The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (7 page)

“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? 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 be 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.

“Rest assured,” said Malta Kano, “I asked to see you today purely about the missing cat. That was the matter about which Mr. Wataya sought my advice. Mrs. Okada had consulted him on the matter, and he in turn consulted me.”

That explained a lot. Malta Kano was some kind of clairvoyant or channeler or something, and they had consulted her on the whereabouts of the cat. The Wataya family was into this kind of stuff—divination and house “physiognomy” and such. That was fine with me: people were free to believe anything they liked. But why did he have to go and rape the younger sister of his spiritual counselor? Why stir up a lot of pointless trouble?

“Is that your area of expertise?” I asked. “Helping people find things?”

She stared at me with those depthless eyes of hers, eyes that looked as if they were staring into the window of a vacant house. Judging from their expression, she had failed to grasp the meaning of my question.

Without answering the question, she said, “You live in a very strange place, don’t you, Mr. Okada?”

“I do?” I said. “Strange in what way?”

Instead of replying, she pushed her nearly untouched glass of tonic water another six or eight inches away from herself. “Cats are very sensitive creatures, you know.”

Another silence descended on the two of us.

“So our place is strange, and cats are sensitive animals,” I said. “OK. But we’ve lived there a long time—the two of us and the cat. Why now, all of a sudden, did it decide to leave us? Why didn’t it leave before now?”

“That I cannot tell you. Perhaps the flow has changed. Perhaps something has obstructed the flow.”

“The flow.”

“I do not know yet whether your cat is still alive, but I can be certain of one thing: it is no longer in the vicinity of your house. You will never find the cat in that neighborhood.”

I lifted my cup and took a sip of my now lukewarm coffee. Beyond the tearoom windows, a misty rain was falling. The sky was closed over with
dark, low-hanging clouds. A sad procession of people and umbrellas climbed up and down the footbridge outside.

“Give me your hand,” she said.

I placed my right hand on the table, palm up, assuming she was planning to read my palm. Instead, she stretched her hand out and put her palm against mine. Then she closed her eyes, remaining utterly still, as if silently rebuking a faithless lover. The waitress came and refilled my cup, pretending not to notice what Malta Kano and I were doing. People at nearby tables stole glances in our direction. I kept hoping all the while that there were no acquaintances of mine in the vicinity.

“I want you to picture to yourself one thing you saw before you came here today,” said Malta Kano.

“One thing?” I asked.

“Just one thing.”

I thought of the flowered minidress that I had seen in Kumiko’s clothes storage box. Why that of all things happened to pop into my mind I have no idea. It just did.

We kept our hands together like that for another five minutes—five minutes that felt very long to me, not so much because I was being stared at by people as that the touch of Malta Kano’s hand had something unsettling about it. It was a small hand, neither hot nor cold. It had neither the intimate touch of a lover’s hand nor the functional touch of a doctor’s. It had the same effect on me as her eyes had, turning me into a vacant house. I felt empty: no furniture, no curtains, no rugs. Just an empty container. Eventually, Malta Kano withdrew her hand from mine and took several deep breaths. Then she nodded several times.