LITMIR.BIZ

       5

      Kwasi King was twenty-four years old, and he had been famous for exactly half his life. A month after his twelfth birthday, he became the youngest chess grandmaster in history. Before he reached fourteen, he won the US championship. Chess was pretty much a minority sport as far as the mainstream media were concerned, but one story was always guaranteed to get their attention – a child prodigy who might, just might, be the next Bobby Fischer.

      Especially when that prodigy was a black kid raised by a single mom in America’s largest public housing project.

      Regina King had been seventeen when she’d given birth to Kwasi. The name meant ‘born on a Sunday’, because he had been. If she knew who Kwasi’s father was, she never said so. She had no qualifications to speak of, but what she did have was a work ethic that was positively Stakhanovite and a tidal desire to give her son a better start than she’d had.

      She took two jobs at once, sometimes three, just to keep them afloat; but the jobs were minimum wage and childcare cost money, so the only place she could afford was a small apartment high up in a Queensbridge tower block. Six thousand people lived in the Queensbridge complex, peering with hopeless longing across the water to Manhattan’s glass-and- steel canyons.

      Drug dealers worked shifts along the development’s main commercial stretch, punching clocks as diligently as stevedores. You wanted to go get something from the store, even a loaf of bread or a bar of candy, you had to walk past them. This is the life, their very presence seemed to hiss, this is the life, this is the only life you’ll ever know. In the daytime, they shouted and snarled at each other: when night fell, they started shooting.

      Some of them tried their luck with Regina: she was a good-looking girl, and still only twenty. She turned them down, politely but firmly. A couple of her wannabe suitors weren’t used to women turning them down, and liked to use their fists on such occasions: but there was something about Regina which made them meekly accept it and walk away.

      One day, shortly before Kwasi’s fourth birthday, Regina took him into Manhattan for the day. They walked through Washington Square Park, past the corner of the world which is forever chess: an array of checkered tables in poured concrete, and round them an endless flow of players and spectators. All human life is here: alcoholic hustlers who’ll bet you a handful of dollars a game, Eastern European grandmasters down on their luck, bankers and lawyers in their lunch hours, students, bums, sages, fools. And the play is strictly speed chess. No two-hour games in reverential library-style silence: five minutes each player, tops, with trash-talking not so much encouraged as mandatory.

      Kwasi stood to watch one of the games, his little face barely at table level, so he was peering through the pieces rather than over them as adult players do. The game had ended in a flurry of moves and insults, both players’ laughter deflecting any malice. Come on, Regina said, game’s over, let’s go.

      One more, Mom. Can I watch one more?

      She’d been at work all week, farming Kwasi out to friends. She owed him a little indulgence, no? Sure, honey, one more. Just one more.

      One more became one more after that, and another one, and another one. Nine games later, when a hotshot lawyer had been checkmated seven ways to Sunday by one of the regular park hustlers and grudgingly handed over the five bucks stake, Kwasi turned to him and said, quietly but precisely: ‘You missed checkmate in three moves.’

      Regina, swaying from foot to foot in her impatience to get going, stopped dead.

      She knew two things for sure. First, Kwasi had never so much as seen a chess set in his life, let alone played with one. Second, he wasn’t the kind of kid to come out with something like this unless he meant it. She’d always known he was bright: talking at six months, reading at a year, glued to The Price Is Right at eighteen months – but this, if this was what she thought it was … well, this was something else entirely.

      Lawyer and hustler both laughed: the hustler with some good humor, the lawyer with none. The hustler, breath sweet from his paper-bag rum, leaned toward Kwasi. ‘Mate in three, huh?’

      Kwasi said nothing: simply put the pieces back to where they’d been halfway through the game, and played through the three-move sequence. When he finished, the lawyer took the pieces from him and played it through himself, muttering ‘I’ll be damned, I’ll be damned’ with every slap of piece on board.

      ‘I done seen all that at the time,’ the hustler said. Kwasi merely looked at him, his face completely still like a little black Buddha, until the hustler’s mouth cracked into a goofy raggedy-tooth smile and he threw up his hands in mock surrender. ‘OK, kid, OK, you got me. I never saw that neither, none of that. How old are you?’

      ‘Three years, eleven months and twenty-six days.’

      ‘A’iiiight. It’s good to be precise. And when you learn to play chess?’

      ‘Thirty-eight minutes ago.’

      The hustler laughed again, until he saw that Kwasi was serious.

      When it came to chess, Serious was Kwasi’s middle name. This is my boy, Regina would proclaim, and he’s not taking no crap off of nobody. Not in the years he spent playing all comers in the park, and certainly not when some of them tried to cheat by making illegal moves or subtly nudging a piece off its square; not when people tried to trash-talk him, because the regulars understood that Kwasi didn’t trash-talk and that, get this, it didn’t matter, ’cos he was so damn good; not in the proper tournaments he played, the ones that had TV crews and arbiters and trophies; not at school when the other kids swung between admiring his talent and calling him a freak; not when the cops came round after yet another gang murder to ask whether he’d seen anything from his apartment window six stories up; not when as a teenager

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