Baccano! - Volume 16 - Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

The wrecker twirls his weapon with shock and delight

Night A speakeasy somewhere in New York

The underground bar was rather cramped, and at a table in the corner beneath the electric lightbulbs, a young guy at a table in the corner was talking.

“Let me tell you a sad, sad story.”

His voice was clear as a bell and full of despair.

“I’m having a great night. This glass of milk is chilled to perfection, and it coats my mouth and throat and stomach with a blanket of white… Just like drifting snow.” He seemed slightly under twenty, and he sighed mournfully again. “It’s a great night. It really is… So why do I have to tell a sad story? That’s the saddest, awfulest thing about all this. I bet somebody’s gonna say I should just shut up then, but sadly, I can’t. I can’t contain all this sadness inside myself. I want to confide it in someone, at least, so I can have friends who know my sadness. I’d imagine that’s an extremely natural thing to do. After all, humans are so very, very, very weak.”

The young man’s outfit was either perfect for this speakeasy, which was located under a factory, or wildly inappropriate. The blue coveralls did make him look like a factory worker, but such a bright blue would never have been used for ordinary work clothes. If he walked around town dressed like that, he’d be as conspicuous as you could get.

The strangest part wasn’t the color, but the object the man was fiddling with in his free hand while he drank his milk.

It was an adjustable wrench, the sort used to tighten nuts. From that description, one might assume it was a normal thing for a man in coveralls to have—but it had three distinctive features.

The first was its size.

The man certainly didn’t have a large build, and the wrench was clearly longer than a child’s arm. It felt more accurate to call it a medieval warrior’s mace than a work tool.

The second was the incongruity of toying with it while drinking milk in an illegal bar.

And the final thing was—

—the fact that the surface of that wrench was corroded by the red blood and rust caked onto it.

At first glance, the man seemed slender and mild-mannered. His muscles were unexpectedly solid, but shiny blond hair hung over his face, and the half-open, sleepy eyes behind it were striking.

If all you saw was his lustrous hair and his pale skin, he might have come across as a handsome young man, but the color in his eyes was incredibly dull and unsettling.

That said—the people who were making eye contact right then were already used to that.

Across from the man in coveralls was another young man, the one among the group who had been the most engaged in the conversation. Still, he answered rather absently as he drank his orange juice.

“Yeah, you said it. Humans are weak. Getting killed and dying—it doesn’t get weaker than that.”

“Right… Humans are hopelessly frail. Not even omnipotent, godlike power could shut down the sadness in our hearts… Then what are we supposed to do? Is… Is that… Is that all we can do? Drown in our ocean of tears and die?”

The man’s rambling seemed liable to depress his listeners, and the friends around him had resigned themselves to their fate.

Just then, an interloper appeared at their table.

“Shaddup, you little punks! Rug rats like you shouldn’t even be in here!”

A big drunk man came up to the young guy’s group, brandishing a liquor bottle he’d grabbed.

He slammed the empty bottle into the table hard enough to shatter it, sending fragments every which way.

The group fell silent.

“Oh, come on. What, you scared of a li’l bottle? I didn’t come here to listen to you yappin’ about God knows what. You gonna pay me back for ruinin’ my evening? Huh?”

The reaction of the people around him emboldened the complainer, who was giving them particular grief for the crime of “being noisy.”

True, the topic hadn’t been a pleasant one to overhear, but the man in the coveralls had been speaking low enough to blend into the surrounding hum of conversation.

This interloper had gone to the trouble of coming over to gripe about it. A leer spread across his liquor-flushed face.

“If you’ve got the dough for a drink here, I’m sure you’ve got enough to make it worth my—”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

Suddenly, the man had realized his knees had buckled.

“Uh, wha…?”

Wondering what had happened, the big man looked at his feet—and saw that his ankle was turned in a peculiar direction. He also noticed that the jaws of an enormous wrench were clamped around it.

“Shi— Huh?”

His liquor-dulled nerves gradually began to transmit pain up from his ankle. At the same moment, the sensation was converted into terror, and the man instantly sobered up.

“Sadness… Somebody just painted over my sadness with more sadness, so what am I supposed to do? On a great night like this, a drunk mugger got all up in my face and wrecked the whole rotten thing? What do I do now? Is a great night so fragile that this is all it takes to break it? …Well? Wait, wait, nights aren’t ‘great’ or ‘awful’ at all; it’s only weak human senses that decide they are, so of course they’re weak… Oh… How can this be? My weakness was so weak it even weakened this terrific weak night! In other words! I sullied this night! Dammit… DammitdammitdammitdammiiiiiiiaaAAAAAaaaaAAAAAH!”

The words of the young guy in the coveralls slowly filtered into the man’s brain, quietly and cruelly.

“D-don’t…”

The man had caught on. He’d messed with someone he really should not have messed with, and now that someone was returning the favor.

The young men around them hadn’t gone quiet because they were afraid of him.

They’d known what was about to happen.

The man in the coveralls began whirling the wrench around and around.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAH!”

“YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUuuuuuuUUUURRGH!”

Simultaneous screams of irritation and terror echoed in the speakeasy.

A few minutes later

“Sorry to keep you waiting. I’m Carl; Carl Dignis from the Daily Days.”

The man still looked young, but he had a seasoned atmosphere. He carried himself with dignity, yet he blended in well with the people around him. He seemed like what you’d get if you took a courteous, elite banker and added an element of folksy charm.

“Did, uh… Did something happen?”

The man who’d introduced himself as “Carl” glanced at the floor a short distance away.

A large man lay there, groaning. All the joints in his arms and legs had been dislocated, and he’d collapsed as bonelessly as a four-legged octopus.

The ordinary-looking young man who was sitting in front of the wrench-twirling one got to his feet and reached out for a handshake.

“Hello, I’m Shaft. I took your call. The fella moaning on the ground there managed to bump every joint he’s got on the corner of a table; don’t worry about him.”

“I see.” It wasn’t clear whether Carl was actually convinced or not, but he didn’t seem too concerned. “May I?” he asked, before sitting down in the chair next to him.

“Sure, go ahead… So what does a DD reporter want to talk to us about?”

“Well, you see…”

Just as he was about to explain, the man in the coveralls abruptly joined the conversation.

“Oh… That’s fun! I’m in a phenomenally good mood today, so let me tell you a fun story!”

“Huh?”

“Never thought that just dismantling all the joints of a mere big guy by myself would cheer me up this much! I’m convinced! Humans are strong! The ocean of sadness rises endlessly, but we have the strength to swim through it to the other side. We have the wisdom and courage to build a boat and get over it… Isn’t that right?”

“Mr. Graham, I wouldn’t say wisdom is part of your— Gwuff!” Taking a light wrench thrust to the gut, Shaft groaned quietly. “Mr. Graham, seriously, gimme a break…! Actually, what was that ‘sad story’ you were gonna tell a minute ago? It ended before you got to the actual story.”

“Oh, the jerky snacks I’d ordered to go with my milk hadn’t shown up yet.”

“I sincerely could not care less about that…!”

As he watched a typical conversation between these two, Carl the journalist quietly narrowed his eyes, observing the man in the coveralls.

Graham Specter.

He was something of a leader of one of New York’s many groups of delinquents. Rumor had it he was a tricky customer. Rumor also had it that he was about as unusual as Tick Jefferson, the Gandor Family torture specialist.

In addition, Carl had gathered that if you managed to piss him off, you didn’t get away unscathed. From the groans of the big man next to him—and his joints, which had been methodically bent in their opposite directions—he understood that that apparently wasn’t just a rumor.

Even so—

Or rather, because this was so, Carl Dignis was speaking to them.

He wanted to convey information to them, as well as glean it from them.

“Graham…wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. And you’re a Daily Days newshound, right? What do you want to ask us about? If it’s a fun story, we’ll talk as long as you want! Just being able to tell fun stories is fun all by itself, ain’t it?! And by that logic, aren’t people perpetual motion machines that can stay entertained forever?! Whoa… I’m getting all worked up now.”

After Graham rambled on excitedly, the journalist took on a certain sort of determination in his expression. “Before we get started, there’s some information I need to pass on to you.”

“?”

The young men looked at him, wondering what was up.

The journalist quietly drew a breath—then spoke very clearly so that each word landed like a solid hit. “You’re familiar with Ice Pick Thompson, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll give it to you straight… The police suspect you all.”

Instantly, the air around them froze.

Just as Carl was about to explain the particulars, he heard the thwap of the wrench striking the palm of a hand.

“I see.”

The once-excited man narrowed his eyes.

Neither confirming nor denying the suspicion, he made a single remark. Something that was, for him, a solid fact:

“This just got fun.”

* * *

The next day, a newspaper ran the story—a new Ice Pick Thompson incident—before any other information outlet could.

On top of that, the article was so graphic it seemed as if its writer had actually been on the scene. It sent a shock through the city—and a sensation.

One might have assumed it was yet another scoop from the Daily Days, but as a matter of fact, it came from a different major paper.

This paper was a prominent tabloid that had, until now, printed full-page coverage of the results of the Olympics, which was why the incident was impressed on the minds of the public even more strongly.

The article had been written by Lester, a young reporter, and it made him a household name overnight.

By rights, just like the one who’d coined the name “Ice Pick Thompson,” this journalist might have met Graham Specter—but instead, he’d encountered a twisted murderer.

And with that incident as the trigger—

—the shadows of the town began twisting in the darkness.