The Ruined Map (5 page)

She seemed to be wearing frozen fish bladders for shoes. But I would wait another half hour. If my expectations were justified—and I could only assume they were—the silhouette of the girl leaning over beyond the curtains would surely appear. This was a different situation from the one of the girl under the grass. The choice was not mine but hers.

I had verified this before: when she had tried telephoning, there was only one posture she could take, since the chair was in her way. By the window, facing sideways, the very top of her head seemed cut off against the light. The curtain
material was rather heavy, but the weave was coarse and it was practically certain that a shadow would show through. If only I could catch her telephoning I would not have waited in vain, frozen as I was. The person on the phone was decidedly a curious fellow, someone she called “brother.” A strange one, who, she said, was kind, clever, self-sacrificing, and who, because of a profound philosophy of life, had no permanent address. He had acted on behalf of the applicant, yet at the crucial moment he was leaving negotiations in the hands of a woman in the early stages of alcoholism, drowning in her own monologues, rolling in laughter, tickled by a phantom husband, dreaming a nightmare with her eyes wide open. He was an irresponsible adviser who did not even show his face.

No, it made no difference. I had absolutely no intention of poking and prying into the right and wrong of my client’s words. This was business, and so as long as I got my fee, I would work seriously even if I was dealing with a lie. But if I didn’t more or less grasp the outlines of the plot, I couldn’t play the role of dunce very well. Rather, the more stupid the character the more difficult the situation. And there was also the business of self-respect. A stupid impersonation was fine, but I couldn’t stand being treated as stupid from the beginning. Since the fee was thirty thousand yen, I would go that far but no further.

Putting my briefcase at my feet, I rubbed my sides with both hands through my coat pockets, all the time keeping my eyes on the lemon-yellow curtains. A taxi, chugging up the hill, gears screaming to the breaking point, stripped away the darkness and plunged deep into the precincts of the housing project. I would wait at least until the taxi returned. But supposing her shadow didn’t appear as I expected?
Impossible—it must. The existence of this “brother” was most questionable. It is a lot easier and more natural to put a puzzle ring back together than to take it apart.

Somewhere, far away, the sound of a roughly closed iron door struck my ears like a sigh from the earth, reverberating back and forth through buried pipes. The feeble howling of a dog rent the air. I wanted to urinate. Involuntarily, my body began to tremble. I had apparently come to the end of my endurance. I thought that the snow had begun to sparkle, but it was manifestly an illusion from having strained my eyes too much in the darkness. Even when I shut my eyes, the snow kept falling behind my closed lids. But what was harder to believe than the snow was …

The taxi came back with the For Hire light on. What was so difficult to believe? Filled with unbelievable things, I no longer knew what I was trying to be suspicious of. My mental faculties seemed to be numb. The lemon-yellow curtains showed no change. A glass bead in the mouth when I wanted a piece of candy. Well, I was lucky I hadn’t munched on it. I shuddered as I finished urinating, picked up my briefcase, and returned to the car. The engine sputtered and groaned. If things had gone as I had anticipated the sound of the motor would have announced my triumph to her, but now it was simply irksome and depressing. Well, if she maintained what she said to be the truth, there was nothing to do but begin with that truth.

A photograph and a worn-out matchbox with advertising. There were too many blank spaces on the map. Therefore, I had no obligation to force myself to fill them in. I was no guardian of the law.

REPORT

12 February: 9:40
A.M.
—I investigated the origin of the matchbox. About twenty minutes by foot from the client’s house, I faced in the direction of S—– station on the main road, and looking to the right at the subway station at the bottom of the hill below the housing project, I saw on the left an open-air parking lot. Immediately diagonally in front, I could see a sign bearing the word “Camellia,” just like the name on the matchbox. A very ordinary coffee house: capacity about eighteen seats. Besides the owner, there was one waitress … about twenty-two, more or less … fattish, with a round face and small eyes … traces of pimples on her forehead. She had a liking for showy things and wore patterned stockings, but she was an unattractive girl. She is doubtless outside the scope of this investigation. On the door there was a sign “Girl Wanted,” and I imagined that someone must have quit recently. I inquired directly of the proprietor, but it was not that. They simply needed a new girl. They had no reaction to the picture of the missing man, no special comment; at least both agreed in testifying that he had not been a regular customer. (N.B. eighty yen for coffee.)

                 T
HIS MORNING
I was hung over. So, though I usually drink two cups of coffee, I decided to let it goat one.

There was no intentional negligence in my report concerning the Camellia coffee house. The damaged condition of the matchbox, the worn label, the close yet inconvenient location of the coffee house itself—all coincided very well with the proprietor’s statement that Nemuro had not been a regular customer. What more could I add?

The tired old walls with traces of former shelving had been left just as they were. Fastened on one wall was a color print of a coffee plantation, maybe in South America. Dust had gathered on the turned-up corners. The person who put it up would certainly not remember that there ever had been such a picture. And yet, in it everyone was wearing widebrimmed straw hats—if you stood in front of it the sun seemed to be shining brilliantly. But from over here, where the bleak dregs of the February day lay stagnant on the other side of the meshed curtain, there was only the red flame of the kerosene stove, smoking away under a faded rubber tree. Furthermore, I was the only customer the whole time I was there. The sour-looking girl stayed bent over a weekly magazine beside the counter, and the proprietor, too, with a puffy
face, as if he had a head cold, went around sluggishly wiping off the tables. Every time he finished a table, he would raise his eyes and look over those he had done and heave a long, reproachful sigh. If I must add something else, I suppose it would be the remark: Dead End. Anything more would be as ridiculous as searching the print of the coffee plantation with a magnifying glass. Not only Nemuro but also anyone else walking into this place would at once be struck with the thought of how fortunate he was to have a home to go back to. Under any circumstances there were no untruths in my report.

Using as a pretext the fact that the proprietor had reached the table next to mine, I closed my briefcase and left my seat. The shop extended along the street and was long and narrow. In order to make way for me, the proprietor had to wait for me to pass, standing sideways between the tables. With every step a black oil oozed up between the floorboards. I gave a two-hundred yen note to the girl, who raised a reluctant face from her magazine, and waited for the change. Well, I would give up visiting the other woman. I had told myself so many times that I had convinced myself not to go. But what about the brother? I thought it made little difference if I just wanted to inquire a bit into his past. Apparently, in the present instance, the advantages and disadvantages for the girl and her brother coincided, and even if there were no reason at all for me to include this in the report, the fraud, if there was one, would be unmasked by the facts and circumstances. In any case they would probably have a falling-out. She was the one who was the official client all the way, and I had no need to trouble myself about him.

A public telephone, the dial holes soiled with use, was located next to the cash register. I dialed the office and asked
to be connected with the data section. I requested that they go round at once to the precinct office where the girl was originally registered, some place downtown, if I remembered rightly, and look up the brother in the family dossier. Then I deliberately mentioned the girl’s present name as well as her maiden one, wanting to be overheard. Neither the proprietor nor the waitress showed any reaction. It was natural that they should not, I suppose. Even if my worst conjecture proved true for the moment, it did not necessarily mean that they contacted each other by using a real name.

Caught in a fit of coughing, the proprietor was clearing my table. When I went out into the street, listening to the girl’s voice behind my back with its trace of Kantō dialect, the sky, a dirty white, was nonetheless dazzlingly bright. Immediately in front of the shop large buses squeezed by each other, cramped by the narrowness of the street. In a moment, when the flow of traffic slowed, I crossed the street and headed toward the parking lot. Three signs hung in a line on the barbed wire that enclosed it.

PARKING—ONE HOUR 70 YEN

SPECIAL MONTHLY RATES

Underneath appeared a telephone number in red letters. A hotel sign was also suspended with a yard-long hand, on which appeared the words

RIGHT HERE

Then, acting as a kind of awning for the guard house at the entrance:

HANAWA PRIVATE TAXI—OFFICE

I paid my seventy yen to the wizened guard, who was seated with his legs wrapped around a brazier. I thrust the stamped receipt into my wallet, thinking that I must not forget to add this to my report. When I looked back, the curtain, which had seemed to be mesh when I was inside, was blocking the window of the Camellia coffee house like black paint, reflecting in all its gaudy coloring the front of the drugstore on the opposite corner. A cat as fat as a pig appeared on the eaves of the second story and composedly began to walk along the edge, but after five or six steps it suddenly vanished. Just at the point where the eaves left off, the chimney of a public bath rose up, trailing smoke as transparent as gossamer. My immediate reflex was to seize my camera, but it was not that important. The probability of coming back here was so slight, what particular evidence could it be?

                 M
Y CAR
was the third one in the left-hand row. It was hidden by the car in front, and I did not locate it at once. When I finally spied its pig-nosed snout, a man approached rapidly from the direction of the guard house, crunching over the gravel.

Was he going to ask for more money?

His face was covered in smiles as he boldly looked me over, slowly, from head to foot. He had an unpleasant glint about
his eyes. He was on the slim side, and his black coat hung straight down from his wide shoulders, breaking sharply at the pocket, perhaps because of something in it. His somewhat too long sideburns gave him a rather rowdy appearance, which in turn gave the lie to his fixed smile. He had a peculiar way of walking, as if purposely wanting to attract attention with his swagger. Maybe the aggressive impression he made was due to his eyes, which were too close together.