THIEF OF BREAN (VOL-1)|✓

A DECEPTIVE DIMENSION- XLV

"I was standing in front of a kingpin, like the one with a walrus moustache. I had my dirk on his neck, you know..."

"That was earlier times. They don't look like that now," Carl recognised the voice to be Webb Croft.

"How do you know that?"

"I have seen some pictures of the wanted list in my father's files. They are hip."

"Really?"

"Yea... and clever as the devil."

They laughed.

"Do you think this man we are after is also a kingpin?"

"Not at all." Webb croft seemed very confident. "Didn't you hear what Major said, these were some muggers trying to find footing in mafia. They will not be hiding in this damned place if they had a clever kingpin."

Carl rubbed his eyes and looked around. Giles was already on his feet and securing the woollen beanie on his head. He straightened up and kneaded his sore ankles while his ears still listened to the boys.

"What, you don't believe me? I'm not making up things... Father used to tell that all the dangerous rings out there once started as started as muggers. If we let them go now, they'll begin getting more deals, slowly they'll learn about the business, then they become a headache to the army. By the time the army tries to take them down, they would have become invincible. Later, the Governor will have to go to LEA looking for aid, at which it will have to send an intelligence official down the stairs to infiltrate the ring and spy on them."

"I'd love to know how they do it, you know, spy the mafia right under their noses. So fascinating when you think about it."

Fascinating only when you think about it, Carl chuckled inwardly. This boy would surely shit in his pants once he landed in the bloodied, reeking gut of the vicious underworld. There was a time when he too had thought it to be fascinating to get down the stairs.

For young boys, there were so many stories told about the beguiling lives of kingpins, their tricks with knives, their master plans that fooled the army, the intelligence and big name merchants alike, the allegiance that supposedly followed them to death, the accounts of their survivals headlining the newspapers and the said devil-may-care attitude were easily misinterpreted for hipness. Obviously it influenced many young foolhardy minds to aspire on becoming a mafia, if not the LEA's fall guy. Some people just loved to get fooled.

Likewise, Carl had wanted to see if all those accounts were really true. He wanted to explore the mafia world.

It was pretty gnarly thought to start with.

Then one day, during the training at LEA, as it happened, he and four more pupils of his batch were sent to tour the streets of district Remenant so that they'd take a closer look at the mafia and study the people involved, as a part of a practical exercise. They were supposed to wander around the taverns, make some casual talk with the tourists and natives, look around the gambling halls, and not involve in the infamous gaming called blue-stakes, or try casting an eye at the rose clubs or the cathouses.

But Carl and his peers were up for a deadly exploit. They had halted their study in the city to make a trip to the slums.

Slums in a city as big and bustling as Remenant usually consisted of the base dwellings of the rings that operated in that city. As most part of the western part of Aristos was white soiled and the small houses in the slums were built of grey limestone, first sight at these slums looked like the costly grey-scale images that were snapped on a thing called camera, by the rich and hung in the hallways of their mansions.