Since my worries (alright, I’ll just come out and say it: my hopes. My empty hopes) turned out to be unfounded, I figured I might as well finish carrying out my excuse of an errand, so I ceremoniously handed the envelope containing the four banknotes to Fudatsuki.
“Thank you very much. What a darling envelope.”
I just got complimented for my girliness.
How clever of him.
But you won’t get much by complimenting a girl dressed as a boy on her girliness, mister.
“This will keep me out of the hangman’s noose, thank goodness,” he said.
I have no idea how genuinely he meant it.
He was completely different from our leader, who was always genuine─not that I’m saying one is better than the other.
In any case, Fudatsuki had revealed how he’d been able to see the invisible kuroko, and I’d succeeded in my original goal of returning the rest of his dropped cash, so I’d taken care of all the unfinished business from our previous adventure─I think it was safe to say that the case of The Swindler, the Vanishing Man, and the Pretty Boys, at least, was closed.
But I had to keep in mind that plenty of other questions still lingered.
“…So are you going around retrieving the money from every single person you handed it out to? You, the maestro, personally?”
“Not necessarily. Our school is blessed with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to human resources─and we’re all pulling together to conceal the crime,” Fudatsuki replied. “After-sales service, you might say.”
By human resources, he probably meant the bunny girls and various other employees who’d been working at the casino─he played it off as a joke, but I think he was genuinely proud of the students at his school.
Although I can’t say I approve of concealing crimes.
Is that really the kind of thing you pull together for?
But pointing that out would just be pissing in the wind─the Pretty Boy Detective Club wasn’t exactly a law-abiding organization itself.
“However, in your case, I felt I ought to retrieve the bills myself.”
“But…why?”
“Why do you think?”
I didn’t like having my question answered with a question (I don’t like most things), but strangely enough, I didn’t feel irritated.
So I answered his question. Defiantly.
“As a pretext. Just like I wanted to see you so I could find out if my hunch was right─”
My hunch about his vision.
My hope that maybe he saw the world as I did.
“─you had some other reason of your own for arranging a secret meeting with me like this. Your real agenda, so to speak.”
Fudatsuki narrowed his eyes.
“You’re wrong.”
Huh?
Here I’d answered like this was some kind of elegant back-and-forth between two people with ulterior motives, but…I was wrong?
He really just wanted the rest of his banknotes back?
“Um… You genuinely didn’t have any other reason for seeing me?”
“I did not.”
“None at all?”
“None at all.”
“Not even one?”
“Not even one.”
Fudatsuki had a grin on his face the whole time.
Seriously??
But, then, why hadn’t he left the task up to one of his worthy subordinates? Like that bunny girl who thought I was a guy… Though if she’d been the one inviting me, I don’t think I would have shown up no matter how slyly she’d asked.
“I came out personally to meet you, and only you, purely because I wanted to see you, Ms. Dojima. There was no other reason.”
So in that sense, you could say the banknotes actually were a pretext, he added smoothly.
So smoothly, in fact, that it almost slipped right by me.
What did he just say? He wanted to see me?
“If you wanted to see me, couldn’t you just have ambushed me like before? You hardly needed to set up this little rendezvous.”
“Oh, but I wanted to.”
“…?”
I didn’t get it.
This playboy was a totally different type from the Pretty Boy Detectives, but in this regard, he was a lot like them─he might’ve even won by a nose in the elusiveness department.
I suppose he couldn’t bear to see me so confused, because he kindly put it in simpler terms for me: “You see, for an investor like me, meeting with people like this is all part of the job.”
Okay, that did make sense.
Even if he didn’t have a specific goal or plan in mind, meeting with people regularly kept him in their minds, and planted the seeds for future dealings.
“In other words, you value my vision, is that right? That’s why you came out to meet with me?”
“You can take it that way if you like. An overseer has simply come to meet an over-seer─for now, anyway.”
Very suggestive.
Maybe it should come as no surprise for a guy who’d been doing the kind of experiments he had, but Fudatsuki seemed to have a lot of vision jokes up his sleeve.
“So you see, Ms. Dojima, I’ve already fully achieved my goal─and I hope you’ll give me the pleasure of meeting with me again from time to time.”
“Uh… I’m not sure about that…” I managed, caught wildly off guard.
I’d returned the banknotes, however belatedly, and I’d unfortunately discovered that Fudatsuki’s eyesight was perfectly normal, so as far as I was concerned there wasn’t any reason for us to see each other again.
In which case you’d think I would have rejected him a bit more forcefully, but instead I added a vague “Maybe if I feel like it.”
I thought my insincere attitude might piss him off, but instead he nodded and said, “That’s fine. Frankly speaking, you probably shouldn’t even have come here today.”
“…”
What the hell? Was he trying to hook me again by pretending he didn’t care? Did he really think he could use the same ploy with me over and over now that he knew I’d come if he said I didn’t have to?
“What, it didn’t occur to you? You didn’t think the members of the Pretty Boy Detective Club might feel betrayed that you gave them the slip and went to meet with the top dog of their rival school?”
He kept his voice even, but his sincere tone made it sound a heck of a lot like a lecture.
“Though I suppose it might be easier for you to talk to an enemy you have no need to befriend than to friends you need to be careful around. But we’re not the only ones after you… After your vision, that is.”
He was right about that.
I couldn’t deny the first thing he’d said, and as for the second, he was spot on─I had no idea when the Twenties might pop into my life again.
Which was why I should never give my escorts the slip like I had that day, no matter how urgent the reason.
However.
Willing as I am to do that kind of self-reflection when it’s called for, there was one misunderstanding on Fudatsuki’s part that I had to correct.
“I don’t think I have to be careful around those guys. I mean, that’s the last thing they would want from me. When I want to go somewhere, I go, and when I want to run away, I run away. I say what I want, and I see who I want─and I tell them what I’ve seen. I can be myself with them.”
Friends I don’t have to be careful around.
And more than that, friends who aren’t careful around me.
That’s what I’d always dreamed of─and the Pretty Boy Detective Club was pretty damn close to that ideal.
“Pardon me,” Fudatsuki said, standing up from the bench.
I thought this time I must have really pissed him off with my emotional rebuttal, but it seemed he’d only stood up because he saw the headlights of the approaching bus─I guess his only motivation had been to see me after all, and now he was going to get on the bus and that would be that.
For the time being.
His meeting with me was no more than one of the many seeds he planted here and there on a daily basis─just one of the countless little intrigues he wove around himself.
When I thought about it like that, I felt overwhelmed by the scale of his enterprises and embarrassed even to be standing next to him─perhaps, I thought to myself, that was another reason I shouldn’t have come to meet him today.
“If you want friends you don’t have to be careful around,” Fudatsuki cut into my thoughts, looking down at me where I sat on the bench, “then we could also be your friends, Ms. Dojima.”
“Um…”
“Come visit our school anytime… If you feel like it. My worthy companions and I─The Heartbreaker Street Irregulars─are ready to welcome you at any time. I’m confident that I can put you to far more appealing use than the Pretty Boy Detective Club.”
With those parting words─Fudatsuki stepped onto the waiting bus.