Return to Hiroshima by Bob Van Laerhoven

Author:Bob Van Laerhoven [Laerhoven, Bob Van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crime Wave Press
Published: 2018-03-25T22:00:00+00:00

62

Hiroshima – metropolitan police headquarters –

Fukuyamakita – Doctor Adachi – evening, March 14th 1995

So what’s the deal with inspector Takeda, Adachi asks himself on his way to the police station. The doctor knows Takeda has always seen himself as an outsider and for that very reason he always played it by the book. Not anymore, Adachi suspects. He has heard plenty of rumours about Takeda’s infamous intuition, exaggerated no doubt during noisy police get-togethers in the city’s karaoke bars. Does his farfetched theory about the bank robbery and now that dead baby have anything to do with that intuition, or has Takeda been able to finally put together the pieces of some complex puzzle? It’s been one scandal after another of late: police bribery, even police involvement in bank robberies. The crisis has had some bizarre consequences: the pride post-war Japan achieved through its industrial superiority is slowly evaporating. And we can’t live without pride, Adachi thinks to himself. We’re losing the plot, especially the younger generation with their painted hair and their crazy underground culture. They’ve turned their back on us and our values. They forget how we did without after the war. They forget about the typhoid, the lice, and the obsessions: eat now, drink now, find shelter now. We tried to survive in spite of the diseases and the radioactive residue. The horrors we had to look at were beyond belief. Skeletons walked the streets and at night you could hear the dead, the blistering dead, weeping, vomiting, coughing, mumbling.

No wonder I enjoy a drink, thinks Adachi as he pulls into the car park in front of the police station. He looks up. It’s dark already and he imagines that he can see a tiny light far above his head that can unfold at any moment into a tempest of fire, scorching and devouring everything in its path.

The police doctor smiles as he informs the duty officer that he’s come to pick up a couple of documents. He takes the lift to the basement. His hands are sweaty, his forehead burning. How did that hanhan Takeda, that fucking half-breed, manage to turn my head with those crazy stories of his about wartime treasures so big that a senior police commissioner wasn’t even afraid to have one of his own inspectors eliminated just to keep a lid on things?

He makes his way to cold storage where they keep the corpses prior to post-mortem, opens box 23 and pulls back the sheet covering the body. The misshapen head of the baby found at the Peace Monument appears. Its eyelids are dried up and shrivelled by the cold and the corpse appears to stare at him in terror. Adachi examines the right heel and instinctively holds his breath.

A sign, Takeda had said. It might be a sign.

Of what?

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