Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [58]
And yet, the brother-in-law of the missing man had died, the one who had beclouded my view, who had scattered the seeds of suspicion like wind-blown pollen. The sky had for some time been rent by a strong wind, and after a long interval a frail sun was streaming through rifts in the clouds. And so, again, I attempted to look at the husband’s picture upside down.
THE PHOTOGRAPH lay with its head toward me. Again I was at the window of the parking attendant’s shack. “Yes, eighty yen,” he said indolently. “I don’t want the change,” I said, throwing down a five-hundred-yen note … and on top of it the picture. The conspicuously uneven hair line, which he had apparently not had for long, had not yet grown sparse.
“There’s something I’d like to ask you.”
The old man had placed a blanket over his knees, and on it lay an open comic book; his lips moved incessantly. He pushed his preadamite glasses up on his forehead, and his reddened eyes looked suspiciously back and forth at the picture and the five-hundred-yen note.
“Say, have you got a brazier going under that blanket? It’s bad for you, you know. Your eyes are so red because they’re irritated by the gas.”
“No, it’s electricity. Sorry …”
“Then it’s too dry.”
“I’ve got the kettle going.”
“Well, it’s entirely off the fire.” I laughed pleasantly, making my voice cheerful, and pushed the five-hundred-yen note closer to the old man. “I wonder if you don’t remember seeing the man in this picture. Maybe quite some time ago …”
“Why?”
“We’re looking for a stolen car,” I said at random. From the upside-down picture I suddenly sensed something aggressive. My decision, which until now had been to treat the husband naturally as the victim, began, surprisingly, to waver. There was no basis for assuming that he was a victim, and there was even a fifty-fifty chance that he was an aggressor. If I let my imagination run wild, he could actually be the one pulling the strings behind the brother’s killing. No, such detective-story events rarely happen. If it were a question of a game in a sealed room, the mystery man would have to sit in the chair right next to me; but in the actual world he would camouflage himself and conceal himself quietly beyond the horizon. Be that as it may, it seemed that this evening I would have to spend some length of time getting reacquainted with him through the binoculars. Even if it was too late, the leading man is the star after all.
“A stolen car, you say?”
“Not necessarily. I mean, maybe it was one that had been in an accident.” I gave in at once to the old man’s expression, which was like a rusted lock, and placed three more hundred-yen coins on the notes. “What’s the proportion between the monthly customers and the casual ones who use the parking lot?”
He looked indecisively from the enticement, which had increased to eight hundred yen, to the window of the Camellia, thus unwittingly revealing his real concern. He replied: “We have only the five-car space in this row open to casual customers.”
“Well, it’s pretty uneconomical to sit here all day for five cars.”
“Oh, I don’t know. If you’re at home all you do is sit around all day in front of TV drinking tea.”
“Don’t be bashful … Take the money.”
With a hand that seemed encased in a snakeskin glove, the old man unconcernedly scooped up his liberal, if unexpected, windfall. “Besides this row, by renting the monthly tenants’ eight spaces that are always empty during the day, we can take care of casual customers. It’s pretty good work