Page 1 of Niccolo

PART I

1

Niccolo

Iwas my mother’s favorite.

When she was suffering through her first bout of breast cancer, back when I was 12 years old, we used to play chess every day while she rested. It was one of the few things that took her mind off the pain and the nausea of the chemotherapy.

My father tended to her lovingly…

And my brothers all dutifully filed in to kiss her good morning and to say goodnight when they went to bed…

But I was the only one who sat with her for hours. Chess was her favorite game, and it soon became mine, as well.

She would tell me stories about her childhood in Florence. How she and her friends would play games in the streets of the old quarter and stay out long past dark. How she learned chess as a child from the old men who played in the park.

It goes without saying that those stories were completely unlike my own childhood as the son of a mafia don in Tuscany.

I listened to them with a sense of wonder, the way I imagined the far-off worlds ofTreasure IslandorRobinson Crusoe.

She beat the cancer, thank God, and it went into remission –

But then it came back with a vengeance.

The final two years of her life, from the time I was 16 to 18, we played chess again…

But this time, she imparted lessons as we played.

They were as important to me as the ones I learned from my Uncle Fausto about how to be aconsigliere.

After all, that was where my gifts lay and my future was headed. Uncle Fausto was Papa’sconsigliere –and one day, when my oldest brother Dario assumed control of the family, I would follow in Fausto’s footsteps and be Dario’s counselor.

But my mother’s lessons were of a different sort.

There are too many to recount, but a couple of them bear repeating.

She had just checkmated me with her queen. She said with a smile, “Remember, Niccolo… a king with a queen is a hundred times more powerful than a king alone.”

On another occasion, when I tookherqueen with one of my bishops, she resigned immediately.

“Why?” I asked. “You could still pull out a draw.”

“I’ve lost my lady,” she said, using the Italian wordgentildonna,“and I can’t go on without her.”

Then she gave me a wan smile, her eyes ringed with dark circles. She was close to the end at that point.

“As in the game, so in life, Niccolo,” she said. “Don’t settle for the woman you can live with. Find the one you can’t live without.”

After my mother died and I became a man, I was always on the lookout for myownqueen.

I found her in the unlikeliest of places:

In the employ of my greatest enemy.

She was brilliant – utterly magnificent –

And it was withherthat I played the two greatest games of all:

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