The office asked if he was a street peddler, and Richard responded by opening up his suitcase. It was packed to the brim with countless little boxes. He pulled one out and removed the rubber band holding it closed. Inside were a number of little vinyl bags.
Both officers gasped and leaned forward, thinking it might be illicit narcotics. I took the bait, too, but the bags didn’t contain nefarious white powder. Inside were blue stones, each about the size of a watch crown and a shade of blue that looked like the deep ocean in crystal form. There must have been about thirty in one bag. They looked almost like beads. Stones of different shades were in other bags. And there were dozens of them.
“Oh. What are those, emeralds?”
“Sapphires. I typically sell these through appointment at clients’ homes. Most of these appointments are made for after a client gets home from work, so I am often out quite late.”
“You walk around town with this stuff? That seems a little careless.”
“There were some rather…unique circumstances today.”
Richard, the jeweler, began to tell us a story that made it sound like this might very well have been the worst day of his life.
Once he’d finished making a house call to one of his clients, Richard took a taxi, like he usually did. But this time, he happened to get a new driver—one who didn’t know the route to the Shimbashi Station exit near the hotel. Despite this, the driver was full of baseless confidence and ultimately got them progressively more lost. The meter kept running up, with the driver showing no signs of stopping. Finally running out of patience, Richard had the driver let him off outside Yoyogi Park. This was when he encountered the ill-mannered drunks, had beer poured all over him, and broke his luggage.
One of the officers started to laugh in the middle of the story. I glared at him, and the older one shrugged.
“You really oughta be grateful to this young man here. Things could have ended much worse for you if he hadn’t been there. I’m sorry, young man, but could you give us your name? We need your eyewitness testimony, too.”
I wrote my name on the notepad on the desk with a ballpoint pen. The officer looked at my first name—written with the same characters as “justice”—and guessed “Masayoshi” for the reading, but I shook my head and wrote the pronunciation down, too: Seigi Nakata.
“Wow! You really did your name justice, huh? I’m impressed!” The older officer, named Suzuki, chuckled heartily. I just smiled awkwardly.
It was 12:45 a.m. by the time they finally let us go. I told him I’d wait with him until the taxi got to the police box, and he gave me this look, like he was utterly baffled by me.
“Are you sure you’re not a knight?”
“A night?”
“A gentleman,” Richard pronounced expertly in native-sounding English. “You accompanied me until I was finished with the police even though they said you could leave earlier.”
“Well, it would’ve been annoying if I’d left and they realized they still needed me for something, right?”
The taxi was taking its sweet time, so Richard went into the convenience store next to the coin-operated lockers in front of the station. He bought two bottles of water and returned to where we’d been waiting. The moment he handed one of them to me, the taxi finally arrived.
I let out a loud “um” without really thinking, and he paused.
“I, um, I know you’ve been through a lot today, but please don’t let this experience make you hate Japan. Not everyone’s like those idiots.”
“I’m quite aware. Not to mention, making sweeping generalizations about people is a rather foolish endeavor. You shouldn’t feel responsible for their behavior.”
Foolish. I hadn’t heard that word in a long time.
The blond man with a much greater command of my own native language than I placed his suitcase in the back seat of the taxi instead of the trunk. This rather unusual meeting was coming to an end. Deciding this might be my only chance to bring up what was on my mind, I took it.
“Excuse me, just one last thing! Mr. Richard, you appraise jewelry, right? Like rings and stuff…”
Richard looked a bit surprised at first. His eyes, blue like the sapphires he’d pulled out at the police box, gazed at me. The taxi driver grumpily announced that he was closing the door from the driver’s seat, but Richard stuck a leg out, setting his gleaming leather shoe on the asphalt. He took a business card from his breast pocket and gave it to me with one hand.
“Jewelry Étranger” it said. I had to wonder what “étranger” meant. It had an e-mail address and phone number on it as well.
“Call me any time. I’m fairly easy to find near Nihonbashi.”
“But—”
“Until we meet again, my knight in shining armor,” Richard said with a smile. I was speechless, probably because it was absolutely impossible to argue with him. And it wasn’t just his face but all of his mannerisms, too.
The taxi vanished into the night, leaving nothing but a streak of orange from its taillights. I got on what was nearly the last train on the Yamanote line and returned to my apartment in Takadanobaba, where I finally checked my phone to see I had a text. It was from Hiromi, my mother.
“How are you? I’ve been well. I’m heading out to work!”
She seemed to be in good spirits. I was living on my own, so I was diligent about answering her texts. Sitting in my underwear and a tank top, I typed out, “I helped a stranger out tonight. He was shockingly beautiful. I wonder if he was a model.”