Baccano! - Volume 10 - Chapter SS

Digression The Police Show Up Late

Turn the clock back two weeks.

“We’re late… He got the jump on us, dammit!”

As he stepped down from a train in Chicago, a bespectacled man who looked like a public servant was fuming.

Victor Talbot, an immortal and Bureau of Investigation executive, had been roundly delayed thanks to Huey’s trap.

“This is as far as he goes, though. Now that I’m here, I won’t let him do a goddamn thing! That Huey louse is gonna be in the pen sobbing his eyes out over how helpless he is, mark my words. Man, would I kinda love to see that…”

Jauntily adjusting his glasses, he strode through the station with an excess of vim and vigor.

From his energy, you’d have thought he was gearing up to arrest the whole town.

Incidentally, a mere thirty minutes later, he would receive the report about Huey’s jailbreak and subsequently become an uncomfortably drunk mess sobbing his own eyes out in front of his men—

But that’s another story.

Somewhere in New York

“I see… So there was quite a lot happening in Chicago, hmm?”

“What do you want to do, boss?”

In a dim room whose curtains had been tightly drawn, three figures were conversing with some distance between them.

That said, one of the figures—Nameless, one of the former Felix Walkens—was very nearly silent, and the only ones speaking were the other two: Senator Manfred Beriam and his hired sniper, Spike.

“Want us to head over to Chicago, too?” Spike muttered indifferently, but Beriam immediately shook his head.

“No, I doubt there’s any point in going now.”

“Huh? Uh…”

“I expect Huey planned to use New York as a decoy and run a large-scale experiment in Chicago. However… After that uproar, he may have abandoned the idea.”

Stubbing his cigar into an ashtray, Beriam spoke in a solemn voice.

“We don’t need to forestall them or set traps. No matter what they use, we’ll take the challenge…and crush them. That is all.”

There was no telling what Beriam was looking at. His gaze wandered through space as he murmured, eyes narrowed. It was impossible to determine whether or not he was speaking as a politician.

“…It would be ideal if we could use this to stamp out those ticks in New York.”

The transcontinental railroad A second-class compartment

“Sham… Send a message to everyone. ‘As of now, I am putting a temporary hold on the Chicago experiment.’”

“Understood, Master Huey.”

“Once the new year begins—the experiment will resume.”

As if it had been waiting for his words, the train quietly began to roll. Gazing out the window at the shifting Chicago scenery as if he was reluctant to part with it, Huey felt his left eye twinge—and smiled softly.

He’d left behind the events behind the prison walls and in the streets beyond; his right eye was already focused exclusively on the next experiment.

In a corner of the moving scenery on the platform, he spotted Victor striding along with squared shoulders, and he murmured the rest with a touch of amusement.

“Under the lights of New York…it should be a grand affair.”

Then Huey toyed with a small jar he held in his right hand.

A single eyeball rolled around inside it. It wasn’t his own.

Making eye contact with the eyeball he’d acquired in an act of revenge just the other day, Huey spoke to it quietly.

As he addressed the silent eye, he was visualizing the faces of his two children…

“I imagine you’d like to see your daughters from time to time as well…wouldn’t you, Maestra Parmedes?”

The train surged into motion.

Bound for New York City, it carried all kinds of human thoughts—dreams, hopes, ambitions…

…and just a touch of poison.