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

In contrast to Sugano, Negoro felt a little stifled, as if the words featured in the other papers—June 1947, a former Hinode employee, Hinode’s Kanagawa factory—were caught squirming around in the murky depths of his mind, making it hard for him to breathe.

“Everyone here? Well then, Sugano-kun, they tell me you knew about this business with the tape from 1990. Why didn’t you write about it?” Maeda demanded, unfurling his anxious tongue.

“We haven’t obtained the contents of the tape or determined its connection to the abduction.”

“But it has to do with Hinode. It also involves employment discrimination, plus a mysterious letter from right after the war. This is not the time to fret about its connection to the incident!”

“No, we can’t write anything until we confirm the contents of the tape. That’s the first point. Also this is not the kind of story that all three papers can have broken together by coincidence. In other words, their source is not the police. That would make the source of the leak a problem.”

“You’re saying it’s risky to write about it?”

“You could say that.”

“How are we going to follow up?”

“After we corroborate the facts. I’ll take responsibility for the front page.”

Maeda and Sugano were like oil and water. The pace of their approaches was as out of sync as the hare and the tortoise, and in their arguments, they never quite managed to find common ground. Even now, the impatient Maeda abandoned hope and shifted the brunt of his attack to Tabe, the slot editor on duty when the scoop occurred. “What should we do with the Metro page?”

Tabe contorted his face as if to say this was difficult. “We can’t consider that until we first determine whether Hinode discriminated in their hiring process, perhaps by asking around the family of the deceased student. But even if were to pursue this angle, I’m not sure whether a story about discrimination could stand on its own as an article related to the incident . . .”

Tabe then turned the spotlight on Negoro. “Negoro-kun, you’ll be able to back up the tip-off call from yesterday, won’t you?”

“I’m getting the sense that someone had Yoshinori Toda tip us off, but I’m still not sure how what he told me relates to the incident.”

“Send someone to Osaka to look for this Toda guy,” Maeda interrupted.

“In due time,” Negoro responded.

“So, are we in agreement that we will not aggressively pursue this story on the front page or the Metro page?” Maeda asked.

“The important thing is what moves the perpetrators will make now that they’ve demanded six hundred million to be delivered later.” The battle-hardened Tabe finally revealed his truth. “Speaking from previous experience, the developments with regard to a cash payment are hardly ever leaked. Even if it seems rather conservative for our coverage of the incident, for now perhaps we ought to keep our eyes peeled for any movements by the police and the Hinode executives so that we don’t miss the moment when the perpetrators take action. Chief Sugano, what do you think?”

“I agree that these guys, the perpetrators, will definitely make a move.” As always, Sugano’s response came a beat too late. “I’ve got my reporters staking out Hinode’s main office and the homes of executives in three shifts, but could you send a few more bodies from the main troops?”

“You got it.”

Maeda was quick at switching gears; he slapped his knee and the follow-up-strategy meeting was thus over in ten minutes. As Tabe and Sugano had pointed out, the perpetrators’ movements were crucial now—it was obvious that they should focus all their efforts on catching the moment when the cash payment was made, which was certain to happen. Especially in cases of corporate extortions, past precedent showed that unless the police made an official announcement, the movements of the parties concerned remained shrouded in darkness one hundred percent of the time.

Negoro was one person who understood this all too well, and his thoughts turned again to the flickering shadows lurking in the darkest corners and around the far fringes of this case—the tip-off caller, the stockbroker, and the crime syndicate—he had a hunch that this time, like before, these would soon become more indistinct as they receded underground. This was just as well. He couldn’t care less about any of the various subterranean tendrils that were to be found beneath every stratum of this country—yet here and now, who would take on the burden of identifying these foreign entities that kept appearing and disappearing?

Maeda had told him to search for the “Toda guy.” But if Negoro pulled at that thread and Takeshi Kikuchi’s name spilled out, he would need to dig more into Kikuchi’s background and the movements of his company GSC, Ltd., which would in turn make it necessary to probe around the Seiwakai to the Okada Association, and on to the politicians. The automatic sequence of motions that involved inching closer to the identity of such subjects—whom he couldn’t write about but nevertheless must be cognizant of—was part of a newsman’s peculiar sense of mission, though as a matter of course, this job was never taken on by the frontline reporters, who were much too busy chasing after stories that would occupy the pages of the daily paper. As for today’s edition, Negoro saw it as a natural conclusion that he—a side-story reporter who consistently veered off the main topics of the Metro section reporters—would have to play the martyr again. And although during the Ogura-Chunichi scandal Negoro had put out feelers in various arenas, searching high and low, he never did find any leads that tied into the main story.

Send someone to Osaka to look for this Toda guy? It was out of the question to send a reserve reporter busy on the frontline on such a wild goose chase—there was no way of knowing what lay behind it, and even if they found something, they couldn’t write about it. Negoro had only two options: either join forces with a