Mr Pulano Mengano

The rain stopped and the day of reckoning dawned.

Early in the morning, Boris and his team of knights arrived to accompany the Grand Duke and Duchess. Upon seeing the severed bridge, they immediately alerted the rescue team, who swiftly came to the scene.

To investigate the previous night’s murder and the guilt of the Viscountess Borodin, Nikolai filed a complaint with the magistrate, who sent investigators to the hotel.

Like the Viscountess Borodin, Judith was arrested, but Nikolai promised to send her a competent lawyer in the capital.

While he was talking to the investigators, pretending to be an ordinary citizen, Katya tapped the shoulder of Mr Mengano, who was standing there in a daze.

[What’s wrong?]

“Come with me for a minute.”

She led Mengano to a corner of the reception desk and pulled out a first aid kit.

He’d previewed the location when he’d given Katya her cold medicine.

Mengano’s hands were cut and bruised.

Last night, when he’d pushed the trolley and rushed to visit Judith, he’d bumped into the door.

No one noticed, only Katya.

[Oh, it’s nothing, you don’t have to worry about it–]

But Katya didn’t want to hear anymore, so she took his hand and began to disinfect it.

She would have done the same even if she understood Archetian.

In the end, Mengano had no choice but to let her do her thing.

It was the first time he’d ever been held by a woman, and he was nervous.

“You worked really hard yesterday. The situation was such that even Mr. Mengano was suspicious, and I’m sorry about that. As a hotelier, you worked hard to the end to provide the best experience to the guests by yourself.”

[…….]

“Oh, what does experience mean in Archetian?”

Katya, who was fluent in her native language, stuttered as she tried to speak in her unusually weak Archetian.

[Good experience. Thank you].

As she finally came up with the words, she spoke with a proud expression on her face, and Mengano, who was receiving treatment, smiled wryly.

He glanced down at the sloppy but carefully wrapped bandages for a moment before removing his tinted glasses and wiping them with a soft cloth.

It was hard to see her face.

When he put them back on, he could see her clearly, sitting face-to-face in front of him.

“I’d like to come back to your hotel again sometime, Mr. Mengano. What’s your name? If you ever change jobs, I’d like to follow you.”

After all, this had happened to him on his first day of work, so it wasn’t unreasonable for him to change hotels due to trauma.

Katya sincerely wished she knew his full name.

He was a courageous and conscientious manager.

[Name. The whole thing!]

Looking into her eyes, Mengano opened his mouth with a faint smile.

Somehow, she felt compelled to answer.

[Pulano Mengano.]

I’ll tell you something only you should know. He swallowed the words down.

“Tia, where are you?”

Katya jumped at the sound of her husband’s voice searching for her.

“Just rest here for a while. Okay?”

She bowed to him, then turned and walked out beyond the reception desk.

Mengano watched Katya’s back for a moment as she left.

Her last words seemed impossible to keep.

“Were you looking for me?”

“Where were you?”

Nikolai, who had finally found her, asked in a concerned tone as he gently took her hand.

“Just over there at the information desk.”

At that, he cast a glance over Katya’s shoulder.

“Were you alone?”

“No, I was with Mr. Mengano–”

When Katya turned around, Mengano was already gone.

“Huh? Where did he go?”

As she stood there dumbfounded, the investigators approached the couple.

“We’d like to talk to the manager you were with about the case. Where is he now?”

“Well, I think he was just with my wife, but I can’t see where she went for a minute.”

“Then I’ll take the manager’s statement when I see him. What is his name?”

The investigator, who had been taking out a notebook and taking notes throughout Nikolai’s statement, asked.

“Mr. Mengano.”

“And you don’t know his first name besides his last?”

“Yes. That’s all I know…….”

“It’s Pulano! Good thing I asked him earlier.”

Katya said, interrupting the conversation.

Although it wasn’t because of this, there was some satisfaction in having asked.

“Aha, thank you. Mr. Pulano-Mengano.”

The investigator wrote it down, pronouncing the last word long and hard.

It was then that something flashed through Nikolai’s mind as he listened.

“Wait a minute, Tia. Did the manager really say that?”

“Yes! Why?”

“In Archetian, pulano mengano is a phrase used to refer to an unidentified man. It means Mr. Anything.”

The name had long been used negatively in newspaper articles to describe unidentified criminals or unidentified bodies. So there was no way he could have named himself that if he was truly Archetian.

The man had given it to Katya, who didn’t speak much Archetian.

After hearing Nikolai’s explanation and sensing something was amiss, the investigators dispersed and began scouring the hotel.

But Pulano Mengano was already gone.

The search yielded nothing else.

They found several men and women lying dead in an underground wine cellar.

Fortunately, they were all still breathing and appeared unharmed.

The investigators, who had brought in a doctor from the village, were relieved to hear that they had simply fallen asleep.

“Look at this. Wake up!”

One by one, the investigators grabbed them and shook them awake, and they opened their bleary eyes.

“Uh, why are we here?”

“Were you staying at this hotel?”

They all shook their heads.

Turns out, the sleepers were the real Archetian owners and hotel staff.

Without them, the mystery that Mengano had been struggling with was solved.

They claimed that they had no recollection of eating the cookies given by the guest.

The investigators put together a montage based on the descriptions they had heard from Katya and Nikolai, including glasses, a hawkish nose, and a mustache, and showed it to them.

“That’s right, it was him!”

Mengano had put the original staff to sleep and pretended to be the manager for a day yesterday.

It had even happened before Judith, Baron Lanzkoi, and Viscountess Borodin had arrived.

“But why did he do that?”

Katya asked, looking back at Nikolai.

“Did they have a grudge or something?”

“Maybe. Or maybe he came here for something else and got caught up in this incident unintentionally.”

None of the money at the front desk or the valuable decorations in the hotel were missing.

This was not a robbery for money.

“It would have been easier to put the staff to bed and close the hotel. But the fact that they bothered to pretend to be in charge in front of the guests suggests that one of the three probably had an errand to run.”

As they struggled with the mystery, the mysterious man arrived in Vasnetsov’s city center.

The man who dismounted was no longer the Mengano they remembered.

The hawkish nose, the beard, the hair that looked as if it might fall out at any moment – all of Pulano Mengano’s features were gone, and in their place stood an athletic, handsome man.

The effects of the shapeshifting potion had worn off after 24 hours.

The man removed the glasses he wore as camouflage.

He remembered removing them earlier, when he wanted to see Katya’s face properly.

He almost forgot to pretend to be blind and looked at her with his bare eyes.

Katya didn’t notice, but for a split second, he lowered his head and his hands were shaking as he cleaned his glasses.

He could still feel the tremor he’d felt then.

The trembling wasn’t from fear of being recognized, but from the way she took his hand.

“It’s been a long day.”

In fact, Katya was right.

He had been following Baron Lanzkoi, an important source in the investigation.

When he realized that the Baron had booked into this hotel, he took the opportunity to meet with him privately.

Posing as the hotel manager, he lets his guard down, approaches him, and tries to extract information, only to be killed by Judith.

After Baron Lanzkoi was found dead, he ransacked his room under the guise of cleaning up the murder scene to get what he needed for his investigation.

“Little did I know that I would run into His Highness the Grand Duke.”

He did, in fact, recognize Nikolai.

He, too, was a nobleman, but he had left the family before Nikolai ascended to the Grand Duke’s throne and hadn’t had much opportunity to see him.

He’d met him up close once, but he wasn’t the kind of person to pay attention to others, and even that was a blur.

Plus, he had dyed his hair, which has been even more confusing.

He didn’t recognize him from the start. It wasn’t until he saw his calm response to Baron Lanzkoi’s murder that he thought of the Grand Duke.

He was still nervous, so he tried to get a closer look.

[What’s going on at this hour?]

[I just wanted to make sure your door was secured in case there were any intruders wandering around.]

He lurked in the hallway, using the excuse of serving tea in the middle of the night.

“What if he’s got something in there?”

“But how can you just send it back. After all the trouble he took to bring it here, how can we just let it go and send it back? It’s something that only requires acceptance, isn’t it?”

“You don’t drink the black tea your husband gives you, but you trust the one given to you by a strange man?”

As she talked about the tea, he realized that the man in front of him was indeed the Grand Duke.

Contrary to the infamous rumors surrounding his nickname, the ‘Grand Duke of Blood,’ he was in love.

Nikolai was attentive to his wife at every opportunity, especially in the hallway, where he would put one arm around Katya and pull her close to him, resting his chin on her head.

As if to keep her away from other men.

He even referred to himself as her husband.

There was no need to speak in Hersen and falsely call himself her husband in front of someone from Archetia.

‘He married without telling the capital?’

The man tipped his hat in the direction of the hotel.

“It was an honor to meet you.”

His Highness the Grand Duke, and…… Her Highness the Grand Duchess.

His name is Pavel Petrozsky.

The older brother of Ivan, who had broken away from the Petrozsky family early on. And who had won Katya’s heart by winning the final of the last jousting tournament…….

Maybe even Katya’s first love.

Nikolai would freak out if he found out.

With a quick bow, Pavel turned his attention to his next destination.