Tanizaki pretended to think while trying to calm himself down. What should he do? He thought back to what Kunikida said when they discussed the matter. According to him, “Dazai never directly says what he wants. He always gets someone else to say it for him.” If Ranpo was the art of deduction itself in the agency, Dazai would be the epitome of manipulation. The marionette strings he used to tie down and control people’s hearts were complex and abstruse. Nobody could see where they led. But he couldn’t stall here.
“How about we draw strips of paper?” Tanizaki suggested with a forced smile. “We’ll write numbers on them and have everyone draw one. The smaller the number, the more stressful role.”
Dazai instantly agreed.
“That’s not enough.” Kunikida furrowed his brows. “Surely you know how tricky this man’s fingers can be. They’re frighteningly dexterous. He could pick a lock to a bank’s safe with a single needle, so of course making fake slips of paper and switching them out would be nothing for him.”
“Hee-hee…” Dazai placed a hand over his mouth as he giggled, bouncing in his chair. “I can’t tell you how tickled I am to have Kunikida compliment me so much today.”
“Stop laughing. It’s creepy.”
“Then why don’t we do this?”
Tanizaki turned his gaze upon the old newspaper on the corner of the conference table—the one Yosano had been reading. “Let’s use this old newspaper. It’s from two months ago, so it’d probably be hard to prepare a fake one or write over it.”
“Interesting…,” Yosano murmured while dragging the old newspaper her way. “You’ve got a point there. I guess it’d be tough for even a magician to pull a fast one with this. But what exactly are you going to do?”
Tanizaki waited for a few moments before answering.
“We’ll cut the dates off with the page number and fold them.”
He gazed at the old periodical.
“As you can see, there is only one of each number on the pages. This newspaper starts on page one and goes to page forty. Plus, it would be hard to find the same newspaper from two months ago just lying around, so if we cut out the dates with the slips of paper, then you wouldn’t be able to re-create these unless you called a business that collected and recycled old newspapers.”
“Uh-huh.”
Dazai cheerfully nodded. “That’s a really good anti-cheating system for something you just came up with on the spot. What say you, Kunikida? Seems foolproof to me.”
Kunikida glared at Dazai. “Nothing makes me more nervous than when you claim something’s foolproof. Although I suppose I could compromise.”
Tanizaki let out an inward sigh of relief. They made it past the first obstacle. The biggest hurdle, however, came next.
“All right, I’ll make the slips we’ll be using to draw,” Tanizaki said as he began folding the dates of the newspaper. With nothing better to do, the others decided to pass the time by discussing the specifics of this “staged disturbance”:
“What if we did it like in a fairy tale, where a princess gets captured by some bad guy? We could have the rookie just happen to be walking by when it happens.”
“Hold up. Who gets to be the bad guy?”
“Isn’t that why we’re drawing slips of paper?”
“I want to be the villain! Sounds like a lot of fun!”
“No, you’d break the rookie’s skull in.”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind that.”
“Wait. Stop for a moment. We’ll figure out who plays the villain through the drawing; there’s still the damsel in distress.”
“Who’s going to play the princess?”
“I mean, we could decide through the drawing as well, but princesses are usually played by women, so…”
Silence.
“Me? Sure, but then I’m gonna split the new guy’s skull open.”
“I figured…”