Ch.28Request Log #005 – Proci’s Concerns (3)

When you understand the problem, a solution often emerges. I turn my gaze away from the gaudy, colorful nighttime streets that only make me feel nauseous.

First issue: I have absolutely no connections with the Irish mafia. I’m not some underworld bigshot. Just a common detective with a veteran background.

The one fortunate thing is that even a quick scan of these streets reveals where their headquarters must be. An unpleasant magical stench wafts from the dance halls and casinos.

I have two options. One, walk straight in and prove I’m someone worth talking to. Two, execute option one exceptionally well. What an impressively wide range of choices.

If the branch manager’s sibling was the informant, asking the low-level grunts wouldn’t yield anything useful. The only way to meet the higher-ups who might have information was to do exactly this tonight.

I grab my skinning knife and silenced pistol—the same ones I used to intimidate that third-rate journalist—and head toward the dance hall. It’s a place blazing with light like midday, playing loud and frivolous music.

Of course, they’re not just dancing. In the corners, people exchange drugs, and it’s easy to spot men and women courting vampires in search of a night’s passion.

That’s not my goal today. My targets are the Irish mafia members having drinks in the elevated section beyond the dance floor. I pay the entrance fee and enter. No body search.

I push through the crowd of enthusiastically dancing people. Brushing off the cool touch of a vampire’s hand on my shoulder, I head toward the stairs leading to the VIP section. Two figures guard the stairs.

I face their fish-like faces emanating the distinctive unpleasantness of fairy hybrids. With wide-set eyes and webbed hands, they’re clearly mermaid hybrids.

“Hey, this area is VIP only. No Fenid, no entry. Why don’t you go back and dance? You don’t want trouble.”

The Irish mafia called themselves Fianna. Their members were called Fenid. I don’t know the etymology. I’ve never been interested in cultural lessons.

Since I came to talk, I shouldn’t give them any excuse. Conveniently, I had Giuseppina’s note in my pocket, so I deliberately reach into my pocket right in front of them.

This was essentially a threat to people who didn’t know what I had in my pocket, and thugs wouldn’t stand by watching someone pull this kind of stunt in their territory.

A fist comes flying immediately. Thanks for that. They threw the first punch. The mermaid hybrid closest to me swings first. I catch it with my right hand and pull him forward.

His stance collapses. I immediately strike the back of his jaw with the side of my left fist. Having taken a direct hit to a vital point, he crumples forward. He seemed to be unconscious.

Stunned by how quickly it happened, the other merman tries to rush up, but I grab his collar and pull him down. After throwing him to the floor, I continue up the stairs.

Gods live forever. They stay eternally young. They don’t change easily. The Irish gods were still fascinated by heroic tales of warriors smashing guards and kicking down castle gates. I just needed to show them that image.

At the top, a stocky human glares down at me, clearly displeased by the unfamiliar face ascending the stairs. A mean-looking man with a lazy eye.

“This is why you don’t put green recruits with no blood behind their ears to guard the stairs—they can’t filter people properly. Hey, does this guy look like a Fenid to you? What are those kids—”

Fortunately, he looked down the stairs too late. As he glances at the two collapsed figures below, I quickly dash up three or four steps and grab the dwarf’s wrist and collar.

Suppressing his struggles with brute force, I head toward the drinking party at the top of the stairs. Tables are laden with absinthe—beautiful green and luminous but toxic—surrounded by hybrids who looked like mixtures of human forms with something else, something aberrant. Hybrids.

The atmosphere freezes momentarily as an outsider ascends with one of their members in his grip. I have only seconds to speak. I need to grab their attention.

“I came for an apology. Who’s in charge here? If you don’t want to be known as a place that throws punches at guests, you should manage your kids better.”

Only after finishing my statement do I throw the dwarf I’ve been holding. A short woman who had been sitting on a booster chair at one of the inner tables gets down and approaches me.

Human? No, fairy. At the ends of her bare legs were not feet but goat hooves. Her face and white dress were beautiful, but there was something unsettling about her.

She didn’t seem to have a gun. But if I drew mine here, I’d be riddled with bullets by the other members glaring at me, so I just stood watching her.

The fairy approaches closely and lifts her face, sniffing. As if smelling something, she grins and stares up at me.

“Did those children’s fists actually threaten you? For some reason, you seem to have twice the strength, vitality, and vigor of normal people.”

She doesn’t mention that I was the first to do wrong. She probably doesn’t know what happened downstairs, but she doesn’t seem to think I provoked them in the first place. Is she simple-minded, or insightful?

Is she a fairy similar to a succubus? At her comment about everything being doubled, the veins on the back of my hand twitched, but I managed to stay calm and looked down at her. She smiled back, but the unpleasant atmosphere remained.

“Besides, a human truly angered by rudeness wouldn’t make that expression. And you probably wouldn’t have controlled yourself enough to avoid killing those kids. I’d like to hear your business, but was there no other way than coming up here and putting on this show? Well… let’s hear it. Who sent you?”

I didn’t think I needed to prove I was working with the Italians. The proof was sufficient in knocking out the two guards at the stairs and subduing the stocky dwarf on my way up.

When she tapped the floor a couple of times with her hoof, the surrounding members lowered their guns. Success. Though I didn’t like her all-knowing expression, I wasn’t in a position to be picky.

“I’m a detective. Looking for a missing person. Or more accurately, a runaway. He was one of the Italians, with a hidden phone line in his room. Naturally, I thought he was informing to the police or another organization, so I came looking for clues. Know anything?”

The fairy in front of me bursts into laughter. Though she was fairy, she was about the height of a typical elf, yet somehow appeared much smaller and more fragile than her actual size. Just an optical illusion.

“You come to my neighborhood, my establishment, harm my children, and then demand information? If we’d met in a back alley, you’d have grabbed me by the collar and dragged me off for interrogation. Why should I help you?”

“The runaway is the branch manager’s brother, and all the other likely informants have connections to organizations that are being investigated separately. If you’re the only ones not answering, naturally that Italian will think you’re harboring his brother, and next time it won’t be a reasonable human coming but Italians crazed with family loyalty. Is that answer enough?”

The fairy nods briefly. She seemed to be making an expression of displeasure.

“If we really did it, now that we’ve been discovered, handing over the mastermind would be better than resistance… and if we didn’t do it, we wouldn’t want to shed blood for no reason. Is that it?”

“Yes, this job came through a family notary, so you must understand the risks involved.”

“You force an unpleasant choice. Would the notary and branch manager know you’re here?”

“Do I look like the kind of stupid human who would forget something like that when coming to your neighborhood, your establishment, to harm your children and demand information?”

The fairy snickers and waves her hand. An organization member who appeared several times larger than her—damn, another illusion. This is why I hate fairies—places a coat over her shoulders.

“No, if you were that incompetent, you would have killed the guards downstairs and been shot in the head before you could speak. You know restraint, little one. Follow me. If what you say is true, we must act to prove our innocence.”

As she walks, the dancing crowd parts to make way. I follow behind her, hearing some vampires smacking their lips at the sight of me. Twice the strength, twice the vitality. Cursed.

As the fairy owner of the dance hall exits, a black car stops in front of the road as if it had been waiting. The fairy naturally gets in, and I join her.

The front and back seats were separated by a thick curtain. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen the driver when we got in.

“Gancan, take us to the casino. Tell the other fairies to gather too. It seems we have a business problem. So, detective, whose brother are you looking for?”

There was no answer, but the car started moving. With one of their executives right beside me, the driver wouldn’t try anything suspicious. I dismissed that possibility.

“Giuseppina Proci’s brother. He worked as an accountant in that branch. Know anything?”

“Proci, Proci… that big Italian? We don’t know anything. We operate in western New York, and they work in the east, so we haven’t had much interaction. Even though we’re now expanding and clashing, there haven’t been any deaths yet. It probably wasn’t us. Just prove that and leave my Little Eire.”

Right, the two organizations didn’t overlap in territory. Gangsters are like territorial animals—if you don’t touch their territory, they might just observe you from a distance.

“I have no interest in neighborhoods that just glitter like cheap brothels. I’m only here for work.”

“Your inability to see the beauty of this golden age’s sparkle is quite pitiful. Isn’t living like that tiring and depressing?”

“Better to live tired and depressed than to be drugged and mistake a painless terminal illness for health. How do you think you’ll feel when this ‘golden age’ drug wears off?”

Exchanging words full of malice but without any real intention to put knives to each other’s throats, we arrive at the casino. The driver still hadn’t spoken and was quietly waiting after parking the car.

I felt like I was missing something. But arguing with this fairy had left me no time to think properly. I couldn’t let this complicate matters.

What am I missing? Right, what the Italian at Giuseppina’s brother’s house had said. That he had no interest in work, kept a numb distance from other Italians, and just collected his paycheck.

Would someone who had no interest in his work and even hated it run away because of work? Yes, this was what I’d been missing.

I take out the address note that I’d originally used just to pick a fight with those fish-heads and hand it to the fairy who had come with me. Her eyes roll as she looks at the address.

“It was stupid to think of it as a workplace. If he was planning something personal, he’d do it in a personal space. This is just a residential area, so do some of your members live here too?”

She glares at me as if telling me to use the proper term. I didn’t need to bother.

“Yes, some Fenid do live there. As you said, it’s a normal residential area. And we don’t necessarily bind Fenid together under the name of family. As long as they don’t harm the Fianna, we don’t care.”

If I had to work with someone, the Irish hybrids seemed better than the Italian ones. Except for their use of incomprehensible terms like Fenid and Fianna, their treatment seemed better.

I enter the casino with the fairy. I didn’t waste time despising people who were obsessed with chips and cards, thinking one moment could change their entire lives.

This time, with the fairy accompanying me, there were no obstacles. Not a bad place to go if you could carry a silenced pistol.

We pass through the hall where a jazz band hoping for their big break was wasting their effort and talent as mere entertainment to keep casino patrons, and arrive at a meeting room with small tables that seemed designed for fairy bodies.

Soon, fairies gather. The first to arrive was our driver. He wore a neat suit and was the size of a human. Except he had no neck. He was a fairy too.

They’ve lumped all these monstrosities born of gods and humans mixing under the word “fairy.” Since the table was too small for him, he stood with me behind the table, looking down at it.

Soon about seven fairies filled the table. Most looked like hybrids of humans and beasts, as if born from bestiality, and the fairy who brought me here was the most human-looking. Unusual legs aren’t even that strange in New York.

Before starting the meeting, the fairy extends her hand asking to see the note first. I hand it over. She throws it into the center of the table.

“The reason I called you. This detective came to my establishment and threw me this note that smells like hyena fur. He says the Italian mafia branch manager’s brother who lived at this address has vanished. He’s searching all of New York’s back alleys and came to us too… Check your Fenid. If they’re entangled with us, things will get troublesome.”

A stocky fairy in a green suit with a long beard takes the note and checks the address. He was about 5 feet tall, but still the tallest among the fairies gathered here.

“Huh, you called a meeting because of a detective who barged into your establishment? Still can’t break that habit of sucking young men dry?”

She must be some kind of succubus or vampire. The goat-hoofed fairy, insulted by the taunt, speaks in a sharp voice.

“If this detective hadn’t reported to the Italian thugs that he was going to cause trouble in my establishment, I would have handled it myself and Little Eire would have remained peaceful tonight. But what did you say? Did I hear you wrong?”

She rages with an expression suggesting she wants to tear me apart right now… but well, it wasn’t the first time I’d heard such things.

While the two fairies growled at each other, a fairy in what looked like a sealskin fur coat, who had been quietly reading the note, raised a webbed hand.

“This is a neighborhood where many of our Fenid live. If someone needs to look into it, I think I should be the one…”

Already irritated at having to deal with me, and now with her mood further soured by the green-suited fairy, the goat-hoofed fairy nods in frustration.

If she wants to be emotional, that’s fine by me. She’s escalating the situation herself, and I certainly wouldn’t object to things developing this way.

“Fine, Selkie. Take him. Just make sure to keep his mouth shut while you’re with him.”