Chapter 117: Chapter 1.2
April 26 Siesta
In the arrivals lobby of the airport after my flight from England, the first thing I had to do—with my carry-on bag in one hand—was answer the phone nonstop. "All right. ...Yes. Yes, okay, go ahead and rent the shop."
I'd just finished a twelve-hour flight, and now I had to return all the calls that had come in while I was on the plane. That had been the last of them, though. I'd probably be in Japan for a while, so I'd just arranged for a place to stay.
"—It's Japan."
Once I'd ended the call, I started to hear the noises of the crowd around me. Naturally, everyone was speaking Japanese, and I felt a twinge of nostalgia—
although I couldn't say why. It was true that I'd visited Japan a few times before, but had any of those memories been vivid enough to make me homesick?
I was thinking about it rather absently, when— "Bwuff!"
Bwuff?
Looking down, I saw the face of a little girl near my stomach. She'd been running around, and she'd crashed into me before she could stop.
"Are you all right? It's okay. You're fine, it doesn't hurt," I said. I crouched down to be at the same eye level as her.
She looked about five years old, and her flushed cheeks were as soft as mochi.
Oh, she is going to cry, I thought immediately. "...Daddy's gone."
Ah, so she was lost. That's why she'd been running around in a panic. Her voice was hoarse, and somehow, just taking her to the information center didn't feel right.
"Why don't you come over here with me?"
The airport lobby was crowded. Holding the little girl's hand, I found an empty bench, had her sit down, then handed her a drink I'd bought from a vending machine. Her eyes lit up, and she started to gulp it down, holding the can with both hands. She must have been really thirsty; she was swallowing noisily.
Just as I was about to ask if it tasted good, it hit me: For the past few minutes, I'd been speaking Japanese quite naturally.
...That's right. I'd spoken Japanese with a friend like this, long ago. Maybe that explained the nostalgia.
"...A friend?"
A friend who spoke Japanese. Who on earth had it been?
When had I had friends?
"Lady? Are you okay? It's okay." The little girl was watching me in confusion.
Good grief. Now I'd made a lost child worry about me. Pathetic.
"Where did you lose your dad?" I asked as gently as I could, trying my best not to sound like I was interrogating her.
"Near the souvenir shop," she answered. "Daddy's always wandering off." She insisted that her father was the one who'd strayed away. "When I asked the people in the store, they said he'd left his wallet at the cash register."
That was her story, and she was sticking to it.
However, in the wallet the girl had shown me, I found a note with an address and telephone number. What a practical parent. In that case, calling the phone number would probably solve this. I took out my smartphone, but...
"He isn't picking up."
Was he looking for his daughter so frantically that he hadn't noticed the call?
I really wished the human race would hurry up and evolve the power of telepathy.
"Do you think he's okay?" The girl was starting to look uneasy again. She was holding a pack of candy and had chocolate smeared around her mouth. Had she lost sight of her father while she was sampling it, or in the middle of buying souvenirs?
"Shall we go look for the souvenir shop?"
I'd just taken the girl's hand and gotten to my feet when— "Oh! Mommy!"
Slipping free from my fingers, the girl ran toward a woman. So her mom had been here, too.
It seems there wouldn't be any need for a detective this time. Well, that was fine. With a small sigh of relief, I started to walk away.
"I found Daddy," the girl's mother said.
My legs froze. When I looked back, a man who didn't seem much older than forty had joined the two of them. "Sorry for the trouble," he said, smiling wryly.
Early-onset dementia.
The little girl's father really had been the one who was lost. The mother had found him somewhere and brought him back.
The note with the address and phone number had been in the wallet as a safeguard for an individual with dementia, just in case they wandered off. Since I'd heard the story from a child, I'd ignored her claims and thought of a situation that worked using my own common sense instead.
"That was a terrible mistake to make as a detective, wasn't it?" Yeah, I'd flunked this one.
I still had a long way to go. I was nowhere near perfect. My hands couldn't quite pull a client back to safety from the edge of a cliff. My eyes weren't trained enough to spot people buried under rubble.
At this point, I needed to doubt my own common sense.
Or rather, maybe because it was common sense, the idea of doubting it hadn't even occurred to me.
Then what should I do? Think. Think. Think, come up with a hypothesis, test it, fail again probably, and finally find the answer. I'd keep improving myself, day after day, and become a detective who could protect her clients' interests. One who could make wishes come true.
"Right now, I have a job to do."
After I'd watched the family leave, I took out my phone again. Now that I'd landed in Japan, I'd been tasked with finding a man named Danny Bryant who'd disappeared a year ago.
At present, I had no clues whatsoever. I needed a lead. On that thought, I called a certain acquaintance.
"Hello. Would you like to have tea with me?'
An hour later.
Once I'd taken a taxi to my next destination, I promptly met up with the person I'd just called, and the two of us had tea together like old friends. ...Or that was how it should have gone.
"I'm impressed you had the nerve to walk through that door."
We were in a reception room at the police station. The other guest at my tea party was sitting across from me, drumming her fingers on the table in an irritated manner.
"Don't be so cold. The two of us go way back."
"Yeah, we've tried to kill each other and everything." The woman—a redheaded police officer—abruptly pulled a gun and pointed it at me.
Now and even back then, I've always been the one who seemed likely to get killed. "If you're going to draw a weapon, shouldn't you consider where you are first?"
"Conveniently, this room has no security cameras." "They'll figure it out from the noise."
"I've got a silencer. It won't be a problem."
"Isn't the fact that you've modified a department-issued gun enough of a problem already?"
She was still scowling, but she settled back into her seat. This officer, who wasn't behaving like a police officer at all, was Fuubi Kase.
Publicly, she was a Japanese policewoman, but she had a second, private identity as the globe-trotting Assassin. Like me, Fuubi Kase was a Tuner.
As the Assassin, most of her jobs consisted of killing targets on orders from the Federation Government. As one of those targets, I'd spent my days fleeing
from her.
Personally, I considered our past to be water under the bridge. I wanted to cooperate and get along as work colleagues, but Fuubi seemed to still have beef with me. "First you slipped through my fingers, and now you're a fellow Tuner. What are the higher-ups thinking?"
The focus of her annoyance shifted; the government officials who'd ordered my assassination had turned around and made me one of their pawns, and she didn't like that, either. With an aggressive flick of her lighter, she lit a cigar. "And you—how are you okay with this? You're getting worked like a dog by the same people who ordered a hit on you."
Good point. If that were the whole picture, I seemed like an incredibly accommodating person. But...
"The fact that they were after my life helped me come up with a big theory about a possibility that had always worried me."
Fuubi gazed steadily at me, as if she was trying to figure out what I was after. "When you and your people started targeting me, I was hunting Seed for
personal reasons. That should have been considered the right thing to do, yet there you were, the symbol of justice, trying to kill me. I couldn't understand it.
...Not at first." I took a sip of my tea. "After thinking it through, I deduced it must be because my survival would benefit Seed. I could become a vessel that would help him survive. You were trying to kill me before that happened."
I was missing several months' worth of memories. They were probably memories of the days I'd spent with Seed, at that facility his people had built. However, it wasn't until Fuubi started trying to kill me that I realized I might have been cultivated as Seed's vessel.
"As a result, I'm actually grateful to you. Because you attempted to eliminate me, I managed to puzzle out my own identity."
The Federation Government had tried to wither Seed indirectly by killing me. However, when I kept defying their expectations and escaping from the Assassin, they'd decided to make me a Tuner and send me to subjugate Seed instead. If you looked at it that way, there was nothing inconsistent about it.
"Well, aren't you mature." Fuubi dully exhaled a puff of smoke.
In that case, everything from this point on would be childish nonsense. "There's just one thing that bothers me," I said. Fuubi turned to look at me.
"Our superiors ordered you to assassinate me because I was Seed's vessel. How do you suppose they knew that?"
They had the Oracles' sacred text, which foretold all threats to the world. I'd heard it was hard for even the government's people to get a look at it, though.
The other day, Ice Doll didn't seem to be aware of the history Seed and I shared. Had that only been an act? Or did someone else know the truth, and they simply hadn't told her?
"Don't tell me you're asking me to look into all of that for you. Is that why you came here?" Fuubi seemed extremely annoyed at the prospect.
"No, I know this isn't the time to obsess over something like that." My main objective was defeating Seed, nothing more.
And my current job was... "Danny Bryant."
When she heard that name, Fuubi froze for a second. Then she stubbed out her cigar in the ashtray.
"You heard of him?" I asked, although I hardly needed to.
He was a former Federation Government spy who'd abruptly disappeared in Japan a year ago. Fuubi was a Tuner who worked in Japan as a police officer. There was no way she didn't know about him.
"So they gifted you with that pain in the butt, too, huh?" Fuubi sighed heavily. "...Meaning they've sent the job to you before?"
"Yeah, well. I told them I was busy and bowed out partway through."
"I see. So then it was my turn." So this woman was part of the reason I'd been sent all the way to Japan. "What do you know about Danny?" If this had been her job previously, she had to have at least some information.
"He came to Japan about three years ago. Then, last year, he vanished."
"What did he do in the meantime? I don't mean as a spy; what was his cover story?"
"From what I hear, he was a private detective of sorts. Like you." Fuubi smiled. She told me he'd worked as a detective and had been covertly doing something for the government on the side.
Did he come to Japan because of his second job? That part was probably classified; even Ice Doll wouldn't tell me about it.
"It seemed he didn't have a permanent office. It's not clear how he got work." "Where did he live, then? He must have slept somewhere." ...Although I
frequently didn't have a fixed address myself.
"He wandered here, there, and everywhere. We've traced him to places all around Japan. Every single one of 'em is deserted now, but he stayed in this city, too."
Taking out a laptop, Fuubi showed me a list of places where Danny Bryant had lived temporarily. They ranged from Okinawa all the way up to Hokkaido. At least for the two years he'd spent in Japan, he never had a fixed address.
As a matter of fact, both of Danny's jobs had probably demanded that sort of flexibility. In spite of his long, shaggy hair, worn-out shirt, and loosened tie—for some reason, he still had that gleam of amusement in his eyes. Wondering if he'd been a freewheeling character from the beginning, I caught myself putting together a profile for this target I'd never even met.
"—No, that's just common sense." I promptly shook my head. I couldn't let myself be limited by that again.
A free spirit who didn't care about his appearance, whose occupation was
unknown and had no permanent address. That wasn't necessarily his true nature. There was a decent possibility that he was just making it look that way. And... although he seemed to be a free spirit, he might not have been a lone wolf.
"Did Danny Bryant have family?"
Maybe he was a spy, and maybe he had no fixed address. Even so, deciding that he had no family based on those things would have been premature.
"As far as I know, this guy had no relatives during the time he lived in Japan. But..." Fuubi's nose wrinkled as she told me about a certain boy Danny had been looking after. "From what I hear, Danny Bryant used to live here in town with this one problem kid. You wouldn't even believe the amount of trouble he causes for me... Well, perfect timing: You should know it, too. That damn brat's name is—"
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