Page 12 of Niccolo (Mafia Kings #7)

O n weekdays after school, Papa would instruct me for a couple of hours. On Saturdays and Sundays, it was usually much longer. Sometimes four or five hours a day.

He taught me how to plan five steps ahead – and, more importantly, how to deduce what your opponent was planning five steps ahead.

He showed me different types of attacks: forks, skewers, pins, and deflection.

He taught me combinations of moves with strange names: the Caro-Kahn Defense. The Nimzowitsch-Larsen Attack. The Latvian Gambit.

When I got older, he would pull a book from his library of chess books and give it to me. I would go into my bedroom and study the contents late into the night, mimicking the moves on my little magnetic chessboard. At our next session, Papa would demand I use the tactics from the book against him.

I liked chess quite a bit – but more than anything, I craved my father’s attention. He had never been particularly interested in me before I demonstrated an aptitude for chess. If anything, he’d seemed indifferent.

After that afternoon when I pointed out Pietro’s mistake, Papa couldn’t get enough of me.

The only problem was that he was a demanding teacher.

Cruel, even.

He would berate me for mistakes. He would speak to me contemptuously if I couldn’t remember complicated gambits or defenses – even at seven years old.

Some children might have quit, especially as they reached their teenage years –

But not me. I just doubled my efforts, then tripled them.

As I studied chess books late into the night, I would think, If I just get better…

THEN he’ll love me.

My father was an adjunct professor rather than a full professor, which meant he didn’t have tenure, he only taught a couple classes per semester, and he didn’t make nearly as much as a regular professor.

Still, he made more as a part-time professor than he did as a chess grandmaster.

In the world of chess, you don’t make much money unless you’re among the top 10 players in the world.

My father was quite good, but he was barely in the top 10 players in all of Italy.

So, like other grandmasters, he supplemented his income by teaching students.

Papa instructed me privately at home, but he also dragged me along with him to the class he taught at the community center every Wednesday night.

It was mostly boys aged 10 to 15. There were no girls in the group.

I hated it.

Not just because the boys were snotty and condescending, but because my father held me to a higher standard than he did them.

At the start of every class, he would set up an easel with a large chess grid on a metal board. Then he would slap magnetic chess pieces on the board, demonstrate various concepts, and quiz the students.

He always asked me the hardest questions. Whenever I made a mistake, Papa would yell at me in front of the entire class.

So I did my best not to make any mistakes.

After the lecture, all the students would play one another.

I hated that part, too.

Not because they were better players, which they weren’t. I beat all of them all of the time.

At first they chalked it up to luck… then to my being the teacher’s daughter… and then, finally, they avoided me until Papa forced them to play me.

No, the reason I hated playing other students is because boys were assholes.

The ones in the chess club were either socially inept robots or overconfident punks. Sometimes both.

For example: the very first time Papa took me to a class, I played a boy several years older than me. After about 20 moves, he said, “Checkmate,” and stuck out his hand like Good game.

I frowned.

“That’s not checkmate. I can still do this,” I said as I moved my bishop to block the attack.

“Oh,” he said, surprised. Once he recovered, he took the bishop with his queen and stuck out his hand again. “Checkmate.”

“No,” I said, irritated, as I captured his queen with my knight.

Again, he looked stunned.

Then he did something inexplicable to me: he rearranged the pieces on the board. “Well, if this piece were here, and that piece were there, then it’d be checkmate.”

And he stuck out his hand again.

“But those pieces WEREN’T there,” I snapped as I moved the pieces back.

He started insulting me, telling me I was just a girl. I told him he was an idiot. My father came over and yelled at both of us without bothering to hear my side of the story.

From that experience, I took away several lessons:

Boys were stupid jerks.

They would cheat if you let them.

And no one in the world would treat you fairly. No one.

Those lessons repeated themselves almost ten years later, with far more devastating results than just getting yelled at.