The Ruined Map (31 page)

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’s doubtless nothing to stop me considering it a reliable fact that the Camellia constitutes a meaningful clue. The above are the reasons I went on secret reconnaissance of the Camellia. Fortunately the driver Toyama is a good-natured fellow and since he has a satisfactory history as an employee of the Camellia for the time being, and though I do not have a proper letter of introduction, his name will be very helpful to me in getting information.

                 B
UT THAT
was all fake. It was still twelve minutes until the fourteenth of February. There was still one fourth of the day’s time left until dawn. The preparations seemed too perfect, but there was no call to act like a heady schoolboy on a picnic nor to devise Tashiro’s kind of vicious, irresponsible talk. The contents of my report would not change were I to wait six hours … ten hours. Furthermore, I did not need to fear meeting death within six hours, and tomorrow, if after my search of the Camellia I wanted to visit her place as quickly as possible, there was no better excuse than this report. Whatever the meaning of the un
sightly striped curtains, I must be able to pass the barrier openly. In any event the harvest in terms of information would probably fill several lines of my report and I had absolutely no need to feel ashamed. It is self-evident that every night has its morning.

In the little apartment room that I used only as sleeping quarters and where I lived my unaccustomed solitary life, the night was as slow in falling as the day was in rising. I set the hands of my alarm clock at a few minutes before five o’clock, wound it up, and placed it just out of reach on the window ledge; I turned on the radio to drown out the sounds from the mah-jong players on the second floor and crawled into my cool bed, which because of the whisky I had spilled began to stink more than I did myself. From among the nude photos I had taken from Tashiro, I chose one which, though not characteristic, best showed the woman’s femaleness and placed it side by side with the picture of the husband on the table by the bed. As I sipped my whisky straight from a small bottle I concentrated intensely on the relationship between the two photos. The somewhat elongated face of the man, suggestive of an enthusiastic type, was slightly asymmetrical. The surface of the face seemed rough, perhaps due to the splotches of color and not to the roughness of the skin … evidently a type given to allergies. The right eye was strong and gave a feeling of willfulness, but the left one drooped at the corner, and had a conspicuous sag in the lid, giving a kind of sorrowful, doglike expression. The long, thin nose was bent slightly to the left. The lips joined in an almost straight line, as if drawn by a ruler. The upper lip was thin and nervous, but the lower was heavy and calm. To the left of the mouth were some hairs skipped by the razor. The main impression I had had up to now was of a businessman’s temperament, but tonight—perhaps it was my
own fancy—the face had taken on the cast of a visionary. I felt no hostility or resistance, but I could not believe that a real man would materialize and speak to me. The face was one that was best suited to the present pose, as if he had been born as an image on a piece of negative paper. A blurred line of light ran diagonally across the background, perhaps a part of a building gleaming in soft beams of sunlight, or an elevated toll road.

In the other picture, a woman’s hips, naked, flesh-colored, and broad, were set against a background of solid black. Broad they were, but although they filled the whole picture the hips themselves gave the feeling of being rather small-boned. The form made me think of something. Yes, a loquat … a weak-looking, deformed loquat … a cross between a loquat and a pear … a pellucid hemisphere slightly tinged with green below, perhaps because the color of the carpeting on the floor was not a pure black. A cleft underneath ended in the swelling at the tip of the lumbar vertebra. The inside was boldly colored a dark brown and resembled the dampness of mucous membranes. The upper half was an opaque white faintly tinged with a soft pink. The opacity was perhaps due to the downy hair and maybe the white too was a diffused reflection caused by the down. Because the subject was bent far over toward the front, from my viewpoint only the planes of the protuberances of the spinal column, in rows like clusters of old tombs buried in the sand, were the color of scorched flour, polished in texture. The color disturbed me strangely.

Downy hair like expensive velvet, so soft and fine as to be almost invisible. The fine-textured skin of a young boy with a touch of brown. Of course, even though one might have the highest technical competence, color film was incapable of reproducing exactly the actual tones. At this point I had
no intention of rejecting Tashiro’s confession, but if I was again suspicious of a lie based on another lie, it was not at all imposible that the first lie had become true. Moreover, it was true that she herself recognized that her husband was crazy about color photography. The possibility that this nude picture had actually been taken by the husband could really not be ruled out. Since I was suspicious of the way Tashiro had got excited and took back what he had said before, there was probably some question as to how he had come by the photos, When I thought about it—I do not know whether such analysis is possible—on the husband’s face creases characteristic of a peeping Tom seemed to have been etched. The inhabitant of an upside-down world, who could not believe in the existence of something until he had all alone completely absorbed the object into himself.

Thus, I still had reservations. In the first place, I wondered whether Tashiro had the know-how to use a wide-angle lens. Furthermore, there was the album—
The Meaning of Memories
. In it she had been composedly aware of being photographed and had even put on a performance: the picture of her, dressed in her peignoir, through which the contours of her body were visible. (Was it out of disinterest or absentmindedness, was she fully aware of what she was doing, or was it out of natural coquetry that she had calmly permitted herself to be exposed to my eyes as she did?) Yes, it was quite possible. The model in this picture was his wife, my client herself.

I had grown stiff. Leaving only the picture of the woman, I put the husband’s photo aside. Although I would have to be up early in the morning tomorrow, I had without being aware of it finished off a small bottle of whisky. The radio continued ceaselessly playing American folk songs. Under the blankets my body at last had gotten warm, and less and
less was I able to take my eyes from the loquat. In my fancies she had almost become a young girl. The crevice in the loquat was glistening and moist, like the membrane between the toes of a frog. Certainly a very short, crimson dress would suit her well. She overlapped and was inextricably involved—precisely like the Picasso reproduction in her room—with my impression of the eccentric girl who helped in my wife’s shop. I was an acrobat indefatigably repeating my dangerous act, almost falling, on an absolutely safe rope stretched over level ground. How would it be if I took her with me to my wife’s shop to order a dress? Actually, I seemed to recall her saying she wanted to find a job. If I could get them to take her at my wife’s place, the membrane between the frog’s toes would be even more beautiful—like purple rubber. What was broken? What was left? Again the usual face appeared in the veneer ceiling printed with the straight-grain cypress wood … a laughing moon … why was the dream I had a couple of times every year, where I was pursued by a laughing full moon, so frightening? It was still a puzzle I could not understand no matter how I racked my brains.

                 4:56
A.M.
Thinly, like emery paper, the ringing of the alarm clock impinged on my senses. My mouth was dry, and a thick phlegm stuck in my throat, making it impossible to smoke. Rather than a hangover, I seemed still
to have last night’s inebriation; no matter how much cold water I dashed over my face, my eyes felt as hot as after a number of headstands, and no matter how I blew my nose it simply would not stop running.

However, I had already entered my arrangements for today in the report. I could only act as if they were accomplished. The smallish room with almost no furniture gave me the feeling of being embarrassingly large. Perhaps it was due to the cold. Turning on the gas, I placed my two hands on the kettle to gather up its warmth. I would set out immediately after I had had a cup of strong coffee. If I left the apartment at 5:30, I would get to the housing development on the hill by 6:10. If I got my car back and made a couple of passes in front of the Camellia to check the lay of the land and then went in, it would be about 6:30, just as I had written in the report.

I shaved and changed my clothes. Just as I was looking over last night’s evening edition as I sipped my coffee, a bell again began to ring. It could not be the alarm clock this time … the telephone, of course … the only valuable fixture in my room. Though uneconomical, I had had it installed, thinking it would be of some use for my business. I was almost never at home, but on the rare occasions I overslept I could call in at the office. There had not been a single incoming call in over a fortnight. I wondered, indeed, whether I should not get rid of it. The bell rang a third time. It was unbelievable. Maybe a wrong number. No, maybe it was her. Some unforeseen happening that had made the curtain turn a lemon-yellow again. Or was it my wife? If it was my wife … at half past five in the morning … it must be something like an attack of appendicitis or maybe acute pneumonia. Without waiting for the fourth ring, I picked up the receiver.

“Yes?”

“Were you asleep?” came a murky, effeminate voice. Good God, Tashiro!

“For Christ’s sake,” I blurted out angrily, “what time do you think it is?”

“If you hadn’t got up after one more ring, I was going to hang up. But really, I want to talk to you.”