The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [203]
It was 351 non-bookjumper Nakajimas later that, tired and annoyed, I started telling myself that what I was doing was useless—if Mrs. Nakajima had retired to the distant backstory of Jane Eyre, was she really going to be anywhere near a telephone?
I sighed, stretched one of those groany-clicky stretches, drank the rest of my cold coffee and decided to go for a brief stroll to loosen up. I was staring at the photocopied pages as I strolled along, trying to think of something to narrow the search, when a young man’s jacket caught my eye.
As is popular in the Far East, many T-shirts and jackets have English writing upon them—some of them making sense, but others just collections of words that must appear as fashionable to the Japanese youth as kanji appear elegant to us. I had seen jackets with the strange legend 100% Chevrolet OK Fly-boy and later one with Pratt & Whitney squadron movie, so I should have been ready for anything. But this one was different. It was a smart leather jacket with the following message embroidered on the back:
Follow me, Next Girl!
So I did. I followed the young man for two blocks before I noticed a second jacket much like the first. By the time I had crossed the canal I had seen another jacket with SpecOps this way emblazoned on the back, then Jane Eyre forever! followed quickly by Bad Boy Goliath. But that wasn’t all—like some bizarre homing call, all the people wearing these jackets, hats and T-shirts seemed to be heading in the same direction. Thoughts of falling Hispano-Suizas and ambushed Skyrails suddenly filled my head, so I dug the entroposcope from my bag, shook it and noticed a slight separation between the rice and lentils. Entropy was decreasing. I rapidly turned and started walking in the opposite direction. I took three paces and stopped as a daring notion filled my head. Of course—why not make the entropic failure do the work for me? I followed the logos to a nearby market square, where I noticed the rice and lentils in the entroposcope had settled—despite repeated shakings—into curved bands. Coincidence had increased to the point where everyone I saw was wearing something with a relevant logo. MycroTech Developments, Charlotte Brontë, Hispano-Suiza, Goliath and Skyrail were all sewn or stuck to hats, jackets, umbrellas, shirts, bags. I looked around, desperately trying to find the coincidental epicenter. Then I found it. In an inexplicably vacant gap within the busy market, an old man was seated in front of a small table. He was as brown as a nut and quite bald, and opposite him the other chair had just been vacated by a young woman. A piece of battered card leaning against his small valise declared, in eight languages, the fortune-teller’s trade and pledge. The English part of the sign read: “I have the answer you seek!” And I was in no doubt that whatever he said would be so—but, given the unlikely modes of death already meted out by my unseen assailant, probably, yet very improbably in its undertaking, would result in my demise. I took two paces closer to the fortune-teller and shook the entroposcope again. The patterns were more defined but not the clean half-and-half separation I needed. The little man had seen me dither and beckoned me closer.
“Please!” he said. “Please come. Tell you everything!”
I paused and looked around for any sign of jeopardy. There was nothing. I was in a perfectly peaceful square in a prosperous area of a large city in Japan. Whatever my anonymous foe had in store for me, it was something that I would least expect.
I stayed back, unsure of the wisdom of what I was doing. It was the appearance of a T-shirt that had nothing to do with me that clinched it. If I let this opportunity slide I would never find Mrs. Nakajima this side of a month. I took out my ballpoint, clicked it open and marched purposefully towards the small man, who grinned at me.
“You come!” he said in poor English. “You