Tokyo Zangyo

by Michael Pronko

  “We have to work in the morning,” Shio said.

  “Then, you’re going to be very tired,” Hiroshi answered.

  Masayo looked at Shio and nodded her head. “We’ll look after Suzuna in the hospital.”

  Hiroshi looked at Sugamo who nodded it was no problem to watch them there.

  Hiroshi hurried over and got in the main elevator with Takamatsu and Chizu. She said nothing as they rode down to B2 level, accessible only by key.

  They exited into the bottom level of the lower parking lot. The place stank of exhaust fumes and years-old mold. Old generators and air conditioners were piled to one side. On the other, a recycling area had been set up for sodai gomi, computer monitors, desks and office equipment, tossed in tangles of metal and plastic.

  Chizu strode forward past bare concrete pillars, her low heels echoing in the emptiness. She turned back to be sure Hiroshi and Takamatsu were following, and kept going.

  She led them up a short ramp that veered toward the main parking lot above. Chizu turned to a large metal door she opened with a key. Dim lights turned on when they stepped inside a long underground tunnel. The door clunked shut behind them.

  Chizu’s heels echoed louder in the confined space. Hiroshi tried to remember which direction they were going. It seemed like they were going under the street. That meant these tunnels were probably connected to those that ran in all directions from Tokyo Station. Most had been converted to underground shopping malls, others for storage, Hiroshi guessed.

  At the end of the tunnel, Chizu stopped at a large door needing two keys. It had a heavy metal handle that she had to lean on to open. The high-ceilinged space inside had three more doors, each with a similar two-key bank vault system.

  The one on the right opened to another, mustier hall, with dimmer lighting. At the end was a wide, squat door with a number dial and a key. She spun the numbers, inserted the key and let the detectives in first. Lights clicked on with an automatic sensor.

  The room was filled with shelves that slid on tracks attached to the ceiling and floor. The shelves held boxes, files and folders, all carefully labeled. Hiroshi looked at the labels on the side of the shelves, numbers and letters and some kanji that might be connected to different departments inside Senden. Was this the central storage area for company files? Nakata had told them that all files were stored outside of Tokyo in special, secure facilities.

  Chizu turned into an aisle so narrow she had to turn sideways. She stopped in the middle, checking labels, and pulled down two boxes. She carried them to the end of the aisle opposite Hiroshi and Takamatsu. She pushed a button and gears clunked into motion. The shelf slid over to open a new aisle.

  She walked back toward Hiroshi and Takamatsu, checking labels. Chizu reached for an overhead box and Hiroshi shuffled quickly down the aisle to help her get it down.

  At the end of the aisle, an old wooden table took up a low-ceilinged sitting area. She pointed for Hiroshi to put the box down and clicked on the light above the table. She looked down the aisle for Takamatsu and whispered, “Detective, please!”

  When Takamatsu got there, Chizu pointed at the boxes and files. “Nakata called me earlier tonight. He told me to give you the wrong files. Which I did. But these are the real files.”

  “I thought they were stored outside Tokyo?” Hiroshi said.

  “No, only here. They are labeled in a way that only a few people know.” She opened her bag and pulled out what looked like a small printer. “Do you have a USB flash drive?”

  Hiroshi shook his head.

  “I figured not, so I brought one for you.” She pulled out the flash drive and handed it to Hiroshi. She ducked under the table looking for an electric wall socket.

  “What’s this?” Takamatsu asked.

  “A scanner,” Chizu said. “I brought it for you.” She finished setting up the scanner and turned to the first box they took down. “Let’s get to work.”

  Hiroshi said, “What are we doing?”

  “Most of the HR stuff is hidden as are the files for the overseas expansion, especially the budget. That’s what you needed, right?” Chizu looked at him and turned on the scanner.

  Hiroshi nodded. “So what’s in here?”

  “Onizuka was moving money that should have been used for purchases to different accounts, but the same banks. None of the higher-ups remember the account numbers, so he could sneak it by them. Senden’s money went to accounts—both Senden’s and Onizuka’s—in London and New York, but also the Cayman Islands, Nevis, Belize.”

  “I don’t get it,” Hiroshi said. “It would all be traceable.”

  “At first it would be, but after, Onizuka could make it disappear. Where? That’s your job. Nakata figured out what Onizuka was doing, but he didn’t know how to undo it,” Chizu said. “Nakata was furious with him.”

  “Nakata said all this to you?”

  “Rumor had it that Onizuka and Nakata were longtime rivals. They started at Senden the same year.”

  Chizu stopped talking and listened. “Someone’s here. Just the guard. I’ll go tell him everything’s fine. Do you know how to use this?” She patted the scanner.

  “I’ll figure it out,” Hiroshi said.

  Chizu hurried off down the rows of shelves.

  Hiroshi waved Takamatsu over and told him to hand the files one at a time and keep them in order, one after another. They got into a rhythm—hand, place, scan, save, hand back. Hiroshi heard another row of shelves moving in the far distance. The shelves were heavy and the rows longer than in a big library. In a few minutes, Chizu returned with two more file boxes. They had barely made a dent in the first box.

  “Why isn’t all this stored on computer?” Hiroshi asked her.

  “Some of this is, but they only trust paper. It’s all they understand. Let me take over the scanning. It might be faster to take photos of these smaller files. But if you don’t have the whole picture, it’s not going to be worth anything.”

  “Takamatsu, use your cellphone to take shots of all these smaller file folders, can you?”

  Takamatsu moved the smaller folders to the next table.

  Hiroshi started handing papers to Chizu, who was much faster. She stopped every ten or twenty scans to save them.

  “The complaints about Onizuka’s harassment are in here, too?” Hiroshi asked.

  “All of those formal complaints are here, but the way of writing them is so toned down it doesn’t capture the full scope of what he was doing.” Chizu kept working as she explained.

  “Do you think Mayu knew what Onizuka was doing?”

  Chizu frowned. “She had to have known. She kept trying to transfer out, but he wanted to keep her close so he could see what she was doing. The longer she was there, the more she’d know, and become implicated, and the more he could control her. Strangely, though, his performance reports about Mayu were glowing.”

  Hiroshi stopped. “He gave her high evaluations?”

  “Some of the highest in the company. Strange, right?”

  “And Mayu knew about those?”

  “There are open evaluations and closed ones. But she must have known.”

  “And what about the other women who filed complaints?”

  “Mostly, he praised them, too. Maybe it was part of how he kept them in line. He was quite a manipulator.”

  They worked quietly for a while.

  Hiroshi tried to think why Mayu would kill herself if she was getting stellar reviews. Takamatsu looked like he was making progress. He’d taken off his trench coat and his jacket and Hiroshi could tell he was fidgeting for a cigarette.

  Hiroshi said, “You want to change places?”

  “I’m fine,” Chizu said.

  “How do you know the filing system if it’s supposed to be non-transparent?”

  “That secret to the system has been kept inside HR for years. I learned it from Masayo, the woman who was just on the roof to help take care of Suzuna.”

  “What about Mayu?”<
br />
  “She probably knew this system, or I guess she did.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I’m leaving,” Chizu said.

  “Leaving?”

  “Quitting.” Chizu stopped and looked at the wall, taking a big breath.

  “Did you tell them yet?”

  “Not yet,” Chizu said. “I’ll give them two weeks notice, as required. But I have six weeks’ unused vacation time.”

  “So who knew about Onizuka’s embezzling? If you knew, others must have also.”

  Chizu stopped and looked at Hiroshi. “Yes, they knew, but I guess he was blackmailing them.”

  “But he was the one doing it.”

  “Onizuka maybe threatened to expose the truth about the embezzlement and embarrass the entire company. That would be enough to keep everyone quiet until they could force him out. But if he was overseas by then, they’d have a hard time catching him.”

  “But they admitted it all publicly at the press conference.” Hiroshi tried to process what she was telling him, wondering what he would find in the files.

  “They had no choice once he died. They had to move on with the overseas expansion and hope to cover their tracks. And they seem to have done that.”

  “They want to control the narrative, even if it’s bad?”

  “They want to control everything.” Chizu shrugged and kept scanning. “That press conference is later today and I’m in charge. So it doesn’t look like I’ll get any sleep before now and then.”

  Hiroshi kept refiling everything she handed him. “You said you were on the roof the night of Onizuka’s death. What happened?”

  Chizu kept her eyes on the scanning. “It took me time to get the courage to talk with you. I should have just left the company.” She paused, sighed and started scanning again. “That night, Nakata got a call from the security guards. And he called me. I came back to work, went up to the roof, and found Nakata and two guards standing over Onizuka. He was tied up, but he could talk. I pulled my jacket off and put it over him, he was freezing.”

  “You weren’t surprised?”

  “Nothing Nakata did would surprise me. I only waited to be told how to cover things up.”

  “What did Nakata say?”

  “He said to let him have a cigarette. Somehow, whoever had stolen his clothes had left him his cigarettes.”

  “And Nakata lit it for him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then?”

  “Then, he told me to go to the office to get all of Onizuka’s transfer papers,” Chizu said. “The papers weren’t in our office, so I had to come down here, to this storage room.”

  “How long did that take?”

  “The papers weren’t here. And there’s no cellphone reception in here. So, after I looked everywhere I could think of, I gave up.”

  “After how long, roughly?”

  “I must have searched for thirty minutes or so.”

  “And then?”

  “And when I got cellphone reception again, Nakata told me to go home.” A single tear dropped onto the paper she was holding. She wiped it off with the back of her hand. “I hated what Onizuka did, but I didn’t want to see him die.”

  Chapter 37

  Back in his office, Hiroshi hung up his coat and headed straight for the espresso machine, clicked it on, and loaded the hopper with fresh beans. He’d been bent over the scanner so long, his neck was sore. His arm was throbbing, though the bleeding had stopped.

  Takamatsu followed him in, holding his cellphone with the photos of Senden’s files they took with Chizu’s help. “She could still get in trouble. We should have brought her with us.”

  “I don’t think anyone will figure out what she did,” Hiroshi said, turning on his computer. “She said she was leaving anyway.”

  “There’s leaving and there’s leaving,” Takamatsu said. “Let’s send someone to watch the door to her apartment building.”

  “She’s the one who walked off after she let us out that back exit. She had to hurry because she’d be working all night on the press conference about the overseas opening. We can’t send someone into the Senden building.” Hiroshi looked at Takamatsu.

  “We should have put a call button on her like the one Mistress Emi uses.” Takamatsu started flipping his lighter. “Send her a message at least.”

  Hiroshi sent a LINE message to Chizu, and waited for the little mark to show she read it.

  But she didn’t.

  “I’ll send her another message later.”

  Takamatsu looked around the office. “So, let me help. What do you want me to do?”

  “Can you read a spreadsheet?” Hiroshi asked.

  “No.”

  “Make espresso?”

  “No.”

  “Send photos of the files from your cellphone?”

  “Akiko does that for me.”

  Hiroshi looked at Takamatsu. “Leave your phone on her desk and write down the passcode.”

  “She knows what it is.”

  “Then why not grab some sleep?”

  “A few hours horizontal in the bunk room wouldn’t hurt. Are we going after them today?”

  “From what Chizu said, it should all be here, so we should hit them as soon as we can.”

  Takamatsu left his phone on Akiko’s desk and headed for the door. “I’ll stop by the lab and see if they found any rope fibers.” Takamatsu paused at the door, drumming his fingers on the doorjamb. “Thanks,” he said, and left.

  Hiroshi made himself a double espresso and tried to remember if he had ever heard Takamatsu say thank you before. Or offer to help. Even after he fished Takamatsu out of the freezing cold water of Tokyo Bay, all he had done was joke about it. Maybe he was getting soft, or getting old.

  Hiroshi took his espresso to his desk and pushed the USB with all the scanned files into his computer. He wondered how Chizu knew exactly which ones to give him, and he panicked for a moment, worried that she had tricked him. He’d need to compare the new files with the ones Nakata and Suzuki had arranged to be sent during the mahjong parlor raid.

  One of the nurses from the police clinic came in. “Takamatsu sent me. For your arm.”

  And now this… well, something must be up with Takamatsu. Hiroshi got up and took off his shirt. It was bloody and torn. He put it in an old convenience store bag and dropped it in the trash. The nurse took off the bandage and disinfected his arm. The blood and fluid spilled into a steel basin she’d brought with her.

  “Do I need stitches?”

  The nurse looked it over. “The puncture is a bit deep, but it should close up on its own. You need to keep it clean.” The nurse put on a fresh bandage and slipped a longer flex bandage over that.

  “When was your last tetanus shot?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I’ll check your records. Stop by the clinic to get a booster before you go home, will you?”

  “I’m not going home for a long time.”

  “Neither am I.” She sighed and gathered everything.

  Hiroshi thanked the nurse and pulled a new shirt from his file drawer. He ripped off the plastic, buttoned the collar and slipped it on. He pulled a sweater from the coat rack and put it on. He wouldn’t be able to look at all of the files before the start of the working day, but he could get through enough of them to be sure.

  The files showed substantial accounts in several places. Nakata didn’t have his name on anything, and neither did Onizuka, but some of the accounts were earmarked for overseas HR use. Hiroshi looked at all of the overseas accounts and each one had transfers in and out at irregular times.

  Hiroshi could not see how the fund transfers to the overseas accounts could be easily tapped, so there must be some trace of that. He looked at the loans to other subsidiary firms, but they looked to be in order. He went back year by year until he found where Senden had started overseas branches. Those seemed in order, too.

  Hiroshi checked the investment banks that had
lent money to Senden for the overseas expansion, and it seemed they had secured loans with collateral that lacked any verifiable origin. He was only looking at one small part of the whole scheme, but by loaning and repurchasing various assets, it seemed like the accountants at Senden had been very good at hiding debt, or rather spreading it around.

  All the transfers were lateral, a sort of accounting sleight of hand, now you see it, now you don’t, a variation of the tobashi schemes that Japanese firms specialized in during the early 1990s, schemes which nearly caused the collapse of the Japanese economy. By hiding bad debt from the past while amassing capital to expand overseas, and assuming profits abroad could be folded in, and also assuming the exchange rate moved favorably, it might work.

  Quite neat, Hiroshi thought.

  But how did that tie in to Onizuka?

  Hiroshi got up for another coffee. He was suddenly hungry. He sent a message to Akiko to pick something up on her way into the office.

  Akiko sent a message back. She had just gotten up and would be there soon.

  Hiroshi sent a message to Ayana apologizing for not apologizing sooner.

  He opened the HR files, but his eyes refused to relay the information to his brain, or maybe it was his brain that couldn’t receive what his eyes were sending. He put in eye drops and stood up to stretch, taking big oxygen-full breaths. Then he sat back down.

  He sent a LINE message to Chizu again, but there was still no answer and no small notice that she read the last one.

  Hiroshi turned back to the files. As soon as he did, he saw two names, Masayo Uchibori and Shio Fujii. Was that the same Masayo and Shio who were Suzuna’s friends? They had filed complaints against Onizuka, too. The two photos that popped up did not look much like Masayo and Shio. Their faces were tight, with their hair pulled back by hairpins. They looked pinched in their black jackets and tight white shirts, more straight-jacket than workwear.

  To clear his head, Hiroshi grabbed a change of underclothes from his file drawers and went down to the showers. The nurse had left a waterproof arm sleeve for the shower. He inflated it to cover his arm from fingers to armpit.