“Idiot. Who’s gonna use poison? I’m still a cop, you know?”
Koh guffawed, with grains of rice shooting out of his mouth. “Well then, doesn’t matter if it’s salt or sugar—the result will be the same.” He pushed aside his messy plate.
“That’s disgusting, wipe it off,” Handa said and threw a paper napkin at Koh, whose shoulders shook as he laughed, wiping away the bits of rice spilled on the table. “That pretty much suits your needs, right?”
Koh glanced up at him briefly, then immediately looked away as he replied brusquely, “Sure.” If their beer were to be contaminated with a foreign substance, Hinode’s stock price would plummet without a doubt, and the profit from margin trading would be all but guaranteed. But something in Koh’s eyes implied that this—a mere bonus to their main plan—should be something they agreed not to discuss.
Handa ordered two coffees from the waitress and brought the conversation back to its original topic. “Incidentally, with regard to the right moment to strike, you still think spring to summer is the window that’ll affect their sales the most?”
“I think so. The sales campaign will heat up in April. Hinode hasn’t released any new products this year, so they definitely will next spring. They’ll have an enormous budget to launch their advertising strategy, so it’s best for us to start when their shipments are in full swing. That should be late March.”
“All right. Then we’ll start at the end of March. Say, in terms of sales, how much would Hinode have to lose before they gave in?”
“If you mean how much loss they can withstand—even if an entire year’s worth of sales evaporated, with all their assets they still wouldn’t go under. But for senior management it’s a matter of responsibility, so I’m sure they’ll crack at a much lower number.”
“Well then, first I want you to evaluate Hinode’s break-even point.”
“It’s impossible to calculate accurately with just the numbers listed on the balance sheet. I can give you a rough estimate, though.”
“That’s fine. Next, you can get your hands on data that shows their average monthly shipping volume, right? From there, figure out where they break even for each month. How much loss would they suffer depending on how much shipping decreases, and at what point would Hinode’s management start to panic? I want you to create a simulation for those scenarios.”
“No sweat,” Koh replied succinctly.
The coffee that was brought over tasted awful as usual, as if it had been boiled down. Handa drank this same coffee practically every other day, paying 350 yen each time and sitting in the same slightly dirty chair. As he sipped the coffee, another self-deprecating thought started to spin inside his mind.
He had made a ritual of drinking every last drop of this incredibly nasty stuff. At some point, this very ritual had created the mentality of a hardened cop who no longer even recognized this coffee as awful. And here he was drinking it again today. Maybe I don’t hate the taste of it after all, he thought to himself. His thirteen years on the police force, where he had been able to nurture his fantasies over a single cup of coffee per day—maybe they hadn’t been so bad. And yet, his masochistic tendency had reached the point where he was now trying to destroy all of that by his own hand, and the truth was that he could no longer control it.
Handa contemplated this calmly. He was like an octopus devouring its own leg. If he allowed himself to demolish his career at the police department—a hotbed for his fantasies and pleasures for so many years—where would he go from there? Most likely, he would just set out again in search of even more terrible coffee. Realizing this, Handa’s spirit nearly drained out of him.
The point was, something was still missing. For this octopus to consume its own leg, there had better be a cause worth dying for. Kidnapping or tainting beer with a foreign substance was all well and good, but it wasn’t enough. Handa lost himself in this burning question, in the urgent but directionless search for that something.
The best place to meet up with Jun’ichi Nunokawa was at the wild bird sanctuary in Yashio, where Nippo Transport’s truck terminal was located, after he had finished the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe route. Every evening, Nunokawa left the terminal before eight and drove the six-hour Keihanshin route, as it was called, to Osaka, where he took an hour break during reshipment before heading back. Then, returning to Tokyo shortly after ten in the morning, he would soon take his minivan back to the company housing in Kachidoki. But if he saw Handa waiting for him in front of the main gate of the wild bird park, Nunokawa would circle halfway around the park to the parking lot on the south side, where he would pick Handa up.
Handa always tried to tailor the conversation to fit within the time it took to drive northward along the waterfront to where Nunokawa lived. It was obvious that the truck driver was exhausted after the Keihanshin round-trip, which was 550 kilometers each way. Nunokawa barely seemed to have the energy to open his mouth, and as if this were his last task before he could get to sleep, he forced his heavy-lidded eyes open and merely listened to Handa. Even when Handa had exclaimed, “We’re talking two billion!” Nunokawa had only looked at him drowsily without uttering a word.
When they had seen each other in mid-October, however, Nunokawa had handed Handa the thing he had asked for and said, “Will these do?”
Handa opened the manila envelope and took out three standard-size snapshots and checked their subject matter. “Perfect,” he replied
The daughter of Takeo Sugihara, one of the executives at Hinode, was living in a luxury apartment in the hills of Takanawa. Yoshiko was married now and had taken her husband’s name, Itoi. Her address was listed in her alumni association’s directory; once Handa knew her address he had been able to figure out her husband’s name, and after making up a reasonable excuse and inquiring at the precinct’s local police box, he had learned that her husband was a physician. Handa had stopped by the address several times, whenever he happened to be nearby, and from what he had observed Yoshiko was now the mother of an infant still in diapers. In the mornings she would leave her apartment with her stroller to go shopping at the Peacock Supermarket at the bottom of Gyoranzaka Hill. Sometimes, she would take the baby to Takanawa Park. On three separate days, Nunokawa had taken snapshots of this same mother and child with a compact camera as he drove a rented van along Gyoranzaka Hill. On one thirty-six-exposure roll of film, Nunokawa had mixed in random other shots whose locations were impossible to identify and taken it to a photo shop far from Minato Ward, where he had had them developed and printed as fast as possible.
The faces of Yoshiko and her child were clearly visible in all three photos, which Nunokawa had taken from the driver’s seat of the van. The young mother, doing her morning shopping and pushing her baby in the stroller, had the peaceful visage of one who was never far from affluence, and the baby was plump and healthy—the snapshots conveyed nothing significant aside from these plain facts. Nunokawa did not divulge anything about his own impressions of the fortunate mother and child he had observed with his own eyes, and Handa also refrained from asking anything further.
“By the way, Nunokawa-san. Can you steal a car?”
“Stealing it is easy, but if you want to drive it around, you need a key.”
“Yo-chan can cut a key. Once the new year starts, in or out of the city, it doesn’t matter where, I want you to mark ten or so vans that are sitting in parking lots collecting dust. The darker the color the better. Once you’ve found them, give me the makes and models for all of them. I’ll give you prototypes for the keys to those models, and I want you to insert them into the keyholes, turn them around a few times, and bring them back to me. Then Yo-chan will cut the teeth of the keys.”
“So they get nicks where the teeth should be, right? Got it.”
A quick learner who did exactly as he was told and said nothing redundant—Nunokawa was indeed useful. The special skills and athletic ability he
had developed in the military seemed wasted in the driver’s seat of a truck; it would be a shame not to put them to use now in various ways.
“After you pick the cars, we’ll choose which roads. You ever heard of the N system?”
“You mean those things that look like rapid surveillance cameras above major intersections?”
“Yes, exactly. Do you know the intersections and expressway toll booths where those things are found?”
“Yeah.”
“I want you to investigate various getaway routes from the Tokyo metropolitan area that avoid them completely. It doesn’t matter where—the destination could be Tanzawa, Okuchichibu, Fuji, Okunikko—the deeper into the mountains the better. We don’t need a hideout, either, but if there’s a place where we can spend two or three nights on the mountain, that would be great.”
“Driving during the day or at night?”
“Late at night.”
“What season?”
“Next year, late March.”
“Better find roads that won’t be icy.”
Nunokawa replied in a clipped monotone that made it seem as if this were no different from his daily work. Nunokawa had decided to join them of his own volition, but he seemed to still be thinking about splitting, and Handa found his detachment both manageable and disconcerting.
“Hey . . . Why’d you join the military anyway?”
“I saw a recruitment poster on the wall at the post office, and somehow I just applied. If I hadn’t joined the military, I’m sure I’d be drying daikon radishes at my parents’ farm back home.”
“Your whole life—everything happens ‘somehow’ doesn’t it? You somehow joined the army, somehow got married, somehow had a kid, somehow raised her, and before you knew it you found yourself in over your head, and the first time you use your own head the answer you come up with is to split. Am I wrong?”
It didn’t matter what he said, Handa knew that Nunokawa barely listened when the conversation turned abstract. Sure enough, Nunokawa only mumbled, “I guess you’re right.”
“Anyway, enough of this ‘somehow,’ all right?” Handa persisted, hoping to put some fire into his spirit for once.
“And how’s your wife doing?”
“She sleeps, she gets up, sleeps again.”
“If you need some help, just say the word. I can do anything.”
When Handa said this, Nunokawa moved his head vaguely in response.
As they approached the Shioji-bashi intersection, Handa decided to get out of Nunokawa’s minivan. As he disembarked, he reached into his bag and shoved a mamushi snake extract energy drink in Nunokawa’s lap. For the first time Nunokawa turned to look at him, smiling faintly with eyes that seemed to yearn to say something.
Handa still had the feeling that “something” was missing, though. And yet, his physical and psychological engines, which were developing the plan, continued to spin at a nearly steady pace, so that on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of November, Handa found himself at Tokyo Racecourse in Fuchu to catch up with his conspirators.
As the time neared for the final race of the day, the passageway to the betting windows became crowded with people—some leaving, some storming the automatic payout machines, and some just loitering around before making their final bet. Handa sat waiting in his usual spot by the pillar, and soon enough Yo-chan’s sneakers appeared out of nowhere. One sneaker kicked the pillar, and then Yo-chan took a seat next to him.
“How much did you lose?” Handa asked.
“Five thousand yen.”
“You betting next?”
“No. That’s enough for me.”
Yo-chan had recently stopped shaving his head and begun to grow out his hair, which made him more and more indistinguishable from the throngs at the racecourse. Though when he planted himself right on the floor by the betting windows and buried his nose into the newspaper spread before him, he was still the same Yo-chan. Nevertheless, he was one of the men who was in on the plan, for reasons known only to himself. The only explanation he gave was “because everyone else is,” and there was no point pushing him any further for an answer—like Nunokawa, he had done everything he had been instructed to do well enough, and Handa could find no particular reason to be worried.
Handa placed in Yo-chan’s palm the tissue-wrapped item he had brought with him. Unwrapping it, with his fingertips Yo-chan picked up a thin steel sheet about the size of a pinkie and brought it closer to his eyes. A few days ago, Yo-chan had cut the notches and the ridges into both sides of the sheet based on the key to Nunokawa’s minivan. Handa had then inserted it into the minivan’s keyhole and turned it around a few times so that the steel would be imprinted with nicks from the grooves in the cylinder lock.
“You see the nicks?”
“I do.”
“Try cutting the teeth out of them.”
“That’s easy. All I need’s like half an hour,” Yo-chan replied and slid the piece of steel into his pocket. For Yo-chan, who shaped metal molds everyday with a margin of error of 0.001 millimeter, cutting a car key should be easy as pie.
“After the key, there’s this.” Handa grabbed the can of beer he had purchased at a vending machine outside the racecourse and held it upside down, then quickly inserted a pushpin into the bottom of the can. Liquid instantly spouted from the puncture, and Handa held his finger over it.
“When you showed Monoi-san before, it was just a can of juice, right? This is what happens when the liquid is carbonated. Can you plug this hole neatly?”
Yo-chan took the can with the hole that measured no more than a millimeter in diameter and from which foam oozed nonstop. He turned his machinist’s eye on it and after examining it for about a minute, he said, “It’d be tough. An aluminum can is only point two millimeters thick, at most. With the pressure from the carbonation, I don’t think whatever plugs it will stay put.”
“So a can would be difficult.”
“I could do it with a bottle. The cap of a beer bottle, I mean,” Yo-chan said and tossed the can into the trashcan.
“Fine, let’s go with a bottle then. And finally, there’s this.”
Handa placed a paperback book he had purchased at a bookstore he had happened to pass by in Yo-chan’s hands, then got to his feet. Yo-chan looked up and down the spine of the book and—muttering “You’re shitting me” to himself—leafed through the pages, no longer paying any attention to Handa. The book had the dubious title, Horseracing Newspapers: How to Read to Win.
The weak rays of the late autumn sun had started to fade by the paddock, where the horses set to appear in the last race of the day were being led by the reins. The wind streaming through the horses’ manes had turned increasingly cold, and the remaining crowd of onlookers had formed a dark gray mass, hushed and still. Seizo Monoi sat on a bench beneath a cluster of a trees overlooking this view, hunched idly over the horseracing paper on his lap. Handa walked halfway around the paddock to reach the bench and sat down next to him.
“Getting cold,” Monoi said to him.
“It’s almost December, after all.”
Handa slipped one of the snapshots that had been tucked into the notebook in his breast pocket into Monoi’s hand. Monoi held the photo fifty centimeters away from his right eye and stared at the image of his late grandson’s girlfriend and her newborn child. His only comment was, “She reminds me of Princess Michiko when she was young.” Their features were different, but in terms of their refined, well-bred manner and calm expression, they could be said to resemble each other.
The next thing Handa handed him was a clipping from a magazine. Monoi once again held it in front of his right eye and squinted. The article was from a financial magazine, a short, serialized column called Managers Up Close, cut out from this month’s issue and featuring Kyosuke Shiroyama, the president of Hinode Beer. Handa had been collecting as many a
rticles on Shiroyama as he could find, but the subject was apparently a simple man both at work and at home, for his name appeared mostly in hard financial articles, making it difficult to deduce anything about his private life. This article, however, was a rare find that offered a glimpse into Shiroyama’s personal life.
“Huh. In order to sustain long, hard workdays he takes great care of his health above all . . . After a simple dinner, he enjoys a bit of beer or whisky . . . Attends social events one night a week at most. Makes sure to be in bed by midnight and rises early to do his reading . . .”
“If he’s in bed by midnight, that must mean he gets home no later than 11 every night. Of the ten times I’ve trailed him now, he’s returned home roughly around ten each time. In a black Nissan President driven by his chauffeur.”
“So you think this is our man?”
“Looks that way.”
Handa put the photo and clipping back inside his notebook and added, “So far, so good.”
Monoi had no further questions. “I’m sure you all could use some money. One of the old man’s time deposits has reached maturity, so split this among everyone as you see fit.” Monoi handed Handa a manila envelope he had taken from his jacket pocket.
Handa tucked the package in his own pocket. From the feel of it, he guessed it was around five hundred thousand yen. “The return on it will be eight-hundred-fold, just you wait. For now, I’ll use this to pay Nunokawa back for the car rental. Then, little by little, I’ll start buying the props we need.”
“You and Nunokawa should be careful around your wives. Women have sharp instincts.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. Not one of us—Yo-chan and Koh included—are the type to get excited. We sure are a motley crew.”
The horses were already leaving the paddock for the racetrack, and the spectators had dispersed as well. The sunlight had waned, deepening the gray scene.
“I myself feel a little excited, to be honest . . . Sure, my life hasn’t changed, but little by little I can feel my spirits swelling. Well, I knew all along I’d be bidding farewell to my peaceful life when I decided to do this, so I suppose it’s all going as I expected.”
Lady Joker, Volume 1 Page 27