GANGSTERS' LEAGUE

CHAPTER 1

August Bruzi was twenty years-old when he killed a man. The man’s name was Ben Mema and he was an associate of the mafia clan that August wanted to work for. Word on the street was that Ben was talking to the police.

That cold autumn night, August and a clan captain, Nikoll Domi, or Nicky for short, were waiting in their car.

Ben stepped out of an apartment building and walked to his car. He was alone.

Nicky and August hopped out of their car. It was noisy out there. Cars roared past on the highway close by. No other soul was in sight. The wind played around with the telephone cables overhead and the street lights flickered weakly, barely hanging on to life.

August looked at Ben. His heart started to race and his hands started trembling, but this was it, he thought; the crossroad between having money and not having any, and the latter was an iron door. They wouldn’t give him another chance and now that he was exposed to the clan’s business maybe they’d give him a bullet behind his ear. August took a deep breath. Nicky was watching him.

“You alright?” Nicky asked. “You wanna do this?”

“Yeah, I’m good,” August said, his voice wavering.

“Okay,” Nicky said. “C’mon.”

August and Nicky emerged from the darkness like hostile specters into the faint circle of light where Ben stood. He jumped. His eyes widened.

“Don’t move!” August said, pointing a gun at him.

Nicky tied Ben’s hands behind his back with handcuffs.

Ben, a tall beast of a man in his late forties, seemed so overwhelmed with shock at first that he didn’t resist, but then pierced August with his eyes and lifted his chin up as if to say, Try something, I dare you.

August pressed the gun under Ben’s chin. “Get a move on,” he said. “Get in the car.”

The plan was to take Ben to a desolate area into the woods to kill and bury him there to cover their tracks instead of killing him outside of the apartment complex and having to travel with a dead body in the trunk. August had suggested earlier that they should just shoot him and leave him there, but Nicky said that the guy had friends and it’d be better to make him disappear.

Nicky pushed him and August pulled him, but Ben wouldn’t budge. It was as if they were trying to move a tree.

“You better start walking motherfucker!” August said.

Ben glared at August, as if delving inside his soul. Maybe August didn’t have what it takes to take a life. He thought for a moment that Ben could sense his weakness. Ben grinned and said, “Fuck off.”

August felt the blood sizzling in his veins. He wasn’t going to let Ben, his victim, talk to him in that way in the presence of an important gangster such as Nicky. How was that going to make him look in the days to come? He smacked Ben in the face with the gun, putting his whole arm into it, and waited for him to fall.

But Ben stood tall. His head moved a bit to the side, as if he’d been slapped by a child. He sneakily leaned back a little, as if bowing in submission, and gave August a knee kick to his balls.

August crashed to the ground with a thud. He saw black stars and gasped. He felt numb from the waist down, as if his dick had escaped his body and a hundred claws clutched at his stomach. He tried to look up, but his eyes burned from tears. A multitude of feelings washed over him. The pain intensified his anger. “Motherfucker!” he screamed.

Nicky let out a wry grunt. It sounded muffled, but to August more deafening than the agony he felt. Nicky snatched the glock from August’s hand and hammered Ben’s head with it. Repeatedly.

Ben crumbled to his knees. Dust rose as he fell.

August wiped his tears with his right hand while still holding his numb crotch with his left. Everything was a blur.

The right side of Ben’s face was mashed to a pulp. He clenched his teeth, but made no sound of pain. “FUCK YOU!” he said. “YOU FUCKING FAGGOTS! You think you can hurt me? I’ll fucking bury you! Your mothers and your sisters are whores. I have fucked them all against their will and, by the way, they hit harder than you. FUCK YOU!!!” He laughed like a mad man and blood slid down his face.

“Talking big shit,” Nicky said calmly.

August managed to get up, slowly, painfully. He drew in a deep breath and found Nicky looking at him. August’s face heated with embarrassment. Nicky’s face was stone. This was nothing new to him. “I think he’s stunned,” August said.

“He’s a piece of shit, is what. Just shoot him already,” Nicky said, annoyed, handing August the gun.

“Out here?” August asked. “What about the plan?”

“Yeah, here!” Nicky scowled as if eager to get the thing over with. “I don’t give a fuck!”

“F-fuck you!” Ben growled, his voice breaking, perhaps realizing his fate, spit flying out of his mouth. “You fucking…lowlifes!”

“Shut the fuck up!” Nicky said and stuffed a kerchief in Ben’s mouth. It was late, past 11 p.m. but some apartments’ lights were still on. “Kill this motherfucker!”

August screwed the silencer into the gun, pointed it at Ben’s head, and froze at the sight of a boy standing in the shadow of a flight of stairs. He looked to be about fifteen years old. Their eyes locked for a brief moment, but to August it felt like a lifetime. Streaking tears glittered on the boy’s face.

Nicky turned in the direction of August’s gaze. August blinked and the boy was gone. “What the fuck are you looking at?” Nicky said. “Do it already!”

August didn’t say a word. He couldn’t feel the gun in his hand. He was numb. His heart seemed to have slowed to one beat per minute and everything folded in front of his eyes in slow motion: a tree’s branches moving, the blood dripping from Ben’s face to the ground, and even Nicky’s lips moving. Nicky was yelling, but August couldn’t make out what he was saying.

Nicky jumped as if he’d had enough. He reached for his gun strapped to his waist.

August’s eyes snapped wide open and in that brief moment he thought he’d better act. Nicky might not just finish Ben off. He might shoot August as well.

August pressed the trigger and shot Ben Mema; one bullet to his head. He felt relief right after, despite the pool of blood underneath Ben’s corpse, as if a huge weight had been lifted off his shoulders, and a sudden burst of energy flooded him. He felt superhuman. He felt one hundred feet tall, as if everyone and everything was below him and he could do anything. He was God.

They left Ben’s corpse lying there and got into their car. Nicky took the wheel. August thought of that boy on the way home. What was that boy doing there? Why was he crying? Maybe he’d killed the boy’s father, but the thought that he had to kill Ben to save his own skin gave him comfort. His first hit hadn’t unfolded as smoothly as he’d hoped, but it could have turned out a lot worse.

August cracked his passenger side window open and breathed in fresh air. It was the year 2000 and he was twenty years old and he had made his bones.

“You did okay tonight,” Nicky said. “I’m gonna tell the boss that you did good.”

They didn’t speak another word to each other till they reached August’s house. August didn’t ask for the details of why Ben had to die. He had a good feeling that Nicky didn’t want him to. In their kind of life one didn’t ask those questions. Questions meant that you were shaky and couldn’t be trusted.

As August was getting out of the car, Nicky put a hand on his shoulder. “The guy you killed was no good,” he said. “It was either him or us.”

“Sure,” August said, “I understand.” But he wasn’t convinced that was the whole story. It lingered in his mind because it was his first kill and as he found out later on, the truth lay somewhere else entirely.