I’m beginning to get curious, peeking to see how far he went. “Any luck?”
“Nah,” The Pillar says. “This is the seventh game I lost in a row.”
“In only a couple of moves, apparently.” I point at the screen.
The Pillar glances toward me. “I think we’d better give in and let the world end. Neither of us can beat the Chessmaster.”
“You’ve just said it may be another sort of chess game,” I remind him. “Besides, there must be a point in collecting Carroll’s pieces.”
“Of course, but we don’t know what it is.”
“Maybe you can only beat the Chessmaster with Carroll’s Knight. It’d make sense why Lewis scattered the pieces all around the world.”
The Pillar seems to like the idea. “Not bad thinking for a mad girl who’s a mere character in a children’s book.”
“Stop the joking. Be serious for a few minutes.”
“Can I be seriously joking?” He raises an eyebrow.
“Stop it, really.”
“Seriously mad?”
“Pillar!”
“I was thinking seriously funny. Now that’s new.”
“I’m not going to warn you again. Now tell me what’s in Kalmykia. I’m sure the chess piece didn’t say just to go there without further clues.”
“You want to know what’s in Kalmykia?”
“Yes.”
“Chess City.”
“Chess City? What is that?”
“A large complex devoted to chess competitions, located east of Elista, Kalmykia, in Russia.” The Pillar tucks his phone into his battered pocket. “A small town, actually, with a domed Chess Hall.”
“A center for playing chess, you mean?”
“Yes, but that’s not Chess City’s main attraction. The small city is an Olympic-style village of Californian-Mediterranean Revival Style architecture. It has a conference center, public swimming pool and a museum of Kalmyk Buddhist art.”
“And?” I tilt my head. Clearly none of what he’d mentioned is what we’re after.
“Chess City also has a complex feature of sculptures and artwork devoted to chess. One of them is a statue of a man called Ostap Bender.”
“Who’s that?”
“A fictional character of popular books written by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov, Russian authors, equally infatuated with Alice in Wonderland.”
“What were their books about?”
“The character in their books proposed a creation of a world chess capital.”
“That’s interesting.” I’m curious to see where the Chessmaster fits in.
“Earlier, Chess City had been used to host holy men like the Dalai Lama and such, but then, when completed in 1998, a millionaire from Kalmykia, and ruler of the republic since 1993, by the name of Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, made this city into something much madder.”
“I’m listening.”
“Kirsan Ilyumzhinov was also president of FIDE, the international governing body of chess, at the time,” The Pillar explains. “A fanatical chess enthusiast, and totally against the IBM scam with his friend Garry Kasparov, had the city expanded and built for the 33rd Chess Olympiad.”
I am not saying a word. The Pillar’s story seems complex, so I keep listening eagerly, waiting for the punchline, because with The Pillar, there is always a punchline.
“Since then, Chess City has hosted three major FIDE tournaments. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov had future plans for hosting watersport and skiing events, but that never happened.”
“Why?”
“You want the truth or the newspaper’s headlines at the time?”
“Start the newspapers at the time.”
“They claimed that due to Kalmykia being a poor republic of approximately 300,000 people located in the barren steppe regions in the southeastern corner of Europe, with scant natural resources, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov was corrupt and economically stealing the poor people’s money,” The Pillar says. “As a result, the construction of the opulent Chess City was abandoned.”
“Abandoned?”
“It became a dead city,” The Pillar says. “As beautiful as it was, the investigations never ended, and no one lived there anymore.”
At this moment, the city starts to show itself beyond the fading white of snow in the distance. Slowly, I am absorbing the ridiculously beautiful and larger than life aspect of it. From this far, I could already see an endless chessboard built on the ground, much, much larger than the one in Marostica.
Beyond it, the rest of the city’s buildings are colorful and enchantingly designed, reminding me of the ridiculousness of everything Lewis Carroll imagined in Wonderland.
“I can’t believe how beautiful it is,” I say. “How come such a place is abandoned?”
“Which brings us to what really happened with Kirsan Ilyumzhinov,” The Pillar says.
“I’m curiouser and curiouser.” I say.
“In reality, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov was a dear friend of…”
“Of whom?”
“The March Hare.”