Lady Joker, Volume 1 Kaoru Takamura (ereader ebook .TXT) 📖

As he let that ambient noise wash over him, Negoro stared idly at the sight of the two men who had reappeared again on the street, about ten meters away from the phone booth. The men were standing on the sidewalk, their shoulders and legs twitching while they smoked cigarettes, their gazes fixed on him. They were of the same ilk as the men who had trailed him night and day four years ago, when Negoro had been chasing the story about where the shareholdings of the former Chunichi Mutual Savings Bank’s founding members had been transferred. These types seemed to have trouble keeping still—they were always jiggling some part of their bodies, as if out of boredom.

“Hello? Negoro-san? I’m sorry my kids make so much noise,” the slot editor from Osaka said over the phone.

“No, I’m sorry to bother you at home. I just have one thing to ask. You wouldn’t happen to know the name of the stock speculator that Takeshi Kikuchi was hanging around with?”

“I think it was Yasui something or other from the former Ezaki group . . .”

“Takuji Yasui?”

“Yes, yes, that’s him. Back when Yasui’s faction had been dabbling with the Osaka Exchange, Kikuchi interviewed him for a story and must have gotten to know him.”

The men on the sidewalk tossed away their cigarettes and turned to leave, heading off toward Ginza. As he watched them, Negoro made a snap deduction: tonight, intimidation; next time, attack.

“Negoro-san?”

“Oh, sorry. I must be getting old, lately my hearing’s been going . . . Thanks so much again.”

Negoro hung up the phone and, still in the booth, cautiously sorted his thoughts. Tonight, the only person who knew firsthand that Negoro was going to be in the Shimbashi neighborhood was the slot editor at the securities industry news he had called earlier. Perhaps the editor happened to mention Negoro’s phone call to someone, and from there the information could have been passed along. Or maybe, as he was making the rounds at the other four bars tonight, someone had seen him and triggered an alarm. But the most important question was why the same kind of threat from four years ago was suddenly being made again tonight.

Negoro didn’t think that the story he was currently pursuing was one that would have drawn attention from the underworld. The only thing he had done today that could be considered outside the scope of his reporting was contacting Takeshi Kikuchi on the phone.

Even if another reporter had taken Toda’s tip-off call this morning, the whole matter would have made its way to him once Toda specified “a reporter who knew about the Ogura-Chunichi scandal.” Negoro now realized he himself must have been the one Toda had intended to speak to all along.

In addition, the way Toda had contrived to mention Takeshi Kikuchi’s name at the beginning of the call had prompted Negoro to look up Kikuchi’s whereabouts, and then even to call him directly. Negoro could have just dismissed the phone call as odd and left it at that, but he had not done so. Could it be that his opponent had tested whether he would respond? Negoro considered how the tip-off call could have meant to goad him into action. But if so, why him? The only reason he could think of was the Ogura-Chunichi scandal mentioned in the call.

Back in the summer of ’88, before the shadow of the scandal was even looming, Negoro had been waiting for an interview subject in the lobby of the former building of the Akasaka Prince Hotel when he happened to cross paths with three men who were hurrying down the side staircase. He immediately recognized one of the men as the secretary to the representative Taiichi Sakata, of the eponymous S. Memo scandal, but at the time Negoro had no reason to know who the other two were. The secretary, with whom Negoro was acquainted, had met his gaze with a frantic look, and Negoro could still vividly recall the expression on his face.

Negoro later learned that one of the two men was the managing director and a founding member of the former Chunichi Mutual Savings Bank and the other was an ultranationalist who would act as a conduit of the transferred Chunichi shares, which meant the plan to bankrupt the mutual savings was already in play at that point. Then in ’91, when all the newspapers were reporting on the scandal and Negoro alone found himself the target of intimidation, he had always felt that it was the result of his chance encounter with those three at the Akasaka Prince Hotel—that they had misconstrued something about him. The Ogura-Chunichi scandal was a thing of the past, but the threat that suddenly loomed tonight suggested that, somewhere amid the chaos surrounding the kidnapping of Hinode Beer’s president, the same network had sprung back into action.

And it was highly probable that Takeshi Kikuchi was connected to whatever it was. If Kikuchi was indeed working for Yasui from the former Ezaki group, as the Osaka slot editor had said, it was equivalent to Kikuchi being under the influence of the Seiwakai and G.S.C., which gave Negoro reason to believe that Kikuchi had tricked him today by getting Toda to make the tip-off call.

Negoro recalled the voice he had heard today over the phone today, that of his former colleague Kikuchi—whose features were still hazy in his memory—and he thought of the watchful eyes of the men he had seen tonight. He contemplated himself, sinking into the deep backwaters of the city at night, his mind continuing to churn as he stood alone in the phone booth.

Four years ago, Negoro had been involved in a hit-and-run right in front of his home. The car was later found—it turned out to be a stolen vehicle—but the perpetrator was never identified. Negoro always maintained his testimony to the police that a car parked on the shoulder of the road