Episode XXXVIII-In terms of trickiness, I get an extra D12 roll for guile.

It was situation critical. By desperate and pure random supposition, or, the law of averages, Inteligente had fingered us correctly. That little snitch. Now I really wished that we had finished him off sooner. My blood was pounding in my head. Clean was good, because he was sitting quietly. No one would vote for him this round. But I – I was in trouble. Heads were turned my way; eyes nodding, analyzing. I had to come up with something good. Something irrefutable. Something full of logic and personality.

“I can’t believe this!” I roared, full of bluster and mock anger. Well, if I couldn’t come up with something reasoned, why not something patently unreasonable. It worked for sophists and politicians all the time. “You’re my friend! I’ve helped you out all the time. Not just all the time, but like all, the time. And now, you do this? I can’t believe it.” If I could have cried on command, I would have thrown in a tear or two. “This is how you thank me. I swear, that I’m not mafia. I’m done kidding around. This is so ridiculous.” If I was standing, I would have paced around the room in agitated circles. “I get voted out early every game! I just want to play! Why do you hate me! I swear, if you do this, I’ll never, ever be your friend again!” It was a classic non-Shakespearean performance, full of sound, fury, and no real content.

After the last words poured out, I looked at his face. It was crushed like an old can.

“I’m – I – I’m sorry?” He said. “It’s just a game…look, ok, it’s not you. I’m sorry.”

Inwardly, I smiled and ruminated about how he had fallen for my gambit. But as the discussion shifted to a scapegoat brought up by a person that turned out to be no other than Clean, I realized that our team was now in danger. Once Ms. Politics was voted out, and we offed another, no fake performance would hide the fact that we were the mafia. Especially since Inteligente, despite being cowed, would be listening aggressively like a lemur.

The citizens went to bed. Clean and I stayed alert. We had a limited amount of time, and no verbal way to communicate. Adroitly, we combined odd hand gestures, grimaces, lifted eyebrows, intense stares, and strategically silent arm signals into a plan. With grim efficiency, we executed it, to the confirmation of the watching moderator. Then, as the theoretical sun rose briskly, the circle looked around for appreciable changes and awaited the cold total of the night’s capers.

“I know who it is!” Inteligente declared briskly. “I heard…”

“And in the early light of the dawn, the L.A. is found, stone dead in his flat…” The moderator said, droning on, bored of the game, and just wanting a simple, quick victor.

The look on Inteligente’s face was priceless. It passed from smug, utter self-confidence to total shock and disbelief in a mousefart of time. His breath rushed out in a groan of defeat.

“But – I heard you…move…and yet….”

“And yet, sadly, I’m deader than a board.” I chortled. Being dead in this manner was actually quite enjoyable, as I could watch how stupefied he was. The idea to kill me off and have Mr. Clean then move unopposed against the rest of the group was genius. I wanted to do my bad victory dance right then and there. It was as bright a move as putting cheese in a can. It was perhaps, the most devious and cunning move that could ever be made in such a sophomoric card game.

The plan played out cleanly. Well, as cleanly as killing off our peers could go. Inteligente bravely chased all sorts of strange leads after my death in the limited time he had left to live, after begrudgingly apologizing to me. Unfortunately, his conspiracy theories failed to catch any fish, and he ended up indignantly pushing up daisies in defeat.

“I was right!” He triumphantly declared once the ruse was over. “I knew you were mafia!”

“But you fell for the oldest trick in the book!” I insouciantly taunted, “The fake death!”

This left him to sputter about in a self-righteous manner about how I had threatened him, and so forth. I pretty much ignored it, because I knew that we had conned him, and fooled him good. He was lucky to walk out of the room with his shoelaces as we had definitely taken him to the cleaners.