In a country very extremely far away, the industrial conurbation called Mamukh had become, in effect, run by an organised crime ring formed by gangsters who fled there from another country, Scilia, when its own authorities clamped down. The corruption ran from top to bottom, and everybody knew it. But nobody knew for certain more than affected their own immediate circle, and nobody dared discuss it because… they knew what affected their own immediate circle. But privately it was suspected that even the Mayor and the Chief of Police were either part of the ring, or at least thoroughly compromised by its bribes or blackmail. Still, there were many not directly affected who fondly imagined that they lived in a free and democratic city.
Then, one day, a notorious murder took place in the deprived Sudeskhsal district of Mamukh. The entire staff of a much-loved local family business was gunned down as they opened the shop, and several bystanders were also seriously injured. Almost immediately a courageous ex-soldier rugby-tackled the perpetrator and several others held him down as his gun was seized, and the murderer was arrested once the police arrived.
It was rumoured locally that he was one of the mob’s “protection” operatives, and one of those who had held him down was certain he saw the gang’s characteristic tattoo on his arm. Another thought the man had shouted something like, “I told you that shops can break, but you wouldn’t listen!” before he fired.
Immediately local feelings boiled over, as one and all said, “This can’t go on any more.” Spontaneous protests, some quite aggressive towards the authorities who seemed indifferent to the racket’s effect on the people, broke out. And once the news spread across the country, similar protests erupted everywhere, because Mamukh was not the only city affected by organised criminals from Scilia, whom the national government seemed to welcome in large numbers without any checks on their character.
The Chief of Mamukh Police was thoroughly corrupt, indeed, but had regard to the viability of his city, or perhaps it was just a regard for his own reputation. He recognised that a city rendered fearful and impoverished by rampant gangsterism is a terrible place to live for ordinary people, and was intelligent enough to see that it could only get worse. But the decline into a filthy sink would certainly not happen during his tenure, as he was due to retire and collect his customary barony just a couple of years hence.
Meanwhile, as he discussed with the Mayor, and subsequently with the National Chancellor, the worst thing that could happen was widespread civil unrest. Not only would this damage his reputation and that of Mamukh, but it would expose the fact that he, his counterparts in other cities, and the government, were responsible for letting this mess develop in the first place. No, civic peace was, surely, the paramount consideration.
Consequently the solution was obvious, and was implemented by the National Chancellor himself: the gang assassination story had to disappear. In the first place, the Chief of Police issued a statement that the killer, Rergon Razterplatz, was a local-born Sunday School teacher who, following an unfortunate dawn struggle with his parents on a canal bank, had recently developed a psychotic illness. But, he hastened to add, nobody could have predicted that he would ever become violent.
Nobody could check the story, because gagging orders were imposed on all the witnesses to the crime, all the medical staff who had ever treated him, and the Methodist church where it was said he had taught children. His parents simply disappeared. A story appeared in the Daily Mail that the man who said he had spotted the gang tattoo had once perpetrated a non-crime hate incident.
At the national level, the police and judiciary were directed to quell the protests (for unlike our own nation, dear friends, this country’s law enforcement and judiciary were not fully independent of government). The National Chancellor immediately went on TV to condemn the protestors as anti-Sciliatic racists, local police forces bravely arrested all the shopkeepers who took to the streets, and the judges banged them up for exemplary prison sentences within days. Just to prove how violent the racists were, were it not clear enough to the viewing public, the Intelligence Services sent out groups of masked men in black to be filmed burning a few buses, somehow always disappearing before the police got to them.
Razterplatz, being declared mentally incapable, never came to trial and was granted a new identity, some said in Scilia. Before that, though, fellow-prisoners said they saw him reading Proust and making tea for the Governor.
And in this way, the ideal of civil peace was indeed restored, and it was hoped that this order – surely the greatest good – might be maintained even as the Scilian gangs took control of the levers of government… which perhaps they already had. Keeping the people compliant, even if they were constantly intimidated, robbed, and occasionally murdered, was better for the “greater good” than the expression of popular rage which might even unseat the democratic minority government. So it was hoped.
It was really hoped. Hard.
