Кобо Абэ - The Ark Sakura

Once the sound broke off and Sengoku, mistakenly assuming I was through, turned around. “Oops, sorry,” he said. “Thought you’d finished. Say, you’ve got a whopper there, don’t you?”

At this the shill turned around too. “It’s just because he’d been holding his water so long,” he opined. “Anybody would get that big.”

The girl, of course, kept her eyes ahead of her. As I put the lid on the steamer and tried to ease it to the floor, a stabbing pain shot through my knee, erasing the retort I had prepared. Sengoku took the steamer from me. Perhaps he wasn’t such a bad sort after all. Slowly the pain in my belly eased. Evidently the tension in my bladder had been aggravating the pain in my leg. Then my eyes fell on the badge on the collar of Sengoku’s open-necked shirt, and though I knew I should thank him, instead I blurted out a sarcastic remark.

“Well, well — gold brooms, is it? Very fancy. And how long have we been wearing this?”

“It’s just gold-plated.” Sengoku rubbed his Broom Brigade badge with the ball of his thumb and added, “Ordinary members are silver. If you joined, Captain, of course yours would be gold-plated, probably with horizontal stripes to boot. Upper echelons have those.”

The shill stepped back and gazed fixedly at me up and down, taking in my exact relationship to the toilet. “I get it,” he said. “You’re in the same trouble as a bottle of wine with a cork stopper, after it’s stayed too long in the fridge. What’s the procedure in a case like that?”

“You can either warm it to expand the air or open a hole in the cork with a nail to let air in,” I said. “One or the other.” I shot the girl a warning look, meaning for her to keep quiet, and went on. “In this case, there’s no way to heat it, so the only thing to do is open a hole.”

“I agree.” Sengoku rubbed his injured shoulder, pursed his lips, and smiled. Something in his manner struck me as servile, though perhaps I only imagined it. “Logically you’ve got to achieve a balance with the external air pressure.”

“Let’s see — where’d be the best place to drive in a nail?” The shill studied the area between the toilet bowl and the floor.

“If you drilled seven or eight inches down in the concrete, you’d come out below my foot.”

“Well, of course we can’t do that,” he said unceremoniously. He was smiling — rare for him — but the smile was cruel. “Your leg will heal with proper medicine and care, Captain, but what happens if you wreck this toilet? The ship is nothing without it. How would you ever explain it to Komono? Disposing of the body has got to be our number-one priority.”

“How about inserting a rubber hose between his leg and the toilet wall?” The girl’s voice was animated, but she didn’t sound very confident.

“There’s not enough room. I may be fat, but I’m no water cushion.” Once again my pulse beat a threatening drumbeat in the calf of my leg. The mere thought of some foreign object being stuck between my skin and the pipe made my lungs start to expand with a budding scream.

“Wait — that’s not a bad idea. A narrow pipe of copper or steel just might work,” said Sengoku. He came over and made as if to poke a finger between my leg and the toilet wall. In his enthusiasm he had failed to reckon with the ferocity of a wounded boar. I grabbed his finger and twisted it sharply up. I have no illusions about my strength — but even so I’m close to average compared to Sengoku, whose muscles are like dried fish.

“Cut it out — you’ll break it!” he screamed.

“Apologize,” I said.

“What for?”

“Never mind; just apologize.”

“I’m sorry. Stop hurting me!”

“I’m in a lot more pain than you are.”

“I’m sorry.”

“If you’re really sorry, give it to me straight. However it happened, Inototsu here ended up dead, I can see that — but what ground have you got for saying he died in my place? Tell it to me in plain language. Who’s to say you’re not just making up the whole thing?”

“There were graffiti sprayed all over the walls down at the garbage dump by the tangerine grove—‘Attention sausage stuffers: Dead hogs delivered free of charge.’ ” His voice was so feeble that I let go of his hand. After retreating a safe distance, he rubbed the joint with a sullen look. Once again my clumsiness had earned me an enemy.

“What proof is that?” I sniffed.

“It’s obvious who would do a thing like that, isn’t it?” he said.

“In other words, it had to be somebody who lumped you in with the Broom Brigade, Captain.” In an apparent effort to sort out his thoughts, the shill pressed his forehead against his clasped hands, so that he appeared to be gazing through them. “Or maybe they had the idea you were the Brigade’s real leader. So they took out their grudge against them on you. ”

“What was that about sausage — say it again, the graffiti,” I said.

“ ‘Attention sausage stuffers: Dead hogs delivered free of charge.’ You could take it as a kind of death threat, couldn’t you?” said Sengoku, smiling slightly.

Still staring at his clasped hands, the shill went on: “Yes, now that I think of it, Komono and I should have marched right in, in plain view. Komono wouldn’t hear of it. Thanks to his line of work, which involves pulling the wool over people’s eyes, he was beside himself with suspicion, determined nobody was going to pull anything over on him. He hardly looks the part, but it turns out his favorite strategy is — what’s it called? — a commando operation. Penetrating deep into enemy territory with a handful of men. It probably comes from an overdose of TV, more than any influence from his SDF days. So there we were — just like some hostage rescue squad. Well, I’m a shill by trade. What could I do but jump in with both feet?

“We stopped the jeep a fair distance away and then walked. After carefully looking the place over, we synchronized our watches and split up. Three minutes later I knocked on the front door. While the enemy’s attention was diverted — I realize thinking of them as the ‘enemy’ was strange, but anyway — Komono sneaked through a back window into enemy headquarters. Assuming everything went according to plan, that is. What really happened I have no way of knowing. Since my knocking on the door was intended to form a diversion, I guess I overdid it a little; in fact, I broke the glass. The next thing I knew, the lights went out — whether because someone turned them off on purpose, scenting danger, or because the power just happened to fail, I don’t know. I do know that at almost the same moment I heard a pistol shot.” He was silent a moment before continuing.

“What do you make of it, Captain?” he said. “I see it as a case of internal strife. On the personal level it’s murder, of course, but if it were two countries involved, it seems to me they’d both be victims, caught in a trap. And the intended victim, after all, was you.”

“Bravo,” said Sengoku. “I could never have summed it up half so well.” The remark was apparently sincere, meant as neither flattery nor sarcasm. That uncomplicated sincerity of his was what I found most amiable about Sengoku. It was something I, who postured like a hedgehog even with the odds all against me, could never imitate.

I said, “But who’s responsible for the graffiti? I haven’t got any idea. Besides, there’s no motive.”

“Cleaning up graffiti could have been part of the Broom Brigade’s work. Still, that’s a weak motive for murder.” Sengoku swung his injured arm around in big circles, taking deep breaths. “Komono should be back anytime now with the whole story. ”