White Death. Daniel Blake
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Название: White Death
Автор: Daniel Blake
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Приключения: прочее
isbn: 9780007465118
isbn:
He played against celebrities. He guested on hip-hop albums, rapping about the ways in which chess mirrored life. He said he was going to hire himself the best architect available and build himself a house shaped like a rook, replete with spiral staircases and parapets. Sponsors fell over themselves to sign him up, this perfect synthesis of every marketing man’s dream: hip enough to appeal to kids, smart enough to appeal to adults, wholesome enough – never much talk of girls, let alone drugs – to be held up as a model for the black community. Kwasi had Tiger’s reach, Jordan’s smarts, 50 Cent’s cred, Denzel’s looks. Will Smith wanted to play him in a movie.
The one thing he didn’t do was the one thing that had made him famous. He didn’t play competitive chess. As world champion, he was guaranteed the right to defend his title, so he didn’t have to go through the official qualification process again, but there were still plenty of other tournaments in which he could have played, names that tripped off the tongue of chess fans the world over: Linares, Wijk aan Zee, Dortmund.
The less he played, the more his mystique grew, this Gatsby of modern-day chess. Was he working on some new fiendish openings? Could anyone else call themselves a winner without playing him?
It wasn’t as though Kwasi needed the tournament income. The championship prize money had made Kwasi a millionaire literally overnight. In the year or two that followed, endorsements multiplied that at least tenfold, probably more. The only two people who knew the exact figures were Kwasi and Regina, and they weren’t telling. And yes, she was still there, always at his side. No one got to say so much as a single word to him without going through her first. No sponsor got to pitch him a proposal until she’d read it and sat in their boardroom for three hours going over it point by point.
When he bought a condo in the Village, she moved in with him. When he played in exhibition matches, she was right there in the auditorium, front and center. When they stayed in hotels, they had a suite, two bedrooms, one for him and one for her. At home or on the road, she made sure his cooking and laundry were done. She was mother, manager, promoter, gatekeeper.
Time ran a profile on her. YOU KNOW THE KING, ran the headline, NOW MEET THE QUEEN. She cut it out and put it on the noticeboard in their kitchen, alongside one that showed her on the street outside their old tower block, a farewell to their old life. THE QUEEN OF QUEENS, that one said.
And now Kwasi was due to begin the defense of his title – against Tartu once more – at Madison Square Garden in less than two weeks’ time, and Regina was dead.
New York, NY
‘I don’t understand,’ Kwasi said. ‘She’s never late.’
Marat Nursultan tapped his Breitling. ‘We get on with it? We suppose to start a half-hour ago.’
‘Of course,’ said Rainer Tartu.
It was only the three of them in the room: the three most powerful men in world chess. Not that it was an equal triumvirate, of course. Kwasi was the box office: his presence, and his presence alone, determined the dollars. Tartu just happened to be the one on the other side of the board. If Kwasi could have somehow played against himself, the sponsors wouldn’t have given Tartu a look-in; and if he, Tartu, didn’t like it, there were plenty of other grandmasters who’d take his place in a heartbeat.
As for Nursultan … well, he was the kind of guy that everyone had an opinion about. He liked people to call him Mr President, as he held two such offices: the presidency of Tatarstan, the semi-autonomous region of Russia whose capital Kazan had hosted the first match between Kwasi and Tartu; and the presidency of FIDE, the Fédération Internationale des Échecs, the governing body of world chess.
Rumors of bribery and corruption had swirled around both elections, and Nursultan had done little to dampen them: how else, his sly smile and calculated bonhomie seemed to ask, how else was one supposed to win elections? Nursultan was pretty much the prototype for homo post-sovieticus: after completing a doctorate in applied mathematics from Kazan State Technical University, he’d seen which way the winds of perestroika were blowing in the late 1980s and had positioned himself accordingly.
In the chaos that had followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he’d made a small fortune in car dealerships, a medium one in oil and banking, and an enormous one in technology. The Kazan Group, of which he was chairman and CEO, was now at the forefront of mobile communications and software development. On a good day he was worth $12 billion, on a bad day $10 billion. He was comfortably one of the richest hundred people in the world. He had mistresses whom he paraded in public and a wife whom he didn’t. He claimed to have been abducted by aliens and given a tour of their galaxy.
And he loved chess with a passion. His Rolls-Royces were only ever black or white, the floors of all the houses he owned around the world were checkerboard marble, and he’d made the game a compulsory subject at every school in Tatarstan. He spent as much time out of Tatarstan as he did in it, leaving the day-to-day running of the place to the prime minister, who happened to be his brother. As far as Nursultan was concerned, both Tatarstan and FIDE were his own private fiefdoms. He liked to answer to one person only: himself.
Now he sat in his suite – the presidential suite, naturally – at the Waldorf-Astoria, graying hair slicked back above his brown, watchful, flat Asiatic face. ‘Kwasi, we not wait any longer. Your mother not here, that too bad.’ He put out his hand. ‘You have demands, no? You give them to me.’
Kwasi handed a sheaf of papers to Nursultan and another one to Tartu. ‘They’re both the same,’ he said.
Nursultan flicked to the last page. ‘Sixteen pages.’ He looked up, eyes glittering with the prospect of challenge. ‘One hundred and eighty demands!’
‘We’ve divided them into sections. Prize money, playing environment, and so on.’
‘This is a laundry list,’ Tartu said.
‘And they’re not demands,’ Kwasi added. ‘They’re conditions. I’m entitled to have match conditions which suit me.’
‘And me?’ Tartu added. ‘Am I entitled to conditions which suit me?’
Kwasi shrugged.
‘If we not accept these, er, points,’ Nursultan said carefully, ‘then what?’
‘Then I don’t play.’
‘They are demands, then.’
Kwasi shrugged again.
‘The match starts in two weeks’ time.’
A third shrug. ‘I know.’
Nursultan looked at Tartu and raised his eyebrows.
They started to read Kwasi’s list. Nursultan jotted notes in margins, pursing his lips and giving little dismissive laughs from time to time. Tartu read the whole thing very fast, and then went back to the start and did it again, more slowly. Kwasi walked over to the window and looked down at Park Avenue, as though he could will his mother into arriving simply by the power of his gaze.
‘Well,’ Nursultan said at last, ‘Rainer and me, we should talk about this, СКАЧАТЬ