Once the managers and section editors gathered, they would be entrenched in meeting after meeting. Negoro would pull together the articles that would flood in during the intervals and, with one eye always on the clock, just when he thought he had a final draft, things would get switched around and he’d be rewriting articles down to the last second. While every staff member embedded at the main office—including Negoro—was transformed into human word processors, the reporters were working in the field, hunting down interviews as they launched into their dog race. Negoro was concerned about his own engine, which seemed to be taking a little longer than usual to rev up, and as he blinked his sleep-deprived eyes, the thought of the rose show floated into his mind again. He realized that he would miss the opportunity—again and for the foreseeable future—that he had secretly hoped would bring about a small change in his life.
久保晴久 Haruhisa Kubo
Earlier that evening, the check-in for the regular interview session at the official residence of the chief inspector of the First Investigation Division hadn’t started until 11 p.m. since the MPD was hosting a party for incoming and outgoing officials at the Hanzomon Kaikan. That night, Haruhisa Kubo, on his second year as the beat reporter for the MPD, arrived in front of the chief inspector’s official residence in Himonya in Meguro district a little more than ten minutes past eleven, and was ninth on the list after reporters from various commercial broadcasting companies, NHK, Asahi, and Kyodo. Other media companies followed, arriving in groups of twos and threes, and the line of reporters quickly materialized in the alley, standing silently with their shoulders hunched, wearing headphones from their portable radios.
For the majority of those present, the night’s topics of interest related to First Investigation included the whereabouts of the cult leader, who had an arrest warrant out on him on suspicion of a murder plot to unleash poisonous gas, and developments in the interrogation of senior members of the cult who had already been arrested. Since there had only been a handful of official announcements from the MPD, each organization had spent these last few days feeling out the leader of First Investigation. Kubo, curious to know what leads his competitors might have up their sleeves, approached this evening’s session by gulping down his requisite nightly antacid and energy drink. In spite of this practice he never lost any weight. Even in his student days, he had had a large build, but since becoming a Metro reporter, thanks to the irregular lifestyle, he had put on another ten kilograms, and during his company medical checkup the doctor had told him that he was on the verge of fatty liver disease.
The night was terribly cold for the beginning of spring, with rain drizzling off and on. At 11:25 p.m., a complaint rose from the scrum of reporters from the commercial broadcasting companies. “He’s late.” It was past the expected arrival time of the official vehicle for the chief inspector, but since he was sometimes even a full half hour late, Kubo wasn’t particularly concerned. No doubt the other reporters had come to the same conclusion, for no one joined in the grumbling.
But the second time someone murmured, “He’s late,” it was contagious, and the words were repeated over and over. It was now three minutes past midnight. Along with the mumblings of “Did something happen?” and “Something’s up,” another voice quipped, “His neighbor hasn’t returned yet either.” The official residence of the chief inspector of First Investigation stood next to that of the chief inspector of the Crime Scene Unit, and since the latter didn’t drink, there was no way he would have stayed out late for an after party or some other social gathering. This fact, and that it was now past midnight and the chief inspector of First Investigation had still not returned home either, did not take more than a few seconds to sound an alarm in the minds of the dozen or so reporters huddling in the alley.
Had they located the cult members wanted by the police? Or was it another incident? The reporters exchanged dubious looks of suspicion, and after another moment, the impatient ones began disappearing from the alley without a sound. Kubo told himself that if something had happened he would hear from the kisha club and so he did not budge from his spot, yet during the couple of minutes he continued to stand there, needles of anxiety and irritation that his competitors would beat him to a story continued to prickle him. At six minutes after midnight, one of those needles suddenly sunk in deep when his pager went off.
The number that showed on the LCD belonged to the kisha club at MPD. The other newspaper reporters immediately shouted out, “Did something happen?” and “What do you know?”
“I have no idea,” Kubo replied, which wasn’t a lie, and he began trotting away from the alley at last. For the fifty meters he had to run to the side street off Meguro-dori where his hired car was parked, his ample belly swayed beneath his jacket, and the strained buttons of his dress shirt threatened to pop off.
When he dialed the number from the car phone, Chief Sugano answered immediately and asked in his perpetually aggressive tone, “Can you get to Sanno Ni-chome?”
It was still unclear what exactly might have happened in Sanno, but just hearing that something was going on made his heart leap before his mind could catch up.
“Head for Sanno Ni-chome, please,” he told the driver, and as he quickly opened a map, he felt himself already anticipating what had yet to take shape. A new incident had occurred, and every time his point of focus shifted the illusion swelled in his heart that a new horizon might unfold before him, that he might break away and discover a place that was—at the very least—different from the one in which he found himself scrambling around now.
The car passed through the intersection in Kakinokizaka and headed toward Kanpachi, and it took about twelve or thirteen minutes to cover the distance to Sanno Ni-chome, but it wasn’t until they crossed the tracks of the Tokyu Ikegami Line that the deputy chief reporter finally made first contact. “Apparently there’s an unmarked police car in the backyard of Omori Police Department. Try circling around the Sanno neighborhood.”
From what he said, Kubo’s partner on the First Investigation beat, Yuichi Kuriyama, had scoped out the precinct already and reported back, but they still did not know the scene of the incident.
As soon as Kubo heard about the unmarked police car, his vision of a new horizon was supplanted by ambitions of an exclusive story, which lit a fire under him. Stuck in traffic at the Magome intersection, he glared first at the hands on his wristwatch, which showed seventeen minutes after midnight, then at the chain of red tail lights on the cars in front of him, and was just wondering which alley in Sanno he should go down when the second call came in.
“Get to Hinode Beer’s main office in Kita-Shinagawa now! The president of Hinode has been kidnapped!” blared the voice over the phone.
It wasn’t that his mind immediately reacted to the name of the company Hinode Beer and the news that its president had been kidnapped; he just automatically absorbed the instructions he was given. He was to report directly to Hinode’s main office and observe the comings and goings of employees. If possible, he was to get the first comment from an employee or executive. There was no time—the news embargo would soon take effect.
If this really were a kidnapping, the upside of not being able to report whatever they uncovered was that at least they would not be scooped by a rival paper—an inappropriate sense of relief at this briefly crossed his mind in the next moment. Before he knew it, the ambition to snag an exclusive was replaced by speculation about how they would gain an advantage over their competitors once the embargo was lifted, but this too only lasted a second—as soon as Kubo had informed the driver of their new destination, he suddenly came to his senses and leaned forward in his seat. The black shadows of trees in the Sanno hills streamed past his car window. As he watched them go by, in his mind three or four question marks lined up after the intangible word—kidnapping???
12:35 a.m. During the third phone call he learned the simple yet implausible fact that the
president of Hinode had been abducted from his own home, and when Kubo’s car arrived in front of the building of Hinode’s main office in Kita-Shinagawa, he found the street along Yatsuyama-dori completely empty. At first Kubo was surprised that there was no sign of any other newspaper or TV reporters and, realizing that he was first on the scene, his heart skipped a beat. He looked up at the luxurious forty-story high-rise and tried once again to imprint upon his mind that the master of this tower had been kidnapped—it remained a fuzzy reality to him.
There was only a smattering of lights on on the bottom three-quarters of the building—the rest was pitch dark. The remaining top floors were shrouded in a low-hanging mist, and the red beacons that must have been on each of the four corners of the roof flashed blurrily in the mist. When his gaze returned to the ground, he saw that the entrance to the building, which was set back twenty meters from the sidewalk, was also dark, with no signs of people there, either.
On the signpost facing the sidewalk, gleaming gold lettering and arrows pointed the way to Hinode Opera Hall, Hinode Contemporary Art Museum, and Hinode Sky Beer Restaurant, but the entrance for the general public that could be seen just beyond was shuttered, and a fence barricaded the walkway leading up to it. The entrance to the underground parking lot was on the west side, but this too was shuttered at the bottom of the slope leading down to it.
Trotting back to Yatsuyama-dori where his hired car was parked, Kubo called the kisha club and asked them to try calling Hinode’s night-time number. He spoke with the overnight reporter covering Second Investigation, who told Kubo that they had already tried calling Hinode’s main office as well as their Tokyo and Yokohama branch offices, and all they got was a recording that business had closed for the day. Right now, he said, they were calling Hinode’s branch offices, regional offices, and sales offices one by one, but the result was all the same. Calls to the executives’ homes all reached answering machines, and while surely the executives and managers were gathered together somewhere, they had no clue where. Moreover, MPD’s Public Information director had called in the chief reporters from every media organization, so it was certain that they intended to request a temporary embargo.
As Kubo replaced the receiver, worried that time was running out, he saw that several hired cars from other media companies were now flanking his. The time was 12:41 a.m. There were even TV crews with video cameras in tow. Just as Kubo had done when he first arrived, the other reporters ran around the darkened building, then, once they had given up, gathered on the sidewalk. A reporter Kubo recognized from the Yomiuri Shimbun scurried toward Kubo’s car, where he rapped on the window.
“You got here first, didn’t you? Any way we can get in?” he asked, sticking his neck in as soon as Kubo had opened the car door.
“I wouldn’t be here if there were. Any bright ideas?” Kubo shot back, and he heard the other reporters who had gathered behind him sigh in unison.
It was obvious that none of the other journalists had made contact with anyone at Hinode. Still, every one of them standing there in the road knew the Hinode executives must all be together somewhere, and their eyes darted around like foxes as they racked their brains trying to figure out where that might be.
“This is going to be an uphill battle . . .” someone muttered.
Fifteen meters away by the side of the road, where a van from a commercial broadcasting company was parked, one of the crew members signaled to them by making an X with his arms. The time was now 12:45 a.m. The embargo had been issued.
Kubo and the rest of the reporters looked at one another, and signaled back “okay” to the crew. Cries of “Shit” and “Damn it” erupted all around him, followed by pitiful goodbyes and “See ya”s as the group scattered to their hired cars. In Kubo’s window as his car pulled away, the towering Hinode building seemed even more formidable than a few minutes earlier, as if mocking the challenges the reporters would face in the days ahead—but at the same time, the few lights visible on perhaps the thirtieth floor appeared blurry in the mist, almost weakened and cowering in such unexpected circumstances. Looking up at the skyscraper, Kubo tried to convince himself for the third time that night that the master of this castle had been kidnapped.
It was 1:18 a.m. when Kubo returned to MPD in Sakuradamon. In the elevator, he ran into a few other reporters who had also returned there after the embargo went into effect. In lieu of a greeting, they searched one another’s faces and asked tersely, “So?” “Got anything?” “What about you?” There was no need to answer—it was clear from their expressions that none of them had managed to reach Hinode.
There were three kisha clubs on the ninth floor, and Toho’s press nook was located inside the Nanashakai kisha club, to which the six major national daily newspapers belonged. Even the entrance to the Nanashakai was crowded, and Kubo had to weave this way and that to slip past the tumult of people and reach his paper’s nook. Every paper had assembled their chief kisha club reporters as well as all of their beat reporters. Toho’s nook was partitioned off from the others, and when Kubo parted the entry curtain he bumped up against an unfamiliar back right away. In the few steps it took him to make his way to his desk, calling out “Excuse me, coming through,” he became nauseated from the stench of hair tonic and cigarette smoke, several times more potent than usual. The nook, which was as tiny as an eel’s lair, typically accommodated at most four or five journalists working at the desks while others were out reporting or sleeping in the built-in bunk bed, so now that it was packed with all seventeen or eighteen members of their team, including the beat reporters, there was not even standing room. Amidst this melee the direct line to the news room rang incessantly, and the fax machine spat out pages that everyone scrambled for and passed from hand to hand.
In the innermost seat amongst this crowd, there was Chief Sugano, his expression immutable no matter the situation, holding the receiver for the outside line in one hand while raking a comb through his salt-and-pepper hair with the other. Whenever there was a crisis, Sugano had the indelicate habit of taking out his comb, no matter where he was.
“Apparently the Hinode executives are gathered at the Hinode Club in Kioi-cho,” Kagawa, the deputy chief reporter, called out from beside Sugano. Makes perfect sense, Kubo thought, immediately recalling the old European-style stone mansion near the New Otani Hotel in Kioi-cho. It was a corporate guesthouse used for entertaining, and sometimes there would be luxury cars in the driveway, idling in front of the entrance tucked away from the main road.
“Did somebody go check it out?” Kubo asked, looking around him.
“No. We heard them talking about it next door,” responded Yuichi Kuriyama, the reporter in charge of First Investigation, as he rapped on the partition wall with his fist. Beneath the spot where he knocked sat Kondo, another reporter on the First Investigation beat, along with Maki and Kanai, who were on the Second and Fourth Investigation beats, respectively, and were now manning the phones that were ringing off the hook. The Reserve section of the Metro desk had already created an assignment chart and launched into action, and was now relaying information—“We sent copies of all the materials from the archives” and “We sent you the articles related to Hinode that we pulled from our database”—and haranguing them for a story: “Did you get anything?” and “Any movement?”
In due time, Chief Sugano finished his phone call. “Listen, everyone.” His voice carried through the entire nook, and Kubo and the rest of the reporters pricked up their ears at once. “We’ll prepare two advance articles: one in the event that the president is safely rescued, and the other in the event that things take a turn for the worse. If a criminal profile or motive is not clear at the point when the president is in protective custody, the first draft will cover everything chronologically from abduction to rescue, and then let’s plan on steadily spotlighting the unresolved issues, one by one. First and foremost, I want it made clear that this is a heinous crime. Your t
eam can handle that, Kubo.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Maki, Kanai, and Momoi will track the movements of the extortionists and the ultranationalists. Tazawa and Ogawa will focus on any issues related to roadblocks and checkpoints, and also check whether any of the vehicles come from a car rental company. The beat reporters will work in three shifts, and take turns staking out Hinode’s main office, their Tokyo branch, and the Hinode Club until the embargo is lifted. Observe the comings and goings of the executives and any unmarked cars. I’m sure Hinode will put up a formidable defense—they’ll have strong corporate security and protection in place—so don’t overdo it. Kagawa, you make the assignment chart for the beat reporters.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Once the chart is worked up I need the beat reporters to go out to their assigned posts. Everyone, make sure you look over the materials on Hinode. Finally, this case may take a while to crack, so we need all hands on deck. That’s all from me.”
Sugano always gave such specific instructions, and as far as Kubo knew, he had never erred in his judgment.
And Sugano, who took out his comb again, held in his arsenal a vast network of sources the likes of which Kubo could only dream about. Whenever Kubo marveled at the technique, time, and toil that must have been required for Sugano to build such a tremendous wealth of information—which awed one and all alike—a tangle of jealousy and suspicion came over him, and he was forced to question his own capabilities as a journalist.
Even now, as he repeated Sugano’s speech in his mind, Kubo imagined that, ultimately, MPD’s Public Security Bureau would be moving with a suspicious eye on the actions of ultranationalist groups embroiled in underground banking, and Sugano himself must have information on the bureau within his grasp. If ultranationalist groups were involved, there would be politicians on the outside, with crime syndicates and extortionists underneath. Kubo quickly ran through his own dossier of sources, but he could not come up with a single person who might provide the kernel of a story from that angle.
Lady Joker, Volume 1 Page 32