Two Truths and a Lie: the Confessions of a Conman

[Soundtrack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-R0jxIxvh8 ]
Smoke drifts up from the tip of a cigar, swirling in the last light of late evening. Omura Tadao lifts it to his lips and sucks in another inhalation of the cloying smoke, filling his tongue with smokey taste. The aftertaste of fruit lingers in the tarry residue on his tongue. It’s a terrible habit, smoking, and expensive. But what use is there in quitting to a dead man? What use is money to a man whose every cent is owed to another? So he’d taken the habit up, again. And he had broken out the good stuff, meant for when he finally got free of all this and retired somewhere nice and warm and anonymous.

Conman will be free of this. One way or another. So he takes another drag from his cigar and clenches it between his teeth, fingers punching another few lines into his manuscript. Two Truths and a Lie, the Confessions of a Conman. So far as Omura had told his old hero agent, it was a comeback scheme. An autobiography of his rise to heroism and fade to obscurity to reignite the interest of old fans, tall tales peppered with the falsehoods and half-truths he’d come to be playfully known for. Yet the lies they expect are not the lies, and the truths they believe are not the truths. This delicate ballet of double-talk excites Omura’s quirky neurology.

The truth at last poured out of his heavy, heavy chest, but it comes flowing as freely as a tantalizing lie. How strange that his happiest days in years are the ones he spends writing his own death warrant. Another paragraph in, Omura takes the cigar from his mouth and blows a smoke ring towards the ceiling. “It’s a shame only a small handful will ever know the full truth to this story,” he reminisces to himself on the students who had pried his secrets from him. In so doing, they had dragged his soul from purgatory and offered him a stairway back into the light. “No, that’s a lie,” he admits to himself, with a smile. It’s not a shame. It just makes his truth a rarer, and more valuable commodity.

That girl, Nyaro Hoge. She’d been the one to crack Omura’s code. It hadn’t been a masterpiece or a work of art, but her talent is clear. Omura had already dedicated to book to she and her lover boy, with plans to set aside and mail them each a free copy. First drafts, untouched by his editors' seedy little hands.

Omura trusts she will find the messages he’s hidden. Cobbled together in the form of stylized letters leading into each chapter, and small grammatical errors.

”I have fed information to the organization known as the Red Finger for years. They are older than they seem. Look at Tatarimokke’s shipments from Africa.”

Could he have confessed all of this information to them directly?

Probably not. Omura’s quirk plays tricks with him that way, makes it difficult to be honest and clear at the best of times. Sometimes he doesn’t even catch it happening. But this way… Omura keeps his brain happy, and he is pleased to find the message does not suffer his compulsion.

There’s a knock at the door to the apartment. Omura’s heart rate remains steady. The knock is familiar. It’s not the curious knocking a stranger. Not the angry thumping of a disgruntled creditor. Setting his cigar in an ashtray on the side of his desk, Omura clears his throat and goes to answer.

As predicted, Rebecca Webber is standing on the other side, hefting her girthy midsection. With a huffing voice she asks, “Aren’t you going to offer me a seat?”

“Second-hand smoke isn’t so bad,” Conman teases, moving side to wave her in. Rebecca just grunts in response. From his spot leaning against the wall just out of view, Karuga Ito swings inside behind her. “You look like you’ve been sleeping well.”

“Wonder why,” Ito rubs his eyes, pulling out one of the chairs by Omura’s plastic folding table, the centerpiece of his kitchen. Rebecca eases herself onto the couch. “The noose is tightening,” the man continues while Omura takes the seat next to him at the table. “Received my final warning today. A bloody hand in a box.”

“Any idea whose hand?”

“No, but I can guess who roasted it to a blackened crisp.”

Reaching into his coat pocket, Omura produces a pack of cigarettes. He opens it one-handed and flicks one out, on offer for Ito.

“Not going to offer me some of the good stuff?” Ito asks dryly.

“Ha! Of course, of course, it’s not like I was planning to savor it myself.”

Waving his hand, Omura’s coworker and fellow dead man refuses the cigarette. “I’m quitting.”

“Odd time to quit,” sliding the box back into his pocket, Omura stands and walks to his lonely cigar, swiveling his office chair to face the others. No use letting it burn down without him. “Would you have accepted if it was this one?”

“Maybe,” looking down at his hands, wringing each other, Ito frowns. “Felt like a sign.”

“To quit?”

“To start fresh,” the disheveled psychiatrist corrects. “If we survive.” It’s unsaid, but the odds are slim.

“I think,” coughing in the smokey air, Rebecca stops her thought and holds out a hand. “Screw it. Give me one.” Indulging her, Omura produces a smoke, tossing it to her. A tiny arthropod crawls out from inside her shirt and extends a proboscis that sparks with a tiny flame, lighting the tip. Rebecca only continues after she takes a long drag and coughs through it. “I think there’s only two routes to surviving. We disappear somewhere or we come clean.”

“Inigo said that he was working on clearing our debts,” Ito’s voice doesn’t carry half the conviction he wishes his words did.

The heavily, eternally pregnant woman sighs. “And did he seem confident last time we asked him about it?” The silence answers her. “So we pool our resources and get out of the country. That’s the only way to a fresh start.”

“Good idea. The organizations we’ve got coming for us are based only in Japan, after all,” Omura nods his head sagely, while Rebecca scoffs at his sarcasm.

“Then we turn ourselves in? Prison. Out in forty years if we’re lucky, like that old fart Sentaro,” Rebecca bemoans.

“I know what I’m going to do,” and since he said it, it mustn’t be completely true. But Conman lets himself believe this one, among all of his own lies he’ll believe this one.

“That book?” Rebecca asks, already knowing the answer.

Ito meets his eyes grimly. “It’s a suicide note.”

Raising the cigar to his lips, Conman takes a deep breath in through the thickly rolled deathstick. “This is the worst I’ve felt in years,” he lies confidently. It’s the feeling of a free conscience.