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

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