The Sacred Band Ch 03

This is the third chapter of a long story about a vicious and remorseless criminal and a group of people with unusual lifestyles who attempt to combat him. It is written in two ways. Sections which tell the personal lives of the participants are told in the form of memoirs. These are headed with personal names e.g. Philip and Denise, Ivy and Ginny. They contain graphic sex of various kinds.

Sections that tell the Rotkoff story are written in the third person. These do not contain any explicit sex.

The story is set in Leicester and Birmingham, England, between 1951 and 1956.

My thanks are due to several volunteer editors, in particular Lusty Madame whose valuable advice I ended up (protesting all the way, in accepting in its entirety. Thank you Madame. I also acknowledge the help of Michchick98.

Of course, the end product, w.a.f. is my own.

There is no sex in this episode. There is a scene of violence.

The Sacred Band, chapter 2.

Vignette; 1937. Philip Rotkoff comes of age

Stephen Rotkoff's real experience of violence began in his teens. Not the routine domestic violence of the beatings his father handed out to him, but the sort of experience that was life transforming.

When he was sixteen, and already big and strong enough to intimidate and sometimes physically chastise streetgirls and their pimps, he became aware that his father had a problem that was worrying him.

A bookie's runner named flapper, because of his habit of flapping his hands about vigorously when frightened or excited, had overheard information about a drug purchase; information that he should not possess.

Of course, when taxed with this, he denied any such knowledge, and said plainly that he had not being paying any attention, since he was working out the payout on a four-horse accumulator that looked like coming off and costing a lot of money.

This could, of course, be true, and Rotkoff senior had appeared to accept his word for it, but after Flapper left, he turned to his son.

"What do you reckon, Stevie boy? Should we trust him?"

Stephen knew that this was a test, and that a lot depended on his answer.

"No!" he responded. "We can't take a chance. We have to off him".

His father plainly concurred.

"Right you are then son. I'll get Denny and Bern to take care of him."

Stephen knew better that to ask questions, or dispute his father's word. This led inexorably to a punch in the face, and sometimes worse. This time he had to take a chance.

"Dad, let me take care of him, I know I can do it, and I have to start some time."

Rotkoff senior pondered the matter for half an hour, keeping his son on tenterhooks, then announced his decision.

"Ok, you can do it. I'll send Denny and Bernie along with you just to be on the safe side, but this one's down to you, and don't fuck it up or I'll fuck you up."

Stephen knew just how he wanted this to go. The Stalinist Treason Trials were all over the newsreels, as ex-Bolshevik after ex-Bolshevik, in treason trials with world-wide coverage, confessed tearfully, that they had betrayed the Revolution and acted as tools of Western Imperialism. Accounts of how the NKVD, the Soviet Secret Police used torture and brainwashing techniques intrigued him, and he read all he could about them.

One method of execution especially attracted him. Prisoners would be escorted along a white tiled underground corridor, and, at a given signal, the NKVD agent who walked behind would raise his pistol and shoot the prisoner at the point where the base of the skull met the atlas bone, the first cervical vertebra. The lowly guards would then drag the body away for disposal and then hose down the corridor.

In a powerfully effective variant on this technique, a prisoner was forced to his knees in a crowded cell, and shot in full view of his friends or family. They would then be left, staring in shocked horror at the body, their clothing crusted with blood and brains, awaiting their own interrogation.

Stephen grew more and more excited as he replayed this scene in his imagination. He decided that this should be how he would conduct his first execution. It would intimidate even hardened gang members like Denny and Bern, who would act as witnesses and spread his reputation abroad.

In his father's arsenal there was a nickel-plated Smith and Wesson .38 revolver. with a four inch barrel, that had fascinated him as a child. He loaded two bullets into the cylinder. The three men then went in search of Flapper, who was doing his rounds of pubs and barbers' shops collecting betting slips. They met him just coming out of a newsagents, and fumbling to remove the silver foil from a packet of ten Woodbines.

"Flapper, the Guv'ner wants another word. He sent us to fetch you back to him."

Because he was being spoken to by a sixteen-year-old he had known all his life. Flapper gained a bit of confidence. Surely, he reasoned, the Guv'ner would not have sent him along if his two bruisers were going to work him over.

The four men turned down the narrow alley between two crumbling terraces of back-to-back houses. They walked along the cobbled passage, with its central evil-smelling drainage channel, until they reached the middle. Anyone who saw the group, with its two brutal, middle-aged thugs, razor-scarred and fist-battered, turned away hastily and hurried in another direction.

"On his knees", Stephen ordered tersely. Denny and Bern grasped Flapper by his elbows and forced him to his knees. Flapper knew that he had made a misjudgment. He was in for a kicking. Sill, he reasoned, it's not the first, and I don't suppose it will be the last. He could get through it.

They dragged him to his knees and held him, straight-armed like a deformed crucifix. No fists or boots were laid upon him. His last coherent thought was to wonder what was the loud metallic click. Then the world exploded into a clap of thunder; a flare of vivid colours; followed by eternal blackness.

Rotkoff watched, fascinated, as the man on the ground writhed and convulsed, whilst strange strangled sounds came out of his shattered mouth. The bullet had passed right through the man's brainstem, smashed his spinal column, and come out of his mouth in a spray of teeth, bone and blood. As he watched the steaming urine pool under the body and trickle down into the gutter, Rotkoff made a mental note to angle the gun a trifle higher next time.

Rotkoff's two wingmen allowed the body to drop, and prepared to walk away.

"Wait, you clods. Get the betting slips from his pocket, and empty his pockets. Lets make it look like a robbery."

Denny and Bern felt deeply humiliated tobe told their job by a kid. To Rotkoff this was the final glorious touch. He had come of age. Tonight he would take a couple of the youngest whores to bed, and fuck himself to repletion on their unresisting bodies.

cont.to/ Philip Cheshire: into business