A group of college students were touring Europe, and to kill the travel time 20 or so of us played Mafia in the back of a bus. You all know the rules: an omnipotent narrator controls the village, having all the players close their eyes, while the Mafia is asked to awaken and choose someone to kill. They choose, someone’s life is in danger, and the narrator asks the Mafia to close their eyes again. Next the Sheriff is awakened, asked to silently point out and accuse someone of being Mafia; they are then given the affirmative or negative nod by the all-knowing narrator, and asked to sleep again. Next the nurse awakens, is given the opportunity to save anyone, even themselves, and then falls asleep. No one knows who anyone is except the narrator. No one knows who lives and who dies. Finally, the whole village is awakened by the narrator who informs everyone about who is saved, if anyone, who is dead, if anyone, and asks whether or not one of the villagers should be accused and hanged as the Mafia. Accusations are made, defenses are given, quarrels arise, a vote is taken, necks are strung, and then another round begins. Those who live till the end are the victors, either the Mafia or the villagers.
“Everyone close your eyes,” said the Narrator. Sam and I threw a knowing glance at each other and shut our eyes for what we knew would be mere seconds . “Mafia awake.” Two days previous in the back alleys of the Venetian labyrinth, tucked away in a whisper I managed to get the Narrator to agree to make the two of us Mafia together.
We knew what we had to do. The first kill was obvious: it had to be Joy. We had observed that no matter what role Joy played in previous games, Mafia, Sheriff, Nurse, or regular townsperson, she talked too much. She stirred the pot and was too good at it. We couldn’t risk that sort of chaos. We were banking on our rhetoric and we needed to silence our main competition.
But that part was obvious. Was easy. Was a segue into the real genius of the plan.
Because the real crux of the thing hinged on the very moment everyone awoke, after the first death had been served, when the accusations began, when the Sheriff—Sam and I did not know who—was in for a bit of a surprise.
“Joy has been killed by the Mafia,” said the Narrator. And I remember to this day the wince that came across her face. For like all the dead things on this earth, she could no longer speak, no longer participate. She was to watch from the sidelines the utter ruin soon to follow.
Then almost before the Narrator finished his words, Sam enacted the plan. He yelped, “Everyone, look, I’m the Sheriff, and I just accused Kevin. He is NOT the Mafia. We can’t hang him”!
Sam had lied. He was not the Sheriff and I was not a villager. We two Mafia had risked everything on a single sentence. We braced ourselves for the fight. It was to be only a matter of seconds before the real Sheriff spoke up.
But the silence that followed had not entered our calculations. For all of our planning, all our ingenuity, we had forgotten one sublime possibility. We had not prepared for the best case scenario.
You see, the idea was for Sam to feign being the Sheriff, to falsely accuse me, to vindicate me, and then for the both of us to prepare for a battle of rhetoric with the true Sheriff. We were to have the upper hand in every way. It would be two against one, the both of us highly confident in ways of manipulation. Sam had also spoken up first giving us the advantage, the actual Sheriff’s simply wouldn’t have had a well formed argument given such an audacious claim on our end. I myself was ready to give a short speech saying that I heard Sam point toward me during the Sheriff’s time to accuse. And were things to get really iffy Sam had prepared a monologue about how we had planned that if one of us were get Sheriff that they would accuse the other so as to be able to solidify the safety of at least one villager. The strength of the argument was not its logic, but its appeal to the villagers: by eliminating 2 possible suspects—Sam as Sheriff and me as, well, his Deputy—the villagers could focus on hanging others, thus increasing their individual odds of survival. The real Sheriff would have too much stacked up against them. We would overwhelm the villagers with rhetoric, and hang the real Sheriff then and there or we would kill them the next night.
But silence. Complete and utter silence.
It hit us as immediately as it hit Joy’s wincing face. In that quietude we learned how dearly the Mafia gods loved us. By sheer luck we had killed the Sheriff in the first night. Joy was the real Sheriff.
I cannot explain how difficult it was to stifle our laughter. The only point at which our plan could falter, the only point of risk, had been completely removed from the realm of possibility. As far as the villagers were concerned Sam was the Sheriff and I his Deputy. We were safe and reliable, trustworthy. If the village was to survive the onslaught of the Mafia it would be by our graces.
From thenceforward it was pure Sadism.
I spoke up, “Nurse, listen, you have to keep Sam alive. He’s the Sheriff, the more he can accuse the better chance we have of finding the Mafia.” Sam gave his bit of bull too, “Nurse, actually, even if you want to save Kevin, that’s fine too, at least he can guide the accusations when we’re awake.”
And so it was that the hands that fed them, fed them poison. I had the villagers arbitrarily hanging each other during the waking hours, and Sam had the pleasure of killing the villagers during the sleeping hours. But perhaps best of all we had the Nurse tending to the ailments of the Mafia. It was a massacre, an ambush, a Kansas City Shuffle if ever there were one. They died one by one, some near 20 people, without a single moment’s danger for either Sam or myself.
And what I remember most is the faces of the dead. Of course, when the Narrator said “Mafia wake up” for the next 7 or 8 rounds, the newly dead did not expect to find Sam and I’s eyes peering into the crowd, seeking whom we may devour. Sometimes there was shock, mouths agape, sometimes horror, other times anger, hands flailing violently into the air. They had trusted us with their lives because we made them believe we were trustworthy.
At one point someone even joked, “wouldn’t it be crazy if Sam and Kevin were Mafia”? They thought when we laughed we were laughing with them. We were laughing at them.
Of course Sam and I won. It wasn’t even a competition. Without doubt, after that evening the two of us never made it past the first two rounds. We were hung immediately and with malice. No one has trusted us ever since.
But it didn’t matter. We had played the perfect game. The game never to be surpassed.
