Oyamo settled opposite and began to set up the game. The magnetized figures had been designed with space-age motifs. The pawns wore EMU space suits. The knights were sleek aerospace planes. The rooks were fanciful third-generation space stations.
Ramsanjawi noticed Lorraine Renoir join Tighe at his table. He could not hear what they were saying, but it was obvious they were annoyed with each other.
Oyamo attacked with his knights and bishops. Ramsanjawi was so intent on the brewing argument that he failed to pay attention to the game. Oyamo’s opening moves had him on the run.
A surge of adrenaline swept away Ramsanjawi’s interest in the wardroom encounter. He moved swiftly to the attack, capturing one of Oyamo’s bishops, both of his knights, and putting the space queen in jeopardy. Many an Englishman’s competitive fire had been stoked on the playing fields of Eton. Ramsanjawi’s had been fanned by the youthful Derek Brock-Smythe.
They had been an odd pair; Derek porcelain white and exquisitely tiny, Chakra dark and lithe despite a belly distended from years of poor diet. Derek’s tongue was sharp and he was in constant nervous motion. Chakra was shy, his movements languorous, almost lazy. Derek resented the filthy interloper and only grudgingly obeyed his parents’ commands to be civil to his Indian adopted brother. Cagily, he resorted to competition in order to make Chakra feel unwelcome. But Derek’s problem was that he was not very good at sports. He challenged Chakra at tennis, squash, and croquet, and Chakra always won. He even challenged Chakra to a footrace, but his mincing gait was no match for Chakra’s nimble strides.
As one unusually warm summer drew to a close, Derek challenged Chakra to golf, a game neither supposedly ever had played, at a course outside at Bath. During the round, it became apparent to Chakra that he had been duped. Derek had secretly played the game all summer and had received instruction from a battery of professionals.
Chakra did not know golf, but he knew physics. He hung in the match long enough for the increasingly nervous Derek to self-destruct, as he always did in their competitions. Chakra won the last hole, and with it the match. He could still see Derek, stomping furiously next to the flagstick in the orange light of dusk and shouting, “You may have beaten me. But you’ll never be an aristocrat. You’ll never be a true Englishman. Never! Never! Never!”
Ramsanjawi deftly removed Oyamo’s space queen from the board and bore down on the king. The Japanese amused him, trying so hard to look inscrutable, impassive. Yet every time Ramsanjawi leaned forward across the board, Oyamo leaned back. As if an invisible force kept them apart by a rigid full meter. The Japanese are trained to remain that distance away, Ramsanjawi reflected. It is a cultural trait, quite unconscious. Like their fanatical insistence on cleanliness and bathing.
Oyamo allowed Ramsanjawi to pursue his king for eleven moves before finally placing himself in checkmate. It pleased this would-be Englishman to win at chess. It loosened his braggart’s tongue.
As they set up for another game Oyamo deftly moved the topic of their conversation to their work. He knew that progress among the Europeans was painfully slow, and for some reason Ramsanjawi did not seem worried by it. The Americans would slow down, too, now that Nutt had left the station. He had been the only one among them with any flash of inspiration, any drive at all.
Oyamo grunted and nodded and let Ramsanjawi talk away in his strange mixture of Oxford and Delhi. The bloated Indian thinks we are playing chess. Oyamo knew better.