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Chapter 05
For a moment, I felt overwhelmed. But now that I had made up my mind, there was no turning back.
First, I should wash my face. I need to clear my head.
I took off my glasses and splashed cold water over my face.
When I raised my head, my reflection stared back at me in the mirror. My face had grown noticeably gaunt in just a few hours, and my blue-green eyes were bloodshot. Every detail was painfully clear.
In truth, my eyesight wasn’t bad at all.
If anything, it was better than average.
Even so, I always wore glasses. It had become something of a habit.
There were three reasons for it.
The first was that I had entered the working world at such a young age that I needed something to keep people from looking down on me.
The second was that debt collectors had chased me around so relentlessly that hiding my face had become second nature.
And the third…
“Your eyes…”
It was because of something my father had once said.
His voice briefly echoed in my ears, but I didn’t have time to indulge in sentimentality.
After giving my cheeks a few brisk slaps, I put my glasses back on and left the restroom.
An annoying employee. An incompetent employee.
Creak, creak.
There was a document storage room in the corridor connecting the restroom to the office. The floor in front of it seemed rather old, creaking whenever I stepped on it.
I wonder if Arden dislikes noisy things. Should I deliberately stomp around this hallway?
As I entertained the thought, an irritated voice suddenly rang out.
“Why do you keep wandering around?”
“Ah! I’m sorry.”
“Tsk.”
The voice belonged to Jeremy.
Wait a minute.
As I returned to my seat after being scolded, a thought suddenly struck me.
Does it necessarily have to be Arden? Wouldn’t it be enough if I got on the other employees’ bad sides?
In other words, I just had to become the person everyone complained about, saying, ‘I absolutely cannot work with that guy!’
Keeping an eye on Jeremy, I approached his desk to test my theory.
“Um, Mr. Jeremy?”
“What? What is it? Talk from there.”
The moment he heard my voice drawing closer, Jeremy hurriedly straightened his back, positioning himself to shield his desk.
“Is there anything I should start with? Perhaps something I need to be briefed on…”
“What? A briefing? You learn those things by using your own initiative!”
“Then is there anything I can help you with?”
“Help me? What could a trainee possibly help with? Stop bothering me. If you’re bored, why don’t you… go over there and dust the top of that cabinet or something!”
Oh.
It seemed I’d found an unexpectedly excellent example of an incompetent employee I could learn from.
People who couldn’t do their jobs properly often used vague talk about ‘initiative’ as an excuse to bully their juniors. Jeremy was a textbook example.
And on top of that, he had a terrible personality?
If I genuinely had to think of him as my supervisor, I would have been utterly miserable. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case right now. I could barely contain my delight.
All right. I’ll play the role of a completely clueless newcomer who has no sense of initiative and keeps pestering everyone!
Ahem.
I cleared my throat and deliberately asked in a rather vacant voice.
“Then what should I do after I’ve finished dusting?”
“Do I have to explain every little thing to you? Just read the documents in the cabinet! Not that you’ll understand anything even if you read them.”
“Yeees.”
“Don’t talk to me again until you’ve finished reading everything!”
“Understooood.”
“Argh! Why did the boss have to assign someone like that to me as a trainee…?”
Judging by how quickly he was already grumbling, this might actually work.
Suppressing my laughter, I picked up a feather duster and a cleaning cloth and headed toward the cabinet.
Come to think of it, shouldn’t my supervisor, of all people, know that I used to work for a trading company?
Although my previous position had been different, I’d worked in the industry for seven years. How could he simply assume I wouldn’t understand anything?
And why had he been hiding his desk earlier?
Of course, it was understandable if he didn’t want to casually expose confidential company documents to a trainee.
Luther mentioned earlier that Jeremy had only been working here for about six months, didn’t he?
Despite Arden’s unpleasant personality, most of the employees at La Mar had remained loyal to him right up until the end.
It was probably less because of his personal charm and more because he threw money around so generously, but the point remained.
For that reason, I remembered the names of the key employees who were still working alongside Arden one year later.
But the name ‘Jeremy’ wasn’t among them.
And this was no minor employee, either. He held the important position of internal secretary.
Did Jeremy get himself into some kind of trouble within the next year…? Good grief.
Lost in thought, I was brought back to my senses by a squeaking sound.
There hadn’t been much dust to begin with, so a few halfhearted swipes would have been more than enough. Yet, out of habit, I’d been scrubbing the cabinet thoroughly.
Good grief. Old habits really were hard to break.
“I’ve finished cleaning all the cabinets in the office. Should I wipe down the desks, or perhaps the cabinets in the document storage room?”
“What?! The storage room? Trainees aren’t even allowed in there! I told you to read the documents! And didn’t I also tell you not to bother me until you’d finished reading them?!”
“Oh! That’s right. I’m sorryyy.”
“Argh!”
While I was at it, I’d managed to polish Jeremy’s temper a little, too.
I opened the cabinet.
The inside was an absolute mess.
Why are these documents arranged so haphazardly? And what’s with these index labels? Did someone just stick them on wherever they felt like it? …Ah, Jeremy must have organized them.
Remembering Jeremy’s remarkably disorganized desk, I shrugged.
His sloppy work habits weren’t particularly surprising. What surprised me was that Arden had allowed this to go on.
Perhaps, unlike the document storage room, this cabinet didn’t contain any particularly important files, so Arden had simply left it to Jeremy and never bothered checking.
I have been curious about how La Mar operates at this point in time.
La Mar was a trading company Arden had deliberately established as part of his plan to extend his influence into high society.
In other words, it was a front for cleaning up his public image.
Before he could take control of aristocratic society, he couldn’t afford to give anyone a reason to criticize him. So at this point, the company was probably operating right on the borderline of legality.
I’d been curious about how it was making money at this stage—and, if it was profitable, just how much it was earning.
Why don’t I take a look?
Before I knew it, I had fallen into my usual habit of sorting through the documents as I read them. I continued for quite some time, until my hand suddenly stopped in the middle of turning a page.
Wait a second. This…
Something was wrong.
No matter how I looked at it—no matter how many times I checked—
…This is a shell company.
If La Mar itself had been a shell company designed to swindle other people, I might have been able to accept that.
But that wasn’t what was happening.
Surprisingly, it was the exact opposite.
Someone is swindling La Mar?!
Who on earth was audacious enough to make an enemy of Arden…?
For the first time in my life, I found myself genuinely curious about just how enormous someone’s nerve could be.
This is insane. Whoever’s behind this, they’re really going all out.
There was more than enough evidence in the documents to prove that Ronen Logistics, a cargo-handling company, was nothing more than a shell corporation.
First, there was the cargo unloading schedule.
How is it possible for the intervals to be this perfectly consistent? Port conditions change all the time. Sudden weather changes can delay or even advance shipping schedules. There’s no way the unloading cycles could remain this regular. It makes absolutely no sense.
Second, there were the disposal costs.
When transporting cargo, defective or missing goods were inevitable. That was simply part of the business.
But…
It’s not agricultural produce. They’re transporting lumber! How on earth does the loss rate come close to seven percent? What, did they hold a campfire on the ship? That’s an absolutely impossible figure!
Third, there were labor costs.
How can the port conveniently be congested every single time, causing delays and requiring additional workers? At least have the decency to come up with different excuses!
Shockingly, the amount they’d embezzled through this scheme had already reached a staggering 300 million gold in the first half of the year alone.
And the amounts they were billing had recently begun to increase.
It was obvious what they were doing. They had started by testing the waters, and when La Mar failed to notice anything, they’d decided to rob the company blind.
When did this start?
I hurriedly flipped through the documents, so engrossed in my investigation that I failed to notice someone approaching.
“Hey, trainee.”
“Yeees?”
The sudden call nearly made me yelp, but I managed to hold myself back just in time.
When I looked up, I found Jeremy staring down at me with an expression that was half puzzled and half displeased.
“I’m going out for lunch, so don’t slack off while I’m gone.”
It wasn’t even, ‘I’m going to lunch. Want to come along?’
He was simply ordering me not to slack off.
I hadn’t intended to eat with him anyway, but the fact that he was still bossing me around during the lunch break certainly didn’t improve my opinion of him.
Fortunately, I had just the perfect way to get under his skin.
“Yes, sir! Oh, by the way, could I wander around and have a look at the office? There are still quite a few areas I haven’t seen.”
You don’t like me wandering around, do you?
