The central seat, opposite the champion, was of course assigned to McConnor, who eased his nerves by lighting one strong cigar after another and restlessly checking the time again and again. But the world champion kept us waiting for a good ten minutes (I had had a pre-sentiment of something of the kind from my friend’s tales), which only heightened the effect of his poised entrance. He walked calmly and coolly to the table. Without introducing himself—“You know who I am, and who you are is of no interest to me,” this rudeness seemed to say—he embarked with professional dryness on the technical arrangements. As the unavailability of chessboards on the ship made a simultaneous game impossible, he said, he proposed to play us all jointly. After each move he would repair to a table at the other end of the room in order not to disturb our consultations. Once we had made our own move, we would tap on a glass with a spoon (unfortunately we didn’t have a bell). He suggested a ten-minute maximum for a move, unless we had another thought. Like bashful schoolboys we agreed to everything. Czentovic drew black; he made the first countermove while still on his feet and immediately went to wait in the spot he had suggested, where, casually hunched over, he leafed through an illustrated magazine.

There is little reason to describe the game. It ended, as it had to, in our total defeat, after only twenty-four moves. In and of itself it was hardly surprising that a world chess champion had dispatched a half-dozen average or below-average players with his left hand; what was so depressing to us was the overpowering way in which Czentovic made us feel all too clearly that he was doing just that. He would cast a single, seemingly cursory glance at the board before each move, looking past us as indifferently as if we ourselves were lifeless wooden pieces. It was a rude gesture that irresistibly recalled someone averting his eyes while tossing a scrap to a mangy dog. With a bit of sensitivity he could have drawn our attention to mistakes or bucked us up with a friendly word, in my opinion. But even when the game was over, this chess automaton uttered not a syllable after saying “mate,” but simply waited motionless in front of the board in case we wanted a second game. I had already stood up—clumsy as one always is when faced with crass bad manners—in an attempt to indicate that, with the conclusion of this cash transaction, the pleasure of our acquaintance was at an end, at least as far as I was concerned. But to my annoyance I heard the rather hoarse voice of McConnor next to me: “Rematch!”

The sheer provocation in his tone startled me; in fact McConnor at that moment looked more like a boxer about to throw a punch than a polite gentleman. Whether because of Czentovic’s unpleasant behavior or merely his own pathologically touchy pride, McConnor was in any case completely changed. Red to the roots of his hair, nostrils flared with the strength of his feeling, he was perspiring visibly, and a sharp crease ran between his firmly set lips and his aggressively jutting chin. I recognized uneasily in his eyes that flicker of uncontrolled passion that for the most part only grips people when they are at the roulette table and the right color hasn’t come up six or seven times running, the stakes doubling and redoubling all the while. At that instant I knew that, regardless of the stakes, this fanatically proud man would go on playing Czentovic until he had won at least once, even if it cost him his entire fortune. If Czentovic stuck it out, he had found in McConnor a gold mine from which he could shovel dollars by the thousands all the way to Buenos Aires.

Czentovic remained impassive. “As you wish,” he responded politely. “The gentlemen will now play black.”

The second game went much as the first, except that some curious onlookers both swelled and enlivened our group. McConnor gazed so fixedly at the board that it was as if he was trying to magnetize the pieces with his will to win; I knew that he would happily have sacrificed even a thousand dollars for the pleasure of shouting “Mate!” at his heartless adversary. Strange to say, we were all unconsciously picking up some of his determined agitation. We discussed each move with much greater passion than before, restraining each other until the last minute before agreeing to give the signal that summoned Czentovic back to our table. Little by little we had arrived at the thirty-seventh move, and to our own surprise our position seemed amazingly advantageous, because we had succeeded in advancing the pawn in file c to the penultimate square c2; we needed only to move it to c1 to win a new queen. Not that we were smug about this all too obvious opportunity; we were unanimous in suspecting that this apparent advantage must be a trap set by Czentovic, who did after all have a much broader view of the situation.