Харуки Мураками - Killing Commendatore

While standard accounts claim that faulty strategy caused the Armada’s decimation by the English fleet, a defeat that changed the course of history, this book argued that most of the damage was caused not by direct fire from English cannon (volleys by both sides, it appeared, missed their targets to fall harmlessly into the ocean), but by shipwreck. Accustomed to the calm waters of the Mediterranean, the Spaniards simply couldn’t navigate the angry seas off the Irish coast, and thus ran vessel after vessel against the dark reefs.

As I followed the sad fate of the Spanish navy and sipped my second cup of black coffee, the sky gradually brightened in the east. It was Saturday morning.

Someone will phone you, my friends, this morning, and invite you somewhere. You must not decline.

I mentally repeated what the Commendatore had told me. Then I looked at the phone. It preserved its silence. But it would ring at some point, I was sure of that. The Commendatore was not one to lie. All I could do was be patient and wait.

I thought of Mariye. I wanted to call her aunt to find out if she was safe, but it was still too early. I should wait until seven o’clock at least. Her aunt would contact me if Mariye was found. She knew how worried I was. No word from her meant no progress. So I sat at the dining table reading about the invincible Armada and, when I tired of reading, staring at the phone. But the phone maintained its silence.

I called Shoko shortly after seven. She answered immediately. As if she had been sitting beside the phone, waiting for it to ring.

“We haven’t heard from her. She’s still missing,” she said right away. She sounded as if she’d had little (or maybe no) sleep. Fatigue filled her voice.

“Are the police looking?” I asked.

“Yes, two officers came last night. We gave them photographs of Mariye, described what she was wearing… We explained that she isn’t the kind of girl who would run away or stay out late partying. They spread the word, and by now I’m sure it’s been broadcast to all the precincts. I’ve asked them not to make the search public yet, of course.”

“But nothing so far, correct?”

“That’s right, no leads up to this point. I’m sure they’re working very hard on it, though.”

I did my best to console her and asked her to let me know the moment something did turn up. She promised she would.

When our call ended, Menshiki had already risen and was scrubbing his face in the bathroom sink. After brushing his teeth with the toothbrush I had set aside for him, he sat across from me at the dining room table and drank his black coffee. I offered him toast, but he declined. Sleeping on the sofa had mussed his luxuriant hair a bit more than usual, but then his “usual” was super neat. The man sitting there was the same coolheaded, well-groomed guy as always.

I related my conversation with Shoko. “This is just my gut feeling,” he said when I finished, “but I doubt the police will be very much help.”

“Why is that?”

“Mariye is no typical teenager, and her disappearance is no typical disappearance. I don’t think she was kidnapped, either. That means the usual police methods are likely to hit a wall.”

I didn’t offer an opinion. But I figured he was right. We had been given an equation with multiple functions but almost no solid numbers. To make any progress, we had to nail down as many numbers as possible.

“Shall we go take another look at the pit?” I asked. “Who knows—there might be some change.”

“Let’s go,” Menshiki said.

We were operating under the tacit assumption that nothing else was to be done. I knew that the phone could ring, and that Shoko Akikawa or the person behind the “invitation” the Commendatore had mentioned might be on the other end. But I was pretty sure neither would call this early. Call it a vague premonition on my part.

We put on our jackets and headed out. It was a sunny day. A southwesterly wind had swept away the cloud cover of the previous night, leaving behind a sky almost unnaturally high and transparent. Indeed, when I raised my eyes to the sky, I had the feeling that up and down had been reversed, and that I was peering down into a spring of clear water. I could hear the faint drone of a long train running along a faraway track. When the air was like this, you could pick up distant sounds on the wind with great clarity. That’s the sort of morning it was.

Without exchanging a word, we cut through the woods and around the little shrine. The plank cover of the pit was exactly as we had left it the night before. Nor had the stones holding it down been moved. When we took off the boards, the ladder was still leaning against the wall, its position unchanged. No one was in the pit. This time, Menshiki didn’t offer to go down to search the floor. The bright sunlight made that unnecessary—we could see that nothing had changed. The pit looked altogether different in the light of day than it had at night. There was nothing at all unsettling about it.

We replaced the lid and rearranged the stones that held it down. Then we walked back through the woods. In front of my house, Menshiki’s spotless silver Jaguar sat reticently beside my dusty, unpretentious Toyota Corolla.

When he reached his car, Menshiki came to a halt. “I think I’ll head home,” he said. “I’ll just be in your way if I presume on your hospitality any longer, and there’s nothing I can do now anyway. Do you mind?”

“Of course not. Please go home and rest. I’ll let you know right away if there’s any change.”

“Today is Saturday, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. It’s Saturday.”

Menshiki reached into his windbreaker pocket and pulled out his key. He stood there staring at it for a moment, thinking. Trying to make his mind up about something, perhaps. I waited for him to reach a conclusion.

“There’s one thing I should probably tell you,” he said at last.

I leaned on the door of my Corolla as he figured out what to say.

“It’s actually quite personal, so I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate, but then I thought perhaps I should, for courtesy’s sake. I don’t want to cause any needless misunderstandings… Anyway, the thing is, Shoko and I have become—what’s the correct word?—quite intimately involved.”

“You mean you and she are lovers?” I asked, cutting to the chase.

“Exactly,” Menshiki replied after a moment’s pause. I thought I saw a faint blush rise to his cheeks. “You may think it quite hasty.”

“No, the speed isn’t the problem.”

“That’s correct,” Menshiki acknowledged. “The speed is not the problem.”

“The problem is—” I began.

“My motives, you were going to say. Am I correct?”

I didn’t respond. Yet it was clear that my silence meant yes.

“You should know,” he said, “that none of this was planned from the beginning. It was an entirely natural development. In fact, it happened without me being conscious of it. You may find that hard to believe, of course.”

I sighed. Then I spoke frankly. “All I know is that if you started with that plan in mind, it would have been pretty easy to carry out. I’m not being sarcastic, either.”

“You’re probably right,” Menshiki said. “I recognize that. Easy, or at least not all that difficult. Perhaps. But that’s not how it was.”

“So are you saying that you met Shoko Akikawa for the first time and fell in love right off the bat, or something like that?”

Menshiki pursed his lips as if embarrassed. “Fell in love? No, I can’t make that claim. To be honest, the last time I fell in love—I think that’s probably what it was—was ages ago. I can’t even remember what it was like. But I can say with confidence that I find myself powerfully attracted to Shoko, as a man is attracted to a woman.”