The Ruined Map (8 page)

                 S
OMEONE WAS
following me. Paying no heed, I continued to walk.

Leaving Dainen Enterprises, I went about two blocks south, down the main street, turned right, and climbed the abrupt incline. I came to a railroad crossing with no gate. The street which lay alongside the tracks on the other side was, in this neighborhood, the only place where parking was possible. A line of cars stretched almost solid from there to the next main street. Most of the parked cars were small-sized trucks, since the whole area was crowded with small factories. Every time a train came by, it would raise a metallic dust, and here even the road appeared rusty-red.

My car was parked at the end of the street. When I turned and looked over my shoulder, the figure of the man shadowing me had vanished. There was nothing to get excited about. He would, I suspected, soon reappear. I got in the car and shoved the seat back as far as it would go, inserted a carbon between two sheets of paper on top of my briefcase, which I propped on my knees, and lit a cigarette. Putting records in order in places like this was a habit in which we had had to acquire some skill. The same was true for information and shadowing techniques. Yet, after the few lines of stereotyped opening, the following sentences simply didn’t come. “No results,” I wrote—an incredibly wretched expression that only corroborated my alibi. Fortunately I did have thesheet with the map of the meeting place at S—– station, which I had had young Tashiro draw up, a sketch like a plumber’s draft for some water conduit. That was something to pad out the report with. Nothing is so devastating at such times as one’s own incompetence. Well, maybe I was really incompetent. Had I ever once been competent? I wondered. Once in a long while, when my words flowed, when I was able to draw out my “No results” over thirty lines, I had the illusion of competency. Since I took a rather aggressive attitude toward my abilities, there was no need to be particularly competent. I would manage some way to forget about my inefficiency.

Tearing off a length of Scotch tape, I attached the piece of paper with the map to the left-hand corner of my report sheet.

A long freight train crowned with snow—it had come through the mountains—beating and bending the rails, taking an endless time, began to pass by. Once again the figure of my follower appeared in the corner of the rear-view mirror.

It was, as I expected, young Tashiro. He vanished into a dead angle of the mirror and was transformed at once into a real person standing at my window. Opening the opposite door, I signaled to him with my finger to go round to the other side. The window groaned as if it would break under the pressure set up by the train, and the report sheets on my knees fluttered violently. He pitched, almost collapsing, into the car, and I was struck with the pungent
odor, like that of an old icebox, coming from his overcoat.

For the several minutes—actually a score of seconds—until the train had passed completely by, the pupils of my companion’s eyes became smaller and smaller behind his glasses, and his head sank deeper and deeper into his coat collar. His rigid body trembled in unison with the train, vibrating quite as if he were a thin iron plate. What tale had he come to bear? I wondered. If he was carrying tales, good enough, but perhaps he had come to throw a little sand in my eyes, as he had done a short while ago. The promising young clerk, and for that matter the missing husband too, were, in the words of the director, pretty rare types.

At length the train passed by. After it had gone, a sound like the buzzing of insects lingered in my ears.

“Depressing weather, isn’t it?”

With these words the rigidity suddenly left his knees, like a film that begins to roll; and he shifted his body, turning slightly in my direction. When I flipped my cigarette out the side vent, he in turn took out one and lit it, pushing up his glasses, which kept slipping down.

“I’m sorry. I … to tell the truth … I told a lie back there. I’m sorry. There was really no need to.”

“You did it out of deference to the director, I suppose.”

“Well … no, I don’t think so. Because it was something the director knew all about. But why did he act as if he didn’t know anything at all about it and why didn’t he correct me? I feel awful. It goes against my conscience … because I’ve become an accomplice in betraying Mr. Nemuro, who’s the head of my section.”

“Don’t worry about it. If in the long run it’s to Mr. Nemuro’s advantage, it’s all right.”

“No, it’s not to his advantage. I knew from the start that
it wasn’t. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be telling a lie. I realized that telling it was probably useless.”

“Just let me decide whether it was useless or not.”

“It’s about the destination of those documents.”

“Did you know?”

“The section manager … here,” he began, extracting from his breast pocket a calling card, which he brandished with a histrionic gesture. “I actually do recall hearing him make a telephone call about delivering some documents or other. Possibly about two days before he disappeared.”

“Oh, yes. A ward councilman. But it’s a ward you don’t often hear about.”

“It’s a newly formed one under joint management. But you won’t get anything by going there. We haven’t been sitting around with our arms folded.”

That was a line I seemed to have heard before. Yes, it had come from the brother back in the parking lot. Suddenly I was overcome with an uncontrollable anger.

“Look, come on now. While you’re at it why not have the courage to come clean?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I’m asking—you know that much.”

I turned on the radio, catching out of the corner of my eye my companion’s expression, which was stiff, as if pasted on. Someone accompanied by a guitar was singing in a sweet, childlike voice:

Young Tashiro heaved his shoulders in a great sigh, wiping
away the mist on the window with the flat of his hand. Actually, he wanted to say something. A wall of rainy sky loomed immediately beyond the tracks. The car seat was cramped, with no place really to stretch out in, no matter how one shifted around. The thumping of my companion’s heart seemed audible in my own body. Perversely, I waited in silence.

“All right, I’ll tell you,” he said, stretching out an arm and shifting his seat. Looking into the distance, he continued: “So please turn off the radio.”

“Yes, you had better tell me. I never do anything that might have an adverse effect on someone giving information to me. That’s my business.”

Two trains passed each other going in opposite directions, and the car was whipped as if by a steel lash as they sped by. The radio emitted a startled shriek as I hastily turned it off, making me think involuntarily of a dentist’s drill. I had lost a molar about a month before. If I sucked hard, I could still taste blood.

“Yes, I’ll tell you. Maybe I can’t claim to be entirely honest, but I didn’t intend to be uncooperative. I didn’t, really … because I was one of those who stood to lose by the section manager’s disappearance. It’s frightening when I think about it, like at night, alone. I get the shudders … vanishing like that into nothing. But it’s hard for me to speak up. I don’t like hurting others’ reputations with things like this.”

“Complete secrecy is an obligation I have to observe in my work.”

“Actually, he had a side to him people didn’t know. He had one slightly strange quirk. He was all wrapped up in pictures—photographs—of nudes.”

“You mean he collected them?”

“No, he takes them. He always seemed to be going to a studio. But I imagine I’m the only one who knows that. It so happens I introduced him to a friend who rents a darkroom.”

“Did there seem to be some particular model?”

“Well, I can’t go so far as to say a particular one.” At length his voice loosened up, and even his expression became relaxed and comfortable, like an old shoe. “Apparently there was one girl he liked a lot.”

“Do you know her name or anything?”

“I know where the studio is. And I’ve got the pictures too. Shall I show them to you next time? They’re amateurish, but the amateurishness itself gives them a lot of feeling, you know. If he had passed out such pictures to his customers, they’d have loved it.”

“We might as well go on over to your place after this.”

“I can’t. I used lunch as an excuse to get away and come over here. It’s really quite impossible—the section manager eloping with that girl. He wouldn’t ever do that. I really don’t think he liked people. When I was invited for a drink—once in a long while—it was impossible. It didn’t bother him at all not to say a word for ten or twenty minutes.”

Suddenly someone was slapping at the window on my side with a wet sponge. I wiped the window with my hand and looked out. A young boy about ten, dressed in a skimpy uniform, with a large bald spot on the left side of his head, was looking sheepishly up at me as if he would burst out crying at any moment. I half lowered the window. “I’m sorry, mister,” he said in confusion, preparing to take to his heels and pointing under the car. “My ball fell in that hole.”

“You’re a lot of trouble. Do I have to move the car?”

“If you don’t mind me squeezing under, then you don’t have to.”

“All right. Go on.”

A fine, almost invisible drizzle was changing the russet surface of the ground into the color of crude oil. Certainly the elbows and knees of the boy would be soaked to the same hue. At length he came crawling out, holding the ball in one hand. “How many miles do you get to a gallon, mister?” “Sixty.” “Oh, yeah!” he muttered derisively, sliding down the slope on the opposite side of the tracks. I burst into laughter in spite of myself, drawing my young companion into my hilarity. Without knowing why, I was relieved. It might be well to spend more time with young Tashiro and get to be friends.

While I was closing the window, I started the motor and turned on the heater. The cold two-cylinder engine set up a racket like a bad percussion instrument.

“Say. Are you a drinker?”

“Well, maybe I can take a couple of highballs …”

“All right. Shall we plan on tomorrow night … with Mr. Nemuro’s nudes? Let’s get in touch by phone tomorrow about time and place.”

                 T
HE CHIEF
, sprawling flaccidly over his chair, his back to an enormous progress chart in which the investigators’ names formed a vertical column cut by horizontal lines for dates and days, gave one the feeling of a wrinkled balloon bulging with water. If it had not been for
the movement of his fingers clasped on his stomach one could only suppose he was napping. A profusion of deep wrinkles were etched like embedded strings in the slackened flesh of his chin, and traces of pimples stood side by side like the warts on a prickly pear.

Without stirring, the chief half opened a wary eye and gave a sarcastic chuckle. In a rasping voice, rather like a dog with a cold, he snapped: “You’ve gotten damn serious about this.”

“Why shouldn’t I be serious?”