The Ruined Map (26 page)

However, my expectations were disappointed. A rude interruption of the role I was deliberately playing. It was the chief. Another tedious lecture. Why did he always have to start all over again from lesson one? Because an investigator was no more than a drain cleaner, that was why. He crawls around in the midst of filth, unexposed to light.—“I want you detectives to be far more careful about cleanliness and pay attention to your health.” I realized, without being told, the chief’s perplexity when without contacting him I broke my promise to put in an appearance at the office after noon. Although he was most considerate and thoughtful of others he demanded the strictness of an ascetic in matters of self-defense and the cash register, but only in these areas. My thoughts about a chief like this were never unhappy ones. I rather admired his professional conscientiousness when I reflected that many people put up a pretense of evil and hypocrisy as temporary painkillers.—“You had better watch out. As far as your client’s brother’s concerned, it’s a case of murder. It’s preposterous. May I remind you again, if you get involved in a police case without consulting first with me, from that instant on you’re going to have nothing more to do with this office. It sounds unfeeling, but I can’t do anything about it. It’s company policy. You get in trouble if you force a man to stay here who doesn’t really fit in.” I did not usually find this tone unpleasant. On the contrary, it usually made a favorable impression on me. But today for some reason it was without effect. My client came back at just the right point in the conversation. Moreover, she had,
in the meantime, changed from her mourning clothes into an ordinary dress—extremely rapidly, I thought. Apparently I no longer had to fear being plagued by the stench of death. It was a dress of black crepe that loosely molded her body. I wondered if she remembered that I had said black became her. She tilted her head to one side. I shook my own from left to right, indicating with my free hand that the call was for me. She circled the table and sat down immediately in front of me. At the closest point we were about eight inches apart. Her hair was long, the peculiar waves equally divided between shallow and full ones. The curve of her shoulders would fit in the hollow of my hand, were I to place it on them. Without realizing it, I laughed, interrupting the chief’s words.—“Thanks for the enjoyable scolding. These days I’ve been doing nothing but walking around and looking for someone. It’s not at all unpleasant to have someone looking for me.” No, it was not a lie. But after saying that, I realized rather sentimentally that my words were those I might have used to my own wife rather than to my chief. Any number of times I had visited my wife and had got in touch with her, but when I thought about it she had not once contacted me. Perhaps it wasn’t right. The fact that I didn’t have the courage to wait in silence until she sought me out may have eroded our relationship.

I returned to my seat, appropriately leaving on the other end of the line the ceaselessly scolding chief. Her beer and her pathetic smile were not the slightest bit unnatural now. I too put my fingers on the corner of the table in the same way she had done and resumed the rather irritable conversation we had been having. I had that lazy Sunday-afternoon feeling that comes after the pleasure of an unaccustomed late morning in bed.

“But let’s forget about the business of expenses. There are still about four days to go. I’ll do the best I can in that time. We can think about expenses when the time comes.”

“When it comes to that point, I’ll try and get a job somewhere. My brother’s not here to scold any longer. I realize the world isn’t all he claimed.”

“Things are discouraging now, but the investigation has made some progress.”

“You said before you had to be suspicious about the child I aborted. What did you mean by that?”

The tone was casual, quite as if she were discussing the weather, but her innocent expression was not to be trusted. I had had enough of this strain.

“Did I ever say anything like that?”

“I suppose you meant it was my brother’s child, didn’t you?”

“How can you say such a terrible thing with a straight face? I was only trying to say that one can pose all kinds of hypotheses. But I understood your brother’s tastes, and you did show me the album.”

“It’s curious, I felt that myself. And I talked about it with my brother. He was disgusted. He abhorred women and evidently he disliked children too.”

“You’re an amazing woman. I didn’t mean anything so far out as that by what I said. I meant something a lot simpler … a conventional ménage à trois or something like that. He might have pretended to be a brother so you could hide the relationship. That’s a possibility, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean, ‘pretended to be a brother’?”

“Frankly speaking, it was an equivocal situation.”

“I wish you had said that to my brother.”

“Of course, I’m not suspicious any more.” I quickly leafed
through the album, trying not to look at her expression. I showed her the page with the picture of the brother and the car. “Look at this picture. It’s written here that you were the one who took it. Your husband has crawled underneath. Your brother’s standing to the side, looking rather absently at what your husband is doing. No, he is pretending to look, smiling like some accomplice in the direction of the person who’s taking the shot—that is, toward you. Naturally your husband can’t see his expression.”

“I wonder if he wasn’t beginning to be suspicious.”

“No. This is a record. It has been left specifically as such. That’s precisely the sense of
The Meaning of Memories
. Both the one who’s taking the picture and the one who’s having his picture taken must be very much aware of that. If the two of you had had anything to be ashamed of, you would have consciously avoided such a scene.”

“You’re a clever fellow, I knew it.” Suddenly her voice became animated, and she laughed as she filled up my glass, which for some time had been empty. I did not demur. There were only about two inches of beer left in the bottle. “I like this kind of talk. I want more of it.”

“What do you mean, ‘this kind of talk’?”

“Talk that reverses itself, where top becomes bottom, as you’re listening to it. Maybe I can do it too with one subject: my brother. Shall I try?”

“I’ve just about a quarter of an hour.”

“Some years ago my brother had a real lover. I mean a girl, of course … someone he had met in a student movement, he said. That was winter. He seemed terribly happy on through the spring. But one day in the summer the girl said he smelled like cat piddle and couldn’t he have some operation or treatment.”

“I suppose it was an underarm odor.”

“Anyway, my brother meekly began going to the hospital. But when the treatments were half over he decided to have nothing more to do with her. Instead his old dislike of women came back. I began to be more and more important to him. I was the only woman in the world who, for him, was not a woman. We loved each other … really. It was funny we didn’t have a child. But then my husband came on the scene. And I became a real woman.”

“Well then, they must have vied with each other.”

“On the contrary, they didn’t. Right away my brother got along perfectly with my husband. It was much better than if I had made friends with other women.”

“But he could have wanted exclusive possession of you, couldn’t he?”

“Well, he did have exclusive possession … of a boy.”

“Oh, I see.”

“I really liked everything about my brother.”

“Can’t you talk about your husband that way?”

“But my husband didn’t have such a double life.”

“Yet he was the one to run away.”

“Yes, and that’s why it’s so horrible.”

Terror flashed in her eyes, a pathetic fright like frost-covered wires moaning in the wind.

“You’re frightened because you’re thinking of your husband who’s not here. Try instead to imagine him being somewhere. You may suffer but your fear will go away.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“Even if you imagined he was living with some other woman?”

“If I don’t understand why he isn’t here, it’s the same thing.”

“I wonder if the news about your brother is in this eve
ning’s paper. If it is, your husband may see it and get in touch with you quite normally.”

“Do you mean that my brother was the motive behind my husband’s disappearance?”

“That’s a silly idea, forget it. Anyway, it’s not good to have made up your mind to something. I myself was obsessed until just a while ago with the idea that the matchbox I had in my possession was material evidence definitely unfavorable to you. It contained both black and white sticks. Someone who valued the matchbox but who rarely frequented the shop had, in the course of events, replenished the matches. If he had gone to the shop regularly he could have got new matches any time. Now, what kind of situation can you assume? One, it was a man who went out but rarely. Two, he was someone interested in the telephone number printed on the label. Three, he was a man who needed a secret telephone contact.”

“Can’t you jot a telephone number down in a notebook?”

“If anything happened, an address book would be checked first thing, but no one’s going to pay any attention to a matchbox from a coffee house. But that album a little while ago quite removed any basis for suspicion. I was relieved. It was a real dilemma for me. The matchbox was a very troublesome item because we investigators can’t go around suspecting clients. A good example of having made up my mind in advance. Shouldn’t you try being more tolerant toward the relationship between your husband and your brother?”

“You’re the one who’s prejudiced against my brother.”

“Well, let’s drop your brother then. It’s time for me to be going. It’ll take me about ten minutes to S—– station by subway.”

She dropped her eyes and nervously bit twice at her thumbnail.

                 “S
AY, THIS
article was in the newspaper last year.” Young Tashiro peered through thick glasses as he presented me with a tattered newspaper clipping, barely waiting until I had sat down.

“I must say, your map was pretty hard to follow.”

“It says there were over eighty thousand missing persons. I was amazed. Mr. Nemuro’s case wasn’t particularly exceptional.”

“Were you the one who decided on this place?”

“Yes. The view’s rather interesting, don’t you think? You can see both the people going up and the ones going down the stairs when you look over there. You have the feeling of viewing the world absolutely privately, unnoticed by anyone, as if from some nonexistent hole in space. I really like this spot. It’s interesting, people walking around without even knowing they’re being watched.”

“Be that as it may, your map is wrong. I missed the corner four times. I’m nearly twenty minutes late.”

“It’s all right. It’s not so much the map … the underground passages are hard to follow.”

“It’s not all right.” I ordered coffee from a white-jacketed waiter who came to take the order. “With a map like this, it’s conceivable Mr. Nemuro might not have been able to get here.”

“You’re exaggerating. I waited exactly one hour and ten minutes. It may be complicated, but it’s not impossible. And he knew the name of the shop perfectly.”

“Was there about this much of a crowd that morning?”

“The morning rush hour’s not like this. You can’t see the floor for the people.”

“But there’s a considerable crowd now.”

I was seized by the hallucination that I had retrogressed three or four hours in time when I thought of the calm of her room. One had no idea of the direction governing these walking people, where they came from, where they were going. Perhaps it was because, with the tiled floors and the tiled pillars, all the lines of the passageways and stairs converged here, and anyone could follow the line of his choice.

“The people around now are most interesting … each one has his own way of walking … his own expression.”

“Well, let’s take a look at the pictures, shall we?”

“Do you think it’s all right? Here, I mean? They’re pretty hot.”

“We’re not going to pass them around, after all.”

“No, I suppose not, but …”

He passed a square envelope over to me with an air of secrecy. Opening it, I found a paper wrapping held by a rubber band. Inside that, six card-sized photos lay in a pile between two slightly larger pieces of cardboard.

“They’re all color shots,” he said, lowering his voice and leaning toward me. “See there, the poses are different. They’re a lot hotter than the professional ones in magazines. The model might not be so good though. The legs seem too small for the body … sort of like an insect’s, aren’t they. But you certainly get the idea. You can just see a bit of hair there at the buttocks. Hair’s absolutely out for the magazines, they say.”

“Every picture’s taken from the back. Did you pick out only this kind?”

“I guess it was Mr. Nemuro’s taste. For some reason they’re all back views.”

“The model seems to be the same in them all.”

“Boy! That hair’s something. Looks like a horse’s tail.”