“Let me ask Naomi if there are any left.”
Tanizaki hurriedly got to his feet, then trotted past Ranpo and opened the door to the conference room. But as he was passing by, Ranpo quietly stared at him with strangely vacant eyes. After that, he faced forward once more before turning his gaze toward a stack of old newspapers in the corner of the room.
“Tanizaki,” Ranpo called out.
“Yes?”
Tanizaki turned around, but Ranpo didn’t immediately answer. Instead, he gently shook his head before at last saying, “Well, good luck.”
Tanizaki talked to Naomi in the kitchenette and asked her to look for any leftover meat buns. On his way back to the conference room, he ran into Kunikida.
“Kunikida, how did things turn out?” Tanizaki asked.
“Dazai is handling the meeting. I told him I had some business to take care of and left.” Kunikida looked about to make sure there was nobody around before continuing. “More importantly, Tanizaki, how are things coming along with you-know-what?”
“Everything is ready to go.”
Tanizaki nodded, then held up the schoolbag he’d received from Naomi just now when they were chatting in the kitchenette. She’d also taken that as an opportunity to try to force herself on Tanizaki, but he managed to escape. Inside the bag was a large brown envelope.
“Tanizaki—you know what to do.”
“I do.” He nodded. “Everything so far has gone just as you predicted, Kunikida.”
“I haven’t been partners with Dazai this long for nothing.” Kunikida’s face twisted in utter and genuine revulsion. “My instincts let me know when he’s scheming something. My vision was flickering so much during the meeting that I almost fainted. I won’t let him have his way, though. It’s time for him to pay for his self-indulgence.”
Tanizaki nodded, then headed back to the conference room alone so that nobody would suspect anything.
By the time Tanizaki returned, Ranpo was already gone. He’d left to search for meat buns of his own, only half-heartedly wishing everyone good luck before his departure. Not that a mere “Hey, we’ve got a meeting” was enough to grab the attention of anyone in the agency, of course. The rest of the participants exchanged dumbfounded glances, then turned their attention to the whiteboard with expressions that said, “Eh, that was a reasonable time to leave.”
“Solve an in-house issue”—the proposal Tanizaki came up with.
Settling on one of the earlier extremely generic proposals at the end of a noisy, heated meeting wasn’t a rare occurrence, be it at a detective agency or some other company. Nonetheless, that didn’t mean the meeting was over. There were countless in-house issues that needed fixing. Big things, little things—risky problems, tame problems. For the entrance exam, however, they had to choose only the most suitable task.
“The elevator’s been acting up lately.”
“Let’s contact the management company.”
“The operating room’s running out of supplies.”
“I’ll put in an order at the usual pharmacy!”
“The office staff said they want takeout for lunch…”
“What, you want the rookie to open a soba shop?”
Nobody could think of anything worthy. Kunikida returned to the conference room a few minutes after Tanizaki and joined the group in fishing for ideas. However, with all the highly qualified agents at the agency, every suitable issue was nipped in the bud early on. All that was left were tedious, pointless chores such as cleaning, repairs, and complaints about the food.
“Feels like we’re right back where we started,” Yosano muttered discontentedly. “Aren’t there any bigger problems that need solving around here?”
“Well, the president is still single…,” offered Tanizaki.
“Not that big!”
Everyone desperately brainstormed for an idea while exchanging glances, and before long, they arrived at a conclusion: “If there aren’t any, then we’ll just have to make one ourselves.”
A fake case to solve—in other words, a ruse.
Someone would create a fake problem, and the rookie, who happened to be there, would be asked to solve this problem to test his capabilities. The mood in the room made it clear that was the only option; everyone was getting sick of thinking about it. However, there was one person brave enough to object.
“Wait.” Kunikida spoke up. “A ruse is all well and good, but there’s a fundamental problem with this idea: Dazai.”
He looked at Dazai, who cheerfully pointed at himself. “Me?”
“Yes, you. With this plan, we probably wouldn’t be bothering anyone outside the company. Someone could simply cause a commotion and create the problem. This part of the plan is fine. However…”
“‘However’…?”
“I want everyone to think back to what got us here in the first place.” Kunikida stood from his chair, put both hands on the desk, and leaned forward. “The person who got us into this mess and invited the newcomer to join our agency was none other than Dazai. Even though said newcomer was a designated threat, Dazai didn’t think to capture him or take him into custody. Rocks-for-Brains here only came up with the terrifying idea of letting him join the agency of all things because the idea just randomly popped into his head.”
“Oh, stop. You’re embarrassing me.” Dazai smiled and scratched his head.
“That’s not a compliment. At any rate, I am not advising anyone to reconsider. The president’s already given it the green light. However, I know Dazai’s nature more than I ever wanted to, and it is painfully obvious to me what he’s doing.”
Kunikida paused, then looked around the room before continuing.
“‘I’m determined to see this through, and I’ll push all the hard work onto someone else.’ Surely this is what you thought to yourself. Right, Dazai?”
Dazai gleefully smirked and nodded. “Looks like the cat’s out of the bag now. I’m impressed, Kunikida.”
“Your praise means nothing to me. In any event, I have been burned far too often because of how he does things. Forcing responsibility onto others, shifting it onto others, avoiding it—he flatters people just to kick the ladder out from under them. Whenever I vow to never be tricked by him again, I find myself somehow walking down the path he laid out for me. Thanks to that, I’ve been through so much over the past two years we’ve been partners: I’ve cleaned out drains in the freezing cold, fallen into the women’s fitting room at a department store, and even been forced to drink so much that I woke up in someone else’s bedroom without any memories of the night before.”
“You two have really done some interesting things together,” said Yosano in shock.
“You’re a strong person, Kunikida!” Kenji praised Kunikida, completely missing the point.
“Therefore, I’m convinced Dazai has come up with some sort of scheme so that he’s the only one who doesn’t have to do any of the hard work. He’s shrewd—I’ll give him that. What I’m trying to say is…Dazai, you’re planning on getting someone else to do the entrance exam while you’re doing nothing! Admit it!”
“Wow, Kunikida. You really like playing the victim, huh?”
“Whose fault do you think that is?!”
Dazai nodded a few times before responding. “But I understand why you’re worried. Over the years, I have been avoiding boring, tedious work whenever I could. But it would be difficult this time to force the responsibility onto someone else under these conditions. This is a meeting, after all. It would be quite surprising if everyone’s opinion somehow suited my needs.”
“Really? I think it’s quite the opposite,” Kunikida said while crossing his arms. “For example, the meeting has pretty much settled on creating a problem that doesn’t exist. In other words, we only need one unlucky individual to handle the ruse, and then you’re free. Also, you’re the one who chose the time and place for the meeting along with who would be coming, so I can’t help but wonder if you predicted we would end
up going with such a proposal. You waited until everyone decided on it because you calculated your scheme so that someone other than you would have to do all the work. Am I wrong?”
“You’re really buttering me up today, Kunikida.” Dazai audaciously smirked. “I see now. So you were on your guard this entire time, huh? All right, Kunikida, let’s hear your proposal, then.”
“I won’t force you to do all the work, but at the very least, I want this to be fair,” Kunikida stated. “I don’t want any dishonesty. Whether the roles are easy or difficult, they have to be fairly decided upon in a way that everyone will agree with.”
“Understood. That’s a very convincing argument,” Dazai said before looking at each and every person in the room. Then, out of nowhere, he added, “What do you think, Tanizaki?”
“Wh-what? Me? Um… I…”
Tanizaki panicked after suddenly being called on. He glanced at Kunikida, who stared back at him as if he wanted to say something. Tanizaki had been a timid person ever since the day he was born, and he tried to think through his confusion. There shouldn’t be a problem if he simply agreed.
“I… I think that’s a great idea.” Tanizaki managed to string some words together. “The entrance exam has always been difficult, so I think forcing roles on one another isn’t going to make anything better.”
“Then how about we do this?” Dazai clapped his hands together before continuing. “How about we let Tanizaki decide on how we’re going to allocate the roles? You could go with ghost legs, or cards, or— Well, just choose something that’s fair and square. That’s how we’ll determine who gets the grunt work. How’s that sound, Kunikida?”
Kunikida silently shot Tanizaki a look. Tanizaki started to quietly panic once again; everything was going a lot more smoothly than he had imagined.
“Okay…”
Tanizaki pretended to think while trying to calm himself down. What should he do? He thought back to what Kunikida said when they discussed the matter. According to him, “Dazai never directly says what he wants. He always gets someone else to say it for him.” If Ranpo was the art of deduction itself in the agency, Dazai would be the epitome of manipulation. The marionette strings he used to tie down and control people’s hearts were complex and abstruse. Nobody could see where they led. But he couldn’t stall here.
“How about we draw strips of paper?” Tanizaki suggested with a forced smile. “We’ll write numbers on them and have everyone draw one. The smaller the number, the more stressful role.”
Dazai instantly agreed.
“That’s not enough.” Kunikida furrowed his brows. “Surely you know how tricky this man’s fingers can be. They’re frighteningly dexterous. He could pick a lock to a bank’s safe with a single needle, so of course making fake slips of paper and switching them out would be nothing for him.”
“Hee-hee…” Dazai placed a hand over his mouth as he giggled, bouncing in his chair. “I can’t tell you how tickled I am to have Kunikida compliment me so much today.”
“Stop laughing. It’s creepy.”
“Then why don’t we do this?”
Tanizaki turned his gaze upon the old newspaper on the corner of the conference table—the one Yosano had been reading. “Let’s use this old newspaper. It’s from two months ago, so it’d probably be hard to prepare a fake one or write over it.”
“Interesting…,” Yosano murmured while dragging the old newspaper her way. “You’ve got a point there. I guess it’d be tough for even a magician to pull a fast one with this. But what exactly are you going to do?”
Tanizaki waited for a few moments before answering.
“We’ll cut the dates off with the page number and fold them.”
He gazed at the old periodical.
“As you can see, there is only one of each number on the pages. This newspaper starts on page one and goes to page forty. Plus, it would be hard to find the same newspaper from two months ago just lying around, so if we cut out the dates with the slips of paper, then you wouldn’t be able to re-create these unless you called a business that collected and recycled old newspapers.”
“Uh-huh.”
Dazai cheerfully nodded. “That’s a really good anti-cheating system for something you just came up with on the spot. What say you, Kunikida? Seems foolproof to me.”
Kunikida glared at Dazai. “Nothing makes me more nervous than when you claim something’s foolproof. Although I suppose I could compromise.”
Tanizaki let out an inward sigh of relief. They made it past the first obstacle. The biggest hurdle, however, came next.
“All right, I’ll make the slips we’ll be using to draw,” Tanizaki said as he began folding the dates of the newspaper. With nothing better to do, the others decided to pass the time by discussing the specifics of this “staged disturbance”:
“What if we did it like in a fairy tale, where a princess gets captured by some bad guy? We could have the rookie just happen to be walking by when it happens.”
“Hold up. Who gets to be the bad guy?”
“Isn’t that why we’re drawing slips of paper?”
“I want to be the villain! Sounds like a lot of fun!”
“No, you’d break the rookie’s skull in.”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind that.”
“Wait. Stop for a moment. We’ll figure out who plays the villain through the drawing; there’s still the damsel in distress.”
“Who’s going to play the princess?”
“I mean, we could decide through the drawing as well, but princesses are usually played by women, so…”
Silence.
“Me? Sure, but then I’m gonna split the new guy’s skull open.”
“I figured…”
“Out of the frying pan and into the fire…”
“Oh, I know! Kunikida could play the princess!”
“Are you out of your mind?!”
As Tanizaki was getting things ready, he imagined the tall Kunikida in a frilly white dress while flirtatiously saying, “Oh myyy! Somebody, do help me!” A rather repulsive notion, but one that kind of suited Kunikida for some reason. Either way, that would be enough to blow the lid off the exam in an instant.
Tanizaki suddenly started to become anxious. Was this really going to work? Would this really make Dazai finally take responsibility just as Kunikida said it would? Kunikida assured him this would work as long as they stuck to the plan. And he said that most of all…this was for Dazai’s sake as well. He claimed that no one would ever be able to defeat Dazai again after this.
According to Kunikida:
“I was in charge of showing Dazai the ropes when he first joined the agency, but he’d already reached the height of his shenanigans by that time. He had already wrapped his marionette strings around countless people involved, and he even manipulated the moves our enemies made.
“The greatest detective in the agency is without a doubt Ranpo, but his intellect is used for controlling cases and crime scenes. Dazai, on the other hand, uses his intellect to manipulate people—something he uses to take a position of power over them. It would be no surprise if he led the agency one day in the not-so-distant future as the president’s right-hand man. I get the feeling this entire ordeal with the rookie was the first step to that as well. We can’t have someone as free-spirited and carefree as that in the agency. I am not going to let him keep shifting his responsibilities onto others. This entrance exam needs to be an opportunity for him to experience firsthand how difficult it is to hire and manage someone.
“That is why this entire exam needs to be done by Dazai and Dazai alone.”
This whole ruse was created for that sole reason. Tricking Dazai—this was the master plan Kunikida had come up with after being partners with him for two years.
Kunikida’s plan went like this:
First, they would place an old newspaper in the conference room before the meeting.
Then, when they were deciding everyone’s roles and things started g
etting complicated, one would casually suggest the necessity of everyone drawing slips of paper to decide roles, since not even the embodiment of scheming itself, Dazai, would be able to manipulate the results. Therefore, everyone would be randomly given their roles, which would be fair. Once that happened, without fail, someone would suggest using the old newspaper to make said slips of paper for the lottery. If, by any chance, nobody said anything, Tanizaki or Naomi would wait for the right moment and suggest it themselves.
Kunikida was going to shut Dazai down, he’d said. He continued by saying he was going to force Dazai to realize what it feels like to carry his own burdens and take some responsibility—both for his own sake and for the detective agency’s.
Around the time the slips of paper were finally ready to go, Naomi stopped by the conference room with her schoolbag in her hand.
“Say, dearest brother, I was thinking about heading back home now. Is there anything you needed before I go?”
“Oh, Naomi.” Tanizaki looked overcome with relief. “We’re about to draw slips of paper to decide roles. Do you have a bag or something I can put these in?”
“How about this?” Naomi replied before taking a large brown envelope out of her schoolbag. Everything was going as planned. “It’s a leftover envelope from a school event. You’re free to use it if you want.”
When Kunikida had mapped out the plan, he proposed including someone who didn’t participate in the meeting. Dazai would surely see through Kunikida’s scheme if it were only him. On the other hand, having everyone in the meeting involved would run the risk of information being leaked. This was Dazai, after all. He could easily weasel the information out of someone—most likely Kenji. Kunikida’s partner in crime had to be the best of the best; thus, he ended up going with the Tanizaki siblings.
Tanizaki himself had no idea why he was chosen. Perhaps he was simply included with the Naomi package deal. It was starting to feel that way. When people asked Tanizaki for help, it was usually because anyone would do, or they needed his skill, Light Snow, for something. But skills were useless against their current opponent, Dazai…which could mean that he was chosen because he was a safe, passable choice.
The Untold Origins of the Detective Agency Page 4