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

few minutes that they needed? The question that had flickered in his thoughts while speaking with Officer Sawaguchi still pulsed in a corner of his mind.

But in reality, as Goda peddled away on his bicycle, he wondered where he would be and what he would be doing come tomorrow. He might be canvassing this neighborhood on foot or investigating suspicious vehicles; on the other hand, he might not even be recruited to Special Investigation headquarters, and he’d find himself back with the rank and file at the precinct, writing up cases as usual. No matter what, he had no doubt that he would be somewhere far away whenever any developments occurred.

11:42 p.m. The alley was as silent as it had been half an hour earlier. It would still be a while before the MPD held a press conference, but for the time being, it seemed as if nothing had been leaked to the public. After telling the two young officers who were controlling traffic to stay put until instructed otherwise, Goda set off toward the police box by Omori Station only a short distance away. As he traveled back through the maze of alleys, he spotted three unmarked cars of the Crime Scene Unit and the Special Investigation Team parked in the darkness.

根来史彰　Fumiaki Negoro

On the copy desk of Toho News’s Metro section, Kei’ichi Tabe, the slot editor, tore off a sheet from his page-a-day calendar. His arm inscribed a large arc in the air and the ripped-out piece of paper sailed away from his hand.

Tabe had a habit of doing this when the date changed at midnight. The slot editor’s desk had a conspicuously large desktop computer on it, so that Fumiaki Negoro, sitting a little distance away in the section for reserve reporters who floated wherever they were needed among the various hard news sections, could only see Tabe’s arm and the flyaway paper behind the massive monitor.

The clock showed the time as one minute after midnight. It was Saturday, March 25.

Ripping off and throwing away the page from his own small daily calendar with one hand, Negoro resumed working on his unfinished draft. It was the next day’s installment of a six-part series, “Waste or Resource?” and he had taken this brief moment of free time to begin writing it. The thirteenth edition of the morning paper had gone to press half an hour ago, and there was an hour and a half until the final deadline for the fourteenth edition. The crowd in the news room could best be compared to that in the lobby of a theater running a play that boasted a relatively good turnout, if not a full house. Directions to confirm or finesse articles before press time bounced from one corner of the office to another, and phone calls came in now and then from reporters in the field. However, since everyone spoke in low tones and with few words, their voices didn’t travel far.

In addition to Tabe, the slot editor, there was a rim editor on duty and four overnight reporters on the Metro desk. In the Reserve section, the only one left was the chief, Negoro. Until half an hour ago, there had been at least three other reporters getting their research materials together, but after Tabe asked them to do some additional reporting for the final edition, they had gone off somewhere, leaving behind an ashtray with a mountain of cigarette butts.

During the Great Hanshin Earthquake that struck in January, the reserve reporters—eighteen in total—were for the most part allocated to the earthquake and disaster news crew, but just when they thought the confusion in the aftermath of the disaster had subsided, March brought a succession of major incidents beginning four days ago with the unprecedented crimes of a poison gas terror attack and random killings by a religious sect, followed by the bankruptcy of two credit unions within the metropolitan area. Added to this were suicides of children being bullied, a spate of gun-related crime, city expos, waste issues, urban disaster prevention, a resolution to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of the war—the reserve reporters were hardly at their desks long enough to warm their seats. It was rare to have such a bustling year, and Negoro did not have to wait until spring to complete his annual transformation into “the solitary reserve,” the lone reporter rooted to his desk, churning out article after article.

Always watching the clock, all year long Negoro assembled the drafts filed from all over by the other reserve reporters into a coherent whole, revising and rewriting to create feature articles to fill the Metro page and sending them off to the slot editor. In between all this he would touch up articles for his own column and pre-write advance articles on occasion. As it came down to the wire before press time he would check headlines, and in the event of an exclusive he would immediately swap around, punch up, or correct articles as per the slot editor’s specs. For the most part the work felt automatic, and after twenty-three years on the job his body had grown accustomed to it, but when the clock ticked past midnight, his lumbago, the result of a car accident four years ago, would start to trouble him. To make matters worse, yesterday he had stayed up reading a book—knowing all along that he should get some sleep—and he was paying for it now, his eyes hurting a little as he looked at the computer screen.

“Hey, Yoshida, this piece on the Product Liability Act—I think the consumers come out too strong,” Tabe was saying on the other side of the desktop computer. “Which do you prefer, add in some corporate voices, or shorten the opinions of the consumer group?”

With the phone in one hand, Tsutomu Yoshida, the overnight reporter covering the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, responded, “Please shorten it.” The rim editor, Takano, sat in front of another desktop computer next to Tabe, and