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It was a busy Friday night. Lupin loved staging his heists on Friday nights; though Inspector Zenigata insisted this was out of practical concerns that helped him pull off his capers, such as empty offices buildings and thick downtown traffic, Yata deeply suspected it was so he could party it up if he succeeded.
But tonight, the only party would be here, at the station.
It was only Yata’s second time on a Lupin case, but they’d nabbed him. The infamous Phantom Thief had ceased to be a specter in the night and instead turned into a flesh-and-blood man, who, now that Yata was looking at him through a two-way mirror…
“He’s really very plain up close, isn’t he?” he asked no one in particular.
Lupin was only about 5’ 7”, brown-haired and lithe. He had almond-shaped eyes of a hazel hue, and a round, boyish face that seemed completely unremarkable in a crowd. Put a book in front of the guy, and he’d look like any given grad student. Give him a beard, and he could be anything from a farmer to a homeless guy to a tech bro depending on the cut. Put a hat and a uniform on him, and he could pull of any given blue-collar worker. Plus, because he was small, he could fit in plenty of access vents and slender shadows. Yata could even see how his face, from the right angle, with the right wig, would become a perfectly charming lady. To look at him, the Lieutenant could see now why he always got through their guard—the guy really was blessed with a versatile face and build.
“Mmm,” Zenigata agreed; he was going through some paperwork in preparation for the initial touch-base, the preliminary interview that lead to the real interrogation that would take place over the next several days. It was a bit odd that he was doing this in the viewing room, but he’d set up a small table and chairs in here just so he could keep an eye on Lupin while doing the work.
And as for Lupin…
In this country, they had 48 hours to hold him without outside interference, but because they already knew they were arresting him at the end of that period, Yata was under the impression that, beyond those first two days, they could hold him for up to a month without even so much as a lawyer speaking to him.
If the local police were in the mood to make him crack or disappear, they had ample time to do it. Lupin’s friends were still out there, and they were not to be trifled with, but even they couldn’t storm a police station without immediately becoming the world’s most wanted and drawing so much heat they shut down a country and got all of international law enforcement on their asses at every border. He doubted they’d risk that.
Perhaps that was a bit of why Lupin—he couldn’t stop staring at him, scrutinizing him now that he had the chance—was looking a bit anxious as he waited. Yata was really rather expecting an unshakeable mobster who was loudly complaining, or a sociopath who was patiently napping, but what he saw seemed to be more of an anxious guy with a habit. Which was…kind of disappointing really. And angering, for some reason.
Our great adversary is…this?
At the moment, Lupin was wearing a navy-blue button-up shirt rakishly rumpled from the activities of the night and grey slacks; the collar was unbuttoned and the sleeves half rolled up his forearms as he sat at the metal table in the interrogation room. Cuffs were looped around both his wrists, heavy chains draping around the tabletop between his elbows; he had his fingers interlaced and his forehead against them, shutting out the light as he waited. Under the table, he was bouncing his leg, and he seemed to be calculating things in his head, twitching this way and that as he thought. He appeared to be mumbling to himself too, in time with all the little movements.
“He seems kind of anxious, honestly,” Yata noted, tossing the question to Zenigata.
The Inspector didn’t even look up from his papers. “He’s probably worried I’m going to yell at him for letting you get hurt,” he drolled. “Because when I’m mad at him, he doesn’t get fed, and when he doesn’t get fed, he gets loopy, and when he gets loopy, he gets uninhibited, and when he’s that way we have a lot of fun that he regrets, that doesn’t stop until I let him sleep.”
A little smirk pulled up the side of Zenigata’s mouth as he finished. Yata wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the journey that was that statement, so grabbed onto the first part of it: “Letting me get hurt?” he wondered. “I’m the one who tackled him!”
Zenigata shrugged. “He knows better that to directly injure my guys.”
“Well…” Yata glanced at his arm, which was in a sling, and the shoulder that was the cause for it. He’d tried to tackle Lupin on a pitched, clay-tile roof, and they’d both rolled down it, breaking tiles and their bodies as they went. Yata had tried to catch the edge of the roof and stop himself, and while he had caught the gutter, Lupin had also caught him, the force of which had cut Yata’s hand and dislocated his shoulder.
In turn, that’d made Yata lose his grip on the roof and they’d both gone back to falling. It had been Lupin who’d caught Yata then—and a chimney pipe, with one of his Batman throwing-weight-on-a-wire-cord doo-dads. Yata had refused to let him go as they reached the ground, even with only his one arm, and that struggle had made the difference in letting the rest of the squad catch up. They’d surrounded Lupin/Yata in the yard, and the thief had been theirs. Grudgingly.
There might have also been a very petulant “God, fine,” from the thief as Lupin was forcibly separated from Yata, which involved Lupin kicking Yata in the shoulder and Yata promptly passing out to the sound of a fading, “Oh shit, sorry—”
Maybe that was what the Inspector was referring to, the kick. But that was the part he’d drink away tonight in their celebrations, as soon as he was able. They didn’t need to worry over Yata’s pathetic finale, because he wanted it to not be remembered at all.
Still, the fact remained that they’d caught Lupin. The Lupin. Because of Yata. He was practically zinging with glee, even now, with his aches and pains. The thief was really here, in the station, and Yata wanted to give him hell just because he could.
It had been a couple hours of hospital triage for himself and letting Lupin cool off while the Inspector filled out forms and collected necessary documents, but that was after hundreds of hours of policework leading up to this situation from dozens of individuals. The second Yata had come back into the station, all abuzz as it was, he couldn’t help but get his blood running again.
“So what are we gonna do to ‘im?” Yata asked now, grinning.
“’Do’?” Finally, the Inspector looked up, only to eye him icily. “We’re going to speak with him. Politely.”
“But?” Yata wondered, bewildered. “Don’t you like…?” He held out his good hand toward the prisoner, and made a few suggestive gestures. “When you catch him…?”
“Don’t I like, break him in? Knock him around a little to let him know you don’t fuck with the police? Lieutenant Yata, is that really why you’re a cop?” Zenigata frowned purposefully. “If you are, then I think I need to have a conversation with HR about you.”
Yata’s eyes went wide, and a huge breath went through his lungs, which he regretted for how it made his shoulder smart. “No-no! Of course not! I just…! I thought…” He turned out to Lupin, who had come up for air but was still just staring into space thoughtfully with his chin in his hand, like some renaissance painting. If he was honest with himself…all that came to mind was ‘show that little twerp the hell he put you through.’
“Yeah okay, maybe I do want to fuck around with him a little bit,” Yata admitted with a sigh. “Don’t you?”
“Oh sure,” Zenigata said sagely, going back to his papers by flipping another folder open like he had all the time in the world. “But I tamp down that urge because I’m a mature adult that knows the best policeman reforms his suspects with kindness, not proves them right with brutality.” He shrugged.
“Oh…” Yata deflated even more, feeling like a heel. “The best fight is the one you walk away from, huh…?”
“Taking care of people is harder than throwing them away, is all.” Zenigata curled one hand under his chin and rested his head on the back of his fingers. “Let me ask you something, Lieutenant Yata – what do you think this job is?”
Yata frowned. “Doing diligent work to put a stop to crime by getting criminals to the next stage of the justice system?”
“That’s right—putting a stop to crime. And how does a person do that?”
Yata tilted his head, waiting.
Zenigata smiled at him, a twinkle in his eye. “By giving deeply damaged people a reason to believe that society holds something for them that’s worth behaving.”
Yata’s frown deepened. Well…shit.
Zenigata made an encouraging note in his throat, then turned to Lupin. His gaze fell back to a brooding one, much the way Lupin was staring at the glass. “You survive this business long enough and you learn to tell the difference between thugs who don’t want to be reformed, psychos you can’t reform, and people like that guy in there.”
He nodded at their perp. Yata traced his stare to the thief, then back again, two strikingly similar streams of thought winding silently through the air, to look upon their faces. He could almost see their shining red ribbons of fate dancing about and intersecting between them like two rivers in an aurora. “What do you mean?”
“Guys who aren’t bad per se, but from the get-go were set on the wrong path and have no idea the trouble they’re causing other people with their actions. Guys who are so smart they will never fit in, and that means to be true to themselves is to break all the rules that keep the rest of us in check.”
His eyes narrowed, and for a second he grew very quiet. But then the Inspector huffed, shook his head out. “Well, anyway. There’s lots of damage a person can suffer in the world, but you’ll start to see how it creates people, twists people, when you see enough suspects and talk to them about their lives. So that’s what we’re gonna do today.” He smirked and rapped his knuckles on the table. “Get to know a thief.”
Yata sputtered. His night was taking quite the turn, and his open mouth as Zenigata tossed him the stack of papers showed as much. To the point that the Inspector closed his jaw with a finger as he walked by.
“Don’t let him see ya do that, he can sense weakness,” he chuckled as he opened the door. “C’mon. Let’s see if we can’t unwind that twisted ball of yarn that is our perp’s baggage a little, so he can start making better choices—that help him fit in, and in turn, help us never have to deal with him again.”
That said, the first that happened when they walked in the room was that Zenigata, hand still on the doorknob as he held the door wide open, stopped abruptly.
Yata bumped into his back; confused, he looked up to find the Inspector’s determined scowl on his face, aimed at Lupin.
Lupin, meanwhile, chains clinking slightly, slowly lifted his gaze to meet the Inspector’s eyes.
The Inspector swelled with a heavy breath. And then—
He broke into a huge grin and announced with utter glee, “Caught you, fucker.”
Lupin, clearly startled, sat up straighter, eyeing him like an alert and nervous squirrel. A tense second went by, then another, and then, just when Yata thought all hope was lost for their plan, the thief suddenly broke into a wide grin too. “Heh. Nice to see you too,” he offered fondly.
“Your Highness,” Zenigata went on, with a booming and regal theatricality that Yata had no idea where it was coming from, hand moving with a great flourish as he did so, “Welcome. To the great and mighty Fortress of Broken Dreams.”
He was delivering the line like something Shakespearean. The whole thing was quite exuberant, while the end tasted particularly ominous. To finish it off, he cackled gleefully, in that gloating way he enjoyed when something particularly ironic and pleasing had occurred at a suspect’s expense. Yata had seen it once or twice, but never to this degree, and he was somewhat alarmed by the vivacity of it, as it echoed off the walls.
Whatever happened to “get to know the suspect and make him a better person”?!
Meanwhile, if Yata was giving the Inspector a bewildered stare because he no longer knew who he was, the master thief himself was still just sitting demurely in his chair, hands in his lap and an incredulous look on his face, not unlike a teenager being embarrassed by their parents trying to be cool.
And then, when Zenigata was done, he looked to Lupin for a response. Another moment went between them, silent communication of some sort, and then Lupin, much to Yata’s surprise, burst into breathless snickers. “I can’t even with you right now,” he chortled, waving a hand. “What…What is this?”
He didn’t seem displeased though. In fact, he had to look away and wipe tears of laughter out of his eyes.
Yata was suddenly struck by the thought that this person couldn’t possibly be their phantom. The way he moved…something about it was strangely fluid, almost…tinged with a feminine delicacy around the edges. It didn’t look bad on him, it was actually quite appealing in an odd, “I want to protect it” sort of way, but it didn’t seem like a mastermind who was dragging society’s villains around by the nose and costing police hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer-funded overtime and leaving dead gangsters all over the place.
And Inspector Zenigata…seemed happy to see him?
Yata’s head was suddenly spinning.
Not the that Inspector noticed. He strode into the room, beckoning Yata to follow with the extra paperwork he carried under his good arm.
“You done fucked up,” Zenigata crowed at his captive. “Let me count thine ways.”
Lupin snorted and rolled his glittering eyes, biting down a smile that never quite left his face. It was very much an “Oh, you” gesture, but he played along anyway: “Are we doing this so soon? I suppose you did always like to gloat over the burn while the iron was hot.”
“Exactly!” Zenigata roared like a rowdy pirate. Indeed, he slapped down the top folder from Yata’s pile like he was about to yell “harr”. “But first! Meet Lieutenant Yata, the man who caught you.”
Both policemen were still standing. Lupin took the queue and stood up too.
“Hi there. Nice to meet you.” He ducked his head a little, a Japanese gesture so familiar Yata forgot which country he was in for a moment. “Sorry about your arm—normally people don’t tackle me on pitched roofs.”
To Yata’s surprise, it wasn’t a complaint, just a friendly statement of fact. And given that the man was polite, too, was making his head spin; he suddenly felt like he was being introduced to a new colleague.
“That was a dumb move,” Lupin went on with a chuckle and a wink, finger twirling through the air to demarcate his points. “But brave. Glad it turned out all right for everybody in the end.”
“But you’re…?” Yata asked, bewildered. “…Captured?”
Lupin shrugged. “Alive though. That broken leg wouldn’ta been good, let me tell you. And that’s if I’d landed on my feet. Not to mention what woulda happened if you had fallen clean off a roof and I didn’t catch you. He’d have my hide.” He looked over at the Inspector. “Right?”
He nodded perfunctorily. “Right.”
Lupin turned back to Yata with a breathless smile. “I don’t mind hospital watch with him but we do get on each other’s nerves after a while.”
“This is true.” Zenigata nodded, clearly remembering the last time it’d happened, given his face. “There’s only so many games one can play with you to pass the time because you compulsively cheat.” He glanced at Yata. “Last time, he started pilfering parts of people’s lunches too, even.”
“Damn,” Yata muttered, turning back to Lupin, looking over him anew. “Didn’t know you’d stoop that low.”
“Hey, don’t look at me like that.” Lupin just shrugged, a hand on his hip and a mousey smile on his face. “Gotta keep my skills sharp, even in the kiddy pool.”
“Or you could just be a decent human being and play fair,” Zenigata noted with a smirk.
“Where’s the fun in that?” Lupin laughed. “You can’t handle a day without something to investigate. And, rules are made by the rich to keep the rest of us complacent anyway. Why in the world would I follow them?”
“You don’t want to know what happened the time we played Monopoly,” Zenigata muttered dryly toward Yata.
“That time we played Life was interesting though, I feel like we opened up a lot to each other,” Lupin shot back thoughtfully, crossing his arms and shifting his weight onto one leg. “Wouldn’t mind doing that again.”
Zenigata shrugged, open to the idea. “Yeah, I appreciated that.”
Yata, trying to keep up, was left speechless.
“Well, I suppose we have other things to get to,” Lupin admitted, going for the files under Yata’s arm. “You play shogi, kid? We gotta get some more people into our Interpol pool here.”
“Hey, wait, I---?” Yata looked to the Inspector, but he just waved it away.
“I’m winning, currently,” Zenigata stated as Lupin liberated Yata of the stack of manila folders, maneuvering expertly around his chains to get it done. “For the record.”
“I’m better at Chess,” Lupin noted, setting them down on the table.
“You’re shitty at poker though. I still don’t understand that.” Zenigata added his stack of papers next to Yata-turned-Lupin’s.
“Gambling addiction floods my brain with magical thinking and all my card sharping abilities become useless.” He rapped on the stack proudly. “Good at blackjack though.”
“Dully noted. Anyway, yeah, everyone, please, sit.”
Remarkably, Lupin did as told without complaint. “Seeing as how you’re back so soon,” he said to Yata as he scooted his chair forward, “I assume it’s all right? Just dislocated maybe?”
He honestly looked a little worried, as he gazed up at Yata. The Lieutenant took a deep breath, remembering he wasn’t in here to make the guy feel the trouble he’d caused through the end of a fist. It would have been so easy, from this angle. Maybe that was why the Inspector wanted him to sit.
“Nothing’s torn, but the cut in my hand’s gonna scar for sure.”
The thief hissed. “Gutters’ll get ya every time. Hate the damn things. Glad you got it fixed up before it got infected though.”
Yata frowned thoughtfully as he sat down. The things you had to think about when you were a cat burglar…
But wait. No. He wasn’t supposed to be sympathizing with the guy…right?
He looked to the Inspector, but he was studiously arranging his papers. Naturally, Yata turned to the other person in the room for answers, but that just put him face-to-face with Lupin.
The Lupin, his mind whispered, who was looking him over fastidiously, like he was memorizing the design on his shirt buttons. When he was caught in the act, though, Lupin perked up and smiled, like an innocent kid excited for the attention.
Yata frowned, confused. What was going on here…? Wasn’t this guy supposed to be a murderous criminal mastermind?
“All right,” Zenigata began, clearing his throat. He folded his hands sternly on the table before him and looked Lupin dead in the eye like a school principal. “Do you know why you’re here.”
“Crime!” Lupin chirped with a grin, for all the world matching him by looking like an eager schoolboy who’d gotten the right answer to a question.
Zenigata blinked a few times rapidly, then took a deep breath to steady himself. “…Yes,” he acknowledged grudgingly, “I suppose that will suffice. Are you aware you are not entitled to a lawyer or release for 48 hours in this jurisdiction?”
Lupin nodded, the look on his face never changing. “Yep.”
“And how do you feel about that.”
“Fine.” Lupin’s pleasant demeanor didn’t change. “If anyone tries to fuck me up, I’ll make ‘em regret it. As will you, I’m sure.”
The grin that spread across his face grew Cheshire. It sent a shiver down Yata’s spine.
“Am I entitled to sleep, though?” Lupin asked.
Zenigata frowned, thinking. “I’ll have to ask the station chief and get back to you on that.”
“Are you planning on letting me sleep?” Lupin pressed pleasantly.
“Depends on how evasive you choose to be,” the Inspector hummed. “But at the moment, yes. There are no emergencies around your heist this time, and it’s not like we need you to admit to it and corroborate the evidence. We’ve got that in spades.”
Lupin visibly let out a breath. “Phew, good. Thanks, man.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” he assured with a smirk. “That was just the opening formalities.”
Lupin’s smile finally twitched into a frown. He sat up straighter in his seat. “Okay.”
Likewise, Yata, on alert, watched the two curiously. What would Zenigata’s first real move be?
Admittedly, the standard interrogation playbook was totally out the window at this point, so this was all a learning experience for him, never mind the fact that his heart was thrumming with excitement about who exactly this was at the table.
The Inspector and the thief locked eyes and began sizing each other up in silence.
Somewhat surprisingly, the suspect did not launch into deflection and complaints, the way one would expect from a career criminal. The interrogator, likewise, did not begin a long speech, as would be expected from a guy heading an interdepartmental task force that’d involved months of sacrificed family time from everyone on it.
No, instead they just looked at each other, for quite a long time. It seemed like they were having a whole conversation, reading the new lines on their faces, the magnitude of weariness in the other’s eyes. Yata, meanwhile, watched the both of them, trying to decipher the language only they spoke.
At the end of it, Lupin nodded his head just a little.
“I see. Thanks for not shooting me.”
Zenigata nodded back, about half as much. “Thanks for not shooting me. And…” Here, he nodded noticeably deeper, in a way that quickened Yata’s heart for its scandal. “Thanks for saving the sapling here.”
Yata, heart already in his throat over what he was seeing, quickly darted his gaze between the two of them several times, since this was apparently his fuckup. “N-n-no, Inspector, it was all my fault, honestly. I should be the one…”
Zenigata cast him just the slightest glance and it shut Yata up immediately.
“He doesn’t owe you anything,” the man gruffed toward Lupin. “You wanna extort somebody for his life, you come to me, you got it?”
“Got it,” Lupin assured gracefully, just the smallest smile on his face as he shrugged theatrically. “We’re all gentleman here.”
Yata’s wide eyes waited for the Inspector to give him another look, but he wasn’t granted one. He simply went back to his top folder, flipping it open with a bit more force than necessary. Yata, meanwhile, unable to process how deeply he’d messed up because it was unfathomably deep, looked to the only other person in the room for help—which of course, was Lupin himself.
The man was waiting for it, with a knowing little smirk.
Yata could feel the snake tighten around his throat.
So that’s how he works. Quietly, cunningly.
Dude’ll blow out a wall and make every alarm blare, but…
It came to him in a flash: That sort of thing…that was for attention. But this. This was how he operated when he needed to get things done.
And that was why he was so dangerous.
This was how a professional moved.
“O-oh,” Yata muttered, shaken, before he could help himself.
The thief made a little noise of satisfaction in his throat, eyes closed, before turning his attention back to the Inspector. He settled in, waiting patiently, his hands in his lap.
“So how have you been?” Zengiata asked quietly. He was still looking over his work, spreading out images here and there in a slow arc across the table. Far from his previous tone a moment ago, he was now neither boisterous nor rough, but instead, hushed and kind, like he was talking to an old friend for whom the question might be painful.
That, too, gave Yata whiplash. Weren’t we just talking about extortion?
Lupin watched the photos fan out. “All right; my whole gang’s still alive, bless the saints, so I can’t really complain much. But I feel like the world’s losing its damn mind sometimes.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Zenigata scoffed.
“Despots croppin’ up everywhere, coups popping up like dandelions after them, but you can’t tell the difference between fake ones that are excuses to round up the intellectual class versus real ones that are just that incompetent for some reason… Radical wealth inequality even in the ‘good’ countries, kids commoditizing their lives online because normal people have forgotten how to live, sex scandals fuckin’ everywhere…perfect place for a thief to make a dime, but damn, this just makes it seem like I need a franchise.”
Zenigata choked. His audience waited a beat, and then he sputtered, wiping at his red face, “Heaven forbid.”
“Heh. Well…I suppose you would say that.” Lupin smirked. “Don’t have a heart attack there, now.”
Zenigata got his coughing under control. Lupin sighed and tilted his head back on the chair. “But seriously. I was kinda hoping to retire someday, and this just makes it seem like I need a protégé to continue my work, cuz I tell ya, I don’t like where things are going and I don’t think I can fix it in twenty years. And that’s if we aren’t all dead from mother nature knifing us in our beds from rapin’ her so often.”
“Don’t talk about her like that.”
“Well that’s what the industrialists do. Ecocide should be a crime and I’m really enjoying going after those bastards.”
A wide, malicious grin stretched across his face as he stared dreamily at the ceiling. It gave Yata shivers.
Zenigata, however, seemed to be taking notes. “Industrialists, huh? You gonna become an ecoterrorist? Blow up whaling ships and shit?”
“Jigen would do that,” Lupin said thoughtfully, rubbing at his chin, seemingly unperturbed by the heavy chain raking across his chest as he did so. “I’d be more likely to steal their money and their wives, and then take them down by connecting them to Epstein for you.”
“Any time you want to connect somebody to Epstein for me, I’m all ears. Just drop that shit in a mailbox and I’ll be there.”
“Heh. See. That’s why I like you. Dependable. Efficient. A man of the people.” Lupin chewed his lower lip. His eyes were starting to glitter again. “And you don’t let a little thing like jurisdiction and department get in your way.”
Lupin tilted his head down, sending that sparkle toward the Inspector. “But man. You’re giving me ideas. The most amazing thing I could ever steal back from a person is an entire environment. Do it enough times and you steal yourself a planet, and by extension, everything on it owes you its life. Hmm. Yes. And maybe sink a few whaling ships while I’m at it, somewhere they can become reefs.”
As he spoke, Zenigata looked up and slowly started giving him a very specific disapproving look, the way parents did when they wanted their children to cycle through options aloud and arrive at the right one. Lupin eyed him for a second at the end of this jaunt, and, mulling that look over, tacked on, “With no lives lost, of course. Unless they’re scum.”
Zenigata took a deep breath, somewhere between Lord help me and It’ll do. “And how does Fujiko feel about animals?”
“Ambivalent, like me.” He shrugged. “it’s Goemon who can’t handle the little furballs to save his life. If I can find a lingerie store next to a shop with a cat in the window, all four of us can waste an entire afternoon with our pleasure of choice. Add a chocolate shop and a liquor store and man, the night’ll be good too, if you know what I mean.”
Zenigata shuddered a little, but caught himself. “Speaking of your crew… How’s Jigen’s knee, by the way?”
“Doin’ all right. Heaven help me, he’ll never go under the knife if it needs to be replaced. Man can’t even go to a dentist, as you know. I don’t look forward to having that conversation with him—because trust me, it’ll be a few—so I’m just trying to get him to be nice to it and eat a full meal once in a while in the meantime to build up the cartilage.”
Yata was going through his mental files as this exchange occurred. Jigen…Jigen’s knee…? He vaguely recalled reading that he had some kind of wound to his knee that had scar tissue in it. From time in the navy. And that was a major contributing factor as to why he ended up a hitman and an alcoholic in the first place.
But he liked cats, huh? That was news…
“What is…” Yata began, before he could think better of it. The words were quiet, but it was like a record screech for how the two men stopped and turned to him. Lupin, who by now had come forward with his chin in his hand, elbow braced on the table, just tilted his head a little to glance at him, while Zenigata, a beat after, flicked a hard gaze at him that read, If you fuck up you’ll hear about it. But that might just have been his surprised face, honestly. “What is Jigen’s favorite kind of cat?”
Zenigata had once told him that invoking Jigen’s name around Lupin was a bit of a dicey thing to do. The thief had feelings for him, deep ones, and they were protective of each other. You got either of them in the station talking about the other and there’d be a hell of a lot of complaining and then a proverbial knife to your throat if you threatened their relationship in any way. And those boundaries and sore spots were landmines, whose pattern of spread were quixotic at best.
So it felt a little sacrilegious, and a little thrilling, to speak that name in from of this man. The man who had all the power in the world over the underworld’s most storied cleaner.
Lupin, for his part, seemed like he just remembered Yata was there and then promptly forgot him again as he gazed at the ceiling in thought. “Hmmm, I think…?” His mouth moved from side to side as he considered, deforming in a way that would have been comedic if he weren’t being so serious. “Well, Goemon loves fluffy cats that look like clouds. Jigen…he’s got a soft spot for anything orphaned. He’ll let cats treat him like shit if it means he can feel good about savin’ ‘um. Jigen actually likes weird animals more though, you know? Rats. Weasels. Hermit crabs. Lizards. Luckily he isn’t into snakes though, because if he was a tattooed goth snake guy he’d have gages in his ears and I couldn’t date him.”
Yata shook his head at this statement, bewildered.
“Not because of the gages. Those are cool. Because he’d be obnoxious and into snakes and bugs and man…I just can’t with that. I got enough problems, I don’t need to worry about my lover’s snakes strangling my at night. I lose enough sleep worrying about my lovers doing that themselves!” He chuckled fondly, and promptly got happily lost in some kind of daydream. “Yeah, I’ll take my tatted closet goth who likes rodents and asshole cats.”
“Closet goth?” Zenigata asked. “What is that? That a thing?” and suddenly, Yata realized with some horror, his boss was Old.
Lupin turned to him, both elbows on the table now, chin in hands like a schoolgirl. “Nah, not really, just my term for it. He wears black all the time but it’s a professional control of his inner goth desires, you know? You should see him on the rare times he goes full counter-culture though. Hnnng. The eyeliner? The studs? The collars and the ripped jeans and the black lipstick and the leather bits with the shiny chains? God.” Lupin squeezed his eyes shut and wiggled in his seat. “Fuckin hot, is what that is. And when you add in the yakuza tatt? Fuck, I’m weak.”
“I have some questions,” Zenigata began carefully, “about when whips and handcuffs get involved in this scenario of yours, but you know, I don’t think I want to ask them.”
Lupin giggled. “Smart man. But you know. Give in a little. Have some fuuuun.” He winked. “There’s some parties I could invite you to.”
“Please don’t.”
“I’m definitely going to incorporate it into my next heist invite.”
“Lupin.”
“Nee hee hee hee hee.”
“Please,” Zenigata said, deadpan, “Control yourself.”
Lupin took some more time to run out the giggle fit and then grew strangely syrupy, draping over the space between them luxuriously. “What about you? You found anyone to let you tie them up lately?”
Zenigata winced, hissing in a breath and turning bright red. “Not in front of the kid.”
Lupin burst into a mighty cackle. He pointed at the Inspector as he turned to Yata. “See? He admits it. He admits it!” He sat up straight and dusted his hands off theatrically. “My work here is done.”
“Is your work to ruin my reputation with my subordinates?”
“Maaaaaybe!”
“Then,” Zenigata purred, clasping his hands together on the table, “Why don’t you mention that in your cat-and-lingerie story, it’s you who’s trying on the lace for Fujiko?”
Lupin’s eyes went wide, and it was his turn for his face to burn scarlet.
“You dick!” he screeched, scandalized. “You can’t tell him about that the first time he meets me! Wait a couple dates at least?!”
Zenigata chuckled, spreading out his hands much the way Lupin had earlier, to gloat over his victory. “I’m sure you have pictures, you wanna share?”
Lupin glowered like a disappointed teen.
“Feel free to drop that in the mailbox anytime, too.”
Zenigata smirked down at his spread of photographs on the table, while Lupin looked over to Yata balefully. They shared a look, Lupin very much saying See what I have to put up with?, and Yata’s screaming, What the hell is this?
But still, it felt like they’d connected. It was a start.
“Were they red?”
Lupin sucked in a breath through his nose and winced. “Inspector.”
“No, she wears the red, I bet. You wear the black.”
“Please,” Lupin parroted. “Control yourself.”
“But…I bet they were blue this time. You do look good in navy.” He pointed at Lupin’s shirt. Lupin, for some reason, stopped his complaining to blush.
Zenigata, meanwhile, put his chin in his hand, gazing at the ceiling, his tone airy. “Did you pair it with stripper heels or gogo boots? I guess the answer depends on if you chose it or if she did.”
“Sir,” Lupin pleaded, only half mockingly. “Sir.”
“White heels and blue lace…yeah, that’s a couture she’d make you shell out for. Maybe some earrings and a stolen necklace. Oh—and. Yes: I think that’s where the whips come in. Did it have sparkles?”
Zenigata’s gaze came down to pin Lupin with a vicious smirk. Lupin put his very red face in his hands and failed to respond. Yata, meanwhile, was incredibly embarrassed and considering filing a harassment complaint, though he wasn’t sure if it should be on his own behalf or Lupin’s.
“They were gold,” Lupin squeaked out in a tiny voice. “Three inches.”
Zenigata burst into a hearty laugh.
“You’re just jealous,” Lupin muttered finally, haughtily, a dart thrown at the heart of the board—even if it was muffled through his hands.
“Which one of you wears the bra when you go at it?” Zenigata mercilessly deflected the missile in midair.
This, it seemed, was crossing the line. Lupin’s hands shifted down, staying over his mouth but revealing his eyes. They narrowed, fiercely bright around his reddened skin.
“You just wanna watch and are grumpy you can’t,” he replied. And then, the low rumble of a distant mortar shell dropped onto the landscape from above: “Did someone confiscate your tapes?”
This attack, it seemed, landed. Zenigata paused tellingly and tried very hard not to look at Yata. “N… Nnnno…”
A malicious grin, slow and succulent like molasses, spread across Lupin’s face as his fingers curled down into fists at his jawline. The snake was tightening the noose.
“There are copies,” Zenigata replied quickly.
The grin grew. “Is that a challenge?”
The Inspector sighed through his nose, eyes tightly closed. Perhaps wisely, he forewent any more come-backs. “Let’s move on, shall we?”
Lupin, far from being annoyed, smirked darkly to himself. “Now I know what to get you for Christmas,” he whispered.
It was very clear from his face that he wasn’t kidding.
While Yata’s head just about exploded in regards to what might or might not have been lying in wait in the archives, Zenigata coughed a few times and tried not to turn red like his opponent still was.
“Well, your very strange and possibly illegal kinks aside,” the Inspector began in a way that was convincing no one, “How’s that wound in your shoulder that you got a few months ago?”
“Oh.” Lupin brightened up, and much to Yata’s chagrin, started peeling off his shirt. He unbuttoned it slightly more and then slipped off the left shoulder with more of that feminine grace that came out when he was idling. “It’s healing up okay, thank you for asking.”
What was revealed was pale skin and a twisting scar that was only half formed. It looked like a knife wound. Somebody had stabbed him, maybe even pinned him to a wall. Yata’s stomach roiled looking at it.
“You didn’t lose any function in your arm, did you?”
Lupin lifted the hand in question for Zenigata to see and flexed it a bit, wiggled the fingers. “I definitely can’t lift as much as I used to be able to, and there’s a numb spot around the wound. Plus, a couple fingers do this thing now…” He turned his palm skyward and then half curled his pointer and middle finger. They made a stuttering twitch until he brought them further inward. “That’s a bit annoying. I don’t think that’ll go away, but I can still feel and use them well, yeah.”
“Good,” Zenigata said, and he honestly sounded relieved. “I know the use of your hands is really important to you, so I was worried about you, there.”
“Mmm.” Lupin nodded, looking regretful. But he swallowed it down, shook his head out. “Occupational hazard.” He shrugged.
“I hope you stop all this stuff before you get injured too badly and end up drinking yourself to sleep every night like Jigen. Because I’m not sure he or Fujiko’ll be able to lift you up out of the trenches of depression the way you did for them.”
It was a rather blatant thing to say. But rather than get angry, Lupin just mulled it over, looking a bit depressed already.
“Well. Presumably, some injury is going to do my career in someday. I’m just aiming for ‘not dead’ and ‘no brain injuries,’ if I’m honest. Because you’re right…they aren’t going to stick around for that. Though Jigen would be real sad if I died. I think Goemon would shrug but he’d pour a forty at my funeral, bless him. Even Fujiko would mourn it, in her own way. I’m the most stable thing she’s ever had in her life, you know.”
“And that’s noble. But. Take it from someone who also works in a hard profession were people get injured into retirement in ways that can get ugly—you want to stop before that happens. Because believe it or not, there is value in life after retirement, and it’s much easier to find if you get yourself there in good shape.”
Lupin titled his head thoughtfully, and put down his hand. “I’ll eat my vegetables,” he said, and apparently that was the end of the conversation, because Zenigata nodded, appeased.
Yata wasn’t sure why that was enough for the Inspector. But it seemed like Lupin was listening. And they did have all night, he supposed, to come back around to the point and hammer it home, if that was one Zenigata was intent on.
Why, really, was Zenigata intent on making Lupin think about protecting his body? Didn’t he want him to stop thieving? And an injury could get them all there faster than any judicial system.
Honestly, it seemed almost…teacherly?
“Speaking of Jigen and Fujiko, how’s your crew doing overall?” Zenigata went on conversationally. Yata side-eyed him, wondering if this was a ploy to get intel on their whereabouts and habits. Looking to Lupin a moment later, though, it didn’t seem like he suspected anything—or even if he did, he didn’t feel threatened by it.
“That’s a good question,” Lupin said, putting his chin in his hand and covering his mouth thoughtfully with curled fingers. “I could actually use your advice on a couple things.”
Zenigata, to Yata’s great surprise, smiled. “Go for it.”
“Well, neither Jigen nor Fujiko trusts me as much as I’d like them to, and you know, I think it’s a different reason for each of them. But what if it’s not? Am I just annoying? Tell me the truth old man. Am I insufferable?”
“I don’t think it’s that,” he said sagely.
“I dunno,” Lupin mumbled, forlorn. He stared at the wall deep in thought, clearly going over some old scene and its wounds in his mind. “I just…maybe I use people too much?”
You think, Yata wanted to yell, but with great effort managed to restrain himself.
And good thing, too, because the Inspector smiled even more as he watched Lupin’s turmoil, this time a bit smugly. “It is a thing you tend to do, use people,” he began almost gently. “But I know you’ve been working on being more open with them. Did you talk to them about wanting a more open and healthy relationship with them?”
“I did. And you know? They both laughed. And not in a nice way.” Lupin frowned.
For a moment, he seemed remarkably human; he struck Yata as just another troubled guy on a park bench talking to the nice cop that was making the rounds among the homeless.
“That’s not a nice thing to do, when you’re being honest,” Zenigata went on gently. “Then what happened?”
“I dunno,” Lupin groaned. “I pressed it, beat around the bush about it, tried to tickle those locks open…and they just. You know. Dug more into the personality traits of theirs I don’t like.” He glanced off, then ran his free hand through his hair anxiously. “Jigen tried to tell me a bunch of ways I’m a shitty person and then drank a whole bunch—trying to hide it of course—and Fujiko, kinda, I dunno, told me that’s not what we’re about and not what I should want?”
“You know what I’m going to tell you that sounds like.”
Lupin made a face. “That it’s manipulative, right?” he sighed.
Zenigata nodded. “You remember.”
“Of course I remember. I listen to you,” he snipped, throwing a glance their way, first one cop, then the other. “Even if you are a pain in the ass.” Lupin pointed at the Inspector. “Even if they tell me I talk to you too much.”
The last part sounded like a threat, and the black look on the thief’s face backed it up. But in the end, Zenigata stood his ground patiently, and Lupin just sunk into his seat, grumbling. He had his back to Yata, one arm draped over the back of the chair, and the other propping him up as he leaned on the table, side-on to Zenigata.
“So if they’re manipulating you…what do you think they’re trying to get out of you?” the Inspector coaxed.
“I dunno. Complacence? That’s what everyone wants when they do that, right? ‘Don’t rock the boat…don’t make me inspect my choices or myself…don’t make me have to deal with you’…” Lupin shook his head like it hurt.
“That’s a surface-level understanding of it, yes. But what is it, specifically, that they’re trying not to change?”
Lupin tilted his head, and spent a while thinking about it—long enough that Yata got a decent amount of time to consider his posture, memorize the lines of his body for future stakeouts (though hopefully there wouldn’t be any).
“I don’t know what it is. I feel like…the more I try to be better for them, the more I try to get the gang into a better place…the more they pull away?” He frowned. “You ever have anyone do that to you?”
It was the Inspector’s turn to pause. When Yata looked over at him, he found him oddly tense.
“Yes,” he articulated slowly, a sharp look in his eye that seemed to have nothing to do with Lupin before him now. Lupin raised an eyebrow, but in the end, all Zenigata did was shake his head. “Sometimes you just outgrow your relationships.”
The room fell quiet. Lupin and Zenigata shared a look, the thief thoughtful, and the Inspector brooding. The lights above them hummed, and the pictures spread across the table lay silent and abandoned.
After a few more moments, Lupin made a light noise in his throat, turning away to give the inspector privacy for his thoughts.
“It’s noble you tried to tell them who you want to be from here on out,” Zenigata offered after a bit of staring at the table, “and how you want to interact with them, but the fact that they weren’t even willing to entertain the idea tells you a few things about who they’re willing to be, into the future.”
“And how much they respect your feelings,” Yata added quietly.
Lupin blinked rapidly several times, first processing the statement, and then processing that it wasn’t Zenigata who’d spoken. The inspector seemed to do the same, and then suddenly, they were both looking at him.
And honestly, the looks were identical—searching, vulnerable, wanting.
Yata swallowed and straightened up. He only had one shot at this.
“It’s true,” he insisted earnestly, because he wasn’t sure what else to do. “If you meet someone with sincerity and all they meet you with is scorn or derision, they don’t respect you—or see your value—at all.”
“Or their own value,” Lupin murmured, considering it.
“Perhaps, but that’s a deeply personal wound you can’t possibly fully comprehend, and not your job to fix. It’s their job to be decent people. It’s your job to ask them to see you as one, too—though you shouldn’t have to. Dignity should be freely given.”
“Maybe I’ve just spent so long ignoring my own dignity that they think it’s okay to debase it too,” he murmured to himself, a small, strange smile on his face. “Maybe they’re just following my lead of being bad to me because I asked them to implicitly for so long, over and over.”
Yata frowned. “I don’t think that’s how it…no, that’s not quite…”
Something in the conversation had taken a sharp turn all of a sudden, and now he wasn’t sure how they’d gotten here, or how to get out of it.
“I think I’ve got it just fine,” Lupin replied, waving a hand airily. “Thanks, Lieutenant. I’ve got my next move.”
“Lupin,” the Inspector said, picking up the slack for his partner. The thief turned to him, eyebrows raised with interest. “How many of your friends are criminals? Percentage-wise?”
The slip of a man thought about it, eyes moving around the room as he counted people in his mind. “Not very many anymore, to be honest. I’ve fallen out with some. Others’ve died, or gone to jail.” He sounded vaguely surprised about it.
“And how many criminals do you think your gang’s friends with?” he asked.
Lupin’s brow furrowed, and then he said like it was obvious, “All their friends are criminals.”
Zenigata nodded sagely. “I think that’s the difference you’re coming up against.”
Lupin’s frown deepened, puzzled, to which the Inspector continued, “You’re gaining different experiences than they are. Meeting different people. Learning to fit in with the daylight world. Because that’s what you want, deep down—to be able to sit on a beach in Monaco and not look over your shoulder.”
“Monaco doesn’t really have beaches.”
“You know what I mean.”
Lupin frowned and looked off. “Yeah I guess I do.”
“And then when you take that different person back home, they don’t want to see it. Because that’s not who they know. That’s not who they want. They don’t want daylight Lupin. They don’t want whoever you are when you take that moniker off and hang it up on the coatrack for the night. They want the golden goose.”
Lupin pursed his lips, stared at his hands like he was reading a particularly frustrating textbook.
“So you’re moving forward. They’re not. And we’d all like to think that we are enough incentive to move the folks around us, the folks we care about, in the same direction we’re going, when we grow for our own health and betterment. But that’s not always the case. Because our friends…our relatives…our coworkers…are not always there with us…or for us.”
Lupin’s nose crinkled. “That’s particularly Nietzschean, don’t you think?”
“I don’t mean it like that. Sometimes…the friends around us don’t see us. They see what they need. What we bring. They’re so wrapped up in their own problems that they can’t, even if those problems aren’t readily visible or are expertly masked. Addiction is a culprit that does that to a lot of people.”
The implication there was obvious, and Yata knew about it from the files.
“Addiction gets in the way of them being the good people they’d like to be, and that we hope they are. But our own needs, our own weak spots, can often keep us around too long, trying to believe people are something they aren’t. Are in a place they aren’t. Our hopes pull the wool over our eyes, and our fears keep us stuck in place, as the people around us diverge from the path we’re on.”
Lupin winced. In his seat, he was slowly growing tighter. Zenigata, meanwhile, was growing just as much the opposite direction—his voice quiet, his posture soft. And as they diverged, the gulf between them suddenly seemed to grow huge as Yata watched the two from the table’s end.
When the Inspector spoke next, it was a barely audible whisper, like a cloth smoothing over fragile glass:
“And your friends have habits, Lupin. So do you. But you got clean, right?”
Posture tight, eyes glued to the table and expression miserable, he nodded silently.
“You managing that all right?”
Lupin’s gaze flicked aside, far away from anyone in the room, but he still nodded after a moment.
“And what about them?”
The answer was clear on the thief’s face, so Yata didn’t really expect an answer. But surprisingly, Lupin admitted after a bit, very quietly and staring at his lap, “Jigen’s drinking has gotten worse lately, but he keeps hiding it from me, like I won’t figure it out and don’t know the signs of it by now…” he huffed. “And Fujiko…no matter how much I give her, her problems never stop.” He shook his head, eyes narrowing bitterly. “I try not to be an enabler of it. I don’t want to tell people how to live, I don’t have a leg to stand on there, but…”
“You tried to tell her how to be, and it didn’t work.”
He nodded, glowering.
“And then you tried to tell her how you wanted to live, like I suggested last time, and her response was…”
“…To laugh at me and tell me that’s ‘not who we are.’”
“I think that’s your answer then, Lupin.” Zenigata spread out his hands.
“So what do I do now?” he huffed, crossing his arms and legs and just generally turning into a tight ball of angry yarn.
“Stay or leave,” he replied simply.
Lupin shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and growled, all in succession. “No, there’s got to be something better than that.”
“You’re just not ready for that.”
“Stop it. I’m getting annoyed.”
Indeed, Yata could practically see his hackles raising on the back of his neck. But, he didn’t think they were really here to coddle the world’s most notorious white-collar criminal, so he said, “You could always take away all of Jigen’s alcohol and see if he shoots you.”
Lupin shot him a glare. Surprisingly, Zenigata did too.
“Domestic violence isn’t funny,” Lupin said.
“Especially in the gay community,” Zenigata added.
Yata gaped, holding out an incredulous hand at their suspect. How had he suddenly become the bad guy here?
“Anyway he’d lock me out of the house and shoot her,” Lupin mumbled after a moment, when he was sure his point had sunk in. “Don’t want that.”
“Nope,” Zenigata agreed.
“I mean, she’s slier than him so she’d see it coming and tase him or something, but still.”
“Yes, but still: try not to get caught up in a domestic,” Zenigata added, pulling some papers together. “I worry about you, you know. He is a hitman and she is an assassin.”
“Thank you.” Lupin shrugged. “Kinda strange when you put it that way. Maybe I’m just a misanthrope too?”
“You were hurt by people, just like them,” Zenigata said with a shrug. “The difference between you and them is that you were determined not to let it hold you back.”
Lupin tilted his head at that, intrigued.
“I don’t think they made that promise to themselves.”
Lupin tilted his head the other way, frowning deeply. “Why wouldn’t they do that? Doesn’t everyone do that?”
“No,” Zenigata explained. He reached across the table and flicked Lupin in the forehead, which elicited a short eep. “Not everyone spends all their time thinking, like you do.”
“Then when in the world are they doing in their brains?”
“Feeling.”
Even Yata was a bit perplexed about that one. He turned to the Inspector, eagerly awaiting his answer, just as much as Lupin’s confused glower was.
“Most people are controlled by their feelings. They look for a short-term fix to their problems. They say, ‘well, I’m going to go into my habit tonight but tomorrow, tomorrow I’ll be better.’ That’s their promise to themselves, and they break it. Of course they do, because they make it when they’re completely out of control and not themselves.
“But you. I know you. You’ve told me about it: You made yourself a promise when you were really little, that in ten or twenty or thirty years, you’d be a great person. And all along the way, every decision you’ve ever made, big or small, has been in service to that ideal. Whether it turned out to be a mistake in the end or not, each decision was conscientious and weighed with that vision in mind. Not a feeling, but a vision. Same with the course corrections, maybe actually making the course corrections possible.
“Most people don’t do that. They just get buffeted around by the feelings and crises in their lives from day to day, seek short-term solutions because that’s all they can envision, and they get stuck there, slowly going down the whirlpool. You, however, get grounded on shoals sometimes. You get days when you’re dead in the water with no wind. But then you pick up your oars, or you repair your ship, or you row to the island and get on another ship. You always have a plan, a star you’re sailing toward. Most people don’t. Half the time it’s cloudy so they can’t see the stars, and the other half, they stare at the ocean at night and say ‘oh there it is’ and then fall into the water. They spend half their time trying not to drown and the other half they’re refusing to go anywhere because they can’t see a way forward that’s any different. You get me?”
Lupin crossed his arms (and legs) anew and looked left, then looked right. Looked down, then up, then at every corner in the ceiling. He gazed at each knee of his in turn, then his lap. He brooded there for a minute or so, fingers tapping on his biceps. Finally, he took a deep breath, growled a little, and scrunched his eyes shut.
Under the table, Yata could see his crossed leg bouncing in the air as he thought.
“Yeah,” he finally managed, grumbling, “I get you.”
“And in that analogy,” Zenigata finished, sitting back and considering Lupin carefully, “other people’s ships stay adrift for ages and ages, slowly being worn down by storms, until one day they either sink beneath the waves from a violent storm or a slow leak—or, they catch on fire and light up the whole night with their cataclysmic end.”
“So what you’re saying is,” Lupin concluded, top half tilted impressively as he gazed at nowhere in particular by the wall, “I gotta come back with a tug boat.”
“That’s—” Zenigata frowned. “No, that’s not really the moral here.”
Despite himself, Yata chuckled.
Zenigata shot him a look, but Yata motioned with his eyes at Lupin.
Following it, the old Inspector found his thief suddenly smiling like all the weight had been lifted off his shoulders. Zenigata startled a little, sitting up straighter as Lupin locked eyes with him and said sincerely, “Thank you. I’ll think about all that.”
And just like that, Lupin, the man with a plan, was back. He sat up straight in his seat, much like an avid pupil. He gazed at the papers and images strewn about, suddenly interested anew. Zenigata acknowledged this by letting him take a few of the images without issue when Lupin spun them toward himself with a fingertip or two.
“A-As for being misanthropic,” Zenigata went on, “That’s a laugh. You’re the most life-loving, poetic guy I know. If anything, you’re a radical, and radicals tend to need muscle when they’ve really locked onto something good.”
Lupin smiled a little at that, as he looked over the photos.
“Revolutionaries do tend to end up in jail a lot, though,” Zenigata added.
“Not if you win.”
“Not if you win,” the Inspector agreed, in a tone that brooked no more quarter given, “But look around you. I don’t think this looks like winning, do you?”
Oddly, Lupin’s smile grew a tiny bit. He never took his glittering gaze off the papers. “We’ll see.”
Zenigata eyed him over his stack of papers. Yata coughed.
“Anyway, what’s for dinner?” Lupin asked brightly. “Oddly enough, I’m awfully hungry these days now that I stopped cocaine.”
At that, Yata snorted even louder.
Zenigata also winced, but tossed Lupin a thin folder anyway. It spun around, then settled atop the small spread of black-and-white photographs. “Let me know if you need any anti-withdrawal medication tonight, all right?”
“Thank you,” Lupin whispered, not looking up from the pages as he flipped the file open gracefully. “I don’t think I’ll be needing any this time around, but I appreciate that.”
“Don’t want you dying on me now,” he said, “now that I finally have you in custody.”
Lupin’s mercurial little smirk came back as he read. Slowly, he flipped a page. The sound of it was loud in the room.
“Oh don’t worry, I have no intention of dying on you any time soon, god of thieves willing. But you’d better get going, or the cafeteria’s gonna close.”
Zenigata watched him for a long moment, and given Lupin’s slow reading rate thus far, Yata suspected he knew the man was doing it, because he didn’t flip a page the entire time.
Still, something seemed to go between them, and Lupin finally took a page in his hand languidly and said without looking up, “Don’t worry Inspector, I don’t work that fast. I’ll still be here when you get back.”
Zenigata sucked in a deep breath, looking for all the world like he wanted throttle Lupin, then just sighed it out and shook his head laboriously, hands in the air. He got to his feet. “C’mon, Yata. Dinner time.”
“Yessir!” Yata shot to his feet, readying to take the enormous stack of papers with him, even if he only had one arm to do it with.
“Leave ‘um,” Zeniagata instructed. And then to Lupin: “Read whatever you want. I’ll quiz you on it when we get back.”
Lupin gave a saucy little salute as he read. “No worries, I’ll get you what you need to catch these assholes red-handed, since I’m here and all.”
“Don’t say shit like that out loud,” Zenigata scoffed.
And with that, Yata was shuffled out the door.
What just…what just happened? Yata wondered when they were in the hall. As soon as the door shut, he turned to the Inspector. He seemed completely unruffled.
“What was all that?” Yata asked, bewildered.
Zenigata glanced at him, straightening his jacket cuffs. “What was what?”
“That conversation. You seem like…” Yata looked around, made sure they were alone, and then lowered his voice: “Someone on the take…?” His voice was hoarse, and he swallowed down a distraught lump in his throat. “You know…like one of those guys who seems more gangster than the gangsters.”
Zenigata held up a finger. “I get that a lot these days, with him.” He waved him forward. “Walk with me.”
Yata did as told, following him down the hallway and toward the cafeteria.
“Let me explain something to you, Yata: When I started this case, I wanted nothing more than to see this guy in jail. Maybe even rotting there, if he chose not to repent. But then I met the guy. Got to know ‘im. And the thing about him is…he protects people. He fights for the little guy, too. Anybody who’s exploited by the system. He fucks with the people and systems I hate. I don’t condone the way he does it, but…you can’t hate the guy for it and over the years I’ve mellowed out a bit. So has he.
“And so, my opinion on what success looks like with him has changed in that time as well. You can’t keep the little weasel out of jail, you just can’t, it’s impossible. But you can bring him in. And every time I do, I talk to him. Give ‘im the attention and structure and sympathy he never had as a kid. So then he gets mad and determined and escapes and the next time he does a heist says, ‘God damn it that Zenigata, I’ll show him! I’ll make this heist bigger and better and cleaner! I’ll hurt fewer people and have less collateral damage! I’ll pick better targets, he’ll see!’”
As they turned a corner, a cheer went up and the cops in the hallway patted them on the shoulders as they went by. Zenigata smiled brightly and exchanged pleasant thank-yous and return congratulations with them.
When they were through the crowd and Yata had caught up to his strong strides, he went on without missing a beat:
“I get into his head, his heart. I make him want to do, and be, better. Because there’s someone in society who cares about him for once, who inspires him to be a better member of society, at least a little bit. And that, Lieutenant Yata, is what I think success with him is.” Zenigata walked backward for a few steps, just to show him his triumphant grin.
“Hell, one day we’ll probably both retire to neighboring country estates somewhere, where I can keep an eye on ‘im to some degree, writing tales about our exploits and competing on book sales,” he went on, turning back around. “Success looks different for each case, each person within the case. Lupin’s a very special person and so too is his solution. At least, that’s what I’ve come to believe after all these years, along this long and winding road of ours.”
“Sempai…” Yata felt his heart strings tug.
“I could break his spirit, sure. Get the system to come down on him and his friends like a sack of bricks, get him to give up crime by also breaking everything he is and his will to live. But I think…that’d be an awful waste of his spirit. Like tearing down a forest just because you don’t like the brambles in the underbrush.” He shrugged.
Yata stared at his feet as they walked. This was a lot more complicated than the Inspector had ever let on. It seemed like there was a lot more he was going to have to learn, to understand this dance they did. And to evaluate his own finish line of success on the case. To say nothing of what would happen once Lupin got into the courtroom game with all the best mob lawyers. Yata rankled just thinking about it.
Still, it was food for thought.
Food…
Ah, he was glad they were almost at the cafeteria.
When they reached the cafeteria door, Yata reached out to push it open, but Zenigata slapped a hand on the doorframe, keeping Yata from entering.
The lieutenant stopped, perplexed, looking to the Inspector just as the man leaned down into his space:
“Now,” he rumbled lowly, “don’t ever say that about me again or you’ll find yourself summarily transferred, got it?”
Yata snapped to attention. “N-no sir!”
The Inspector clasped him on the shoulder with a wicked smile. “Good lad. Now…let’s go do some paperwork, shall we? You get the tea, I’ll get the soup, and you can tell me what other observations you’ve had while our suspect cools his feet.”
Yata gulped. Zenigata waggled his eyebrows. And in a particular interrogation room, a certain thief was smiling quietly to himself as he read, thinking his plan to let himself be captured so he could introduce himself to Zenigata’s new assistant had gone even better than he’d hoped for.
The only question left for the night was whether Zenigata was going to bring him the pork ramen or the pad thai, and that was exactly how he liked it.