CHAPTER 1
THE INFORMATION BROKER
Early August, somewhere in Tokyo
"Somehow it feels like a long time since I've last been in this car."
In the back seat of an expensive-looking car Orihara Izaya muttered while sitting next to the window on the right and enjoying the view of the city outside.
The young man was wearing a black T-shirt and a likewise black summer coat. Without looking nervous in the slightest, he turned to the other man in the car.
"It's been so long that the sight of Shiki-san's face makes me feel nostalgic."
"Is that so? To me it feels like yesterday."
The male whose eyes had characteristic long slits at the outer corners replied in an even tone. He looked like he was in his thirties and gave the impression that he was hard to deal with.
It was impossible to tell how Shiki felt about Izaya from his expression as he said in a flat voice:
"I heard that someone tried to scoop your entrails out. Are you alright now?"
"Ah, right…I think that made it into the news or something. Thank God they didn't show any pictures of me."
"Who did that to you?"
"I'm looking for that person as well. Anyway, I would readily confess that there are a lot of people who think ill of me when I only meant to be kind. …But still, it's the first time you requested my presence in a long while. Surely it's not just to ask me that?"
"I'm satisfying my curiosity, but I'm also doing this for my job. If someone tries to assassinate an information broker under our patronage, it is only natural to suspect that they are trying to harm us, isn't it?"
Shiki tilted his head further sideways and asked one more question.
"Speaking of which, Orihara-san, would you happen to know anything about someone named 'Nakura'?"
Though Izaya was obviously younger than he was, Shiki still asked the question in a deferential tone*. There was, however, something sharp and cold in his words that made the air inside the car feel sharper on the skin.
* Shiki uses honorific speech with everyone except his own subordinates. Izaya, when speaking to Shiki, changes his first-person pronoun from the casual "ore" to the more formal "watashi".
Izaya, on the other hand, remained his usual self as he replied:
"Nakura-san? Is that a surname or a given name? There was someone whose given name sounded like that in my middle school, I think…we went to the same university, too. But…"
"Well, that Nakura told our Head's granddaughter to do some weird things…"
"Your Miss? Isn't she still in elementary school? Good God, even if Ikebukuro is one of the safer areas around this place you should never have let bad guys have a chance to approach her. Or was that Nakura a woman?"
Izaya muttered without sounding unsettled in the slightest. Shiki fell silent for a few seconds -
And switched to the "main topic" as if nothing had happened.
"…Anyway. I think this is enough chit-chat for the day. There is something I want you to look into. We can't risk exposing ourselves by making any moves, and hiring ordinary detectives seems not quite enough for so dangerous a situation."
"I am well aware that you wouldn't have contacted me if it were anything less. If worst comes to worst, sacrificing me will always be an easy and painless option for Awakusu-kai."
Ignoring the sarcasm in Izaya's remarks, Shiki mentioned a particular word.
"…'Amphisbaena'. Do you know anything about that name?"
Izaya responded almost immediately to the esoteric word that popped out of nowhere.
"Amphisbaena…it's a legendary lizard believed to make its home in Libya. It's poisonous and it has two heads, one at the front and one rear. Over the centuries its image has 'evolved' in poetry, growing a bat's wings among other things. Gradually it came to be featured on many coats of arms of aristocratic families in the West."
"…Is that so? I've never heard these before. All I knew was that it was some sort of dragon-like creature in Western mythology."
"I think very few people are aware of it. It's one of the lesser-known legendary creatures in Japan. …Speaking of which, does that word have anything to do with what you're going to ask me to look into, Shiki-san?"
Izaya steered the conversation forward with his speculation. Shiki nodded readily and continued to speak.
"There is this organization called Amphisbaena…or should I say this nightclub? Anyway, a group with that name is running an underground casino."
"Oops, I see. I don't recall that name being among the casinos controlled by the Awakusu family."
Izaya said this in a tone that sounded as if he knew every business in the city that had ties with Awakusu-kai. Shiki neither admitted or denied it. In fact, he didn't even look displeased as he continued in an even voice:
"…You know how difficult it is to open that kind of business directly nowadays, Orihara-san. We can make it look legal on the surface, but we still won't get the permit if the name Awakusu comes up even fleetingly in their background investigations. Gambling clubs in apartment buildings are different, though…well, enough about that."
Shiki took a breath and looked into Izaya's eyes in the rear-view mirror before speaking again.
"If it's in our territory but not run by us, our policy is to extract as much protection money as we can by threatening to report them to the police as an illegal casino. However, we're having difficulty locating this particular casino."
"What do you mean?"
"…'Members-only' underground casinos have been said to exist for a long time. But most people who talked about them didn't believe that they actually existed. We didn't, either, until we saw a decline in the number of customers at the casinos we collected protection money from…and even casinos that had direct ties to us."
According to Shiki, Awakusu-kai came to believe in the existence of "Amphisbaena" because a customer who frequented their casinos was careless enough to let it slip.
They immediately got hold of the customer and forced him into taking them to the underground casino - but what they found there was only party space for rent. A party hosted by a dating agency was already going on there by the time they tried to look further into the matter.
They tried to extract more information from that customer, but he was about as clueless as they were. He only went to the party place because he received a text message from the mailing list telling him "where to go for the party". In the text message there was not a single word mentioning gambling.
Usually party space owners would never rent their space to a gambling group - but it seemed that no chips-to-money or money-to-chips conversion ever went on in that space.
"Heh…so they changed the chips into money somewhere else? That sounds like the way you redeem prizes in a game arcade."
Izaya smiled slightly after listening to Shiki's explanation.
Shiki returned that smile with a face devoid of expressions as he continued:
"They do not change the chips into money in the open. It seems like they take care of that with something that resembles an IC card system. To the owner of the party spaces they rent it will look like they're just having a board game night with no money involved."
"That's true."
"If we were the police, we could have tracked the text message back to its sender and put an end to this…but things got complicated when we tried to track it back since it seemed to have involved a proxy server in another country. However, it's not really worth negotiating with an overseas proxy service provider for, either…"
Shiki shrugged slightly, but his words remained relentlessly sharp.
Even though Shiki's tone kept reminding Izaya that he was not a man to be trifled with, Izaya kept his own pace as he said:
"But from what you told me, I feel like the way they run this business is a little too bold…or should I say reckless? This whole chipless electronic casino thing, I mean. If a gambler loses, he can find any excuse to not pay. He can blame it on system error, or anything."
"Exactly. Well, the owners should have expected the same thing and taken the due precautions, I suppose. …We have other issues with the 'Amphisbaena' people as well. The things they do are a real pain to us. They're not only pushing their luck by walking on this tight rope - they've actually already stepped off it and are falling to the ground, but they haven't realized it yet."
"So in a nutshell, you want them beaten flat into the ground. Am I right?"
Izaya looked his happiest since the beginning of this conversation when he said this. Shiki, however, simply ignored him.
"Curiously, the customer who originally gave us the information stopped contacting us afterwards. Since they're already trying to hide themselves from us as if they already knew that we would be looking for them, it's necessary that we change our strategy a little bit."
"Therefore you hired me, a free third-party whom you can sacrifice without blinking an eye."
"It's not just about our territory - otherwise we wouldn't have gotten so wound up over this. Things may turn out ugly if people in the territories of other Medei Group branches besides Awakusu-kai catch wind of such rumors. If nothing else, we will need to know if this group has yakuza backing or not. If we can't do that, branches within Medei Group are simply going to keep suspecting each other."
Exhaling silently, he said to Izaya:
"-Which means we're asking you to find out what those people really are."