Baccano! - Volume 8 - Chapter 4.5

CHAPTER 4: BACK

LET’S DISCUSS, LET’S DO THAT

Madison Square Park

“You made Chané cry, didn’t you?”

A girl in a black dress and a young man with red hair, surrounded by men in black.

In story terms, this configuration would have signaled a crisis—but the redhead looked completely relaxed.

“Fellas…I’m going to punch your eyes into jelly and make you shed just as many tears as her, so keep that in mind.”

“Huh? Uh, nah, she ain’t crying.”

In response to Spike’s criticism, the red-haired young man shook his head sadly.

“Can’t you hear it? Can’t you hear Chané’s voice as she cries, overwhelmed with sadness? That voice, calling for help… The voice that only I can hear, technically!”

“Hey, c’mon, what’s with this ignoramus? Are you a dope addict or something?”

“Don’t be an idiot. I don’t lean on drugs. As long as I’ve got a heart that believes, I can send my mood soaring as high as I want, and that way, I can hear Chané’s voice, too.”

“Hey, Mr. Former Felix, did you seriously sell your name to a loon like this?! And actually, is this guy a hitman or something, too?”

The former Felix’s only response to the blind man’s shout was a heavy sigh.

Meanwhile, the redhead—Claire Stanfield, the current Felix Walken—was looking at the blind man, seeming mystified.

“Oh, I remember.”

“…?”

Claire’s voice completely betrayed the mood, and Spike frowned, listening to him.

For the past little while, an incomprehensible siren had been wailing in his heart, but…

…the moment he heard what Claire murmured next—

“You’re the sniper who was on that train, aren’t you?”

—the volume of the alarm increased explosively, toppling the leeway his group’s superior numbers had given him.

Easily. Far too easily…

“What, seriously? After I dropped you face-first and everything… I’m impressed you survived, fella.”

Somewhere in New YorkThe special offices of the Bureau of Investigation

While the men in black were being thrown into confusion in the park, there was another location where the confusion was even worse.

Although the office had escaped going up in flames, it was smoldering and sputtering, sending up black smoke. Inside the room, several figures slowly sat up, coughing.

Although Victor had gotten caught by the blast and toppled over, he’d managed to get by without blacking out.

“Dammit… Are you okay, men?”

When he looked around, although the wind of the blast had done awful things to the desktops, the desks themselves hardly seemed to have moved at all.

“Uh… Physically, I’m fine. Mm-hmm.”

“What was that…?”

When he saw his two unscathed subordinates poke their heads out from under the desks, Victor sighed with relief in spite of himself.

“So you’re okay. That’s great.”

“Mm…”

“……”

“? What’s the matter?”

His two underlings were gazing at him with mystified expressions, and they responded to his question with absolutely no hesitation.

“Well, it’s just, that was the first time you’d acted concerned for us like a normal person, so…”

“Yes… I’ve been your subordinate for a long time, sir, but I’m so touched… Uh, may I cry?”

“…Y-you jackasses…”

Victor’s face went bright red and he ground his teeth. He remembered their current situation almost immediately, however, and walked over to the center of the blast.

“Hunh… To think he’d try to keep us pinned down with a bomb. Did he think he could do something about us with a thing like that? So did the guy already run off?”

There wasn’t anything left where the man had been standing just a moment ago. He’d probably fled the scene in the nick of time.

Just as Victor was about to come to that conclusion, as if to dash cold water on him, Bill droned, “Uh… No, I think he’s managed to pin us down extremely well.”

“What? What do you mean?”

When Victor turned around, Bill was by the window, gazing at the scene outside.

This room was on the first floor, and the situation on the street was in full view.

Following his subordinate’s gaze, Victor peered out the window.

The man from earlier, who seemed to have been sent flying by the blast, was on the ground outside the window, covered in blood.

His limbs were twisted oddly, his neck was bent at an abnormal angle, and he wasn’t moving. From the amount of blood splattered over the pavement, hoping that he was still alive was probably a waste of time.

Even worse—he was surrounded by several dozen rubberneckers who’d been drawn to the noise of the explosion… And now that Victor had poked his head out the window, they were staring at his face from a distance.

From a good ways away, they heard the hoofbeats of the horses the patrol unit rode— And one of the blood vessels in Victor’s brain burst, but since he was immortal, it regenerated immediately and no harm was done.

“Now you’ve done it, Huey Laforet!”

He looked down at the mute lump of meat, repeatedly grinding his teeth in frustration.

“I knew it… I should’ve eaten him the moment I collared him…!”

Millionaires’ RowThe Genoard mansion

“WAAAaaaAAAAaaaaah, Graham is… Graham’s going to…!”

“No, none of that, stop crying. I’m sure Graham’s going to be just fine.”

As he’d listened to the news that streamed from the radio, Jacuzzi had grown frantic again.

The people who’d been trying to comfort him had turned on the radio in an attempt to find a fun topic of some sort, and that’s when they’d heard the news about Chicago. Even the people who weren’t Jacuzzi had been unsettled by it. However, Nice smiled brightly and kept soothing the young tattooed boy all by herself.

“B-but, but, Nice! Three hundred, they said! Three hundred! No matter how you think about it, it’s weird for there to be that many bombs! I bet Chicago’s going to disappear any minute!”

“It’s fine, Jacuzzi. Three hundred is nothing impressive.”

“Wh-why?”

Nice’s words were filled with confidence, and Jacuzzi looked blank as he asked his question.

At that, the girl with the eye patch and glasses smiled with an expression that seemed vaguely rapturous, and…

“Well, I’ve got about five hundred just in my room…”

“Aaaaaah, don’t say it, don’t say any more! It’s scary, so don’t say iiiit!”

Jacuzzi covered his ears, shaking his head vigorously.

The scene that was playing out in the mansion was routine, but just then, the doorbell rang, and an ambience that wasn’t at all routine filled the room.

Di-dingdi-di-ding

At the sudden sound of the bell, the delinquents looked at one another.

This was a second residence, and it almost never got packages. On top of that, most of the time, friends of Jacuzzi’s group didn’t bother to ring.

“Who is it?”

“Whoever it is, guests who show up when Jacuzzi’s crying never mean anything good.”

“Yeah, when Jacuzzi cries, his voice summons trouble.”

“Dammit, Jacuzzi, not again!”

“Would you knock it off already?!”

“Don’t you see that your sadness is making more people sad?!”

“Live like your tears are a divine miracle, wouldja?!”

“Control yourself!”

“Hya— Happy thoughts!”

His friends were saying whatever they wanted, and Jacuzzi involuntarily stopped crying to protest.

“Huh?! Why are you blaming me?!”

Drying his eyes and grumbling to himself, the leader of the delinquents crossed to the front door.

“Good grief… Calling them ‘trouble’ is rude to our guests!”

Then, with a smile in his red, swollen eyes, he flung the door open, and—

“Hey. It’s been a while.”

His shaved, tattooed head and glasses made the man who stood there far too distinctive. He raised his right hand to Jacuzzi, as if he’d missed him.

“…Tim!”

“Oh, that’s great! You’re okay! I’m so glad!”

A man and a woman had been standing outside the front door.

One was Tim, the man with the shaved head and glasses.

The woman, Adele, looked timid and carried a long bundle on her back.

They were both acquaintances of Jacuzzi’s, and it was thanks to an invitation from them that he’d gotten pulled into the Mist Wall incident a year ago. However, as if he’d forgotten this inconvenient piece of information, Jacuzzi cried out in simple, genuine delight over the fact that his friends were all right.

“And your wounds healed up, Adele! That’s wonderful…”

When Jacuzzi suddenly smiled at her, the girl who’d been hiding in Tim’s shadow gave a bewildered response.

“U-um… I… Uh…”

“? What’s the matter? D-did I say something weird?”

Seeing that Adele looked openly flustered, Jacuzzi glanced at Tim anxiously. Tim sighed, gazing back at Jacuzzi with an expression that held a mixture of disgust and admiration.

“You’re a real piece of work. I’m seriously impressed that you can worry about somebody who came this close to killing you.”

“Huh? …Oh!”

Maybe he’d finally remembered what had happened a year ago: As he looked at Adele, Jacuzzi went a little pale, but even so, he kept talking, and he didn’t let his smile falter.

“B-but, you know, everything was really confusing back then, so there wasn’t any avoiding what happened! Besides…it’s not as if we’ve never killed anybody…”

As he said that last bit, his voice faded until it was barely audible, and he fell silent for a moment. However, he recovered promptly and asked his sudden guests what had brought them there.

“U-um, what did you need today?”

In response, Tim simply stated the answer he’d had waiting, without adding any particular emotion to it.

“You know Graham Specter, right?”

“Huh…?”

Not only did he know him—Jacuzzi had been crying out of worry for his safety up until a moment ago.

Graham Specter.

Without giving him time to feel uneasy about why that name had come up now, Tim calmly began to speak about the organization they belonged to.

“You know about our group, right?”

“Um, wasn’t it Chané’s father’s…?”

Nodding as if to say that would make the conversation go faster, Tim went on, looking a bit troubled.

“That’s right. Huey Laforet. There are people acting on the boss’s orders in Chicago, and…apparently, your pal Graham is causing them some grief.”

“Graham is?!”

At that abrupt remark, Jacuzzi gave an involuntary shriek, and the delinquents who’d been watching from the hallway looked at one another.

“N-no! Trouble? Why?! What are they planning to do to Graham?!”

“No, no, other way around. The fellas in Chicago are having trouble because they can’t do a thing about Graham. Frankly, it sounds like they’re completely stuck.”

“Oh.”

“So, uh. The Lamia people got an idea. They want to take Graham’s friends hostage and get him to listen that way.”

He had a really bad feeling about this.

As sweat broke out on his back for some mysterious reason, Jacuzzi fearfully asked the young man in front of him a question.

“Um… Before I ask this, let me say very, very, very firmly that I think it would be better if you didn’t take a hostage, because that’s awful… Uh… Who would it be?”

“We hear you guys were pretty tight with Graham.”

“AaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAaaah! I knew iiiit!”

Jacuzzi screamed and backed away, and in response, tension ran through the delinquents.

However, Tim held up his hands to show he meant no harm. He murmured, smiling wryly, trying to set them at ease.

“Settle down. Don’t worry. At the very least, I’m not planning on pulling you people into this.”

“Huh?! D-do you mean that?”

Jacuzzi, who’d obediently relaxed, smiled as if he was relieved from the bottom of his heart—but as if to erase that smile, Tim said something that promptly fanned his nervousness again.

“That said, I’m not running this particular show. I can’t say for sure that Lamia doesn’t have its eyes on you.”

“No!”

“Well, it looks like you’ve got lots of tough friends… And besides, Leeza was saying something about having found somebody who’d be easier to take hostage, so I think you can probably relax.”

After making them as uneasy as possible, Tim turned on his heel, as if to say his job was done.

“There’s no telling what might happen, though. Be careful not to get dragged into this. The twins are always right there. That may not necessarily be the case, but it’s better to act as if it’s always true.”

On that odd note, Tim left the Genoard mansion behind him.

“If there really is a twin there… The guy may not actually be a traitor, but you’ll definitely have an information leak on your hands. That’s what the twins—Sham and Hilton—are like.”

“Um…Jacuzzi…I… Earlier… I’m very…sorry about that…”

As Jacuzzi watched Tim go, looking stunned, Adele, who’d stayed behind, bowed her head again.

“Huh?! Oh, uh, it’s okay! It really doesn’t bother me anymore.”

As he spoke, Jacuzzi waved his hands and shook his head energetically. Adele gave a little smile, then left the Genoard mansion, following Tim.

As she went, as if in apology for that earlier time, she murmured something strange to herself.

“The twins are…peculiar beings. One name controls a thousand faces. The reverse is…also true.

“It isn’t about…whether the twins are…strong or weak… Even I… Even that monster Felix… Even if we killed them, we probably couldn’t actually kill them.”