Page 2 of Niccolo (Mafia Kings #7)

I was something of an odd child, I guess you could say.

To begin with, I was a twin. I’d been born ten minutes before my brother Roberto. Throughout my childhood, I teased him that I was his older brother and that he had to obey me.

He hated it… which made me love doing it all the more.

I remember watching his reaction and basically analyzing it. I would think, WHY does he get mad? He KNOWS I’m going to say it – why doesn’t he just ignore me?

And how can I make him madder?

I began experimenting with how I told him he had to obey me:

Very seriously.

Loud and shrilly.

Fun and flippantly.

Matter-of-factly.

I noticed that he would react differently according to the voice I used.

I would act one way, and he would react a slightly different way.

Like he was a piano, and I was hitting different keys to produce different notes.

I think that was the very first indication of my fascination with people’s emotions and how I could manipulate them.

As I said: an odd child.

The rest of the time, though, Roberto and I got along incredibly well. Of all our brothers, we were the most similar – more introspective and intellectually inclined – and we spent countless hours together reading in Papa’s study.

It’s just that I gravitated towards Harry Potter , and Roberto liked business self-help books by CEOs and entrepreneurs.

If I was an odd child, Roberto was an extremely peculiar one.

Our brothers were nothing like us.

Dario was the oldest and the one we all looked up to. Even at a young age, his word was law. We would follow him on any adventure – searching for wild animals in the olive groves, catching lizards in the vineyards, or playing Mafioso in the corridors of our house.

Mafioso was a game we invented where some boys were gangsters, and another was the cop who tried to catch us. NOBODY wanted to be the cop. Later, we invented a wrinkle where you could pay off the cop with Monopoly money. Art imitating life, you might say.

Adriano was a holy terror. He would threaten me and Roberto with a beating if we made him angry – and everything made Adriano angry. Dario would have to step in and tell him to stop, at which point he would leave us alone. Unwillingly and grudgingly, yes, but even Adriano obeyed Dario.

Massimo came along when I was two. I don’t remember his birth, obviously, but I do remember later when everyone remarked, He’s such a big toddler!

And he was. At three years old, he was as tall as me and Roberto at five. He only grew bigger from there.

Massimo was even-tempered, though – quiet, never complaining, always friendly. I liked him.

I did not like Valentino. He was born shortly before Roberto and I turned six. I remember being jealous: everyone fussed over him, cooed over him, and acted like he was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

I held a certain amount of antagonism towards him from the very beginning, I guess you could say.

My favorite game with Valentino was when he was learning to walk.

I would aim pillows at his feet and knock his legs out from under him.

He would fall down and wail angrily at me, then calm down and get up, at which point I would do it all over again.

I wasn’t trying to hurt him; I just enjoyed annoying him.

I later wondered if Val had any subconscious memory of those days, hiding down below the threshold of conscious thought… because the antagonism was definitely mutual.

Not that I was especially popular with my brothers.

All right, I’ll admit it:

I was an annoying little bastard.

A know-it-all who liked to push people’s buttons to see their reactions.

I read an Italian translation of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer when I was eight, and it delighted me how he could manipulate everyone around him.

I was convinced Tom Sawyer was a genius. He immediately became my hero and role model.

One of the most famous scenes in the book is when Tom has to paint his aunt’s fence as punishment.

He doesn’t want to do it, so he devises an ingenious scheme: to make everyone think he’s having a grand time so they’ll be envious.

He starts to paint the fence with feigned enthusiasm. One by one, the neighborhood children come over to taunt him about having to work. But Tom tells them that this is the most fun he’s ever had, and he wouldn’t trade painting the fence for anything!

The children eventually believe him and begin begging to paint the fence, too.

Tom tells them no, it’s all for him!

They become desperate and begin offering him payment – money, toys, candy – until he finally relents and lets them take turns.

So not only does he get someone else to complete his chores for him, he profits from the encounter – all while convincing everyone else that it was their idea.

Like I said: genius.

I tried a similar ruse on several occasions. Papa didn’t want us growing up to be spoiled little pricks, so we had chores to do: keep our rooms clean, help workers in the vineyards, and assist the staff during harvest time.

On one occasion, I was able to get Adriano and Massimo to do my share of the chores because I convinced them that harvesting grapes and olives was soooo much fun!

Dario spoiled the fun by telling them exactly what I was doing.

Massimo just laughed.

Adriano did not. In fact, he hated me after that one.

Okay… maybe he didn’t hate me, but I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded if I’d been shipped off to boarding school, never to return.

Massimo didn’t seem to regard me positively or negatively, one way or the other. He just accepted my existence and went with the flow.

Roberto would get annoyed when I teased him, but otherwise I treated him as an equal, and we got along well.

Valentino always seemed to bear a grudge against me. Probably for slinging the pillows at him while he was learning to walk.

The one exception was Dario.

I adored him, and he liked me almost as much. I often thought I was his favorite brother, even though he never would have said so. It would have made the others jealous.

I rarely tried to manipulate him. The few times I did, he would point a finger at me and say authoritatively, “Stop. I know what you’re doing.”

Dario was the only one who could see through my ploys and childish manipulations. I respected that immensely.

After Roberto and I drifted apart in our early 20s, it was no surprise that Dario ended up being my closest brother.

One of my favorite games was ‘Playing Roberto.’

It was definitely not Roberto’s favorite, though.

I would have to badger him until he gave in. Once he finally did, we would wear each other’s clothes, which couldn’t have been more different.

I favored the normal clothes that my other brothers wore: jeans, hoodies, t-shirts.

Roberto, on the other hand, preferred wearing a suit and tie.

We were all required to wear formal attire for weddings and funerals. I suppose my little brother developed a taste for them, because once he turned 13, that’s all he wore.

While the rest of us were sporting American casualwear – Levi’s and Nikes – he was wearing Armani.

Anyway, we would switch clothes, I would slick my hair back, and Roberto would tousle his so he resembled me. Then we would go out and interact with our family and the servants.

Roberto was terrible at playing me. He had a very mild, unassuming personality, and he was just never able to replicate my natural exuberance.

I initially wasn’t that good at imitating him , but with practice, I was able to reproduce his mannerisms exactly – to the point where even my mother and father couldn’t tell if I was Roberto or Niccolo. The servants in our household had no clue.

In much the same way that I had studied Roberto’s reactions when I teased him in different voices, I learned that I could alter people’s perceptions of me by playing a character.

I guess that’s where I got my sense of theatricality. I enjoyed being a chameleon.

When Roberto and I interacted with others side by side, everyone immediately spotted Roberto as the counterfeit.

But when I went out alone, dressed in his clothes, I could fool everyone: my parents… the servants… and Adriano, Massimo, and Valentino.

Only Dario could tell the difference – every single time.