Endgame (56 page)

Bobby peered over the chessboard, scanning and evaluating—attempting not just to suggest a Russian conspiracy, but to
prove
it unequivocally. Despite his promotion of Fischer Random and his rejection of and scorn for the “old chess,” he still played over games, tempted by the action of contemporary tournaments and matches. A board and set, with pieces in their traditional positions, sat on the coffee table in his apartment, always ready for a session of analysis. On this particular day, Bobby was going over once again, perhaps for the hundredth time, the fourth game of the 1985 World Championship match between the two Russian grandmasters Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov. 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. “Even Polgar and Spassky, both World Champions, understand what I’m talking about,” he said to no one in particular, becoming more strident as he went on. “
These games are fake! Kasparov should answer my charges! He should be put through a lie detector test, and then the whole world will see what a liar he is!”

The cheating in that 1985 match was
obvious
, he insisted. In the fourth game Karpov moved his knight on his twenty-first move, which Bobby insisted was the “proof” of the beginning of the staged sequence. He pointed out to anyone who’d listen that Karpov “makes no less than eighteen consecutive moves on the light squares. Incredible!” This was statistically unusual, but not totally improbable, and was certainly not incontrovertible evidence of a plot.

Despite that, no one could talk Bobby out of his belief that Kasparov and Karpov were “crooks.” Bobby remained resolute in his views, even though almost all grandmasters and many other members of the chess fraternity insisted that his accusations had no credible foundation. 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. Segal concluded his scholarly paper by facetiously
musing, “
Perhaps Fischer’s ascent to world champion was part of some conspiracy.”

Some people believed that Bobby was still stewing over the fact that he’d refused to play Karpov in 1975, and therefore was trying to belittle Karpov’s resulting match with Kasparov. Others held that his accusations were a ploy to promote his new Fischer Random chess. Still others chalked them up to simple paranoia. For his part, Bobby never explained what either Karpov or Kasparov had to gain from prearranging match results, except to keep the title in the Russian family. But since both men were Russian that made no sense.

If gratitude is the heart’s memory, Bobby’s call to remembrance was weak or sometimes nonexistent. Not only did the stouthearted Icelanders on the RJF Committee manage to extricate him from a Japanese jail and a looming ten-year prison term, they did everything they could for him once he arrived in their country: finding him a place to live, protecting him from exploiters and prying journalists, advising him on his finances, driving him to the thermal baths, inviting him to dinners and holiday celebrations, taking him fishing and on tours throughout the country, trying to make him feel at home.

Indeed, they created a cultlike following around Bobby, treating him almost as seventeenth-century royalty. Each functionary had his own role to play in granting whatever wishes the king requested. What they didn’t expect was that the king would respond to even the smallest failure with an “off with his head!” attitude. Bobby had behaved this way in his teen years, displaying unforgiving impatience toward any of his young followers who chanced, inadvertently, to displease him. Now, in Reykjavik, despite being the recipient of numerous acts of kindness and generosity,
Bobby began finding fault, negatively overgeneralizing, and snapping at those who’d shown him the most loyalty.

His first break was with his obsequious bodyguard Saemi Palsson. Palsson had never been paid anything (“not a cent,” he complained, although there was a report that Bobby gave him a check for $300 before he went back to Iceland)
for the months of bodyguard work he’d provided for Bobby in
Reykjavik in 1972 and in the United States after the match. And Palsson had been the initial Icelander to join forces with Bobby in his attempt to get out of jail. Palsson had traveled to Japan at his own expense, and he continued to help when Bobby became an Icelandic citizen. Palsson had ample reason to expect goodwill from Bobby. The seeds of their ultimate break were sown, though, when, even prior to Bobby’s departure from Japan, Palsson was approached by an Icelandic filmmaker, Fridrik Gudmundsson, to do a documentary for Icelandic television about Bobby’s incarceration, the fight to release him, and his escape to freedom. Palsson and Bobby
might
see some money, it was suggested, if the film made a profit, although it was highly unlikely for a documentary to realize even a slight windfall.

Bobby initially agreed to cooperate, but with the explicit caveat that the film was to be a dissertation on the evils of the United States, not about his personal life or about chess. As Bobby envisioned it, it would be mainly about his “kidnapping” (as he referred to his arrest and detention) and escape.

Filming began the moment Bobby touched down in Copenhagen, with a camera in the sports vehicle that drove him, Miyoko, and Saemi to Sweden, en route to Iceland. Shot using various cinema verité techniques, with low production values, the film was poorly edited and thematically scattered. It was produced for 30 million kronur (about $500,000 dollars). The initial footage was intriguing, however, since it provided the first real glimpse of Bobby since his match with Spassky in 1992. Bobby was clear-eyed and focused as he forcefully held forth: “I hate America: it’s an illegitimate state. It was robbed from the Native Americans and built by black African slaves. It has no right to exist.” As he delivered his poison against the Jews, the Japanese government, and the United States, he was oddly frisky, as if he’d just become aware that he was free. He and Saemi began to sing “That’s Amore” and other familiar old songs, almost as if they were long-lost friends—as they were at that time—taking a ride in the country and singing to pass the time. There was even laughter on occasion. Miyoko sat quietly, her Mona Lisa smile emerging as she looked with reverence at Bobby.

Continuing to shoot the film in Reykjavik over the next months, Gudmundsson kept trying to pin down Bobby for further interviews and increase his involvement in the project. “What’s the title of the film going to be?”
Bobby asked. When he was told it was
My Friend Bobby
(it was eventually changed to
Me and Bobby Fischer)
, he immediately began to question the whole endeavor. “
This is a film that is supposed to be about my kidnapping, not about Saemi,” he complained. Then money became an obstacle. Bobby was angry that he was not being given any “up front” money. Gudmundsson offered Bobby 15 percent of the profits, with Saemi, the producer Steinthor Birgisson, and Gudmundsson also getting 15 percent each, the remaining 40 percent to be paid to the coproduction partners. Fischer was furious. Why was Saemi being paid
anything?
And since the film was about Bobby, why shouldn’t he receive more money than the others? “I should be paid at least 30 percent,” he argued vehemently, “more than anyone else because I am Bobby Fischer.” He repeated this refrain over and over again: “
I
am Bobby Fischer!
I
am Bobby Fischer!
I
am Bobby Fischer!”

Gudmundsson tried to explain what he was doing. He told Bobby that the film had the potential to become a masterpiece: “This will be a postmodernist documentary with feature elements.”

“Never mind about that,” Bobby shouted. “Tell me what the film is going to be
about.
”

Gudmundsson mapped it out in writing in an all-inclusive public relations proposal:

The more of the description Bobby read, the more disgusted he became with the film, with Gudmundsson, and with Saemi. Bobby appealed to the
members of the RJF Committee to see if they could help stop the film or get an injunction issued before it was completed. Sympathetic to Bobby’s plight, the committee circulated to its members a letter of protest that was ultimately sent to Icelandic Television, other media, and to the financial backers and distributors of the film. Bobby changed some of the wording of the protest before it was mailed, making it much stronger and less diplomatic. It read, in part:

Bobby had already stopped talking to Saemi and taking calls from Gudmundsson, and he 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. Bobby wanted the film to be a polemic, not a biography—and he
certainly
didn’t want it to be about his bodyguard. Almost to a man, members of the RJF Committee broke off any further contact with Saemi Palsson. As it turned out, the film was a box office dud, bringing in only $40,000; it did make additional revenue from DVD sales and television licensing.

Then Bobby’s royal displeasure was directed at another Icelander, Gudmundur Thorarinsson. “I never received the full amount from the gate receipts from 1972,” Bobby suddenly accused Thorarinsson at a party at his house. “
I want to see the books. Where are the books?” Bobby demanded.
Thorarinsson gasped quietly and explained that Bobby had received his full share of the gate receipts in 1972, that he didn’t have the account books at home, but that he’d look for them at the offices of the Icelandic Chess Federation, where he’d been president in 1972 and had been instrumental in initiating the World Championship match. After more than thirty years there was little hope that the records still existed. Bobby was unsatisfied with the answer. The books were never found and Bobby never talked to Thorarinsson again.

Bobby had been using different forms of fallacious logic to accuse and attack whole classes of people, such as the Jews. Now he used his spurious logic against benevolent Icelanders. His illogical syllogism went something like this:

A litany of attacks, suspicions, and far-fetched offenses began erupting in the RJFers’ direction after the Saemi incident, and few from the group escaped Bobby’s wrath.
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
. Gardar got off relatively unscathed—
Bobby’s snit against him lasted only twenty-four hours. The rest of the group became persona non grata.

By the fall of 2007, Bobby’s disillusionment with Iceland was fixed. He called it a “God-forsaken country” and referred to Icelanders as “
special but only in the negative sense.” If his Icelandic benefactors knew of his expressions of ingratitude (“
I don’t owe these [people] anything!” he spitefully proclaimed), they didn’t discuss them publicly, a characteristic of many Scandinavians. Those who directly experienced his thanklessness were saddened
but stoic. “
Well, that’s Bobby,” one Icelander observed. “We have to take him as he is.” It was as if he were a changeling, a troubled child not so secretly adopted by the Icelanders, but with love and without foreboding.