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March 1984
The first time Anatoly sees Freddie after Bangkok, they don’t speak. Freddie barely even looks at him.
He’s still reporting. Perhaps it was self-absorbed of him, to assume Freddie was only doing it to get under Anatoly’s skin, but he admits he didn’t think it would stick. Freddie is there covering a tournament in Amsterdam—the first foray outside the Soviet Union Anatoly is allowed, since returning from his defection.
He’s still world champion. Even Molokov knows he has to make an appearance sometimes, to show off to the world that he is still here, and that Soviet chess still reigns supreme. Rather than tactical help, now Anatoly’s delegation is comprised of bodyguards who watch his every move, making certain he doesn’t stray from the hotel. It unnerves him, having their eyes tracking him constantly. It is not the ideal environment in which to come across an old rival.
He sees Freddie in the hotel lobby with a Global camera crew, holding a microphone and talking to a couple of chess fans. The familiar sight of him strikes Anatoly to his very core, and he stands there, rooted to the spot for a good few minutes, just watching. Two years. For Anatoly, it has been a lifetime. In the end, what has changed?
When Freddie turns away from the couple, his eye roams across the lobby and land on Anatoly. Ridiculously, he feels a twinge of fear.
Nothing happens. Freddie doesn’t approach him, just goes to talk to his cameraman. Anatoly doesn’t hesitate any longer and escapes down the hallway he needs, back to his room. It doesn’t bode well for the rest of the tournament—he goes into his first game feeling heavy, always looking over his shoulder. Except…
Freddie doesn’t speak to him the whole time. He doesn’t seek him out. Anatoly sees him several times, in the background with his camera crew, but not once does he try to interfere. That alone unnerves Anatoly more than his bodyguards’ constant companionship. This can’t be it.
…can it?
Global Television is sponsoring the tournament. That means they secure a short interview with each of the players to air between segments. The person coordinating it all is a woman Anatoly has never met before. Walter is nowhere in sight—he surely would have said hello, if he were here. Which means he trusts Freddie enough to reign himself in, or he is betting on whatever drama could result from having the two of them in the same building again. Anatoly doesn’t know which he feels more confident in.
It’s a rest day, when they film the interviews—all 12 of them in a row, for only 15 minutes each. Anatoly is one of the last they get to, so he sits in the hallway for some time, waiting until his name is called. He is never outright told who will be interviewing him, but he knows.
Freddie stands off to the side of the set talking to a young woman, switching papers with her. He quickly scans the new sheet he has in his hand and takes a few sips from a thermos before handing it back to her and looking up at Anatoly.
He looks good. He didn’t look so good in Bangkok, which was part of what worried Anatoly then. There is no sign of the hastily covered-up bags under his eyes, or the lean frame, or the manic glint in his eye. He looks like he’s eating and sleeping. He has his hair cut differently. He still dresses informally, but plenty smart enough for the camera. In short, he doesn’t look like a man on a mission—he looks comfortable.
Freddie takes one of the chairs on the set and motions for Anatoly to take the other. Anatoly only hesitates for a moment.
“Weird, huh?” he asks, once they’re both seated.
“That’s one word for it,” Anatoly says.
Freddie grins. “Don’t worry about it, this won’t take long,” he says, almost sounding reassuring. Which is ridiculous. And yet…
The cameraman counts them down, and then Freddie is on. Almost like a switch has been flipped, there is a notable change in the way he holds himself, in his energy, but it’s nothing like the last time he interviewed Anatoly. Freddie gives him questions he can actually answer. He quickly picks up on when Anatoly has nothing left to say, and redirects. Freddie ribs him, but gently, and mostly at his own expense. That alone is enough to leave Anatoly almost speechless—he has known Freddie for eight years. He has never known Freddie to act like this.
It’s shocking, how quickly the 15 minutes go. Before he knows it, a man standing to the left of the camera gives Freddie a hand motion, and he wraps the segment up.
As soon as the cameras have stopped rolling, Freddie’s smile shifts into one less easy to parse, but it doesn’t disappear altogether. “See? Wasn’t so bad,” he says. And then he stands and goes back to his assistant to switch notes again.
Anatoly sits there, stunned. He knew he wasn’t the last in line, but—is this really it? After everything?
When it looks like one of the camera crew is coming to shoo him out of his chair, he walks over to Freddie, who has his back turned to the stage, and clears his throat.
Freddie looks surprised to still see him there. “Yeah?” he asks, like he’s bracing himself for something.
Now that Anatoly is here, he doesn’t know what to say. “I…” he starts, then breathes and tries again. “I just wanted to say… it’s good to see you again.”
Freddie gets this little crease between his eyebrows that Anatoly has never noticed him having before. “Yeah. You too,” he says slowly. He glances in the direction of the door and asks, “are you allowed to go anywhere?”
Anatoly looks in the same direction. One of his bodyguards stands outside the door, leaning against the wall of the hallway. “I can’t leave the hotel,” he admits.
“Bummer,” Freddie says. He shuffles his papers around in his hands for a second, distracted by his assistant coming over with the next interviewee. “Hey. I’m gonna be here for a while, but… do you want to meet me at the hotel bar tonight? I’ll buy you a drink.”
The invitation is so unexpected, it startles an answer out of him almost without him realizing it. “Alright,” he says. “What time?”
“Let’s shoot for 8,” Freddie says. “If I’m not out of here by then I’m going to make it everyone else’s problem.”
The next thing Anatoly knows, Freddie is being rushed to his next interview and Anatoly is being politely escorted to the door. He meets the eyes of his bodyguard, his head full of cotton, and heads to his room.
He arrives at the hotel bar 15 minutes late, having gotten caught up in some reading while trying to prepare for the following day’s openings. Coming to tournaments on his own with no seconds has been an adjustment—once, he’d had the best support in the nation within easy reach. Now, as soon as he leaves Moscow, he is on his own.
It turns out not to be a problem, because Freddie is nowhere to be seen. Anatoly takes a seat at far end of the bar, ignoring curious looks from chess fans attending the tournament or the families of competitors. His bodyguards station themselves at tables on the edges of the room. This will be nice for them. They’ll enjoy the chance to drink on the job.
Anatoly sits there by himself for 20 minutes, nursing a single drink for as long as he can. No one bothers him. Maybe he is intimidating, or maybe the chess world has passed him by, just waiting for his upcoming failure. He starts to think maybe he’s being stood up, and about how sad he probably looks sitting here all by himself, when Freddie slides onto the seat next to him.
“Sorry. I had to redo a couple of commercial takes. I swear TV people are never happy,” he says, flagging down the bartender. “Hey, can I get a scotch to start? And put his drinks on my tab, thanks.”
Anatoly wants to tell him it isn’t necessary, but the protest dies before he can voice it. It just feels… strange. “I’m surprised you’re still working for them,” he says.
“You and me both,” Freddie says. He’s angled toward Anatoly, but not really looking at him, instead playing with a napkin. “Now that things have calmed down a little in the chess world, it’s not quite as lucrative, but they let me go pretty much wherever I want. I’ve been to tons of tournaments this past year. Only the bigger ones get on TV, but I’ve been writing about the smaller ones for magazines.”
“Will you be in Moscow?” Anatoly asks.
He doesn’t miss the way Freddie’s fist clenches the napkin on the bartop, or the way his face pinches. “Yes,” he says with finality. “I’m going to Moscow.”
He looks relieved when his drink arrives, and Anatoly leaves him in silence to drink as he searches for another conversation topic. He comes up empty—there is both so much he wants to know, and so little that he can put into words. They have known each other for so many years, but never as friends. They have been competitors, rivals, enemies, and then tentatively something Anatoly can’t put a name to. But what does he have the right to know about Freddie now?
Freddie orders another drink for each of them before he speaks again. “So. What have you been up to?” he asks, finally looking in Anatoly’s direction.
“You aren’t going to write about me, are you?” Anatoly asks cautiously.
“Strictly off the record,” Freddie snorts. “You won one of the most dramatic world championships in history and then went back to the country you’d defected from and fell off the face of the earth. What gives?”
Anatoly shrugs, taking a sip from his glass. “I was tired of all the attention,” he says. “It hasn’t been anything special. I read. I play chess. I pick my children up from school. I am living a normal life.”
“They didn’t punish you when you got home?” Freddie asks. “No jailtime? Nothing?”
“No,” Anatoly says. He could say that being forced back there was punishment enough, but he holds his tongue. “I am still a public figure. They expect me to lose in Moscow, though. I don’t have a budget for staff anymore, so I am mostly on my own for preparation.”
“Huh,” Freddie says contemplatively. “How are you feeling about it? Karpov is pretty good.”
The vast understatement gets a snort out of him. Up until now, Anatoly has been approaching it in a very matter-of-fact sort of way. Whether he wins or loses has been immaterial. “I don’t plan to make it easy for him,” he settles on.
Freddie smiles at him and raises his glass in his direction.
They drink, and as they drink, their conversation gets less tentative and more familiar. They start with chess, and then branch out at random, feeling almost like two old friends catching up rather than… whatever it is that they are. No longer rivals, and never friends—are they strangers now? Maybe they have always been strangers, in the end.
Neither of them ever mentions Florence. Even in their increasingly inebriated state, that feels like a line too raw for crossing. As much as Anatoly longs to hear some sort of news, just that she’s alright, he doesn’t dare speak her name. Besides—he would be shocked if Freddie knows anything, either.
Anatoly is just starting to consider how unwise it is to have had more than one drink the night before a game. He isn’t as young as he used to be, and he’ll be paying for it in the morning. He’s just about to try excusing himself when Freddie speaks again.
“So, my therapist is trying to have me apologize to people in my life that I feel like I’ve hurt,” he says, so incredibly casually, and it startles Anatoly so much he almost drops his glass.
“Yes?” he prompts weakly.
“Yeah. I haven’t gotten very far with it, it’s kind of a new thing. Guess she figures I’m sane enough to handle it now,” he says, swirling the ice around in his mostly-empty glass. “And honestly? You’re not at the top of the list. But I have said some pretty shitty things to you. And about you. And… that interview was pretty brutal. So. Sorry.”
For a moment, Anatoly can hardly breathe. It feels like a punch to the gut—who is the person sitting next to him? What has changed? Surely this can’t be happening. Three years ago, this would never be happening.
But Freddie is right there, looking at him tentatively out of the corner of his eye, expression shockingly earnest. Anatoly sorely wishes he’d had one or two fewer drinks. He is out of his depth. But.
“I… thank you,” he finally settles on. He makes the effort to meet Freddie’s eye. “Really. I appreciate it.”
He thinks he sees a ghost of a smile before Freddie knocks back the rest of his drink. “Well, there’s one checked off the list,” he says.
Anatoly chuckles. “Well, anyway… I think you already made up for the interview,” he says, now that he’s a little more at ease. Normally, he wouldn’t have dared to bring up Bangkok, but after that, what could it hurt? “You did help me.”
“Please. You would have seen the King’s Indian problem eventually,” Freddie says.
“No, that’s not what I mean,” Anatoly says. “It was the clarity I needed.”
“Well, full disclosure, I don’t think taking any non-chess advice from me has ever been a good idea, historically,” Freddie says. “But you seem to be doing pretty okay for yourself.”
“So far,” Anatoly agrees quietly. He is trying, at least. His home life is better than it was. He can still play, and for the most part, he is left alone. He still has a few months before the equilibrium he has created is tested.
He would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought of Freddie, during the last three years. He thinks about Freddie’s disappearance, after taking the title from Karpov—the majority of three years where he was hardly heard from, and his explosion back onto the scene just in time to play Anatoly in Merano. Anatoly thinks about how he has now practically replicated that experience, though unintentionally. He thinks of the great chess players of the past, and wonders how he will be remembered next to them. How they will be remembered, most likely. Sometimes he thinks their stories are probably so bound up in each other that it will be impossible to tell one without telling the other.
Before everything—before Bangkok, before Merano, before Anatoly even won the right to challenge Freddie in the first place, before Freddie’s refusal to participate in any non-championship tournaments was unnerving rather than just an oddity—Anatoly had really admired him. It feels like a lifetime ago. He still thinks Freddie is probably the better player, better at adapting his play style to new situations. Or maybe Freddie in his prime was better than Anatoly in his. Will the world remember that? Will they ever see the men they have grown into now? Or will the two of them be forever frozen in time as they were in Merano and Bangkok?
“Do you want to play a game?” Freddie asks suddenly.
For one terrifying moment, Anatoly wonders if Freddie can read his mind, or if he’d accidentally said any of that out loud. “I’m drunk,” he says.
Freddie grins at him. “Have you never played drunk chess before?”
“I try not to make a habit of it,” Anatoly says.
“Oh, come on. It’s fun, I used to play it all the time,” Freddie says, sliding to his feet and holding onto his chair for balance. With Florence goes unsaid, but Anatoly feels its absence.
It’s late. There’s a chessboard that’s been abandoned at a table nearby. It looks like someone was halfway through a game, but whoever the players were are gone now, and Freddie doesn’t hesitate in resetting the board. Hesitantly, Anatoly gets up to join him.
He is not good at drunk chess. He doesn’t see the pieces move the way he normally does, doesn’t intuit as far ahead as he should. And Freddie makes his moves so fast, which makes Anatoly feel the need to do the same, even though there’s no timer and he’s not in a tournament and there’s no reason for it, he’s just inebriated. He loses handily, and Freddie laughs at him.
“Come on,” Freddie coaxes, smiling wide at him, and it’s really something, having it directed at Anatoly after all this time. It makes him feel more off-kilter than the drinks had. “Best two out of three.”
They gather a few spectators from the chess fans in the bar. “Are you writing down our moves?” Freddie asks one of them, who has a notebook and pen in his hands. “Stop that, this isn’t serious.”
“The current and previous world champions playing chess in public for the first time since 1981 isn’t serious?” the young man asks incredulously, but he stops when Freddie waves his hand at him impatiently. Or at least, he gets more discrete. Anatoly can’t find it in himself to care.
He does better the second game, but he still loses. They play the third anyway, in which Anatoly ekes out a draw. When he offers his hand to Freddie, he takes it with a strong grip and a smirk.
“You didn’t have to lose on purpose to make me feel better, you know,” he says.
Anatoly laughs. He feels lighter than he has in some time. “I’ll keep that in mind for next time,” he says.
They call it a night there. Freddie pays their tab and they part with a wave in front of the hotel bar. Anatoly makes the impossibly long journey back to his room, trailed by his bodyguards. He passes out as soon as he reaches his bed, and he wakes the next morning with a pressing headache.
For the rest of the tournament, seeing Freddie no longer fills him with a sense of dread or foreboding. Freddie does his job, and Anatoly does his. He narrowly manages to take the tournament, which probably doesn’t bode well for his title, but he happens to meet Freddie’s eye the moment after he wins the final game and is rewarded with a small smile.
The next month, a picture of them playing in the hotel bar appears in 64, along with a short description of their games. Anatoly keeps it at his desk next to his most-used reference materials. He flips to it sometimes, when he’s hours into a study session and needs a moment’s break.
Freddie will be in Moscow in a few months. Maybe he’ll have the time for Anatoly to pay him back for the drinks.