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The first few times, he doesn’t quit, and he doesn’t retire after the debacle in Merano. All the same, he never plays another world championship match.
What he does do is burn through seconds like cigarettes – he loses track of how many he chases away in just the first six months after Florence – and eventually decides he’s better off going it alone.
There’s a call from Walter de Courcy – after a long, sweltering summer in New York – suggesting a rematch against Sergievsky, a prospect that he half-considers before turning it down flat the moment the words ‘exhibition match’ are uttered.
It would be rigged – those things always were.
He’s in Tampa, watching the world championships on television when Sergievsky goes off the rails.
It’s subtle at first – stupid little mistakes here and there that cost him a game after his first two wins – Sergievsky is known, to Freddie anyway, as being easily thrown off by his mental state in the earliest stages of the match – but as the first loss cascades into another, and another, he shifts his attention from Sergievsky to Florence, standing behind him, her mouth set in a tight-pressed line, eyes scanning the board like a heat-seeking missile.
“What is he doing?”
As the broadcast ends, Sergievsky sits at three wins and four losses, and Freddie sits in a dark motel room, his cigarette forgotten and nearly burnt down to the filter in the ashtray next to the bed.
What the fuck was that?
For a moment, he glances over to the phone, then shakes his head – no way he was going to get through to Bangkok from here – asking Florence would have to wait till later, if ever. He couldn’t imagine she’d be interested in talking about her new partner’s decision-making if they lost, especially not with him.
By the third day, the match is over almost as soon as it had begun, and Freddie is left trying desperately to piece together what had just happened.
There’s no way in hell Sergievsky should have lost this match – even with the fumbling at the beginning.
Again, he considers phoning Florence, but doesn’t. His flight back to New York is the next morning, and he has too much to do beforehand.
The man who joins her at the hotel after the closing ceremonies is not her father.
Florence doesn’t know how she knows it, and she can’t prove it, but she knows all the same that something is very, very wrong.
Anatoly is whisked away almost immediately, a brief, desperate glance at one another all they are afforded before he’s gone – forever, probably – and she’s left alone with a stranger and her own self-doubt.
It had been an experiment – she had persuaded him to see how far they could push things before the reset. He had been unsure, only recently aware of the fact that something wasn’t quite real about their reality, but unable to deny that he, like her, seemed to be reliving the past two years of their lives over and over again.
But now what?
The question troubles her. She had been certain that it wouldn’t matter. That she would wake up the next day and it would be 1979 again, with Freddie on her arm and the prospect of Merano on the horizon.
But what if it doesn’t? What if this was it and it’s all over?
Haltingly, she asks the man – her not-father – a few probing questions, her tongue tripping over the Hungarian enough to make her wince, and the man responds with similarly unpolished English, his accent thick, but difficult to place. He isn’t defensive, and she has no reason to suspect deception apart from her own gut squirming every time she looks at him.
That night, she tries to phone Freddie in New York, and nearly screams when the operator patches her through to an answering machine. Somehow it was worse than getting nothing at all.
She leaves a message anyway, though she knows that when she closes her eyes on the plane, she’ll wake up somewhere – somewhen else.
When it’s time to board the plane, she tries to ignore the lurching in her heart as she sees another plane, bound for Moscow, begin its trek down the runway.
The night in his hotel room after the closing ceremonies is one of the longest of Anatoly Sergievsky’s life.
He had followed Florence’s instructions to the letter – or done his best to, anyway, losing does not come naturally to him, and losing intentionally even less so, so making it ‘look natural’ was a foreign arena to him. The humiliation was only blunted by the knowledge that he was giving Florence a chance to see her father, and by the assurance that it wouldn’t matter. That they would wake up two days later and be back where they had started from. That he might not even remember it. He had trusted her on blind instinct. In this way, she had always been dangerous to him, though he never said it aloud, as if not saying it would make it less true.
He and Svetlana don’t speak for most of the night, and he doesn’t sleep, even when she gives in and pulls the covers up over her head despite the heat. He paces the floor restlessly – at one point, trying to open the door to go for a walk, only to be met with his wife’s muffled voice. “They lock you in at night.”
The next morning, hiding the razor blade in his watch band is easier than it should have been, all things considered, even after a few drinks. He knows from experience that they’ll check his pockets and belongings – they always did when taking him back to Moscow, he was too much of a risk for them not to – but something as innocuous as his watch? They had never checked it before, so why would they check it now?
The flight back to London is visible from their plane, and he watches it, trying in vain to get a glimpse of Florence boarding. Was her father with her? Did it work in the end? As the plane takes off, he’s left without answers.
It doesn’t matter – it’s not real anyway.
He repeats the words to himself like a ward against uncertainty.
I need to be sure – absolutely sure – that Florence is right about this. Or at least, that I won’t go back.
An hour into the flight, he gets up and makes for the lavatory – no one seems to take any notice, and he can’t stop a sigh of relief from slipping past his lips as he locks the door behind him. All the same, his fingers tremble as he unfastens his watch band and lays it on the small countertop framing the sink, finding the slit in the leather where he had stashed the blade earlier that day.
The first cut is surprisingly hard – at this point, it feels as if it should have been easy – it had always felt easy when he was younger, less like his body was trying to fight him at every step of the way. As it is, he almost retches when he feels the blade slice past tendons for the first time, and it took a longer pause than he wanted to get his breath back enough to move to the other wrist.
It’s a long flight – it would be a long time before someone realised that he hadn’t come back from the toilet, even longer for them to breach the door.
If I’m lucky, that’ll be far too late.
Resting his head back against the wall, he closes his eyes and tries not to think.
It’s late when Freddie arrives back to his New York apartment, and he tosses his duffel bag down in the dark before heading towards his bedroom. He doesn’t see the dim light blinking on his answering machine, and he doesn’t turn on the news.
He glances at the calendar – tomorrow he’ll be back in 1979, like he has for the last three times. This time, he thinks to himself, This time I have to find a way to get to Bangkok – I need to figure out what Florence and Sergievsky know.