I tried to think of any “external distinguishing characteristics” I might have. Did I in fact have any?
“I’m thirty, I’m five foot nine, a hundred and forty pounds, short hair, no glasses.” It occurred to me as I listed these for her that they hardly constituted external distinguishing characteristics. There could be fifty such men in the Pacific Hotel tearoom. I had been there before, and it was a big place. She needed something more noticeable. But I couldn’t think of anything. Which is not to say that I didn’t have any distinguishing characteristics. I owned a signed copy of Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain. I had a slow resting pulse rate: forty-seven normally, and no higher than seventy with a high fever. I was out of work. I knew the names of all the brothers Karamazov. But none of these distinguishing characteristics was external.
“What might you be wearing?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t decided yet. This is so sudden.”
“Then please wear a polka-dot necktie,” she said decisively. “Do you think you might have a polka-dot necktie, sir?”
“I think I do,” I said. I had a navy-blue tie with tiny cream polka dots. Kumiko had given it to me for my birthday a few years earlier.
“Please be so kind as to wear it, then,” she said. “Thank you for agreeing to meet me at four o’clock.” And she hung up.
•
I opened the wardrobe and looked for my polka-dot tie. There was no sign of it on the tie rack. I looked in all the drawers. I looked in all the clothes storage boxes in the closet. No polka-dot tie. There was no way that that tie could be in our house without my finding it. Kumiko was such a perfectionist when it came to the arrangement of our clothes, my necktie couldn’t possibly be in a place other than where it was normally kept. And in fact, I found everything—both her clothes and mine—in perfect order. My shirts were neatly folded in the drawer where they belonged. My sweaters were in boxes so full of mothballs my eyes hurt just from opening the lid. One box contained the clothing she had worn in high school: a navy uniform, a flowered minidress, preserved like photos in an old album. What was the point of keeping such things? Perhaps she had simply brought them with her because she had never found a suitable opportunity to get rid of them. Or maybe she was planning to send them to Bangladesh. Or donate them someday as cultural artifacts. In any case, my polka-dot necktie was nowhere to be found.
Hand on the wardrobe door, I tried to recall the last time I had worn the tie. It was a rather stylish tie, in very good taste, but a bit too much for the office. If I had worn it to the firm, somebody would have gone on and on about it at lunch, praising the color or its sharp looks. Which would have been a kind of warning. In the firm I worked for, it was not good to be complimented on your choice of tie. So I had never worn it there. Rather, I put it on for more private—if somewhat formal—occasions: a concert, or dinner at a good restaurant, when Kumiko wanted us to “dress properly” (not that there were so many such occasions). The tie went well with my navy suit, and she was very fond of it. Still, I couldn’t manage to recall when I had last worn it.
I scanned the contents of the wardrobe again and gave up. For one reason or another, the polka-dot tie had disappeared. Oh, well. I put on my navy suit with a blue shirt and a striped tie. I wasn’t too worried. She might not be able to spot me, but all I had to do was look for a thirtyish woman in a red vinyl hat.
Dressed to go out, I sat on the sofa, staring at the wall. It had been a long time since I last wore a suit. Normally, this three-season navy suit would have been a bit too heavy for this time of year, but that particular day was a rainy one, and there was a chill in the air. It was the very suit I had worn on my last day of work (in April). Suddenly it occurred to me that there might be something in one of the pockets. In the inside breast pocket I found a receipt with a date from last autumn. It was some kind of taxi receipt, one I could have been reimbursed for at the office. Now, though, it was too late. I crumpled it up and threw it into the wastebasket.
I had not worn this suit once since quitting, two months earlier. Now, after such a long interval, I felt as if I were in the grip of a foreign substance. It was heavy and stiff, and seemed not to match the contours of my body. I stood and walked around the room, stopping in front of the mirror to yank at the sleeves and the coattails in an attempt to make it fit better. I stretched out my arms, took a deep breath, and bent forward at the waist, checking to see if my physical shape might have changed in the past two months. I sat on the sofa again, but still I felt uncomfortable.
Until this spring, I had commuted to work every day in a suit without its ever feeling strange. My firm had had a rather strict dress code, requiring even low-ranking clerks such as myself to wear suits. I had thought nothing of it.
Now, however, just sitting on the couch in a suit felt like some kind of immoral act, like faking one’s curriculum vitae or passing as a woman. Overcome with something very like a guilty conscience, I found it increasingly difficult to breathe.
I went to the front hall, took my brown shoes from their place on the shelf, and pried myself into them with a shoehorn. A thin film of dust clung to them.
•
As it turned out, I didn’t have to find the woman. She found me. When I arrived at the tearoom, I did a quick circuit, looking for the red hat. There were no women with red hats. My watch showed ten minutes left until four o’clock. I took a seat, drank the water they brought me, and ordered a cup of coffee. No sooner had the waitress left my table than I heard a woman behind me saying, “You must be Mr. Toru Okada.” Surprised, I spun around. Not three minutes had gone by since my survey of the room.
Under a white jacket she wore a yellow silk blouse, and on her head was a red vinyl hat. By reflex action, I stood and faced her. “Beautiful” was a word that might well have been applied to her. At least she was far more beautiful than I had imagined from her telephone voice. She had a slim, lovely build and was sparing in her use of cosmetics. She knew how to dress—except for the red hat. Her jacket and blouse were finely tailored. On the collar of the jacket shone a gold brooch in the shape of a feather. She could have been taken for a corporate secretary. Why, after having lavished such care on the rest of her outfit, she would have topped it off with that totally inappropriate red vinyl hat was beyond me. Maybe she always wore it to help people spot her in situations like this. In that case, it was not a bad idea. If the point was to have her stand out in a room full of strangers, it certainly did its job.
She took the seat across the table from mine, and I sat down again.
“I’m amazed you knew it was me,” I said. “I couldn’t find my polka-dot tie. I know I’ve got it somewhere, but it just wouldn’t turn up. Which is why I wore this striped one. I figured I’d find you, but how did you know it was me?”
“Of course I knew it was you,” she said, putting her white patent-leather bag on the table. She took off her red vinyl hat and placed it over the bag, covering it completely. I had the feeling she was about to perform a magic trick: when she lifted the hat, the bag would have vanished.
“But I was wearing the wrong tie,” I protested.
“The wrong tie?” She glanced at my tie with a puzzled expression, as if to say, What is this odd person talking about? Then she nodded. “It doesn’t matter. Please don’t be concerned.”
There was something strange about her eyes. They were mysteriously lacking in depth. They were lovely eyes, but they did not seem to be looking at anything. They were all surface, like glass eyes. But of course they were not glass eyes. They moved, and their lids blinked.
How had she been able to pick me out of the crowd in this busy tearoom? Virtually every chair in the place was taken, and many of them were occupied by men my age. I wanted to ask her for an explanation, but I restrained myself. Better not raise irrelevant issues.
She called to a passing waiter and asked for a Perrier. They had no Perrier, he said, but he could bring her tonic water. She thought about this
for a moment and accepted his suggestion. While she waited for her tonic water to arrive, she said nothing, and I did the same.
At one point, she lifted her red hat and opened the clasp of the pocketbook underneath. From the bag she removed a glossy black leather case, somewhat smaller than a cassette tape. It was a business card holder. Like the bag, it had a clasp—the first card holder I had ever seen with a clasp. She drew a card from the case and handed it to me. I reached into my breast pocket for one of my own cards, only then realizing that I did not have any with me.
Her name card was made of thin plastic, and it seemed to carry a light fragrance of incense. When I brought it closer to my nose, the smell grew more distinct. No doubt about it: it was incense. The card bore a single line of small, intensely black letters:
Malta Kano
Malta? I turned the card over. It was blank.
While I sat there wondering about the meaning of this name card, the waiter came and placed an ice-filled glass in front of her, then filled it halfway with tonic water. The glass had a wedge of lemon in it. The waitress came with a silver-colored coffeepot on her tray. She placed a cup in front of me and poured it full of coffee. With the furtive movements of someone slipping an unlucky shrine fortune into someone else’s hand, she eased the bill onto the table and left.
“It’s blank,” Malta Kano said to me.
I was still staring at the back of her name card.
“Just my name. There is no need for me to include my address or telephone number. No one ever calls me. I am the one who makes the calls.”
“I see,” I said. This meaningless response hovered in the air above the table like the floating island in Gulliver’s Travels.
Holding her glass with both hands, she took one tiny sip through a straw. The hint of a frown crossed her face, after which she thrust the glass aside, as if she had lost all interest in it.
“Malta is not my real name,” said Malta Kano. “The Kano is real, but the Malta is a professional name I took from the island of Malta. Have you ever been to Malta, Mr. Okada?”
I said I had not. I had never been to Malta, and I had no plans to go to Malta in the near future. It had never even crossed my mind to go there. All I knew about Malta was the Herb Alpert performance of “The Sands of Malta,” an authentic stinker of a song.
“I once lived in Malta,” she said. “For three years. The water there is terrible. Undrinkable. Like diluted seawater. And the bread they bake there is salty. Not because they put salt in it, but because the water they make it with is salty. The bread is not bad, though. I rather like Malta’s bread.”
I nodded and sipped my coffee.
“As bad as it tastes, the water from one particular place on Malta has a wonderful influence on the body’s elements. It is very special—even mystical—water, and it is available in only the one place on the island. The spring is in the mountains, and you have to climb several hours from a village at the base to get there. The water cannot be transported from the site of the spring. If it is taken elsewhere, it loses its power. The only way you can drink it is to go there yourself. It is mentioned in documents from the time of the Crusades. They called it spirit water. Allen Ginsberg once came there to drink it. So did Keith Richards. I lived there for three years, in the little village at the foot of the mountain. I raised vegetables and learned weaving. I climbed to the spring every day and drank the special water. From 1976 to 1979. Once, for a whole week, I drank only that water and ate no food. You must not put anything but that water in your mouth for an entire week. This is a kind of discipline that is required there. I believe it can be called a religious austerity. In this way you purify your body. For me, it was a truly wonderful experience. This is how I came to choose the name Malta for professional purposes when I returned to Japan.”
“May I ask what your profession is?”
She shook her head. “It is not my profession, properly speaking. I do not take money for what I do. I am a consultant. I talk with people about the elements of the body. I am also engaged in research on water that has beneficial effects on the elements of the body. Making money is not a problem for me. I have whatever assets I need. My father is a doctor, and he has given my younger sister and myself stocks and real estate in a kind of living trust. An accountant manages them for us. They produce a decent income each year. I have also written several books that bring in a little income. My work on the elements of the body is an entirely nonprofit activity. Which is why my card bears neither address nor telephone number. I am the one who makes the calls.”
I nodded, but this was simply a physical movement of the head: I had no idea what she was talking about. I could understand each of the words she spoke, but it was impossible for me to grasp their overall meaning.
Elements of the body?
Allen Ginsberg?
I became increasingly uneasy. I’m not one of those people with special intuitive gifts, but the more time I spent with this woman, the more I seemed to smell trouble.
“You’ll have to pardon me,” I said, “but I wonder if I could ask you to explain things from the beginning, step by step. I talked to my wife a little while ago, and all she said was that I should see you and talk to you about our missing cat. To be entirely honest, I don’t really get the point of what you’ve just been telling me. Does it have anything to do with the cat?”
“Yes, indeed,” she said. “But before I go into that, there is something I would like you to know, Mr. Okada.”
She opened the metal clasp of her pocketbook again and took out a white envelope. In the envelope was a photograph, which she handed to me. “My sister,” she said. It was a color snapshot of two women. One was Malta Kano, and in the photo, too, she was wearing a hat—a yellow knit hat. Again it was ominously mismatched with her outfit. Her sister—I assumed this was the younger sister whom she had mentioned—wore a pastel-colored suit and matching hat of the kind that had been popular in the early sixties. I seemed to recall that such colors had been known as “sherbet tone” back then. One thing was certain, however: these sisters were fond of hats. The hairstyle of the younger one was precisely that of Jacqueline Kennedy in her White House days, loaded with hair spray. She wore a little too much makeup, but she could be fairly described as beautiful. She was in her early to mid-twenties. I handed the photo back to Malta Kano, who returned it to its envelope and the envelope to the handbag, shutting the clasp.
“My sister is five years my junior,” she said. “She was defiled by Noboru Wataya. Violently raped.”
Terrific. I wanted to get the hell out of there. But I couldn’t just stand up and walk away. I took a handkerchief from my jacket pocket, wiped my mouth with it, and returned it to the same pocket. Then I cleared my throat.
“That’s terrible,” I said. “I don’t know anything about this, but if he did hurt your sister, you have my heartfelt condolences. I must tell you, however, that my brother-in-law and I have virtually nothing to do with each other. So if you are expecting some kind of—”
“Not at all, Mr. Okada,” she declared. “I do not hold you responsible in any way. If there is someone who should be held responsible for what happened, that person is myself. For being inattentive. For not having protected her as I should have. Unfortunately, certain events made it impossible for me to do so. These things can happen, Mr. Okada. As you know, we live in a violent and chaotic world. And within this world, there are places that are still more violent, still more chaotic. Do you understand what I mean, Mr. Okada? What has happened has happened. My sister will recover from her wounds, from her defilement. She must. Thank goodness they were not fatal. As I have said to my sister, the potential was there for something much, much worse to happen. What I am most concerned about is the elements of her body.”
“Elements of her body,” I said. This “elements of the body” business was obviously a consistent theme of hers.
“I cannot explain to you in detail how all these circumstances are related. It would b
e a very long and very complicated story, and although I mean no disrespect to you when I say this, it would be virtually impossible for you at this stage, Mr. Okada, to attain an accurate understanding of the true meaning of that story, which involves a world that we deal with on a professional basis. I did not invite you here in order to voice any complaint to you in that regard. You are, of course, in no way responsible for what has happened. I simply wanted you to know that, although it may be a temporary condition, my sister’s elements have been defiled by Mr. Wataya. You and she are likely to have some form of contact with each other sometime in the future. She is my assistant, as I mentioned earlier. At such time, it would probably be best for you to be aware of what occurred between her and Mr. Wataya and to realize that these things can happen.”
A short silence followed. Malta Kano looked at me as if to say, Please think about what I have told you. And so I did. About Noboru Wataya’s having raped Malta Kano’s sister. About the relationship between that and the elements of the body. And about the relationship between those and the disappearance of our cat.
“Do I understand you to be saying,” I ventured, “that neither you nor your sister intends to bring a formal complaint on this matter … to go to the police …?”
“No, of course we will do no such thing,” said Malta Kano, her face expressionless. “Properly speaking, we do not hold anyone responsible. We would simply like to have a more precise idea of what caused such a thing to happen. Until we solve this question, there is a real possibility that something even worse could occur.”
I felt a degree of relief on hearing this. Not that it would have bothered me in the least if Noboru Wataya had been convicted of rape and sent to prison. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. But Kumiko’s brother was a rather well-known figure. His arrest and trial would be certain to make the headlines, and that would be a terrible shock for Kumiko. If only for my own mental health, I preferred the whole thing to go away.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Page 5
