Free The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis Page B

had to wait a long time to get her attention. “I’m trying to find a book about chess,” Beth told her.
    “We don’t handle books in this department,” the woman said and started to turn away again.
    “Is there a bookstore near here?” Beth asked quickly.
    “Try Morris’s.” She went over to a stack of boxes and began straightening them.
    “Where is it?”
    The woman said nothing.
    “Where’s Morris, ma’am?” Beth said loudly.
    The woman turned and looked at her furiously. “On Upper Street,” she said.
    “Where’s Upper Street?”
    The woman looked for a moment as if she would scream. Then her face relaxed and she said, “Two blocks up Main.”
    Beth took the escalators down.
    ***
    Morris’s was on a corner, next to a drugstore. Beth pushed open the door and found herself in a big room full of more books than she had ever seen in her life. There was a bald man sitting on a stool behind a counter, smoking a cigarette and reading. Beth walked up to him and said, “Do you have
Modem Chess Openings
?”
    The man turned from his book and peered at her over his glasses. “That’s an odd one,” he said in a pleasant voice.
    “Do you have it?”
    “I think so.” He got up from the stool and walked to the rear of the store. A minute later he came back to Beth, carrying it in his hand. It was the same fat book with the same red cover. She caught her breath when she saw it.
    “Here you go,” the man said, handing it to her. She took it and opened it to the part on the Sicilian Defense. It was good to see the names of the variations again; the Levenfish, the Dragon, the Najdorf. They were like incantations in her head, or the names of saints.
    After a while she heard the man speaking to her. “Are you that serious about chess?”
    “Yes,” she said.
    He smiled. “I thought that book was only for grandmasters.”
    Beth hesitated. “What’s a grandmaster?”
    “A genius player,” the man said. “Like Capablanca, except that was a long time ago. There are others nowadays, but I don’t know their names.”
    She had never seen anyone quite like this man before. He was very relaxed, and he talked to her as though she were another adult. Fergussen was the closest thing to him, but Fergussen was sometimes very official. “How much is the book?” Beth asked.
    “Pretty much. Five ninety-five.”
    She had been afraid it would be something like that. After today’s two bus fares she would have ten cents left. She held the book out to him and said, “Thank you. I can’t afford it.”
    “Sorry,” he said. “Just put it on the counter.”
    She set it down. “Do you have other books about chess?”
    “Sure. Under Games and Sports. Go take a look.”
    At the back of the store was a whole shelf of them with titles like
Paul Morphy and the Golden Age of Chess; Winning Chess Traps; How to Improve Your Chess; Improved Chess Strategy
. She took down one called
Attack and Counterattack in Chess
and began reading the games, picturing them in her mind without reading the diagrams. She stood there for a long time while a few customers went in and out of the store. No one bothered her. She read through game after game and was surprised in some of them by dazzling moves—queen sacrifices and smothered males. There were sixty games, and each had a title at the top of the page, like “V. Smyslov—I. Rudakavsky: Moscow 1945” or “A. Rubinstein—O. Duras: Vienna 1908.” In that one, White queened a pawn on the thirty-sixth move by threatening a discovered check.
    Beth looked at the cover of the book. It was smaller than
Modem Chess Openings
and there was a sticker on it that said $2.95. She began going through it systematically. The clock on the bookstore wall read ten-thirty. She would have to leave in an hour to get to school for the History exam. Up front the clerk was paying no attention to her, absorbed in his own reading. She began concentrating, and by eleven-thirty she had twelve of the games