Endgame: Chapter 13–Epilogue

His continual fear of being arrested, killed, accosted, or insulted fatigued him, and that may be one of the reasons he slept ten or twelve hours every night.

The Polgars had offered Bobby friendship and a respite, but it was now clear that the press was aware of his specific whereabouts.

He said that he identified with the character played by Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, that he sometimes felt as though he lived in a Kafkaesque world where he—Bobby—like Truman, was the only honest person in the world and everyone else was an actor.

Before he was done, he gave thirty-five radio broadcast interviews—they all found their way online—most of them through a small public radio station in the Philippines and some lasting almost two hours, expounding on his theory that he was a victim of a conspiracy that involved a Jewish cabal, the U.S. government, the Russians, Robert Ellsworth, and the Bekins Storage company.

It was as if he had a form of Tourette’s syndrome where, plagued by a temporary storm in his mind, he couldn’t stop himself from denigrating Jews in the vilest terms: His hate rhetoric just spewed out and he couldn’t—nor did he want to—control it.

Bobby’s polemic was a full-frontal attack on a suffering nation.

Since he was never questioned or stopped at any airport or customs entry point to any country, he felt free to persist with his broadcast vitriol.

Libya—Mu’ammar Gadhafi was attempting to ingratiate himself with the United States and couldn’t take the chance of antagonizing President Bush.

While Palsson was en route to Japan, a group of stalwart Icelanders met in Reykjavik to discuss whether there was any way asylum could be offered to Fischer.

All of the members of the committee were eminent Icelanders and ardent chess enthusiasts: Gudmundur Thorarinsson, former member of parliament and the principal organizer of the 1972 Fischer–Spassky match; Magnus Skulason, a psychiatrist; Gardar Sverrisson, a political scientist; Helgi Olafsson, a grandmaster; and Einar Einarsson, a bank executive.

Most of his vitriol was directed toward the Jews (“absolute pigs”), with a slight softening of his invective against the United States.

Immediately, the media began implying that the alleged marriage was just a ploy to help Fischer obtain his release and live in Japan, but Suzuki disagreed: “It was already a de-facto marriage,” she said.

The situation remained unresolved, however, and as Bobby reached his sixty-second birthday in his cell, he was morose.

When Bobby’s plane touched down at Reykjavik Airport, and he stepped on the tarmac, he didn’t kneel down and kiss the ground—at least, not literally. Metaphorically, however, he genuflected to the land of the Vikings.

Bobby Fischer’s gaze ricocheted from the partially cobblestoned road of Klapparstigur Lane, where he lived, to the slight rise up to the busy thoroughfare of Laugavegur, with its little shops, then back to the BMWs and Volvos parked at meters and the blue-eyed and cherry-cheeked Icelanders heading back to work after lunch.

As for what people thought about his dress, he was cynical and terse: “That’s their problem.”

He could talk about such subjects as the French Revolution and the Siberian gulags, the philosophy of Nietzsche, and the discourses of Disraeli.

Most important, he had no intention of leaving Iceland, because of the threat of extradition to the United States.

Bobby peered over the chessboard, scanning and evaluating—attempting not just to suggest a Russian conspiracy, but to prove it unequivocally.

Bobby’s belief in a Russian cabal involving the two Ks had become his crusade, and he’d been airing his views all over the world for several years. He never wavered from claiming that all of the games in the 1985 match were fixed and prearranged move-by-move.

This was statistically unusual, but not totally improbable, and was certainly not incontrovertible evidence of a plot.

A scientist at the Center for Bioformatics and Molecular Biostatistics of the University of California, Mark Segal, proved mathematically that such a charge was specious and that the moves in the 1985 contest were more statistically likely to have occurred than Fischer’s own shutouts of Taimanov and Larsen, and his near total defeat of Petrosian.

His first break was with his obsequious bodyguard Saemi Palsson.

Bobby had already stopped talking to Saemi and taking calls from Gudmundsson, and his friends began referring to his ex-bodyguard as a “Judas” for trying to make a film that was more about Saemi than about Bobby’s travails.

His illogical syllogism went something like this:
Saemi cheated and betrayed me.
Saemi is an Icelander.
Therefore all Icelanders are cheaters and betrayers.

Even key stalwarts felt his sting: Helgi Olaffson for not tolerating Bobby’s anti-Semitic enmity, and for asking too many questions about the “old chess” (“He must be writing a book”); David Oddsson for reasons unknown, even to Oddsson himself; and, surprisingly, Gardar Sverrisson, his closest friend, spokesman, and neighbor, because Gardar didn’t inform him about a silly and harmless photograph of Bobby’s shoes that appeared in Morgunbladid.

It was as if he were a changeling, a troubled child not so secretly adopted by the Icelanders, but with love and without foreboding.

“I am a genius,” he said shortly after arriving back in Iceland, not pontifically but sincerely.

Gardar Sverrisson, his friend in Reykjavik, was Catholic (one of the few: 95 percent of Icelanders are Lutheran), and Bobby began to ask him questions about the liturgy, the adoration of saints, the theological mysteries, and other aspects of the religion.

He went to a doctor and requested a cursory, nonintrusive examination, but was told that only a blood test would enable the doctor to evaluate his kidney function.

Skulason is a gentle and intense man with a gravitas that is arresting. In his conversations, he appears to be more a philosopher than someone with a medical and psychological background, quoting Hegel as much as Freud, Plato as much as Jung.

An unpretentious Lutheran church—a chapel, really—that looks like a set for an Ingmar Bergman drama and can seat only about fifty parishioners, guards the site of the cemetery.

There was no dirge, no incense, no requiem, although hymns were sung in the small church.

There was no dirge, no incense, no requiem, although hymns were sung in the small church.

It behooved them, therefore, to try to determine the legitimacy of the other claims.

Exhuming Bobby’s corpse was impractical for many months: His grave was covered with snow, and it was difficult to dig through Iceland’s frozen soil until late spring.

The samples were packaged and shipped to a forensics laboratory in Germany for testing; the Icelandic DNA laboratory was ruled out to avoid any possibility of compromise or conflict.

With Jinky no longer being a putative heir, the remaining contenders for the estate were Miyoko Watai, the Targ nephews, and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

Had the estate been negligible, one wonders whether there would have been such a fight over who is the true heir.

If the U.S. Internal Revenue Service is able to collect Bobby’s back taxes and fines, the multimillion-dollar “purse” the competitors are vying for will have been seriously reduced. What was once a fortune may become a pittance, a lost game for the heirs.