Endgame by Frank Brady Page A

the whereabouts of the missing Lindbergh baby. Whitaker, known as “The Fox,” the name he was referred to in the Lindbergh duping, had also been imprisoned for car theft and for raping a twelve-year-old girl. When he wasin his sixties, he proposed marriage to a fourteen-year-old. Regina worried that his pedophiliac tendencies might apply to boys as well as girls, and she didn’t want him to be alone with Bobby on the trip. Why Whitaker was accepted as a part of the Log Cabin team or in the chess community at all is a difficult question to answer, beyond noting that at the time of Laucks’s journey Whitaker was still a powerful player at age sixty-six, and in his prime he had been one of the strongest players in the nation. He also had a charming way about him, as do most confidence men. His chess prowess and velvet tongue may have blinded some people to his despicable past, proving the adage that sometimes chess players make strange team fellows.
    In contrast to Whitaker, one of the chess caravan’s more delightful players was Glenn T. Hartleb, an expert-level Floridian. A tall, gentle man with steel-rimmed glasses and a perpetual smile, Hartleb greeted everyone he met—champion or patzer, beginner or veteran, child or octogenarian—by bowing low and saying with deep reverence,
“Master!”
When asked why he used this salutation, he said, “In life we are all masters,” countering a past champion’s chestnut, “In life we are all
duffers.
”
    The disparate team crammed into Laucks’s unreliable 1950 Chrysler station wagon, which contained everyone’s luggage, chess sets and boards, food, and sleeping bags—some of it precariously strapped on top—and like the Joad family in
The Grapes of Wrath
, gunwales straining, shock absorbers depressed to their limits, they were ready. “Let’s
schuss
!” said millionaire Laucks jovially, using his favorite expression, and off they sped at seventy miles an hour down the turnpike for a hair-raising trip (Laucks was a dangerously careless driver). Bobby sat up front between the fascist and the con man.
    As the Cabineers roamed through the South, stopping at towns for either prearranged or hastily organized matches, Whitaker as best player would invariably play board one, and Bobby board two. Bobby, feeling as though he were playing hooky from school, had a good time competing in the matches, usually at the relatively leisurely time limit of sixty moves in two hours. Most of his competition was stiff but nothing he couldn’t handle. While in the car, he also played hundreds of games with his fellow team members, and with the exception of his games against Whitaker, he usually won.
    “I want to see the alligators,” Bobby piped up as they drove through theEverglades. “Let’s stop—I want a soda,” he could also be heard to say frequently. His little-kid complaints, including the traditional “Are we there yet?” annoyed some team members, and behind his back they began referring to him as “The Monster.”
    The trip was not entirely expense-free for the Fischers. Although Laucks, with his great wealth, could have covered everyone’s expenses, he’d frugally pick and choose where, when, and how he wanted to spend his money. On some occasions, the team would stop at a fairly expensive restaurant and he’d announce to everyone, “Order anything on the menu you want, but
no alcohol.
” At other times Bobby and Regina had to pay for themselves.
    While in the South, Bobby was getting his first exposure to racial prejudice. Blacks were still not allowed to sit at the counters. Bobby had to ask his mother what it meant when he saw a drinking fountain that was labeled COLORED ONLY . Regina was furious at the prejudice she was witnessing, but no one else seemed to care.
    One of the men on the trip began to hint to the others that he was ready to seduce Regina and that he thought she was a willing seductee; he became a laughingstock one night when she adamantly