here …
    “I know what we are here,” boasts Friedemann T., helping himself to a generous portion of caviar from the sideboard.
    “How could you not know,” remarks Pravdin, gesturing with his caviar and toast toward the chess players. A flamboyant Russian grand master named Zaitsev is strutting back and forth between two long tables full of very serious blue-blazered members of a British chess club. Zaitsev, who is playing twelve games simultaneously, grips a chesspiece in his fist and slams it down on the board with a roar.
    “He never had a chance,” he tells the crowd of onlookers. “If God played the Benoni against God, white would win!”

    Zaitsev reaches across the table to accept a glass of champagne, drinks off half of it in one smooth swallow, struts on to the next board. He tilts his great head and examines it for a moment, then pounces on a piece. “Check! Tell the truth—you didn’t anticipate that, did you? Never mind, you’re in good company: I crushed Petrosian in the sixty-nine interzonals with the same move.”
    Zaitsev sails on to the next board, which is opposite Friedemann T. and Pravdin. He studies the position for a long moment with a baffled expression. Suddenly his eyes surge open as he spots the flaw in his opponent’s game. “But you haven’t done your homework,” he taunts. “Fischer tried pawn queen five in a queen’s gambit declined in fifty-nine and lost eighteen moves later!”
    “That’s new,” Friedemann T. comments loudly. “He’s accepting an isolated pawn in return for a king’s side attack.”
    “The poisoned pawn variation of the Najdorf defense is Zaitsev’s specialty,” Pravdin notes. He takes another bite of toast and caviar, sips champagne, adds:
    “The offered pawn is what he always accepts.”
    “I don’t really like caviar,” Friedemann T. admits on their way out of the chess club. “I don’t appreciate all those little explosions in my mouth.”
    “I don’t mind the caviar,” Pravdin confesses, “but vodka I prefer to champagne any day. A headache is what champagne always gives me.”
    Friedemann T. pauses to look in a department store window. “I don’t mean to alarm you,” he says quietly, “but one of us is being followed.”
    “What followed?” Pravdin cries nervously. “Where followed?”
    “The tall man in the blue raincoat at the kiosk. We’ll split up at the corner and see which one of us is the pigeon.”
    They separate, walking off in different directions. Whenthey are half a block apart Friedemann T. turns and points at Pravdin as if to say, “It’s you.”
    Pravdin, cursing under his breath, dashes down a side street, turns up an alley behind a theater, pauses to scrawl on the wall:
    Full conformity is possible only in the cemetery
    (I. Stalin: Pravdin has tried to grin and bear it), hears footsteps behind him and hurries on. Minutes later he pushes through the front door of GUM, the giant department store across Red Square from the Kremlin, plunges into the crowd and drifts with its flow. At a men’s clothing stall he ducks into a fitting room, watches through a slit in the curtain as the man in the blue raincoat, angrily looking right and left, rushes by. Pravdin hurtles back the way he came, dives into the Metro and emerges into the sunlight at the stop nearest the Hotel Ukraine, where he waits to see if Blue Raincoat is still behind him.
    He isn’t.
    Pravdin hurries off down Kutuzovsky Prospect to keep his rendezvous with the American journalist. He meets him in a coffee shop one flight up. Pravdin picks up a black coffee and a bun at the counter and joins the journalist, whose name is Hull, at a table. They don’t speak until they are alone.
    “Coming here I was followed,” Pravdin blurts out.
    “Maybe they picked up on you when you phoned the office,” Hull, a