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By Root 690 0

It wasn’t there! The lemon-yellow window was gone! Curtains of white and brown vertical stripes, completely different, were hanging in the place where the lemon-yellow window should have been. What in the name of God had happened? If I wanted to know I had only to advance thirty-two paces, go up the stairs, and ring the bell at the left of the door on the second floor. But I could not. Since the curtains had changed so radically, the person who would come to greet me would doubtless have turned from lemon to zebra. Was not this striped curtain a flag indicating the husband’s return? There was one possibility in a thousand that, having seen the article in the evening edition, he had returned half out of dislike for the brother … that his one chance in a thousand had materialized. What a boring conclusion … a splendid disappointment. A very easy map to understand. A dialogue indistinguishable from talking to oneself. All right. Everything was perfectly resolved—not a thing was left in doubt. I could completely withdraw from the case with no unpleasant thoughts, although I should never be able to brag of my success.

Yet, there was not a single reason to be unhappy. Subconsciously, I may have wanted the case to go on forever, but the source of funds had been severed by the brother’s death, and no matter how much savings she might have there was no reason for her to let and almost hopeless investigation go on any further. In the three and a half days left till the term of our contract expired, no matter how active I might be, it would not amount to much. There was no reason to be disappointed. Musing that I had just wanted my briefcase from the car, that I had made a detour for it, I withdrew with a heavy heart by the same path I had come. A dark path … too dark. Just one more time I turned to look at the altogether inappropriate, unsightly striped pattern and then went down the slope in the direction of the subway station. I passed a middle-aged couple going in the opposite direction, their necks sunk into their coat collars against the cold, their shoulders hunched timorously; between them a schoolboy dressed in a uniform was volubly discussing something or other. A number of small pieces of paper, each striving to be first, were being sucked into the entrance to the subway, scooped out by the brilliant illumination. For dinner I made do with curried rice with an egg and stew at a cheap restaurant just before the entrance. Although it was dead winter a huge green bottlefly, slipping and sliding, was buzzing as it tried to crawl up the shade over the electric light; it kept circling aroung but there was no need to worry: flies know the seasons better than humans, and their wisdom is great.

REPORT

14 February: 6:30 A.M.—I went on a secret reconnoitering expedition on the basis of the tip that from half past six to seven in the morning the Camellia coffee house engaged in unlicensed placement of temporary taxi drivers. If this unlicensed placement was a fact, then the Camellia matchbox that the missing man had left, with its black and white matchsticks and the way it was scratched, would be profoundly significant. I suppose I shall have to look again into the ad for recruiting drivers that appeared in the sports paper. The Camellia owner’s ad for private drivers could naturally be considered a ploy to fool people, and it is quite possible that it was a special private code understandable only to temporary drivers. (F.Y.I. a couple of examples: they could be giving notice of reopening after a raid by the size or arrangement of the letters; or they could be suggesting a change in the contact place; or it was not at all impossible that there was some special meaning over and above the words.) And so it doesn’t necessarily follow that I will be able to find traces here of the missing man at once. Since drivers in the metropolitan area alone number roughly 80,000 and out of them 15,000, or about twenty percent, are migratory, similar unlicensed employment agencies can be supposed to exist in quite large numbers. However, there