Lady Joker, Volume 1 by Kaoru Takamura (lightest ebook reader .txt) 📕

When he heard Kurata’s voice, Shiroyama’s heart had jumped with the thought, At last, but he remained calm, replying, “I understand. I’ll see you later then,” before replacing the receiver. There was a small ping in a corner of his mind: the days of anticipation are over, now all I need to do is focus on our response.

But there were still various subtleties to consider. Kurata had grown extremely cautious about the company’s overall response, given that Tamaru from the Okada Association had been implicitly threatening them since right after the incident. And the criminals had waited to make contact until the initial shock of the incident had worn off and a peaceful mood had begun to settle among the executives and employees alike.

Shiroyama ate his usual breakfast. After he finished, his wife called him out to the garden, saying that the irises were in bloom, and there he saw a dozen or so of the diminutive flowers showing off their purple petals at the foot of the Himalayan cedar. During the past month, he had had no time to pay any attention to the garden—now that he noticed, it was bursting with spring flowers. These irises in the shade appeared to be the last ones to bloom.

At 7:45 a.m., punctual as ever, his driver Yamazaki pulled up in front of the house. When he suggested, “Shall we take the usual route around Oi Hankyu today?” Shiroyama replied, “That’ll be fine.” In fact, he made this response after much hesitation, remembering how the consultant Kotani had advised him not to alter his daily routine, just in case, to avoid attracting attention from the public and the police. Thus, despite Kurata’s phone call, Shiroyama spent part of that April morning exploring the city in the company car, arriving in front of Hinode’s main office at 8:20 a.m.

When the new building was constructed eight years ago, it was set back twenty meters from the road to accommodate a copse of camphor and zelkova trees, which had matured splendidly. Now at the height of spring, just before Golden Week, the vivid green of their budding leaves cast a verdant hue over the white granite pavement. Again this morning, a young man sat alone on a bench along this promenade under the new foliage. From inside the car, Shiroyama gave him a slight bow, and the man returned the gesture, rising briefly from his seat.

Apparently he was from Toho News. Ever since the incident, their reporters had been staking out the company building around the clock in three shifts—one reporter keeping watch by the main entrance and another on the south side, by the entrance to the underground parking lot. The news media seemed to suspect that the incident would take a turn at any moment, and Shiroyama could not help but be impressed by the tenacity of their reporting.

The public’s interest in the incident had waned after the first week or so—the press corps in front of Shiroyama’s home had dispersed, and Hinode’s name no longer appeared on the Metro pages of the newspapers. The tabloids ran special issues for two weeks, and their subway ads had been splashed with predictable headlines—the bizarre facts behind the hinode president’s kidnapping, the undeniable truth about hinode’s backroom dealings, all the reasons why hinode was targeted, the lineage between hinode and the underworld—and crude, titillating attacks on Shiroyama’s character—charmed nepotism, the life of an elite. From a corporate standpoint, Hinode deemed none of these stories worth an individual response, and Shiroyama hardly gave them a second glance.

On the other hand, the investigation dragged on and on. At the beginning of April, an eyewitness account of an unidentified vehicle on Ome Highway had turned up, and an investigator had informed him that the vehicle used by the criminals to transport him was most likely a dark blue Nissan Homy with a license plate ending in “54.” But the alleged vehicle had yet to be located, and it had already been ten days since Shiroyama was told that the car’s license plate may have been bogus and that the police were checking out every Nissan Homy registered in the metropolitan area.

Likewise, not a single fact about the criminals themselves—appearance, age, occupation, or lifestyle—had yet to be uncovered. The police had tried locating the point of sale of the cans of pork and beans and cartons of fruit-flavored milk the kidnappers had given Shiroyama, but there were no stores that stocked all of the food items, which meant they must have been purchased separately from various stores.

The figure of the reporter disappeared from the rearview mirror as the car moved toward the front entrance, pulling up right on time at the porte-cochère. Briefcase in hand, Shiroyama got out, conscious that the reporter was no doubt observing him through the leafy shade as he called out “Good morning” to the guard outside the doors. The guard returned the greeting cheerfully. Other arriving employees greeted Shiroyama as well, and Shiroyama replied to each of them in turn.

The deputy manager of general affairs who had been assigned exclusively to the special control center must have been eagerly anticipating Shiroyama’s arrival and swiftly approached him. “Kurata-san is waiting for you in the control center,” he whispered and ushered Shiroyama toward the elevators.

“How did they make contact?”

“A security guard at the Kanagawa factory picked up a letter that had been thrown inside the front gate. The guard alerted the factory manager, and someone on duty immediately delivered it to us here.”

The elevator stopped on the second basement level, where they passed through a steel door into a restricted area and entered the control center located beneath the opera hall stage. Seigo Kurata greeted them with only a bow, his expression tense with worry.

The letter lay open on a table. It was an ordinary sheet of B5-size letter paper. When Shiroyama looked closely, the handwritten characters, apparently drawn with a ballpoint pen using a ruler, leapt out