Even though he was calling from a payphone, Handa chose his words carefully, one by one, apparently paying no mind to the dwindling minutes on his telephone calling card. His tone suggested that, more than explaining it to Monoi, he was trying to convince himself.
As Monoi listened to him on the other end of the phone, once again he allowed the fateful bond he had with this corporation—Hinode—to slowly chafe at him. If it weren’t for this Sugihara person—this Hinode board member—neither his grandson, Takayuki, nor Hiroyuki Hatano would be dead. Or if Hinode as a corporation had even a shred of integrity, Hatano would never have sent them a threatening letter or tape.
“So you’re saying Hinode is a go?”
“Absolutely. Oh, and also, in the Toho Weekly magazine that went on sale yesterday, in their ‘Face of Japan’ feature, there’s a photo of Kyosuke Shiroyama. He’s dressed casually—a classy, simple summer sweater and faded chino pants. He’s even got on a well-worn pair of white Reebok sneakers—this guy has pretty good style. Looks to me like they took the photo on the grounds of a small shrine. I knew I’d seen that landscape somewhere, so I went to confirm it in person, and it was just as I’d thought. You know those stone steps in front of Omori Station? Tenso Shrine is at the top of those steps.”
“Ah, I know it. So the president of Hinode lives in Sanno. Of course, a wealthy residential neighborhood.”
“The address is in Sanno Ni-chome. I looked it up and checked it out myself. An impressive home. A huge yard, dense trees offering cool shade, and a glass greenhouse. No dog.”
Handa spoke as if he were recalling each item one by one in his mind, then he murmured, “A kidnapping might work,” and seemed to snort softly.
As this word—kidnapping—echoed in Monoi’s ears, another thought—ransom—ran through his mind, where the numbing effect of the fiend still prevailed, followed by no moral judgment whatsoever. There was merely the realization that, little by little, their plan was being set into motion.
“Hey, I only just thought of this. Sanno Ni-chome is in the precinct of Omori Police Department—to the north it’s Oi, in Shinagawa. To the south it’s Kamata. All of that is my turf. The emergency deployment instructions over wireless will be leaked straight to me . . . This could get interesting.” Handa let his imagination run wild, then regained an administrative tone. “By the way, I spoke with Nunokawa yesterday. I got a good impression. It’s still the Bon holiday, so he said he would call you tomorrow or the day after. Also, that Yoshiko Sugihara we talked about got married in ’92—now her name is Itoi. I plan on scoping out the situation.”
That was the end of Handa’s phone call.
The telephone call from Jun’ichi Nunokawa came in the following afternoon. He too called from a payphone, and there must have been a playground nearby, because children squealed in the background.
Every year, during the time when the main horseracing tournaments moved to the countryside for July and August, Lady’s usual care facility also went on a summer break, so Nunokawa and his wife were kept busy looking after their daughter. When Monoi heard Nunokawa’s voice over the phone, it dawned on him that now must be that time.
“Yesterday, I put the girl into a special care facility,” Nunokawa said. “This place keeps her there over the weekend. With my wife sick, well, it’s more than I can handle on my own.”
I see, so Lady isn’t at home. Hearing this, Monoi felt a rush of both pity for Lady and relief that Nunokawa had been given a little reprieve. He was at a loss for words. Finally, he replied, “I see.”
Nunokawa also took a long pause. Even though he was the one who had made the call, perhaps he had not sorted out what he intended to say, for that the next thing Monoi heard was an abrupt, “Damn, it’s hot.” Nunokawa’s voice, as usual, bore no discernable emotion or inflection, and managed to communicate only one or two of the hundred things he could have said.
“Yes, it sure is.”
“By the way, I talked with Handa-san. I want in.”
“What’s your motive?”
“Do I need one?”
“Not necessarily, but I’m sure you’ve been thinking about a lot of things, too.”
“I just want to come to terms with my life.”
“What for?”
“I’m sure you can tell by looking at my life.”
“Your life? You’re a skillful driver, you earn six, seven hundred thousand yen a month, your wife is sick, and your daughter has a disability. So what? There are countless other lives just like yours.”
Monoi worried that Nunokawa might take offense and hang up the phone, but the line was still connected. Instead, he heard a guttural “Ah”—more like a yelp than a sigh—that seemed to have erupted from deep within Nunokawa’s body, and then, silence resumed. On the other end of the line, the crack of a baseball hitting a bat followed by children’s voices cheering and laughter resounded.
There was no rhyme or reason, it was not about happiness or the lack thereof—just that each person led their own fragile life. Nunokawa had said all along that his daughter would stay in a facility until she turned eighteen, but he had no idea how he would take care of her when she was in her thirties and forties. Even if there were plenty of other parents who took care of children with disabilities, as long as the person in question—Nunokawa himself—said he couldn’t do it, perhaps the impossible remained impossible.
Handa had said there was a possibility that Nunokawa might vanish, and Monoi guessed that could be what he meant by “coming to terms with his life.” Which was all the more reason Monoi needed to question him further. If he were to join them out of self-destruction, it could cause trouble for all of them.
“Nunokawa-san. Take your wife on a nice trip to a hot spring spa or wherever. We’re not going to pull this off today or tomorrow, so there’s no rush to give me an answer.”
“So long as the joker that I drew isn’t going anywhere, my answer’s not gonna change.”
“By ‘joker,’ do you mean Lady?”
“Who else would it be? Out of a thousand babies, there are only one or two jokers, and my wife and I, we drew one of them. Is there any other way to say it?”
A child born with a disability, a child who dies after crashing into the wall of the Shuto Expressway at 100 km per hour, Seiji Okamura, who suffered from mental illness, and Monoi himself, transformed into a fiend in his old age—of all the fates that fell down from the heavens, in the eyes of a parent, at least, Monoi could not deny that “joker” was a fitting description.
“Then she’s a Lady Joker,” Monoi said, and as if a levee had broken, laughter erupted from Nunokawa, which went on for a while, and then he hung up the phone.
As if she had been waiting for his long phone call to be over, the lady pharmacist shouted from the store, “Shall I cut up some watermelon?”
“A slice for the altar, please!” Monoi yelled back.
Before long, she came into the living room with three slices of watermelon on a tray. “Here we are,” she said. She sat down on the tatami floor and remarked, “That was a long call.”
“When your hearing starts to go, you have to ask them to repeat everything.”
“Your hearing’s starting to go, Monoi-san?”
“Your voice is loud, so I hear you just fine.”
Monoi offered a slice of watermelon for the altar, struck the gong, and joined his hands together. Seiji’s urn and memorial tablet had been left as they were—since the wake, there was still no word from Okamura Merchants in Hachinohe. If he didn’t hear from them before the equinoctial week, Monoi planned to bury Seiji in his family plot in Herai.
After polishing off the slice of watermelon that the pharmacist had bought on sale in the shopping district, Monoi stood up to water the sidewalk as he did every evening. She had gone out to the storefront before him, and had been chatting idly for nearly fiv
e minutes with a housewife from the neighborhood, giggling gaily. The housewife had been their customer for going on ten years. She always purchased the same stomach remedy and multi-symptom cold medicine, and now and then she would buy whatever she had forgotten to pick up at the supermarket—cough drops, bug spray, mosquito coils, talcum powder, cleanser, toilet paper, and so on.
The other patrons of Monoi Pharmacy were more or less the same. Under the management of an owner with no business acumen, the pharmacist did a good job; she recommended brands with high rebates for the customers, wangled beer coupons and gift certificates from the distributors’ sales reps and cashed them in at the voucher exchange shop, handing him his share: “Here’s your take for the day. Fifty-fifty.”
The profits from a small pharmacy on the outskirts of the city were negligible, but even after deducting the pharmacist’s pay and various other expenses, Monoi still brought in three million yen a year, give or take, and this combined with his pension was enough for a single man of sixty-nine to go on living comfortably.
The housewife, seeing Monoi come into the store, called out affably, “Oh, hello there. I’ve been wondering about you since I saw the notice that you were in mourning.”
“Yes. When you get to be my age, all you do is send people off,” Monoi gave a noncommittal response along with a shy smile, and after lowering his bowed head two or three times like a turtle, he walked outside.
Beneath the woven reed shade, the seedpods at the ends of the shriveled morning glories’ stems were beginning to swell. Monoi subconsciously tilted the right side of his face toward them, and stared at the seedpods with his good right eye. Making a note in his mental calendar to remove the seeds in a week or so, he suddenly wondered, when these blue morning glories bloomed next year, where would he be and what would he be thinking? Even if he were to get his hands on a large sum of money, for a man who would be seventy, a life of revelry and luxury was utterly unnecessary, and with the most important thing—a sense of peace in his heart—moving ever further away from him, by this time next year, perhaps he would be an even more wretched fiend than he was now.
Monoi contemplated this and, resolving that at least he would no longer live the life of an animal, he murmured to himself, That would be good enough for me.
4
Shuhei Handa
Soon after the autumn equinox, there was an unusual drop in the incidence of violent crime, and Shuhei Handa took this opportunity to start seeing a dentist he knew near Kamata Station, making the excuse to those around him, “This is the only chance I have to get my teeth fixed.” Since his police department was being renovated and he was working out of a temporary office building in Hon-Haneda, his visits to the dentist became a good pretext for him to sneak off further afield. Handa also scrounged time from his comings and goings to make gradual contact with his conspirators.
At the end of September, just as their plan had started to take shape, on his usual way to the dentist Handa met up with Katsumi Koh. Whenever Koh was out making daytime rounds on sales calls, he always appeared in the three-piece ensemble of a modern Japanese banker-man: black briefcase, motorcycle, and helmet. He thought these made him conspicuous, so Koh made sure to leave his bike a little distance away.
When Handa met up with Koh at a coffee shop in a crowded shopping district on the west side of Kamata Station, the conversation bluntly got down to the question of how much money they would take from their target. As he ate his curry rice garnished with bright red pickled relish, Koh replied, “As much as we want.” Then he added, “Hinode’s got money to burn. They can get it from anywhere.”
“You don’t say. But how do you know?”
“It’s obvious. Look at this.” Koh thrust toward Handa the publicly listed company asset securities report that had been tucked inside the weekly magazine he was carrying. It was a slim, orange pamphlet titled Hinode Beer Company.
“Take a look at the category ‘Cash and Deposits’ at the very top of the assets section on the balance sheet.”
“163.2 billion yen . . .”
“The number from the previous term is next to it. Compare the two, and you’ll see there’s about a thirty-billion increase. That means money is going in and out by the tens of billions. That cash-and-deposits category lists the instantaneous number at the end of the term on December thirty-first, which doesn’t mean that same exact amount will be sitting in their bank account come January first. For a corporation with as many assets as Hinode, the sums of money they’re moving around is on a whole different scale—that much becomes clear just by looking at their financial statements.”
“So because they’re moving around huge amounts of money, we can take as much as we want?”
“Basically. For instance, below that same category do you see where it says ‘Other Current Assets’? It says ‘other’ because they’ve thrown various types of accounting in there. Short-term loans and reimbursements, temporary advances for travel and business trip expenses, unpaid bills, down payments, and so on. I can’t tell what type of money it is unless I see the actual ledger, but you can bet that there’s money caught up in there whose actual purpose is impossible for anyone on the outside to know. The fact that they have seventeen billion yen worth of it there—well, they’re in a league of their own.”
“You said they can get money from anywhere, but where, for instance, would it come from?”
“That’s Hinode’s problem.”
“But say you were in charge of finance at Hinode, how and from where would you get the money? If word got out to the public and to the police that Hinode had caved to criminal demands and coughed up the money, they’d lose their credibility—so they’d need to raise a slush fund without anyone on the outside being the wiser. Now, how would you do that?”
“It depends on the amount, but if it’s a matter of two or three hundred million, I would create a random expense item and charge it as a temporary advance, like the one I just mentioned. As for adjusting the account afterward, I would wait until things calm down and then chalk it up little by little as a deductible expense.”
Koh talked as if this were the easiest thing in the world. “Let’s see, what else . . .” He drew the pamphlet back toward himself. “A common nest for a slush fund is ‘Construction Suspense Account’ under fixed assets. Hinode’s got fifty billion in there this period. Huge, right? When they construct factories or other buildings, they make deals with contractors so that, for example, they can write up the price they’ve padded with an extra billion yen as a construction startup fee under this heading, and that’ll be the end of story. What else . . .”
Koh let his fingers trail lightly over the balance sheet and, mumbling, “This is good too,” paused in the middle of the section on liabilities. “This category called ‘Deposits Payable’ is also useful. See, a beer company pays taxes based on shipments. To insure against the possibility of a client going bankrupt before they can settle their account, they always take a deposit, and this is the category where they record such deposits. For example, Hinode deals with some sixty subsidiaries and affiliated companies, right? Under the guise of a joint marketing fund, they could make each company contribute fifty million, which comes out to three billion. If each paid a hundred million it would be six billion. That money could then be sorted under this ‘Deposits Payable.’ On the books, you’d see no problem whatsoever. Combine all these methods I’ve just mentioned, and coming up with ten billion or so is a breeze.”
As Handa listened, he was once again impressed by the finance man’s accounting savvy. Though perhaps he was more impressed with the sloppy accounting of large corporations.
“So, Handa-san. How much do you want to take? We should discuss that first.”
“That’s a tough question . . . How about two billion to start?”
“That’s all?” Koh looked up with dismay.
“Listen, Koh-san. We’re talki
ng about a crime. The money we get will be paid in cash or gold. That’s the iron rule for not getting caught.”
“What century do you think this is?” Koh said, looking dumbfounded again. “Transferring money is no big deal if they use one of their overseas subsidiaries and pay in dollars. Nowadays, everyone dealing in illegal transfers uses that trick.”
“No—it’s gotta be cash. Think of Monoi-san, and Nunokawa, and Yo-chan. How are they supposed to use dollars deposited in some offshore bank account?”
Hearing this, Koh deferred immediately, as if his practicality had been called into question. “You’re right.”
“Now, if it’s cash, there is a physical limit to how much we can carry. Those things you guys use—duralumin cases. How many stacks of ten million can one of those hold?” Handa asked.
“Twenty-one. You’re right, it’ll weigh quite a bit.”
“Then why don’t we say two billion for now?” Handa threw out the same number.
Koh replied, “Sure,” but he seemed to have little interest in the actual amount, instead moving on to the next subject. “More importantly, what’s the bargaining chip we’ll use to make them pay?”
“Bargaining chip? Of course we’ll go right for the jugular. We’ll take their beer sales hostage.”
“That sounds good.” A smile flickered over Koh’s face for the first time and, without looking up, he continued to spoon up the curry rice he had sloshed around on the plate. “If we can reduce their sales, Hinode won’t stand a chance—they’ll pony up two billion without any questions. In fact, I’d bet on it,” Koh said with his mouth full of rice.
“Lowering beer sales is a piece of cake. Isn’t that right, Koh-san?”
“There are vending machines all over Japan where anyone can buy beer. Add a little cyanide and that’s it—they’re finished.”
Lady Joker, Volume 1 Page 26