The case files of jewele.., p.1
The Case Files of Jeweler Richard Vol. 1, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyrights and Credits
Table of Contents Page
Case 1: The Pink Sapphire of Justice
Case 2: The Ruby of Truth
Case 3: The Amethyst of Protection
Case 4: The Diamond of Memory
Extra Case: To Wish Upon a Rose Quartz
Newsletter
A FRIEND HAD INVITED ME to join him working the night shift part-time at a TV station. Specifically, our job was to guard the studio’s many keys. At least two people had to be on duty at all times, but all the job entailed was lending out keys to people using the studio and making sure they got back to their appropriate spot on the rack when they were done. That was it. The shifts were irregular, but the work was easy. It was in Shibuya, too, so I got to brush shoulders with celebrities from time to time—not that I could exactly say anything to them, since they were there for work. The job felt like a surprisingly good fit.
I started over winter break, but once I was going to class four days a week during the day, then straight to my job in the evening, taking a morning nap in the break room and heading right back to school, it really did a number on my internal clock. I could never quite think clearly. My wallet was full, but I had nothing in particular to spend the money on. I don’t think I’d ever heard someone use my actual name at work—both my friend and I were uniformly addressed as “guard.” Even food was starting to taste bland. I knew I couldn’t keep it up much longer.
I’d signed up for a hardcore prep course for the civil service exam but hadn’t even been able to start studying. I’d never thought of myself as the kind of person who was very sensitive to this sort of thing, but I got the feeling it was just an issue of time management. Come April, it would have been two full months of this.
I guess I’ll just try to get my shifts reduced or find a new part-time job if I can’t manage it? Yeah, that’s the plan.
All of that swirled through my head as I walked through Yoyogi Park that evening. I heard the voices of some drunks coming from one of the paths off the main road. They seemed to be arguing about something, but a wall of high shrubs made it impossible to see anything. I had gotten off early that day, so it was about midnight, and there was nothing in particular going on that might lead one to expect this sort of rowdiness.
I crossed the road and ran toward the voices. There were four or five people—men in worn-out suits—raising hell. The man in the middle of the group, carrying a suitcase, had tripped and fallen.
One of the drunks cackled and dumped his beer on the man’s head. I took a deep breath.
“Officer! Right over there! Hurry! Someone’s being attacked!”
The over-excited drunks scattered and escaped into the station. The man on the ground remained. He pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket to wipe himself off.
“Are you okay?”
“…You’re a lifesaver.”
Under the light of the bug zapper, the man turned around. He had blond hair, blue eyes, and an impeccable command of Japanese, but his features were most captivating of all. I prayed he hadn’t caught the little “whoa” I’d let out under my breath.
I’m going to make a bold assertion: I’ve never laid eyes on a more beautiful human being in my life. He had high cheekbones and a perfectly sculpted nose, gently curled blond hair, and his skin was pale and silky smooth. His eyes were a shade of blue that I felt like I could stare at for hours. It was like someone had taken individual parts from all the most beautiful people in the world and combined them in immaculate balance to create this creature. Time and space—even down to the tiny particles of dust in the air—all flowed at a different pace around this man. It was almost enough to make you believe in the divine. It might have been some kind of fated meet-cute—if he’d been a woman, that was.
The most beautiful man I’d ever seen in my life was standing before me in a grey suit.
He told me his name was Richard.
The two of us walked through the park together until we got to the police box in front of the station. I encouraged him to file a report. One of the wheels on his black cloth rolling suitcase was broken. I offered to carry it for him, but Richard stubbornly refused.
“Richard… Rana, uh… Sorry, could you say that again?”
Being stationed in Harajuku, the officer wasn’t terribly accustomed to foreign names as he struggled to file the report on his neglected computer. The blond man handed him a card from his wallet. His name was written in roman characters on one side and Japanese script on the other: Richard Ranasinghe de Vulpian. The difficulty certainly shot up in the second half of his name—it almost sounded like a tongue twister—and the officer had to make constant reference to the business card as he typed. The other officer offered us bottled green tea but didn’t say a word. He didn’t look nervous, though. Maybe it was a religious thing or something.
“Are you a Japanese citizen?”
“British, actually.”
“Are you here on vacation? Business? What line of work are you in?”
“Business. I deal in precious gemstones. I’m a jeweler.”
A jeweler. I had no idea how you’d even get to know someone in that profession, other than going to a department store or a jewelry store or something. What was he doing out here at this hour, anyway?
The office asked if he was a street peddler, and Richard responded by opening up his suitcase. It was packed to the brim with countless little boxes. He pulled one out and removed the rubber band holding it closed. Inside were a number of little vinyl bags.
Both officers gasped and leaned forward, thinking it might be illicit narcotics. I took the bait, too, but the bags didn’t contain nefarious white powder. Inside were blue stones, each about the size of a watch crown and a shade of blue that looked like the deep ocean in crystal form. There must have been about thirty in one bag. They looked almost like beads. Stones of different shades were in other bags. And there were dozens of them.
“Oh. What are those, emeralds?”
“Sapphires. I typically sell these through appointment at clients’ homes. Most of these appointments are made for after a client gets home from work, so I am often out quite late.”
“You walk around town with this stuff? That seems a little careless.”
“There were some rather…unique circumstances today.”
Richard, the jeweler, began to tell us a story that made it sound like this might very well have been the worst day of his life.
Once he’d finished making a house call to one of his clients, Richard took a taxi, like he usually did. But this time, he happened to get a new driver—one who didn’t know the route to the Shimbashi Station exit near the hotel. Despite this, the driver was full of baseless confidence and ultimately got them progressively more lost. The meter kept running up, with the driver showing no signs of stopping. Finally running out of patience, Richard had the driver let him off outside Yoyogi Park. This was when he encountered the ill-mannered drunks, had beer poured all over him, and broke his luggage.
One of the officers started to laugh in the middle of the story. I glared at him, and the older one shrugged.
“You really oughta be grateful to this young man here. Things could have ended much worse for you if he hadn’t been there. I’m sorry, young man, but could you give us your name? We need your eyewitness testimony, too.”
I wrote my name on the notepad on the desk with a ballpoint pen. The officer looked at my first name—written with the same characters as “justice”—and guessed “Masayoshi” for the reading, but I shook my head and wrote the pronunciation down, too: Seigi Nakata.
“Wow! You really did your name justice, huh? I’m impressed!” The older officer, named Suzuki, chuckled heartily. I just smiled awkwardly.
It was 12:45 a.m. by the time they finally let us go. I told him I’d wait with him until the taxi got to the police box, and he gave me this look, like he was utterly baffled by me.
“Are you sure you’re not a knight?”
“A night?”
“A gentleman,” Richard pronounced expertly in native-sounding English. “You accompanied me until I was finished with the police even though they said you could leave earlier.”
“Well, it would’ve been annoying if I’d left and they realized they still needed me for something, right?”
The taxi was taking its sweet time, so Richard went into the convenience store next to the coin-operated lockers in front of the station. He bought two bottles of water and returned to where we’d been waiting. The moment he handed one of them to me, the taxi finally arrived.
I let out a loud “um” without really thinking, and he paused.
“I, um, I know you’ve been through a lot today, but please don’t let this experience make you hate Japan. Not everyone’s like those idiots.”
“I’m quite aware. Not to mention, making sweeping generalizations about people is a rather foolish endeavor. You shouldn’t feel responsible for their behavior.”
Foolish. I hadn’t heard that word in a long time.
The blond man with a much greater command of my own native language than I placed his suitcase in the back seat of the taxi instead of the trunk. This rather unusual meeting was coming to an end. Deciding this might be my only chance to bring up what was on my mind, I took it.
“Excuse me, just one last thing! Mr. Richard, you appraise jewelr
Richard looked a bit surprised at first. His eyes, blue like the sapphires he’d pulled out at the police box, gazed at me. The taxi driver grumpily announced that he was closing the door from the driver’s seat, but Richard stuck a leg out, setting his gleaming leather shoe on the asphalt. He took a business card from his breast pocket and gave it to me with one hand.
“Jewelry Étranger” it said. I had to wonder what “étranger” meant. It had an e-mail address and phone number on it as well.
“Call me any time. I’m fairly easy to find near Nihonbashi.”
“But—”
“Until we meet again, my knight in shining armor,” Richard said with a smile. I was speechless, probably because it was absolutely impossible to argue with him. And it wasn’t just his face but all of his mannerisms, too.
The taxi vanished into the night, leaving nothing but a streak of orange from its taillights. I got on what was nearly the last train on the Yamanote line and returned to my apartment in Takadanobaba, where I finally checked my phone to see I had a text. It was from Hiromi, my mother.
“How are you? I’ve been well. I’m heading out to work!”
She seemed to be in good spirits. I was living on my own, so I was diligent about answering her texts. Sitting in my underwear and a tank top, I typed out, “I helped a stranger out tonight. He was shockingly beautiful. I wonder if he was a model.”
Ultimately, however, I deleted that and sent her my usual, “Good luck at work. I’m doing fine. Heading to bed now.” My mother wasn’t really the person to be texting about every trivial detail of my day, anyway.
After that, I looked up the name of the jewelry shop from the business card. Apparently étranger meant “stranger” in French. The shop had a website, but it was only available in English and Chinese, so I didn’t get very far there. They didn’t sell anything online, either. It must’ve been a physical location. Regardless, it was definitely a real jewelry shop.
Maybe the whole incident was a blessing in disguise, though.
I opened the fridge. I’d been skimping on cooking lately, so there was nothing but pickles and condiments in it. And one other thing in my unused freezer—a small black box. It had been ages since I’d even taken it out.
Inside the cloth-covered box was a platinum ring with a tiny pink jewel in the middle.
I patted the muzzle of the Mitsukoshi Ginza lion statue for the first time. It was nice and smooth. An unfamiliar world lay before me as I emerged from the Ginza subway station: Chuo City, the second-smallest of Tokyo’s twenty-three wards, after Taito Ward. It had a different atmosphere than Shinjuku, with its variety of businesses, and had the polar opposite of Shibuya and Harajuku’s lively, youthful vibes. All the buildings were around the same size, with each storefront perfectly aligned, like an expensive bento box. It was almost like the city was an intricate diorama built to display beautiful buildings and advertising that humans were merely allowed to borrow. Though a few things had seemingly slipped through the cracks, like the retro clocktower and bronze statues.
I waited on the second floor of a chain coffee shop near Mitsukoshi. Right on time, the man whose face I would never forget in a million years, even though I’d only met him once, appeared with a brand-new black suitcase in tow. With each table he passed, the customers turned their heads, one after the other—like toppling dominos—to get a look at beauty incarnate. What was this, a zoo?
Richard greeted me with a casual hello and a raised hand. He was wearing a dark blue suit and a button-down shirt. He’d immediately agreed to meet me when I called, saying that it was pointless to discuss an item without being able to look at it. Being a student, my schedule was pretty flexible, so I left the location to him. That was how I ended up in the middle of Ginza.
And so, the man who looked like he could be a walking billboard for a high-class menswear line sat down in front of me. I, on the other hand, was wearing a pair of khakis and a cardigan.
“Thank you again for the help the other day. I hope you’ve been well.”
“I have, thanks. Man, you really are good at Japanese.”
“Language is an important tool of my trade, after all.”
Richard’s tray only had sweets and water on it. It was a little unusual, given drinks were definitely cheaper than the food here. I hadn’t even touched my coffee yet, but I sat up straight and got right to it.
“I brought the ring. I want you to grade it for me.”
I took the small black box out of my backpack, popped the lid open, and showed him the ring with the pink stone in the middle. It was no bigger than the plastic head of a sewing pin, but it glimmered as the light reflected off its facets. It was roughly the same dimensions in terms of length and width—a brilliant, round stone. The silvery metal of the ring was unadorned, with no trace of engraving. It was the singular piece of jewelry I owned.
“It appears to be a pink sapphire.”
“Huh. I did try researching what it might be online, but I was never sure.”
“I see,” Richard said with a nod.
I continued, “It’s a keepsake from my grandmother on my mother’s side. She passed away when I was in high school… She was always convinced it was a fake.”
The jeweler looked a bit surprised. I kept going.
“I mean, it’s weird, right? But my family doesn’t own any other precious jewelry, so neither my mother or I had any idea what to do with it. I couldn’t stand the idea of leaving it unresolved forever, so I wanted to take it to an expert to have it appraised.”
“For stones other than diamonds, we don’t call it ‘grading’ but ‘identifying.’ What you’re looking for is an identification report, unless you were interested in more than the question of the stone’s authenticity.”
“Can you tell if it’s a fake just from looking at it?”
“To a degree,” he nodded. He really was a professional. I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything less. “That said, fakes have gotten quite convincing as of late, so I can’t be one hundred percent confident of my assessment. I would prefer to give it a more thorough examination to be sure.”
When I asked if he’d hold on to it to do just that, Richard’s expression soured for a moment.
“…No?”
“Normally, people aren’t so quick to entrust something so valuable to a total stranger.”
“But we’re not total strangers.”
“Perhaps ‘total’ was a bit of an overstatement. I could be a much wickeder person than those drunks in Yoyogi Park, for all you know. What if I were accepting the ring under false pretenses to defraud you? You would never see your precious heirloom again.”
I didn’t mean to, but I nearly burst out laughing. Was that his problem? I remembered reading in a magazine ages ago that since gems held such value, trust was paramount in the industry. And Richard was an established member of that industry.
“You’re probably right, but I don’t think a bad guy would go out of his way to say something like that. Did you ever consider the reverse, though? What if I were a swindler who gave you a fake before demanding you give me the ‘real’ one back? Well, don’t worry. I took thorough photos of the ring and even made two sets of printouts. You should take one. What else should we do just to be safe? Add some kind of seal, maybe?”
Honestly, I didn’t really expect an almost total stranger to trust me, but I did really want to know more about the stone. Richard remained silent even after I made my case. I hoped he would believe me. After all, he did see all my personal information at the police box that night.
“So, I don’t have a lot of money, but could you give me an estimate?”
“Somewhere between three and five thousand yen on the high end if I use a domestic lab.”
“That’s so cheap! Oh, uh, sorry. Whenever I looked into it online, the quotes were always in the tens of thousands.”
“That sounds about right for a formal identification report from an American lab. If you don’t mind using a domestic one, it should be in the range I mentioned. Is that acceptable?”
“That’s fine by me. I just want some answers to set this to rest. How long will it take?”
“It could be as little as a week or closer to a month, depending.”
I asked him to go ahead, bowing my head, and he nodded in response. Glad we’d managed to work something out, I began to drink my coffee, but then Richard cut in with a question.
