I SCANNED THE chess players’ faces for Harvard, the balloonatic toy merchant, but couldn’t spot him at first. The players composed rather a motley crew (Metalhead the monkey abuser should have been there): an elderly Asian man with a face like a melted wax blossom, a high-cheekboned Slav with pre-Communist-era Coke-bottle glasses, a fat young man in a short-sleeved White Stripes T-shirt that revealed his marbled ham-hock arms, and a petite red-haired woman in a pale-green pantsuit who must have been my age but who gazed down at the board with all the giddiness of Anne of Green Gables after tippling Madeira. The intensity coming off these faces was different than the intensity coming off the faces of the patrons at the computer terminals; the former were more committed somehow, relying on t
