Tamuramaro bowed in response to her accusatory look, and Sora was finally starting to get the picture. Tamuramaro had likely sniffed out the news that Sora had some work with the Kouichi Koudera Tax Accountant Office and reached out to Odajima in anticipation. He really was keeping a close eye on Sora.
“Just in case, I assure you that Ms. Kawaguchi didn’t leak anything. I tricked her by claiming to be with Oushuu and wheedled her into telling me about the client,” Tamuramaro explained to both Natsuki and Odajima, so as not to tarnish Miku’s reputation.
“I’ll have you know, Mr. Tamura, it doesn’t matter how good-looking you are, Miku’s definitely not into guys like you. She doesn’t fall for the manly type.”
“Ms. Natsuki…I don’t think that line of attack works on him,” Sora intervened.
“Actually, I’m surprisingly hurt. I’m very proud of my manly looks, you know.” Tamuramaro sighed, then drank his tea. It was impossible to tell whether he was joking or dead serious on that one.
“So, you see,” Odajima went on, “this dashing lawyer with a majestic name came to our company. And your Heron Girl is apparently a law practitioner, too. My reading is that they know each other very well.” He seemed to have guessed how things stood between them from their initial reactions, but instead of being angry, he looked amused.
“My identity is changing by the minute,” Sora remarked. “I’ll hand him my business card, Ms. Natsuki.”
“As you like.”
Now that her plan to sneak Sora in as an assistant had been immediately foiled, Natsuki threw caution to the wind.
Sora took out his business card and stood up. “Please excuse my lack of courtesy. My name is Sora Oushuu.” He walked over to Odajima and held out the card.
“Thank you very much. Oushuu Law Firm—a certified fraud examiner, I see. It’s the first time I’ve heard of such a profession, but I have a vague idea what it’s about. Fraud is quite a weighty word.”
Odajima gestured to the sofa, inviting Sora to sit down again in a well-practiced manner. For the first time, he left his fountain pen untouched on the table.
“So here I have our consulting lawyer, who thinks I’m in some trouble. Ah, well, I guess that settles it, Mr. Tamura. I do seem to be in trouble, so I’ll hire you. And here we have our tax accountant, who brought along a former prosecutor and a current law practitioner.”
Odajima surveyed the three guests gathered there with a helpless smile.
“I suppose it won’t be long now,” he said simply, still amused.
“Don’t give up, Mr. Odajima!” Natsuki cheered him on recklessly. She sounded slightly desperate, but Odajima himself didn’t seem to care whether he stayed or went.
“But, Natsuki, you brought young Sora here because you thought he was necessary, didn’t you?”
Though Sora was startled by Odajima’s almost fatherly use of his first name, he stayed silent to observe how things unfolded. He still had a long way to go in terms of learning about human nature, and Odajima’s character was a mystery.
“I’ll be totally honest and tell you what I’m concerned about.” Natsuki braced herself, straightening her back to disclose everything. Perhaps she’d known from the beginning that little tricks weren’t going to work on Odajima.
“Go right ahead,” said Odajima, toying with his fountain pen again without writing anything down.
“For the last two years, the income and expenditure of your subsidiary company has been unstable. There are too many instances of unspecified expenditures in the books.”
“We’re an upper-bracket tax payer. We might make it onto around the end of the list.” Odajima smiled wryly, guessing what Natsuki wanted to point out. “We’ve come a long way. You said we should sell off this land to a home improvement store, but we started out here as a small construction company, just a subcontractor. We didn’t even know about the economic miracle while it was happening—we just grabbed all the deals we could and climbed up from the bottom rung. We used to do so much more bid rigging back in those days.”
“You have an outstanding company, Mr. Odajima,” Natsuki assured him quietly. “The work you take on is important, and you do it thoroughly, with care and attention.”
“Now we do.” He sighed, smiling. “I wouldn’t have minded retiring, but then that disaster happened. Our longtime subcontractor was half-destroyed. Couldn’t operate, at least. So I bought them and turned them into our subsidiary, and then there was all that post-disaster special demand. No better time to build than after a crash, as they say.”
The last phrase seemed to sit awkwardly in his mouth. To Sora, it sounded like Odajima hadn’t quite accepted those words, or he could have also been poking fun at himself—Sora couldn’t tell which.
“Have you been to the regions that were hit by the disaster?” asked Odajima, to no one in particular.
Both Natsuki and Tamuramaro replied in the affirmative.
“…I’m sorry. I’ve only seen it in video footage.” Sora had lived in many towns, but he’d never thought about living in the northeast.
Twelve hundred years ago, he had promised himself to return to his homeland once he found a way to turn Fuuka back into a human. But his people quickly assimilated into the culture of the Imperial Court, and there was no longer a home to go back to. Those who were awaiting his return all passed into the Pure Land before he knew it.
“Videos capture the worst and the best. The real lives of the people sit somewhere in the middle, you could say. Not that I go there often myself—only once in a while.” Odajima waved his hand, reassuring Sora that it was fine not to have seen it firsthand. “The point is, it takes some years to clear it up, first of all. You have to level the ground, reinforce it, and so on. The plans for the actual building can keep changing, too.”
“Why is that?” asked Sora. He’d learned a bit of the present reality of his long-lost motherland.