Endgame (53 page)

Three members of the RJF Committee—Einarsson, Thorarinsson, and Sverrisson—traveled to Japan at their own expense to see if they could find a way to expedite Fischer’s release. No matter what logic they offered to the authorities, such as the fact that Iceland’s foreign minister David Oddsson had issued Bobby a foreigner’s passport—similar to what is called a green card in the United States—the rules-conscious, bureaucratic Japanese were not persuaded. They continued to maintain that Bobby would be deported back to the United States once the legal proceedings were concluded.

The RJF members were about to leave Japan, depressed that they’d made little headway, when a call came in from Suzuki that bore potentially good news. A member of the Japanese parliament was willing to meet with the
committee to see whether there was a way he could help. He’d studied the issues and sided with Bobby.

The meeting was held in secret, and the parliamentarian, who spoke perfect English, having been educated at Oxford, asked for anonymity, which he believed would enable him to better work behind the scenes. After he heard all of the arguments as to why Bobby should be released, and judged that the RJF members were committed to their cause, he went into action. Somehow he ignited the interest of Miszuko Fukushima, chairman of the Japanese Social Democratic Party. The goal was to get Fukushima to petition for Bobby’s right to be deported to—and accepted by—Iceland.
Fukushima criticized Chieko Nohno, Japan’s minister of justice, for the arrest and detention, and asked him to reconsider the case. Although it was not a watershed moment, the current was beginning to shift, and as Bobby saw the accumulation of small advantages—a concept in chess described by Wilhelm Steinitz—he became optimistic, although not exhilarated.

When the RJF Committee members returned to Iceland, they worked full-time arousing their parliament’s interest in the case,
warning that if action weren’t taken quickly, it would be too late for Fischer to receive justice. He would be extradited to the United States and probably imprisoned for ten years. Many of them believed, as did Fischer, that he could be murdered while in prison.

The Icelandic Chess Federation took a calculated risk in attempting to add strength to the argument for releasing Bobby. They issued a strong critique condemning Bobby’s statements, while hoping that an appeal to the United States’ sense of humanitarianism might alleviate the tension in Japan:

The letter was sent to President George W. Bush and received no reply.

Twelve years prior, months after the 1992 indictment had been issued, Bill Clinton had been elected President of the United States. David Oddsson, then the prime minister of Iceland, had visited the White House at the time and made a personal appeal to one of Clinton’s senior aides, asking that the president drop the charges against Fischer. Word came back that Clinton would prefer not to make a ruling on the matter, “an unusual decision,” according to Oddsson. “
When the leader of a country makes a personal plea about a relatively small matter (in the scheme of things) to another leader, it is usually granted.”

Back at the time of the sanctions controversy, Spassky wasn’t indicted by the French, and Lothar Schmid wasn’t indicted by the Germans. Bobby Fischer was the only person in the world ever known to have faced charges under President Bush’s bill.

Trying to prevent Fischer’s escape to Iceland, various agencies in the United States accelerated their pursuit of Bobby, putting more pressure on Japan to extradite him.
A federal grand jury in Washington began what turned out to be a smoke-screen investigation accusing Fischer of money laundering after his match with Spassky in 1992. Since there was no evidence of such laundering, it was Fischer’s lawyers’ belief that the government was attempting to propagandize Fischer’s sanctions case by further tarnishing his public image. Nothing came of the investigation and no additional indictment was handed down.

At this time James Gadsen, the U.S. ambassador to Iceland, got involved,
suggesting that Iceland drop the offer of sanctuary to Bobby Fischer. David Oddsson, in his foreign minister role, invited Gadsen to his office and then categorically refused to back down, adding that
Fischer’s alleged crime of a violation of trade sanctions in Yugoslavia had exceeded Iceland’s statute of limitations.

Perhaps because of the political pressure exerted on him, Japanese justice minister Chieko Nohno told reporters after a cabinet meeting, “If he [Fischer] has Icelandic citizenship it would be legally possible to deport him to that country.
The Immigration Bureau must think about the most appropriate place for him to be deported to.”

The situation remained unresolved, however, and as Bobby reached his
sixty-second birthday in his cell, he was morose. He’d served nine months in prison, and the few people who visited him said he looked wretched. Thorarinsson said that Fischer, locked behind bars, reminded him of Hamlet, and then he quoted a line from Shakespeare’s play:

The RJF members called virtually every member of parliament to lobby for citizenship: full,
permanent
citizenship, not just a temporary permit to live in Iceland. They then met with the General Committee of Althingi. A bill was written asking for approval of citizenship for Bobby Fischer, and an Extraordinary Session of Parliament was called for Saturday, March 21, 2005. Three rounds of discussion took place in the space of twelve minutes, and questions were posed regarding the extent of the emergency. The answers were succinct and forthcoming: Bobby Fischer’s improper incarceration was a violation of his rights; all he was really guilty of was moving some wooden pieces across a chessboard; he’d been a friend of Iceland, and had a historical connection to it, and now he needed the country’s help.

Once the issues had been dealt with, each member of the Althingi was
polled on whether to grant Fischer permanent citizenship.
“Já,”
said forty members, one by one.
“Forõast,”
said two members who abstained. No one voted
“Nei.”

Bobby smiled for the first time in months when he heard that the Icelandic bill had been enacted, and on March 23, 2005, he was released from his cell. He was picked up by
a limousine supplied by the Icelandic embassy, given his new Icelandic passport, and he and Miyoko, hand in hand, sped to Narita Airport.

When Bobby emerged from the limousine at Narita, the scene resembled that moment in
A Tale of Two Cities
when Dr. Manette is released from the Bastille, “recalled to life” as it were: white-haired, battered, with a grizzly beard and old clothes. The difference between Bobby and Dickens’s good doctor was the voice: Manette’s was faint, “dreadful and pitiable”; Bobby’s was booming, ferocious and vengeful. “
This was nothing but a kidnapping,
pure and simple!” he said to the dozens of reporters and photographers who were following him into the terminal. “Bush and Koizumi [the American and Japanese presidents] are criminals. They deserve to be hung!” said bad old Bobby, showing that prison had done nothing to tamp down his denunciatory fervor. But something in him
had
changed. When Zita, then thirty years old, saw the footage of him on television, she said: “
It is not his beard. There is something bothering about his eyes. He is a hopeless, broken man.”

When Bobby’s plane touched down at Keflavik 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. He was now in a country that really wanted him, and for the first time in thirteen years he felt truly safe. His first order of business was to settle into the Presidential Suite at the Hotel Loftleidir and order one of his Rabelaisian meals, with bowls and bowls of
skyr
.

F
IRST THERE WERE
the familiar hazel eyes. They stared at everything furtively, judgmentally, not wanting or permitting eye contact with others. Bobby Fischer’s gaze ricocheted from the partially cobble-stoned road of Klappirstigur Street, 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. The passersby recognized Bobby: He’d become the most famous man in Iceland and was remembered not for his public venom toward America but for putting Iceland on the map in 1972. His frozen glance denied them access, however, and they walked with their heads down, trying to lessen the slight of his disregard as they bent against the bitterly cold wind sweeping down from Mount Esja and off the bay. A crunch of snow seeped slowly into the sides of Bobby’s black Birkenstock clogs.

Then there was his ineffective signature disguise:
blue denim work shirt and pants, a black leather fingertip coat with a leather baseball cap to match, and the obligatory blue fleece sweater, all carefully selected so that he’d appear to fit in, to be seen as just one of the Norse folk who were his new countrymen.

Gone were the elegant handmade suits and carefully knotted ties. The man who’d proudly owned eighteen suits as a teenager, and who’d aspired to own a hundred more, now dressed the same way every day. People, even his friends, thought Bobby only owned one outfit, because his appearance was unvarying, but he owned several copies of the same denim pants and shirt,
and he laundered and ironed them himself, often daily, usually late at night, singing as he pressed for perfect creases.
As for what people thought about his dress, he was cynical and terse: “That’s their problem.”

Downtown Reykjavik, a charming city of almost 120,000 people, has the atmosphere of a typical Scandinavian village, although it’s somewhat larger. A visitor sees twisting streets, tidy clapboard houses with colored roofs, shops for tourists and locals, and people dressed in boots, parkas, scarves, and woolen hats pulled over their ears. It’s not quite Gstaad or Aspen, but the weather is cold enough to ski on the snow-covered mountains looming to the north.

Often, Bobby walked barely two blocks from his apartment to one of his favorite restaurants, Anestu Grösum—“The First Vegetarian”—and climbed the stairway to the pumpkin-painted second-floor eatery. The food was spread out behind a counter, cafeteria style, and he simply pointed to what he wanted. The server behind the counter, who looked something like the actress Shelley Duvall, smiled and handed him a tray with his selected food. The portions were huge.

When Bobby, as was typical, arrived past two o’clock, the restaurant would be sparsely filled: perhaps a Danish hippie, two American tourists, and three young local girls preoccupied with what they thought was important gossip. Ever a creature of habit, Bobby moved to his favorite table—one by the window looking out onto a side street, with a few birch and juniper trees not yet in bloom. Before he sat, he’d go to the cooler and help himself to a bottle of organic beer, Oxford Gold, and as he confronted his food, he’d open his latest reading matter. He was particularly taken with a book entitled
The Myth of Progress
, by Georg Henrik von Wright, a Finnish philosopher and successor to Ludwig Wittgenstein at the University of Cambridge. A moral pessimist, von Wright questioned whether the material and technological advances of modern society could really be considered “progress” at all. Bobby had found an English-language copy of the book at the local bookstore, Bókin (“Book”), and it seemed to mesh with his own philosophy. He was so taken by von Wright’s ideas that when he discovered an Icelandic edition of the book at Bókin,
he gave it as a gift to his new friend Gardar Sverrisson.

Was this the same Bobby Fischer who supposedly knew only chess, the sullen
high school dropout from Brooklyn? He looked something like the Bobby Fischer of decades past, the intelligent eyes, the slight bumpish imperfection on the right side of the nose, the broad shoulders, the loping gait, but this Bobby Fischer was harder, a balding man with a slight paunch, a man at the far end of middle age who looked as if he’d known if not tragedy then at least major reversals. Something about his aura reminded an observer of an ill-treated dog just escaped from his captors. There was a lump the size of a large fingertip above his right eyebrow. He rarely smiled, perhaps because of embarrassment over his broken and missing teeth; he never looked at himself in a mirror because he disapproved of what his appearance had become. The real inconsistency, however, was that this Bobby Fischer—the great chess player who some thought was a cultural dolt, a man who supposedly knew nothing of life except a
game
(“
Fischer came close to being a moron,” Martin Gardner, a writer for
Scientific American
, seriously opined)—was reading a philosophical treatise!