Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [38]
Perhaps he had read my thoughts, for he gave a little chuckle and said in a self-deprecatory voice: “I can’t forgive him. I can’t stand his self-centeredness. Even a thug, when he wants out, pays for it. Unless he plays by the rules, how can I forgive him? He said something about my sister’s not being a complete woman. He’s some kind of queer. Let him be, I don’t care, but if he doesn’t follow the rules … One way or another, I’ve got to get him back and make him smart for it. My sister’s a mess, damn it. Do you understand?”
Unfortunately, I didn’t. I automatically stepped on the brake at an oncoming truck with its lights on high beam. Why should he make him smart? Would finding the husband and bringing him back to her make him smart? I wondered. Didn’t he realize that such thinking would result in hurting her? The road was swallowed up in the cloud of dust left by the truck. They say the thief who pretends he’s been robbed is the cleverest thief.
“Well, no, you are the only one I can rely on. I’ll take the responsibility for the expenses. If it comes to that, I’ll ship off to Vietnam. I’d make roughly two hundred thousand yen on one trip if I could get thirty men to sail with me. You have a little more time now, don’t you?”
“YOU’RE HIGH, I’m afraid,” she said calmly, leaving the chain on the door. She could tell surely by just looking.
“I had something I wanted to ask you. It had to be tonight. Something I’ve got to know for the investigation tomorrow …”
Hesitantly, she removed the chain and, leaving me waiting in the vestibule, dodged away into the room, pushing up with one hand the wisps of hair at the nape of her neck and straightening with the other the collar of the coat she had slipped on over her nightgown. Involuntarily I found myself searching the vestibule floor for a man’s shoes. At the same time I kept my ear tuned toward the other room. What was I suspicious about? I wondered. I was disappointed in myself. Was he or wasn’t he there? A husband pretending to be missing, who in fact was quietly hiding away in his own house.
The idea was fantastic, but it was not altogether unfounded. Who would ever say the first thing this late in the evening, “You’re high, I’m afraid”? She’s the employer. Wouldn’t it be natural for her to expect the latest report right off … the way any employer would?
No, that was not the truth. It was an evasion. One look at my apologetic attitude and she would have realized immediately that she could not expect very much in the way of news. First of all, if it was urgent news, good or bad, there was always the convenient little device of modern civilization called the telephone.
When she returned, she was wearing dark-blue slacks and a tan cardigan of a heavy-knit yarn; her hair was arranged in the usual way, but the freckles under her eyes were unpleasantly conspicuous and made her a completely different person, one with a hard, brittle air. I experienced a mood of warning, as it were. I began to talk falteringly in justification of my visit.
“Actually, I want to talk about the incident of the matchbox last night. I put it down in the report, but from the Camellia coffee house I got, to put it succinctly, exactly nothing. But, I find it a little bothersome, if I remember correctly, that you said something to the effect that the matchbox was found together with some old newspaper, wasn’t it? Do you still have the paper? It would help if you did.”
“I must have it, I suppose, but …”
I restrained her from going off in search of it on the spot. The unpleasant paradox of having my explanation itself be a kind of justification caught in my throat. The first thing I wanted to know was the date line of the newspaper. Was there or wasn’t there a relationship between the matchbox and the paper? Practically speaking, there would seem not to be, I thought. Yet I couldn’t say for sure until I knew what the date was. I was a bit worried. What was the reason that the matchbox was so badly worn? That the vitally important Camellia coffee house had