Pagliacci
"Any progress, sir?"
Hayami Hayato looked up from his desk, his brows drawn together in a frown, the younger man standing at his shoulder, expectant of some kind of response, the concept of interaction with a superior enough for him. He glanced at the officer's name tag. Yamabuki. For a moment, it crossed his mind that he might be ungrateful of his junior's interest in his investigation; for a moment, it crossed his mind that he might use this moment as a chance to let off steam, to kick downwards, to make this younger man feel stupid, feel insecure, just as older officers had done to him when he was still in uniform. To do that, however, would be to miss the opportunity to talk about that which vexed him so.
He leant back in his chair and let out a low groan.
"Ah, Yamabuki, I'm getting nowhere!" he declared loudly.
The younger man's face seemed to swell with enthusiasm and pride, excited that a senior officer was humouring him, was talking to him.
He picked up a chewed pencil, tapping the rubber firmly against a black and white photo on his desk, a young man with a startled expression, dark hair parted in the middle, conventionally attractive, he supposed.
"I'm convinced this Minami Kotaro is the Black Masked Rider RX, but I still can't prove it."
He looked towards the younger man, awaiting his input, and he clearly read the panic on his face, the fear that now he had engaged a senior officer in conversation, he had to avoid making a fool of himself.
Yamabuki swallowed hard.
"You… You haven't been able to catch him in the act?"
The junior officer looked like the mayor of Karinto New Town, Hayami reflected. When younger, he had holidayed in Karinto with his wife. People had told him then that he looked the mayor also. He paused, frowned slightly. Did that mean that he looked like Yamabuki? No. With an almost imperceptible shake of the head, he decided otherwise. No, Yamabuki and he looked nothing alike.
"I wouldn't be sitting here if I had caught Kotaro in the act."
He allowed himself this one mean comment, this one moment of reminding the younger man who was in charge.
Yamabuki went red in the face.
"Q-Quite right, sir."
Hayami allowed himself a small smile as he surveyed the assorted debris that filled his desk, scraps of paper littered with equations, digitised photographs reprinted in poor resolution, antique illustrations of life upon other worlds.
Maybe RX wasn't the problem, he thought dourly. Maybe it was him, his own inability to let go. Ever since he had lost Susan, he had thrown himself into the occult, the supernatural, chasing down anything weird, trying to straighten out the unnatural, to make sense of the world with law and order.
"Are you married, Yamabuki?" he asked, not looking up.
The younger man nodded.
"Yes, sir." He smiled warmly. "She's a prize. I don't know what I did to deserve her."
The next question would hurt, he thought, but he asked nonetheless.
"And children?"
"Yes, sir," Yamabuki said, just as warmly. "Three daughters, sir."
He remembered Susan, he remembered the long night in which her mother had been spirited away by Gorgom, used to incubate the Crab Mutant's own spawn. In that critical time, still needing her mother, fragile from the start, he had lost his daughter.
Doctors had told him the details of how it had happened, yet Hayami had never stopped believing that his newborn daughter had died of a broken heart. She had died too young to understand that there was a chance her mother would return, that she would be rescued… if only her father, if only the police, if only the Black Masked Rider had acted sooner.
"Hold onto them," he said softly.
"Y-Yes, sir," Yamabuki answered, although this time his voice seemed full of confusion.
In the days that had followed, Interpol had been around, a young detective speaking with an accent he could not place, flashing his badge, Detective Taki. Then, as well as Black Masked Rider, there had been that other masked figure, Memorial Soldier, his laser scimitar so much like the blade that RX now used.
Hayami's expression darkened. He remembered reports of that vigilante. At first, he had conflated them with the phantom thief, Matenro, but in the end there had been nothing to connect them.
Another unsolved case. He tightened his grasp on the pencil. He was determined not to let this matter with RX remain the same way.
He looked up at the young man again.
"Is that all?"
Hastily, the younger man nodded.
"Yes, sir!"
He departed swiftly and Hayami was left alone at his desk, his usual levity exhausted, all those bad memories now brought once more to the surface.
A year, how quickly things can change in a year. He remembered the shape of her pressed against him, so much smaller, so much frailer in death than she had been in life.
What was that song, that old song? Tears of a clown.
He tried to concentrate on the photograph before him, a young man with a startled expression, yet his vision was strangely blurred.