Lonely Thieves

Act III, Part VIII

Kolya's Side (April 11, 11:00 am)

A man in a suit slowly picked himself off of the ground and nursed his throbbing head. Two other men dressed in similar suits ran up to him with pistols in their hands.

"Franco! Where'd he go?!"

"I don't know," Franco replied, still holding his head where he was struck. "He got me by surprise and knocked me out."

"Damn! We'll keep looking, so go back to Headquarters and make sure you don't have a concussion."

Franco nodded and stumbled over to his car, which still stood running with its doors open. He turned on the auto-pilot and navigated over to the Innocenti Bank Headquarters. The car spun around and headed straight to a doctor's office across from the Headquarters, taking no detours on the way there.

As Franco was being checked by the Innocenti's main doctor, his direct superior Amoretto came into the room whistling a jaunty tune. Franco glared at him irritably before recognizing his boss.

"Mr. Amoretto. Did you come to check on me?"

"Don't get cute, Franco. Give me the details. Where'd that Markov run off to?"

"I don't know, boss. He knocked me out from behind."

Amoretto sighed. "Useless. This guy's been giving us the runaround for days now. We can't even ignore him since he'll cause trouble otherwise."

"Hey, boss," Franco called out nervously. "Why are we huntin' down Markov anyway?"

"You didn't see the statement I sent out? He's betrayed us. He's working to take us down."

"Yeah, but who's he workin' with? I mean, the Hayasakas are going out of their way to patrol our turf, and we're collaboratin' with the Overman Foundation. Who else could be gunnin' for the Three Great Families workin' together?"

"Is it your job to be asking questions like that?" Amoretto asked. He was smiling, but his eyes were glaring coldly.

"N-no, boss."

"Then shut up and do as I tell you. It's not your place to be worrying about things out of your pay grade." Amoretto spun around and left the room without so much as a good-bye. Franco leaned back onto the bed and waited for the doctor to clear him for the day.

He was eventually let out of the small clinic, but with orders to take it easy for the rest of the day. It was still daytime, so Franco decided to go and have lunch at his favorite place, a cafe across from the Innocenti Bank Headquarters. He sat down, ordered his usual, and leaned back in his chair as he waited for his food to arrive.

As he got his coffee, he noticed two of his compatriots walk into the cafe as well. They noticed him and sat down at his table with only a gruff nod as acknowledgment.

"Hey, what's all this? I don't remember invitin' you."

"Come on, Franco, this place is packed!" remarked Enrico, a stout man with beady eyes. "Besides, we can lick our wounds together."

"What do you mean by that?"

The other man, who Franco knew as Jerry, a thin man with a mean mug, pointed at the welt on his large forehead, still throbbing painfully. "He got me too. Grazed me with a metal pipe. Might still be in the hospital if I didn't duck."

"I lucked out," Enrico remarked slyly as he rubbed his shoulder. "Got thrown out of the passenger seat of Jerry's car. It hurt a bit, but I only got scrapes and cuts out of the whole thing."

Franco sighed and sipped at his coffee. "Damn ex-assassin. Don't know why he's causin' trouble for us all of a sudden, but you can bet I don't appreciate it."

"You gotta respect it though," Enrico piped up. "He's good. We've been chasin' him for days and he ain't been caught once."

"I ain't gotta respect nothin'. If he'd fought me like a man, I would've laid him out like the geezer he is."

Enrico cackled. "Well, you got spirit at least!"

Eventually, the waitress came back with Franco's order, a reuben sandwich with extra pickles. Franco bit into his sandwich as he listened to Enrico and Jerry talk.

"Still, I can't believe Hayasaka is openly workin' with us. Makes it seem like the world's gonna end, right?"

"I still say there's some kind of backdoor deal going on. Maybe Hayasaka has some blackmail on the boss."

"Then why is Hayasaka Security goin' to the trouble of patrollin' round our headquarters? There has to be a mutual benefit to all this!"

"No no no, brother. They're here to make sure that we hold up our end of the deal. They're watchin' us under the guise of protectin' us. It's a classic move!"

"Don't you guys have anything better to talk about?" Franco grumbled between bites of his sandwich.

"Come on, Franco, don't tell me you aren't curious. A situation like this has never happened before. Even some of the oldheads are saying the same thing."

Franco frowned, but he couldn't disagree. After all, just a few minutes ago he was trying to ask Amaretto the same question. He normally wouldn't even consider questioning an order from above, but something he had heard piqued his curiosity.

Franco leaned in and spoke to the other two in a low voice. "I might have heard somethin' about that. You didn't hear it from me though."

The others leaned in, curious to hear what Franco had to say. Franco looked around once more to make sure no one else was listening and continued.

"I went in to report to Amoretto, but he was on his phone. I listened in on his conversation, and I think he was speaking to the Hayasakas."

"Speaking to a Hayasaka?" Enrico's face scrunched up in confusion. "What's Amoretto doin' somethin' like that for?"

"Who knows? I couldn't hear much of what they were sayin'. But, before he hung up, I heard him say one thing."

"What was it?"

"'Even if the thief gets away, the Hayasakas will still get their necklace back.'"

"Eh? What's that mean?"

"Beats me. But Amoretto definitely knows somethin' about it."

"So it is blackmail," Jerry concluded. "Amoretto wouldn't bow so easily to the Hayasakas otherwise."

"I'm tellin' you, that's not it!" Enrico shot back. "You can be real stubborn when you wanna be, huh?"

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The three mafia grunts continued to argue for some time longer, but Kolya was no longer listening to them. He took off his headset, which he had tuned to the listening device in Franco's jacket, and sighed. The statement that Franco had made about Amoretto's call was interesting, although he couldn't exactly say why that was. Well, there was no point in thinking too much about it; he didn't have any evidence either way as to what had happened. Kolya flipped through the various listening devices that he had planted in many of the other Innocenti grunts he had encountered over the past few days, but none of them had anything interesting for him.

As he began to look through the equipment he had picked up from the safehouse he was currently hiding in, Kolya received a call on his phone. He had set up a blocker on his phone to keep it from being found on the grid, so only one person could be calling him right now.

"Alvarez," Kolya greeted him curtly. "You have the information I asked for?"

"Yeah. I already sent it to you via email. Take a look."

Kolya maneuvered over to his email and glanced at the files he was given. Sure enough, Alvarez had delivered. There were several police files covering the investigation into the theft of the sapphire necklace, as well as security footage from the Neumann's mansion during the time of the theft. It was certainly a lot of data and evidence to go through.

"Good work. I knew I could count on you."

"...Yeah. Of course. I'm the best, after all."

Kolya's brow furrowed. He wouldn't say that he knew Alvarez very well, but he knew enough to know that he was acting strangely. Normally, Alvarez wouldn't need an excuse to toot his own horn, but this time he was almost reserved.

"Is something the matter, Alvarez?"

"What? Nothing's wrong. Everything there should be good."

"Should be good? Normally you'd throw a fit if I tried to question your results."

"What's your deal?" Alvarez was getting grouchy. "I got what you wanted, didn't I?"

Kolya sighed. "Listen, Alvarez. I don't pick my associates lightly. The reason I always come back to you is because we have a relationship built on professional trust. We have that relationship because I determined that while you were a greedy, unsociable person, you never tried to oversell your ability or give me bad info. I wasn't wrong in thinking that, am I right?"

"What, were you trying to compliment me or something?" Alvarez sighed. "All right, listen. This info is good. I just didn't get it by myself."

"What do you mean?"

"When I started looking into the whole case, I was suddenly contacted by an unknown person who said they had info that I was looking for. I was a little apprehensive about it, but the stuff I got looked authentic. I still had to dwell on it for quite a bit before I decided to hand it off to you, though."

"You're saying someone sent this to you?"

"Yeah. Maybe they just wanted this to get out there somehow, or maybe you've got more allies than you realize."

Kolya scratched his chin thoughtfully. He hadn't contacted anyone else about what he was doing, and he didn't think Megumi or any of her friends would bother being this roundabout just to give him some data. There was certainly something suspicious about the whole situation, but the veracity of the information was being vouched for. He couldn't deny that he was in sore need of this information, after all.

"...All right. I'll trust in your professional opinion."

"Cool. I'll contact you if I find anything else."

Kolya hung up and sat down at a table. There was a lot of information in that email, and it would take quite a while to sift through it.