Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [32]
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,