Hidden Nexus (24 page)

Monday 3rd January 6:00pm

Junsa
Saito and Sergeant Mori sat patiently in a small, secluded bar opposite police head quarters. They’d not said much since leaving Niigata Kyubin.

‘I thought that the Inspector said he was meeting us in the office,’ queried a confused
Junsa
Saito. ‘And it’s not for me to say, but should you be drinking beer if you have such a bad head cold?’

Mori sniffed. She really was quite forward, he reflected. ‘You don’t know the Inspector as well as I do. So when he says the office, he really means here. At least that’s what he used to mean. Trust me. As for the beer,’ he said raising his glass and admiring the bubbles as they rose endlessly to the surface. ‘You’re probably right but it’s a force of habit. If nothing else it might give me a good night’s sleep.
Campai
- cheers.’
Junsa
Saito clinked her glass against his. She had ordered an Oolong-cha - perhaps he should have followed her lead, Mori reflected.

‘You were quiet in the car. Is anything the matter?’ he asked.

Junsa
Saito looked up at him with her large brown eyes and for a second or two Mori suddenly felt uncomfortable being under her gaze. There was an intensity about her which occasionally was all too apparent. He wouldn’t have described her as naturally pretty, but neither was she ugly. Her straight dark hair was cropped unconventionally short and her face was not classically attractive – her jaw being quite square and her build short and curvy rather than slender and glamorous. She did however possess an almost permanent smile which lit up her features in the most endearing way and her eyes – they needed no further description. They constantly pulled you in.

‘I thought you wanted to think,’ she said. ‘But also if I’m honest there was something I wanted to say.’

‘Go ahead.’ Mori was not surprised and took a sip of his beer.

‘I thought you were going to hit Takeda san back there. I don’t know what I would have done if you had.’

Mori smiled again. He was intrigued that she was so forward. Most tended to keep their thoughts to themselves but he was grateful that she’d brought it up. ‘Well there was something else you didn’t know. I had the advantage of having a previous meeting with Takeda this morning and I’d already taken the decision that he was a man who was unlikely to respond to the softly-softly approach. When a man has lied to you once, there’s only one other way that will usually work.’

‘Yes, but hitting. That can’t be right. I mean - If he’d pressed charges-’

‘I wasn’t going to hit him. I was just giving him the impression that I
might
hit him. There’s a difference.’

‘You really think so.’ She looked at him doubtfully.

‘Yes I do, and anyway you’ll come up across much tougher nuts to crack than him, believe me. He was a bit of a wimp all things considered.’

‘Well, I’m still not sure-’

‘Are you worried that you’ve hooked up with a loose cannon? Do you really think that I regularly threaten interviewees and witnesses?’ He spoke in a gentle tone as if to compensate for what she saw as his earlier unwarranted aggression.

She smiled at him. ‘I was just shocked, that’s all. I wasn’t expecting it. Also your language – that was quite, er… quite ‘fresh’, too.’

‘Like I said you need to employ all sorts of approaches. Sometimes it’s a good tactic to put people off guard with a change of pace or language or an implication or two.’

Junsa
Saito grinned back at him. ‘I’m obviously still a bit wet behind the ears as far as field work is concerned. I’m more used to desk research in the office but I’m keen to learn though and I can see I am with one of the best.’ She bowed in mock reverence.

‘I’m not sure about that. I just do my best,’ Mori laughed and drained the rest of his beer.

‘Would you like another?’ She pointed to his now empty glass, surprised at the speed at which Mori drank.

‘Why not?’

For a second he thought she was coming onto him. Suddenly her lips which moments before had seemed quite plain and unassuming were glistening and pouting.

‘I wonder where Saito is?’ He felt suddenly embarrassed and looked at his watch. 'It's six twenty already and he's not usually late.'

‘Have you tried his mobile?’

The brief moment of chemical
frisson was swiftly broken.

Mori patted his jacket pockets and looked back at her with a boyish look on his face. ‘I must have left mine in the office. I’m not too, er…’

Junsa
Saito gave him a motherly look to compliment his own. ‘I’ll ring him. Do you know his number?’

‘
Actually I do.’ Mori pulled out a scrap of paper from his wallet. 'It happens quite often that I don’t have my phone.’ He passed over the note.

‘I can believe it.’
Junsa
Saito laughed
.
Their hands touched as she took the note from him.

Mori suddenly felt butterflies in his stomach. It was an unpleasant feeling. He thought of Ren Narase, his girlfriend, far away. He missed her more than he cared to admit.

Junsa
Saito dialled the number but only got the voice mail answer service. ‘I’ll try an e-mail.’

They waited but there was no reply.

‘Come on.’ Mori picked up his coat and got up to leave. ‘Something doesn’t smell right.’

Thirty-five minutes later, after having first popped back to the office and luckily finding the address of the YBP meeting still scribbled on Inspector Saito’s note pad, they approached the conference centre where the meeting was due to have taken place. The hall echoed to their footfall and was quite deserted save for a few caretakers tidying up the rows of chairs.

‘They're all in the banquet hall upstairs,’ one of them offered. ‘But you’ll be lucky if they let you in.’

They made their way upstairs and similar to the battle Saito had experienced earlier on they had a job convincing the bouncers that they had good business to be allowed entrance, despite their official badges.

Mori thought it highly unlikely that Saito would have ingratiated himself so well as to be invited into an intimate shareholders banquet but his instincts were alive to something wrong, ‘Try your phone again.’

Junsa
Saito tried for the seventh time. There was still no answer.

‘You go that way, I’ll go this.’

They circled around the banquet hall meeting up again at the opposite side.

‘Any sign of him?’

‘Not that I could see.’

‘Come on.’

They returned to the hall once more and Mori took a quick look around. He spotted a side door towards the back and following a hunch exited through it.

Monday 3rd January 6:15pm

Kenji Ozawa, not for the first time in recent days, considered his feelings. At the best of times he was a severe, single-minded man who didn’t tolerate fools gladly and who was a man who rarely pondered on the softer emotions. It was the key reason behind his business success and
a
t fifty-nine
Kenji Ozawa
was still a wiry, tough-talking business man. Not only that – he was an innovator and a risk-taker.

Niigata Kyubin was a relatively new player in the logistics business compared to Yokohama Black Panther for example, which was a long-standing company with an established and trusted market share – a market share that was however, small compared to the other big hitters in Tokyo and Osaka.
Niigata Kyubin’s modern management ideas and progressive employment policies had been novel for Japan and had broken through many traditional business customs, particularly in the field of recruitment. They consciously hired young, athletic men – men not necessarily honed with a university education or eager for a corporate life, but those they believed were best suited to handle the strenuous, corporeal work and long hours that were demanded.

Even now, at well after
six,
the well-lit complex of Niigata Kyubin was a beehive of activity. Every few seconds trucks driven by the clean-cut, young men in red and white striped jackets would be backing into the warehouses to unload. Vehicles would be meticulously scrubbed to ensure that the fleet remained sparkling and the livery spotless. Inside, packages would be sorted and reloaded into smaller trucks that would then supply Kanagawa’s tens of thousands of wholesalers and retail outlets with everything from Sony 3D HD televisions to ladies lingerie.

In return for the long hours and hard work the drivers were paid well, with a starting salary well over the national average, but not only that – the strategy was to turn them into salesmen, giving them a commission for any further business they drummed up to make sure their trucks didn't return empty from their long trips.

But to speed up the development of the company into a truly nationwide delivery network, Ozawa still knew that he had to break further taboos and forge agreements or mergers, and if not that, then aggressively sought take-overs and acquisitions.

If he was honest he’d been hardly surprised at the reluctance of Yokohama Black Panther to jump into bed with him, recognising quite clearly that Noboru Nakasone,
his late counterpart,
had been less instinctive businessman and more a cautious, company mandarin.
Nakasone was hewn from the unyielding marble of corporate uniformity and his rise to the head of YBP could be said to be the polar opposite of Ozawa’s.
He was so obviously not a risk taker by nature. The irony here was that it was precisely Nakasone’s safe pair of hands and steady network of alliances that Ozawa had been banking on to legitimise his more upstart company. YBP with their stable, established methods and universally recognised brand name together with Ozawa’s business insight and implacable drive had been sure to be a winner. That was the prize combination that Ozawa had been, and was, still chasing.

Ozawa though, regardless of the late Nakasone’s misgivings was all too aware that both companies needed to get around Japan’s pervasive web of regulations. Niigata Kyubin and Yokohama Black Panther alike required the regulations to work in their favour – they required a loosening of the private anti-competitive practices that made it so hard for new firms to challenge the entrenched leaders.
They needed the rights to operate along certain routes and they needed the exemptions from zoning regulations to allow the company to expand its terminal network.
The only way they could achieve this was to work closely with the governing hand.

This is why he’d taken Eri Yamada to the meetings. She had been his legal expert, not that he'd had much occasion to work with her before the negotiations had started. Their paths had rarely crossed. In fact it would be fair to say that he had barely known her.

He had though, found himself being surprisingly and gently seduced by her abilities and charm and n
o matter how hard he had tried to focus on her business input there had been one thought that had revolved around his mind.

How agreeable it would be to get her into bed!

He may have been single-minded towards his business interests but he was also hard-playing and women, particularly women who came within his sphere of influence, were all considered fair game.

He had been desperate to
barely
know her.

As he sat now in his office, staring over the compound, he felt a definite murmur within his heart and he smiled wistfully, almost ruefully, to himself. He recalled one of the earlier meetings in which he’d first been alerted to her charms.

As he’d sat in that meeting, with his eyes closed listening to the various discussions, initially he’d not noticeably picked out any of her contributions.

He’d then focussed onto a conversation which had veered unexpectedly off track, courtesy of a short comfort break, surrounding the shocking and premature death of Kumi Kizaro one of Japan’s top female, j-pop artists. She’d been found dead in her hotel room that morning - an overdose of drugs having seen her off, at least according to the press who had gorged themselves at having something juicy to report on other than economic hardship - except that apparently there had been no suspicious circumstances. ‘
More the pity
’ you could have heard the editors grumble.

The general mood of the collected group had been one of sympathy and disbelief. Kumi Kizaro had been a larger than life public figure, not often away from the front pages of the dailies. She’d dallied in a number of ventures aside from singing – a one-off mediocre movie in the vampire genre, a short stint at modelling - some of it provocatively nude and a mid-night talk show that ran for a season. It was her mix of alluring sex-appeal and child-like innocence that allowed these failures to be graciously forgiven. All had spoken nothing but good words for the late singer.

‘In my opinion this was a dog’s death – a bad death!’
Ozawa
had stated suddenly,
cutting across the more sensitive and delicate opinions that had been passed politely around the group.
The others had sat back in silent shock at hearing this sudden, forthright opinion.

‘To die without fulfilling one's aim is a bad death. This woman that you're talking about - I don’t know why you are so over-indulgent with your sympathy. She wasted her life and she wasted her death,’ he’d continued in his low guttural tones.

‘What on earth are you talking about Ozawa san?’ Eri Yamada had asked, daring to confront him directly. It had been the first time that he had really noticed her.

Ozawa had looked up. He hadn’t expected a reply. Usually his pronouncements were met with bowed heads and murmurings of agreement. He’d seen Yamada san smiling directly at him, displaying a perfect set of pearly-white teeth embroidered by voluptuous lips of astonishing red
, and many men, Ozawa had considered, would have found those lips very hard to resist.
He recalled taking a sideways look at her. He’d just about been able to see down her enticing cleavage courtesy of a stray un-done button. Her face had been smooth, her eyes had been clear and her hair had been healthy and shimmering alluringly. He’d particularly liked her ears, he’d noticed, which were perfect in their shape. Everything about her had seemed to be perfect.

He had also noticed that she’d been completely unperturbed by her surroundings, by him or the conversation. He’d liked it. It had been fresh.

At that point he’d been
definitely
determined to get her into bed.

‘What do you mean that she wasted her death? It’s a strange expression. I’ve never heard it before,’ Eri Yamada had continued.

‘We all want to live, of course we do, but we should live our lives focussed solely on what we can achieve and do well at. From what I understand Kumi Kizaro flitted from one thing to another without achieving anything of any greatness. There seemed no point to her at all and to finish her life as she did was cowardice. It was an avoidance of life. She had a bad life and similarly to die in such a way was a bad death – a dog’s death!’

The others had continued to look blankly back at him.

‘I’m saying that by setting your focus every morning and evening.’ Ozawa had leant forward becoming energised by the topic, ‘and by genuinely achieving your aims you are able to live as though your body was already dead. It’s a kind of existential freedom. Your attainments are complete and therefore life and death have no separate meaning.’

There had been a polite pause as these thoughts had been digested. Most were unsure at what had been said and so had nodded sagely so as to demonstrate their agreement with these wise words from their master. Only Eri Yamada had appeared to have the gumption to question him.

‘So you don’t think she achieved her aims, then?’

‘From what I know almost everything she did was a failure. I don’t believe she was really that much of a singer, either. My karaoke is better!’

‘I completely disagree. She made lots of money and kept herself in the public eye. From where I sit she was a pretty shrewd business woman. I didn’t see eye to eye with all that she did, particularly, er… the photos, but in a man’s world she succeeded pretty well.’

‘Which photos do you mean?’ Ozawa had asked mischievously? He’d known precisely which photos she’d been referring to.

‘The nude ones,’ she’d answered, her voice not wavering.

Ozawa had raised an eyebrow and grinned. ‘Nude! And in a man’s world that’s the way to succeed, is it?’

Eri Yamada had blushed. ‘Like I said, I didn’t agree with everything she did-’

‘You wouldn’t stoop so low, then – despite your fine figure?’

Eri Yamada had blushed again. ‘Of course not!’ she’d simply added.

Ozawa had helped her out. It had been, of course, a calculated move on his part to introduce a slither of innuendo into their conversation. Her replies had made him want her even more but he’d returned to the topic of the unfortunate Kumi Kizaro. ‘And now she’s dead! Is that succeeding pretty well?’

‘You don’t understand the pressures we women face.’ She’d rested her light brown eyes squarely upon him.

‘True, I can’t comment on that,’ Ozawa had deferred. ‘But drug taking is surely an avoidance of reality. It doesn’t sound like someone working hard to reach their potential. It doesn’t sound like someone using her life or working with reality. It’s spineless. She doesn't deserve any sympathy.’ He’d sat back emphatically in his seat.