FIRST WARD, F—— City. Former F—— Village’s main street, which begins at the post office. A straight road on a gentle incline about four hundred yards long, ending at the stone steps leading up to the town hall. Mixed among the tile-roofed stores, the farmhouses stood out conspicuously with their lattice doors and high-pitched roofs—apparently the farmers had raised silkworms. In the spacious yards were small passenger cars, bought by the sale of mulberry fields. The same as everywhere else, the electrical appliance shops were unreasonably brilliant. There were even barrel makers, whose shops seemed on the verge of collapse. Generally the shops seemed affluent, still keeping some touch of the old days. However, the paucity of street lights suggested the fate of the old town, which was being left behind and forgotten. Although on the ridge of the low hill to the west the light was still bright enough so that one could distinguish each branch of the trees, the valley town was already completely in the shadow of night. I noted a deep ditch to the right as I slowly drove the car over the pocked asphalt road, which had long lain unrepaired.
An old, gnarled cypress just before the town hall had encroached over a third of the road and towered above me, at what was apparently the entrance to a shrine. There was quite a bit of free space, and a good many cars were parked there. A light-blue or a slightly dirty blue one? Among six, four were various shades of blue and thus provided no clue. The windows of the town hall, except for a part of the second floor, were still bright, probably people working overtime on accounts. I turned the car around and went slowly back over the way I had just come.
I was not well acquainted with the organization of a fuel supplier. But along with the spread of the residential areas toward the suburbs, the charcoal dealers were also extending their business in propane gas, and the more the population increased, the more they prospered. But just as inevitably as the great reptiles ultimately had to give way to the mammals, they too would be taken over by city gas. They were born of the city’s growth and of that growth they would die—a paradoxical business. An appealing fate, where at their moment of greatest affluence they were sentenced to death. Uneasy moneymakers, sumptuously wined and dined, their tables were their gallows. Surely they must have deep anxieties.
Yet, no matter how they might suffer, they knew from the beginning what the results of the game would be. What alternative was there to city gas? What room for maneuver was left them? They were caught in the coils of events, and the disparity in strength was too great. What was the husband’s goal in trying to send Tashiro on the mission that morning? It would seem that he had not been forced to disappear. Perhaps I should believe the story of the sales manager when he insisted that there was no crime involved. Perhaps Tashiro’s parting taunt, that one way or another my coming here would be fruitless, was not untrue. The most a wholesaler like Dainen Enterprises could do for a cornered retailer was to help him along to an easy death, or perhaps to order the tombstone for him.
I stopped the car a little before the fuel supplier’s.
Other than the outdoor floodlights suspended from the edge of the eaves and projecting inward, I could see no change in the scene. As before, the two men were tossing down the tanks and carrying them into the storehouse. One was a slim fellow about twenty, who looked as if he had stomach trouble. The other was a man about thirty, who had a weather-beaten, craggy look; a towel encircled his thick neck. He worked sluggishly, as if he had no liking for it, and he could hardly be blamed, since there were so many tanks.
“The boss here yet?”
“Boss?” the younger man shot back, with an expression as if he were not used to hearing the word. He looked up at me suspiciously, his hands resting on a tank. In color and shape the tank was the image of a bomb, and in the middle of one end there was a white trademark in the shape of a leaf.
Perhaps the expression I had used went against his grain. Although originally a charcoal dealer, M was now a ward councilman; maybe I should have called him the “proprietor.” But my qualms were apparently groundless, for with a slight motion of his chin he indicated the house beyond the road.
“He doesn’t come to the store very often and he’s not back home yet … the car’s not there.”
“I’ve just come from Dainen Enterprises.”
It wasn’t really an untruth. My starting point had been our office, but before that I had indeed passed by Dainen Enterprises. If I were questioned later I would get out of it by saying that the fellow had jumped to a hasty conclusion.
The youth set down the tank, straightened up, and looked at the older man, who had just come back from inside the storehouse. There seemed to be some reaction. But just what was not obvious—the name Dainen Enterprises was apparently already familiar to them. The suspicious relationship between Dainen Enterprises and M, before the husband’s disappearance, had resolved itself into a completely ordinary one after it; and thus my hopes of stumbling on a trace of the husband here had become more and more improbable.
But I did expect something, and I was not particularly disheartened at what I heard. If I could, I should have enjoyed getting in smaller doses the information I toiled to acquire. Being deceived and checkmated, being made to go miles out of my way and take all kinds of pains—I wanted at least to use this information to make my report plausible. My trip that had lasted a full two and a half hours had become just as obvious an act as casting a line in a pond.
Moreover, at the time when the possibilities were collapsing one after the other, the vexatious quiverings of huge, flesh-colored moth larvae nestling in my breast were growing in intensity, as if they were on the point of bursting forth from the cocoon and flying away. As soon as they were liberated, these gory moths would make a dash straight for that lemon-yellow window. The shadow of a man standing in their way as they passed with a rush through the glass and the curtains—the black-walled back of the self-styled brother, of course—aiming for the heart, they would sink their fangs into it. Hold on! Moths don’t have fangs. So let them stop at the dentist’s on the way and get themselves fitted with special custom-made teeth. Right. I would have to go right to the dentist’s myself. When I put the tip of my tongue in the hole left by my molar, more and more I got the metallic taste of blood.
“When you say the Dainen, you mean the main office?”
Sucking up air into his nose, the younger man exhaled strongly on the tips of his oil-stained fingers peeping out from the torn work gloves. I wondered if he had swallowed the mucous he had inhaled. He inclined his head toward me as I nodded.
“Funny … his going out before noon. He said he was going to drop in at the Dainen main office.”
“Who knows?” said the older man, tucking the ends of the towel round his neck into the collar of his overalls. He spoke in a thick dialect that was difficult to understand. “He’s always got one excuse or another for going out. He can do it in his position … just drop out of sight like that.”
I answered him at once with a smile and an air of complicity.
“He can afford a car, and the city’s right around the corner.”
“What do you mean?” The younger man made as if to cross his arms, his hands under his armpits, rocking his body as he spoke. “Once the working men’s temporary flats were finished in the second ward, the city kind of began to come out here. Go around by the river on your way back and take a look, if you like. The hotels and restaurants are on the other side of the river. Even on this side they’ve got … oh, you know, the micro-something-or-other … the little buses they use for kindergarten kids. Every evening there’s some ten of them hung with red lanterns. How about some noodles? Or a hot dog? Or some vegetable stew with a little cheap sake?”
“But don’t be fooled. Filling up the belly’s not the only use for a hot dog,” added the older one, clearing his throat and spitting out a gob of phlegm. “The real thing for sale is right behind the counter. What do you think is on the other side of the partition in the bus? Back there they’ve got a fantastic gadget—a so
ft cushion with a hole.”
“Why? Do you know why a cushion has to have a hole?” asked the younger laughingly, titillated, squatting on his heels as if to defecate. Thereupon his long dark shadow, darker than the dark surface of the ground, which was cast by the light under the eaves, suddenly grew shorter and slipped under the fellow’s buttocks as if attached to him. “It’s too cramped there … you can’t lie down. So you call it a cushion, not a mattress.”
“It’s a cheap, money-eating hole.”
Spitting out the words, the older man turned to go back to work, and the younger one casually followed after him. They slapped together their work gloves that, gummed with mud and oil, had become like old rubber.
“Well, that’s the way it is, so you never know when he’s going to come back, exactly. Another customer has been waiting an hour for him.”
“Nervy guy. Making himself right at home … using the telephone any time he wants.”
The two, as if by prearrangement, cast a hard look inside the building that was ostensibly the office—evidently not a very welcome customer, a bill-collector type or something like that. If I were going to get any information, it would be from these two. I put a cigarette in my mouth and offered the pack to the two men. “I have one or two things to ask you …”
“No fire!” the older one interrupted in a gruff voice. But the younger, unruffled, took one and when the flame of the lighter lengthened to almost an inch, applied it first to his own cigarette and then, with it still lit, brought it close to the tip of my nose.
“It doesn’t make any difference. Tonight the wind’s from the west.”
“How can you say that? You have a license to deal with explosives and combustibles.”
“I’m not the type to cling to life, I guess.” I too, without a sign of perturbation, suddenly decided to take a light from the burning lighter, which he was holding out to me, thinking a cigarette was after all less dangerous than an open flame. “If things are going to catch fire they do in the first second. Anyway, it’s all covered with insurance. The president himself would be just as happy to see it go.”
The “president”? Ridiculous! Of course, with the outskirts of the city constantly expanding, in a single night town areas suddenly spring up from what had been fields. The large-scale development of presidents was nothing to be surprised at, particularly.
“Someone like you is called ‘green.’ ”
“Sure enough, compared to your nose, mine is pretty green.”
“So have the last word.” With his fingers he blew his nose, which had become red either from the cold or from alcohol, whereupon a secretion that was neither tears nor eye gum oozed like honey from the corners of both eyes.
He jumped over a ditch and moved to the side of the road where the tanks were lined up. In a strangely soft and sympathetic tone he said: “The old guy here had his pocket picked at the bike races—twenty thousand yen from the money he made selling off his land … then he forgot thirty thousand yen in the baggage rack on the streetcar … and he turned Red for good.”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” snapped the older man, as he too turned in the direction of the tanks in the same sluggish way, with an expressionlessness that was neither denial nor affirmation. “Well … if we don’t put a little more muscle into it, the next load’ll be here before we know it.”
“I’d just like to ask …” I too jumped the ditch, starting after him. As I went toward the two men, I shifted my briefcase to under my arm and turned the switch on the tape recorder. “How long has it been since you two began working here?”
“It’s a little over a year for me,” said the younger one unconcernedly, setting to work. “Gramps, about three months maybe.”
“It’s exactly three months and ten days today. And it’s not worth it.”
“Then,” I said, turning the mike chiefly toward the younger man, “I guess you know the firm’s section head—Nemuro—head of sales. He must have showed up here a good many times.”
“No, I haven’t heard of him.” Adroitly, he lifted the tank, which he had tipped to an angle, on to the board scarcely twelve inches wide that spanned the ditch beside the road. There he gave it a strong push, and taking advantage of the natural incline, steered it with his hands and his body as he rolled it along. “In any case, even when customers changed to Dainen from the old wholesaler we had nothing to do with it.”
“When was that?” I said with unexpected emphasis, temporizing by pretending to be choked with cigarette smoke. Involuntarily my vocal cords tensed. “When was it that business shifted to here?”
“Must have been last summer … we got a day off at the time of the change-over and went swimming in the river. A kid was drowned.”
He answered casually, and did not particularly seem to be holding anything back.
“July, was it? Or August?”
“Probably July, I guess.”
Supposing it were July, that would be about the time the husband, as the new section head, was doing all he could to get the M Fuel Supplier to change its affiliations. Or perhaps he had been promoted section head because he had been successful in these maneuvers. One way or the other, his efforts had borne fruit, and now the place was going ahead doing business with Dainen Enterprises. If the situation were the opposite and the maneuvers had ended in failure, with no contract being signed, that might have had something to do with his disappearance. However, that wasn’t the case. Again, I had wasted the battery of my tape recorder to no purpose.
Somewhere in the distance a metallic explosion sounded, reverberating on either side of the hill in long drawn-out echoes. Perhaps it was the backfire of some heavy-duty motor. I flipped the knob on my tape recorder and followed behind as the younger man expertly rolled the tank along.
“About the business … is there someone who’s pretty well informed … about how matters stand?”
“Well, now,” replied the younger man without interrupting his work, “there’s an office girl inside but … well, she’s new. Besides, she was teased by that ugly fellow and now she’s on the verge of tears. You won’t get much out of her.”
“What ugly fellow?”
“Oh, some thug, I guess. Some deadhead with pull in the red-light district on the river.”
We had arrived in front of the storehouse at the end of the roofed garage. With the help of the older one, who had followed along behind, in one movement he lifted the tank he had been rolling up to the top of the already three-tiered pile. Judging from the sound of steel striking steel, the tanks must have been heavy indeed.
“Want a peek inside the office?”
“It feels like it’s going to be cool tonight, doesn’t it.”
The older man, manifesting no interest, humped his back and with a shuffling, dancelike gait went back toward the street.
“You go through here and it’s to the left,” said the younger one, sniffling, indicating with his chin the space between the storehouse and the building. Then he looked up at the viscous, black sky, and grasping the fingers of his worn gloves, followed after the older man.
Just as I had been told, the office was directly to the left as I emerged from the narrow alley. There was an ill-fitting sliding door of cypress in which the cracked glass window was mended with Scotch tape. It smelled like drain sludge dissolved with gasoline. Or else it was the stench of chemical fertilizer soaked in the urine of domestic animals. The sliding door screeched on the twisted rail. Hesitantly, I opened it enough of a crack to let me through, and instantly a blanket of hot, sticky air pressed against my face like a moist rag. It was obviously a fuel supplier’s office.
Directly in front of me as I entered was a partition screen that rose to the ceiling. A bus schedule, printed in two colors, was fastened to it with thumbtacks. I glanced to the left, along the partition; there were only a single old-fashioned office desk and what seemed to be a lookout platform. Above the desk rose the head of a girl in a page-boy bob, and under it two white, wel
l-rounded knees were clamped tightly together.
“Good evening,” I said in an unnecessarily cheerful voice, passing my hands over my arms and shoulders as if to rub in a little warmth and purposely not looking at the girl’s face.
“Good evening.”
For an instant I doubted my ears. What came to me sounded exactly like a man’s voice. Yes, quite definitely, it was a man’s voice. It had apparently not come from the girl at all, but from the other side of the partition wall. A disturbing voice. Probably the customer I had just heard about. As I advanced, there came into my field of vision, in the following order: steel shelves, white window curtains that made the vulgarity of the surroundings stand out even more, plastic artificial flowers of indeterminate variety, then a television set, a round table covered with a silvery vinyl, on it the familiar ashtray with the four beckoning cats, and then, in the background, a fellow with a receding chin I remembered having seen.
It was him!
Him … there was no mistake, it was him, the self-styled brother. He had taken off his coat, and his black necktie hung loose. He smirked at me insolently, his forehead beaded in sweat. In his shirtsleeves, his thin, crooked shoulders did not show to advantage as I had expected they would. What could he be doing, turning up in a place like this? A damned unamusing game. The key to catching a stray dog is to act as if you’re completely absorbed in something else, and I intended to do just that for the time being. I would have the stray dog I was after, crawling to me with wagging tail from a completely unexpected place.
“AGAIN TODAY! The day’s pretty full of coincidences. I’m amazed.” He didn’t appear to be in the slightest. “I’m absolutely flabbergasted. I thought you’d sniff this place out in due time, but, well, don’t stand there … take a seat.”
“But why didn’t you say anything if you knew of the place?” Immediately I snapped on the tape recorder. “You know, it was written right there in the application for investigation: you were supposed to give me any and all information.”