Chapter 101: The God of Shit-Stirring

TL: LittlePeach

To win a person's trust quickly, all it takes is one tiny scrap of common ground.

Whether it's grief or rage, find the emotion the other party reacts to most sharply and gladly play along to their rhythm. That's the basics.

"To explain in a little more detail, the description of the terrorist that Yamamoto-san gave was as follows. A Hawaiian shirt and shorts, a straw hat and sunglasses, a mask...."

"Ah, aah.... Th, that's right. Exactly what my uncle told me."

I rattled off the terror suspect's description without a single stumble, details no one but the man himself could possibly have known.

And just like that, Shinichi's eyes went soft and deep as he looked at me, as though he'd come face to face with his savior.

"Even now.... even now my head aches just thinking about it. Some lunatic psychopath of a terrorist brought the entire Coconut Warehouse down on us, and the sheer amount of capital we watched vanish into thin air.... you probably can't even imagine."

"That must have been a terrible ordeal for you."

"Oh, absolutely!"

Once a little common ground has been used as bait to pop the latch on a man's heart like that?

Everything after that becomes very easy.

"And on top of it all, my uncle got caught up in the war between the Shanyuan Society and the Hongmen Society, of all things, and died...."

"We feel the weight of that responsibility deeply as well. That is precisely why Equipment Office Chief Yang Zhenghu of the Shanyuan Society personally named me the man for the job and entrusted me with this mission."

I declared it with a face brimming with pride.

"Me. Le Wei, the Shanyuan Society's finest hitman."

"Aaah...."

Enter Le Wei, back from the dead more times than I could count.

I was going to be out of this prison before long anyway, so as an identity to use for a few days and throw away, there was nothing better.

"I began in Phnom Penh and chased down countless leads, tracking whoever stands behind the terrorist. And in the end I caught hold of one decisive lead, which is what brought me inside New Bilibid Prison."

"A decisive lead?"

I lowered my voice and cautiously covered my mouth.

Shinichi leaned in to listen and swallowed dryly.

"The ones behind them are inside this prison."

"Hup."

Shinichi shuddered from head to toe as though he'd been struck by lightning.

With bullshitting skills that had ascended to the level of outright reality manipulation, working one naive kid like a lump of dough was hardly any effort at all.

"Before I get into specifics, there's one piece of information you need to know first, Shinichi-san."

In acting, the concept is everything; in bullshitting, it's shamelessness.

I put on a grave face and breathed soul into my bullshit.

"Did you know? Right now in Cambodia, the Irobuchi-kai isn't the only organization to have been hit by a bombing in exactly the same fashion."

"Wh, which organization would that be?"

"An organization called the Carlo Family, headquartered in Italy. Have you heard of them?"

"Carlo.... No, that's the first I've heard of it."

"Ah, I put that badly. Even if the Carlo Family means nothing to you, you'll certainly know about the Mango Farm they were running in Sihanoukville."

"Ah! Yes, yes! That I know. So the Mango Farm was this Carlo Family's operation?"

"That's right."

Only then did Shinichi nod, startled.

"And that Mango Farm was blown up just a few days ago. Reduced to ashes."

"What?!"

The kid let out a strangled sound and gaped.

He'd been so thoroughly spooked over the course of the conversation that his face had gone dead white.

“I-is that really true?”

“It is. I saw it with my own two eyes while tracking the terrorists. They drove in a van loaded with gas cylinders, set off an explosion, and blew their entire production base to pieces.”

"Ah...."

Shinichi trembled violently.

It was so exactly like what had been done to them that simply recalling the night the Coconut Warehouse went up seemed to send a chill crawling through him.

"Shinichi-san. Do you know what these two organizations have in common?"

"That's...."

I'd thrown out the question, but I gave him no room whatsoever to guess.

The answer was already decided. All the kid had to do was swallow it whole.

"They're both production arms. And both went beyond production and tried to become a distribution arm as well. Inside Southeast Asia, no less."

"...."

"Think about it sensibly. If someone held a grudge against the Irobuchi-kai or the Carlo Family and carried out attacks like these, they wouldn't have gone out of their way to destroy production bases. They should rightly have gone after each organization's headquarters in Japan and in Italy."

"That's...."

"But instead they singled out the production bases sitting in Cambodia and smashed those specifically. Do you understand what that means?"

The Irobuchi-kai had built a production base in Cambodia in order to push into direct distribution across Southeast Asia.

If they could secure a distribution network of their own, an enormous flow of cash became possible without anyone skimming a middleman's margin.

"Who stands to gain the most from wiping out both organizations' Southeast Asian production bases?"

"...The Southeast Asian distribution network that was handling the selling until now."

"Exactly."

Up to that point, at least, I hadn't told a single lie.

There wasn't a gap in my logic, and Shinichi's eyes rolled around in their sockets.

Now it was time for the finishing blow.

"There's no doubt about it. Samgor is behind the terrorist."

"...."

By this point my objective had shifted toward sowing discord among the drug cartels inside New Bilibid.

Overseas, the Irobuchi-kai might be dismissed as just another common production arm, but in Japan, they were a deeply rooted criminal organization.

On the Japanese mainland at least, they threw their weight around as a fearsome yakuza power, so if I gave them a gentle prodding and got them to sink their teeth into Samgor?

"Samgor currently holds half the Southeast Asian drug market. In the middle of all that, how outrageous do you think these two organizations' moves must have looked from where they sit?"

"B, but that's...."

"After all, men who'd been eating out of someone else's bowl went and stuck their spoons into the owner's table without asking permission."

Shinichi's gaze quivered.

And I went ahead and drove the knife straight into it.

"To Samgor, the Irobuchi-kai are not an equal business partner. They're nothing more than a subcontracted plant that can be swapped out whenever they please. When an obedient dog starts trying to chew through its own leash, what reason would the owner have not to pick up a stick?"

"...."

Had I hit too close to home?

Shinichi's wavering expression suddenly twisted with humiliation.

That discomfort poured straight toward me as resentment.

Well, the truth hurts most when it hits the bone.

"I apologize. My wording went too far."

"...No. It isn't as though you were wrong."

He'd surely known it perfectly well himself.

Which was presumably why they'd built a production base in Cambodia, in their own bid for independence.

'And I burned the whole thing to the ground. Whoops.'

Life really does have a way of taking cruel turns like that.

Anyway.

I decided to take a step back for the moment.

Relations between cartels run on interests with survival at stake rather than on trust in the first place.

A man can close his eyes and pretend not to see, and it stays there in plain view; and even knowing, there's no way at all to stop it.

"I intend to continue the investigation as things stand. No solid evidence has surfaced yet, after all. So there's no need for you to dwell on what I've said, Shinichi-san."

When I stood, pretending to wrap up the conversation in a hurry, Shinichi, who had been wearing an uncomfortable look for some time, lifted himself off his chair as well.

He wasn't entirely convinced by what I'd said; his face was still complicated, caught between belief and doubt.

"I'm sorry. I couldn't even entertain you properly...."

"Not at all. Inside a prison, this counts as a banquet. Thank you for the tea."

And so, not long after, Shinichi saw me out and we stepped outside together.

That was when I suddenly noticed the strange chill hanging in the air outside.

'Something feels off.'

Sure enough.

“What kind of little conspiracy were you two discussing so intently, Shinichi?”

Beyond the crude prefab structure, several intimidating, bulky men were waiting by the entrance of the building across from us, standing with their weight cocked onto one leg.

Bare torsos covered in elaborate dragon tattoos and vicious expressions on their faces.

Shinichi flinched and hurried past me toward them.

"W, Wei Hong-ssi? What brings you here.... Is something the matter?"

“I should be asking you that. You violated our exclusive contract and diverted fifty kilos of product into Cambodia. Under the circumstances, you can hardly expect me to keep trusting the Irobuchi-kai.”

The man called Wei Hong spoke with his chin tilted up.

He had the most brutal-looking face of anyone in the group.

Between the timing and what he was running his mouth about, it was obvious he belonged to Samgor, the very organization I'd been smearing all this time.

Shinichi, for his part, was too busy shrinking into himself at the man's arrival to manage anything else.

"Supply is short, there's no time to catch your breath.... You push the deadline back every time, and yet you had time set aside to receive a new guest? And here we've been, as business partners, doing our patient best to settle this through conversation."

"N, no, it isn't like that! You've misunderstood! Th, this gentleman is an acquaintance of my late uncle's...."

"Listen, Shinichi."

Wei Hong cut him off flatly.

His tone was courteous, but the look Wei Hong aimed down at him was plainly contemptuous.

'Or is that just the face he was born with?'

A brutal face that looked like it was seething with rage even when it was doing nothing but breathing.

He'd probably collected a fair number of misunderstandings over the course of his life on account of it.

"We want to keep a good relationship with the Irobuchi-kai for a long time to come. So please, don't give us cause to misunderstand you. There's no need to make me come all the way out here, is there?"

"Yes, yes, of course.... A, absolutely."

Maybe that was why.

Wei Hong was admonishing him at a leisurely pace in a reasonably courteous tone, and yet Shinichi trembled and nodded frantically.

Then Wei Hong dismissed Shinichi entirely and turned his eyes on me.

"Hey. Hick."

The tone he spat that in had changed completely.

Nothing like the way he'd spoken to Shinichi.

The murderous glint in his eyes as he looked me up and down suited that brutal face far too well.

“I don't know if you crawled all the way in here looking to buy some cold medicine on the cheap, but this is Samgor territory, you damn bastard. You trying to get yourself killed?”

Click.

Without warning, Wei Hong pulled a handgun from inside his clothes.

The moment he openly drew a gun in broad daylight in the middle of the prison, the eyes of countless prisoners converged on us like a spreading wave.

The guards on the second floor, sensing the dangerous atmosphere, gradually gathered as well and began watching us.

"I don't need to look to know what you had in mind, coming to see somebody else's partner. But here's the thing. Every last gram of product that moves inside this prison goes through us, through Samgor. Without our say-so, the Irobuchi-kai can't sell so much as a speck of dust to anyone."

Wei Hong kept the muzzle up and closed a step on me to press the threat home.

For all that, he hadn't even hooked a finger through the trigger.

It was pure performance, meant to establish dominance. He had no intention of actually firing here.

"And if by any chance you're thinking of helping yourself to our product, be ready to croak right here on the spot. Anybody who takes a cut of these guys' goods behind our backs, we chase to the ends of the earth and skin alive. Got it?"

"...."

Whether he took my silence for agreement or not, Wei Hong put the gun away and stepped back a few paces.

He looked at Shinichi again and slipped back into his original courteous voice.

"Shinichi, make sure the promised quantity is filled by the end of this week. That's the last request I make of you as a partner. If you pull one more stunt with Cambodia on your lips.... then our relationship really is over."

"U, understood...."

At Shinichi's shrinking answer, Wei Hong grinned.

Though to our eyes it somehow looked more like a sneer.

He shot me one more sidelong glare.

"You too. Next time you lock eyes with me on this turf, be ready for a hole in your skull."

"...."

"Let's go."

Wei Hong started walking, and the whole group drifted off unhurried, like an outgoing tide.

The crowd of onlookers gathered in the street murmured and stole glances at us.

Setting aside, for the moment, what it felt like to be a monkey in a zoo.

'What a true partnership.'

The way I saw it, Wei Hong had been unfailingly gentle with Shinichi from start to finish.

The problem was that until moments earlier I'd been pouring every slander I could invent about Samgor straight into Shinichi's ear.

Add Wei Hong's menacing face on top of that, and by sheer coincidence my strong-armed argument had picked up credibility.

'There we go.'

Shinichi was shaking from head to toe.

His face twisted, fear and fury and humiliation and suspicion all churning together.

It was a mouthwatering sight, and the first thing I did was wet my lips, good and thick, for the lying ahead.

Now was the moment.

Whisper, whisper.

"Did you hear that just now? Exactly as I said. They treat the Irobuchi-kai like a subcontractor that cooks their drugs for them."

"...."

"It's plain as day, what those Samgor bastards are really after.... Isn't the case that they smashed the production bases in Cambodia far too clear?"

"Ngh, nnngh...."

There was no need to run my mouth any further.

Because I could see conviction finally filling Shinichi's eyes to the brim.

'Next time I come through, one of the two will be gone.'

A stain of suspicion doesn't wash out easily.

Wield a three-inch tongue well enough, and there's no need for a gun at all.

*****

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