The Rolling Bootlegs Read Free

open wound, as though returning to its host. When all the blood had vanished, the wound itself disappeared. There wasn’t a single stain left on the table.
    If I’d been watching this on some kind of screen, I’d have been able to call it a cheesy special effect and laugh it off. However, unfortunately, it had happened right in front of me.
    Both the way the liquid moved, defying gravity, and the way the wound closed in the blink of an eye had been so corny I thought CGI might actually look better. That only made it creepier.
    I thought I might have been the only one in the place—no, in the world—who’d witnessed this abnormality. Here, in this restaurant with its slightly upscale atmosphere, a guy had just scrambled the laws of physics.
    …And yet not one of the customers or employees was even looking our way.
    After giving it a little thought, I spoke to…whatever it was…in front of me.
    Are you going to kill me? I asked.
    At that, the man looked a bit surprised. Then he smiled again.
    “That’s a reaction I haven’t seen before. Up until now, when I showed this to people, some of them brandished crucifixes at me, and some whipped out guns and started firing… The police hauled away the latter, of course. Poor devils; I’m afraid that was mean of me. Come to think of it, there were some who ran the second they saw the knife.”
    Well, duh.
    “Why did you think I’d kill you?”
    Because I thought you were a monster, I answered honestly. Then I apologized for treating him like a monster, and at the same time, I told him that, whether it was real or a trick, he should stop scaring people like that.
    “…You really are a rare breed. No one’s ever stayed this calm before.”
    Unfeeling
would probably have been a more accurate assessment than
calm
. I hear this from people all the time, but apparently the shock of almost getting eaten by a brown bear once in Hokkaido had numbed my sense of fear. I’ve been told I should become a war photographer, but I don’t have the know-how to get across a battlefield, so I’d die for sure. I didn’t want to die, so I’d stayed a wildlife photographer.
    When I told him this, the man looked me in the eye, steadily. He seemed entertained.
    “You’re quite a fascinating person. …Listen, since you’re here, would you be interested in hearing me talk about old times? The story of how I acquired this power of immortality, and the curious tales surrounding it… It would be a good way to pass the time.”
    That did sound like an intriguing story…but was it all right for me to hear it? After all, we’d just met.
    “It doesn’t matter. Even if you told others about it, I doubt they’d believe you.”
    I told him, firmly, that it had better not be anything religious. There was somebody immortal right in front of me, and I’m not sure why I was so calm. Looking back, I think I was a complete moron.
    “Ah, don’t worry. It’s nothing to do with anything like that. It really is just a simple way to kill time. …Although I suppose a demon does make an appearance in this story.”
    The man who’d called himself a Camorra
contaiuolo
, a man who was apparently immortal, ordered our food from the waitress, and then slowly began to relate his “legend.”
    “All right. Then I’ll begin… It’s the tale of a man who drank the demon’s liquor and gained immortality. That miserable man’s lonely, lonely yarn. The stage is Prohibition-era New York. It’s a story of the peculiar destiny surrounding the sudden appearance of the ‘liquor of immortality,’ and of the spiral of people who found themselves drawn into it…”



PROLOGUE
    1711     The Atlantic Ocean          The
Advena Avis
    Alchemy.
    Believed to have originated in ancient Egypt, it was an academic discipline, a skill, and at the same time, a culture.
    Having sprung from Egyptian arts, it came to Western Europe via the Arab world during the Renaissance and deeply permeated the society