A Wild Sheep Chase (23 page)

So I placed a three-line notice in the morning editions of four newspapers for the following day.

For the next two days, I waited by the phone. The day of the ad there were three calls. One was a call from a local citizen.

“What’s this ‘Rat’?”

“The nickname of a friend,” I answered.

He hung up, satisfied.

Another was a prank call.

“Squeak, squeak,” came a voice from the other end of the line. “Squeak, squeak.”

I hung up. Cities are damn strange places.

The third was from a woman with a reedy voice.

“Everybody always calls me Rat,” she said. A voice in which you could almost hear the telephone lines swaying in the distant breeze.

“Thank you for taking the trouble to call. However, the Rat I’m looking for is a man,” I explained.

“I kind of thought so,” she said. “But in any case, since I’m a Rat too, I thought I might as well give you a call.”

“Really, thank you very much.”

“Not at all. Have you found your friend?”

“Not yet,” I said, “unfortunately.”

“If only it’d been me you were looking for … but no, it wasn’t me.

“That’s the way it goes. Sorry.”

She fell silent. Meanwhile, I scratched my nose with my little finger.

“Really, I just wanted to talk to you,” she came back.

“With me?”

“I don’t quite know how to put it, but I fought the urge ever since I came across your ad in the morning paper. I didn’t mean to bother you …”

“So all that about your being called Rat was a made-up story.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Nobody ever calls me Rat. I don’t even have any friends. That’s why I wanted to call you so badly.”

I heaved a sigh. “Well, uh, thanks anyway.”

“Forgive me. Are you from Hokkaido?”

“I’m from Tokyo,” I said.

“You came all the way from Tokyo to look for your friend?”

“That’s correct.”

“How old is this friend?”

“Just turned thirty.”

“And you?”

“I’ll be thirty in two months.”

“Single?”

“Yes.”

“I’m twenty-two. I suppose things get better as time goes on.”

“Well,” I said, “who knows? Some things get better, some don’t.”

“It’d be nice if we could get together and discuss things over dinner.”

“You’ll have to excuse me, but I’ve got to stay here and wait for a call.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Sorry about everything.”

“Anyway, thanks for calling.”

I hung up.

Clever, very clever. A call girl, maybe, looking for some business. True, she might really have been just a lonely girl. Either way it was the same. I still had zero leads.

The following day there was only one call, from a mentally disturbed man. “A rat you say? Leave it to me.” He talked for fifteen minutes about fending off rats in a Siberian camp. An interesting tale, but no lead.

While waiting for the telephone to ring, I sat in the half-sprung
chair by the window and spent the day watching the work conditions on the third floor office across the street. Stare as I might all day long, I couldn’t figure out what the company did. The company had ten employees, and people were constantly running in and out like in a basketball game. Someone would hand someone papers, someone would stamp these, then another someone would stuff them into an envelope and rush out the door. During the lunch break, a big-breasted secretary poured tea for everyone. In the afternoon, several people had coffee delivered. Which made me want to drink some too, so I asked the desk clerk to take messages while I went out to a coffee shop. I bought two bottles of beer on the way back. When I resumed my seat at the window, there were only four people left in the office. The big-breasted secretary was joking with a junior employee. I drank a beer and watched the office activities, but mainly her.

The more I looked at her breasts, the more unusually large they seemed. She must have been strapped into a brassiere with cables from the Golden Gate Bridge. Several of the junior staff seemed to have designs on her. Their sex drive came across two panes of glass and the street in between. It’s a funny thing sensing someone else’s sex drive. After a while, you get to mistaking it for your own.

At five o’clock, she changed into a red dress and went home. I closed the curtain and watched a Bugs Bunny rerun on television. So went the eighth day at the Dolphin Hotel.

“Just great,” said I. This “just great” business was becoming a habit. “One-third of the month gone and we still haven’t gotten anywhere.”

“So it would seem,” said she. “I wonder how Kipper’s getting on?”

After supper, we rested on the vile orange sofa in the Dolphin
Hotel lobby. No one else around except our three-fingered clerk. He was keeping busy, up on a ladder changing a light bulb, cleaning the windows, folding newspapers. There may have been other guests in the place; perhaps they were all in their rooms like mummies kept out of the light of day.

“How’s business?” the desk clerk asked timidly as he watered the potted plants.

“Nothing much to speak of,” I said.

“Seems you placed an ad in the papers.”

“That I did,” I said. “I’m trying to track down this one person on some land inheritance.”

“Inheritance?”

“Yes. Trouble is the inheritor’s disappeared, whereabouts unknown.”

“Do tell. Sounds like interesting work.”

“Not really.”

“I don’t know, there’s something of
Moby Dick
about it.”

“Moby Dick?”

“Sure. The thrill of hunting something down.”

“A mammoth, for example?” said my girlfriend.

“Sure. It’s all related,” said the clerk. “Actually, I named this place the Dolphin Hotel because of a scene with dolphins in
Moby Dick.”

“Oh-ho,” said I. “But if that’s the case, wouldn’t it have been better to name it the Whale Hotel?”

“Whales don’t have quite the image,” he admitted with some regret.

“The Dolphin Hotel’s a lovely name,” said my girlfriend.

“Thank you very much,” smiled the clerk. “Incidentally, having you here for this extended stay strikes me as most auspicious, and I’d like to offer you some wine as a token of my thanks.”

“Delighted,” she said.

“Much obliged,” I said.

He went into a back room and emerged after a moment with a chilled bottle of white wine and three glasses.

“A toast. I’m still on the job, so just a sip for me.”

We drank our wine. Not a particularly fine wine, but a light, dry, pleasant sort of wine. Even the glasses were swell.

“You a
Moby Dick
fan?” I thought to ask.

“You could say that. I always wanted to go to sea ever since I was a child.”

“And that’s why you’re in the hotel business today?” she asked.

“That’s why I’m missing fingers,” he said. “Actually, they got mangled in a winch unloading cargo from a freighter.”

“How horrible!” she exclaimed.

“Everything went black at the time. But life’s a fickle thing. Somehow or other, I ended up owning this hotel here. Not much of a hotel, but I’ve done all right by it. Ten years I’ve had it.”

Which would mean he wasn’t the desk clerk, but the owner.

“I couldn’t imagine a finer hotel,” she encouraged.

“Thank you very much,” said the owner, refilling our wineglasses.

“For only ten years, the building has taken on quite a lot of, well, character,” I ventured forth unabashedly.

“Yes, it was built right after the war. I count myself most fortunate that I could buy it so cheaply.”

“What was it used for before it was a hotel?”

“It went by the name of the Hokkaido Ovine Hall. Housed all sorts of papers and resources concerning …”

“Ovine?” I said.

“Sheep,” he said.

“The building was the property of the Hokkaido Ovine Association, that is, up until ten years ago. What with the decline in sheep raising in the territory, the Hall was closed,” he said, sipping his wine. “Actually, the acting director at the time was my own father. He couldn’t abide the thought of his beloved Ovine Hall shutting down, and so on the pretext of preserving the sheep resources he talked the Association into selling him the land and the building at a good price. Hence, to this day the whole second floor of the building is a sheep reference room. Of course, being resource materials, most of the stuff is old and useless. The dotings of an old man. The rest of the place is mine for the hotel business.”

“Some coincidence,” I said.

“Coincidence?”

“If the truth be known, the person we’re looking for has something to do with sheep. And the only lead we’ve got is this one photograph of sheep that he sent.”

“You don’t say,” he said. “I’d like to have a look at it if I might.”

I pulled out the sheep photo that I’d sandwiched between the pages of my notebook and handed it to him. He picked up his glasses from the counter and studied the photo.

“I do seem to have some recollection of this,” he said.

“A recollection?”

“For certain.” So saying, he took the ladder from where he’d left it under the light and leaned it up against the opposite wall. He brought down a framed picture. Then he wiped off the dust and handed the picture to us.

“Is this not the same scenery?”

The frame itself was plenty old, but the photo in it was even older, discolored too. And yes, there were sheep in it. Altogether maybe sixty head. Fence, birch grove, mountains. The birch grove
was different in shape from the one in the Rat’s photograph, but the mountains in the background were the same mountains. Even the composition of the photograph was the same.

“Just great,” I said to her. “All this time we’ve been passing right under this photograph.”

“That’s why I told you it had to be the Dolphin Hotel,” she blurted out.

“Well then,” I asked the man, “exactly where is this place?”

“Don’t rightly know,” he said. “The photograph’s been hanging in that spot since Ovine Hall days.”

“Hmph,” I grunted.

“But there’s a way to find out.”

“Like what?”

“Ask my father. He’s got a room upstairs where he spends his days. He hardly ever comes out, he’s so wrapped up in his sheep materials. I haven’t set eyes on him for half a month now. I just leave his meals in front of his door, and the tray’s empty thirty minutes later, so I know he’s alive.”

“Would your father be able to tell us where the place in the photograph is?”

“Probably. As I said before, he was the former director of Ovine Hall, and anyway he knows all there is to know about sheep. Everyone calls him the Sheep Professor.”

“The Sheep Professor,” I said.

According to his Dolphin Hotel–owner son, the Sheep Professor had by no means had a happy life.

“Father was born in Sendai in 1905, the eldest son of a land-holding family,” the son explained. “I’ll go by the Western calendar, if that’s all right with you.”

“As you please.”

“They weren’t independently wealthy, but they lived on their own land. An old family previously vested with a fief from the local castle lord. Even yielded a respected agriculturist toward the end of the Edo period.

“The Sheep Professor excelled in scholastics from early on, a child wonder known to everyone in Sendai. And not just schooling. He surpassed everyone at the violin and in middle school even performed a Beethoven sonata for the royal family when they came to the area, for which he was given a gold watch.

“The family tried to push him in the direction of law, but, the Sheep Professor flatly refused. ‘I have no interest in law,’ said the young Sheep Professor.

“‘Then go ahead with your music,’ said his father. ‘There ought to be at least one musician in the family.’

“‘I have no interest in music either,’ replied the Sheep Professor.

“There was a brief pause.

“‘Well then,’ his father spoke up, ‘what path is it you want to take?’

“‘I am interested in agriculture. I want to learn agricultural administration.’