The Ruined Map (24 page)

“I drove down the freeway a little while ago.”

“Why? I wonder.”

“As I went along I thought how wonderful it would be if I could go on like that forever. And then I felt I really could. But I shudder now when I think of my psychological state at the time. Supposing everything had come out as I wished, supposing I had gone on and on and, no matter how far I went, never, never came to the toll gate …”

Suddenly she raised her head from her glass.

“It’s all right. You’d run out of gas in half a day.”

Our eyes met in a strange look.

But she seemed to take no meaning from what I was saying or from what she herself said, and when she noticed the stiffening of my expression she was suddenly flustered. “It’s strange, isn’t it. My husband seemed to use the freeway a lot too. Of course, in his case it was to test the cars he had repaired. He said he used to go round and round on the freeway so much that he got tipsy. That was in the evenings when the iron roofs of the buildings still shone red in the sun, though the underparts were already darkened.”

“Perhaps what I was saying was just that.”

“He said that as he went up and down the freeway a hundred times, a thousand times, the exits gradually diminished in number, and that in the end he felt locked in.”

“When you’re driving, you never want to think of stopping. You want the moment to go on forever just as it is. But when it’s over, you shudder at a state like that, with no end. There’s a big difference between driving and thinking about driving.”

A faint smile hovered about her lips. It differed from her usual smirk, yet it was a worrisome smile, as if she were forcing herself to be agreeable. She again lowered her eyes and I had a feeling of frustration, like some salesman turned away from the door with excessive courtesy.

The momentum of my words carried me on: “So perhaps I needn’t be so concerned about the diary. The diary, after all, is imagining the driving; your husband is the one who actually drove.”

“Oh. The diary …”

“What did you think I was talking about?”

“I thought it had to do with a man and woman,” she said in an uninterested tone as if she were tossing aside an orange peel. Again she lowered her absent-minded gaze to her glass.

“Do you know anything about the contents?” At length I too was roused. “What is this business … your being so uninterested in your husband’s diary? I don’t know any more who to worry about.”

“But I don’t think even my brother made much of a point of the diary.”

“Did you trust your brother that far? Even more than your own judgment?”

“I’m all alone now.”

She closed her eyes, the upper part of her body slackened, and she seemed quite unaware of my presence. Yet I wondered whether deep in her heart a tempest was ravaging her.

“Well, have it your way. It’s none of my business. However you may think of your brother. But what in heaven’s name were the circumstances that got him in such a mess? Do you know, actually?”

“Oh, yes, that reminds me. I have to give you this.” She picked up a large, square, white handbag that she had put next to her chair, and which was somewhat ill-matched with her mourning clothes, and lifted it into her lap. Out of it she took a package wrapped in newspaper and slid it over the table toward me. It was a strangely shaped package,
poorly done up. From the sound it made on the table it seemed rather heavy.

“What’s this?”

“The man who came to talk to me a while ago … the one with the heavy beard …”

“Oh. That’s the owner of the noodle place. He ran a spot in the dry river bed where the fight took place.”

“He said it was a memento of my brother’s.”

The paper tore as I was opening it, and a black metallic tube, gleaming dully, was revealed. A pistol! It at once occurred to me that I must not leave any fingerprints. I grasped it by the muzzle with an edge of the newspaper and gingerly drew it toward me across the table. A small buttonlike object, wrapped with the pistol, fell out. It was the badge.

“These things aren’t very much, but …”

She was quite imperturbable, and it was I who was thoroughly disturbed. For god’s sake, what kind of woman was she? What was her everyday world?

“Did you know this? It’s a six-shooter Browning.”

“Oh, it’s only a toy.”

“A toy?”

“Look. The barrel’s blocked up.”

I saw that it was indeed. The color, shape, and weight were perfect, and I could not tell it from a real revolver. Particularly the chill around the well-oiled trigger gave it an inorganic feel. For psychological effect, one needed nothing closer to the real thing.

“I heard the other man got excited when my brother pulled this out.”

“Curious. The noodle fellow must have got out of there before me, so he couldn’t actually have witnessed the scene.”

“Once he had parked the bus in a safe place, he said, he went back again.”

There was nothing I could say to that. Even I could have done something … rushed to the office of the temporary workmen’s quarters … or run to the police station … or something. But all I did was clear out of the place. I let him die without lifting a finger, without showing him as much good faith as the noodle man.

“But I didn’t go back.”

“It appears his head was stomped in with a heel.”

“That’s questionable. According to that boy in charge I spoke with a while ago, it seems he was shot to death.”

“You can’t trust what those boys say. Right away imagination becomes fact. The police also said he had been clubbed to death.”

“But you imagine facts yourself, don’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“Did the police mention anything concerning me or your husband?”

“No, not particularly.”

“A thing like this revolver doesn’t mean much.” I was irritated at being fooled and I deliberately applied my fingerprints to the surface of the gun. “But it’s something of a problem if you consider that the business your brother was running was as innocent as this gun.”

“Of course. Originally, the gun was my husband’s, you realize.”

“What was your husband doing with it?”

“He bought it somewhere and loved to flaunt it around. My brother got all excited and took it away from him.”

“That’s strange too. The positions seem somewhat reversed. Your brother had no right to complain about some
thing as innocuous as a toy pistol, when you consider what he was doing. For instance, do you know what he was up to in the dry river bottom where the fight took place last night?”

“Yes. In a general way …”

“He took the key money he got and had a number of shops set up for the workingmen’s quarters—you know, the microbuses. That in itself would be all right, but he put women in them—prostitution right in the open. Did you know that?”

“Well, yes … generally …”

“For heaven’s sake, what sort of a relationship was there between your brother and your husband? I can’t believe they were individuals of the same kind. When you talk you seem so uncritical of your brother.”

“I think I understand him. My brother would never permit my husband to play with such a toy.”

“So that’s why I wondered how he could justify complaining about the gun. I can’t believe he had any justification.”

“Justification? Well, I don’t know …,” she said, thrusting her finger into her glass and then licking the beer foam from the tip. “It’s a strange turn of the wheel of fortune. If my brother was killed because of this toy, it would seem my husband did it.”

Perhaps her complete indifference and her tenseness, which seemed to be on the verge of tearing her apart, dwelt together in her single expression. Suddenly the pain which convulsed her breast, as she frantically stifled a cry, pierced me. It was apparently not my turn to be upset.

“You worry too much. A thing like this is a straight clue.”

“Put it away right now. Please. I hate toys like that.”

“I’ll take it along with me. What shall I do with the badge?”

“Oh. Well … you might as well throw it away.”

“I’ll have to be leaving shortly after six.”

“Would you have another beer?”

“Actually I’d prefer looking at an album or something.”

“An album?”

“Yes, one with family pictures.”

“We do have one, but … surely it’ll be a bore.”

Twisting around and half rising, she drew from the bookcase behind her an oversized scrapbook contained in a case, on the spine of which was printed in large letters:
The Meaning of Memories
. On closer inspection, I saw it was not printing but letters that had evidently been cut out of a magazine or something and pasted on in a line.

“
The Meaning of Memories
is a rather strange title, isn’t it?”

“It’s typical of him. So meticulous …”

So this was the meticulousness typical of him.

“No doubt the pictures inside are just as meticulously done.”

“Hmm.”

Turning to the first page of the album, I casually said: “What type of picture did he seem interested in lately?”

“Well, he was enthusiastic about color and he was all the time going to a rented darkroom where he could develop his own pictures. He was proud of the one that seems to be rings of colors in a puddle of water.”

Colored rings … Apparently she didn’t know anything about the nudes. But there wasn’t much object in telling her at this point. The brown, faded portrait of an older woman appeared on the first page of the album. From the
way the painted ocean and cliff stretched away in the background, I supposed it dated from the twenties.

“That’s my husband’s mother, who lives in the country with my sister-in-law,” she commented, peering at the picture. An odor of sun-drenched hair wafted to my nose.

The pictures of the husband alone stopped with this page. From the second page on, they abruptly shifted to the period just after his marriage. A souvenir shot of affectedly expressionless newlyweds.

“Aren’t there any pictures of your husband before you and he got married?”

“No. We collected them all, including the old ones, and left them with his mother in the country.”

“Did you have some reason for that?”

“We weren’t particularly sentimental about the past.”

The periods of the pictures kept changing as I turned the pages. But portraits of her occupied the most space, whatever the period. Apparently his interest in photography dated from some time ago, for they were arty shots taken from every conceivable angle. But what was even more disconcerting was her disagreeably aggressive attitude that was caught in them. One showed her face reflected in a mirror as if she were making herself up, quite devoid of timidity. A face clearly aware it was being looked at, a smile hovering about the slightly open mouth, veiled, pensive eyes dreamily looking into the distance. More surprising still was that there was even a picture of her in a peignoir, through which, the shot having been taken against the light, the contours of her body were almost visible. A strange woman. Had the husband taken them … or had she had them done? I should have to begin by looking into that.

Mixed in with these pictures, though rarely, were others
of the family and him, souvenir photos of a time when the two of them had visited his mother. A country village … the front of a general store that served as a tobacconist’s. It was apparently summer and a bench had been brought out. The mother was in the center, with the two of them to her right; on her left were his elder sister and her husband. They were all holding cups of shaved strawberry ice in their hands and laughing happily. At once I scrutinized the expressions of the mother and sister. Wasn’t there some feature the three had in common? Some portent that hinted of his disappearance? Some genetic sign of insanity? I should have had a magnifying glass.

There was another picture in which he was fussing with a tree in the garden.

“Is this where you lived before you came here?”

“Yes. That was when he was an agent for Dainen Enterprises.”

“How did he first come to do that kind of work?”

“After the first business went bankrupt, he sold magazines for a while. And then, unexpectedly, a college classmate of my brother’s started a supermarket with capital he got from selling land: my husband bought his share of the store.”

“What about the money?”

“My husband finished paying it in monthly installments last summer.”

“So there’s nothing between them any more?”

“No. My brother did the negotiating from the very beginning.”

“Then I suppose your brother was also the one who received the title.”

“I really don’t know. Whichever it was, my husband was
the one who was promoted from branch head to section head in the main office. There’s no problem there, I think.”

“You’re right. Of course, there was some kickback out of his earnings.”

“Oh, do you think so?” She smiled wearily as she refilled both our glasses with beer. “But we … my brother and I … lost our mother and father early and always had to lead a hand-to-mouth existence—just the two of us. When one of us was picked on, the other felt it as if it were he himself. Even after I married I don’t think things changed much. Actually, it was through my brother that my husband got to work in the main office. It’s true. We didn’t want a child of ours to go through the hardships we did, so until our insurance and retirement pay were guaranteed and our net wages were over sixty thousand yen a month we decided not to have a child. But, I would be eight months pregnant by now.”

“Now?”

“Yes, if I hadn’t lost it.”

“Did your husband know you were pregnant?”

“Of course he did.”

“What was your brother’s work before he entered the organization?”

“When he was in school, he was dismissed because he was too active in some student movement … or, let me see, maybe he left of his own free will. He couldn’t get respectable work for various reasons. For a very short time he was private secretary to some city councilman.”

At length, close to the end of the album, I came to the photo I wanted to see. It was a picture of him—the client’s brother. The scene was the same as the earlier one, in the garden. There was an old car with its hood up, facing the
camera at an angle. A man resembling the husband had crawled underneath on a mat. There stood the brother with one elbow leaning on the roof, a smile on his face, his mouth wide open—apparently he was saying something to his brother-in-law. But he was looking into the camera as if embarrassed. He was wearing wooden sandals and a short-sleeved shirt. Indeed, the photo gave off very much of a homey feeling.